27 Notes On Growing Old(er)

1.) Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.

2.) Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity - while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.

3.) The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.

4.) One of the weirdest things about the midlife ageing process, as those of you who have passed 40 will know, is that it is discontinuous. It doesn’t happen at a gradual and consistent rate, allowing you time to adjust. After lulling you into a false sense of security, it rushes forward, catching you unawares. It’s like finding yourself dropped into a different world. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

5.) The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

6.) I think people who had a lot of success early in their careers (not an affliction from which I suffered) feel this more acutely than most. When you’re always the youngest guy in the room, it’s natural to build a whole identity around your precocity. Then suddenly - and it is sudden - you’re not the youngest anymore. You’re one of those anonymous older guys. So now who the hell even are you?

7.) In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

8.) The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way - that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.

9.) One reason that the experience of growing old can feel jagged and abrupt is that there is a disconnect between how old we feel and how old we are. You often hear people say “inside I still feel young”. It’s tempting to dismiss that as meaningless happy talk but actually it’s often true, and it’s one of the strangest things about growing older. Neuroscientists use the term “proprioception” to describe a person’s intuitive sense of their own body in space - the position of their arms, the movement of their legs. If it deteriorates, you can’t control your actions without conscious effort. I think there’s a kind of proprioception for age, which for some mysterious evolutionary reason gets switched off around age 40. When you’re 18, you feel 18, when you’re 35 you feel 35, and when you’re 53 you feel…35. You’re constantly having to arbitrate between your felt age and your real age, reminding yourself that you’re not actually that person anymore, making a special effort to act appropriately (maybe you shouldn’t actually go skiing, or drink six pints, certainly not both). If you’re a young person, and you’re talking to an older person, it’s as well to remember that they may well believe, at some level, that they’re the same age as you. Many such conversations are asymmetrical: the young person always aware of the age gap, the older person not so much. [ed. this is kind of interesting]

10.) There hasn’t been enough scientific investigation of ‘felt age’ but there is some. This study finds that people over the age of 70 have, on average, a 13 year gap between their felt age and their real age. So a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

11.) Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though your your knees sound like they’re unlocking a safe when you bend down, and you can’t straighten up without an “oof”, you can at least revel in the depth of your insights into the human condition. Well, yes and no. It is true that we accumulate knowledge (and if we try really hard, more of it than we forget). It’s true that we get a feel for the repeated patterns that constitute so much of human experience, and a clearer sight of the possible mistakes arrayed before us at any point in time (whether or not we make them anyway being another question). But there are countering forces too. The world changes faster than we’re ready for, which borks our pattern-detecting software. We’re endlessly self-deluding; we smooth the random accidents of life into stories that put us in control of our own destiny (this is what The Road Not Taken is really about). We’re also lazier, more set in our ways, more dogmatic, less prone to question our assumptions. If we’re not careful, our ‘wisdom’ makes us stupid. Most cognitive decline is self-inflicted.

12.) In a quasi-scientific study of “wisdom at the end of life”, researchers interviewed people who knew they were dying, mostly old people. These interviews elicited such crystalline insights as, “I think you would have more wisdom if you have empathy and compassion.” Right. “Wisdom means seeing life on life’s terms.” Deep.

13.) People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies - I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on: “The human condition is that we want it all, and we're not willing to make trades…‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path - the path they could have taken - without considering the cost of that path. So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.’ It's like, well yeah, but you didn't, because you actually chose the path that you're on, and you weren't willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.”

14.) Age is just a number, so they say, but numbers are pretty important. This one gives you a rough idea of where you are on the journey between birth and death. You might want to make a note of it is all I’m saying.

15.) Should you act your age? Yes if it means making elegant and creative adaptations to it. No, if it means performing it: striving too hard to convey authority, or worse, behaving like somebody who has given up on life. (...)

16.) There’s an interview with Mick Jagger from when he was 58, in which he’s way more patient than he might have been, while a Dutch interviewer suggests he’s too old to be a rock singer. Jagger is 81 now and still selling out stadiums. Jagger, McCartney and others from their generation have endured decades of being sneered at for not “acting their age”. Few people do that anymore. By stubbornly persisting, they’ve changed our ideas of what that phrase means.

17.) Jagger and McCartney hardly ever engage in age-based self-deprecation. They tend not to make those slightly nervous “I’m just an old geezer” jokes, of the kind that the rest of us start making from the moment we pass 30. I think that might have something to do with the almost ridiculously good time they’re having in their eighties. They play the double game to perfection: simultaneously aware of age and oblivious to it.

18.) There is comedy to savour in it, too, albeit comedy with that British sitcom feeling of being trapped in a losing game, laughter the consolation prize.

19.) What a strange thing to happen to a little boy or girl! Rembrandt’s late self-portraits capture so much about how it feels. That look on his face: pissed-off, amused, baffled, defiant. Here’s my face. Not pretty is it? But it’s the only one I’ve got.

by Ian  Leslie, Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Rembrandt, various stages of life. The Collector.

[ed. Some good points but also 1.) feeling like anyone giving aging advice who's younger than you probably hasn't experienced the whole story yet (up to and including dying); 2.) living every day knowing a bomb could go off at any time, and likely will...eventually; 3.) dealing with the accumulated loss of loved ones and the shared histories that make up life - who we are, what it all meant, and inexorably drifting further out, away from everything that used to define us.] 

‘Quishing’ Scams Dupe Millions

QR codes were once a quirky novelty that prompted a fun scan with the phone. Early on, you might have seen a QR code on a museum exhibit and scanned it to learn more about the eating habits of the woolly mammoth or military strategies of Genghis Khan. During the pandemic, QR codes became the default restaurant menu. However, as QR codes became a mainstay in more urgent aspects of American life, from boarding passes to parking payments, hackers have exploited their ubiquity.

“As with many technological advances that start with good intentions, QR codes have increasingly become targets for malicious use. Because they are everywhere — from gas pumps and yard signs to television commercials — they’re simultaneously useful and dangerous,” said Dustin Brewer, senior director of proactive cybersecurity services at BlueVoyant.

Brewer says that attackers exploit these seemingly harmless symbols to trick people into visiting malicious websites or unknowingly share private information, a scam that has become known as “quishing.”

The increasing prevalence of QR code scams prompted a warning from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year about unwanted or unexpected packages showing up with a QR code that when scanned “could take you to a phishing website that steals your personal information, like credit card numbers or usernames and passwords. It could also download malware onto your phone and give hackers access to your device.”

State and local advisories this summer have reached across the U.S., with the New York Department of Transportation and Hawaii Electric warning customers about avoiding QR code scams.

The appeal to cybercriminals lies in the relative ease with which the scam operates: slap a fake QR code sticker on a parking meter or a utility bill payment warning and rely on urgency to do the rest.

“The crooks are relying on you being in a hurry and you needing to do something,” said Gaurav Sharma, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

On the rise as traditional phishing fails

Sharma expects QR scams to increase as the use of QR codes spreads. Another reason QR codes have increased in popularity with scammers is that more safeguards have been put into place to tamp down on traditional email phishing campaigns. A study this year from cybersecurity platform KeepNet Labs found that 26 percent of all malicious links are now sent via QR code. According to cybersecurity company, NordVPN, 73% of Americans scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites.

“The cat and mouse game of security will continue and that people will figure out solutions and the crooks will either figure out a way around or look at other places where the grass is greener,” Sharma said.

Sharma is working to develop a “smart” QR code called a SDMQR (Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR) that has built-in security to prevent scams. But first, he needs buy-in from Google and Microsoft, the companies that build the cameras and control the camera infrastructure. Companies putting their logos into QR codes isn’t a fix because it can cause a false sense of security, and that criminals can usually simply copy the logos, he said.

Some Americans are wary of the increasing reliance on QR codes. [ed. Me!]

“I’m in my 60s and don’t like using QR codes,” said Denise Joyal of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I definitely worry about security issues. I really don’t like it when one is forced to use a QR code to participate in a promotion with no other way to connect. I don’t use them for entertainment-type information.”

Institutions are also trying to fortify their QR codes against intrusion.

Natalie Piggush, spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which welcomes over one million visitors a year, said their IT staff began upgrading their QR codes a couple of years ago to protect against what has become an increasingly significant threat.

“At the museum, we use stylized QR codes with our logo and colors as opposed to the standard monochrome codes. We also detail what users can expect to see when scanning one of our QR codes, and we regularly inspect our existing QR codes for tampering or for out-of-place codes,” Piggush said.

Museums are usually less vulnerable than places like train stations or parking lots because scammers are looking to collect cash from people expecting to pay for something. A patron at a museum is less likely to expect to pay, although Sharma said even in those settings, fake QR codes can be deployed to install malware on someone’s phone. (...)

Low investment, high return hacking tactic

A QR code is more dangerous than a traditional phishing email because users typically can’t read or verify the encoded web address. Even though QR codes normally include human-readable text, attackers can modify this text to deceive users into trusting the link and the website it directs to. The best defense against them is to not scan unwanted or unexpected QR codes and look for ones that display the URL address when you scan it.

Brewer says cybercriminals have also been leveraging QR codes to infiltrate critical networks.

“There are also credible reports that nation-state intelligence agencies have used QR codes to compromise messaging accounts of military personnel, sometimes using software like Signal that is also open to consumers,” Brewer said. Nation-state attackers have even used QR codes to distribute remote access trojans (RATs) — a type of malware designed to operate without a device owner’s consent or knowledge — enabling hackers to gain full access to targeted devices and networks.

Still, one of the most dangerous aspects of QR codes is how they are part of the fabric of everyday life, a cyberthreat hiding in plain sight.

“What’s especially concerning is that legitimate flyers, posters, billboards, or official documents can be easily compromised. Attackers can simply print their own QR code and paste it physically or digitally over a genuine one, making it nearly impossible for the average user to detect the deception,” Brewer said.

by Kevin Williams, CNBC |  Read more:
Image: Fongfong2 | Istock | Getty Images
[ed. Not surprised at all. I've avoided using them from the start.]

Yoann Bourgeois: Stair Dance

Yoann Bourgeois: ‘I want to return to the spirit of childhood' (The Guardian)

Image: YouTube

[ed. Don't miss this one - delightful dance art.]

Ichiro Suzuki Inducted into National Baseball Hall of Fame

 

[ed. Couldn't happen to a classier guy. Never heard him speak a word of English before except through an interpreter. Funny, too.]

Why Jolly Ranchers Are Banned in the UK but Not the US

On June 11, the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) issued an alert declaring several candies manufactured by The Hershey Company “unsafe to eat.” Four products from the flagship Jolly Rancher brand—Hard Candy, “Misfits” Gummies, Hard Candy Fruity 2 in 1, and Berry Gummies—contain mineral oil hydrocarbons, banned from food in the UK.

The offending substances are mineral oil aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH) and mineral oil saturated hydrocarbons (MOSH). Both are derived from crude oil and are often used in confectionery to reduce stickiness and enhance the candy’s shine. “Consuming mineral oil regularly and over time could pose a risk to your health,” says Tina Potter, head of incidents at the FSA. “If you’ve eaten them, there is no need for concern, but don’t eat any more.”

Nevertheless, the FSA has branded the consumption of these sweets a “toxicological concern.” MOSH have been found to accumulate in the tissue of certain species of lab rat, causing adverse effects in the liver. But MOAH are more concerning—the UK’s FSA, alongside the European Union, considers some of these compounds to be genotoxic carcinogens—substances that can cause cancer by altering cells’ genetic material. (...)

Enforcement will likely take time. But in the US, MOAH remain permitted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “The key takeaway from all of this is [that] mineral oil is allowed and deemed safe for use in food in the US,” says Todd Scott, senior manager of communications at The Hershey Company. “Mineral oil is not an ingredient in the recipe. We use it as a processing aid to keep the candy from sticking to the mold.”

MOAH are just one of a number of chemical compounds banned by the UK and EU that are deemed safe for Americans. Much of the discrepancy lies in the FDA’s “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) loophole. In the US, any new food additive is subject to premarket review and approval by the FDA—unless the substance is generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of its intended use.

These assessments, however, are often completed in private labs and sometimes even by the manufacturer of the chemicals themselves—and manufacturers aren’t required by law to submit their GRAS determination or supporting data to the FDA. The assessments don’t require third-party experts, either. In a 2023 study of 403 GRAS notices filed by the FDA between 2015 and 2020, an average of 30 percent relied on the opinion of a manufacturer’s in-house employee.

Adopted in 1958, the GRAS exemption was intended to cover the use of commonplace ingredients, explains Jensen Jose, regulatory counsel for the nonprofit watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest, based in Washington, DC. “It was so you wouldn’t require a new piece of legislation every time you added salt to a sandwich.”

However, as the food industry’s appetite for additives grew over the following decades, the GRAS rule came to cover a widening array of ingredients—with the manufacturers of these additives left effectively to govern themselves. “The hope is that they conduct scientific studies of their own,” says Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health lawyer and associate professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. “But legally speaking, no one’s checking.” In theory, Pomeranz says, “a company can add a new ingredient and not even list its chemical compound on the packet.”

The result is that a host of additives, recognized as safe under FDA regulations, are banned by other governments over safety fears. “Compounds are added to food for shelf life, aesthetics, and convenience,” says Lindsay Malone, a registered dietitian nutritionist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition at the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. “Even down to how easily food comes out of the plastic container.”

Compounds that carry health risks line the shelves of US grocery stores, consumed by Americans every day. Take butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), for example, a preservative that has been linked to hormone disruption. It’s often found in cereals, dried snacks, and packaged cake mixes. Meanwhile a packet of chewing gum, potato chips, or processed meat may include butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), a probable carcinogen. Both are exempt from FDA regulations through the GRAS loophole.

In isolation, compounds like BHT, BHA, and MOAH aren’t necessarily dangerous. Public health advocates are more concerned about their cumulative effect—a lifetime of eating common, addictive, harmful compounds. 

by Alex Christian, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Washington Post/Getty

[ed. Clear as mud. I like JRs, and the stated risks seem fairly low. It's almost impossible to find hard candies anymore (check out your local shelves). Everything's soft, gummy, chewy, or sour. Ack.]

Jane Kenyon: "The Pond at Dusk"

To be read at the author's funeral

“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.

The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon 

A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food. 

The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms. 

But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.

Its 12 lines reject false comfort and offer something more useful in its place: a measure of clarity about the human situation.

For two of its three stanzas, this reads like a nature poem. And like most nature poems, it understands the natural world both as a series of phenomena and as a storehouse of symbols.

Insects, birds and trees just are what they are. But people can’t seem to look at anything in nature without trying to read it. Which is, inevitably, to misread, to write our own thoughts onto the universe’s inscrutable page.

Jane Kenyon, contemplating a pond in the gloaming, catches tremors of worry in what she sees.

She turns errors of perception into a kind of conceptual mischief, a charming game in which unease plays tag with reassurance. You can call the ripple on the water a “wound,” which turns its disappearance into healing.

The fly that caused that brief disturbance buzzes off to become prey for the swallows, but any potential violence in that image is dissolved as the insect is reclassified as food. We arrange the world as we translate it into language.

Sometimes we realize our mistakes. Kenyon’s second stanza emphasizes the fallibility of human perspective, and makes gentle comedy of our habit of inventing causes for alarm.

Is that a cloud of poison gas hovering over the orchard? Exhaust from an alien spaceship?

Did the barn catch fire?

It’s only the trees. Everything is fine.

And then it isn’t. As soon as we think the premonition of doom has been dispelled, the hammer drops. Sometimes — the worst times, as often as not — things are exactly as they seem to be. Lulled by the fading light over the water, we awaken to find ourselves at a funeral.

What happened? Whose funeral? The final stanza is blunt — spelling matters out plainly rather than playing with ambiguous images — but also enigmatic.

And death, the conclusion to every story, isn’t without its comic aspect, the slapstick of the pallbearers grappling with their burden. The brusque last line might be taken as a punchline. (...)

This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel. (...)

In “The Pond at Dusk” she sees a lot, and conveys it in very few words.

Just 73 of them, arranged into four sentences of increasing complexity.

This is free verse, which means that the music happens not through meter or rhyme but in the line breaks.

Those breaks are also subtle cliff-hangers. The eye, looking for continuity, finds white space. The voice pauses, creating a breath’s worth of suspense. What are the swallows dropping toward?

What is it that looks like smoke? Like disaster?

There is nothing mysterious in this poem. A bug skims the water. A flock of swallows scatters. Trees are in leaf and in blossom. Someone has died. And yet the poem itself swells with mystery, an intimation of deep waters running under the placid surface.

by A.O. Scott, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jane Kenyon in 1992. William Abranowicz/Art + Commerce

[ed. Wish I understood and could appreciate poetry more... another dimension of human experience, art, and expression mysterious to me.]

Bob Dylan & Co.

[ed. Nice to see everyone in their prime again after many great hits and performances.]

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Elon’s Edsel

Tesla Cybertruck Is The Auto Industry’s Biggest Flop In Decades

The list of famous auto industry flops is long and storied, topped by stinkers like Ford’s Edsel and exploding Pinto and General Motors’s unsightly Pontiac Aztek crossover SUV. Even John Delorean’s sleek, stainless steel DMC-12, iconic from its role in the “Back To The Future” films, was a sales dud that drove the company to bankruptcy.

Elon Musk’s pet project, the dumpster-driving Tesla Cybertruck, now tops that list.

After a little over a year on the market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality–with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off–and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics.

“It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”

Judged solely on sales, Musk’s Cybertruck is actually doing a lot worse than Edsel, a name that’s become synonymous with a disastrous product misfire. Ford hoped to sell 200,000 Edsels a year when it hit the market in 1958, but managed just 63,000. Sales plunged in 1959 and the brand was dumped in 1960. Musk predicted that Cybertruck might see 250,000 annual sales. Tesla sold just under 40,000 in 2024, its first full year. There’s no sign that volume is rising this year, with sales trending lower in January and February, according to Cox Automotive.

And Tesla’s overall sales are plummeting this year, with deliveries tumbling 13% in the first quarter to 337,000 units, well below consensus expectations of 408,000. The company did not break out Cybertruck sales, which is lumped in with the Model S and Model X, its priciest segment. But it’s clear Cybertruck sales were hurt this quarter by the need to make recall-related fixes, Ben Kallo, an equity analyst for Baird, said in a research note. Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The quarterly slowdown underscores the fact that when it comes to the Cybertruck, results are nowhere near the billionaire entrepreneur’s carnival barker claims.

“Demand is off the charts,” he crowed during a results call in November 2023, just before the first units started shipping to customers. “We have over 1 million people who have reserved the car.”

In anticipation of high sales, Tesla even modified its Austin Gigafactory so it could produce up to 250,000 Cybertrucks a year, capacity investments that aren’t likely to be recouped.

“They didn't just say they wanted to sell a lot. They capacitized to sell a lot,” said industry researcher Glenn Mercer, who leads Cleveland-based advisory firm GM Automotive. But the assumption of massive demand has proven foolhardy. And it failed to account for self-inflicted wounds that further stymied sales. Turns out the elephantine Cybertruck is either too large or non-compliant with some countries’ pedestrian safety rules, so there’s little opportunity to boost sales with exports.

“They haven’t sold a lot and it’s unlikely in this case that overseas markets can save them, even China that’s been huge for Tesla cars,” Mercer said. “It’s really just for this market.”

More than a decade before Cybertruck went into production, Musk hinted that Tesla would eventually do some kind of electric pickup. When he unveiled his design to the world for the first time, Musk was clear that he did not want a conventional aesthetic or even something that played with pickup looks a bit but was still familiar, the approach Rivian took with its R1T pickup.

“Pickup trucks have been the same for 100 years,” and Cybertruck “doesn’t look like anything else,” said Musk, who earlier that month had proudly told an audience at a conference for space entrepreneurs, “I do zero market research whatsoever.”

That would be an apt tagline for Musk’s preposterous pickup. “The spectacular failure of Cybertruck was a failure of empathy,” said CARLAB’s Noble, whose company helps carmakers develop products based on consumer research. “Everything from the bed configuration to the cab configuration to its performance and all sorts of pickup truck duty-cycle issues, it’s just not empathetic to a pickup truck buyer.”

Cybertruck’s distinctive look resulted from two key forces, said a person familiar with the development process, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. One was Musk’s passion for sci-fi designs. The other was an early decision to create a vehicle that didn’t need to be painted.

If Tesla opted not to paint the trucks, it wouldn’t need to install a new $200 million paintshop, a big potential cost savings. And it wouldn’t have to worry about EPA scrutiny from the harmful emissions and runoff those facilities often produce.

Ultimately, Musk opted for a stainless steel exterior, the same choice Delorean made for his ill-fated sports car four decades earlier. But because Musk isn’t a production engineer, he may not have fully appreciated the challenges it presents versus aluminum or composite materials, the person said. Aside from the fact that stainless steel shows handprints–a common gripe about kitchen appliances–it’s hard to bend and likes to snap back to its original shape, one of the reasons there have been problems with Cybertruck body panels.

“This is where I think they misconstrued the tradeoff,” Mercer said. “They drooled over not spending $200 million on a paint shop, but probably spent that much trying to get the stainless steel to work.” 

by Alan Ohnsman, Forbes | Read more:

Image: Fernando Capeto for Forbes; Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Ohara Koson, Sandpipers on the Beach, 1930s-40s
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Friends in Low Places

I've come to the Buda Wiener Dog Races because of Zeus. Not the Greek god—my dog. A tricolor Cavalier King Charles spaniel with the attitude of a runaway aristocrat and the survival instincts of a moth in traffic, Zeus has never in his life completed a walk around the block without incident, much less a race. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he managed to get himself disqualified from today’s proceedings for reasons I’ll get into later. But that doesn’t stop me. I leave him behind in Austin and make my pilgrimage to a festival devoted entirely to short-legged misfits with overdeveloped egos.

When the starting gates open it’s like each wiener dog in this preliminary heat of six racers is auditioning for a different dog food commercial. Not one dachshund stays in their grassy lane or plays by the script. They range from dazed, to confused, to determined. All are adorable.

The stout, short-haired fellow in the pink collar comes out as crookedly as a baby tooth and drops off the back of the pack. He’s the puppy of the bunch. Ahead of him, a golden-haired lowrider hustles so hard his ears fly behind him. The ears of the wiener dog in the yellow collar next to him swing straight up like devil horns with each stride. He’s got the determined grimace of a champion, but he’s making about as much forward progress as a rocking horse.

Several sausage links ahead of the nearest competitor, a long-haired specimen in a blue collar bounds on the diagonal toward her owner at the finish line, tail erect as a sail, flaunting her rich white coat and chestnut markings to the admirers in the bleachers.

“This one has that mama-has-a-treat-at-home energy,” a spectator beside me says. She thumbs one of her wiener dog earrings. “She doesn’t realize she’s in Buda. She thinks she’s at Westminster.”

The Buda Wiener Dog Races, now in their 28th year, are like comic-con for the tubular canines with stubby legs and Napoleonic personalities. For one April weekend, a mass of people gathers for a pet parade, a costume contest, live music, a barbecue cookoff, and the sprint to be crowned the fastest wiener dog.

The race I’ve just witnessed is hardly a classic photo finish. Then again, it’s always a Hollywood ending here in Buda. Regardless of what place a dog comes in, their owners greet them with toys and treats. They sweep their wieners up in their arms for kisses and document every aw shucks moment with their phones. You’d think these brave dachshunds traveled not 70 feet of browning park grass but hundreds of miles, over hill and dale, to be reunited with their owners.

It makes me miss Zeus, even though he’s just at home.

I’ve never gotten used to how little it takes for Texans to have a good time. I’m not talking starry skies and endless horizons, cattle drives and campfires, but something closer to home. I mean the perpetual summer camp feeling of living in Central Texas—the gritty, grimy, sweaty fun that comes when, say, a bunch of people in a small town 20 miles south of the capital city decide to turn a public park into a wiener dog racetrack. They grill some burgers and spray white paint to mark the finish line, and 12,000 people show up.

I’ve coined a term for this cultural phenomenon: a Texas Attraction.

A Texas Attraction is chaotic, crowded, hot, and uniquely regional, largely without the corporate gloss of Disney or its commercial ilk. (...)

A Texas Attraction is going to Austin City Limits Music Festival last October in 100-degree heat, putting my shirt over my nose and mouth to keep out the dust, and rushing the stage through tiny tornadoes of kicked-up dirt and dead grass when 91-year-old Willie Nelson made a surprise appearance to sing a cowboy duet with country crooner Orville Peck.

A Texas Attraction is emerging from McKinney Falls covered in moss, like a swamp monster. It’s the spit shields above the roller-coaster lines at Six Flags Fiesta Texas. It’s eating it on the rocks of Hippie Hollow. The hot tub in my condo complex in Bouldin Creek, south of downtown, briefly became a Texas Attraction when, in the swelter of last summer, the cover broke and the water temperature soared to 130 degrees.

For as much as I can appreciate a Texas Attraction, I never let my dog Zeus tag along. The few times I’ve tried to include him in an outing, we’ve ended up at the pet ER. When Zeus goes anywhere, he is the Texas Attraction.

Zeus is a dog of regal good looks and impeccable breeding who came my way because of a deformity that knocked him out of dog show contention: an underbite. Sometimes it looks like he’s rakishly chewing his lip. That’s the extent of it. (...)

About three-dozen dachshunds raced in Buda’s inaugural competition in 1997 under the theme “The Amazing Wiener Dog.” The race’s popularity, and the playfulness of its theme, grew from there. It’s fair to say galloping wiener dogs are now a big deal in this part of the world. There’s a reason Buda calls itself the Wiener Dog Capital of Texas. (...)

A cheer erupts from the stands in the distance. The first races have started. I make my way past a high school mariachi band and head to the racetrack.

The apparel that people and their pets wear rivals a Renaissance fair. A guy with a classic brown wiener dog in his arms sports a hat of comparable size, shape, and color. He’s like a Cheesehead but for wiener dogs. It’s Etsy gone wild: socks, belts, bracelets. One shirt features a Sasquatch walking a wiener dog. “Y’all are slipping,” the announcer tells a pair of owners at the finish line. “Y’all don’t have hats and shirts. I expect wiener shirts on both of you tomorrow.”

Folks in the stands let out an approving roar. Indications of this being a Texas Attraction are not hard to find. A beefy biker dude in the bleachers mops at the sweat on his head with a white bandanna. At his feet: a dachshund in a sunflower-patterned harness. A tattooed guy who looks like he could take down Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House is wearing a soft cotton T-shirt that announces to the world he’s a “Dachshund Dad.” Some of the wiener dogs racing today are named Brisket, Pickles, and, cleverest of all, Boudin, like the Cajun sausage. “I don’t know why y’all come up with some of these names,” the announcer says. “I don’t know why you can’t just call them D-O-G.”

I can’t imagine Zeus with any other name. Nothing else could capture those eyes of thunder or the part of his bangs, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic. And forget about the spotted roof of his mouth when he yawns. He may not be the god of gods but he’s the dog of dogs. What’s in a dog’s name? His dad’s name. Destiny.

Near the gate where racers exit the track, I meet a red piebald miniature dachshund named Poppy. Her mom, Audrey Garcia, is wearing a teal Dog Mama hat covered in wiener dog pins, a silver wiener dog necklace, gold wiener dog earrings, and a shirt that says “Fueled by Jesus & Wiener Dogs.”

Poppy raced for the first time last year, when she was just 6 months old, and got second in her heat. After a year of training, she came in second again this year. “She likes to go after the No. 1 dog,” Garcia says, chuckling. “I’m like, can you focus on mommy standing at the finish line?” Garcia is originally from San Marcos but recently moved to Blanco, about an hour west of Buda. She came to the races today to meet up with her best friend, also a wiener dog owner. “We plan on making it a little tradition,” Garcia says.

It’s probably too much to say that in quirky Texan traditions like the Buda Wiener Dog Races, we find a reflection of our state’s character—unvarnished, affectionate, a little raunchy. And in our relationships with flawed but beloved dogs, we see our own imperfections embraced and celebrated. But why not? “Fueled by Zeus & Wiener Dogs.”

Walking around a tent with posters from previous wiener dog races, seeing the humble dachshund photoshopped onto Tom Cruise’s body in Top Gun or beautifully rendered as young Simba against the savanna sunset in “The Wiener King,” it occurs to me that some textbook projection is at play. In Texas, a state where everything from the trucks we drive to the cups we drink from has to be bigger, there’s something comforting about going small. In this one realm, on this one weekend, our heroes don’t need to be giants. They can be fallible, charming—a little more like the humans who love them. Wiener dogs, you are us.

by Gregg Marshall, Texas Highways |  Read more:

Image: markk

[ed. We have a Weiner Dog Festival here, too. I don't know who started first and don't have the energy or interest to look it up (a true wiener dog attitude if there ever was one). Suffice to say, they both sound pretty similar. I grew up with dachshunds, my first being "Jingle" a Christmas surprise (of course). My mom tried to breed her once, but the vet wasn't much into due diligence and instead of a line of first class AKC puppies, we got eight (nine, but one died at childbirth) little wiggling sausages of mysterious pedigree who'd go tearing everywhere around the house, chasing and tumbling after each other, and yelping out little mini-barks. Good times. In the end, despite lacking purebred qualities, they all went to good homes. Except for Sam, the last of the bunch. Like the author's dog with the underbite, Sam had an overbite, which meant that half the time he looked like he was sticking his tongue out at you. But he was such a sweet little guy, curious and easy going (always acting brave behind his mom whenever trouble appeared), kind of how I imagine Ringo to be (dogwise). Since then I've had other wieners who were just as sweet and devoted. A good breed for sure, one of the best. But, back to the festival. Glad to hear it! We can't have too many. Here are some pics I took from our town's a few years back: Wiener-palooza!]

Matt Groening
via:

Anatomy of a Wolf Pack

via:

Lea Ignatius, Bird of Twilight, 1983

via:

L'affaire Epstein Update: July 23, 2025

[ed. Crisis management 101: deflecting attention/responsibility.]

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that's not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing.” Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats. (...)

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes from an American |  Read more:

[ed. Best to lay low, go golfing in Scotland (on the taxpayers dime), and let the lawyers do their job with Maxwell. See also: July 25, 2025; and, Before the Flood (Epsilon Theory):]

***

I am aware that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was even less interested, if that’s imaginable, in identifying the rapists of more than a thousand young women, many of them children. Why? Because the Biden administration was pathetic and weak. That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this:

• Because there are incredibly wealthy and/or influential men — Dem-coded, GOP-coded, nonpartisan-coded and everything in between-coded, men like Leon Black, Jes Staley, Glenn Dubin, Les Wexner, Bill Gates, and Larry Summers — who we know from publicly available documents and legal filings regularly ‘socialized’ privately with Epstein after his 2009 conviction and engaged in financial transactions with Epstein.
• Because there are so many more load-bearing names of wealth and power found throughout the publicly available Epstein record, including two American Presidents, an Israeli Prime Minister, and the brother of the King of England, and I suspect there are so many more load-bearing names in the sealed FBI records.
• Because I strongly doubt that any of the circumstantial evidence and grainy videos in the FBI records would hold up in a criminal proceeding against any of these incredibly wealthy and/or influential men, especially now that the only source of direct testimony was found dead in his jail cell while in Federal custody.
• Because I am certain that because of the aforementioned Presidents and Prime Minister, both US and Israeli spy agencies were at a minimum aware and in my opinion more likely up to their eyeballs in this covert intelligence operation systematic rape of children, and while circumstantial evidence and a grainy video may not work for a criminal trial, it is absolutely enough to turn a billionaire or a politician into an asset.

Put this together and any administration would want to run away from the Epstein case as fast as they can, because its full release would result in (probably) zero criminal convictions but (almost certainly) the reputational collapse of load-bearing names of wealth and power in multiple nations and (almost certainly) extremely damaging revelations about our government and allied governments. So that’s what Biden did. He ran away from this as fast and as far as he could. To his eternal shame.

The difference for Trump is that he can’t run away from it. He made Epstein a core part of the meaning of his candidacy and his Presidency in a way that was never part of the meaning of Biden’s candidacy and Presidency. Also, of course, the difference for Trump is that one of those load-bearing names of wealth and power that runs throughout the public Epstein record is his own.

There’s only one way for Trump to play this out from here, and it’s exactly what he’s doing: masks off!

All you Trump lieutenants and factotums and mouthpieces and hangers-on, time to toe the line and shut up about Epstein. You don’t like it? Tough. Case closed and we’re moving on. Bigger fish to fry. The ‘base’ is confused and angry? Who cares. Eff ’em.

Tom Guald
via: New Yorker

What Was Scattered Was Not Destroyed

Mega churches have replaced the Good News with a mission statement.

Here in Rockford, Illinois, a Rust Belt city well-acquainted with extraction and abandonment, that line isn’t satire. It’s an observation. You can’t drive across the east side without passing half a dozen colossal church buildings, their parking lots repaved more often than their theology. Inside, you’ll find stage lighting, fog machines, and sermons that sound suspiciously like quarterly business updates. If you drive west, over the Rock River, you’ll pass a dozen smaller sanctuaries. These are the old brick churches with crooked signage and overgrown hedges. The lights are off. The pews gather dust.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve sat with the shepherds of these flocks, who confess, quietly and often tearfully, that the Church is dying. Not changing. Dying. Some say it with a kind of weary relief, as if finally naming aloud what they’ve known for years, but didn’t have permission to speak. Others say it with resignation, their voices thin from holding up too much for too long. They speak of empty pews and aging congregations, of buildings they can no longer afford to heat, and the pressure to stay upbeat and innovate. Many of them have baptized, married, and buried three generations of the same families. What they grieve is not the loss of status or size, but the slow unraveling of something sacred, something that once held people together, and now struggles to hold at all. None of them say it flippantly because they’ve stayed, and love the flock, even as the pasture thins.

It reminds me of what’s happened to the land itself. This region was once a checkerboard of crop rotations and small farms that provided local goods and sustained families. Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.

The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.

As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?

I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.

I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.

The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.

Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.

This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.

But it’s real.

The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot. (...)

In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. (...)

In Rockford, that difference shows up in the space between pride and grief. This is a city that once made things, machine parts, fasteners, hard goods with weight and permanence. When that vanished, we didn’t evolve. We mourned, slowly and without permission. The prosperity gospel doesn’t play well here, except in places that pretend the grief never happened. The landscape remembers. It’s a patchwork of rusted factories, cracked sidewalks, and churches that were built to last but now echo with silence. Faith here has to grow low to the ground. It doesn’t rise like glass towers. It creeps through the broken concrete and clings to whatever light is left. It is not triumphant. It is tenacious.

In therapy, I often feel caught between the two ladders. Clients want to “fix” their lives. They’re not asking how to self-actualize. They’re trying to understand why the scaffolding they built their life on no longer holds. They come in chasing Maslow, but often find Rohr: the painful gift of being broken open. Of discovering that transformation isn’t about climbing higher, but surrendering to what they can no longer control. The Church used to know something about that. Before it became obsessed with branding and metrics and appearing successful, it offered something harder and holier. It didn’t hand out blueprints. It offered bread, wine, and silence. Now it offers sermon series with titles like “Level Up.” (...)

And now, beloved, let us speak plainly of what’s become of Babel.

The Babel story was never just about language. It was about the illusion of unity: everyone speaking the same tongue, chasing the same goal, convinced that ambition itself was holy. It is easy to hear that same cadence today. In politics, in the media, even in ministry, everyone is talking. No one is listening. Each angle is convinced it is speaking sense while the other just refuses to understand. We have built towers of ideology, platforms of performance, and digital sanctuaries where clarity is promised but rarely delivered. The noise is constant, and underneath it all is something quieter, something heavier. Loneliness. (...)

The Church once served as a counterweight to all this. It was an embodied community, stubbornly local, where you sat beside people you did not entirely like and still called them brother or sister. It held tension instead of amplifying it. Now, many churches have become political performance halls, leaning into culture wars, doubling down on certainty, and selecting congregants more for their alignment than their presence. The container that once held our contradictions has become another venue for tribal identity. (...)

Babel didn’t end with a curse. It ended with dispersion. With people being sent back to their places, their languages, their particular lives. The tower fell, but the story didn’t. It just stopped trying to reach heaven by force. I walk through my community, meditating on this as I pass shuttered buildings, familiar faces, and the quiet persistence of people who keep showing up. So many of them carry disappointment like an old coat they cannot quite throw away. The plant closed. The school consolidated. The church split. And still, they show up.

by Colin Gillette, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: GetArchive

The Bitcoin Coup

How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America’s Financial Collapse. JD Vance and the Tech Oligarchs Who Want to Burn Down the Dollar.

There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.

This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.

To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.

The Philosophical Foundation

Peter Thiel’s own public statements reveal the framework driving this project. Speaking at Libertopia in 2010, he described PayPal’s founding vision as an attempt “to overturn the monetary system of the world.” He continued: “We could never win an election,” but technology could “unilaterally change the world.” In 2021, he declared that “Bitcoin is the most honest market we have in the country. It’s a canary in the coal mine. It tells us that this decrepit regime is about to blow up.”

This represents more than economic analysis—it’s a declaration that existing monetary systems are fundamentally illegitimate and that technological alternatives should replace democratic currency governance. Thiel isn’t merely predicting dollar instability; he’s advocating for conditions that would accelerate it. (...)

The Network of Coordination

The financial relationships between these figures make coordination clear. After their PayPal exit, Sacks, Thiel, and Musk’s wealth became deeply interwoven. Sacks launched Craft Ventures and frequently co-invests alongside Thiel’s Founders Fund, with stakes in companies like Palantir and SpaceX. They didn’t just get rich together—they coordinated their investments in ways that create mutual dependencies and shared interests.

As White House AI & Crypto Czar, Sacks holds a special ethics waiver that allows him to influence digital-asset and tech policy while maintaining investments in companies that benefit from those policies. Despite divesting from crypto assets upon entering government, he likely retains holdings in SpaceX and Palantir—companies building infrastructure that could replace traditional government functions with privately controlled systems.

The audacity of their approach is revealed even in their naming choices. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—wasn’t just an acronym chosen for bureaucratic convenience. It was deliberately named after Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has relentlessly promoted. When a government department takes its name from a digital currency promoted by the man running it, the agenda becomes transparent.

Dogecoin was itself based on a popular internet meme, but by strange irony, the term “Doge” originates from the title of rulers of Venice and Genoa—elected elites who presided over commercial republics for life. Whether intended or not, this historical reference reflects their vision of governance: efficient, corporate-style rule rather than messy democratic processes.

The Scale of Their Vision

What distinguishes this from ordinary corruption is the scope of their ambition. These men aren’t simply seeking to accumulate more wealth within existing systems. If their vision succeeds—if government currencies collapse and Bitcoin becomes dominant—their early cryptocurrency positions would transform them from billionaires into something unprecedented: controllers of the fundamental infrastructure of human exchange.

This represents the complete transformation of the American political economy. When they speak enthusiastically about dollar collapse, they’re not just making investment predictions—they’re describing a world where their cryptocurrency holdings make them the effective central bankers of whatever system emerges from the wreckage.

The temporary chaos of currency collapse becomes acceptable when viewed as the price for establishing permanent control over the monetary system itself. They’re not just betting on America’s financial decline—they’re positioned to profit regardless of the human cost.

JD Vance: The Ideological Convert

JD Vance’s role represents something more dangerous than typical political opportunism. His transformation from Trump critic to cryptocurrency advocate reflects his genuine conversion to neoreactionary ideology under Thiel’s decade-long cultivation.

Vance has publicly praised Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary theorist who advocates replacing democracy with corporate-style governance. Discussing Yarvin’s ideas, Vance has suggested that Trump should “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people....And when the courts stop you...stand before the country, and say...the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This isn’t standard conservative rhetoric about limited government. This is advocacy for the systematic elimination of constitutional constraints on executive power—exactly what would be necessary to implement the kind of monetary policy changes that could destabilize the dollar.

Vance understands what Yarvin calls “neocameralism”—the vision of society run like a corporation rather than a democracy. In this framework, citizenship becomes shareholding, elections become obsolete, and governance becomes a technical matter for qualified executives rather than a democratic process. (...)

The Succession Strategy

As constitutional crises consume the Trump presidency—particularly around the Epstein revelations where promised evidence has failed to materialize—the crypto accelerationists appear to be positioning for the next phase of their plan.

They have invested over a decade in positioning Vance not as an emergency replacement for Trump, but as the natural evolution—someone who shares their fundamental critique of democratic governance but possesses the intellectual framework to implement systematic change.

Where Trump operates through impulse and grievance, Vance would operate through ideology and systematic planning. He arrives not needing to learn how to subvert democratic institutions, but with a fully developed philosophical framework for why such subversion is necessary and justified.

The Constitutional Trap

Evidence suggests that Sacks may have positioned Trump for exactly the kind of constitutional crisis that would necessitate succession. The mechanism appears to be cryptocurrency-related violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

TrumpCoin and World Liberty Financial create potential constitutional violations because they allow foreign entities to provide financial benefits to the president. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the President from receiving any gift, payment, or benefit from foreign governments without explicit Congressional approval. World Liberty Financial’s investor rolls include entities like the UAE, whose purchases could constitute exactly this kind of prohibited foreign benefit.

Cryptocurrency’s structure makes such violations both easier to commit and harder to hide—blockchain creates permanent, traceable records of every transaction. Sacks, with his University of Chicago law degree, would understand these implications perfectly.

While ensuring his own conflicts were addressed through narrow divestitures, Sacks never publicly warned Trump about these constitutional landmines. Instead, he legitimized TrumpCoin on television, describing it as “a baseball card or a stamp” rather than acknowledging its potential regulatory implications. (...)

The Seditious Nature

What we’re witnessing constitutes sedition in its most systematic form. When government officials use their positions to undermine the financial systems they’ve sworn to protect, when they engineer constitutional crises for personal and ideological benefit, when they work to replace democratic governance with privately controlled systems—they’ve crossed the line from legitimate political activity to betrayal of their constitutional obligations.

David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance are actively working to subvert the constitutional order of the United States. Not through dramatic rebellion, but through the patient capture and systematic undermining of the institutions that make democratic self-governance possible.

Their sedition is particularly dangerous because it operates through legal mechanisms and maintains the appearance of legitimate governance while systematically destroying its substance. They’re not overthrowing the government—they’re reprogramming it to serve their interests rather than democratic publics.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Jp Valery on Unsplash

[ed. For a good summary of where we are and how we got here with crypto, see also: From Truth Social to bitcoin empire: Trump’s $2 billion pivot (PI):]

***

On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), a publicly traded company majority-owned by Trump, announced that it had acquired $2 billion in bitcoin. Trump is turning a failing media company into a bitcoin holding company. TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, lost over $185 million on just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024. (...)

Trump’s embrace of crypto provided a sizable fundraising boost. The New York Times reported that Bailey raised $30 million for the Trump campaign from fellow crypto executives. Sacks also hosted a multimillion-dollar fundraiser with San Francisco tech executives. Major crypto investors like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated millions of dollars to various pro-Trump super PACs. In total, the crypto industry accounted for over half of all corporate money in the 2024 election across federal races, raising $245 million. (...)

The financial conflicts in the White House go beyond Trump. Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, is continuing to work as a partner at Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Sacks that has investments in crypto companies.

A memo released by the White House in March states that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested over $200 million in digital-asset related investments. However, the memo also states that Craft Ventures continues to hold “private equity of digital asset-related companies that are highly illiquid and thus not easily divested.” At the time of the memo, Sacks also had a direct interest in a venture capital investing platform “that may presently have some minor digital asset industry holdings or might in the future.”

Normally, government employees are subject to conflict of interest laws. But the White House has issued multiple waivers to allow Sacks to work in the Trump administration while maintaining his investments. The first waiver, released in the March memo, allows Sacks “to participate as a special government employee in certain particular matters regarding regulation and policy related to the digital asset industry, including cryptocurrency.”

The White House memo acknowledges that Sacks’ work in the Trump administration could affect his investments, but argues that his personal financial interest is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of [his] services.”

Tom Gauld

via:

Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

“The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”

This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.

Consider the familiar structure of a scientific paper: Introduction (background and hypothesis), Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. This format implies that the work followed a clean, sequential progression: scientists identified a gap in knowledge, formulated a causal explanation, designed definitive experiments to fill the gap, evaluated compelling results, and most of the time, confirmed their hypothesis.

Real lab work rarely follows such a clear path. Biological research is filled with what Medawar describes lovingly as “messing about”: false starts, starting in the middle, unexpected results, reformulated hypotheses, and intriguing accidental findings. The published paper ignores the mess in favour of the illusion of structure and discipline. It offers an ideal version of what might have happened rather than a confession of what did.

The polish serves a purpose. It makes complex work accessible (at least if you work in the same or a similar field!). It allows researchers to build upon new findings.

But the contrived omissions can also play upon even the most well-regarded scientist’s susceptibility to the seduction of story. As Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (Marseilles, Fr.) recently explained,

“when we are reading a paper, we tend to follow the reasoning and logic of the authors, and if the argumentation is nicely laid out, it is difficult to pause, take a step back, and try to get an overall picture.”

Our minds travel the narrative path laid out for us, making it harder to spot potential flaws in logic or alternative interpretations of the data, and making conclusions feel far more definitive than they often are.

Medawar’s framing is my compass when I do deep dives into major discoveries in translational neuroscience. I approach papers with a dual vision. First, what is actually presented? But second, and often more importantly, what is not shown? How was the work likely done in reality? What alternatives were tried but not reported? What assumptions guided the experimental design? What other interpretations might fit the data if the results are not as convincing or cohesive as argued?

And what are the consequences for scientific progress?

In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.

The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.

However, cracks are showing in this façade. In 2021, the FDA granted accelerated approval to aducanumab (Aduhelm), an anti-amyloid drug developed by Biogen, despite scant evidence that it meaningfully altered the course of cognitive decline. The decision to approve, made over near-unanimous opposition from the agency’s advisory panel, exposed growing tensions between regulatory optimism and scientific rigor. Medicare’s subsequent decision to restrict coverage to clinical trials, and Biogen’s quiet withdrawal of the drug from broader marketing efforts in 2024, made the disconnect impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, a deeper fissure emerged: an investigation by Science unearthed evidence of data fabrication surrounding research on Aβ*56, a purported toxic amyloid-beta oligomer once hailed as a breakthrough target for disease-modifying therapy. Research results that had been seen as a promising pivot in the evolution of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, a new hope for rescuing the theory after repeated clinical failures, now appears to have been largely a sham. Treating Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques may have been a null path from the start.

When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—a landmark 1995 paper by Games et al., featured on the cover of Nature under the headline “A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.” It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.

In what follows, I argue that the seeds of today’s failures were visible from the beginning if one looks carefully. I approach this review not as an Alzheimer’s researcher with a rival theory, but as a molecular neuroscientist interested in how fields sometimes converge around alluring but unstable ideas. Foundational papers deserve special scrutiny because they become the bedrock for decades of research. When that bedrock slips beneath us, it tells a cautionary story: about the power of narrative, the comfort of consensus, and the dangers of devotion without durable evidence. It also reminds us that while science is ultimately self-correcting, correction can be glacial when careers and reputations are staked on fragile ground.

The Rise of the Amyloid Hypothesis

In the early 1990s, a new idea began to dominate Alzheimer’s research: the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

First proposed by Hardy and Higgins in a 1992 Science perspective, the hypothesis suggested a clear sequence of disease-precipitating events: protein processing goes awry in the brain → beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulates → plaques form → plaques trigger a cascade of downstream events, including neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, synaptic loss, neuronal death, resulting in observable cognitive decline.

The hypothesis was compelling for several reasons. First, the discovery of the enzymatic steps by which amyloid precursor protein (APP) is processed into Aβ offered multiple potential intervention points—ideal for pharmaceutical drug development.

Second, the hypothesis was backed by powerful genetic evidence. Mutations in the APP gene on chromosome 21 were associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The case grew stronger with the observation that more than 50% of individuals with Down syndrome, who carry an extra copy of chromosome 21 (and thus extra APP), develop Alzheimer’s-like pathology by age 40.

Thus, like any robust causal theory, the amyloid cascade hypothesis offered explicit, testable predictions. As Hardy and Higgins outlined, if amyloid truly initiates the Alzheimer’s cascade, then genetically engineering mice to produce human amyloid should trigger the full sequence of events: plaques first, then tangles, synapse loss, and neuronal death, then cognitive decline. And the sequentiality matters: amyloid accumulation should precede other pathological features. At the time, this was a thrilling possibility.

Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.

How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse

“Mouse Model Made” was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary Nature solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”

In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.

First Rule of Making a Transgenic Mouse: Don’t Talk About How You Made a Transgenic Mouse

How did Athena pull it off? Hard to say! What's most remarkable about the Games paper is what's not there. Scan through the methods section and you'll find virtually none of the painstaking effort required to build the Alzheimer’s mouse. Back in the ‘90s, creating a transgenic mouse took years of work, countless failed attempts, and extraordinary technical skill. In the Games paper, this effort is compressed into a few sparse sentences describing which gene and promoter (nearby gene instruction code) the research team used to make the mouse. The actual details are relegated to scientific meta-narrative—knowledge that exists only in lab notebooks, daily conversations between scientists, and the muscle memory of researchers who perform these techniques thousands of times.

The thin description wasn’t atypical for a publication from this era. Difficult experimental methods were often encapsulated in the single phrase "steps were carried out according to standard procedures," with citations to entire books on sub-cloning techniques or reference to the venerable Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual (We all have this on our bookshelf, yes?) The idea that there were reliable "standard procedures" that could ensure success was farcical—an understatement that other scientists understand as code for "we spent years getting this to work; good luck figuring it out ;)."

So, as an appreciation of what it takes to make progress on the frontiers of science, here is approximately what’s involved.

Prerequisites: Dexterity, Glassblowing, and Zen Mastery

Do you have what it takes to master transgenic mouse creation? Well, do you have the dexterity of a neurosurgeon? Because you’ll be micro-manipulating fragile embryos with the care of someone defusing a bomb—except the bomb is smaller than a grain of sand, and you need to keep it alive. Have you trained in glass-blowing? Hope so, because you’ll need to handcraft your own micropipettes so you can balance an embryo on the pipette tip. Yes, really.

And most importantly, do you sincerely believe that outcomes are irrelevant, and only the endless, repetitive journey matters? If so, congratulations! You may already be a Zen master, which will come in handy when you’re objectively failing your boss’s expectations every single day for what feels like an eternity. Success, when it finally comes, will be indistinguishable from sheer, dumb luck, but the stochastic randomness won’t stop you from searching frantically through your copious notes to see if you can pinpoint the variable that made it finally work!

Let’s go a little deeper so we can understand why the Games team's achievement was considered so monumental—and why almost everyone viewed the results in the best possible light.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via