The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space
The Weird Times Issue 21, October 4, 2020
There is so much news right now, it is impossible to keep up. It’s a good thing this newsletter is not a newspaper, or I’d be up all night rewriting.
Jim Carrey playing Joe Biden on SNL’s season opener summed up how millions of Americans feel, when he held up his remote and put his opponent on pause. Silence for just a moment. A welcome relief.
The pandemic reached the highest level of government this week. That wiped away every other important story of the day, but we cannot ignore them: Trump’s taxes, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s sexual harassment of a Fox News staffer, the president’s support of the Proud Boys and the threat of right wing violence, Repugnant party driven voter suppression efforts (especially in states like Texas that are turning blue), continued climate change denial, the Amy Coney Barrett nomination, and the ongoing effort by Trump party faithful to steal the upcoming election in courts across the country.
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“I urge every senator to take a step back from the brink,” he said. “Take off the blinders of politics for just one critical moment and stand up for the Constitution you swore to uphold.” —Joe Biden, 9.27.20
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“This crisis shows how the administration’s refusal to share information and its insistence on its own version of reality creates confusion that leaves Americans vulnerable and anxious. Its history of secrecy and lies means that few people actually trust anything its spokespeople say. It was striking how many people did not believe the Trumps were actually sick when the news broke; we are so accustomed to Trump’s lies that many people thought he was simply looking for a way out of future debates.
The constant lies—about coronavirus and virtually everything else—destabilize the nation because we cannot know what the truth really is. And if we don’t know what is actually happening, we cannot make good decisions. Today the editorial board of the Washington Post warned that the White House simply must let us know the truth about the president’s health so that we know who is actually running national security, the economy, and the election on our behalf.
That plea did not appear to make much of an impression on the White House: it did not bother to tell Pelosi, who is third in line for the presidency, that Trump was being helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital.”
—Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, October 2, 2020.
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Ten Things You Need to Know to Stop a Coup, Waging Nonviolence, Daniel Hunter, September 18, 2020
“We have a president who has openly said he might not respect the outcome of our election. We have to be ready if he claims victory before votes are counted, tries to stop counting, or refuses to accept a loss.”
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You Don’t Need to Feel Sick About What Happened Last Night: A counterintuitively optimistic take on the first presidential debate. Douglas Rushkoff, September 30, 2020.
“So no, last night was not a debate. It was more of a competition over our perception of reality. Trump showed that the only way he can win a debate or an election is to convince us that there’s nothing we can do to stop him. That resistance is futile.
But according to Trump’s own logic, all we need to do to defeat him is to believe otherwise, and vote. It’s that easy.”
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Trump just told you how he plans to become America’s dictator. Believe him. Umair Haque, Medium, September 24, 2020
“This is Donald Trump’s final assault on American Democracy. He’s not playing a game, bluffing. He is trying to turn American into a fascist-authoritarian state, and he is one tiny, tiny step away from succeeding. Because he has a complex, sophisticated plan to accomplish that final transformation, by knocking down whatever few threadbare pillars of democracy are left standing in his way — people, electors, courts, ballots, votes.
He knows exactly what he is doing, but Americans are still very much underestimating it. If you don’t get that, remember how pundits are calling it a “refusal to commit to a transfer of power,” when Trump is telling you something much much worse than that when you think about it, that he doesn’t want or intend to have one at all.”
Read this entire piece. Even if you think this is an exaggerated fear. It is not. It does not matter that the instigator is in the hospital right now. His henchmen are working on implementing his plans.
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Maybe you're thinking that Biden won because Trump alienated women. Maybe you're thinking that Biden's calm demeanor was his ace in the hole. Maybe you're thinking Biden scored a few points. THAT'S ALL IRRELEVANT! The debate was purely about style, and what we've got is a fascist doing his act on national television and no one calling him out on it.
--Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter
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Why Environmental Justice Needs to be on the Docket in the Presidential Debates: If you want to talk about the inequality in our economy, COVID-19, race, and silent violence in our cities, you need to start with environmental injustice. --Derrick Z. Jackson, Environmental Health Network, September 29,2020.
“It's a shocking reality that no moderator asked about climate change in the 2016 presidential debates. Three weeks ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists joined nearly four dozen groups in writing a letter to the moderators of the three upcoming presidential and one vice presidential debates, reminding them that, in a Stanford University poll, a record 82 percent of people said they thought government should do at least a moderate amount to blunt the effects of climate change. The letter called for the candidates to be asked about "how they will combat the environmental injustice that has plagued Black and brown communities for decades.""
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Bird Brains are far more Humanlike than Once Thought, Bret Stetka, Scientific American, September 24, 2020
“Two papers published today in Science find birds actually have a brain that is much more similar to our complex primate organ than previously thought. For years it was assumed that the avian brain was limited in function because it lacked a neocortex. In mammals, the neocortex is the hulking, evolutionarily modern outer layer of the brain that allows for complex cognition and creativity and that makes up most of what, in vertebrates as a whole, is called the pallium. The new findings show that birds’ do, in fact, have a brain structure that is comparable to the neocortex despite taking a different shape. It turns out that at a cellular level, the brain region is laid out much like the mammal cortex,explaining why many birds exhibit advanced behaviors and abilities that have long befuddled scientists. The new work even suggests that certain birds demonstrate some degree of consciousness.”
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The unusual relationship between climate and pandemics, podcast by Lauren Lipuma at EOS. In this episode, climate scientist and historian Alexander More describes the relationship between climate and pandemics in the context of these two seemingly unconnected pieces of research and discusses what humans can learn from pandemics of the past.
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The Election Threats That Keep US Intelligence Up at Night,,Lily Hay Newman, Wired, September 28, 2020.
In the span of a few days last week, Facebook announced that it had taken down disinformation campaigns from China, the Philippines, and Russia. While the latter efforts mostly targeted countries outside the US, it was a disturbing echo of the Kremlin's attacks against the platform in 2016. Facebook warned that it could presage a risk of the sort of "hack and leak" operations that Russia carried out back then against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of security policy, said the company has not seen any specific activity indicating such leaks are imminent, but he emphasized that it's important to prepare for the possibility. Russia and other state actors could easily pivot to such operations before Election Day.
"The FBI and CISA urge the American public to critically evaluate the sources of the information they consume and to seek out reliable and verified information from trusted sources, such as state and local election officials," the alert from the agencies says.
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New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster: Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling. Damian Carrington, The Guardian, September 28, 2020.
“A super-enzyme that degrades plastic bottles six times faster than before has been created by scientists and could be used for recycling within a year or two.
The super-enzyme, derived from bacteria that naturally evolved the ability to eat plastic, enables the full recycling of the bottles. Scientists believe combining it with enzymes that break down cotton could also allow mixed-fabric clothing to be recycled.”
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The Agriculture Department began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food sent to needy families include a letter from Trump claiming credit for the $4 billion program. Food banks and other nonprofits worry that distributing these Trump-branded boxes could be misconstrued as election activity. (Politico)
Sure – why not?
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Beau Beausoleil reading Poems for George Floyd, September 26, 2020
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Hylonoetic:
everything that is or was
in any sense alive
has consciousness.
And everything with consciousness can talk.
And does talk.
And we can learn to hear.
Wood or metal,
carapace or bone,
winged or worm—
they all report.
Things think.
Matter sings.
—Robert Kelly
Happy 85th birthday, Robert!
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Baseball Hall of Famer Bob Gibson died October 2. He was not only a brilliant pitcher and athlete, he was a great human being. While battling pancreatic cancer, he spoke to sportswriter Bob Lupica: “One of these days,” he said, “people in this country are going to stop being afraid of what they don’t know. That day just hasn’t come yet. And that doesn’t make me angry. It makes me sad.”
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And where was the will of my father
When he raised his sword on high?
And where was my mother's wailing
When our flags were justified?
And where will we take our pleasures
When our bodies have been denied?
So now is the time for your loving, dear
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea
Now in this age of confusion
I have need for your company
—Children of Darkness by Richard and Mimi Farina
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I am really pleased to have had the chance to talk with the extraordinary writer Roger Angell, author of some of my favorite books about baseball. I conducted the interview in the course of doing research on a New Yorker writer, Robert M. Coates, whom Roger knew for many years. Roger Angell turned 100 on September 19, so this is my chance to wish him a century of happy birthdays. Listen at Writerscast.com or on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app.
Roger Angell with Maine Governor Janet Mills, August 2020 (Photo by Kevin Madden)
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Let us never forget the lives lost and the scale of human suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA and elsewhere.
As of 10.4.2020:
Coronavirus Cases: 7,602,720
Deaths: 214,284
Recovered: 4,818,769
Source: Worldometers.info