Thinking Points, September 30, 2023

Bougieness, freedom, Covid report, madness, political ads, Noah, ethics, the crisis in cosmology, POTS service dogs

Here are my latest thinking points:

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Bougieness

Bougieness is like playing a carnival game. Learn the rules, figure out how to win, reap the rewards. Soon one discovers that the games are rigged and the prizes are junk. Then the question becomes what to do? Smart people walk away. But bougiecrats become carnival barkers.

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Freedom

I like that Naomi Wolf just calls it the freedom movement. No need to add the word “medical” before it. All of the other freedoms are in jeopardy too right now. It’s freedom vs. fascism and all good people should be on the side of freedom.

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CHD hits a home run with this brief Covid report

This report from from Children’s Health Defense to Congress is really fantastic. It describes everything that went wrong with the Covid response and what Congress should do to fix the problems. And it accomplishes all of that in just 20 pages. The report starts on page 10. Background article (here).

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A perfect paragraph

My argument is not ‘the news media lies,’ or ‘there’s a lot of misleading discourse.’ My argument is that whole overlapping layers of high-status America — in academia, in media, and in politics — are psychotic, fully detached from reality and living in their own bizarre mental construction of a fake world. I don’t mean this figuratively, or as colorful hyperbole. I mean that the top layers of our most important institutions are actually, literally populated by people who are insane, who have cultivated a complete mental descent into a fake world.

— Chris Bray

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70 years of political ads on TV and they have no idea what works

The largest study ever of political ads (forthcoming in the American Political Science Review)...

The puzzling finding: Some ads were markedly more successful than others, but there was “no persistent pattern to what worked best,” according to a presentation on the data by Swayable co-founder and CEO James Slezak, who is one of the authors.

I think authenticity + showing the ability to listen to voters is what works. But those two factors are very difficult to quantify.

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Conspiracy theorist

Imagine still using the phrase “conspiracy theorist” as a pejorative after the events of the last three years. That’s like making fun of Noah for building the ark AFTER the flood already proved him right.

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Ethics

Having ethics is a MASSIVE disadvantage in the workplace (yet no one talks about this). All of your instincts will not align with the incentives that govern the place. It will feel like walking into invisible walls over & over. But some of us are just wired for ethics; we will never fit in with bougieness.

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The crisis in cosmology

Over the last few weeks there has been a wave of articles in the mainstream press about the crisis in cosmology. The James Webb Space telescope “discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.” So now, physics, the hardest of the hard sciences, is having major doubts about its bedrock assumptions.

From the NY Times:

We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Mind-blowing paragraph:

One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe.

Cosmologist Andrew Pontzen, writing in The Guardian:

Ultimately, galaxies are less like machines, and more like animals — loosely understandable, rewarding to study, but only partially predictable.

I cannot stress enough how important this is. Physics is the foundational science that all other branches seek to emulate. Yet, physicists acknowledge that all of their fancy models at best explain the 4% of the matter that we can see (the rest is “dark matter” and “dark energy” that serve as placeholders for all that is not known). And now the theories that govern the 4% of the known universe are unraveling too.

You can see where I’m going with this — if all of the other sciences are based on physics and physicists now admit that their models are wrong then all of the other branches of science should be subject to reformulation as well.

It’s even worse than that though because the other branches of science are trying to mimic 18th century physics. Biology, chemistry, virology, and epidemiology (to name a few) have yet to even contemplate the implications of early 20th century physics (quantum mechanics, relativity) let alone these radical insights and growing chasms of not-knowing from the 21st century.

All of this is by way of saying that we have never been modern. Our elaborate scientific theories only explain a tiny fraction of our existence and they do it “through a glass darkly.” More than a little bit of humility is in order. We should absolutely ridicule the “Because Science™️!” people (Peter Hotez, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paul Offit, Brandy Zadrozny, etc.) because they have no idea what they are talking about and are not doing science at all. We must be conscious of the contributions to knowledge that can come from spirituality, parenting, lived experience, nature, meditation, prayer, philosophy, art, and intuition. And we must create space for better science to replace the mainstream junk science that has surrounded us our whole lives.

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Your moment(s) of Zen

Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is a known vaccine injury. POTS causes irregular heartbeats that can lead to fainting and dangerous falls. Now there are service dogs that can smell when their person is about to have an episode and alert them so that they can sit or lie down before they collapse. The videos of these dogs in action are extraordinary.

Bailey and his human Katie

The narration in this video is great because it describes each of the steps in the process that Bailey is trained to carry out.

Sparrow and her human Libbi (who has Neurocardiogenic Syncope [NCS] which is a type of dysautonomia similar to POTS).

Sparrow was just playing, she noticed that something was wrong, she was told to “break” (which is a release command akin to “at ease”), but Sparrow just stuck with it until Libbi shifted from seated to horizontal to avoid a bad outcome from the episode.

So this then is late stage capitalism with extraordinary humans and amazing animals doing their best to survive and take care of each other amidst the carnage wrought by soulless corporations and the predatory state. But I’m inspired by the love between these beautiful animals and their human friends — it reminds me of the underlying goodness in the world that we are fighting to defend.

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Blessings to the warriors. 🙌

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏

Huzzah for everyone building the better world our hearts know is possible. ✊

In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

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