This is an excerpt from a much longer discussion. Michael Shellenberger is discussing San Francisco's homeless problem with Joe Rogan. One of his conclusions is the well-intentioned attitude by many liberals that all homeless people are purely victims and that they cannot be blamed for any of their behaviors, including their uses of dangerous drugs.
What I'm currently reading: Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard (2021). Simard makes a stunning claim. Here's an excerpt from her introduction:
My queries started from a place of solemn concern for the future of our forests but grew into an intense curiosity, one clue leading to another, about how the forest was more than just a collection of trees.
In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. What started as a legacy, and then a place of childhood home, solace, and adventure in western Canada, has grown into a fuller understanding of the intelligence of the forest and, further, an exploration of how we can regain our respect for this wisdom and heal our relationship with nature.
One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading acrossfungal membranes.
The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin.The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.
This letter should not have been necessary. There are two, and only two, sexes. That should be the starting point for all discussions of transgender issues. Here's an excerpt from an Irish Journal of Medical Science letter titled: "The Reality of Sex":
We regard the claim that sex is neither fixed nor binary to be entirely without scientific merit—there are two sexes, male and female, and in humans, sex is immutable (disorders of sexual development are very rare and, in any event, do not result in any additional sexes). Such politically motivated policies and statements have no place in scientific journals. It is essential that impartiality be maintained in order to preserve public trust in science as a process dedicated to producing shared knowledge.We call upon authors and editors to resist non-scientific pressures to suppress honest and accurate discussion of these matters, particularly in the field of medicine where diagnosis, prognosis and treatment can depend on a patient’s sex.
Sanjay Gupta is one of the good guys. During the pandemic, he has provided a lot of good information regarding COVID. That said, Joe Rogan had him on the ropes as Gupta tries to defend the misconduct of CNN, Gupta's employer. Well worth watching and excellent analysis by Krystal and Saagar.
Two related things of note. First, Glenn Greenwald notes that Democrats are falling in love with America's Deep State:
What the fuck is happening to Democrats? We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.
Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.
We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable. . . .
Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .
Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.
In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.
. . . .
The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:
