From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.

The idea is not new, only the rhetoric.

That https://character.ai is so enormously popular with people who are under the age of 25 suggests that this is the future. And Meta is certainly looking at https://character.ai with great interest, but also with concern. https://character.ai represents a threat to Meta.

Years ago, when Meta felt that Instagram was a threat, they bought Instagram.

If they don't think they can buy https://character.ai then they need to develop their own version of it.

National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.

About local democracy:

1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.

2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).

3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.

4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).

Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.

Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.

There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.

But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.

There is the separate issue of war crimes. Some commanders in the IDF may not have shown due caution towards civilians. That will eventually be adjudicated in the courts. But that is a separate charge and has nothing to do with genocide.

I remain baffled why some people want to take the various charges that could be made against Israel and conflate all of the charges with the charge of genocide. The charge of genocide has become deeply attractive to a large number of people, even when other charges would be easier to prove and have more evidence to support them. But for some reason "war crime" is not as attractive as "genocide" and so supporters of the people of Gaza have developed an emotional commitment to fighting for the charge which they cannot possibly prove, because events have undermined their narrative.

"In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to outsource work to Brazil or India. Here in New York City, I am seeing an uptick in outsourcing. The work that remains in the USA will likely continue to be office-based because the work that can be done 100% remotely will likely go over seas."

He responded:

"Pee pee poo poo aaaaaaaaaaa peeeeee peeeeee poop poop poop."

I don't know if he was taking drugs or what. I find his persona on Twitter to be baffling.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D2HZXB4/

This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 when the President was a Republican, the majority of all economists are Republican, but somehow this writer blames this on Democrats? The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.

There is some evidence that there are health benefits that are specific to the fasting mode. This has mostly been studied in the context of chemotherapy, where fasting can protect against some of the side-effects of chemotherapy:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5870384/

Most of this has only been studied in animals, not humans, but in animals the results were clear:

"Fasting before chemotherapy (CT) was shown to protect healthy cells from treatment toxicity by reducing the expression of some oncogenes, such as RAS and the AKT signaling pathway [2]. This reduction is mediated by the decrease of circulating insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and glucose. In addition, starvation and calorie restriction activate other oncogenes in cancer cells, induce autophagy, and decrease cellular growth rates while increasing sensitivity to antimitotic drugs [2]."

If we assume that we have been shaped by millions of years of frequent famine, then our evolution has been shaped by famine. It is possible that our immune system simply makes the assumption that we will soon face famine, and therefore some important tasks, such as extreme autophagy, are normally postponed till the famine arrives. However, in the modern era the famine never arrives, and so we may have to induce it by artificial means.

I have experimented with very long fasts. My longest fast ever was in September of 2015 when I managed to go 12 straight days on nothing but water.

Obviously, any health benefits from that incident might have been psychosomatic, since I was expecting health benefits. But all the same, I did find some of the health benefits to be shocking and completely unexpected. Since at least 1995, and possibly 1990, I had a mole on my skin on my left arm. I wasn't worried about it, so I simply ignored it. I had it on my arm at least 20 years, maybe 25 years. I recall one morning in November of 2015 when I was in my kitchen, making breakfast, and I reached over to pour myself some coffee, and of course my arm was in my field of vision, and after a moment of thinking something was different, it occurred to me that the mole was gone. It had been there at least 20 years, and then it disappeared, at some point during the weeks after I had done the 12 day fast. I don't know when it disappeared, it just slowly faded away at some point between September and November. There was no remaining sign of it on my arm.

Again, that might have been purely psychosomatic, but it was interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cen...

The Annales journal was established in 1929 and shaped the context of everything that Christopher Hill did:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

Braudel is the most famous of the historians from this school. His book “The Structures Of Everyday Life” established historiography on the basis of what ordinary people did in their ordinary lives: what they ate, what they wore, how they worked. And Braudel was building upon ideas already established by the founders of the Annales school. But this enormously influential group of historians were a constant source of inspiration to Christopher Hill, and I think shaped the way he wrote The World Turned Upside Down.

I recommend both Hill and Braudel, both pillars of my intellectual life.

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...

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