If the interests of future generations were considered on an equal footing with those now able to vote and alive, something ten times more efficacious than the Green New Deal would already be in place, fossil fuel usage would be completely banned, and the world would already be radically different than it is.

Greta Thunberg is the only true climate realist in the public eye at the moment, because she knows climate change is likely to kill her.

I finally found the book and thus the series I’d been attempting to re-discover!

It is the Joe Ledger series by Jonathan Maberry. I’ve only read the fifth book in the series (Extinction Machine) so far but will likely read all the rest of them now.

I had unknowingly read an entirely different series (the Rot & Ruin one) by this same author between reading Extinction Machine and then attempting to find it again. (I read a lot of books.) But after all these months of searching off and on I am glad to have discovered it again.

That something — like the nation-state — is a “relatively recent development” says nothing about it at all, qualitatively or morally. Washing your hands before you slice into someone on an operating table is a relatively recent practice, too. Should we also stop doing that?

I despise this sort of shallow thinking. It’s not really thought at all. It’s confirmation bias combined with shoddy ideation combined with pollyanna-ish wishful thinking.

About the nation-state specifically, I am not certain that it’s the best way to organize a society or a polity either. Perhaps there are better ways and we should almost certainly be looking for those ways. However, I’d never abdicate my responsibility to consider this sort of problem deeply, all just so that I could have some sort of mood affiliation with what makes others feel righteous and equanimous in their vacuous thought bubbles.

Europe Adopts Tough New Online Copyright Rules Over Tech Industry Protests.

This is going to backfire in a huge way against the copyright industry. While I’m no supporter of the tech companies, they are in the right here. This will hurt authors and musicians and will help big companies at the expense of everyone else.

Expect the internet to be even more censored, even beyond the dreams of the most censorious liberal thoughtcrime enforcer.

Whatever any left argument for closed borders may have been at one time, ANYONE who defends closure of borders and reduction of migration today is a racist monster. I don't care what your intentions are; your position has consequences beyond what you may have intended.

— Laleh Khalili (@LalehKhalili) March 22, 2019

Guess I am content to be a racist monster, then. Despite the fact that I don’t want millions of white people to just up and immigrate, either. These days, it is possible to be racist against white people even if you are white, I guess. We do indeed live in strange times.

Some people want every country to fall apart rather than just a few of them. Seems smart to me.

This, though, is dead on:

Vehemently disagree. Open borders is not a left stance. It is a neoliberal one. You don't even have to be anti-immigrant to acknowledge and open border policy in the face of unequal states is not good policy.

— Nicholas Nowlin (@theTakeDownNick) March 24, 2019

Exercise adds up to big brain boosts.

I can feel it. I know it’s bad these days to talk about IQ, but I think I’d probably do 5-7 points better an on IQ test these days than I would have a year go.

And as the article discusses, my memory has also improved a great deal. I noticed that it had declined a bit since high school, where I had an absurdly great memory (I once memorized the entire periodic table in a weekend). Since working out heavily I don’t think it’s quite back up to that level but in cramming for a certification test recently, I noticed I had to study much less than I did a few years ago to memorize similar material — about half the time.

Nice to know that the cognitive benefits accrue over time.

Another usage change I’ve observed recently is “wrecking havoc” instead of “wreaking havoc.”

Kind of makes sense. Where else do we use “wreaking,” unless you’re me? Nowhere. Although “wrecking havoc” doesn’t parse all that well, it’s more familiar than the older usage.

Expect to see vegan and vegetarian foods pushed hard in the near future. Big ag companies have realized they can charge far more for those products than meat-based ones, and they cost vastly less to produce.

Companies go where the profits are. They care about nothing else, and no, this won’t save the planet etc.

Intelligence is an aptitude for winning games, primarily reputation games, and primarily by lying. Intelligence is a faculty for deception

— Zero HP Lovecraft (@0x49fa98) March 21, 2019

I agree. Here I quote my own bad self.

Rationality — to the extent that we engage in it — is our hoodwinking engine being repurposed from deceiving, manipulating and managing others to an attempt at understanding the mind of the universe. (And no, I don’t mean some wishy-washy conception of “universal mind.” I mean that our minds are engaging in animism about the universe as a cognitive tool.)

Of course, I got the idea from Peter Watts and modified it a bit. Not many new ideas out there, really. But intelligence and rationality had to evolve from something. Most likely we got to it via that path.