Notices by James Gleick (gleick@mas.to)

What has Trump fueled, packaged, monetized, and embodied above all else? What is his brand now?

Hate.

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/23/the-downside-to-selling-hatred-as-a-maga-commodity/

So, credit to the Biden administration?

No! The whole thing is just a big mystery: “researchers and federal and state health officials have puzzled over the exact reasons for the decrease, including why overdoses have fallen so much in recent months.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/us/politics/drug-overdose-deaths-decrease.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU4.z6HD.18lQGD0Xcuyo&smid=url-share (2/2)

Across species and even domains of living organisms, cells seem to be exchanging information, sending messages encoded in RNA. Microbiologists are probing a molecular communications system that was invisible till now. From @quantarss:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/cells-across-the-tree-of-life-exchange-text-messages-using-rna-20240916/

#information

The Biden administration made the overdose epidemic a priority and took a series of actions to control it, including:
—expanded access to addiction treatment, including methadone and buprenorphine,
—created a National Response Plan to combat fentanyl and xylazine,
—permitted Medicaid reimbursement for addiction treatment services.

Now the NY Times reports a sharp decrease in overdose deaths and a dramatic reversal in the spread of fentanyl. (1/2)

I don’t know how the Secret Service can be expected to have done any better. Trump made an unscheduled visit to his 27-hole golf club, where he rides hither and yon in a open golf cart at his pleasure. A disgruntled former Trump supporter with a semiautomatic rifle never got anywhere near him. The only shots fired were fired by the Secret Service. The guy was quickly arrested.

I’d say they protected him successfully.

#SecretService

@dangillmor Clearly there is a paper-wide written policy. There must be a memo to staff. They owe it to readers to explain.

#lies

The NY Times has a blockbuster story here. Somebody at the Supreme Court is LEAKING. The court is truly in crisis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/justice-roberts-trump-supreme-court.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K04.Hw-C.FVxaHPVlsDTE&smid=url-share

#SCOTUS

The man is breaking down before our eyes.

Imagine if, say, Joe Biden recounted a conversation he had with “Abdul,” who he claimed was and still is “the head of the Taliban.”

Only there was no such conversation, and there is no such person. It’s a fantasy from his addled brain.

Wouldn’t we need to get to the bottom of this?

https://masto.ai/@Nonilex/113121366913582917

This is a persuasive demolition of the fantasy of humans settling on Mars. Though I resent the snark aimed at the much-maligned Ian Malcolm, for whom I have a place in my heart.

https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars

#Mars

“This doofus's birdbrained space-colony takes are important to know … Capitalist society permits such profound inequalities of wealth and power, and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay, that Musk exerts a terrible gravity on the world around him: … Whatever pit he wants to throw his money into, some appalling volume of the world's resources and human labors will follow it down.

"Those labors will be, for the people doing it under Musk, basically suicidal.”

How Trump Broke Fact-Checking

One candidate speaks the truth and the other is a firehose of outlandish lies. Yet the convention is to “fact-check” both candidates equally.

What Harris said was absolutely true, yet the Times is compelled to say it “needs context”—the context being that Trump doesn’t want to be taken literally.

The context needs context, too: namely, that Trump regularly seeks to incite violence. It’s not a one-off; it’s what he does.

Is Kamala Harris a good retail campaigner? Watch this snippet and judge for yourself. And imagine the other guy interacting with these people in Penzey’s Spice Store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpTCweo0tCQ

A lot of my Mastodon friends are complaining that the NYT and other mainstream press underplayed Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris. Honestly, I don’t think it was that egregious. They covered it. It’s not earthshaking.

This is what’s earthshaking and egregious. In 2024, while we watch the world burning and flooding, EVERYBODY understands we’re seeing a climate crisis and our future is in the balance. Everybody, that is, except one crackpot who could become president.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/sep/06/presidential-election-climate-crisis-project-2025-trump

The covert Russian influence campaign code-named “Doppelgänger” is a vast scandal, the dimensions of which are only beginning to be revealed. Paid propagandists, witting and unwitting, include “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” (Hello, Tucker Carlson.)

Here is Heather Cox Richardson:

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/september-6-2024?r=g7z5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The U.S. presidential election is taking place in about seven states. If you’re in one of those states, you know that. Otherwise you may not realize: The presidential election is taking place elsewhere and you’re not relevant.

How can ANYONE still like our absurd Electoral College system? It keeps choosing the losing candidate. It disenfranchises most of the country. It’s a farce.

This is a way forward, if only more people understood it: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

The commies at Goldman Sachs discover what everyone knows: Democrats are better for the economy. https://mastodon.social/@uspolitics/113076833189542013

“It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as ‘I am happy to see you.’ There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language.”

When he’s not busy being one of our best fiction writers, Ted Chiang has become our best critic of generative AI:

“The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as ‘money laundering for copyrighted data,’ which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

Why is the responsibility to press charges laid upon the harassed cemetery employee, who understandably fears a stream of abuse from the Trump people? The Army can and should enforce its rules.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/us/politics/trump-arlington-cemetery.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Gk4.yfYT.BjBAm7NZFY8L&smid=url-share