Category: news

Bananapocalypse

Here’s a good article on the possibility of a coming bananapocalypse. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s a real problem.

The world’s most popular fruit, the Cavendish banana, is also one of the least genetically diverse. These seedless bananas destined for the $11 billion export market are, essentially, clones. That leaves the humble Cavendish vulnerable to diseases that can take advantage of its limited genetic diversity.

I eat a banana almost every day, so it would really bother me if they disappeared, but of course that’s a “first-world problem.” I’d just eat more of something else, and get on with my life. In some parts of the world, bananas are a staple and an important source of nutrition.

All of this seems to be leading up to a world much like the one presented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Let’s hope we don’t actually let it go that far. (Which reminds me: I need to read more Paolo Bacigalupi.)

Waiting for the Miracle

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m really hoping next week is better than this week. I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” right now. This live version is pretty good. I never got the chance to see him live, and now I really regret that. Hearing of his passing right after the election news was a bit of a one-two punch.

I’d been listening to The Essential Leonard Cohen a lot recently, so he’s been on my mind. I got on a Cohen kick a couple of months ago, after reading a book called A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, by Tyler Dilts. It’s not a book about Cohen, rather a police procedural that references Cohen (and Springsteen, and some other interesting music and books).

I didn’t really intend on writing another blog post touching on the election, but I’ve got a lot of stuff swirling around in my head, so maybe letting some of it out might help.

I was going to link to one or two articles on Quartz, but there are so many random post-election articles on there that picking out one or two seems pointless. Oh, heck, I can’t resist the temptation: here’s their two most popular articles right now (from the “popular” link at the top of the home page):

  1. A playlist of Leonard Cohen’s songs to help you make sense of the world
  2. Want to understand how Trump happened? Study quantum physics

The first one is just a list of YouTube videos (including some pretty good ones). I’m not even going to try reading that second one. From the headline, it seems like it would be fairly similar to a whole host of media stories about how we can “understand” the election through the lens of one particular viewpoint or another (math, physics, history, art, etc.). At this point, I think I’ve decided to opt out of reading any more of those.

Here’s another bit of media overload I hit this morning: Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about a hiker running into Bill and Hillary Clinton while out for a walk. The hiker got a selfie with Hillary. Minor, innocuous, story, right? The kind of thing that wouldn’t even be a story, if we still got our news printed on dead trees and delivered daily. But on the web, it’s worth writing up and posting, because it’ll attract a few clicks, so why not? Well, this morning, in the infamous “trending topics” sidebar on Facebook, I see a link to an article with this title: “Was the Hillary hiking in the woods photo staged?” (I’m not linking to this article, for obvious reasons.) First: a generally good rule of thumb for any article whose headline is phrased as a question is that the answer to that question is always “no.” If it was “yes,” the headline would have been a statement instead of a question. (This is apparently Betteridge’s law of headlines.) Second: who cares? Hillary has already lost the election. Why would she be “staging” photos? Why would anyone care if she did? I think this article is basically the result of a process that got started at the beginning of this election cycle and is now stuck on auto-pilot, and nobody knows how to turn it off. The day after Hillary passes away, years from now (hopefully not any time soon), there will be an article titled “Did Hillary fake her own death?” (The answer will, of course, be NO.)

My main takeaway from the paragraph above is that I should really spend less time on Facebook. One of my Facebook friends recently linked to F. B. Purity, which is a Firefox add-in that cleans up Facebook a bit, allowing you to hide some of the more annoying bits, like that “trending topics” section. I went ahead and installed it this morning, so we’ll see if that helps. Of course, it’s only useful on Mac and Windows, and not on iOS. I’ve fallen into the habit of checking Facebook on my phone a lot at work, and I should really stop doing that. Sometimes, it’s a nice little break, if I hop on there and see something funny, or a nice photo of a friend’s kids. But generally it’s just a time sink, and I shouldn’t be bothering with it at work.

I think I might want to revisit the Bored and Brilliant series of episodes from the Note to Self podcast. When it first aired, I thought there were a few really interesting observations and ideas in there, along with a bunch of stuff that seemed either really obvious to me, or that didn’t really apply to me. Right now, though, rethinking how I use my phone and how I consume news and social media seems like a really good idea.

Working my way back around to something that actually relates a little more directly to the election results, rather than how the media is reacting to the results, and how I’m reacting to that, here’s a link to a blog post by Marco Arment on the election results.

Most people in the world are good, and want to be good to each other. Whether they vote that way or not, far more Americans believe in progressive, liberal, inclusive views than regressive, aggressive, conservative ones.

He relates this election to his feelings during the George W. Bush years. I’m apparently a good bit older than him, so I’ve been thinking back to the Reagan years, which correspond almost exactly to my teenage years. So thinking about the next four years as “probably not much worse than Reagan or Bush” is… a little comforting?

I remember a lot of Reagan-related black humor from my nerd friends in high school. I suspect there will be a lot of black humor over the next few years. I just recently finished reading a book of Hunter S. Thompson essays from the Reagan years. I think we really need a find a new Thompson for the Trump years. Maybe Matt Taibbi? Not quite, but he’s usually worth reading. Of course, he rejects the comforting idea of comparing Trump to Reagan or Bush:

Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead.

So now my panic pendulum is swinging back from “this is kinda bad” to “this is a disaster”. I don’t know. I should just stop reading all these think pieces, right?

I was kind of hoping I could go see Fantastic Beasts today, but it doesn’t open until next week. Here’s an idea: get on the train and go over to the Met Breuer, and see the new Kerry James Marshall exhibit. And, hey, the Paul Klee exhibit looks pretty good too!

Splendid Isolation

A very clever DJ on the radio this morning played Pete Yorn’s version of Splendid Isolation (originally a Warren Zevon song). It seems apropos, after this week’s election results.

David Remnick’s An American Tragedy, from The New Yorker, is a well-written (but fairly depressing) assessment of the situation. Tim Urban’s It’s Going to Be Okay is a bit more hopeful.

Joshua Benton, at Nieman Lab, has written a good overview of the media forces at play in this year’s election. I’ve been reassessing my own consumption of media, though I think I’m probably going to keep reading and watching the same things, for the foreseeable future: The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and PBS NewsHour for “real” news, and The Daily Show, Colbert, and Samantha Bee for “funny” news. I’m thinking about cutting back a bit though, especially in the short term, just to keep from going crazy.

I’m thinking a little bit about religion too, but I’m not at all sure what to do on that front. I think that the Catholic Church is going in the right direction, so that’s a ray of hope.

And a little escapism isn’t a bad thing. (I’m re-watching some of the Harry Potter films this week, for instance. And reading some comics. And listening to some Doctor Who audio dramas.)

And some cosmic perspective might help too:

(I don’t usually try to embed multiple tweets in a blog post, so this may look weird. But hopefully it works ok.)

I’m also thinking about doing something that I haven’t done in a long time: create a mind map. I’ve had a lot of thoughts going through my head about positive things I can do over the next four years, both to stay sane and upbeat, and to help others. But I really need to organize those thoughts. This NY Times Op-Ed piece by the Dalai Lama has given me some additional stuff to think about, but I’m really not sure where to go with it.

Pope Francis Names Joseph Tobin to Lead Archdiocese of Newark

From the NY Times:

Francis’ pick is Joseph W. Tobin, currently the archbishop of Indianapolis. He made national headlines last year when he rebuffed Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, now the Republican vice-presidential nominee, by refusing to stop Catholic Charities from resettling a family of Syrian refugees.

And:

Archbishop Tobin [..] is replacing Archbishop John J. Myers, a conservative who is among a small minority of American prelates who announced long ago that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should not receive Holy Communion.

Also:

Myers’s tenure was hobbled in recent years after he failed to ensure that a priest convicted of child sexual abuse no longer had access to children.

Myers is the guy who spent half a million dollars of church money on upgrades to his retirement home.

I have a lot of snarky comments in my head about all this upheaval in the church, but I’m going to withhold them all and just say that I’m following Francis’ reforms with some interest and lots of hope.

Archbishop Peter L. Gerety Dies at 104

…he had erased a multimillion-dollar deficit in the archdiocese, in part by selling a lavish archbishop’s mansion in a gated community in West Orange and settling instead in a rectory in the North Ward of Newark, a city still scarred by the race riots of the 1960s.

Source: Peter L. Gerety, Oldest Archbishop Who Preached Social Justice, Dies at 104

I kind of remember Archbishop Gerety from back when I was a kid. He probably came to our parish once or twice. I didn’t know much about him then, but, reading his obituary, he sounds like the kind of archbishop the Church can be proud of. (Unlike this guy and his fancy retirement house.)

gun control

I don’t usually post anything overtly political on this blog. And I’m still not sure if I want to; I’ve started, and then trashed, several versions of this post.

I watched several of Monday’s late night talk shows on my TiVo last night. They all, as expected, addressed the Orlando shooting. The NY Times has a good overview of the late-night response to the shooting here. One thing I noticed about all of these responses is that there was a bit of a “meta” aspect to them. They all mentioned the awful frequency with which these incidents are happening, and the standard pattern of responses that we all seem to fall into after a shooting. And they all included a call to action, though with varying levels of vagueness.

I’ve always been a proponent of reasonable gun control. And honestly I can’t even understand why anyone wouldn’t be. I can understand some difference of opinion on specifics, but I really don’t understand why anyone would think that it’s a good idea to allow anyone to buy an assault rifle, especially someone with a history of mental problems, or someone with a record of spousal abuse, or someone who has been investigated by the FBI for links to terrorism.

The NY Times has an article titled How They Got Their Guns, which they first posted last year (I think) and have updated to cover more recent shootings. The key takeaway: “At least eight gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons.”

There’s been a lot of talk on TV about the NRA and about how they’ve blocked any reasonable gun control legislation from being passed over the last couple of decades. But something that occurred to me recently was that there has been very little talk about any particular organization opposing the NRA. So I used my old friend, the internet, to see if there was any actual meaningful and organized opposition to the NRA. And, of course, there is. The two main organizations seem to be the Brady Campaign and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The Brady Campaign is named for James Brady and has been around since 1974 (originally under a different name). Some useful history of the organization can be found on Wikipedia.

Everytown is a much newer organization, founded in 2014, as a combination of Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group with another group. It has some pretty high profile people on its board, including Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. Their Wikipedia page is also a good place to start for background info on them.

Both of these organizations have reasonable, moderate, agendas. I’m not entirely sure how effective they are, or how good they are at managing donations, but they both seem to be on the right path. So I guess all I’m saying here is, if you’re as bothered by all of this as I am, maybe look into supporting groups like these.

OK, that’s it for politics. I promise my next blog post will either be about comics or all the keen new Apple stuff that was announced at WWDC this week.

NY Times news

Here’s a couple of recent articles about the NY Times:

Can Anyone Save the New York Times from Itself?

New York Times ‘Exploring’ Ad-Free Digital Subscription

I’m still paying for my (digital) NY Times subscription, and still using an ad-blocker on their site. Their site is definitely a mess without ad-blocking. I don’t know if I’d pay extra for an ad-free subscription, but I don’t mind paying in general.

Antibiotic Resistance – NY Times

I don’t know why I read articles like this. There’s not much that I can do, personally, about antibiotic resistance. I’m not a doctor, researcher, farmer, or politician. And I really don’t need the extra stress of worrying about this stuff.

Well, I guess I can vote for folks who recognize that this is a problem and that vaccination is a good thing and doesn’t cause autism. And I can try to buy meat and dairy products that come from animals that haven’t been fed loads of antibiotics.

The best outcome is preventing infections through vaccination or public health measures so that we improve human health without increasing resistance to antibiotics.

Source: We’re Losing the Race Against Antibiotic Resistance, but There’s Also Reason for Hope – The New York Times

The economics of very high taxes

From Bernie Sanders’s Tax Plan Would Test an Economic Hypothesis in the NY Times:

That is, a 73 percent top rate would generate more revenue than the existing tax code, but it would not generate proportionately more revenue — meaning Mr. Sanders’s revenue estimates, based on applying rates to the existing tax base, will tend to overstate revenues available to pay for a plan that is already facing criticism for too-low cost estimates, even if 73 percent is the correct estimate of the revenue-maximizing tax rate.

I don’t normally post anything political on this blog, but this article reviews an interesting issue in economics. How high can you set a tax rate before revenues actually start going down instead of up? And it touches on the subjective issue of what happens when you reach that tipping point. Does “greed” decrease? It’s interesting to think about, though it’s largely an academic argument, since it’s unlikely we’ll see tax rates go that high in the USA, even if Bernie does somehow get elected.

Of course, all the candidates’ tax plans are pretty much nonsense, and would never work as they say they would, even if they could get them through Congress.

And, speaking of Bernie, his appearance on the Late Show this week was pretty good. I’ve been enjoying Colbert’s Late Show, mostly, though some of his new bits don’t really work for me, and some of his interviews aren’t really that interesting to me either. But I’d say about 60% of the show is generally worth watching, and I can fast-forward through the parts that don’t interest me.

The article I quoted from above is from The Upshot, which I’ve been following since I started my Times subscription. It’s a pretty interesting blog that is, apparently, the replacement for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, since he left the Times back in 2013. FiveThirtyEight.com is pretty nifty too, and I’ve been following that on and off since it was re-launched under ESPN in 2014.

RIP Abe Vigoda

I’ll miss Abe Vigoda. Barney Miller was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I remember being excited about the Fish spin-off show too. (And I was bummed that it only lasted one season.) I even remember buying a novel featuring Fish, though I can’t find any trace now that it ever existed, so maybe I’m mis-remembering that.

I also remember, when I was a kid, seeing a doctor about my (mild) kyphosis. He explained the effect of kyphosis to me by telling me that I’d be hunched over “like Abe Vigoda” when I was older. I remember thinking that I really didn’t want to be hunched over like that, but Abe Vigoda seemed like a pretty good guy, so I could probably deal with it.