Shared with Your friend

Most people, but not all, might agree that it’s a good thing to be open-minded, but many fewer people are open-hearted at least by their actions.

From Orwell

 

Shared with Your friend

Liberal historians believe that the past cannot be altered and that correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course whereas Fascists believe that history is something to be created than learned, which turns history into a theocracy to keep the plutocrats in power.

-George Orwell, 1946

Spectacle

 With his return to the White House, Donald Trump now has the singularly powerful bully pulpit and megaphone of the presidency, and with that, great control and influence over a vast multimedia propaganda communications machine which includes not only television, radio and print but also social media, podcasts, YouTube and other online spaces and digital culture.

Donald Trump, like other historically powerful authoritarians and autocrats, is a master of spectacle and distraction. This spectacle is disseminated through and amplified by a type of political and social experience machine that compels Trump’s MAGA people and other followers and supporters by entertaining, “educating,” and emotionally training and conditioning them into TrumpWorld, the MAGAverse and the larger right-wing echo chamber and alternate reality. The Democrats and other mainstream establishment political voices (including small “c” conservatives and traditional Republicans) who believe in America’s democratic institutions, the Constitution, the rule of law and “normality” have not built an equivalent experience machine. This is one of the main reasons why Donald Trump and his authoritarian populist MAGA movement and the larger global antidemocracy movement have been so effective in their revolutionary project to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and civil society.

 That Nero fiddled while Rome burned is probably apocryphal, but I would not be surprised to hear fiddling in this country at any moment.

Adaptable

 Adaptable 

by Herman Pontzer (Avery)

Nonfiction

Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, offers an engrossing, richly informative exploration of human biological diversity. He catalogues a great many examples, from East African hunter-gatherers whose life styles shield them from cardiovascular disease to Southeast Asian sea nomads with genetic adaptations that let them spend hours a day underwater. By revealing how our variable bodies respond to a wide range of environments, Pontzer challenges us to rethink assumptions that underpin our social and medical systems: ideas about disease, treatment, excellence, procreation. These assumptions, he shows, rest on a flawed monolithic image of the human body, a prototypical Homo sapiens whose vulnerabilities remain unchanged across climates and genetic histories. “There is no textbook human,” he writes, and, if we’re to better serve humanity’s needs, we must develop policies and practices that take into account the physiological diversity of our species.

-From The NewYorker

 It's a 3 a.m. emergency and an aide asks, "Should we wake the President?" The aide in charge responds, "What's the point?"