A Myriad of Algorithms will never replace Shakespeare

"Extinction Level Event" . “Death Spiral,” “Budget Bloodbath,”
These are terms that must be familiar to you because often they are included in headlines regarding education, particularly the humanities and liberal arts programs.
Higher education itself has it's neck wrapped in the hangman's noose with the populist demagogues and the "Think Tank" puppeteers  funded by billionaires or industries,
 leading this sad parade.   

Less than a year after the onset of COVID-19, by February 2021, U.S. colleges and universities saw their workforce cut by 13%. Administrators leap at the promises of ed tech to deliver a future of internet only teaching, though now that we’ve had a taste of how alienating and ineffective this can be, most students and faculty appreciate more than ever the value of person-to-person teaching. Is education kids staring at screens, following the prompts of an algorithm?

The media has turned to businessmen, politicians, and tech moguls, for “expert” opinions. They’re more likely to accept a press release from that billionaire-funded think tank or foundation than ask an educator, so they perpetuate this narrative of higher education as a “broken fiscal model” that needs to be transformed, to be made more like business.
 They feature attention-grabbing stories of admissions scandals, athletic scandals, "snowflake" students, “cancel” culture and “if it bleeds, it leads”  stories that find faults with higher education, but have little relevance whatsoever to the experience of most people.

The media give disrupters inordinate air time. Kind of like the way traffic slows down as people rubberneck to see an accident when they drive by, it increases their viewers-listeners-readers. Kevin Carey, author of The End of College, and Ryan Craig, author of College Disrupted, advocate doing away with “bricks and mortar” colleges altogether. They speak of “unbundling” higher education into online learning and workplace-directed programs.
For them, and for Apple or Microsoft, the “value” of higher education is measurable in the monetary sense, it's purpose is mere training that yields maximum return on investment in terms of employment. While job training is indeed a fine thing, in a Venn diagram it would have some intersection with education yet much more of the two areas on the graph would be quite separate. 

While I don't begrudge Bill Gates an opinion in a any way, I think his motivation may be questionable in this matter. He devises tech-heavy, standardized, test-driven programs for other people’s children, while sending his own to the very same  posh, private school he attended himself, Lakeside:
“I had great relationships with my teachers. … Classes were small.
You got to know the teachers. They got to know you.
The relationships that come from that really make a difference. If you like and respect your teacher, you’re going to work harder” Gates said...
so he knows what works.
Everyone knows what works: small classes where teachers can give students individual attention. Teaching and learning are things done with people, by people, for people,
dependent on the trust and goodwill, presence, participation, responsiveness of people.

Joshua Kim, director of Digital Learning Initiatives at Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning was asked "is there innovation/idea/movement methodology that excites you in terms of the future of education?” his reply was “Get a liberal arts education.” If we hope to “reimagine and revolutionize education,” we should recognize that “the most powerful personalized and adaptive learning platform ever invented is an experienced and well-supported educator”: “Give me an oval table, an experienced and well-supported educator, and 12 curious students — and I’ll rip out every single piece of campus technology.”
Kind of strong words, from a techie, right?
Research corroborates the truth of the matter.

Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs concluded on the basis of a 10-year study of students and alums that relationships matter more than the technology being sold to schools and colleges in the name of “innovation.” Even more than the subjects studied.
They matter in terms of “long-term life outcomes,” Richard Detweiler concluded on the basis of a study of 1,000 graduates of all kinds of colleges, “by educating people for lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment,” accomplishments that serve not only the individual but “the common good.”

 “If there is one thing that the educational research clearly and consistently demonstrates, it is that the most successful long-term results for students occur when they are able to develop close relationships with their faculty,” 

Job training is one thing, but an education is SO MUCH MORE. 
Personally I have found in most cases that the training you get for a job is obsolete within a short time; sometimes even by the time you finish the course. Particularly in the tech field.
In contrast Shakespeare will never be obsolete.

liberal arts programs watch as enrollments plummet and humanities courses and programs are replaced by degree programs with “product-market fit,” as the Charles Koch Foundation advocates.
The assault on the liberal arts is bipartisan, it's sadly one of the few things Democrats and Republicans can get together on; and it’s been extremely effective.

 Students are flocking to majors in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) because they’ve been told this is where the jobs are — when in fact, there are more STEM graduates than there are jobs and many of those markets are farmed out to labor markets that Americans simply can not afford to compete with. (Just like most other industries)
They’ve been told the humanities offer poor job prospects,
when, as Karl Voss (Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University) explains in the Hechinger Report:
“Employers consistently say that they are looking for employees who can analyze complex, multifaceted problems, are creative and innovative, have good communication skills, are willing to learn, work with a variety of people, see the larger setting in which decisions are made, and understand the ethical dimension of decisions and interactions” — all of which is EXACTLY what the liberal arts develop.
“The difference between humanities majors and science majors, in median income and unemployment, seems to be no more than the difference between residents of Virginia and North Carolina,” writes Benjamin Schmidt in the Atlantic: “If someone told to me not to move to Charlotte because no one there can make a living, I would never take them seriously.”
And neither should you!  

Mathematics, the sciences, engineering, and technology are certainly useful, but the humanities provide another way of viewing issues and solving problems that is equally valuable. The more we automate, the more we create a constant low-level hum of digital connectivity, the more we get tangled up in the vastness and blind spots of big data, the more essential it is to bring human judgment into our lives. A liberal education is a cohesive collection of experiences, each providing its own unique contribution to the enlightenment of its practitioners.

 Typically, a liberal arts education involves the study of the natural sciences (including mathematics), the social sciences, and the humanities. (The natural sciences and math are frequently associated with STEM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — and not considered to be part of a liberal education, even though they are.)

As with most things in life,
the most satisfying experiences are to be had
when we have multiplicity on our side.  

A liberal education is a cohesive collection of experiences,
each providing its own unique contribution to your enlightenment.  
It should be pointed out that typically, a liberal arts education
 involves the study of the natural sciences (including mathematics),
the social sciences, and the humanities.
(The natural sciences and math are frequently associated with STEM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — and not considered to be part of a liberal education, even though they are.)
 I suggest understanding the liberal arts is similar to understanding the Tao (the source of everything in Taoism)  is it not a philosophical system that explains why things are the way they are and why things happen the way they do?

Consider Leonardo da Vinci, was he an engineer or an artist?
He was both. 

The liberal arts offer knowledge and the cultivation of habits of mind,
 that allow one to mature into a successful, productive member of society who can appreciate others, experience and embrace the notion of empathy, and seek lifelong learning. 
Leonardo is not a bad role model. 

Who Will Stop The Reign?

Conservatism is an identity more than an ideology,
Modern conservatism is shame-proof.
The history of small men on the wrong side of history matters not.
Truth matters not.

Conservatism has retreated into a welcoming form of comfortable stupidity.
It has become a world view typified by shock jocks and outrage-merchants, as well as an absolute revulsion to commonly-accepted science.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal referred to the Republicans as the "Stupid Party", echoing John Stuart Mill’s jibe about the Tories. Perhaps no one better epitomizes this better than Donald Trump, a man with the seemingly unique gift of having no redeeming features whatsoever.




American Right-wing commentators, in an appeal to their increasingly male audience, have tried to pretend the philosophy is more macho than it actually is, when in reality many conservatives by nature are quite literally driven by fear and childish selfishness. Likewise in Britain, where tabloids take on the conservative banner against a socially liberal broadsheet and broadcasting media, the Right has become associated with deliberate anti-intellectualism and even villainy.

These are observations, not opinions. And yet this quackery wins elections when in fact it should not even be in contention.  Since the 1960s the west has gone through the biggest cultural shift in half a millennium, an epochal change similar in some ways to the Christian takeover of pagan Rome and the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Both of these events led to revolutions in public ideas about morality and eventually to culture conflicts – and conservatives, like the Roman polytheists and Catholics before them, are today on the losing side.

The bad news is that this second reformation is going to be long, painful and boring, and both sides are going to get more tedious, mundane & hysterical, just as divisions the last time around drove Catholics and Protestants into prolonged periods of insanity. Conservatism will see revivals but it will become increasingly dominated by it's own sort of dreadful  identity politics it once loathed, a phenomenon already developing in both continental Europe and Trump’s America.
 
 While I suggest conservatives are entirely wrong - I do not contend that the left is always right.
It's more a matter of getting some things right.  Barack Obama said of al-Qaida, (another group of guys not entirely comfortable with the modern world) that they were "Small men on the wrong side of history." 
This can be said of all conservativism today.

Banality, Ineptitude, and the Unbearable Vapidity of the Disinformation Age - A Dispatch From The Front

 While we can find some relief that our nation barely escaped a coup and no longer is under the grifting thumb of Il Douche directly, this is but a mere temporary reprise. The internet, once a shining promise of information, has devolved into a gaping sewer hole of disinformation and outlandish imbecility. 
While this in itself is hardly news, we the people who prefer self governance to tyranny (and can discern the distinction between them) must keep abreast of the situation even if the conditions of public policy making are found to be repugnant. We have met the enemy, and he is willful ignorance.  

Dispatch From The Front -

What's happening?

Even with Il Douche not in office, QAnon beliefs continue to infect politics.

Why it matters

The debunked conspiracy will be in play during the upcoming midterm elections, but that doesn't mean you have to fall for it.

QAnon, a fringe right-wing conspiracy theory centered on former President Donald Trump, didn't fade away when he left office. Instead, belief in the wild conspiracy persists and continues to play a part in the political discourse, whether Americans realize it or not.

The QAnon conspiracy, which first surfaced in October 2017, falsely purports that Trump was fighting some hidden war against a cabal of Satanist pedophiles in Hollywood and the Democratic Party. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute -- a nonprofit that researches the intersection of religion, culture and public policy -- released a study in February showing that nearly 16% of Americans believe the core QAnon conspiracy.

"QAnon has evolved from a movement centered around Trump leading a secret military intelligence operation to save the world, into a movement that not only doesn't need Trump but doesn't even need the iconography it developed over the past four years," said Mike Rothschild, conspiracy researcher and author of The Storm Is Upon Us, which provides a history of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories can be dangerous and even deadly as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, with vaccine misinformation playing a role in some people succumbing to the virus and particularly creating venues for the virus to mutate.
Despite being repeatedly debunked, belief in the QAnon conspiracy continues to infect areas of politics beyond Trump. So far this year, aspects of the conspiracy have seeped into protests, a Supreme Court hearing and legislation.

"Its mythology of secret pedophile rings, suppressed cures and technology, massive corruption and fraud propelling a [purportedly] decrepit Joe Biden into office, and COVID being a hoax, have infected every aspect of mainstream conservative politics and culture," Rothschild added.

With the midterm elections coming up, the conspiracy is likely to continue popping up in campaigns and on social media feeds. Being able to recognize its influence may make it easier to spot, and avoid, in the future. At least this is my hope.

Here are some of the current events that the QAnon conspiracy has latched onto, some obvious and others less so.

Midterm elections

In 2020, almost 100 candidates who expressed support for QAnon ran for office. The two most prominent candidates who won their races were Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia.

This year, so far, there are 78 candidates running for office in 28 states who believe in QAnon, according to Grid News. One race, in particular, has an interesting candidate, with the person allegedly responsible for posting as Q running for office.

Ron Watkins is the former site administrator for the anonymous board 8chan and the person reported to be responsible for many of the Q drops as laid out in the Q: Into the Storm documentary series. He's also running for Arizona's 2nd Congressional District seat.
This guy is deranged and dangerous. While I find it incomprehensible that anyone could ever find credence in anything remotely associated with him, I am apparently in error regarding my faith in humanity on this front.

Watkins gained prominence among Republicans following the 2020 presidential election when he repeated claims of election fraud that have since been 100% debunked. He's one of several candidates running in the Republican primary for the seat, which will happen on Aug. 2.

Another candidate who has in the past supported QAnon, Doug Mastriano, is running to be governor of Pennsylvania. Mastriano won the Republican nomination on May 17.
He tweeted multiple times in 2018 with QAnon hashtags and slogans.
He'll go up against Democrat candidate Josh Shapiro in November..

A QAnon influencer that goes by the name Juan O. Savin -- an alias intended to sound similar to James Bond's codename "007" -- is working on a coalition to get Q faithful candidates into the secretary of state offices in South Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, according to a report from Media Matters. The 2020 presidential elections and false claims of voter fraud made Americans more aware of the responsibilities of the position of secretary of state. In many states, this is the official who helps determine whether an election had voter fraud issues..

 Durham investigation

In May 2019, Attorney General Bill Barr ordered an investigation into the 2016 presidential election and tapped US Attorney John Durham to lead it. Many QAnon followers viewed this investigation as part of the "storm" that would lead to arrests of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others within the Democratic National Committee. One of the last messages from Q in 2020 had only one word: Durham.

Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who worked with Clinton's campaign in 2016, was indicted by Durham in September for allegedly lying to the FBI. On Tuesday, a jury acquitted him of the charge.

Both Trump and Q followers shared their dismay at the US legal system after the acquittal was announced. Some also began to spin the decision to support the false conspiracy.

War in Ukraine

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Russia has been using misinformation to try to justify Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to go to war. Both Facebook and Twitter have called out Russia for its disinformation efforts. One false narrative touted by Russia early in the invasion was that Ukraine had supposedly been developing bioweapons, a conspiracy theory that was floated by QAnon believers months earlier.

Posts from conspiracy theorists in 2021 claimed falsely that Biden and his son, Hunter, were part of a plot to develop bioweapons in foreign countries, according to Media Matters. One of the countries mentioned was Ukraine.

Days before Russia began spreading misinformation about biolabs, a conspiracy theory Twitter account shared the false claim about the labs in Ukraine. It began circulating in QAnon circles, and then quickly spread to other right-wing forums and was amplified by conservative media including Fox News' Tucker Carlson. Eventually, both Russia and China began running with the narrative of the Ukraine biolabs.

Claims of bioweapons being made in Ukraine have been proven false. The US and Ukraine do have a treaty to prevent the development of bioweapons in labs that were created when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. But that is hardly the same thing.

Trump's potential return to Twitter

Elon Musk in April agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, though the Tesla CEO has since said the deal is on hold. If he does indeed buy the social network, Musk said he will remove the platform's ban on Trump. The former president's account was banned by Twitter days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

This news sent some QAnon believers into a fervor on various social media platforms where they congregate such as Gab and Telegram.

They suggested Trump's possible return to Twitter was predicted by Q in 2017 and would be a sign the former president was about to confirm a crackdown on the fictional cabal. Like the entire QAnon conspiracy, this is completely false.

Trucker Convoy/Anti-vax

At the start of the year, a group of anti-vaxxers in Canada formed a movement to occupy the country's capital over vaccine requirements. Their secret weapon was the use of semi-trucks. The trucker convoy lasted weeks as trucks camped out in Ottawa before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made use of emergency powers to force the removal of the protestors.

In March, a similar protest happened in the US with the goal of reaching Washington, DC. This version got much less attention and support, in part due to the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

QAnon believers played a role in both the protests. COVID vaccine misinformation runs rampant in the Q communities, and that misinformation begins infecting other right-wing groups. Trucks and other vehicles in both the US and Canada were adorned with QAnon logos and slogans.

Disney Protest

Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill, also referred to by opponents as the "Don't Say Gay Bill," was signed into state law in March. Disney employees protested the company's lack of action on the bill's passage, which in turn led the company to say it'll work to repeal the law.

This drew the ire of Republican state legislators who passed a bill to remove Disney's special tax status in April. The Mickey Mouse company also became the target of QAnon believers.

Protests at the entrance of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, started in April. Those protesting chanted and carried signs referring to Disney World as "Pedo World" and the slogan "Ok, Groomer," which is a take on the "Ok, Boomer" meme.

QAnon believers not only supported these protests but also began spreading misinformation about the company and its CEO, Bob Chapek. This included exaggerating losses the company experienced due to the protests and false claims that Chapek was arrested for human trafficking and child pornography. The claims about Chapek and his arrest are completely bogus.

The internet has become less like a source of information such as an electronic encyclopedia and more like a toilet.
It's time for a courtesy flush.
A final observation for this month is that while Biden and the Democrats will be blamed for the gas prices & inflation, that's the way these things go...just remember that oil company profits have never been higher. Perhaps that fickle finger of fate should be pointing at price gouging and profiteering more than actual supply chain issues at this point.


Stop voting for imbeciles. Thankyou.

Right-Left Asymmetry And The Tower Of Babel

 

Remember that old origin myth about the Tower of Babel?

In biblical literature, there was this structure built in the land of Shinar (Babylonia)
some time after the deluge.  The story of its construction, given in Genesis 11:1–9, appears to be an attempt to explain the existence of diverse human languages. So the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.”

Well, God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Look, they are one people, and they have  one language; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.

The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but you know in most popular renderings of the story, he does.
Picture the folks wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.



Mythology is very good at teaching us important things through metaphors.
Look at the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went horridly awry.
We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
We are cut off from one another and isolated from the past.
The lessons of history, even recent history; are forgotten. 

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different nations claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within our institutions, universities, companies, and even families.

Babel is also a metaphor for what social media has done to nearly all groups and institutions.
 

Raising The Modern Tower

If there is a direction to history, and there is;  it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
It is observable in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships.
We can see it in cultural evolution too.
In the book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Robert Wright documents that history involves a series of transitions, driven by population density and new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning.
 Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) It's an interesting read with an optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future for mankind thanks to continued technological advance.

We might see the early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy.  After all, what dictator could impose his will on such an interconnected citizenry?
What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet? 

The high point of this techno-democratic optimism was 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement.
That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.
We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,”
and we had effectively overcome the division by language.
If you were optimistic, you might have thought humanity's future
would not be a dystopian nightmare.

In February 2012, Mark Zuckerberg was preparing to take FB public.
He told investors “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,”
He said FB planned “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” 
It would "transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do.
He did rewire the way we spread and consume information;
he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point.
It has not worked out.


In the past, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies
to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow.
But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States
India, or modern Britain and France?

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust),
strong institutions, and shared stories.
Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless.
They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands.
In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. They became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation which began in 2009: It was the intensification of viral dynamics.

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom.
This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to show each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or “share”.
 Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react.  One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place.
As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool,
he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

The newly tweaked platforms were perfectly designed to bring out
our most moralistic and least reflective selves.
The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger
that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.
The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

The tech companies that enhanced virality brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison said that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper?
How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird? 

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters;
it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires (and social media can be utilized far more effectively for spreading that sort of rubbish than previous media technology), but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization 
is never warranted under any circumstances,
but if citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts,
the police, universities, and the integrity of elections,
then every decision  becomes a life-and-death struggle.
social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism;
and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
It's bad for civilization. 

In the pre-digital era we were a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, 
We were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of our own society.
The digital revolution has shattered that mirror,
and now the public inhabits those broken shards of glass.
So the public isn’t  in any sense one thing 
with a shared experience of a concrete reality anymore.
It’s highly fragmented, and it’s mutually hostile.
It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.

Outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence,
Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared 
(or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—
so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
When our public square is governed by mob dynamics
unrestrained by any sort of due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion;
we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

In the 20th century, we built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history.
In the past decade, they got stupid en masse.
To remain viable in this post-Babel era, we must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship.

 

The Wisdom Of The US Presidents

 

In Honor of President's Day today we offer some of the greatest inspirational quotes from American Presidents. "If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. " George Washington (1789–1797)
   "If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?" John Adams (1797–1801)

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be...I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." James Madison (1809–1817)

 "National honor is a national property of the highest value." James Monroe (1817–1825)

 "America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government."
 John Quincy Adams (1825–1829)

   “The mischief springs from the power which the monied interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining...and unless you become more watchful in your states and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away…." - Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, 1837

"There is a power in public opinion in this country—and I thank God for it: for it is the most honest and best of all powers—which will not tolerate an incompetent or unworthy man to hold in his weak or wicked hands the lives and fortunes of his fellow-citizens." Martin Van Buren (1837–1841)

 "A decent and manly examination of the acts of the Government should be not only tolerated, but encouraged." William Henry Harrison (1841) (Harrison resigned from the army in 1814. He had an obscure career in politics ending up 20 years later as a county recorder in Ohio. He was nominated for president in 1835 and billed as a military hero whom the conservatives of the day hoped to control, he ran surprisingly well against Van Buren in 1836 and defeated Van Buren in the following election. He caught pneumonia and died in Washington on April 4, 1841, a mere month after his inauguration. Harrison was the first president to die in office.)

"Patronage is the sword and cannon by which war may be made on the liberty of the human race." John Tyler (1841–1845)

"No president who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure." James Knox Polk (1845–1849)

 "For more than half a century, during which kingdoms and empires have fallen, this Union has stood unshaken. The patriots who formed it have long since descended to the grave; yet still it remains, the proudest monument to their memory. . ." Zachary Taylor (1849–1850 )

"The man who can look upon a crisis without being willing to offer himself upon the altar of his country is not fit for public trust." Millard Fillmore (1850–1853)

 "The storm of frenzy and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock of the Constitution." Franklin Pierce (1853–1857)

 "The test of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there." James Buchanan (1857–1861)

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865)
  "Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide." Andrew Johnson (1865–1869)

 "I have never advocated war except as a means of peace." Ulysses Simpson Grant (1869–1877)
  "He serves his party best who serves the country best." Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1877–1881)

 "We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government." James Abram Garfield (1881) ( The Garfield administration had barely started when he was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed republican office seeker, in Washington on July 2, 1881. He died in Elberon, N.J., on Sept. 19.)

   "Good ballplayers make good citizens." Chester Alan Arthur (1881–1885)

 "A man is known by the company he keeps, and also by the company from which he is kept out." Stephen Grover Cleveland (1885–1889)

 "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893)

 "Unlike any other nation, here the people rule, and their will is the supreme law. It is sometimes sneeringly said by those who do not like free government, that here we count heads. True, heads are counted, but brains also . . ." William McKinley (1897–1901)

 "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909)



  "Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution . ." William Howard Taft (1909–1913) (I Suppose the SCOTUS decision that eminent domain included corporate interests overriding citizens ownership rights disagrees no?)

 "We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers." Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921)

 "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little." Warren Gamaliel Harding (1921–1923)

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. John Calvin Coolidge (1923–1929)

 "Prosperity is just around the corner." Herbert Clark Hoover (1929–1933)
  "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–1945)

  "We need not fear the expression of ideas—we do need to fear their suppression." Harry S. Truman (1945–1953)

  "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."  Dwight David Eisenhower (1953–1961)


 "And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961–1963)

 "If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves." Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969)

 " Solutions are not the answer. " Richard Milhous Nixon (1969–1974)
   "Truth is the glue that holds governments together. Compromise is the oil that makes governments go." Gerald Rudolph Ford (1974–1977)

 "The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation." James Earl Carter, Jr. (1977–1981)


 "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964." Ronald Wilson Reagan (1981–1989)
 "I want a kinder, gentler nation." George Herbert Walker Bush (1989–1993)

 "There is nothing wrong in America that can't be fixed with what is right in America." William Jefferson Clinton (1993–2001)

"I have opinions of my own-strong opinions-but I don't always agree with them." George Walker Bush (2001–2008)




 "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential. " - President Barrack Obama

"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart…I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star, to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…and a very stable genius at that!"
-Donald Trump

“Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable,”
-- Joe Biden

Happy President's Day to Everyone!
Hey, some are wise.
... And some otherwise. 

Monophysitism

Cyril of Alexandria liked to wear half a beehive on his head.

Monophysitism, in Christianity, is the assertion that Jesus Christ is a single package.

While a few Christians believe that Christ was schizoid, most pondered the details of His Oneness.
These questions have baffled clerics throughout the ages.
(However they were somewhat preoccupied defending their palaces against advancing Huns and Goths at the time so it was something of a back burner issue really).

 In the 4th century, the issue was whether Jesus and God were the same person but in different guises (leisure suit vs. birthday suit). The ancients did not have Clark Kent vs. Superman as a model to work from., and even if they did, there were no phone booths available for Jesus to put on his cape and leotards. The dilemma led to a lot of bitter arguments between 'Nicene' Christians and the not-so-Nicene Arian Christians. This fight eventually saw the Arians booted out the door.

Then the argument became about Jesus himself.
How does a divine being manifest himself when it came to balancing
his spiritual know-it-allness and physical shell?
Where does one stop and the other start?
The term Monophysite arose in the 5th century, an era of decline, confusion, and general beastliness when the Roman Empire broke apart.
The Christians — who had spent previous centuries hiding in catacombs or graveyards — had plenty of time to ponder the exact nature of their favorite deity suddenly had  their status change when Emperor Constantine  shouted "Olly olly oxen free" which gave them the all-clear to emerge and to get on with spreading smallpox.
Yet one nagging problem remained: They had still not nailed down the exact nature of Jesus Christ.

Some of Cyril's supporters chanting and carrying on.

Theologians, more or less wasted conclave after conclave retrospectively analysing how many pinheads could dance on an angel...but they also wondered what was going on inside Jesus's head and body to no avail. In 428, the arguments shifted to the position of the Virgin Mary.
Bishop Nestorius the Enormous of Constantinople was sure God as Jesus had no need of a woman's body to pop out of. (He also was certain Justinian Beaver was a talented musician...so they did not call him "Nestorius the Infallible"...not even once.)
Nestorius proclaimed  Jesus had no need of a childhood; so Mary must have given birth to  a full grown Manly Jesus. (While the human birth canal is indeed elastic, this was a real stretch.)
This all seemed to suggest two distinct entities for Jesus: Godhead Jesus and Manhood Jesus.
That meant the virgin birth was of twins.
 This theological position was named 'Nestorian Christianity,' in contrast to the formerly unanimous 'Nicene' version. The Nestorians insisted they were still also Nicene even though they disagreed on the nature of Jesus.

Bishop Cyril of Alexandria,  after receiving a secret report from Constantinople from a holy insider called Eutyches. wanted to grab Nestorius by the cassock and throw him against a statue of Mary. Cyril was no weak chinned, clap-happy televangelist. If you disagreed with him on anything, he would send around his monks to beat the crap out of you.
He had shown no mercy when dealing with pagans and women teaching geometry.
Hypatia, the great philosopher/pole dancer had been stripped of her clothes and then of her flesh by the blood-lusting Cyril crowd.
 Cyril got his kicks in against Nestorius and his supporters — twelve kicks, in fact, called the 'anathema.' The dozen technical missteps about Christianity that could land you in boiling hot water went like this—

1.  Virgin Mary is the mother of God. Hers was a divine pregnancy.
2. Anyone suggesting She wasn't gets a boot to the face.
3. Anyone suggesting the boot is too extreme gets the boot to the mouth.
4. Jesus had only one tongue.
5. Jesus had only one change of underwear.
6. Everyone must not change their underwear to honor Jesus.
7. Everyone must buy Cyrus brand underwear...no exceptions.
8. Everyone must wear their Cyrus brand underwear on the outside so the church can check.
9. To further punish Hypatia, all future quartets will be any number of people except 4.
10. Anyone who disagrees will burn in hell
11. Jesus is the ho ho holiest of all ghosts & spooks
12. Whosoever shall not confess: let him be anathema.

When people started to tire of these dopey arguments, Cyril published a further annoying decree.
 The Five Tomes, The Collected Letters and Post-it notes... more or less repeating everything again.
 He was going to bury Nestorius.  Cyril became so involved in the dispute that, in 431,
 he went beard-to-beard with Nestorius at the WWF Council of Ephesus.
The fix was already in, as the latter's supporters
had been given the wrong date and address for the match.
Cyril declared Nestorius's views on Jesus as heretical as he pinned him to the mat
and then he glued googly eyes on all his posters around town.
He even defied Emperor Theodosius II The Acrimonious,
when the latter put him under house arrest and threatened to sew Cyril's lips together.
Nestorius got the sack and later got a room (but no key) at an Egyptian monastery.

Eutyches finds a handy pedestal with his name on it to espouse his view of Jesus.

Cyril stayed 'on-side' with respect to orthodox Nicene Christianity — until going down to the pitch for good in 444. The next patriarch was Dioscorus, whose ally in Constantinople, Eutyches, brought a new improved Christian formula: Jesus didn't have two natures, but only one nature, which had simply absorbed the human stuff. So the team adopted the term 'Monophysite.' They denied the Nestorian position much more gracefully than heretics of earlier centuries, who believed that Jesus was an invisible plant, and what the people of Nazareth saw was merely a hologram.

The Christian world was quickly moving to a three way split
or four if you counted the Arians as well
(yes by this time a few did except the German barbarians).
  They could be described like this:

• Nestorians: One person, two realities, two natures.
• Catholics: One person, one reality, two natures.
• Monophysites: One person, one reality, one nature.
• Certs breath mints: It's two — two — two mints in one.

The actual Greek term for reality was 'hypostasis'.
You can also say 'substance,' but people will think about a drug bust.
It was a tag-team match to the death, as all sides invoked God to
support their positions and smite their rivals.
Once the idea of compromise was ruled out, the most extreme views prevailed.
This was seen at the Second Council of Ephesus of 449 and the Council of Chalcedon of 451 where the Catholics came out on top and rewrote the Christian creed to exclude both the Nestorians and Monophysites.
In fact, Nestorius nimbly denied he was a 'Nestorian' and Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria denied he was a 'one reality/one nature' bishop, but everyone had seen, heard, & read his positions and knew his pants were in flames at this point.
Dioscorus was removed as Patriarch of Alexandria and pro-Chalcedonian Christian Proterius replaced him till the later was in turn knocked down and killed by a mob of thuggish monks.
Proterius was replaced by the ardent Monophysite Timothy the Weasel, a tiny man with the propensity to bite your ankles and, if he found a chair, would go straight for the throat.
The Nestorians quit the Roman Empire to move further East.
The Monophysites remained firmly entrenched in Egypt and Syria with pockets of support elsewhere.
In Western Europe and most of North Africa, the population remained Catholic, though for a time under the rule of Arian Christians like the Goth "Theodoric the Greasy" who was naturally hostile to all forms of Nicene Christian baking.
To try to keep the Eastern Roman Empire intact, further church councils searched for a magic formula to satisfy both Catholics/Orthodox and Monophysites. All failed and instead sliced-and-diced it finer, including a new division called 'Monothelitism' (or 'Monophysitism Lite'), a 'compromise' that said Jesus had two natures but only one will. (Of course, this led to corrupted manuscripts often mischievously rendering this as 'one willy.')

St. "Ayy" Macarena (center) shows the other girls trendy arm and hand movements
known today as special pleading.

Over time, as with all schisms, there were plenty of further attempts to portray one side as angelic whilst any other interpretation were gyrating to the devil's song book.
In the 7th century, these divisions became unbridgeable — and in any case, unenforceable, as North Africa fell to the armies of Islam. To the Muslims, all sects of Christianity were equally infidel.
Rival Christians, whether Catholic, Monophysite or Nestorian, were left to use 'special pleading' with a caliph or emir to save their their necks. A word of advice. It's unwise to go into a Coptic Christian Church and call them Monophysites. You will get a whack on the head from a bishop or monk manhandling a crozier.

Just Deserts... Or - The King James Version vs. Darwin.

Remember the Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge?
They were in the news for refusing to follow the state's Stay -At-Home rule.

Remember Pastor Tony Spell ?
He had been in national headlines for the past few weeks because of his refusal to follow his state’s ban on large gatherings and busing in his 'flock' to fill his tithe.

Well members of his megachurch got Covid 19...and then he got Covid19.
Now he's dead.
He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff!
Bereft of life, 'He rests in peace! He's pushing up the daisies! '
His metabolic processes are now history! '
He's off the twig! 'He's kicked the bucket,
He's shuffled off  his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!
THIS IS AN EX-PASTOR!!

On Easter, his church held a massive service with 1100 attendees  Harold Orillion, 78, was one of six people in the Baton Rouge area to pass away Wednesday from COVID-19. Spell confirmed that Orillion was a member of the church. The coroner listed acute respiratory distress syndrome, pneumonia, and COVID-19 as causes of death, but Spell (who had no medical credentials whatsoever) disagrees. “That is a lie!,” he told WAFB news yesterday.
It is not clear what Spell believes killed Orillion or how he would know.
And the Church lawyer Jeff Wittenbrink, 56, has also fallen ill and has been hospitalized.
Louisiana’s The Advocate reports that he has a high fever and a severe cough.
 He is on oxygen but is expected to recover.

Spell & his lawyer argued that religious freedom meant that his church could not be stopped from holding services. Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran accused Spell of putting people’s lives at risk for “his own self-promotion.”
“Mr. Spell will have his day in court where he will be held responsible for his reckless and irresponsible decisions that endangered the health of his congregation and our community,” Corcoran said.

Well Spell will not have a day in court or anywhere else either.
“I firmly believe that God is larger than this virus. You can quote me on that,” he said.
 “I am essential. I’m a preacher — I talk to God!”
But a week later, it seems God may not have been happy to receive his phone call.
The minister has died from COVID-19. His wife is also sick.
I hate to say good riddance to ANY human being...that is wrong on many levels.
But I will say...I can find no tears on this occasion.

Pastor Tony Spells...RIP.   (Rot In Pieces)