Thursday, 20 August 2020

What I've Been Reading, July 2020

Links

Above the Fold

Miscellaneous

At the Doomstead Diner

Over the last while I've gotten together on Skype with RE at the Doomstead Diner and made a few videos. Here are links to what we've done so far. There is more to come.

Defund the Police

Coronavirus

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Economic Contraction and Growing Inequality

  • The Ides of Autumn--Seeds, Stagflation and Crash Risk , by Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics
    "For anyone involved in economic interpretation, these are hectic times. They’re frustrating times, too, for those of us who understand that the economy is an energy system, but have to watch from the sidelines as huge mistakes are made on the false premise that economics is ‘the study of money’, and that energy is ‘just another input’."

Recipes and Cooking

  • Bouillon Brodo Caldo Dashi, Medium-Anthology of Cooking
    "The broths of several cultures, their preparation and use"
    I find broths freeze quite well. I also tend to cook them quite a bit longer than this piece suggests, like overnight. Very few tings benefit by being turned in a race.

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Genetically modified literature (in which I read books so you don’t have to), by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Practical Skills

American Politics

  • What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?, by Jabin Botsford, The New Yorker
    "A new book conjures three scenarios in which President Trump could lose the election but not step down."
  • Are you a conservative? It’s a trick question., by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
    This article makes some good points, but I'd say that conservatism is a force for evil, and still a powerful one.
  • Biden’s Big-Tent Strategy Seems to Be Working, by John Cassidy, The New Yorker
    "None of this means that Biden is a lock for the Oval Office. Between now and November 3rd, something could conceivably shift the momentum against him, such as a Vice-Presidential pick that backfires, a major slipup in the debates, or a surprising economic upturn. Right now, though, the challenger’s strategy of keeping the focus on the incumbent and pitching a broad tent that accommodates anyone who wants to see the back of Trump is working well."

Canadian Politics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Science Based Medicine

"Science is properly reductionist for a reason. In order to understand the world, and to have reliable empirical knowledge, you have to build your theories from the bottom up, but also confirm them from the top down. This means that we correlate ultimate effects with basic knowledge about mechanisms. Scientific knowledge does not have to flow in any particular direction. At times we discover something fundamental about the world, and then look for implications and applications. At other times we observe effects in the world, and then reverse engineer their cause. In either case real scientific phenomena become increasingly embedded in this network of knowledge. When a claim remains persistently isolated at one level, and neither leads to further applications or to more basic discoveries about the nature of reality, that is suspect." Steven Novella

There is No God, and Thou Shall Have No Other Gods

I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I am an atheist, but I may not have made it clear that I think any sort of worship is a bad thing and that believing in things is to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, I do not believe in belief itself. That's what the "Thou shall have no other gods" is about—it's not enough to quit believing in whatever God or Gods you were raised to believe in, but also we must avoid other gods, including material wealth, power and fame.

Further, many people today (including most atheists) follow the religion of "progress", which is based on the belief that mankind is destined to follow a road that leads from the caves ever upward to the stars, and that however bad things seem today, they are bound to be better tomorrow due to technological advancement and economic growth. This is very convenient for those who benefit most from economic growth, but it is hardly based on any sort of science and leads to a great many confused and incorrect ideas.

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Artificial Intelligence

  • If You Think GPT-3 Makes Coders Obsolete, You Probably Do Not Write Code, by Chris I., Medium--Data Science
    "In rebuttal of data scientists and developers going obsolete"

    • Books

    Fiction

    Non-Fiction

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