The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces: Issue 236, November 17, 2024 (V5 #28)
When a clown visits the castle it doesn’t make him a king. It makes the castle a circus.—Steve Schmidt
…totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.—Hannah Arendt
This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment.—Timothy Snyder
I have gotten myself together. Now I am ready to fight for a more just world. Choose your space and get to work.—Eddie Glaude
Let's be inspired by this traumatic tragedy to deepen our commitment to each other as we renew our crusade on behalf of beauty, truth, justice, and love.—Rob Brezsny
Books, Music, Art, Culture
Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75: She wrote lovingly and often hilariously about her harrowing childhood in a working-class Southern family, as well as about the violence and incest she suffered, Penelope Green, NY Times, 11/8/24: “Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be. But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear.”
Whose Future Is It Anyway? Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right,” Jess Maginity, LA Review of Books, 11/12/24: “Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.”
How R.E.M. Created Alternative Music: In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could break through to mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal, Mark Krotov, New Yorker, 11/13/24: “R.E.M. remained committed, to an unusual degree for a rock band, to oblique strategies.” Book: The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography by Peter Ames Carl
What the Band Eats: Memories of the meals I ate growing up with the Grateful Dead, Reya Hart, The Atlantic, 11/15/24: “It’s not until we’re near the midpoint of the tour that we begin to resent the sushi platter, blame it for the monotony of our lives.”
‘Yesterday a missile hit. Tonight, we have poetry’: the writers drawing crowds on Ukraine’s frontlines: As Ukraine remains under Russian bombardment and the election of Trump adds a new level of fear, its residents are turning to the power of literature to console and inspire in even the darkest days, Irina Tsilyk, The Guardian, 11/14/24
“… We are the masters of sports in balancing.
Balancing on the edge between different realities.
A Girl on a Ball, hold on tight,
press your feet into your planet,
while it shakes …”
Memories in the Marsh: A Love Letter to Exploring, Studying, and Creating Art in Nature: Anna Farro Henderson on Romance, Distance, and Change as She Studies a Maine Marshland, LitHub, 11/11/24: “I can’t smell the trees or feel the sun, but thousands of years of time flow through my mind and I see the retreating ice sheets, growing and shrinking lakes, the march of deciduous trees northward.” Book: Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood
We've Been Consumed: Thoughts on getting back to a life of experiences, John Warner, Biblioracle, 11/10/24: “Democrats were selling democracy, Republicans were selling consumerism, and consumerism won. Trump’s message was essentially that there are others who are in the way of your desire to have stuff and he is going to get them out of the way by deporting them or slapping tariffs on their goods or whatever. It never needed to make sense to be effective.”
Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world: A population numbed, dazed, present-but-not-present – had it happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie. And if you looked up from your phone for long enough, you might notice it’s started already…, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 11/16/24: “The mobile phone is not only a device offering you things to pay attention to but also offers you a way not to pay attention to other things.”
Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America : on the Dire Consequences of Republican Policies, Gabrielle Bellot, LitHub, 11/15/24: “If Trump does the things he has promised, like removing our access to hormone therapy or refusing to federally recognize our existence at all, I may not have much more of a story left in this country.”
Dick Van Dyke Says He's Glad He "Won't Be Around" for Trump's Second Term: The 98-year-old actor went very dark, very quickly, when asked about a second Trump presidency, Kase Wickman, Vanity Fair, 11/15/24: “Fortunately, I won’t be around to experience the four years.”
‘We’ve become distrustful of each other’: Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer on Trump, rural America and resistance: Her last book sold 2m copies. Now the Native American ecologist is taking on capitalism. She talks about how the ‘gift economy’ could heal divisions across the US, Sophie McBain, The Guardian, 11/16/24: “We hear so much about hope. Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again.”
This Game is Not Reality: Post-Election Thoughts, Doug Rushkoff, Newsletter, 11/11/24: “The political institutions that seem to be failing us now are just one symptom of a civilization whose many institutions are no longer up to the challenge of contemporary, digital life. Their inconsistencies and compromised value systems simply can’t hold up to the stresses of this time….The more we do for each other, the less stress we put on the institutions that are already crumbling under their own weight, and the more time and slack we give them to reconfigure. The more resilient we are from the bottom up, the less we need to be provided from the top down.”
We need to pay more attention to the other R in the room. Not Republican or Race but religion. We talk a lot about democracy but we should also highlight the importance of the separation of church and state in our nation. We talk about slavery more than the importance of religious freedom. Notice how many Blacks and Latinos are now motivated by their Christian faith and believe posting the Ten Commandments on a school door will make a student learn more. Why get a vaccine if you can say a few Hail Marys. Religion will make you think of sin as well as Old Testament punishment. Religion will make you think sex is not to enjoy but only to procreate. Religion will tell you Eve should bow down to Adam and Lilith never existed. So if you think the world is simply black and white and racism is running amok again- the Evangelicals have big plans for you. If you are not Born Again there will be no Rapture for you. I’m afraid the US Constitution has been consumed by the burning bush. If folks believe Trump is now doing God’s work our only alternative might be to return to worshipping the calf.
—E. Ethelbert Miller
Politics, Economics, Technology
Welcome to the Upside Down: It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy, Rachel Bitcofer, The Cycle, 11/10/24: “Propaganda cannot be beat by comms and the Right’s propaganda and its massive media and online distribution power has successfully branded Democrats as out of touch elitists that care more about sex changes for prisoners than you. This is what Trump ran on. Spoiler alert: its not the economy.”
The End of Days Inn: What Trump’s team wants to do to America, and how to fight it, Sarah Kendzior, Newsletter, 11/14/24: “Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.
That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.” (DW: Must read!)
Liberalism is the rebellion now: Belief in individual freedom and dignity is being driven underground, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 11/15/24: “If you believe that individual human freedom and dignity are paramount, you’re now facing a world that wants to crush your ideals and enslave you to the will of various authoritarians.”
After Trump’s election, women are swearing off sex with men. This has been a long time coming: The rise of ‘separatist’ movements rests on the idea that when misogyny reigns supreme, a sex strike can be a feminist act, Cécile Simmons, The Guardian, 11/12/24: “Moving away from men might be a needed defence mechanism for women. It is powerful in the message that it sends: that women don’t have a duty to show compassion to men who deny them basic respect.”
‘Democrats presented no alternative’: US voters on Trump’s win and where Harris went wrong: Harris and Trump voters share their election opinions from a Guardian callout that received more than a thousand responses, Jedidajah Otte, Caroline Bannock, The Guardian, 11/12/24: “Biden should have never run for re-election. There would have been a different outcome if Democrats had had the time to run primary elections and pick a strong candidate.”
Why Did Trump Win? These Dems Have Discovered a Very Disturbing Answer: Are you sitting down? Turns out it proved very hard to persuade swing voters that Trump was a bad president, Greg Sargent, New Republic, 11/9/24: “…Biden got the blame for Covid. He had to deal with the residual mess of it: the economic crash, the inflationary pressures, the societal pressures. People don’t even remember that as a Trump phenomenon.”
I’ve been to more than 100 Trump rallies since 2016. This is why I think he won: Travelling many miles across multiple states, I saw Republicans united in their disdain for facts – and a Democratic party far too relaxed about challenging them, Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, 11/14/24
Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters: A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed, Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Washington Post, 11/15/24: “The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as ‘false positives.’”
This fascist nightmare brought to you by Rupert Murdoch: The Fox News founder undermined our democracy. Now all TV networks are under pressure, Mark Jacob, Stop the Presses, 11/12/24: “Now is the time for us to demand better TV news, loudly, and to reward courage when we see it.”
When Will Democrats Learn to Say No? Adam Jentleson, NY Times, 11/16/24: “In politics, winning elections is the moral imperative. You go into this business to change people’s lives for the better. That means changing policy, and to change policy you have to win. Those who would rather lose elections so that they can feel better about themselves leave the real suffering to the people they claim to fight for. No one wins when we lose. It is time to start winning again.”
Trump isn't picking a cabinet, he's appointing capos to help run Trump Inc., Lucian K. Truscott IV, Newsletter, 11/15/24: “Trump has already made perfectly clear that each one of his cabinet appointees will be expected to be loyal not to the Constitution and the country, but to Donald Trump. They will serve the interests of the American people only so far as they don’t get in the way of the interests of Trump Inc.”
Decapitation Strike: Preserving America from Trump's Appointments, Timothy Snyder, Thinking About, 11/16/24: “Trump's proposed appointments…are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.” DW: Please read this!
As Trump's plans become clearer, reject these four dangerous ideas: Debunking and, I hope, clarifying some of the spin and lies, Margaret Sullivan, American Crisis, 11/17/24: “…he has fallen below 50 percent of the popular vote: 49.99 percent for him; 48.22 percent for Harris. Don’t buy the landslide talk.”
The Aftermath of Competitive Hyperbole, Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 11/12/24: “A political coalition that loses an election by one and a half points is by definition not smashed, moribund and in irremediable decline…You make the best decisions when you start from an accurate understanding of what happened.”
7 Reasons Democrats Should Be Optimistic About Their Chances in 2026 and 2028, Wally Nowinski, Noahpinion, 11/15/24: 1. Turn out will be lower 2. No one has emerged to succeed him 3. Americans turn against party in power 4. Republican over reach will be unpopular 5. High interest rates or high inflation 6. Social security 7. Democrats will get smarter (maybe).
The New Driving Force of Identity Politics Is Class, Not Race: The nation is increasingly voting along class lines, not racial ones. That could upend how we have thought about politics for decades, Jeanne Whalen, Valerie Bauerlein, Arian Campo-Flores, Wall Street Journal, 11/15/24: “Republicans have successfully rebranded themselves as the champions of the working class…” (No paywall)
Was This Election A Gender War? Sam Kahn, Castalia, 11/15/24: “The premise with this election, from the Democratic perspective, was that it would mark the ascendance of feminism. The result shows that gender is a much more complicated subject than that.”
Is this the End of an Era? Or even a Watershed of History? Maybe. Maybe not. It is literally impossible to know -- and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or selling you something, Dan Gardner, PastPresentFuture, 11/17/24
The hare is the color
of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur
like a slip of grass holding an exact amount
of the season’s voltage. And the window within the eye,
which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,
though you know it is joy that is held there.
—from “A Poem as Long as California,” Rick Barot
Science, Environment
AI Revealed a New Trove of Massive Ancient Symbols: The 2,000-year-old geoglyphs offer clues to ancient Nazca people and their rituals, Aylin Woodward, Wall Street Journal, 11/6/24 (No paywall)
Plankton are the backbone of the ocean — and may struggle with what’s coming: A pair of papers in the journal Nature shows how plankton are struggling to survive in warming seas, Dino Grandoni, Washington Post, 11/13/24
Finding Food and Solace in the Intertidal: On the complex pleasures of harvesting shellfish with the people you love, Emma Marris, Hakai, 11/14/24: “Shellfishing elicits some of the most primal positive emotions of our species: the dopamine rush of searching for rewards, and the deeply ancient bliss of finding food outside with your kin.”
As Ocean Waters Warm, a Race to Breed Heat-Resistant Coral: Around the world, researchers are working on a range of projects that aim to enhance corals’ resistance to marine heat waves. In a promising sign, a U.K. team recently became the first to quantify an uptick in heat tolerance among adult corals selectively bred for the trait, Sofia Quaglia, Yale Environment 360, 11/14/24
Sea Turtles Set a Record in a Hurricane-Filled Year: It’s been a good season for nesting, but storms brought extra challenges for hatchlings, Helen Bradshaw, Garden & Gun, 11/14/24
Despite Biden’s Promise to Protect Old Forests, His Administration Keeps Approving Plans to Cut Them Down, April Ehrlich, McKenzie Funk, Tony Schick, ProPublica, 11/12/24: “There is a massive disconnect between the administration and what’s happening on the ground.”
Is Desalination Everywhere Realistic? Tomas Pueyo, Uncharted Territories, 11/14/24: “Israel, therefore, exports the equivalent of about a third of its freshwater production. So yes, desalination can water a country.”
Trump Is Handing China a Golden Opportunity on Climate: Already a leader in clean tech, China may see a new reason to act as leader in addressing climate change too, Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic, 11/11/24
An America-sized hole in the world: Washington won't help in the climate fight, but there's still a key role for Americans, Bill McKibben, The Crucial Years, 11/12/24: “Governors and representatives in Congress on both sides of the aisle have come to recognize that clean energy is a huge moneymaker and a job creator. President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now.”
The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules: Wherever astronomers look, they see life’s raw materials, Elise Cutts, Quanta, 11/13/24: “Those of us interested in searching for life have to understand how planets could acquire organics in the absence of life. We spend a lot of time thinking about this.”
This poem can do whatever it wants—
It can change the past and make it new—
It can make hollyhocks bloom again
in my mother’s yard,
pink and white against the wall where I sit
in the safety of summer mornings.
—from “Reversal,” Grace Cavalieri
Health, Wellness
New discovery may lead to more effective treatment for cardiovascular disease: Study identifies molecule that simulates inflammation-reducing effects of a low-fat diet, Case Western Reserve, Science Daily, 11/13/24: “Researchers have identified a new target to treat atherosclerosis, a condition where plaque clogs arteries and causes major cardiac issues, including stroke and heart attack.”
Even at low levels, early bisphenol A (BPA) exposure is hazardous to later health, study shows, Pamela Ferdinand, US Right to Know, 11/14/24
Plastic medical products should not get a “free pass” from regulation, scientists say, Katherine McMahon, Sarah Howard, Environmental Health News, 11/13/24: “Single-use medical products contribute considerably to plastic pollution, despite the lack of evidence that they improve safety or hygiene.”
PFAS levels increase throughout pregnancy, study finds, Katherine McMahon, Sarah Howard, Environmental Health News, 11/15/24: “PFAS levels in pregnant women significantly predicted PFAS concentrations in their babies.”
Body as a shell: The RFK Jr. pick for HHS secretary, Katelyn Jetelina, Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD, Your Local Epidemiologist, 11/15/24: “Right now, science communicators are exhausted and demoralized at the prospect of doing it all over again. But we will. I will keep showing up and doing my best to help you sort the evidence from the rumors.”
We are each other’s
business;
we are each other’s
harvest;
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
Birds, Birding
Ducks delay their migration as the climate warms: Some are migrating along the Atlantic flyway later in the fall – or even spending the winter farther north, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 11/12/24: “…the change is occurring in species that time their migration based on temperature and precipitation cues rather than changes in day length.”
Migratory birds can use Earth's magnetic field like a GPS: Eurasian reed warblers don’t just get a sense of direction from Earth’s magnetic field – they can also calculate their coordinates on a mental map, Christa Lesté-Lasserre, NewScientist, 11/13/24
Bird brain from the age of dinosaurs reveals roots of avian intelligence, Sarah Collins, Univ of Cambridge, 11/13/24: “A ‘one of a kind’ fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.”
This darkness we feel has been coming for a long time. Now we must keep the lights of love, hope, and beauty burning brightly, and stay strong in our commitment to truth and freedom for all.
Please do stay in touch. It matters so much to know we are not alone.
I say this every week: We need each other more than ever.
Love is always the place where I begin and end.—bell hooks
We can open the door to the light.—Timothy Snyder
We have to speak up. We have to participate. We can’t just sit down and shut the door and stay by the fire. We have to fight more than ever and figure out how to be most effective. We will have to fight hard to protect democracy from here on in.—Madeleine Kunin
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.—Thomas Jefferson
In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen.—Felix Frankfurter
Stay strong.
Love always—David