"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov (Newsweek, 21 January 1980) 

He later wrote: "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

• A little video introduction to Rachel Carson and the origin of Scientific Environmentalism.
• Here is a second video about Rachel Carson.
• You may also enjoy listening to this Marvin Gay remake of "What's Going On" titled Mercy Mercy Me (the ecology)
• Did you know that the first Earth Day was in 1970? No? Then listen to this.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake
• https://theconversation.com/is-god-good-in-the-shadow-of-mass-disaster-great-minds-have-argued-the-toss-137078
• https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/november-1-1755-the-earthquake-of-lisbon-wraith-of-god-or-natural-disaster/
• The Enlightenment: Crash Course European History #18
• an hour with Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANZTjzcaoVc

• using tide-gauge measurements by the British navy (starting in the 1600s), we know that average sea level rose 20-cm (8-inches) between 1890 and 1990
• we now know that the recent rate of sea level rise measurements from satellites represents a tripling compared to the average from 1901-1971. References:  here1 and here2
• the second average above would result in 46 cm per century (or 18 inches), and the rate is still increasing. The problems of Venice Italy today could be a foretelling of the problems of American ports tomorrow.

1. This does not mean that human reproduction will end after 2040, but it might mean the end of natural reproduction. One immediately thinks of the back stories behind Brave New World or The Handmaids' Tale
2. Since the article also mentions similar drops in animals (dogs) I am tempted to think this continual drop since 1950 might be due to environmental pollution. One immediately thinks of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was the basis for the Blade Runner movie). BTW, the book was released six years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring
3. As an aside, over the decades I have always wondered about the increase in people who now identify as non-heterosexual. Industrial pollution may be a factor. For example, I just learned that Cadmium can be estrogenic which causes me to wonder what happened to all those NiCad (Nickel Cadmium) batteries we discarded in land fills.
4. If the prime mover has triggered some sort of emergency shutoff switch to avert overpopulation, then I'm sure we could all agree that the land grabs in Ukraine and Palestine now appear absurd.

• includes a discussion of veneer theory
• includes a discussion of Thomas Hobbes whose 1651 book, Leviathan, was known to educated people like Hamilton. BTW, Hobbes book (and philosophy) was used to justify British colonialism which we now know was wrong (at least through modern eyes)
• mentions that the Stanford prison experiment done by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 is another example of biased bad science

• Lessons from an ancient Athenian in an era of 'fake news'
  • Thucydides, Part 1: The First Journalist (53 min)
• Is civilization a thin veneer? What the plague of Athens can teach us about dealing with COVID-19
  • Thucydides, Part 2: Lessons from the plague of Athens (53 min)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electoral_systems_by_country
2. University of Waterloo professor, Byron Weber Becker, has published a set of computer simulations based upon historical voting statistics. These simulations indicate that the Alternative Vote (AV) scheme used in Australia is worse than first-past-the-post.
   caveat: note that Alternative Vote is just first-past-the-post with ranked ballots. BTW, this scheme was used in Alberta approximately 100 years ago.
3. Andrew Coyne: The Way Forward on Electoral Reform in Canada and What’s Wrong With How We Vote?
4. John Cleese (Monty Python) discusses FPTP problems in Britain
5. History shows that costly errors are usually associated with majority wins because fewer people are involved in decision making. Food-for-thought: British politicians of all parties agreed to quietly work together under Churchill during WW2. Everything went well (politically speaking) until the end of the war when party bickering resumed. If Britain had adopted proportional representation, then I suspect:

   Britain would have applied to join the EU in 1952 rather than 1962 (entry was delayed until 1973 for reasons discussed here)	Winston Churchill won a majority government in 1951
   there would have been no Suez Canal crisis in 1956	Anthony Eden won a majority government in 1955
   there would have been no Falklands War in 1982	Margaret Thatcher won a majority government in 1979
   there would have been no BREXIT (starts in2016)	David Cameron won conservative majorities (2010, 2015)

6. More than 100 years ago, the majority of voters were barely educated, so they needed to send an educated representative to the nation's capital. Since the majority of today's voters are better educated, I wonder if sending a representative to the capital (where they fall under the influence of the party whip to vote the party line) is still necessary.
7. Fifty years ago, when manufacturing was still a thing, the 'business class' usually voted conservative while the 'working middle class' usually voted labor. Since then, 'millionaires and billionaires' (a.k.a. the one percent) have hijacked conservative politics, then tricked the working class into supporting many right-wing causes which includes flat taxes, lower taxes, and austerity.

1. why do western governments institute austerity programs to defund public education? (the father of economics, Adam Smith, advocated "government sponsored" education for all, including the working class who were unable to afford to educate themselves)
2. why do western governments support sectarian (religious-based) education which includes home schooling?
   • this is only desirable if you want to produce a society of priests and nuns.
   • won't all sectarian students eventually become wards of the state? (look to modern day Israel to see and example of this)
   • shouldn't religious education only be done on church property?
   • What happened to the separation between church and state?
3. why do western governments allow investors to make huge amounts of money on student loans, which only serve to temper higher levels of education? (perhaps "education" and "health care" should be run without capitalism's market-place incentives)

1. Sal Khan of Khan Academy on 'How I Built This' (42-min) speaks about using A.I. to help teachers educate students. This is not a magic bullet for funding education since it requires all students to have access to an internet-connected computer. But it could provide the equivalent of a personalized tutor.
2. Advanced Placement (many times just known as "AP") for providing opportunities to capable students.

• https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2000220228000
  Technology took away our ability to focus, but Johann Hari says it's not too late to get it back.
• https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/15957007-why-hard-focus - guests:
  (1) Johann Hari, best-selling author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again, explains why we are all having trouble paying attention and what we can do about it.
  (2) Professor Nathan Spreng, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, describes his research into the power of mind-wandering.
• https://www.amazon.ca/Stolen-Focus-Attention-Think-Deeply/dp/0593138538/
• has any deep thought ever been transmitted in a twitter message of 140 or 280 characters?
• Companies with trillion dollar evaluations [Meta (Facebook + Instagram), Alphabet (Google + YouTube)] refuse to financially support Canadian journalism so have removed all links to Canadian news. Will the USA be next? Welcome to a dumber, more uninformed, future.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online News Act
  • https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66049640
  • https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/01/california-news-publishers-law-meta-google
  • https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/29/google-to-remove-news-from-search-in-canada-over-new-law
  • https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-us-senator-urges-canada-to-stand-firm-against-meta-googles-threats-to/

Global mean sea level has risen 101 millimeters (3.98 inches) since 1992 and continues to do so at 3.9 mm (0.15 inches) per year.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/collection/1684/sea-level-rise
• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-years-of-sea-level-rise
• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147572/sea-level-watcher-takes-flight

• nineteenth century average rate of rise: 1.4 mm per year.
• twentieth century average rate of rise: 1.7 mm per year.
• the current "satellite measured" rate of rise is: 3.9 mm per year.
  • oops, in 2024 this number was increased to 4.62 mm/year)
• multiplying by 100 yields 390 mm (39 cm or 15 inches) per century.
• recall that distance over time is known as velocity (or speed); and that an increase in velocity over time is known as acceleration. Since the rate of sea level rise (speed) is increasing then we can say that sea level rise is accelerating (much worse than simply increasing)
• this measurement is vertical, but beaches are sloped which means much more flooding during high tides and storm surges.
• 39 cm (15 inches) per century is a guaranteed minimum BUT it appears that the annual rate has now passed 4.0 mm per year.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. There are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest."

• Size differences in two brain structures, the amygdala (larger in conservatives) and the anterior cingulate (larger in liberals), bias human perspective of the world.
• Conservatives see most issues as "black-and-white" (or good-and-evil) and are more pessimistic while liberals see "shades of gray" and are generally more optimistic.
• Conservatives are more fearful of others so are more easily encouraged to vote for POPULIST issues like "building the wall" or BREXIT (funny point: Britain had the lowest number of per-capita immigrants but had the highest political reaction against them)
• Conservatives play politics as a team sport so will almost always "vote their party" while Liberals will split their vote choosing alternate parties (not very smart in first-past-the -post)

1. Like George Orwell (1984) Ayn Rand knows how to tell a fictional dystopian story
2. Rand's character John Galt seems to be a kinder (although equally ridiculous) version of Orwell's character Big Brother
3. 1984 (which Orwell claimed is really about 1948 England) was published in 1949 while Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 so perhaps this tells us something about the zeitgeist of those years
4. Ayn Rand seemed to project a naive (childish?) view of industry vs government regulation. Did she really think that corporations would never do anything evil? Had she lived longer I would have loved to hear her ATTEMPT to defend the actions of the Big Tobacco for knowing the numerous health hazards associated with the use of their product then hiding them in order to make a buck; or that EXXON knew as early as 1977 that the burning of fossil fuels would cause climate change (they hid these reports then hired retired scientists working for politically motivated think thanks to deny such a thing was possible). It is possible that these large companies got the inspiration to do this from Rand's description of the fictional "State Science Institute" which was low on science while high on politics. I wonder if people who read this book are also skeptical of science and vaccines.