As permanent draught takes hold of the American Midwest, it will affect agricultural output there, and the Ukraine war will also affect food production. So, Canada might produce more food, if temperatures rise? Isn’t it natural to assume that what is now grown farther south, in a future of elevated temperatures, might grow well in the north?

Let me tell you a thing that is not often mentioned, which I think contributed to the rise of the American right we see today. In the us, unlike in Europe where freedom was economically tied to the rise of lower classes in their struggle against landowners and aristocracy, the notion of freedom implied a freedom from the norms of the majority. This is the old “frontier myth”. Then the prairie was settled, but that myth was entrenched. Then the internet came and opened up an unlimited and unregulated space for these cults and alternative views, and since the technological dynamics constantly drives everyone away from pain and towards pleasure, that is confirmation of existing beliefs, the “echo chambers” mushroomed. Because of historical baggage, the US was predisposed towards eccentricity, in a way. On top of this comes the fact that Congress has always had a very very low approval rating. It is epitomized by the representatives who read the phone book out loud, or filibuster, from the podium in order to sabotage the passing of legislation. At salaries paid by the taxpayer!! Then there is the annual shutdown ritual over the raising of the debt ceiling, which could have been avoided by switching from absolute numbers to a percentage of GDP. But it is a ritual, like the knocking on the door of the British parliament. So they keep it. But it adds an impression that they do nothing, that everything is jammed and that no representatives from different parties ever talk to each other over coffee, and that “hate” remains even after the cameras are off.

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No, it is not Darwinism, for in his The Dsecent of Man from the 1870s Darwin extended natural selection to include emotions; it is the individuals who are to reproduce that transmit their genes to the next generation. And the process of dating does not proceed by rape. Then there is a debate concerning “group selection”, and whether there is a selective mechanism at that level. Then it shifts a little back and forth, with inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism) making an occasional comeback until the modern synthesis between Darwin and Mendel in the 1930. But these days, horizontal gene transfer and several other mechanisms continue to blur the image a little. And Gould’s old calculations that made directed evolution improbable have also been challenged in computer models, and where they have landed, I do not actually know, since it has been some years since I even thought about this subject. What you are talking about is probably Herbert Spencer, who by some weird coincidence (or perhaps it was intended?), is buried next to his ideological opposite, Karl Marx, in a London cemetery. It is from Spencer that many such things have emerged. His influence upon the robber barons and the shaping of the American right was considerable.

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What was she doing there?

If you live your life waiting for confirmation from others you always be disappointed. However, if you live to annoy others…

Some day, when you grow up, you too will see naked adult women. In the meantime, you can do research online…I recommend pubmed, base and core, as well as anatomical atlas.

That people start open newssites is good, but if it is not commercially run, the issue of the backer’s influence will always be there. I still hope they make it work, but that they make clear these things.