Something cheery, hopeful and encouraging? That would be nice.
A note regarding the mostly inconsequential happenings at the SOTU last night (It was interesting that Justice Thomas decided not to come, given that he is hardly in a position to want to draw attention to himself): this was the first post I put up after finding my wife’s lifeless body, and we had discussed the cynical idiocy of the concept, which Grace found gobsmacking. Last night Biden said “Hold my beer!” and announced that he has ordered the U.S. military to construct a temporary port in Gaza to facilitate hundreds of trucks of aid into the region each day….while the U.S. gives support to Israel’s war effort, which is what necessitates the aid. If last week’s Gaza-supporting actions were responsible and incompetent, and they were, what should we call this?
Conservative wag Stephen Green‘s answer: we should call it “desperately trying to keep Michigan’s electoral votes,” since there are so many Muslims and Hamas-supporters there.
Ethics Alarms 
Stephen Green is wrong. It is desperately trying to keep Michigan AND Minnesota’s electoral votes.
OK, this is cynical, but I think also encouraging. France has dismantled so much of their nuclear power infrastructure that petroleum is their main source of electricity generation (nuclear used to be 60%). Germany has closed down all 20% of their generation from nuclear plants and replaced it with coal. These changes were made to reduce CO2 and reduce climate change. These changes have not been protested by the IPCC, but supported.
OK, it makes no sense if you want to believe the narrative, but I think it is hopeful. There is no way this can be done without major backlash if the IPCC and the environmentalists in Europe actually believe that global warming is a major threat to humanity. The change maybe could be made by necessity, but not without a lot of criticism. This was done without major criticism and with some support from the environmental groups. Germany even bulldozed a windfarm to open up a lignite mine to fuel the coal-fired plants they were bringing online to replace the nuclear plants they shut down ahead of schedule. Lignite! Not anthracite or bitumous coal, but lignite!
So, good news! The fact that we cannot practically do anything about global CO2 production as long as only Europe and the US are trying probably doesn’t matter much. At least it isn’t keeping ‘the experts’ up at night.
…or maybe word is getting out to the public that nearly the entire frequency spectrum of infrared radiation absorbed by CO2 in the atmosphere is already being absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. Making CO2 the boogie-man turns out to be a less-than-stellar idea when actual scientists get involved.
The Biden Gaza Port will work out exactly as successfully as the Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal did.
Best part about it, it won’t win him Muslim votes. They want Biden to *stop* support of Israel. And best part also, is his continued support of Israel (the right thing to do anyway) isn’t winning him Jewish votes, as they see right through him to his base that absolutely hates Israel and increasingly absolutely hates Jews.
”Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — Biden
And other smug jabs aimed at SCOTUS, should earn Biden from all other Justices, on principled protest, when he continues as President, to never attend another one of his speeches.
https://quillette.com/2024/01/26/the-seven-laws-of-pessimism/
The following are all quotes from the great article – Read it – some of the “laws” are redundant or overlapping – like 4 and 6. Still. Read it.
1. The Law of the Invisibility of Good News: Progress happens gradually and imperceptibly, while regress happens all at once and immediately grabs our attention.
Human progress is dependent on incremental improvements afforded by infrastructure that quietly hums away in the background, invisible until something goes wrong.
2. The Law of The Velocity of Bad News: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, except bad news.
The problem here is demand, not supply.
So, why are we so eager to consume horrific news in the first place? What kind of sick perverts are we?
3. The Law of Rubbernecking: The more gruesome the news, the more we lap it up.
bad news, on average, has far more serious fitness consequences than good news. If your ancestors were lucky on a particular day, they might have managed to hunt down a large animal, or encountered an unexpected mating opportunity, thus raising their fitness by a few increments. But any unlucky day might very well have been their last.
4. The Law of Conservation of Outrage: No matter how much progress the world is achieving, the total amount of outrage remains constant.
One of the benefits of progress is that you can afford to be more demanding of the world; we don’t have to tolerate the same levels of misery and suffering that we once did. But if you don’t realize that you’ve been raising your own standards, you may get the impression that the world is steadily getting worse and worse.
As angry faces become less frequent, people start interpreting neutral faces as angry. And when unethical requests become rare, people start seeing innocuous requests as unethical.
when people are confronted with overwhelming evidence that our societies have become ever less violent, they often inflate their concept of violence to justify their pessimism: “Isn’t Internet trolling a form of violence? Isn’t strip-mining a form of violence? Isn’t inequality a form of violence? Isn’t pollution a form of violence?”
5. The Law of Awful Attraction: If you don’t find bad news, bad news will find you.
Social media algorithms can therefore reinforce any biases and impulses we already have—even those we are unaware of or even consciously fighting to overcome. Thus, in the age of social media, if you pay bad news the slightest bit of attention, more bad news will soon find you.
6. The Law of Self-Effacing Solutions: Once a solution has been achieved, people forget about the original problem (and only see further problems).
every solution will give rise to novel problems. If these are less severe than the original problem, we will rightly call this “progress”—but only if we remember just how bad the original problem was. Many ugly problems give rise to solutions that are far less ugly, but still not exactly ideal.
Since progress tends to cover its own tracks, people often forget the ugliness of the original problem and focus on the residual ugliness of the solution.
[me here: I disagree with him on his Covid lockdown take. Leading me to point out that I think law #6 is probably the most important law as it regards not just the prolific nature of “bad news” but as it regards public policy. Solutions sometimes create new problems. Undoing ancient solutions – “Chesterton Fences” – reveals old problems. Policy debate has to balance out whether or not the new problems are actually worse, better or tolerable than the previous ones. AND policy debate has to decide if there are other solution options also.]
7. The Law of Disinfecting Sunlight: The freer a society, the more ugly things will surface.
“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.” This phenomenon is widely known as “Moynihan’s Law.”
the freer the society, the more complaints you will hear about oppression and abuse.
Jack, I can’t tell if WordPress just put up a medium length comment into moderation or not.
If it’s gone, I’ll recreate it. If it’s in moderation, I won’t.
https://quillette.com/2024/01/26/the-seven-laws-of-pessimism/
Great article. I’ve attached some quotes from it. Read it. Some of the ‘laws’ are either redundant or have significant overlap such as #4 and #6. Anyway, read it.
1. The Law of the Invisibility of Good News: Progress happens gradually and imperceptibly, while regress happens all at once and immediately grabs our attention.
If an event happens at a clearly defined place and moment in time and affects a lot of people at once, it will almost certainly involve something awful: a devastating earthquake, a suicide bomber attack, a stock market crash, a tsunami, a political coup, an oil spill, or the like.
If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it’s “news”), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better.
Good news is at its most invisible when it is simply the absence of bad news, as is often the case.
Human progress is dependent on incremental improvements afforded by infrastructure that quietly hums away in the background, invisible until something goes wrong.
2. The Law of The Velocity of Bad News: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, except bad news.
No matter how much progress the world achieves, there will always be enough catastrophes to fill the evening news.
So, why are we so eager to consume horrific news in the first place? What kind of sick perverts are we?
3. The Law of Rubbernecking: The more gruesome the news, the more we lap it up.
It’s not that we’re perverts or sadists… bad news, on average, has far more serious fitness consequences than good news. If your ancestors were lucky on a particular day, they might have managed to hunt down a large animal, or encountered an unexpected mating opportunity, thus raising their fitness by a few increments. But any unlucky day might very well have been their last.
This also explains why, even in times of peace and prosperity, many people become spell-bound by prophets of doom who predict imminent catastrophe.
4. The Law of Conservation of Outrage: No matter how much progress the world is achieving, the total amount of outrage remains constant.
As societies become safer and more prosperous, we demand more of them, and gradually raise the bar for what is considered “safe” or “prosperous.” As a result, even though fewer disasters are happening than ever before, people still have the impression that the world is going downhill.
This isn’t a problem, per se. One of the benefits of progress is that you can afford to be more demanding of the world; we don’t have to tolerate the same levels of misery and suffering that we once did. But if you don’t realize that you’ve been raising your own standards, you may get the impression that the world is steadily getting worse and worse.
As angry faces become less frequent, people start interpreting neutral faces as angry. And when unethical requests become rare, people start seeing innocuous requests as unethical.
when people are confronted with overwhelming evidence that our societies have become ever less violent, they often inflate their concept of violence to justify their pessimism: “Isn’t Internet trolling a form of violence? Isn’t strip-mining a form of violence? Isn’t inequality a form of violence? Isn’t pollution a form of violence?”
5. The Law of Awful Attraction: If you don’t find bad news, bad news will find you.
Social media algorithms can therefore reinforce any biases and impulses we already have—even those we are unaware of or even consciously fighting to overcome. Thus, in the age of social media, if you pay bad news the slightest bit of attention, more bad news will soon find you.
6. The Law of Self-Effacing Solutions: Once a solution has been achieved, people forget about the original problem (and only see further problems).
every solution will give rise to novel problems. If these are less severe than the original problem, we will rightly call this “progress”—but only if we remember just how bad the original problem was. Many ugly problems give rise to solutions that are far less ugly, but still not exactly ideal.
Since progress tends to cover its own tracks, people often forget the ugliness of the original problem and focus on the residual ugliness of the solution.
[me here: I disagree with him about the Covid Lockdown point. But that leads us to acknowledge that his 6th Law is less useful for analyzing the proliferation of bad news and more useful for acknowledging the complexity of policy debates. Solutions can generate new problems. Sometimes we accidently remove ancient solutions – “Chesterton Fences” – to ancient problems. Sometimes there aren’t actually new problems but we don’t what the solution asks of us. In policy we have to debate the comparative “harm” of the original problem with the potential new problems – not just immediate effects, but secondary, tertiary and tangential effects as well. In policy we have to debate if related or allied topics will be fundamentally brought under the microscope that turn out to be so important, that on principle the original topic actually isn’t a problem after all. In all this, values and opinions will play a far larger role than statistics or ‘experts’]
7. The Law of Disinfecting Sunlight: The freer a society, the more ugly things will surface.
“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.” This phenomenon is widely known as “Moynihan’s Law.”
In liberal democracies, by contrast, people are free to complain about both real and imaginary violations.
It is difficult to find something cheery right now for many of us. Presidential politics is a trainwreck. The economy is a mess but is being ignored by politicians and the media. Workaholics populating government, academia, and the media seem to have free reign over reshaping America in their utopian pipedreams.
Jack lost his life’s partner.
While last year I survived cancer surgery, I am apprehensive about my upcoming screening for its reoccurrence. My wife is undergoing cancer surgery this month and I probably need back surgery to alleviate the debilitating pain I have experienced since this January.
If we focus on the negative aspects of events, it becomes difficult to avoid the blackhole pull of depressive thoughts. Despite the negativity and chaos, I am mostly calm and upbeat. I am curious how others cope with life’s difficulties. For me, I have various coping skills.
I find if I count my blessings and discount my misfortunes, I am happier. Is this a mindfuck? Probably. I don’t care.
When I pray for what I need and not what I want, my prayers are answered. What I have found I need most in life are peace, courage, strength, understanding, compassion, and
balance. Is this God answering my prayers? My mind over matter? Combination of both? I don’t know and don’t care. It helps me cope.
I also focus I what I can control and accept what I can’t. For me, the only thing I truly can control is me. For acceptance, I use a question a friend posed to me. What is your other option?
Finally, meditation helps me and if all else fails, a good book can be a refuge.
Democrats are already leaning heavily on Biden’s SOTU as proof he isn’t in rapid and wild cognitive decline.
So quickly and sharply.
That’s the key thing they are worried about.
Not worried about his disastrous policies and radical positions.
He’s pulled off these key speeches in the past likely from excessive rehearsals and medications. But his continued avoidance of long public encounters combined with the few public encounters he has being complete addled fiascos let’s us know that SOTU doesn’t show anything about his mental capacity.
Trump needs to hammer home demands for debate after debate after debate after debate.
Biden can medicate through one or two, but he will never make it through a series of them back to back to back.
I agree, though President Trump’s debate style with President Biden needs to radically change if he wants to have success against even an addled C-i-C.
Anyways, just my thoughts.
Solid strategy.
1. I am CERTAIN they won’t let Biden debate unless he’s trailing wildly in the polls.
2. Trump has no discipline. It doesn’t matter what the best strategy is. He can’t restrain himself.
What I would like to see is Trump Challenge Biden to a televised live cognitive assessment tests for dementia.
Jack.
Please check wordpress for my blocked comment.
Got it.
100 plastic pennies for the price of 1,053 actual pennies (before tax).
For the purpose of teaching children how to handle money.
No further commentary.
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Advantage-Pennies-Plastic-Coins/dp/B00872WTHU
I suspect that’s to prevent the children from being tempted to steal them, but why wouldn’t they use cardboard or paper pennies instead of plastic? It’d be better for the environment.
EC,
I’d wager, if those kids are anything like mine, a set of 100 cardboard or paper coins would last almost one day before they were completely destroyed. Plastic coins stand a change of enduring for a couple of years, though any classroom that started with 100 coins will probably be down to 82 tops by the end of the year. But that would still be less waste than trying to replenish the cardboard or paper coins.
I’ve heard many rebuttals. They mostly orbit around germs and thievery.
From my understanding, metals have an anti-septic quality that plastics don’t. So I don’t buy that argument.
And while there may be some thievery, schools are supposed to be teaching civic virtue along with knowledge and logic – what better opportunity than to be handed something of actual value (and pennies are in a child’s mind).
I’d wager that *years and years and years* of classes would come and go before a teacher had to replace the equivalent of $11 worth of pennies.
They make compressed cardboard tokens for board games that are pretty durable. My family used to have coins made compressed cardboard for learning about money–those are the ones I’m thinking of. If a class can’t be trusted not to break those, they can’t be trusted not to choke on them.
I’m frankly overwhelmed today with the insanity. Where to begin: Angry Bird POTUS at SOTU? Kit Harrington (Jon Stark) starring in play at Noel Coward Theater from which white people are cordially banned from on two nights in June? The 20% discount that North Face now offers for customers who confirm their racist credentials by completing an on-line program on racism?
I’m going to water my baby bonsai trees.
Last night Biden said “Hold my beer!” and announced that he has ordered the U.S. military to construct a temporary port in Gaza to facilitate hundreds of trucks of aid into the region each day….while the U.S. gives support to Israel’s war effort, which is what necessitates the aid. If last week’s Gaza-supporting actions were responsible and incompetent, and they were, what should we call this?
Is there a custom and tradition of providing aid to belligerents in war?
How much aid did the Allies provide to Germany and Japan during World War II?
We dropped ALOT that aided their the decision to surrender
Here is something both cheerful and hopeful.
Hope and anticipation are in the air, both in the desert and by the coast. Possibilities are endless, nothing is impossible. New heroes and new goats are just around the corner. Millions of people are gearing up in ancipication.
Yes, boys and girls, spring training is well under way. In a few short weeks baseball will again be captivating our hearts and minds. The Rangers could repeat. The Red Sox could make the playoffs. The Yankees could still finish is last place. The Angels could win the pennant (well, that might be a base too far).
Hope springs eternal and dang, it seems like forever since the World Series finished.
Play Ball!
At 8 AM on Friday, I mentioned that it looked like we are having 1 air disaster/day. I am concerned that we have reached the point that we are not capable of running the complicated aviation system we have built because of the declines in our educational system, the demands of DIE, and the corruption of our government agencies and management.
Then I came home to this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/08/boeing-plane-off-runway-houston-texas