1) I thought this was interesting (article: www.cnet.com/health/cultivated-meat-factory-opens-for-public-tours-in-a-bid-to-explain-what-it-does/) and I just want to say: I would totally try cultivated meat. I think the positive environmental impact is a bonus for sure. If it tastes like normal meat and gets textures right...I'm all for it. Sign me up for a lab-cultured plate of oxtail.
2)RIP Colin Powell. I didn't always like everything he said, and I wasn't always a fan of his politics...but I respected him all the same. I thought he was a model moderate. I applauded his willingness to break ranks with his party over their embracing of He Who Has The Worst Combover Ever.
3)It seems like Zoom seminars/symposia/conferences are fading out. I think it's a shame. I think it's a great way to be eco-friendly. It's nice to fly from NY to France (or where-ever) for 3 day conferences....but all the travel does have a significant impact on the environment.
4) I'm not going to lie, I (mostly) agree with James Carville's take that "extreme wokeness" is going through the backlash phase, and it's hurting Dems. (article: thehill.com/homenews/media/579991-carville-blames-stupid-wokeness-for-democratic-losses). I emphasize the "extreme" part. I agree with "wokeness" when that means equal rights and acceptance (not just tolerance) of all lifestyles (excluding lifestyle choices such as paedophilia, death cults...you get the picture). I agreed with things like taking the Confederate iconography out of state flags, taking down statues of slave owners in public spaces, acknowledging fluidity of gender, etc. But maybe let's work on making these changes incrementally. Let's try actual reform of police (not just in words, but in action and accountability) before we start abolishing police. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you can't just abolish the police. What's the alternative, anyway? Private vigilantes/mercenaries? The hope that people just stop raping and killing and otherwise victimizing innocents? Be realistic.
5) I was dismayed regarding the jury selection in the Ahmaud Arbery case. I hope the jury is impartial and sees this as what it is: murder. There was no need for Mr. Arbery to die. He was threatening nobody's life, regardless of whether the claims he stole some good from a construction site are true or not. The punishment for theft is not execution in any of the 50 states, last I knew. The murderers could have just followed him to his house and called the police if they were really concerned about theft. They had no right to do what they did.
6) I was glad to see the jury in the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery came to the proper verdicts for all 3 of the murderers. I was having nightmares about what would happen if they were found innocent. But the jury came to the right decisions, the judge was impartial and fair, and this is the outcome that needed to happen. This was what justice shoudl be.
As to the Rittenhouse trial...I wasn't surprised by the outcome. It seemed pretty doomed for the prosecution from the get-go. I wasn't happy with the outcome, but I wasn't surprised.
So we got racial justice. But it was a split decision on the role and scope of vigilantism in modern American society I personally don't want people with guns driving around towns and cities picking and choosing who they consider to be worthy of public execution. If it came to that point in America, we would essentially be beginning the decent from world power to being a 3rd world country. We'll be the country other countries send armies into for "peace keeping operations". That may sound like hyperbole, but I think validating vigilantism and giving vigilantes the power to make on the spot decisions to publicly execute people.... that doesn't exactly jibe with the type of justice we demand other countries uphold.
(ps- Vigilantism is exactly what you end up with if you abolish police. I'm all for reforming an out-of-date system. I'm all for making it easier for good, unbiased police to do their job. But if you outright abolish the police and replace them with "community watch groups" and such....that's vigilantism. There will be communities where people like the McMichael's will comprise a "community watch group" or whatever you want to call it. You can't just abolish the police because some of them are racist. Most aren't. You don't burn down an apple orchard because one-tenth of the trees aren't producing good fruit.)
7) Congratulations to Barbados, who will be removing the Queen of England as the Head of State and becoming a Republic today (29 Nov., 2021); Hopefully more Caribbean countries can soon make that same move to sovereignty..
8) RIP Prof. Jacques Tits, one of our great modern mathematicians. If you've taken a math class higher than calculus, you've encountered at least one of his contributions. Here's a memorial article from Le Monde: www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2021/12/08/le-mathematicien-jacques-tits-est-mort_6105202_3382.html
I know it's in French, but I'm guessing most readers have a "translate this page option". For myself, I'm not using translators because I don't want my French minor to go to waste.
9) Taking a quick time out from finals studies to express my displeasure with how the abortion rights/Roe V. Wade fights are turning out. KEEP ABORTION LEGAL. I think it's especially sick to see states taking the position that victims of rape and incest should be forced to see the pregnancy through. I think it's generally sick to see the laws being put in place by states like Texas, but I think forcing victims of rape & incest to have children is especially disgusting. My faith in basic human decency is steadily and not-so-slowly fading to nothing, and my desire to remain an American is deteriourating at a similar rate.
10) Sort of related to the last point: I have to say that I'm just really disappointed with the way people handled (and are continuing to handle) the whole COVID........thing.. Not on any medical level, but just on a human level. I think a good example is mask compliance. From the first moment we were asked to put on the mask, people were throwing fits. Even though the reason for wearing the mask was to help protect others, not ourselves, from transmitting the virus. The whole point of the mask was to keep your germs to yourself.. And all you had to do was wear a mask. But nobody wanted to wear a mask because... they WANTED to spread their germs? More likely, they just didn't like being told what to do, even at the expense of the lives of vulnerable people around them. And so things got worse, and restrictions got worse, and instead of learning our collective lesson, we chose Spring Break with a million other people over the health and/or lives of others. We chose watching sports in stadiums, we chose (maybe most amusingly in an ironic kind of way) religious congregation, we chose concerts, we chose movies, we chose large scale violence in the streets, we chose fighting over fucking toilet paper (unmasked).....we chose all of that and so much more over basic human decency. We chose it over watching out for the health of the elderly, children and others who were more prone to fatal cases of COVID. We would rather storm the fucking Capitol and kill police officers and hunt down politicians than put a piece of cloth over our mouths. Anti-compliance from the outset, all the conspiracy theory bullshit and all of the freedom posturing..... how hard was it to just wear a proper, recommended mask form the get go, and see how it goes. And was it really so bad to stay indoors and actually get to all of those things you regret not doing when you wake up with a hangover on your cruise ship (maskless)?
The point is, the sacrifices we were asked to make at the outset were just that....sacrifices. Sacrifice isn't comfortable, and it's, in general, a very difficult thing. But wearing masks, following arrows on grocery aisles, staying home instead of going to a concert or bar or sporting event or movie or whatever for a month... it's a lot. But non-compliance lead to more cases and, inevitably, more deaths. So we had to make bigger sacrifices like closing businesses, because no one wanted to keep their germs to themselves for like a month. It snowballed over some juvenile "I'm not gonna cause I don't wanna" bullshit.
The fact is millions of people died from COVID world wide. Their deaths may have been from COVID itself, or from COVID complicating and existing condition. Either way, they died from COVID. The science is there. The virus existed in their system and, in one way or another, caused that persons death. And we'll never know how many of those people WOULDN'T have died if people could just put a piece of fucking cloth on their mouth, stayed inside and watch some Netflix or (gasp) tried to fucking learn something new, and stayed six feet apart. But the vast majority of us still haven't worked out of that "I'm not gonna 'cos I don't wanna" phase of our lives. At the expense of other peoples lives.
And I think that really says pretty much everything that needs to be said about...human nature, on a grand, collective scale. Our problems are rooted in this kind of childishness. You can still be a free-thinking individual or whatever while also caring about the lives of others. The two aren't mutually exclusive. We just equate freedom with killing. Not just in America. It's definitely not exclusive to America, although we do have a sort of melodramatic flair to our toxicity.
People weren't willing to sacrifice current freedoms to ensure other freedoms that were in jeopardy (including the right to...well, life *ahem*). They want freedom without discipline or sacrifice on even the most basic level. And this obviously applies to all shades of the political spectrum. Nobody has clean hands in this, broadly speaking (I do salute those who did, and continue to, take this seriously from the start).
It's just so....I guess I'm not even surprised. To be honest, I was kind of inspired at first, when COVID started, and people were coming together and kind of embracing (or at least tolerating) a new experience in the face of some sacrifices. There was a large portion of the global population that resisted any sacrifices from the get go, obviously. But just the existence of that sizable portion of the population that was making the most of it... it was inspiring. But then a lot of people kind of didn't put their money where their mouth was. A lot of rich people who were talking about relief weren't stepping up to help relieve the economic burden COVID placed on the government. Sometimes you have to pay more than taxes. Sometimes you need to do more than donate 8% of every purchase of Hostess cupcakes to COVID research.
I'd like to add how much this highlights how many of us would completely fold under REAL actual oppression. Imagine some dimwit trying to storm the capitol of a real, actual Totalitarian Dictatorship....in whatever way you define a TD.. I don't know. People get killed for a whole lot less than storming capitols (state or national) over some face coverings.
11) Just got my booster vaccine for COVID. I encourage everyone who can to get their booster. I still haven't sprouted an extra ear, and I don't see any black helicopters in the sky tracking my location, so I think it's safe.
Which brings me to a point related to item #10 above:
Stop with the vaccine conspiracy theories. If you really believe the government or whom ever is able and smart enough to put microchips into vaccines or some such nonsense, what makes you think they'd choose the most controversial vaccine out there? If they really had that kind of power and ability, they'd use a vaccine you don't think twice about getting (e.g.; flu shots, Measles Mumps Rubella shot). Don't be dense.
Also: if the government really wanted to track you, they'd just use the phone your face is constantly buried in. Not a fucking vaccine.
12)RIP Desmond Tutu. One of the truly great voices in the Anti-Apartheid movement, and in civil rights in general. It's sad that we lost him, but the impact he had on the world was so positive that any sadness due to his loss is offset be the joy and freedom he brought to millions.
Also: RIP bell hooks. I wasn't so familiar with her works, but I recognize the positive impact she had on so many people. Her contributions to benefit society might have been more abstract than Archbishop Tutu's, but she was an important voice to so many.
13) Sort of related to the above couple of COVID rants, I personally think the new variants won't be as deadly as the first. I think in terms of deaths, the worst is behind us. People will still die from COVID, the same way people still die from the flu. But outside of the occasional freak variant every 5 or 10 years, I think we collectively got in front of this pretty well. It probably could have been much, much worse. I still think it's smart to add a COVID shot to the yearly round of seasonal vaccines, like cold & flu shots. Until we're at like 90% vaccinated rate, things like masks and social distancing and limited seating at events is going to be fairly normal every time some variant comes up.
14) I'm sort of flabbergasted that, as of 5 Jan. 2022, the longest sentence for the treasonous act of violently storming the nations capitol (and all the crimes that were part of said storming, up to and including murder, that occurred during said storming) is 63 months. 63 months. That's just over 5 years. For what's essentially treason. That's insane to me. I won't even get into comparing those sentences to sentences Black people for crimes that are MUCH MUCH less serious than storming the Capitol building, killing cops, and intent to murder Congresspeople..
15) I was happy with the sentences handed out for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.. It was one of those things that kind of restored a smidge of my long-lost faith in humanity.
16) I've heard speculation that Hillary Clinton might run for president again in 2024 (www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-2024-speculation-embarrassment-democrats-kevin-mccarthy-says-1669143 ), and I've been shaking my head ever since. It would be an absolute disaster. She will NOT win an election. She is NOT a good candidate. And I say this as an unaffiliated voter. SHE.WOULD. .NOT. WIN. She has no charisma, she's corny/cringy, and she's just not a good debater.
17) Living here (Stony Brook, NY) has reminded me just how much I hate snow. If I never see a millimeter of snow anywhere but the top of a mountain (a real mountain, not these hills they call mountains on the East coast), I would die happy. It's just another reason (amongst many) why I'd never, ever, ever move back to the Midwest for any reason. If the only 2 schools I got job offers from were University of Michigan and Linn-Benton Community College, I'd decline UofM's offer and ask LBCC when I could start. Fuck snow. I hate it.
(Note: the UofM and LBCC thing is two extreme choices. I would say no to any school within 750 miles of Kalamazoo, MI without hesitation. The further I am from Kalamazoo, the happier I am. Anyway, if I were offered a hypothetical job at a school like, say, Stony Brook or Columbia...it'd be pretty hard to say no despite the snow. And the salary at schools like that would be good enough where I could at least take a few weeks a year to get back to the PNW for real nature adventures.
But all other things being equal, I just prefer the PNW climate. The Willamette Valley, especially, was just kind of perfect for me, as far as year round weather. And I've discovered that I do need mountains and outdoorsy-ness for optimal mental health. My at-least-once-a-week hikes at Oak Creek, for instance, gave me balance. I exercise out here, and it helps keep me mostly balanced....but it's not enough. I need elevation gain on my hikes. And I need real Wilderness (with a capital W) activities at least once a year. There's still places in Oregon I'd love to explore, or at least explore more.)
Update 7 March 2022: To be honest, I don't think a couple of weeks a year for outdoorsy stuff (like, REAL outdoorsy stuff, with REAL hikes) is enough. If I'm being honest, It's not just the snow out here. I hate living in a giant suburb that extends from the City to the Atlantic. It's so boring out here. I was writing my only dear friend in the world, and I explained how living in places that aren't Oregon (or PNW) just.... I'm in such poor mental health. Living with room-mates who are like 2 decades younger than me doesn't help either. I like living alone, and the cost of living out here is ridiculous. No place to myself + no real hiking + tons of people around wherever you go + stuff I don't even want to get into**=me hating life (being hyperbolic there, but it is rough on my mental health) . I can tough out 2 years, but that's it. I would literally say "no" to Harvard because of where it's located. I'm no good at math if my mental health is this poor. No amount of counseling or whatever is going to help me find a replacement for the things that balanced me out like real hiking AND math AND living alone in a non-broom closet apartment...that combination of stuff just really balanced me out, and it got me in a really good place. For the last couple of years in Corvallis/Philomath, I was sort of "peak Jonathan", and it was because of the combination of things and not any one thing specifically.
** Keep in mind, the negative stuff that "I don't really want to get in to" had nothing to do with Stony Brook's math department. But I don't spend 24 hours, 7 days a week in the Math Department. I also think math departments with highest-level research breed competitiveness, and if I'm being honest, that definitely exists at SBU. There's good and bad to that, but for me... I just hate competition. I prefer working with people collaboratively, not against them competitively.
18) File under "They were really too oblivious to see the irony?":
There's a church between the apartment I live in & my gym with a sign in front that says "Don't let fear lead you back to what's familiar".
So, if you're scared of dying or whatever, and you go to that church...they're telling you not to come back, I guess.
I lol every time I pass that sign.
19) This article (www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1083077194/news-anxiety-tips-self-care ) kind of perfectly sums up the self-centredness of the West, and maybe especially America. But basically this article is like "how can I, as someone thousands of miles from this war, cope with having to read about people getting killed while their country is being destroyed". We are so self-centred as a culture that we need to take time to make ourselves feel better about having to read about real human suffering. Being informed is literally too much for most Americans to handle, apparently. You're supposed to feel bad for the people dying and having their freedom stolen and fighting through it all against overwhelming odds. It's not about you. It's about them. Maybe finding some way to contribute to the cause, however seemingly small will help you. You could post stuff on a blog with a low-to-moderate traffic, for instance. But don't appropriate other peoples suffering and pain as your personal depressive episode. You can be sad for them, but being sad for yourself?...come on.
20) Related to #19... fuck this guy (www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/03/06/piano-man-poland-ukraine-border-refugee-shelter-sidner-dnt-vpx.cnn). People have phones, computers, mp3 players and all that. Its 2022, not 1970. People aren't looking for the hotel lounge experience immediately after escaping bombing raids and leaving their whole lives behind. They can use devices to listen to music if that's what they want to do. If PianoBro really wanted to help, we would have towed food and supplies for 5000 miles instead of that huge fucking piano. Nobody wants to hear this guy play "We Are the Champions" after watching the ravaging of their towns. They need food, shelter, clothes...real tangible help. Not some "let my renditions of other peoples songs heal your spirit." bs.
Tbh, if he was just a resident of a town near the border, I don't think it'd bother me so much. But all the money & effort he spent to travel 5000miles to play piano for freshly traumatized people? There are better, more useful ways to expend that time, energy, & resources.
21) I've been following the French elections, mostly via French news services Youtube Live feeds. So, yes, I'm following French language feeds. And the LiveFeeds don't have closed captioning. While it's a good way to keep an ear for the language, I'm really only familiar with "American university-level textbook French". There's a lot of conversational nuance I miss. But, with an approximately 50% understanding of the general themes, the second round is looking to be a photo finish. There's some pretty obvious similarities to the division we have in the U.S.
This is a quick take, but I want to say 2 things:
A) I hope Macron wins. I know I'm no citoyen, and my choice means rein when the votes are counted, but I'm in the pro-Macron camp..
B) One of the more interesting aspects of this election is how neither of the candidates are from "traditional" parties. It would be like if we were having an election in America, and the choice was between two candidates for President who were both from parties that had only existed in the last 20-or-so years.. In the end, this French election is still kind of coming down to "conservative VS. liberal", but it was almost a choice between two Liberals (Melechon was really close to LePen) (also: I consider Macron a Liberal in the way I consider Biden a Liberal...really more of a Moderate, but with slight Liberal leanings). Anyway, I just think the willingness to give new parties a try is a really cool aspect of the French political landscape. I think it's refreshing to see a culture that isn't so hell-bent on traditionalism that they can't imagine having to choose between two parties every election. I also like France's secularism.
C) It's still crazy to me how much anti-Muslim (and, probably by extension, anti-Arab) sentiment there still is in France. Maybe it's because in the U.S. most of our recent major terrorist attacks have been domestic and we've seen that the real bad guy is the one in the mirror....but I thought we decided as a global community that you don't blame whole ethnic or racial groups for the acts of a few extremists?
update 17 Ap 2020: As someone who hates voting for the lesser of two evils himself, I totally understand the "ni Macron ni LePen" movement/protests in France currently going on. At the same time, as someone who chose the lesser of two evils in 2020 (Biden, IMO), that those who dislike having to make that choice do end up voting for Macron. It's not worth risking the evilest of the two evils getting in (Le Pen in France, Trump in the USA...again, IMO). I understand (and support) the protest & its sentiments, but this is one of those moments in history where we have to decide if we're going to regress (Trump/Le Pen) or if we're going to hold steady to gain the footing we need so we can progress (Biden/Macron).
22) This article : www.cnn.com/2022/04/15/politics/biden-youth-approval-polling/index.html )...
I think that article is as out of touch as Biden. It's insane how someone can work for a huge media corporation, with all of the data & information & interviews & resources that entails, and the best they can come up with is "Must be COVID response.."
Younger people are fed up with the fact that Biden is kind of out of touch (much like the article) with what people are looking to fix...which is just about everything. COVID response is a very small piece of that pie. People, on both sides I think, are tired of the unspoken non-promise; that is, they're tired of hearing all of these vague promises for big things that everyone knows won't really happen. They're tired of career politicians who are in it for themselves more than the people they serve. Politicians who would rather work on book deals and such than spend that time in the communities they serve to see what's really going on, and hear what issues they're really facing. I think it's part of the reason why extremism is becoming such an enticing option for some: there's an appeal to taking what you want when you know no one's going to help you get what you need.
I think both Biden & Trump represent an old America that most of us would rather move on from. I don't mean in a "burn the system down" kind of way, but in a philosophical way. I think more people want a solutions-oriented government as opposed to this unkeepable-promise & career-oriented system.
I dunno..there's a lot I could say about this subject, but I don't really have the time It just bugs me when people (in this case, Chris Clizzila or whatever) are just being lazy and don't even try to think for one second on why people might not be into something (in this case the Biden presidency)
23) RIP Patrick Lyoya. Lots of people "don't comply", and they some how manage to not get shot, much less murdered. See, for example, like every single f*cking episode of COPS. Mr. Lyoya didn't deserve to die over some license plates. Should have have fought or run? No. But that's not worthy of a death sentence. I hope Mr. Lyoya and his family get justice.
24) I am not happy with the way the Supreme Court seems to be leaning with Roe V Wade. I support states rights in a lot of ways. States rights plays a role in making America a diverse place that represents its diverse population. But some things need to be a federal standard. At the bare minimum, abortions should be legal for victims of rape and incest, or when the party giving birth is in danger of losing their life. That should be the bare minimum of the birthing party's rights on the federal level.
I don't think a reversal of Roe V Wade will have the effect Conservatives (and apparently the SCOTUS) think. And this is no longer an age when keeping a pregnancy secret is really possible. It's going to be...interesting.....to see which Conservatives are getting extra-marital with their baby-making.
I think the bitter, darkly ironic/humourous thing about all this is that it could have been avoided if RBG had just stepped down during the Obama administration, while a more liberal legislative branch was still able to pass her replacement through. And no, she didn't "earn the right" to let her hubris be the first domino to fall on the trail to Roe being overturned.
25) This video is everything I hate about politics:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKqtMvpwUu4
As someone with no political party affiliation, I find this kind of Left-centric rhetoric to be just as bad as similar Right-centric rhetoric. One side saying the other side is over-run with extremists to the point of being an exclusively extremist party. When she says "There are no moderate Republicans" and "the Republican party is exclusively extremists"...it just sounds like any sound bite from Tucker Carlson, but with the other political party's name subbed in. Most people aren't extremists. The couple of thousands of people turning peaceful protests into riots, or storming capitol buildings, or any of that...that's a couple of thousand of people. A few thousand out of about 330 million people. Most people aren't radical, be they Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green....or *ahem* even unaffiliated. Most people aren't taking things to extremes. But many people ARE letting themselves be drawn to extremes because they see divisive trash like this from both sides 24/7 on all the mainstream media networks (and yes, despite their protestations, Fox is definitely mainstream media, and they can drop the bullshit martyr act). I dunno. I'll write more on this later, I'm sure.
Additional thought: I dislike how much we emphasize Twitter as a platform for political influence. Nothing substantial comes from Twitter. Sorry, but it's just a place for people to argue, not for well-thought out debates. It's a place when philosophy (political or otherwise) is condensed into memes w/ like 10 words. It's a place that amplifies "gotcha" politics, where people just point out stupid flaws like a grammatical error or mis-spelling. Is it incredibly stupid that a sitting politician thinks Martial Law is spelled Marshall Law? Absolutely. But we don't need to spend weeks discussing it. Make fun of it and move on. Quickly.
26)This was a really stupid article based on some really poor research (article link). It dosnt mention that THC vapoes are usually 50+% THC, while the highest flower THC counts are in the 30% area. I personally never smoke anything over 20% THC, and almost always stay at the 15% or lower THC counts. and I never smoke whole joints unless I haven't slept well for a few days. I'm also a fairly seasoned smoker. I'm nobody's stoner (I'm pretty much a "two to four hits off a pipe at the end of the day" smoker), but I know there's a massive difference between the stuff I smoke and the stuff that's in the 20-30+% THC range. If people are smoking whole joints of 30% THC...that's going to cause problems. It's like drinking a whole half pint of liquor in half an hour or so. You're probably going to end up hurting yourself or having a panic attack.
I bought one of those 50+% THC vapes before, took one hit off it, and was like "This is waaaaay too much." so I threw it away.
I think marijuana retailers are selling the higher THC stuff almost exclusively now, and I personally think that's stupid. When a lot of retailers first opened in Oregon after legalization of recreational sales, you might have one or two strains for sale, out of 20 strains, that were in the 30+% range. There was a good variety of different THC levels. People could find their "night at home" strains, but could also get their "lets get wasted, bros and sisses and nb's!" strains. It sort of seems like everything is just the "get blackout wasted" THC levels now.
I think the research in the article isn't giving the full picture, and the reporting isn't questioning the gaps in the scope of research at all. They should be checking for THC levels in the patients (as they would with blood-alcohol levels) if they wanted to give a complete, and accurate, picture. It would be worth seeing if the admittances were all from very high blood-THC levels, if they were from high potency strains, and what a possible regulation on high-THC potency items might do to lower admittances. Like maybe say any given retailer can only have 25% of their inventory at the 20% and above THC level. Just an idea.