Truly, this isn't good news.

 Microplastics in human brains.

Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains Assessed by Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry

Another good argument for a simpler life.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The sw...: T

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 54th Edition. The swift and the not so swift edition.

• Twitter has banned searches for Taylor Swift.

This tells us something about the danger of AI, as what they were searching for is AI generated faux nudes of the singer.

It also tells us something about entertainers we already knew.  Yes, their art counts, but part of their popularity, quite often, is that they're a form of art themselves. Which leads us to the next thing.

Everything about this is wrong on an existential level.  AI, frankly, is wrong.  

And once again, presented with the time, talent, and money to be sufficiently idle to do great things, we turn to the basest. 

• There's a creepy fascination going on with Tyler Swift

I don't know anything about Tyler Swift, other than that she's tall, and from the photos I've seen of her, on stage she wears, like many female singers, tight clothing.  She appears to be very tall, and is sort of a classic beauty.

I suppose that's the root of it.

Apparently, right wing media and MAGA people are just freaking out about Tyler Swift.  This has been headline fodder for some time, but I only got around to looking it up now, as I don't follow entertainment at all and don't care that much.

Swift is dating some football player.  I don't follow football either, so that doesn't interest me.  Beautiful female entertainers dating sports figures, or marrying them, isn't news, and it isn't even interesting.  Consider Kate Upton and Marilyn Monroe.  Indeed, under the evolutionary biological precept of hypergyny, most rich women in entertainment would naturally gravitate in this direction, as much as we like to pretend that our DNA does not push us in one direction or another (lesser female entertainers, such as Rachel Ray and Kathy Ireland, tend to marry lawyers).  Billy Joel may have sung about the opposite in Uptown Girl, but that truly is a fantasy.  There's really very little direction from them to otherwise take, whether they are cognizant of it or not.

And so now we have this total weirdness:

Right wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec: 

People who don’t understand why I have been commenting on Taylor Swift and Barbie are completely missing the point and NGMI These are mascots for the establishment. High level ops used as info warfare tools of statecraft for the regime.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly:

They’re elevating her to an idol.

Idolatry. This is a little bit of what idolatry, I think, looks like. And you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!

Far right activist Laura Loomer:

The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open … It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign.

Donald Trump fanboy and poster child for political train derailment, Vivek Ramaswamy:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall …

And if all of that isn't weird enough for you, a host on the right wing  OAN claims the Swift football dating is a deep state psy op, because sports brainwash kids when they should be focused on religion. 

This is insane.

Liz Cheney warned us that idiocy had crept into the nation's politics.  What more evidence of this is required than this?

• Celebrity endorsements.

Some of this stems from a fear that Swift might endorse President Biden.  I read something that claimed she had in 2020.

I don't know if she did or not, and I don't particularly care.

There are a host of celebrities who have endorsed Trump.  Nobody seems to get up in arms about that, or even notice it.  So why the concern.

Probably because Swift is seen as the voice of her generation, and that sure ain't the generation that MAGA is made up of.  I.e, she's young and an independent female.  

Look at it this way, would you rather have her endorsement, or Lauren Boebert's?

I frankly don't get celebrity endorsements anyhow.  I don't know why we care what any actor or singer thinks about anything.  Freaking out about it is just silly.

• Jay Leno is seeking to be the guardian and conservator for his wife, Mavis, who is 77, and has dementia.

This is a tragedy.

It's also a tragedy in the nation's eye. Most of the time really notable figures endure something like this, it's out of the public eyesight.  We didn't watch Ronald Reagan decline on the news.  Of course, we're unlikely to see Ms. Leno endure this either.

But this serves as a warning.  Old age, we often hear, isn't for wimps.  And one of the things about it is that those who remain mentally fit have to take care of those who do not.  Most families find this out.

But what about when they're running for office?

• The National Park Service reports a 63-year-old man died on a trail in Zion National Park.  Heart attack.

This headline tells us something, too. 63, we're often told, isn't old. But then we're not too surprised when a 63-year-old dies hiking, are we?

• A concluding thought.  We're getting scary stupid.

Freaking out about Tyler Swift, letting two octogenarians run to carry the nuclear football, engaging in endless weird conspiracy theories. . . we've really let the dogs of insanity out big time.

Frankly, a lot of the time the "elite", by which we mean the educated elite, the cultural elite, etc., kept a lid on this.  It wasn't as if the opinions of "the people" didn't matter, but they were tempered.

That's not happening in the country now at all.  Swift is part of a left wing conspiracy, efforts to prevent gender mutilation are due to right wing meanness.  This is out of hand.

Last Prior Edition:

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Lex Anteinternet: Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Mind...

Lex Anteinternet: Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Mind...: 

Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Minded and Luddites

One of the frequently visited topics of this blog is the change in various material items, or the introduction of technology.  Some might suspect that the author might be, therefore, a Luddite, or perhaps a Neo Luddite.  This is not so.

That is, I'm far from the vie that all technology is bad, but at the same time keep the point of view that the measure of a material things worth includes (but only includes) its effectiveness.  Something that works well, works well.  That means, of course, that something old that works well may work better than something new that doesn't work as well.  For example, those who are familiar with ranching can't help but note that the horse has outlasted several of its intended replacements, in some of its traditional roles.  I've seen the dirt bike, the three wheeler and the ATV all come and go as rivals to the horse. They just don't cut it in comparison, so the horse keeps on keeping on.

 

And many other examples of this can be found.  Old Coke was better than "new Coke" because it was.  Lots of old tools do the job as well or better than anything that comes after them.  The big old heavy Dodge Power Wagons are still coveted because nothing compares to them in their intended use.  Cast Iron cookery is better than newer items that are designed for the same purpose, not because they are old, but because the are better.  Espousing all those things doesn't make a person a Luddite, just open minded.

All that is fairly obvious.  When the truly open minded sometimes note that a really old technology or method remains applicable in the modern world in an unexpected way, however, it can be a bit of a shock. Retuning to the horse again, for example, its a mind bender to some to realize that there are armies in the world today that retain mounted troops, and that extensive field forces have been deployed of that type as recently as the 1980s, and actually much later.  Both Portugal and Rhodesia, for example, deployed mounted infantry into the 1980s, in combat.  And mounted rural patrols remain perfectly viable in some places, including parts of the U.S. border, today.  That the horse would remain a viable platform should be self evident, but it comes as a shock.  Its competitors, in this context, offer speed and lower training, but they also are inflicted with noise and cost.  It's a cost balancing matter, therefore, and in some instance, the costs favor the horse.  In a related sort of analysis, some work has been done by economist that show on small acreages horse drawn implements are actually more cost effective, if the cost of the human farmer's labor is deducted, than machinery, up until a certain point at which the speed of the machinery tips the balance. Noting that doesn't make a person a Luddite, just a bit eccentric.

What does make a person a bit of a Luddite, however, is refusing to accept that any technology is either an improvement or useful. . . or in sometimes necessary.  I recently ran across an odd example of that.

As folks who stop here know, I'm a lawyer.  Moreover, I'm a lawyer in Wyoming, which means that I travel around quite a bit.  I was also an "early adopter" of the Internet, which was coming into law firms just at the time I entered the law, which is about a quarter century ago now.  Most younger lawyers, I'm sure, can't imagine a day when every firm didn't have the Internet, but I do.  We were just getting dial in when I started up. We still had to go to the county law library to use Westlaw at that time, which I frequently did.  Now, of course, we all have West Law on our PCs, and were connected all the time, literally.  Is that good or bad?  Well, I've debated that, even here on this site, and there are good and bad elements to that.  But anyway you look at it, it is.

Part of that, of course, includes email.  We use email constantly.  And it has very much impacted how we work, I realized today.  And that's where, perhaps, the Luddite aspect of this kicks in.

I won't say that every type of business everywhere must have internet connectivity.  But law firms must.  A firm without the net is not only a rarity, but obsolete.  I've come to assume that most law firms have a webpage dedicated to their firm.   Having one wouldn't be absolutely necessary, but it's darned near necessary.  It's like having a sign out in front of your shop.

Email is necessary.  I don't know how any lawyer can operate without email.  But today I ran across one, to my surprise, that didn't.

In this case the lawyer was across the continent, literally.  I've been having trouble catching him by phone, and he's been having trouble catching me.  That's easy to occur in this situation.  When I first come into the office most mornings, I probably have a series of early morning emails to catch up with. At that same time, this fellow is doing his mid morning work.  By mid morning, when I might have the best chance of calling from my office, he's probably gone for lunch.  When he comes back and returns my call, I may be just getting back or be out doing something.  If I call him after 3:00, he's probably gone, and so on.  

However, if a person has email.  None of this matters.  I'd catch him first thing in the morning with an email, or vice versa, and we can exchange them over a day so that, in the course of one day, we'd probably be well on our way to having whatever it was all worked out.  So, I went to find his firm website so I could send him an email.

Low and behold, I couldn't find a website, or even an email address.  His state bar listing didn't even list a fax number.  Finally, I had my secretary call his to ask for a fax number or email address.  They did have a fax number.

Here I'll digress that whenever I call this office, the receptionist is invariably snooty.  That may be, in part, because I have a Rocky Mountain accent (yes, there is such a thing) and I'm dealing with somebody who has a certain distinct regional accent.  She might not be able to understand me, and I can't really understand her all that well.  Or she might just be a bit rude.  I always find that odd in a receptionist.  I'm just trying to call her boss on a work matter, which would seemingly be good for us both.  Treating me like an annoyance would not seem to be warranted.  Oh well.

Anyhow, I resorted to the fax, a technology that seemed pretty amazing when I started 23 years ago but which now seems sort of redundant to email.  Oh well.  But here, I can't grasp how, or even why, somebody in this line of work wouldn't adopt this technology.  Shoot, here we couldn't get by without it now, as everyone else has it, and that's the speed at which we must work.  Indeed, even Iphones are a necessity, as they pick up email.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. The Farm, Comrades.

Lex Anteinternet: Friday Farming. The Farm, Comrades.: 

Friday Farming. The Farm, Comrades.

A news announcement from Governor Gordon:

Wyoming Lands World’s Largest Vertical Farming Research Facility

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. –  Governor Mark Gordon has announced a historic economic development investment, as the State Loan and Investment Board (SLIB) approved a grant to support development of the world’s largest and most advanced vertical farming research center in Laramie. The project will support the retention and creation of nearly 200 high-paying jobs in the community.

The company, Plenty Unlimited Inc., is dedicated to advancing the emerging technology field of indoor agriculture. The new research center in Laramie expects to utilize an internship-to-employment pipeline to hire local workers, as well as hire recent University of Wyoming graduates. The investment by the Wyoming Business Council supports the new direction of the Council, by adding value to Wyoming’s core industries and activating new economic sectors. 

“Wyoming is proud to invest in the continued success of a business that was first innovated here in Wyoming by one of our own and demonstrated at the 2015 World Expo,” said Governor Mark Gordon. “The level at which Plenty will be operating in this new facility will truly advance Wyoming’s preeminence as a global center of indoor agricultural research. This center gives us a tremendous opportunity to promote a state-of-the-art R&D cluster and further diversify our state’s economy.” 

The $20 million Business Ready Community Business Committed grant from the Wyoming Business Council to the City of Laramie will be applied to construction and infrastructure costs for the 60,000-square-foot facility, which will be built on 16 acres at the Cirrus Sky Technology Park in Laramie. Additional funding, land and support for the project is being provided by the City of Laramie and the Laramie Chamber Business Alliance (LCBA).

Plenty has its origins in Laramie. Chief Science Officer Dr. Nate Storey co-founded Bright Agrotech as a University of Wyoming graduate student in 2010 and established an innovation center in Laramie.This eventually led Storey and a group of entrepreneurs to found the startup Plenty Unlimited in 2014, which later bought Bright Agrotech. Today, Plenty has more than 400 employees nationwide and the company’s R&D work over the past two years drove more than 100 new patent filings for innovations as diverse as new crop growing systems, a way to detect plant stress and new tomato plant varieties.

“As a Wyoming native, I have devoted my career to advancing plant science in my home state and am proud to be a part of helping the State play a leading role in advancing a new field,” said Storey. "This state-of-the-art facility will not only accelerate our R&D pipeline but will also create an incredible opportunity to attract and employ a talented workforce to further innovation and diversification for Wyoming."

With the SLIB’s approval, the project will be shifting into the design phase, with plans to begin construction later this year and open the facility in early 2025. Plenty’s team and research work will transfer to the new facility from its current Laramie location once it is completed.

-END-

M'eh.

Vertical farming is a real thing, but the expectation that it's going to produce all of our food in the future is frankly unlikely, and a freaking nightmare.  It's industrial agriculture at its scariest, often accompanied by a vision of the future in which this has become necessary due to vast overpopulation of the planet.

Careful demographers, even if they provide overpopulation warnings, are now at the point where they tend to give them with a footnote, as it's now well known that we're darned near at the point of peak population right now. That is, while population continues to go up in some places, it's not really going to for that much longer, and it's declining, or even crashing, in much of the world  It would be declining in the United States but for the fact that up until recently: 1) the GOP saw all immigrants as their lawn care workers, working cheap; 2) the Democrats saw all immigrants as future Democratic voters, and the entire nation still thinks the "nation of immigrants" thing means that the US has to take in immigrants at an absurd level forever.  The falsity of those nations is now beginning to sink in, in no small part as the American people basically fill the country is full up and things need to back off.  If they were allowed to, like every other European country, and like Japan, and like China, our population would be declining.  At some point in this current century, the entire globe's population will be declining.  By next century, it'll be crashing.

And that won't be a crisis.

Part of the reason it won't be a crisis is that it'll allow people everywhere to live more natural lives. But in the meantime we keep getting suggestions like this.

It's interesting how Communist collective agriculture and Corporate industrialized agriculture tends to arrive at the same point.  Agriculture that's industrialized and of scale.

People don't really like it.

Moreover, people need a connection with nature, and agriculture is part of that. 

Well, if some have their way, there'd be less of that.  Rather, we'd be free from the burden of our serfdom comrade and liberated to work in the cubicles.

Nifty.

Blog Mirror: The Great Reset: Living Like It’s 1999

 

The Great Reset: Living Like It’s 1999

Lex Anteinternet: I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays...

Lex Anteinternet: I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays...: 

I'm pretty much habituated to working on Saturdays. . .

as I'm busy, but I took Thanksgiving weekend off for a variety of reasons. Also, for a variety of reasons, it's the first time I've had four days off in a row for several years.

I avoided checking my email, which I'm better at doing than other people that I know.  I don't have my email set up to give me automatic alerts, for example.

Cell phones. The worst thing to happen to humankind since. .. well ever.  These are our old cell phones.  I found them in a drawer when I was looking for something the other day.  They're expensive, so you save them, which you probably don't need to do.

So in checking my email this morning, and my calendar, I see that I have emails from lawyers for every day of the four-day weekend, save for maybe Thanksgiving itself.

There's no doubt about it.  Cell phones and computers have become the enemy of sanity.  

I know that some of those folks were simply working on Friday, which isn't a holiday weekend for everyone.  I had intended to but decided not to.  But Saturday and Sunday?

There's a point at which stuff like this has to stop.  I'm glad to see that for the first time, pretty much ever, Walmart and some other big box stores closed on Thanksgiving itself and will close on Christmas.  Some restaurants were open, however. Grocery stores were as well.  Friday, of course, was "Black Friday", which I've worked many times myself, and Saturday was "Small Business Saturday".

We're reading, of course, about inflation ramping up, which the administration seems to have no handle on whatsoever.  The weekend shows had Democrats on explaining how the "Build Back Better" bill won't contribute to it, which is baloney.  If anything starts to depress it, it'll be the arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which isn't good.

Really building back better would take a fundamental look at which what we've built, which is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week, cubicle economy, and dismantling big chunks of it.  Right now workers are voting for that with their feet.  

Maybe some pondering on that is in order.

Blog Mirror: Losing Time

 A new entry by South Roane:

Losing Time

This gets a bit to a topic I've addressed elsewhere, both here and on Lex Anteinternet, that being that if I'd had my ruthers, I'd just get by on what I grow, shoot or catch.  That wouldn't be my wife's ruthers, however, so a volunteer cow and one of her cousin's pigs is in the freezer right now. And with my really bad luck on hunting license draws recently, if we got by on what I shot or caught, we'd be eating a lot, and I do mean a lot, of rabbit, as it's the only thing that in recent years I could be nearly guaranteed of getting.  

Having said that, I did get a deer last year with a general draw license.

I posted a comment on the linked in blog entry, which is as always well worth reading, but what I'd note again here is that when we look back, and some do, and think "I'd live just like my ancestors. . . ", well, they didn't have freezers.  At least not until the 1950s.

Related threads:

Hunting (and fishing), Stateside, during World War Two.

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in general) during the Great War and there's talk of food conservation, and you are a hunter. . .

Food: Seasonal, local, and from the grocery store. A revolution we don't often recognize.