Chaos Agents

Support Trump or not, it’s clear that the media enables him. They allow his campaign to get away with saying and doing things that would immediately lead to any Democratic candidate being torpedoed and tossed out of the race. There are dozens of examples and they are not hard to to find, so I won’t enumerate them all here.

This is, largely, because doing so makes the media orgs more money. It’s also about fear, too, but for my entire life the Republicans have been held to much lower standards of behavior and policy clarity. That has only worsened with Trump.

Cat-eating Haitians? Come on. It not possible to stoop lower than an attempted coup, but that’s pretty low.

Belief Doesn’t Matter

Whether or not you believe in climate change, the insurance companies certainly do. And they are basically never wrong about such things (in fact, they often misprice risk on the low side, so if they are wrong, it’s more likely to be worse than they currently think).

Your beliefs don’t matter. Climate change is happening and if I didn’t buy it for any other reason, I’d do so because the insurance companies are demonstrating they know that it is.

Annihilation of the Self

I do wonder if all the people who fall for absurd scams aren’t motivated by a similar cultural undercurrent as those who get tattoos: in a world where the self is commoditized and suppressed, in the case of obvious scams it seems that willingly handing off all your resources is a way of annihilating the last of one’s individual materiality, erasing the anchors to a staid, settled being and negating all you were before and making a last desperate grab for all you thought you could’ve been but were not and now never will be in an attempt at glorious resurrection. Tattoos are similar in that they are a way to paint over some past self and instantiate a new one.

It’s suicide by deception — both by the artifice of the scammer but also by the self-deception that must occur to allow such authorized self-destruction to proceed in the name of misguided but still-solipsistic charity. And as with tattoos, the person being scammed feels like this is who they were meant to become. But there is in fact no metamorphosis from a chrysalis-bound pupa of a human to some other, better, entity on the other side; in both cases there is only the self scoured, discarded, with only a husk of depersonalized faรงade retained.

The scammed and the tattoo victim emerge from their ordeal changed, different, lesser than they were before, both marked by trauma but not improved. The self they discarded grabs at their ankles from the grave, and with no new substantive individuality emergent in this nouveau faux-personage, this unformed psyche is pulled beneath the loamy soil, the person that once was subsumed in the chthonian realm they were not inevitably doomed to inhabit but chose de facto by belief in a rebirth that was never to be realized. Both new and old selves are disintegrated, therefore, leaving only void.

There Might Be More Than One Way to Make a Planet. Astronomers have found evidence of a process that supports an alternative, more rapid approach to planetary formation, more top down than bottom up. Please make me one.

Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often.

One Million Are Now Dead or Injured in the Russia-Ukraine War. High losses on both sides are posing problems on battlefield and accelerating demographic fears.

The Polaris Dawn Spaceflight Was More Than Just a Billionaire Joyride.

Inconsistency is a feature, not a bug.

A Star Appears to Have Come Closer to Earth Than the Voyager Probes.

Techno-energy is reshaping the world.

After 13 months of financial instability, dream opportunity may be rescinded due to poor credit. Late-stage capitalism strikes again!

Exploding pagers belonging to Hezbollah kill at least 8 and injure more than 2,700 in Lebanon.

Harris Is the Safer Economic Choice.

Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure ‘citizens will be on their best behavior.’ Hell just keeps getting hellier.