Still Educating Sam Hasler: News I Did Not Know About & Hell Freezes Over & Ball State Theater 2024 -2025: Saturday Morning in Muncie

Procrastinating started at 6:30 this morning.

VW slams production into reverse as industry faces battles on all sides

The manufacturer’s announcement this week that it is considering the closure of two German factories has shocked its workforce, who gave a first taste of the opposition they will mount with protest banners carried into a meeting of thousands of employees with executives on Wednesday.
It comes as Europe’s incumbent carmakers find themselves squeezed on all sides. Demand across the car market is subdued, EU and UK rules on average carbon emissions are tightening, and Chinese competitors are muscling in on their business.

Er, our economy is so terrible?

A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism – regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia Theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

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The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists – not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and non-living environments – to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated 13 December 1966:
“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would – like all other effects of biological entities – be recognisable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on non-biological grounds … We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate – it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.
Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Listening to Trump in full and not being able to hear he is Looney Tunes is something I have never understood.

South Park creators to ignore Trump when show returns in 2025

Stone added that part of the strategy for intentionally avoiding mention of the current Republican nominee for November’s presidential race is how much of “a mind scramble” it can be to satirize such a contest.

No kidding. I haven't watched South Park for years; I guess it is still brilliant.

Indiana Music therapy specialists speaks on what the practice is and how to make it accessible

Another worker at Plainsong is Hospice Coordinator Kinsey Lavy, who primarily works with geriatrics and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“Music therapy can sometimes look like talk therapy, but, usually, music is used as a tool to address non-musical goals,” Lavy said via email. “For example, someone who needs to increase their gross motor skills may use the beat of their favorite song to increase their gait by walking to that beat.”
In her work, music can be used as a distraction for pain management or a tool to relearn and learn differently. Besides verbal communication, music becomes a different form of conveying emotions or to help broach memories for dementia patients.

Good to know this, since I have one of my characters in "Love Stinks" doing music therapy.

Vehicular accident occurs at Scramble Light

Considering what I see of Muncie drivers while riding the Muncie bus, I am surprised this does not happen more often. Only the quality of the bus drivers is why they do not.

Nor have I been following this: