SteveLibrarian

On second glance, there's an awful lot out there about various religious green movements gaining momentum. Though I do think you're right in that it will take some degree of religious dogma to become a widely adopted norm, I think that's actually starting to happen.

🧵Here's a thought I've been having about the cost of transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy:

It does decarb fans no favors to pretend that there's no cost, or that just because "solar is cheap," that makes depreciating one entire system in favor of another cheap or easy.

However!

that to another 25 years & another, and only from a purely self-interested perspective of financial probity, we're talking 100's of 1000's of dollars that can be saved for the next generation. Or spent on quality of life. It's a big startup expense, but no bigger than an average car.

As pure cost-benefit, it's kind of an extrapolation of putting solar on your own house (which I'm finally embarking on - just bought 1st house 2 years ago). We'll hit the payback point in about 6 years, after which we'll save roughly $140k on e-bills over the 25 year life of the system. Extend

Christianity offers stewardship, and there are folks out there banging that drum. Others: Buddhism/Jainism: non-harm (ahimsa), mindfulness, etc. Taoism: yin & yang (balance). Shinto: divinity in nature. Hinduism, to the extent a sect is animist. Find the applicable value & use it.

They should be made to feel extraneous. Ridiculous, even. So much so that they become a chorus to their superiors: why the F are we doing this?

Yeah, exactly.

It's a matter what's ultimately more achievable & by what means: electoral reforms that preserve the union or voter referenda for secession. The first has almost insurmountable practical hurdles, and the second has potentially violent hurdles.

DC is FORTY-ONE PERCENT Black.

Do you understand?

There’s such a constant stream of bad that it almost gets normalized, but there are still things that stop you dead in your tracks.

screenshot of a Facebook post by Sam Brody: "What is happening in DC right now would not be happening if DC had been made a state any time Democrats held both the presidency and Congress in the last 30 years. Adding states to the union is much easier to do than amending the constitution. It requires nothing more than an act of Congress, and only needs a simple majority to pass. The Obama Senate could have easily done it when they had 59 senators. But the party leaders thought, I dunno, it wouldn’t be sporting or something. Not fair to the Republicans to use power to do things. The pundits might call it “overreach,” oh no, not that. Biden could have tried to do it - everyone was already saying it was necessary democracy reform after Trump I - but he pre-gave up because Manchin and Sinema said they just had to respect the ancient and immortal filibuster, so what can you do? Best not to try. So now we have millions of US citizens with no representation at all under naked authoritarian rule by an unchecked federal law enforcement apparatus. And the pundits have all forgotten the word “overreach,” which only applies to Democrats when they win by much greater margins than this and have much larger and more representative majorities than this."

Well, sure, 434% if you start using the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which means you're counting teachers & students criticizing Israel.

When Hitchens came out in favor of invading Iraq I finally understood his "atheism" had specific targets in mind, rationalism & evidence be damned. And Dawkins... christ on a toothbrush, that's not argument, it's polemic.

How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science A new anthology showcases the intellectual failures of a diminishing brand.

Fully entered a state of madness by the time I finished this essay, on the remarkable intellectual (and political) failures of New Atheism, and a new anthology edited by Lawrence Krauss nymag.com/intelligence...

Karen Hao on AI tech bosses: ‘Many choose not to have children because they don’t think the world is going to be around much longer’ The author of Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination discusses the cost of Big Tech’s huge investment in technologies that may do more harm than good

Karen Hao on AI tech bosses: ‘Many choose not to have children because they don’t think the world is going to be around much longer’

Holy shit, they already have the lowest bar for qualification of any public servant: HS diploma or GED & 6 months training... and they can fucking shoot people & get away with it because everyone's been brainwashed.

What happens if you don’t do background checks or training for thousands of people and you give them all total authority?

ICE has been caught looting and destroying property at Pittsburgh restaurants. They even tried to break into the safes. They loaded food, supplies and equipment into vehicles

/

Nixon's resignation letter.

Fifty-one years ago today.

The CEO of a a multi-trillion dollar company went to the White House, openly handed the US president a gift made of gold, and his company got a special exemption to tariffs the president has illegally imposed.

Also, the Founders took bribery so seriously the Constitution bans it 3 separate times.

You can see the ugly combo of fear and belligerence on the cops' faces. They're *frightened* of people with cameras.

Because libraries had to give up on a great initiative to loan copyrighted material digitally, and digital scholars have been constrained by contract clauses that restrict scraping database collections for *scholarly study*, I'm happy to see copyright actually serve a legitimate purpose.

Two BILLION. No billionaires fleeing to NH. They like their $3.5 million homes in Wayland & Weston & Manchester by the Sea. And the tax didn't even put a scratch on their lifestyle, power, or status.

Art or not art? ART.

"Women who aren't trans are being physically attacked in public bathrooms because busybodies think they look too masculine, and in Britain the government is saying that trans men can't use ANY public bathrooms. How is this just? How is this right?"

Meanwhile, here in Maine, AI crawlers have rendered the server that manages our statewide interlibrary loan unreachable by legitimate attempts to pass through requests/information

Again, but louder: the server can’t be reached by libraries and the folks trying to use them BECAUSE OF AI CRAWLERS.

The wildest thing about this era is watching so many institutions say out loud yeah, we’re done committing ourselves to excellence, we’re going to specialize in the coddling of mediocre white men

This is the core problem with the Buttigieg "we have to find common ground" framing. The question isn't sports, it's whether trans people will be allowed to exist as trans in public. Everything else—politically and strategically—is downstream from that.

It doesn’t just remove rights from trans people, it gives others a sort of police power over us.

This iteration of the anti-trans movement is isomorphic to the entire anti-DEI campaign: classifying non-discrimination policies as discrimination, making human rights infrastructure cannibalize itself. This from the UK is rhetorically identical to the ruling in the US that ended affirmative action.

The only reason I'm hopeful through all this is that EO's are easy to undo with the stroke of a pen of the next POTUS. If there is a next POTUS. Meanwhile, 3 1/2 years of ideological bulls in china shops will do a shit-ton of damage to science in the US.