Good morning. Hello. How are you? #679
Boris, dreams of a constitutional convention that would be terrible, Jane vaccine, garening woes, tool battery systems, with whom exactly is Kate Bush making a deal?
Good morning. Hello, there, friend. How are you today? I am good much better day yesterday, work was fine, Jane was a lot better. That was a huge relief.
Looks like Boris Johnson is gonna resign. Any moment now. Honest. Weird how the FT and others are taking this as a done deal before he actually resigns. Ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Shit we shouldn’t say that anymore that is a manifestly not okay phrase. I will work on finding a new one. Suggestions welcome. I guess there’s the rather-more-milquetoast “it ain’t over till it’s over.” Anyway. Been fun watching this chaos in the UK. I can’t quite figure out if they’re behind us — we’ve gotten rid of Trump, they have yet to get rid of Boris, and so they still have Boris’ comeback to look forward to — or ahead of us. Parliments have some kind of nice advantages over our nonsense. This guy I know, Guan Yang, was positing something very interesting yesterday: that the founding fathers didn’t really grasp the interplay between parlaiment and the executive, and that the executive came from parlaiment, and that had certain ramifications. It is a very interesting theory. I would like to learn more on this topic.
(oh huh he actually did it, while I was writing this. Well lovely. Goodbye Boris. You shall not be missed.)
Whenever I say that I think of that newscaster at the beginning of Starship Troopers: Would you like to know more?
Anyway, Boris left the UK with Brexit, Trump left us with a fundamentalist fascist Supreme Court, both are giant messes that are going to take a lifetime to clean up, and both countries have no idea how to even get started on the task. Good times, boy, the world is so great.
On top of all that the squirrels are systematically knocking over my corn stalks and stealing the corn. Bastards.
And my lettuce all bolted yesterday, turned bitter, in one day. So sad. I am going to plant some more lettuce but I need to get some slow bolting varieties I think. It is hot. It was 97°F after dinner yesterday, so we did not take our walk. Gardening guru James Prigioni tells me I can plant summer lettuce so I am going to try because I loved having lettuce every day so much.
All right I have ordered a bunch of slow-bolt lettuce and some argula for good measure from Baker Creek. It won’t be here till next weekend at best, though. Maybe I can find some at Walmart. Baker Creek should have an express shipping option. Mark it up a buck of two, they’d make a killing. Gardeners are forgetful and impatient.
Jane got her vaccine, though. She was a real trooper. I mean, she didn’t want to go, had to be bribed in multiple ways, and then cried beforehand, even though she said it didn’t hurt at all, but she got it done. Round one. God knows what she’s going to be like when I go wake her up in eighty-one minutes. Fingers crossed it’s not too bad. We got her Moderna, which has a higher likelihood of side effects but is only two doses instead of three. But the main reason we chose Moderna, is because the second booster for Moderna, which is forthcoming, is targeted toward Omicron variants. Though it is just occurring to me right now that I bet it’s like the adult doses and you can get that booster regardless of the manufacturer of your primary dose. It is not like, say, tool battery lock-in where you’re stuck.
Which is a giant thing weighing on my mind and I am kind of considering sucking it up and switching to Milwaukee from Dewalt for a variety of reasons: primarily because I really like eBaying shit and secondarily because red is prettier than yellow and tertiarily because the tools are somewhat better and quadrirarily (I just made that word up) because they have a wider selection of outdoor power equipment and it is occurring to me we probably need to massively hedge trim the small trees growing on top of Janet’s leach field. Also I really like the Packout system, which, you know, you can use with non-Milwaukee tools but it just feels wrong. Also I am depressed and desperate so maybe capitalism can distract me and this project is cheaper than buying a car. Man that is a lot of reasons. When you put it like that, it doesn’t seem so utterly wasteful. Which is funny because it is obviously utterly wasteful.
(There was a great Why is This Interesting edition yesterday on the topic of tool batteries, which I recommend. I had been thinking about this switch anyway, mainly thanks to Youtubers ugh.)
The courts have ruled that the FDA’s ban on Juul must be suspended pending appeal. A little while ago, the court asked the FDA nicely to pause the ban pending appeal, and the FDA refused, so the court went ahead and ordered them to suspend the ban. Not sure what that was about. This whole thing is so, so weird. Like you can still walk into a million different stores in the US and buy literal cancer sticks that will kill you, but they want to ban Juul outright because of some irregularies in an application that, by their own admission, is not posing an impending health threat. This does not feel normal, very much feels like a moral panic. We need some sort of moral panic amendment in America, it is astonishing how often our governments at all levels just go on these insane, batshit journeys of insanity for barely any reason at all.
I think about constititional amendments all the time. I fantacize about a new constitutional convention all the time. Of course in all likelihood the entire thing would be a catastrophe of infighting and recrimination, but it’s not hard to think of several amendments that might even pass. Most of them, of course, are just clarifying the old amendments to mean what they obviously mean in the face of bullshit “originalist” interpretations. Some of these the right might even love: “A corporation is not a person.” “When we say ‘speedy trial’ we mean actually speedy. Definitely less than a year. Ideally less than a month. You can’t keep unconvicted people in jail for more than 90 days” or something. “No moral panics.” And then we can enter into fantasyland that would never pass: end the electroal college. Enshrine the governement’s right to regulate pollution, give them the power to address climate change, remove gun manufacturer’s BS immunity from lawsuits, end/limit/clarify qualified immunity back to common-sense. Clarify the second amendment back to what the founders clearly meant. It’s so insane how twisted our interpetation of very basic sentences has become. Unenumerated rights. Speedy trial. Just insane.
Relatedly, I feel like somewhere along the line our congressional Democratic leaders lost the plot on the idea that progress is inevitable. They forgot MLK’s caveat that “the arc of the moral universe is long,” and just focused on the “bend towards justice” part. They assumed things would just keep getting better and they could mainly play a rear-guard game. They lost track of the part that “long” could mean “generations” and that people could live their whole lives waiting for that arc to bend. But more importantly, they decoupled people from progress. They got it in their head that the progess would just happen, regardless of what the people do, so the people can just sit and point and smile and wait and even if the people stop working for it, that arc of the moral universe will still bend toward justice. This feels like a misreading of MLKs words. The moral universe bends towards justice because people make it bend toward justice.
Finished this book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science by Audra J Wolfe and it was very interesting. I bought this book back when I was reading Vannevar Bush’s biography, I thought it would be sort of complimentary, a history of the NSF and whatnot but nope. It was a bigger canvas. A history of the relationship between the scientific community and the US Government during the cold war, and the CIA’s involvement in actually developing the idea that science should be open, that scientists should be allowed to study what they want. Tying scientific freedom inextricably to democracy, in direct opposition to Communism and a phenomenon in the USSR I had not heard of, Lysenkoism. It was a bit dry, this book, but really opened my eyes to something I had not thought about, which is really one of the best things a book can do.
You know, it was only in this recent Kate Bush hubub that I realized that the deal Kate is proposing is for god to switch her place with some other person, not god. All this time, I thought she was saying “hey god, let’s switch places. I will use your omitpotence to run up this hill,” the hill being a metaphor of course I’m not that dumb. But I heard some DJ or something mention the other day that she as asking to switch places with a dude. I mean, the DJ assumed it was a dude, a close reading of the lyrics does not suggest it’s a dude but it does seem pretty clear that she’s asking to switch places with a person. “See how deep the bullet lies,” when you think about it, only applies to a person because god, being omniscient, would know how deep that bullet lies. I always imagined the song as a sort of “Dear God” kind of song, a bit of a “oh yeah why don’t you try living down here” sort of thing, but naw. That’s not what it is at all. I am not into this new interpretation. I think I might stick with my own.
Also this morning in the bathroom my music-shuffle-machine played “Honey” by Robyn really low down and I realized that Robyn can really sound like Kate Bush if she is in the mood. It would be cool if Robyn covered the best Kate Bush song, “Jig of Life.” Also Honey is a pretty good record. It was a huge letdown at the time but it is… not as bad as I thought at the time.
I just want you to know that I have gotten all of my countries right on my country flash cards for two days in a row. This is a first.
Let’s do a goth mix today. New goth. Lotta good new goth out there, really blossoming of the genre. Thank you to Bill for alerting me to some of these bands. Threw a new-Bad-Seed Carly Paradis track on here apropos our conversation the last two days. Has any band ever sounded more like Cranes than Just Mustard? Really is something. Maybe that’s why that guy bought all those Cranes singles from me yesterday. And I really love the new Hercules & Love Affair it is not getting enough attention, just raw and sparse and beautiful, great album.
All right. Talk tomorrow.
"Running Up That Hill" is about her switching places with a man, so they can see how hard it is for her to be a female artist. I forget where, but she discusses it in an interview(s).
read this article and thought of you and your daily geography challenges:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/business/geoguessr-google-maps.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share