I am a soaking wet jacaranda that perseveres Gehenna
Discolored and raked by a pure white northerner
Into a ruddied makeup
Under the frisson of a pompadour crown
I am the corruption of Cyrus
Prophesied and anointed in
Crowdsourced babble
For only I am what am
Soak in me
What you want is hiding
Vast elided meanings for your cabin souls
Drop some spare dread in the passed red hat
And I will bring regulatory disgrace to the Opposer
Virtues will melt into the swamp
As we fight like hell
The ancient order was violence
Now we reorder with glossolalia what was cured of force
Disorder these insecure truths
Castrate protruding honors
Disrupt the cantilevered logs
Soak the timbers of souls
Until they slump
You can hear in this echoic mythos
Clanging in this great opposition
You can read into these fictive sanctuaries
That we can enlarge, expand
Greaten and glisten
Though we are giants in the earth now
Here I am
Soaking wet anger… Read the rest
In the days before Trump’s inauguration we can see some of the reflections of alt-right and conspiratorial ideas crawling ashore from febrile ponds. They range from mildly-incoherent free-wheeling-conspiratorial (Peter Thiel), to narrowly self-serving Libertarian-light (Marc Andreessen), to often contradictory, racist, and cruel (Curtis Yarvin). What should be asked about each is what vision they have of a common good for America and, though they and the MAGA movement are largely focused on our country, how also the larger world might benefit or change as a result of a new form of American engagement with the world. The idea of a common good is an old one that has been brought back into vogue by some social and legal theorists, like the “common good constitutionalist” Adrian Vermuele who I wrote about previously. For Vermuele there is a common good in redistributing land and resources to help the poor as well as in the government restricting and limiting free speech to enforce his concept (informed by his Catholicism) of morality in thought and action.
In radical contrast we have the new MAGA commentariat. There are some fundamental contradictions at the heart of the MAGA braintrust. On the one hand, they see a runaway federal government that hides facts and strong-arms business leaders with threats of regulation and lawsuits. The government and the establishment media and universities support activism by positioning themselves as the fact-sifters and thought leaders. Andreessen complains that educated workers demand too much from his companies. They want environmental and sustainability commitments. They want DEI policies. They want positions on global affairs and worldwide LGBTQ+ rights. It’s annoying to Andreessen and makes entrepreneurship too complicated.… Read the rest
In this, one must be circumspect: reading out stats that contradict the mood is not reading the room. So, instead, I try to focus on unexpected innovations that lead us to defocus on our own situational context and instead find a larger reimagining. This is a modern therapy that isn’t dismissive of the effectiveness of our highly successful institutions of scientific achievement, peace-preserving world orders, and liberal democracies that effectively balance individual freedoms against order. It’s a celebration of them, instead.
I give you two new joys as the new year starts to build. First, we have the novel realization that dark energy and matter might be better explained by relativistic distortions of space-time in the universe based on the quantities of matter in denser versus void-like areas of space. Here’s Anton Petrov with a primer:
This certainly simplifies things if true, but it needs to be observationally verified and reconsidered if it doesn’t pan out. There’s that underlying joy in science: everything is tentative because we are all flawed.
