Nacirema The Island

Please don't start a civil war over abortion. I've seen enough of those in history.

Recently I predicted that the dispensary would become what the soda fountain was in the late 19th and 20th century. I'm right! https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/01/thc-cannabis-beverages-501951 Now I don't drink or do pot but I know lots of people who do.

 There are about three prevailing theories for what causes war and conflict. The number one is poverty; number two is the cost of reproduction; and number three is an overproduction of elites competing for the same number of jobs.  For the final ones, there are too many undergraduate educated young adults, MBA's, lawyers, and PhD's all fighting for the same limited amount of elite positions.  All of these can overlap. A good example is the current situation in the United States. People became poor during the Great Recession and the coronavirus lockdowns, the cost of education, healthcare, and housing have delayed the age of marriage which has reduced reproductive outcomes such as births, and there are too many lawyers and PhD's fighting for the same jobs such as adjunct professors, government jobs, and law office interns. This is why we have so many mass shootings, protests, riots, and events such as the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. Young men cannot provide the...

A long time ago, about one hundred years ago, modern medicine was just taking off. Handwashing was being forcefully introduced by Igor Semmelwetz to Austrian doctors who didn't like the fact that he was a Jew. Louise Pasteur and Robert Koch had only just proven germ theory. X-rays had just been discovered as well. Gregor Mendel died in anonymity, but then was rediscovered. We knew very little about the human body but we were making progress. And so the age old apothecary, or the druggist, or what we now call the pharmacist, had to change as well. This is the transition period between "your mom makes you chew willow bark for pain" to "you use medically prescribed aspirin in a tablet." With all the new innovations, but with all the folk remedies still around, and the new global transportation network, pharmacies wanted to stay ahead of the game. This was the era that radium was painted on watch faces. And children's toys because it glows. So don't get ...

Something interesting happened recently: Can we use apps like Sickweather to predict public health problems in the future? Here is your location for reference. What do you think?

Today on LinkedIN I learned the three most interesting facts since joining that website two or three years ago. 1. Our economy is looking like the Roaring Twenties . Income inequality is high, but the real fear is the declining population due to rising education rates (and the corresponding drop in replacement rates) will cause a housing bubble pop. This will be like 2008 but much much worse. 2. We can vaccinate mice against Lyme disease so that the ticks have less Lyme disease to spread when they bite you. We feed them MnM like kibble so that they can get the vaccine into their body without having to hunt them down and inject them. #vaccineswork https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccinating-mice-may-finally-slow-lyme-disease/ \ 3. Populism is a Modern (read: the last 500 years since Columbus) Affairs. It isn't new! Charles C. Mann is golden. https://www.axios.com/charles-mann-1493-global-world-columbus-created-382e2a9a-71dd-45e6-950c-dae963b0fa60.html ...

Both Brandon Flowers and the Script are commenting on America at large. This is not normal from listening to their music. They state that they usually avoid politics and religion. These are also people who place rather more conservative views on religion in their music than other groups I have heard, and so I wonder if this is a fundamental shift in how they view the world. Land of the Free Divided States of America--the Script

Why do we sell Christmas ornaments in Halloween? Why do we sell Thanksgiving goods in the middle of October? Why do we start campaigning two years before an actual election? This man Marcus K. Dowling, as weird as some of his other thoughts  are , has hit the nail on what the next election will hang on: finding the lowest common denominator such as money and centrist appeal to satisfy America's desire for the bitter infighting we have seen lately in our politics. https://medium.com/@marcuskdowling/the-bull-moose-democrats-will-allow-for-trumps-2020-re-election-a5c0d616729f This is a Bull Moose by the way.

A little late, but I really enjoyed this article. It felt like my values were being represented in Congress again, and in the Republican Party! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romney-the-president-shapes-the-public-character-of-the-nation-trumps-character-falls-short/2019/01/01/37a3c8c2-0d1a-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html

:The manners of the Americans of the United States are, then, the real cause which renders that people the only one of the American nations that is able to support a democratic Government; and it is the influence of manners which produces the different degrees of order and of prosperity that may be distinguished in the several Anglo-American democracies. Thus the effect which the geographical position of a country may have upon the duration of democratic institutions is exaggerated in Europe. Too much importance is attributed to legislation, too little to manners. These three great causes serve, no doubt, to regulate and direct the American democracy; but if they were to be classed in their proper order, I should say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws, and the laws very subordinate to the manners of the people. I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws can not maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a co...

One hundred years ago, the first great advances in genetics, based on Mendel's work, were made. So were advances in physics, chemistry. All of these to me were pure, real science that really made leaps forward. These men knew their math, and basic chemistry so well, that they were nothing but precise. They, unlike us, who are dependant on their great stores of knowledge, had to stab in the dark in the right place, and they did so well, that we don't even think to thank them. Their biology classes did not have the information they pioneered for us today. They literally had to do guesswork to explain what they were seeing. We need to quit being so arrogant about the knowledge we so easily obtain today because of their hard efforts. For example: In 1900, when Mendel’s work was rediscovered and biologists began to apply his principles of heredity, the relation between genes and chromosomes was still unclear. The theory that genes are located on chromosomes (the chromosome t...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/25/the-welfare-state-is-committing-suicide-by-artificial-intelligence/

A great post. I once worked for an environmental group once. I was the token conservative in the group. Knowing me, you should know I'm not as bad as some people think we are. I wore a green camo Browning hoodie to a party. I was feeling lonely, as everybody was drinking. The leader of the group comes up. His name was Josh (name has been changed). He went up to me and said, "I used to be a hunter. I killed a few deer. But then I became vegan." My mind immediately went to tofu, and while he had tried in a nice way to be my friend, it still felt rather passive-aggressive, and I felt like I wasn't feeling very much a part of the group, considering how many people are vegan in your average environmental group. This story at the Business Insider is a good explanation of this phenomenon, and what people can do to change it. Making me feel bad about hunting and eating meat--which is non policy makes me less likely to vote in favor of environmental issues or climate change--w...

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6473365048088756225 The Economist recently released a video about competition in the Digital age..comparing Google's command of internet searches to Standard Oil's control of the oil industry 100 years ago at 86 percent. The more important part of the video is that it gives a good strategy for regulating these monopolies. You can't break up a technology platform Monopoly because it's in the cloud....it has to be the same accross all platforms anytime, anywhere. They suggest you prevent mergers of smaller companies that could provide a competitive advantage. That might work! It's the solution I have been looking for a long time.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5gxn/the-internet-doesnt-need-civility-it-needs-ethics

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6471018600491728897

An interesting study on the real political "divisions" in America. "Hardcore" Liberals are only 1/5th of the population and "Hardcore" conservatives including traditional and alt-right only comprise 25% of the population. Really interesting idea. Most of us fall in the middle. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5bbcea6b7817f7bf7342b718/1539107467397/hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf

People might ask why all the emails? Why all the liberal propaganda? I say as a lifelong moderate conservative it is important to understand and hear out the other side, regardless of where you end up on that issue. If one wants to keep track of the Second Progressive Era, one must pay attention to where people are generating most of the ideas that will become enshrined in law and in culture. Generally the change in American society has come from liberals, whether they be the abolitionists who were racist, the members of the Grange (a farmer's association), or the New York editors who finally decided to support the civil rights movement. A lot of modern "new" ideas have come in the past from them, such as gay marriage, transgender rights, healthcare for all, etc. It is worth it to watch small factions where the ideas come from. One also has to realize that cultural relativity is at play. Democrats meant conservatism for a good 100 years, and the Republicans were the liber...

So with everybody mad, angry, happy, ridiculously overjoyed, or making plans to go canvassing again, the Era continues. I was pretty happy with what happened in Alaska, but in other parts of the country it went a little differently. The House was taken by Democrats, the Senate by Republicans, and well, Trump is still president. Utah has right now an interesting race between Mia Love and Ben McAdams--one a Republican daughter of Haitian parents, fiscal and social conservative. Ben McAdams, as far as I can tell is a an interesting mix of social and fiscal conservative, and a social/fiscal liberal. Both are members of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Both buck stereotypes of Republicans, Democrats, and Mormons that can only happen in a place like Utah that has a large conservative population with a religious organization that makes political hacks second guess themselves with its quirks. Conservatives that are more moderate with immigration, science, and caring for the poor and needy-...

Donald Trump was elected because he seemed to represent and refrain the basic ideals of the American Church. This quotation from Stanley Haurwas, professor of theology and ethics at Duke University helps us make sense of this--and this belief in the American church, but not a personal God on the right and the left has hurt us--because control of the government means control of the 'church' and anyone who does wrong against those belief is an unrighteous opponent deserving of destruction. To quote: "I believe - as Mark Noll rightly suggests in his book,  America 's God  -  America  is a synthesis of evangelical Protestantism, republican political ideology and commonsense moral reasoning.  Americans  were able to synthesize these antithetical traditions by making their faith in God indistinguishable from their loyalty to a country that insured them that they had the right to choose which god they would or would not believe in. That is why Bonhoeffer accuratel...