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Four chapters remain. We are a little over $1,200 from our final reward of the fundraiser ,an article on the Middle Ages Academic crisis (overproduction and collapse.) Chapters to come include:

8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

Chapter 7: The Ritual

Humanity’s first invention was either simple stone tools or rituals.

My money is on rituals.

 The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in which the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … […]

Weeks before Alaska Airlines’ terrifying debacle, one of the aircraft’s manufacturers was accused of systematically ignoring safety problems.

It’s no longer about Jesus and the Bible There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be. Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me: One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online.

Yes, that happened this month in Italy. And yes, they are wearing black shirts. Italian opposition leaders have called on Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government to ban neofascist groups after a chilling video emerged of hundreds of men making fascist salutes during an event in Rome. The crowd was gathered outside the former headquarters of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neofascist party founded after the second world war which eventually morphed into Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. The annual gathering, on Via Acca Larentia in the east of the city on Sunday, commemorates the 46th anniversary of the killing of three militants from the now defunct party’s youth wing. In the video, which was widely shared online, the men are standing in rows making the stiff-armed salute and shouting “present” three times. A militant then shouts “For all fallen comrades!” – a typical rallying cry of neofascists. This sort of thing is ostensibly illegal in Italy. But it’s apparently hard to prove.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Back in 2015, I covered the Trump escalator moment with a mix of horror and amusement. But unlike the smug press corps I took Trump seriously anyway. I quoted Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, (lately #MeToo accused whose career is pretty much defunct) saying it too: I wrote at the time: What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump. I could never stand Halperin and I probably still can’t. But since he was right about that I figure I might as well pay attention to what he’s saying about Trump now. He’s always seemed to have some insight into the weird phenomenon. JV Last at the Bulwark links to Halperin discussing Trump and Biden in the wake of this last weekend of campaign rhetoric from both candidates: It is a crude way to measure both perception and reality, but perhaps the most telling way to view the time between now Election Day is this: Can Biden win enough news cycles to overcome Trump’s current lead?

My senior year of high school, MTV produced a documentary called Once Upon a Prom that followed two students at my high school. I had started to dabble in media arts and was offered to work on the project and earn my very first industry-related resume line item as an intern for MTV Docs. This […]

As you knew he would Over the weekend, the Senate and House agreed on the top line budget number which is required before they can make any kind of deal to keep the government open. The Crazy caucus isn’t happy: Who would be “more conservative” than Mike Johnson, I wonder? Marge already says she won’t vote for this top-line budget (even though she voted for McCarthy’s) and Johnson only has a one vote majority right now. So don’t get your hopes up that we’ll avoid a shutdown. But who knows? Maybe his direct line to God will provide an intervention.

Okay, so we’ve talked about Bosnia and how that set things up for the Kosovo War. Now, what happened in Kosovo that made NATO want to get involved there? Back when Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, Kosovo was a “special autonomous province” of Serbia. This meant that it had limited self-rule and its own regional […]

Following up on my post below I wanted to highlight Brian Beutler’s newsletter today about Biden’s speech, with which I agree wholeheartedly: The remarks don’t just live on the page and in the moment they’re spoken. They have the potential to be recirculated endlessly, on television and social media, and now these clips will communicate Biden’s meaning explicitly, without requiring any sort of decoding. And as they circulate, they may also serve as an antidote to the huge glut of viral video content on social media that’s selectively edited to make Biden seem doddering and confused.  Making things like January 6—Trump’s totalitarian ambitions, his crimes and corruption, his general untrustworthiness—the central themes of the campaign has these ancillary benefits, because they are visceral. They unite Democrats, and enliven Biden himself. Policy and economics aren’t similarly unifying or morally black and white, and stripped of the emotional valence of insurrection and dictatorship, they evoke a softer register.

Have you tried running? It’s exhilarating. Really, I mean it. Running changed my life.

Before running, I’d order pasta without telling everyone I was carbo-loading. But now, I make sure everyone understands that even my food consumption is in service of my new favorite activity. Carbonara just tastes better when you’re lecturing about which glycogen levels best fuel a daily run.

And since getting into running, I’ve bought some truly special specialty gear. I have a full dresser devoted solely to moisture-wicking T-shirts, moisture-wicking leggings, and moisture-wicking socks. Any moisture that tries to come close to me will instantly be wicked. Check out these shoes. They cost two hundred dollars, and the salesperson told me I’ll get shin splints if I don’t replace them every three months. I also bought a special ointment to rub on my nipples.

It’s been so fulfilling to devote myself to becoming good at exercise. The only person I’m trying to beat is me, you know? You don’t know? Don’t worry. I’ll repeat it every opportunity I get so you can never forget it.