Good morning. Hello. How are you? #827
Walmart run, four derailments in one place, two laws that should exist, neighborhood trails
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Happy Friday. All is well. Aug is gone, continuing on his book tour up to Richmond tonight and then DC. Go see him! Our friend Alice came over last night, which was lovely. She commutes in from NYC for her job once a week or so and she’s so busy but Emma has this brilliant approach where just every single Thursday she invites her over, knowing Alice will have to cancel for work or exhaustion every 4 out of 5 times. But that fifth time, she comes over! And if Emma just texted willy nilly, we’d never make it work. It is great! Seeing Alice was so fun!
Uh oh hold please, I just got an important text from cs-support.billingusseamazn-information002-ll910-1011…. something or other telling me that my Account has been suspended I better send them money right away.
Just back from Walmart, it was great, Walmart is so much fun. Walmart Radio was killing it, they played “Royals” by Lorde and “Whole of the Moon” by the Waterboys which, for forty-odd years now, is a better, more moving song than it has any right to be. I bought some Yakult to get that lactobacillus kacei shirota (man that’s a deep GMHHAY callback) going again in my gut post-colonoscopy it’s gonna be great.
They didn’t have any organic cucumbers that was sad. Can’t wait for spring where I grow another hundred pounds of cucumbers man that was insane. Emma wants to move my whole garden and she’s not wrong entirely. Just might be another year before we do it? I don’t know. She snuck it up on me gingerly last night, thinking I would be opposed, but not too long ago I kinda realized she was right and it was a better growing spot. A dilemma. A lot of work.
Didn’t do the recycling yet. I have today off, gonna make a whole day of getting shit outta the house it’s gonna rule. Emma’s calling Habitat for Humanity to take some furniture away, and I’m gonna do a deep recycling collection. Also need to deal with the old PS3 and Xbox One, which is proving surprisingly academically difficult for us to decide how to donate. Like we could just take it to the PTA Thrift down the street, but those old ladies won’t understand what they have and they will separate the consoles, the games, the controllers, and with, like, Kinect games and stuff that’s not great. We could eBay it but that’s a giant hassle for big things like that and we don’t care about the money we just want it to go to a good home, ideally a needy one. I could Nextdoor it like I’m gonna do a bunch of other stuff and that’ll go to a happy home but probably not a needy one? Real dilemma!
Got a great email from a reader following up on two of the topic from yesterday and both parts were so interesting I am going to quote both of them. First, on the topic of trains:
Thanks for the link to the more in-depth coverage of the train. We've been thinking about trains recently in our family after driving through Dunsmuir in Northern CA and learning about the 1991 mega derailment and herbicide spill that killed millions of animals and took 12 years to clean up. Still, 2-3 trains derail at that same spot every year. Last one was in November 2022 I think. Insane. Especially because the spot in question is in the upper Sacramento river canyon. Anything that spills there contaminates California's biggest reservoir. And trains still derail there all the time!!
This is bonkers! Did you know about this? I did not, but just Google “Dunsmuir train derailment” and you’ll get stuff about all four derailments. Bonkers! It’s a weird world that this wasn’t national news.
Oh also it seems that 32 Nasty, the train that derailed in East Palestine, is already up and running again so hey maybe we can have two spots in the US where multiple chemical derailments keep happening.
Who am I kidding of course there is already a second one somewhere.
And then on the topic of the brain and modeling:
Also - when you talk about technological concepts influencing conceptions of the brain, another example: I teach ethnographic design research at UC Berkeley (before that Stanford for 10 years), and one of the core concepts is discussing various mental models of cognition through the 20th century, and how they impact our thinking about thinking today: "black box" input-output Pavlovian model (like a calculator); the hierarchies of Maslow (because society was hierarchical at that time); brain as computer, similar to black box, but trying to figure out what the "brain algorithms" or "subroutines" are and do, which is more or less Daniel Kahneman and heuristics; and then Bruner, through it all, insisting that it's all about meaning and encoding meaning in narrative.
So thank you, Anne, for adding a few names to my dim memory of these theories. I now feel less guilty for copping someone else’s theories.
Okay, so: My own theory. Two laws that I think most Americans would overwhelmingly agree should be laws, but are not laws, indeed the opposite are laws, and it really does get to the heart of a big part of our environmental problems:
It ought to be illegal to dump any chemical into our ground, water or air, until you can conculsively prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, across decades, that it is harmless.
It ought to be illegal to put poisons in our foods.
These are utterly uncontroversial, I’d wager, aside from the people who actually commit these hypothetical offenses. I’m sort of over spending vast amounts of my money running public opinion surveys on pet theories like the old days, you know, five years before they start becoming the biggest thing in the news and all, but I’d bet a shiny nickle that if someone were to poll on these two proposed laws, they would have widespread support across the non-plutocrat political spectrum.
But the bonkers thing is they are both flatly not true, and the opposite is true! You can dump anything! So long as you “don’t know it’s harmful” which is why you get things like DuPont studiously ignoring their own scientists for fifty years about how toxic Teflon and PFOAs were. Because if they knew, they’d have to stop dumping. But if they had plausible deniability, they could keep going!
If you made law number 1 up there a proposed amendment to the constitution, and of course you’d taken care of campaign finance reform, it’d pass no problem. In the real world, of course, there’d be a massive Koch-funded scare campaign telling everyone that it was going to make it illegal for them to pee in the woods or leave the remnants of a campfire behind or some bullshit. But no one actually disagrees in reality! We all want this! That is so upsetting!
Same with the second one! I think this gets to the whole Kitchen Aid scandal and leadsafemommy’s obsession and all that. Kitchen Aid is fucked because there is poison in their products. Sure, it’s coated in some ceramic, not gonna get in your food, and if it does, it’s not gonna get in your food in any amount that is going to make a difference (though hey who knows, something is killing us slowly could be our mixers as much as anything I suppose). But it’s commercial suicide to say that truth: “don’t worry there’s not that much poison in our products and it’s perfectly legal.” Because no one wants this to be legal! I mean sure the scientists aren’t that bothered, but I’d wager (weaker wager here) that they’re getting a bit fed up with the abuses of these laws as well.
Why can’t we just have our laws come from the point of view of zero risk instead of unmanaged risk? It’s what humans want!
But imagine the reality of every passing these, the reality of completely reconfiguring our society from the ground up, which is what it would take. Simple common sense laws, a national effort akin to the new deal and the green new deal to, you know, convert our society to one that conforms to them.
I do not like that one bit!
Last night we had a super social walk it was great. First we ran into the new neighborhood baby on our walk, and her parents, and that was great. Then our across-the-street neighbors were out in their driveway with their daughter, her husband, and their two grandkids, and the grandpa had made a whole kids trail through the woods with gnomes and bees and obstacles and we all went on it and Jane and the grandkids had a great time and it was lovely. Just freakin bucolic really getting into my neighborhood lately.
Got a W Hotel in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you today. It is great. New Caroline Polachek which is very exciting. Whole new album is out today. My vinyl copy has not arrived I am irked. New Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Belt Eagle Scout today too that is exciting.
I hope you have a lovely weekend I didn’t mean to bring you down with those laws n stuff forget about it just have a nice time, okay? Please and thank you!