Monday Mule Pack – Booze, Cold Wars, Dinosaurs, and Computer Simulations
March 6, 2017
A weekly look at some of the more interesting articles from around the web.
Enlightenment thinkers turned their skeptical ideas into skeptical institutions, notably the U.S. Constitution. America’s founders didn’t trust the people or themselves, so they built a system of rules, providing checks and balances to pit interest against interest.
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Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements believe less in calm persuasion and evidence-based inquiry than in purity of will. They try to win debates through blunt force and silencing unacceptable speech.
MM: Unfortunately there are anti-Enlightenment elements spreading among liberals too, not just conservatives.
Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze
All over the world, in fact, evidence for alcohol production from all kinds of crops is showing up, dating to near the dawn of civilization. University of Pennsylvania biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes that’s not an accident. From the rituals of the Stone Age on, he argues, the mind-altering properties of booze have fired our creativity and fostered the development of language, the arts, and religion. Look closely at great transitions in human history, from the origin of farming to the origin of writing, and you’ll find a possible link to alcohol. “There’s good evidence from all over the world that alcoholic beverages are important to human culture,” McGovern says. “Thirty years ago that fact wasn’t as recognized as it is now.” Drinking is such an integral part of our humanity, according to McGovern, that he only half jokingly suggests our species be called Homo imbibens.
At the root of Trump’s new fury: Total contempt for American democracy
But all of these things are connected by a common thread: Trump is enraged at being subjected to a system of democratic and institutional constraints, for which he has signaled nothing but absolute, unbridled contempt. The system is pushing back, and he can’t bear it.
Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Pastor Greg Locke is Pissed: People are Donating to Planned Parenthood in his Name
Pro tip, Greg: If someone trolls you, don’t publicize how effective it was. Because, you know what… someone might write a story about it in hopes that a thousand more people do the same.
MM: The conspiratorial part of me is tempted to think that Greg Locke is actually in league with Planned Parenthood in order to increase donations (I made a donation after watching the video). But actually, the dude really is just that stupid.
This May Be Our Best Idea of What a Dinosaur Really Looked Like
Tony Blair’s Lesson for President Trump
In their place, the Brexiters and Trumpsters want to return us to a globe of everyone-for-themselves nationalisms that helped to foster two world wars. They speak of leading grand “movements.” Their vow is “rip it, don’t fix it.” As Blair noted, “The one incontrovertible characteristic of politics today is its propensity for revolt.”
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That is true in America, too. Donald Trump is not wrong about everything. We do need to fix our trading relationship with China, which has taken advantage of some of our openness. NATO members should pay their fair share for the alliance. We can’t let in every immigrant who wants to come to America. We do need to rebuild our infrastructure and enact sensible deregulation.
It’s what Trump believes — but is provably wrong — that scares me.
The Trump Experiment may come to an early tipping point
Trump has a problem either way. If he was not wiretapped, he invented a spectacularly false charge. And if a court ordered some sort of surveillance of him, on what grounds did it do so?
Every time the issue of the relationship between Trump’s apparatus and Moscow comes up, he is moved to unleash unhinged counterattacks. This only underscores how urgent it is to get to the bottom of this story quickly.
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Sessions’s convenient memory lapse (“I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians”) was especially jarring because it came after an inquiry from Sen. Al Franken in which the Minnesota Democrat did not even ask Sessions whether he met with Russians.
Automakers Near a Victory on Rollback of Fuel Standards
The History of The Bottled Utopia
“I was on the Starship Enterprise and I wanted to take beer where no beer had ever gone before,” Boston Beer Company founder and CEO Jim Koch tells me over the phone. It was 1992 and the craft beer industry was still mostly about recreating classic old world styles in a new world kinda way. Koch was getting bored with these pale ales and ESBs, though, and wanted to try something more creative. Something more extreme. Something more alcoholic.
Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
Not in a generation has the enmity run this deep, according to Sergey Rogov, the academic director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, in Moscow. “I spent many years in the trenches of the first Cold War, and I don’t want to die in the trenches of the second,” Rogov said. “We are back to 1983, and I don’t enjoy being thirty-four years younger in this way. It’s frightening.”
In the last year of his presidency, Mr. Obama often noted publicly that the North was learning from every nuclear and missile test — even the failures — and getting closer to its goal. In private, aides noticed he was increasingly disturbed by North Korea’s progress.
With only a few months left in office, he pushed aides for new approaches. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea’s leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula.
DNA could be the future of data storage
The researchers wrote six files—a full computer operating system, a 1895 French film, an Amazon gift card, a computer virus, a Pioneer plaque, and a study by information theorist Claude Shannon—into 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long. They then used sequencing technology to retrieve the data, and software to translate the genetic code back into binary. The files were recovered with no errors.
Though the circumstances are not the same, Mr. Trump’s indolence and Congress’s palpable lack of initiative sit in sharp contrast to the speed with which President Obama and congressional Democrats were able to engineer a nearly $1 trillion economic stimulus bill in 2009, a task completed in less than six weeks. At the current pace, Mr. Trump’s American greatness project may never get off the ground, remaining no more than a slogan on red hats, a testament to the emptiness of his populist promises to help the forgotten workers.
The ‘Kellyanne Conway on the couch’ controversy is so incredibly dumb
This is not only dumb, but it distracts from more serious and consequential debates like Trump’s travel ban, his campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence officials and his war against leaks. We’re WAY better than this. We need to act like it.
MM: Seriously, this is the stupidest thing ever.
