by Mike Bendzela

“. . . I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.” —Thomas Hardy

Cultural phenomena such as sports, pop/rock music, movies, television/mass media, politics, and religion/holidays have little hold on me anymore. Over time, I’ve eschewed these largely social activities. Call it adaptation; I’m not fit for them nor they for me, so seclusion has become my niche, and a fruitful one at that. Sometimes it is like I do not speak the native language — I awaken, a foreigner on my own continent, with no guide along as translator. Contemporaries will thank you for not singing along if you cannot sing in tune. This may make me culturally illiterate, but some illiterates are truly functional.

Becoming totally unsheathed from culture is to attempt the impossible: You run hard away from it, but it can run harder, having multitudes for legs. Like particulate matter in the air you breathe on your remote mountaintop, culture is ubiquitous.

Sometimes an anecdote illustrates my break with these social customs. Such episodes become signifiers and watersheds only in retrospect; at the times they occur, they seem more like puzzling anomalies or personal eccentricities. Only later do they hint towards a greater disillusionment.

Sports

This is one loss I rue a little, for I can see that fans are having fun. The noise, the team configurations, the mascots, the bands, the spectacle — all are impressive. And I can recognize the phenomenal abilities athletes have, placing them among the prodigies of our species. But the niceties of the games themselves bore me to tears, and my early associations with them were universally awful: When I went out for baseball as a kid, fly balls always thumped in the grass behind me in left field before I could even spot them. I tried out for football as a high school freshman, and the first day I heard those helmets cracking against each other I left the field and never returned, my first and last brush with physical violence. Perhaps wrestling would be more my style, less public and featuring far less velocity; but during my first match, I was so awestruck by the physique of my opponent that I ended up being pinned to the mat within sixty seconds.

Few spectators of sports actually play them, of course. My spectator experience never got much beyond high school, and one anecdote stays with me. During the last game I attended, the senior year homecoming game, our team was down by several points. We had the ball, the clock was running out. The fans in the stands were heated, hungry for a score. A play would be launched to cheers, only to finish with a crashing Awww! as our team failed to gain yards. The din was incredible. I turned to look up at the crowd in the bleachers behind me. People stood on their seats and shouted when a play started, then plopped back down, despondent. A few girls were even crying. I realized this was an emotional debacle as well as an athletic rout. A puzzling thought occurred to me at that moment of wonderment, and only years later did actual words come to me to describe what it was I was thinking:

What the hell is wrong with these people? Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

With its pristine rainforest, complex ecosystems and rich wildlife, Ecuador has been home to one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth. For thousands of years indigenous peoples have also lived harmoniously in this rainforest on their ancestral land. All that has now changed. Since the 1960s, oil companies, gold miners, loggers and the enabling infrastructural workers have all played their part in the systematic deforestation and destruction of this complex eco-system. Human rights abuses, health issues, deleterious effects on the people’s cultures and the displacement of people have all become part of the indigenous people’s lives. But wherever and whenever oppression, exploitation and social injustice raises its ugly head, resistance will eventually emerge, and so it is with the indigenous Waorani people of the Ecuadorian rainforest, under the leadership of Nemonte Nenquimo.

Nenquimo’s recent autobiographical memoir, We Will Not Be Saved, is a detailed narration of her life as an indigenous Waorani woman living in the rainforest and the consequences of the extractive industrial practices on their way of life and the rainforest they live amongst. With the assistance of her husband Mitch Anderson listening, translating and rendering Nenquimo’s voice, she provides us with authentic, deep insight into the exceptional culture and world view of her people; it makes an important contribution to our knowledge of indigenous people’s lives and the devastating impact of the oil industry on those lives.

There are two parts to this book. Part One spans her childhood years in her village of Toñampare and ends with her flight from the missionary couple with whom she lived when in her teens. Nenquimo writes emotively and insightfully about those years of her life and her  community’s intimate and harmonious connection to the natural environment; of her mother’s pregnancies and her twelve brothers and sisters living in a smoked filled oko; of how she makes the sweetest manioc mixture of chicha;  of  hunting with her father and learning to identify the footprints belonging to the diverse forms of animal life; of how she learns of the spirit that lives within the jaguar and of the power of the shamans.

The book is also significant for the way it highlights the stark contrasts between two ways of life and world views, that of the ‘cowori’, ‘outsiders’ as the white people are known in Wao Tededo, the language of the Waorani, and the life of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian rainforest. As a small child Nenquimo runs excitedly to the landing site when she hears the humming sound of an ebo, a plane, bringing the cowori, including missionaries, to her village. She could never have imagined then that one day she would find herself not running towards but running away from the Christian missionaries the plane delivered to her village. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

A specter is haunting Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the specter of the environmental costs of Machine/Deep Learning. As Neural Networks have by now become ubiquitous in modern AI applications, the gains the industry has seen in applying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to solve ever more complex problems come at a high price. Indeed, the quantities of computational power and data needed to train networks have increased greatly in the last 5 or so years. At the current pace of development, this may well translate into unsustainable amounts of power consumption and carbon emissions in the long run, though the actual cost is hard to gauge, with all the secrecy and the rest of it. According to one estimate, nevertheless, improving cutting-edge DNNs to reduce error rates without expert input for correction could cost US$100 billion and produce as much carbon emissions as New York City does in a month – an impossibly expensive and clearly unethical proposition.

Once upon a time, though, advances in so-called neuromorphic computing, including the commercialization of neuromorphic chips by Intel, with its Loihi 2 boards and related software, hinted at a future of ultra-low power but high-performance AI applications. These models were of some interest to me not long ago too, given that they seem to model the human brain in a closer fashion than contemporary DNNs such as Large Language Models (LLMs) can, the paradigm that dominates academia and industry so completely today.

What are these models again?

In effect, LLMs are neural networks designed to track the various correlations between inputs and outputs within the dataset they are fed during training. This is done in order to build models from which they can then generate specific strings of words given other strings of words as a prompt. Underlain by the “pattern finding” algorithms at the heart of most modern AI approaches, deep neural networks have proven to be very useful in all sort of tasks – language generation, image classification, video generation, etc. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

A pandemic has swept the land, talk of apocalypse abounds. A charismatic political figure with a penchant for opulence and known for captivating the populace with speeches about reviving the old empire is embarking upon his second stint in power. In his crosshairs is the political establishment, and under his rule the social order shows signs of fissure.

The story rings familiar, but is it? The year is 1354. The place, Rome.

When we swoop in for a closer look, other details begin to emerge. The apocalypse as it was imagined in late medieval Italy looks different from today’s. Less water, more fire. Though maybe this is my own personal apocalypse speaking, rooted in the southern New England landscapes I know best; where I see only downpours and rising sea levels, Californians might well look into the future and envision a fireball. Four horsemen featured prominently in the medieval imagination, and alongside the extinction of mankind on earth, they would also usher in a new age, one in which justice and peace prevailed in the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem.

The political figure who wants to Make Rome Great Again is Cola di Rienzo, and if you’d lived in Europe before the twentieth century, chances are you’d have known who he was. Machiavelli praised him, and Napoleon retreated from Moscow with his story tucked in his carriage. Byron eulogized him as a radiant figure, Hitler found his charisma inspiring, and Mussolini was warned he’d end up assassinated and strung upside down by an angry mob just like Cola, and lo and behold, he did. Opera fans will recognize Cola as the revolutionary “tribune of the Roman people, “a young man clad in velvet tights whose heroic stand against the depredations of an unchecked elite class was the subject of Rienzi, Richard Wagner’s first opera to hit the charts. Late in life, the composer came to feel ashamed of his youthful score. It was too “Italian”—a descriptor Cola would have eschewed for himself in favor of the more local “Roman.” Neither adjective was revolutionary, but taking the title “tribune” really was, because no one had done it for nearly a thousand years. It recalled the ancient office of the tribune of the plebs, devised to check the power of senators and leading magistrates. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

As Heather Cox Richardson and by now many others have pointed out, a coup d’état is taking place in the United States. Even the New York Times and the Washington Post now seem aware that things are not as they should be. The coup is conducted by the Administration itself, within which Vance occupies the second highest position. This regime, like all authoritarian regimes, recognizes the power attached to the control of information, and the ability to define the conventional wisdom. For that reason, it has embarked on an energetic program of purging unwelcome information from official sources, undermining independent research, and specifying which topics may or may not even be mentioned by sources that receive any Federal funding. What follows, a piece that I began to write on the eve of the coup, should be seen in this context.

A clip posted by National Conservatism on X shows Vance quoting Richard Nixon’s saying, “The Professors are the enemy.” This sent me to the full speech from which the clip came, which Vance, at that time a candidate for election to the Senate, gave to the November 2021 National Conservatism Conference, and which has since been seen on YouTube over a hundred thousand times. I was expecting some load of easily dismissed anti-intellectual drivel. What I found, instead, was a very carefully crafted speech, with some points that do hit home, others that are subtle signals to his audience of his own conservative credentials, and, throughout, a judo-like rhetoric that reverses the moral thrust of his opponents’ arguments.

The speech begins

So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement, in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions. Specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provide research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

and concludes:

There is a season for everything in this country and I think in this movement of National Conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is, we need wisdom. And there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately forty fifty years ago. He said, and I quote, “The Professors are the enemy.” [Applause]

What comes between deserves the closest attention, especially from those opposed to what Vance stands for. Read more »

Chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the church of Maria Weißenstein in Welschnofen, South Tyrol.

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by TJ Price

In a 2001 article in The New York Times, Elmore Leonard begins a series of ten rules for writing with “Never open a book with weather.” Whether or not Mr. Leonard is right or wrong in this dictum, I have decided to start this column with exactly that: the weather. My thoughts on such prescriptivist advice aside, nothing so moves me to awe as the aetherial forces constantly swirling both above and around us, informing the very air we breathe and sometimes literally shaping the landscape in which we live. I relish the casual conversations that others dread, in the supermarket and in passing—my forecasts often come from old codgers I happen across: My knee’s singing, they say, pensively. For sure, it’s gonna rain.

I am relatively sure I inherited this fascination from my mother, with whom I shared an avid love of The Weather Channel, back before it turned into a hopeless amalgam of advertisement and personality. It was with the intensity of sports fanatics that we tracked storms, watching the data go by as a constant cycle of shaded maps and predictions for future precipitation. In hindsight, it’s entirely possible that—due to circumstances of familial uncertainty and confusion at that time—we were attempting to do through forecasting the weather what we couldn’t do with our own lives. 

The New England winter was never a question of if, it was always a question of how much, and when. Early mornings consisted of steaming instant oatmeal, orange juice, and the free jazz of The Weather Channel playing over an endless chyron of scrolling school delays and closures. Being that our town was on the farther end of the alphabet, we had to wait through all the Coventries and Middleburys and Tarringtons and Warrenvilles before we got to ours. Despite the anticipation, we were glued to the screen, speculations all based on the data: cold front is moving in quick according to the radar, and look—Tolland is closed, so is Union…

But beyond the winter, and far more exciting—perhaps because it often spun in waters so distant from ours—there was hurricane season: each mysterious, rotating devastator given a name. There was Andrew and Hugo and Bob, each grinding their inexorable way towards us, and we watched every update with anticipation, making predictions. One model said an incoming High pressure was sweeping down from the north, it would push the thing out to sea; another would say this wasn’t the case and the High was being held back by the Low coming up from the southwest—

I often find myself wondering how many people are behind these divinations, the meteorologists who cast their eyes over fluctuating numbers and patterns, their graphs filling with isobars and front lines like occult glyphs, indecipherable to the layperson. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Mary Hrovat

When I was 17, I took an introductory course in physical geology at a community college. I was enchanted by the descriptions of the physical processes that created land forms, and also by the vocabulary: eskers and drumlins, barchan dunes, columnar basalt. I like to know how things form and what they’re called. My strongest memory of this class, though, centers on the final lecture. The professor put Earth and its landforms and minerals in a larger context. He told us about the life cycles of stars, which have produced most of the elements on Earth.

The central fact of the lecture was that the mass of a star is a key characteristic determining how long it exists and what happens as it ages. Stars are formed when gravity causes a portion of a gas cloud to collapse until its internal pressure, and thus its temperature, are high enough for nuclear fusion to begin. The energy released when, for example, two hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium supports the mass of the star against the pull of gravity. A star’s life unfolds as a story of the equilibrium (or loss of equilibrium) between these two forces pulling inward and pushing outward. As one fuel source is depleted (for example, as hydrogen is converted to helium) other types of fusion occur in the core of the star using the new fuel source (and creating increasingly heavier elements). At the same time, hydrogen continues to fuse in a shell surrounding the core. Mature stars may have shells dominated by various elements undergoing different fusion reactions, although the available reactions depend on the mass of the star.

The professor probably described stars according to their type. I don’t remember if he mentioned the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, although it seems likely that he would have. The HR diagram plots the luminosity of stars (the amount of light they emit) versus their temperature. When stars are plotted this way, most of them fall on a curve called the Main Sequence, which runs from hot blue stars to cool red stars along the sequence O-B-A-F-G-K-M. (In some HR diagrams, the stellar type or color is plotted on the horizontal axis as a proxy for temperature.) Stars remain on the Main Sequence as long as the gravitational and thermal forces are in equilibrium. The larger and hotter a star is, the shorter its time on the Main Sequence, because hotter stars consume their fuel more rapidly.

As they age and leave the Main Sequence, stars undergo different processes depending on their size. The universe is still too young for the very smallest stars to have exhausted their fuel, so they’re still on the Main Sequence. Stars with masses ranging from slightly less than that of the sun to 10 times the mass of the sun go through a red giant phase, ultimately undergoing core collapse and forming dense white dwarfs. Larger stars have more complicated end-of-life scenarios, typically exploding in supernovae and leaving behind superdense neutron stars or black holes. Some elements are created only in supernova explosions. Read more »

Risham Syed. The Heavy Weights, 2008.

Mixed media on paper.

More here and here.

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by Richard Farr

If we could dig up Karl right now, he might be tempted to look at all the current drama in D.C. and say: “Red Scare Theatre repeats itself, but the first umpteen times it’s tragedy and then eventually it’s farce.” That’s not quite right though, because this kind of perennial crowd-pleaser always did have a strong element of farce — and the show that recently opened on Pennsylvania Avenue may evolve into something even more tragic than the others. Still, it’s important to record the fact that Trust Us, We’ll Save You From the Communists is getting a revival, and perhaps even more important to note how farcical it is. 

Skipping over the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s, let’s take a moment to recall that in the 1940s this type of theatre had an especially good run at “The House,” that grand old venue for popular schlock on Capitol Hill. Especially fondly remembered are Lenin is Coming for Your Children, Your Mother Is A Trotskyist, and Only Balding Rich White Men Can Save You. Classic American Theatre of the Absurd — but gradually it became too screwball for its own good. Even box office receipts for Reds Under Your Bed dwindled at last. The era ended not so much because it was all nonsense as because leading man Joey “Senator” McFraud kept tripping over the flag he used as a costume and exposed to public view the fact that underneath he was both naked and shockingly ugly. 

Yet American Conservative Theater never quite forgot that it was money in the bank to describe anyone mildly uncomfortable with haute-bourgeois authoritarian class warfare as a radical leftist traitor. This is why stock commedia dell’arte characters evolved, notably the hilariously incompetent extremist “Hillary Clinton” — red beret, bandoliers jangling against the pearls, teeth full of baby parts and hands covered in the blood of innocent entrepreneurs, shrieking about the immolation of all that true patriots hold sacred from a podium at Goldman Sachs. 

Now the lights have been lit again, the handbills are printed, and a new show, a new apotheosis of the Absurd, is upon us. Most exciting of all perhaps, we learned recently that it will star one of the greatest melodramatists and over-actors of his generation, Russell “Nutter” Vought. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Despite the fact that Newcomb’s paradox was discovered in 1960, I’ve been prompted to discuss it now for three reasons, the first being its inherent interest and counterintuitive conclusions. The two other factors are topical. One is a scheme put forth by Elon Musk in which he offered a small prize to people who publicly approved of the free speech and gun rights clauses in the Constitution. Doing so, he announced, would register them and make them eligible for a daily giveaway of a million dollars provided by him (an almost homeopathic fraction of his 400 billion dollar fortune). The other topic is the rapid rise in AI’s abilities, especially in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Soon enough it will be able, somewhat reliably, to predict our behaviors, at least in some contexts.

With this prologue, let me get to Newcomb’s paradox, which is a puzzle that suggests that the rational thing to do in some situations results in an outcome much worse than doing what doesn’t make sense.

As mentioned, it was first reported in 1960 by William Newcomb, a physicist at the University of California, but it was developed and popularized by the philosopher Robert Nozick in 1969.

The puzzle involves an assumed entity of some sort – a visitor from an advanced civilization, a robot with access to lightning fast computers, an all-knowing network of AI enhanced neural agents, whatever – that has the financial backing of a multi-billionaire. This billionaire claims that his ultra-sapient agent can predict with good accuracy which of two specific alternatives presented to a person he or she will choose. The billionaire further announces a sort of online lottery to demonstrate the agent’s abilities.

He explains that the agent’s assessment of people will utilize two types of boxes. Boxes of type A are transparent and all contain $1,000, whereas boxes of type B are opaque and contain either $0 or $1,000,000, the cash prizes provided by the billionaire, of course. Read more »

First Communion

Three bells rung thrice boys kneeling,
a candle at the altar burning,
god’s portrait on the ceiling,
priest lifts a holy wafer,
do mythic circles make us safer?

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by Barry Goldman

Following the news makes me feel sick. Not following the news makes me feel guilty. This conflict has been going on in my head for years, but recently it has become painfully acute. I don’t make any progress, I just go round and round. I’ve given the voices in my head the names of the two imaginary friends I had when I was a toddler, and I’ve transcribed some of their dialogue below.

Bearky:                   If we don’t stay informed and keep up with the outrages and stay engaged, the theo-plutocrats win.

Berry-Derry:       Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. They already won. They control the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. They own Twitter and Facebook and the Washington Post and the LA Times and Fox and talk radio. Whether you follow the news or not makes no difference at all except that it makes you miserable. How does your being miserable help anything?

Bearky:                  It doesn’t help, exactly. But it makes it help possible. If I don’t stay engaged, if I check out and just keep bees – because I’m a rich old man and I can – then help is not even possible. They want me to give up and let them control everything. If I retreat into my own protective bubble and just read novels, they can do whatever they want.

Berry-Derry:       And if you don’t? If you read every Substack and every blog post and email, and listen to every podcast, what difference will that make?

Bearky:                  I don’t know. But I do know it’s important to resist evil. And I know, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Berry-Derry:       Yeah, right. But as far as the actual world is concerned, watching internet commentators and reading blog posts IS doing nothing. It’s sitting quietly in front of a screen. It doesn’t DO anything. You want to know what the enemy wants? He wants you to sit in front of your screen being mad at the world until you get tired and go to bed.

Bearky:                  So what do you think we should do, go to protest marches and demonstrations? I hate everything about protest marches.

Berry-Derry:       Well, it’s a collective action problem, right? If everybody does it, if there’s a general strike and it shuts down the country for a few weeks, the government has to respond. But if it’s just a few thousand hippies marching around chanting slogans, no one cares. The government can ignore them or arrest them as it sees fit. Read more »

by Rachel Santarsiero

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization best known for its espionage and secret missions—has been spying on climate change. Well, maybe not spying. Not at first, at least.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA conducted a top-secret US program using satellite imagery to capture images of Soviet military installations. The program, codenamed CORONA, dramatically improved U.S. knowledge of Soviet and other nations’ capabilities and activities, and allowed the U.S. to catalog Soviet air defense and anti-ballistic missile sites, nuclear weapons related facilities, submarine bases, IRBM sites, airbases—as well as Chinese and other national military facilities. In total, the CORONA mission, along with sister programs ARGON and LANYARD, yielded almost a million images of the Soviet Union and other areas of the world.

While these satellites were capturing images of Soviet bases, however, they were unknowingly spying on something else: climate change.

Because satellites typically orbit on north-south paths, their sensors can capture the vast majority of the Earth’s surface as the planet turns over the course of a 24 hour period, cataloging sweeping Arctic and Antarctic images. Over the twelve years that CORONA was in operation, the satellite captured approximately 850,000 static images of retreating polar ice, ecosystems’ extent and structures, species’ populations and habitats, and human pressures on the environment.

Due to their highly classified nature, these images weren’t readily available for public and scientific use. In the early 1990s At the urging of first Senator and then Vice President Al Gore for the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to consider releasing environmental information gleaned from classified data, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified reconnaissance CORONA satellite imagery and determine whether or not “classified information could help on particular scientific questions.” According to a 1996 speech by former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, the ETF found that data collected by the Intelligence Community (IC) could fill critical gaps for the environmental science community and could be studied outside of the spy community without revealing “sources and methods.” Read more »