If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Placebos reduce anxiety even when people know they’re taking fake pills (Paul McClure, August 26, 2024, New Atlas)
Taking placebo pills fully aware that they contain no active pharmacological ingredients can still significantly reduce stress, anxiety and depression according to a new study. It’s suggested that these ‘non-deceptive placebos’ might be an effective way of improving mental health.
11 Charts Showing Why You Should Invest Today: Why start investing now? Because the stock market rewards the faithful. (Coryanne Hicks, 8/26/24, US News)
An investor who put $15 a day into the stock market could grow their portfolio to more than $1.2 million in 40 years. If they kept investing $15 a day for 50 years, they could amass almost $2.5 million. It makes you realize how early frugality in life can really set yourself up for comfort in your later years.
Do it for people starting at birth.
Scientists Discovered Something Kinda Alarming: The Universe Shouldn’t Actually Exist
(Jackie Appel, Aug. 8th, 2024, Popular Mechanics)
The research team asserts that if primordial black holes existed during this early period of inflation as many current models suggest, the field would have been bubbling away like a shaken can of soda. So much so, in fact, that nothing should have ever been able to form in the first place.
But we exist, as does everything around us. So, where does that leave us?
Science always affirms Design.
Full Transcript of Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech
In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man.
But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.
Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election.
Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes.
When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.
When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite. He fanned the flames.
And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans. And separately, found liable for committing sexual abuse.
And consider what he intends to do if we give him power again.
Consider his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.
His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy.
His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.
Consider the power he will have— especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled he would be immune from criminal prosecution.
Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails. How he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life. Not to strengthen our national security.
But to serve the only client he has ever had: Himself.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.