I talked to Joel C and KH last night. It came in and between my working on the research project.
I had pig's feet for last night; I have three more in the refrigerator.
How to Cook Pig Feet in the Oven?
The spot where the tooth was pulled is tender and so the face above it. My CPAP mask hits that spot. I did not sleep much last night, so I got up and got to work on blog posts. I also started clearing out the tabs in my Zen browser.
The Guardian published Woman fired from Indiana university over Charlie Kirk post wins $225,000 settlement. It shows off the best of Indiana:
Mearns said Swierc’s post resulted in a flood of outraged phone calls and emails to the university. Some warned they would withhold donations and at least one parent said she planned to withdraw her children from the school. Some callers threatened violence, Mearns said.
“The reaction was extraordinarily damaging to our University’s reputation and image, and it was exceptionally disruptive to our mission and our people,” Mearns said in his statement.
Having fun with the Romans: Mary Beard on the Classics
Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change? (The Guardian)
In Argentina’s Iberá national park, you can see a stunning example of runaway revival. After decades of degradation, the reintroduction of jaguars has reduced bloated herds of grazing herbivores, allowing wetland plants to recover. The plants’ roots trap moisture in the soil, and their branches provide a habitat for species that make this one of the most spectacular wetlands – and carbon sinks – on the planet. After just a few years, caimans now bask on the banks, macaws flash scarlet across the sky and giant otters patrol the waterways.
Of course, nature-based solutions are not always so successful. Companies have created vast carbon farms via monocultural tree planting, destroying native species in the process. The drying of peatlands to reduce methane production leads to the release of huge amounts of CO2. Nature’s power lies in its complexity, so attempting to simplify or reengineer the system often backfires.
The risks and trade-offs tend to disappear, though, when you get one vital part of the equation right. Time and again, when the revival of local biodiversity improves the livelihoods and wellbeing of local people, change becomes truly sustainable. Whenever people are intrinsically motivated to protect the environment around them, they become an integrated part of a natural feedback loop that can quickly gather momentum.
Todd Blanche’s Effort to Grant Trump and His Family “Forever Immunity” Hides a Greater Danger
The Libertarian Party of Indiana (oddly no updates to its blog since last year, are they sure about offering a choice?)
Elevating The Mediocre (Sheila Kennedy) has an interesting study of how the under-educated get recruited and stay loyal to tyrants.
Struggling to get your children off Fortnite? There’s a reason for that (Irish Times)
Schüll’s central insight is that machine gambling is not primarily about money. Instead, gamblers are in search of a flow state that allows players to “manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world”.
While flow states are good, both gambling machines and video games can weaponise them to the extent that some players become numb to everything else.
The Book That Plunges You Into Messy American History (The Atlantic)
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration made what may well be the nation’s most explicit and pernicious attempt to demand loyalty. In 1942, roughly two months after Pearl Harbor, the government began to detain Japanese and Japanese American residents of the West Coast and Hawaii. Eventually, some 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were imprisoned in large inland camps. During their detainment, which lasted up to four years, internees had to take a survey that, among other things, asked whether they would serve in the Army “on combat duty, wherever ordered” and “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America”—that is, to the country that had just imprisoned them, presuming their disloyalty. If Loyalty Day is uninteresting because it’s artificial, then this was something far more sinister. For many internees, the so-called loyalty questions seemed like a threat.
Questions 27 & 28, the author Karen Tei Yamashita’s tenth book, gets its title from those loaded questions. The novel roves through time, space, and literary styles to tell stories of many Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. She brings to life nearly 100 people who were interned—or their ancestors were, or their children, or their legal clients, or a wide range of other connections. All of these stories merge into a sprawling exploration of what it was like to have to answer the loyalty questions, and how those questions echo through American history to this day. Crucially, Yamashita does this without ever legitimizing the test itself. “Those questions,” she writes, “that damned questionnaire, are meaningless, but the consequences of interpreting them, choosing yes or no, shape the future.”
Is this when America was great?
Onto other things, like getting ready for the writer's group.
sch
