CATHARSIS:

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Wild God review – this masterpiece will make you fall back in love with life
(Alexis Petridis, 22 Aug 2024, The Guardian)

Joy feels like Wild God’s mood in miniature. The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – pain, suffering and death all feature, including the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane – but suggest that life can still provide transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, decorated with abstract smears of vocoder and a telephone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls their dissolute past, and deals in reverie rather than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks home from church, pausing to look at a frog in the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” Even if it doesn’t get far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: the point is to keep leaping.

The music follows suit. Cave has reconvened the Bad Seeds – who seemed a little surplus to requirements among Ghosteen’s beatless drifts and who didn’t appear at all on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly melds the meditative, flowing sound of its immediate predecessors with the band’s trademark muscularity (one of the enduring mysteries of Cave’s career is how a band that’s seen something like 23 different musicians pass through its ranks over the years, always sounds like the Bad Seeds regardless). The result is a set of songs that feel simultaneously airy and teeming, not least with a preponderance of glowing melodies. They frequently surge into vast, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment near the end of Song of the Lake, where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously moved things along at a stately, measured pace, suddenly burst into a series of gleeful, clattering rolls. Or the mood flips completely: Conversion initially sounds haunted and stark, before exploding into life midway through in a mass of voices singing and chanting, Cave’s extemporised vocal sounding increasingly rapturous over the top.

The title track, meanwhile, is similarly joyful, although lyrically oblique. One way you could read it is as a sardonic self-portrait, rock’s former Prince of Darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage in the retirement village”), grappling with the dramatic shift in perception that Cave has undergone over the last decade as it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax, bolstered by choir and orchestra. Said climax seems to reaffirm his faith in the transformative power of music and communality: “If you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blue, and if you just don’t know what to do,” he cries, “bring your spirit down!”

AUDIO INTERVIEW: Nick Cave wrestles with a ‘Wild God’: The rock icon on why true art is always a struggle, why his music has always been religious and why his new album required the full power of The Bad Seeds. (Ann Powers, 8/20/24, NPR)

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Markets for the People (Glenn Hubbard, Summer 2024, National Affairs)

The advent of “Bidenomics” has resurrected decades-old debates about the merits of markets versus industrial policy. When President Joe Biden announced his eponymous strategy in June 2023, he blasted what he described as “40 years of Republican trickle-down economics” and insisted that he would seek instead to build “an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.” He would achieve this through “targeted investments” in technologies like semiconductors, batteries, and electric cars — all of which featured heavily in initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Yet despite the president’s professed support for a “middle out” economics, Bidenomics has thus far proven to be less of an intellectual framework than a set of well-intended yet ill-fated industrial-policy interventions implemented from the top down.

Some conservatives have joined Biden in embracing industrial policy. Writing recently in these pages, Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida asserted that while it is difficult to “get industrial policy right, conservatives can and must take ownership of this space to keep the American economy strong and free.” Former president Donald Trump, for his part, staunchly advocates heavy tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing.

Conservatives who adopt their own version of protectionist tinkering with markets are missing an important opportunity. As mercantilism’s decline did for classical liberalism in the 19th century and Keynesianism’s misadventures did for neoliberalism in the 20th, Bidenomics’ failures offer an opening for the right to champion a new type of economics — one that puts opportunity for the people ahead of the economic rules of the game.

We’re far enough into human history that folks should long ago have given up on the idea they can outwit markets.

THAT WAS EASY:

MIT researchers make hydrogen fuel from soda cans, seawater, caffeine (Kapil Kajal, 7/25/24, Interesting Engineering)

MIT engineers have discovered that when pure aluminum from soda cans is exposed to seawater, it creates bubbles and naturally generates hydrogen.

This type of gas can be used to power an engine or fuel cell without producing carbon emissions.

THE RIGHT’S RACIST THROUGHLINE:

Populists Before Trump: John Ganz’s lively new book provides a valuable account of the intellectual origins of Trumpism. (Leon Hadar, 20 Aug 2024, Quillette)

I was therefore surprised to learn that celebrated libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard was proposing an alliance between classical liberals like me and a bunch of dissident right-wingers known as “paleoconservatives.”

The paleocons contended that America was in peril, that liberalism was the new enemy, and that nationalism was the next big thing. As John Ganz puts it in When the Clock Broke, his new book recalling the paleocons’ intellectual and political odyssey, these thinkers believed that the US should embrace a system that would be “based on domination and exclusion, a restricted sense of community that jealously guarded its boundaries and policed its members, and the direction of a charismatic leader who would use his power to punish and prosecute for the sake of restoring lost national greatness.”

In an attempt to mobilise those he called “radical reactionaries,” Rothbard forged an unlikely alliance between socially conservative nationalists and libertarians disenchanted with open borders and free trade. Speaking before an audience at the John Randolph Club in January 1992, he argued that the task of this new movement was to “finish the job” after the fall of communism and dismantle what he called the “soft Marxism” of the welfare state. “We shall repeal the twentieth century,” he confidently declared, and “nothing less than a counter-revolution” would be required.

This new populist strategy would embrace the power of pessimism, a sharp break with the sunny tenets of classical liberalism and the more familiar conservatism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley’s National Review. Paleoconservatives “looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of an earlier time,” Ganz writes. They wanted to “break the clock” of progress, returning America to a “previous dispensation while also creating a new country of their own devising.”

They aren’t conservatives.

THAT WAS EASY:

U.S. Air Force successfully completes test flights of all-electric aircraft: ‘It’s going to make things faster and simpler’ (Stephen Proctor, August 20, 2024, The Cool Down)

The series of test flights evaluated the plane’s performance in real-world scenarios like resupply, cargo delivery, and personnel transport, including during combat. The plane can carry up to five people or 500 pounds of cargo, has a range of 288 miles, and can be recharged in less than an hour.

THAT WAS EASY:

Scientists make incredible breakthrough with new aircraft technology (Leslie Sattler, August 19, 2024, The Cool Down)

Exciting news for the future of air travel: A groundbreaking study from Swedish scientists suggests that most flights within a 750-mile radius could be powered by hydrogen as soon as 2045.

IF NOT INHERENTLY THEN INEVITABLY:

Are All Ideologies Evil? (Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg, August 15th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

According to Merriam Webster ideology is “1: visionary theorizing 2a: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.” If we limit ourselves to the shallow dictionary definition, it may serve our purpose in drawing reasonably sound inferences about the nature of ideology.

But perhaps we can attempt to narrow the definition a little more so that we may end with a foundation of clarity upon which to build a coherent conclusion. George Marlen states that “ideology is an intellectual system of ideas or rigid abstract formulas mixed with scientific jargon and some empirical facts that claims knowledge about reaching perfection in the temporal order.”

If one believes in the perfectability of Man and his institutions, one eventually ends up blaming, and then punishing, people when they fail to live up to the belief. It’s why the Continent’s various Reason based -isms always descend into mass murder.

MORE:

What Can We Learn from Michael Oakeshott’s Effort to Understand Our World? (Timothy Fuller) [PDF]

Ideologies promise thatwe can escape the world we have inherited. Proponents of ideologies can sometimes persuade others thatthey have escaped this limitation. They can rename the Tower of Babel and vary its architectural nuances.They can attempt to pursue perfection as the crow flies. They can also become cynical graspers after powerfor its own sake. What, finally, they cannot do is to fend off the reassertion of the human condition as it hasalways been. 

Fortunately, the death of false ideas is not identical to the death of the human spirit. It arises from its own ashes. Nevertheless, it would be to the good to avoid recipes for the production of ash heaps where possible. Sensible politicians will do so. Philosophers cannot produce sensible politicians, but they can be irritating reminders of the limits of politics. Philosophers might notice sensible politicians and speak their praises simply by describing them. In so doing, they perform a not altogether useless task. Their task is to understand why the world is the way it is, not to postulate a program to liberate us into a world beyond change or to reach the end of history. 

Political philosophers in a special sense are thus of a conservative disposition  

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

The great wealth wave (Daniel Waldenström, 8/16/24, Aeon)

Recent decades have seen private wealth multiply around the Western world, making us richer than ever before. A hasty glance at the soaring number of billionaires – some doubling as international celebrities – prompts the question: are we also living in a time of unparalleled wealth inequality? Influential scholars have argued that indeed we are. Their narrative of a new gilded age paints wealth as an instrument of power and inequality. The 19th-century era with low taxes and minimal market regulation allowed for unchecked capital accumulation and then, in the 20th century, the two world wars and progressive taxation policies diminished the fortunes of the wealthy and reduced wealth gaps. Since 1980, the orthodoxy continues, a wave of market-friendly policies reversed this equalising historical trend, boosting capital values and sending wealth inequality back towards historic highs.

The trouble with the powerful new orthodoxy that tries to explain the history of wealth is that it doesn’t fully square with reality. New research studies, and more careful inspection of the previous historical data, paint a picture where the main catalysts for wealth equalisation are neither the devastations of war nor progressive tax regimes. War and progressive taxation have had influence, but they cannot count as the main forces that led to wealth inequality falling dramatically over the past century. The real influences are instead the expansion from below of asset ownership among everyday citizens, constituted by the rise of homeownership and pension savings. This popular ownership movement was made possible by institutional changes, most important democracy, and followed suit by educational reforms and labour laws, and the technological advancements lifting everyone’s income. As a result, workers became more productive and better paid, which allowed them to get mortgages to purchase their own homes; homeownership rates soared in the West from the middle of the century. As standards of living improved, life spans increased so that people started saving for retirement, accumulating another important popular asset.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Hard-to-treat traumas and painful memories may be treatable with EMDR – a trauma therapist explains why it is gaining popularity (Laurel Niep, 8/16/24, The Conversation)

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro after she discovered that moving her eyes from her left foot to her right as she walked – in other words, tracking her feet with each step – resulted in lower levels of negative emotions connected with difficult memories, both from the more recent frustrations of the day and deeper events from her past.

Conventional treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, rely on extensive verbal processing to address a client’s symptoms and struggles. Such therapy may take months or even years.

Depending on the trauma, EMDR can take months or years too – but generally, it resolves issues much more quickly and effectively. It is effective for both adults and children, and can be done remotely.

Any distracxtion works.

MOJO VS ADMINISTRATIVE LAW:

The Original President (Garry Wills, 8/15/24, Mother Jones)

The originators of our government said that “We the People” are our country’s sovereign power. That is why the legislators, as the representatives of the people, are the only ones authorized to make law or make war. As James Madison said in Federalist 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” The executive power, as the name indicates, just executes the law—or the war, or the policy—given it by the legislators.

Amen, brother.