Decoding Trump 2.0: The Shock & Awe Version (12-1-24)

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 I was ahead of the game until I took that supplement to get my chi moving
04:00 Trump’s Next Move: The Legal Battle That Could Change EVERYTHING, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewE5SEkFnTM
07:00 Conservative Host WALKS OFF Show After CoHost Calls Her A NAZI,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5012229-trump-dei-merit/
24:15 Maladaptive Daydreaming: Avoiding Pain by Fantasizing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqXbZtQ11SM
28:40 Behind the Curtain: Trump’s shock and awe, https://www.axios.com/2024/12/01/trump-cabinet-kash-patel-fbi
35:15 Putin abandons ‘weak’ Assad as rebels head for Syrian capital | Stefanie Glinski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWdB984gz08
40:20 Putin’s armies too stretched to aid Assad’s ‘catastrophically bad’ military | Mark Galeotti, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxr6tAfCxs
48:00 Trump tariffs
1:14:00 Glenn Greenwald: Dangerous New Escalation in Russia, & Our Blackmailed Politicians, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKh4txSD0eQ
1:20:00 Christopher Caldwell: Speaking Trumpian: Persuasion in a post-oratorical age, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/speaking-trumpian/
1:34:20 Post-Thanksgiving Extravaganza, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if04NMat9_4
1:43:30 Biden’s Parting Gifts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXQDOSzglW4
1:47:00 Claremont: All the President’s Mental Lapses: Democracy dies in deception, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/all-the-presidents-mental-lapses/
2:05:50 Who moved my chi?
2:29:45 Velvet Prisons: Russell Jacoby on American Academia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qlBJpJZE0I
2:38:00 Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality, https://www.amazon.com/Character-Trouble-Undisciplined-Essays-Personality-ebook/dp/B09KM7MPG4
2:47:20 Kip joins to talk about how we affect other people
3:26:00 Milgram experiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
3:30:00 Stanford prison experiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
3:37:30 John Doris: Rewriting the history of psychology, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIhp_zxoc2k
3:39:00 The replication bros vs Amy Cuddy, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-for-amy-cuddy.html
3:45:00 I find redheads disturbing

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Decoding World War III (11-29-24)

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Europeans & Democrats resigned to working with Trump, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYdhN85KS88
28:00 Death of DEI
34:00 Who can influence Donald Trump? Not many people, perhaps Susie Wiles, Elon Musk, Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump in certain spheres
38:00 Israel has run the table the past four months
47:00 Yoav Gallant is an American sock puppet
54:00 Reason magazine fancies itself as a bunch of free thinkers but it is conformist on race, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIOJ0z1gbWI
56:00 Martin Gurri voted for Trump, https://www.thefp.com/p/martin-gurri-voting-for-trump-not-kamala
57:00 Sam Harris is not a blank slatist
58:00 Trump’s counter-cultural revolution, https://www.thefp.com/p/martin-gurri-our-countercultural-revolution
1:02:00 I don’t claim to be an expert on anything
1:06:50 Trump’s new coalition
1:10:00 Hezbollah suffers ‘most significant’ setback in its history, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ-I5ue0tnA
1:15:00 Kamala Harris’ Video Remarks to Supporters, the Nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to Head the Nation…, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_BmRay8o60
1:39:00 Getting Over the Election with Adam Grant, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5TEOG–4-c
1:57:00 Ricardo notes that he can’t type into YT that it is the high status thing to support WWIII
2:08:00 Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1982181281
2:11:00 Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, https://www.amazon.com/Ringmaster-Vince-McMahon-Unmaking-America/dp/1982169443
2:21:30 Donald Trump is acting like Elon Musk and doing big bold things, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmC-GVMSPU0
2:47:30 How Donald Trump can make the federal government more efficient, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT4lxJKj0I0
2:51:30 Kip joins – ever feel like another high school hot shot?
3:07:00 The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Distance:_How_Distance_Shaped_Australia%27s_History
3:12:00 Madness is contagious
3:13:00 2nd Edition: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154845
3:23:00 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
3:40:00 My bookmarks on X

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Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2024 book by Emily Nussbaum:

* If you could knock your subjects off balance, they’d reveal a moment so shocking and, sometimes, so tender or surprising, that it would shatter viewer skepticism. It was the quality that Allen Funt liked to describe as being “caught in the act of being yourself,” the fuel that fed the reality engine, at both its loftiest moments and its lowest.

* It gave you the godlike power to create stories from the lives of ordinary human beings.

* I began this book excited to dig into the lively, outrageous origins of the reality genre, but the deeper I dug, the darker things got. There are people whose lives were wrecked by reality TV; there are methods of production so ugly they’re hard to look at; and reality programs, like any kind of television, reflect the limits, and the bigotries, of their creators. Early reality production was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to: That was the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.

* Inspired by a Vanity Fair article about the journalistic fabulist Stephen Glass, Cutler approached Glass’s old high school, in Highland Park, near Chicago, using a reference from his old pal George Stephanopoulos. He cut a deal with administrators, donating $100,000 worth of cameras and editing equipment and also offering to teach a class on filmmaking. In the show’s early stages, Cutler — who had grown up in Great Neck, a similar high – pressure suburb — was thinking about the dark themes in the Glass article, about the “conflict between ambitions and ethics.” By the time the show finished production, however, American High had emerged as a deeply humane project, a real – life analogue to the brilliant mid – 1990s teen drama My So – Called Life . It was full of likeable, layered characters, including an insecure girl and her jock boyfriend, a gay teen coming out to his friends, and a charming trickster with ADHD, on the verge of flunking out.

* Trump was “great TV, because he had no filter,” said Jamie Canniffe, who had started as a low – level producer in season 1, then rose through the ranks to become The Apprentice showrunner through season 6.

* The less ethical a show was, the more authentic the footage it captured. The more trusting (or drunk or exhausted) the participants were, the more likely it was that they’d ultimately crack, releasing a flood of feeling that couldn’t be faked.

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I’ve never become teary over an ad before

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Posted in Apple | Comments Off on I’ve never become teary over an ad before

Capitalism vs Populism (11-28-24)

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Lions QB Jared Goff learns to release, https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5948798/2024/11/27/jared-goff-detroit-lions-mvp-dan-campbell-thanksgiving/
02:00 Great Rabbinic Thinkers: Rabbi Samuel Mohilever (Part 1) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9DeyHTzWng
05:00 This Maverick Thinker (Wolfgang Streeck) Is the Karl Marx of Our Time, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opinion/wolfgang-streeck-populism.html
29:00 NYT: What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now?
The party’s donor class is still wrestling with Donald Trump’s victory, worried about retribution and sluggish liberal energy. Some rich Democrats are even pondering leaving the country. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/us/politics/democratic-donors-reid-hoffman-democracy-alliance.html
44:00 WP: In transgender fight, volleyball ‘saviors’ miss the point of sports, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/11/27/save-womens-sports-transgender-athletes/
58:10 Wolfgang Streeck: The end of the German empire, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUYrsA4sJeE
1:02:00 How Will Capitalism End: Reflections on a Failing System – A Lecture by Wolfgang Streeck, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo8TF6GZg7E
1:14:00 John Birch Society, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
1:25:00 Wolfgang Streeck: The International State System after Neoliberalism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ2z-ygbYNw
1:28:30 Dani Rodrik: Karl Polanyi and Globalization’s Wrong Turn, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8HGyS3IRz8
1:34:00 Christopher Caldwell: This Prophetic Academic (Emmanuel Todd) Now Foresees the West’s Defeat, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-decline-west.html
1:40:30 Emmanuel Todd, Defeat of the West – the main ideas explained in English, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXZYDtBt9k0
2:05:00 Triggernometry: We Went To America…. What The Media Didn’t Tell You, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCjNsLKIPwY
2:11:25 The Race Hustle Is Over – Adam Carolla, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX9RoZe9ZU0
2:36:30 Great Rabbinic Thinkers: Rabbi Samuel Mohilever (Part 1) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9DeyHTzWng
2:38:00 Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Mohilever
2:55:00 Evolution & Judaism, https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/ten-questions-on-evolution-and-judaism-258
3:12:00 New study says DEI increases hostility, https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1861085998379376997
3:30:00 Judaism’s teachings on dignified speech, https://seforimblog.com/2024/06/franciscans-and-more-repulsive-practices-saul-lieberman-abraham-joshua-heschel-and-r-jehiel-jacob-weinberg/
3:31:00 Wikipedia: ‘Neturei Karta believes that the Messiah will usher in a Jewish theocracy to rule over the Land of Israel’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=157969
3:35:30 Kip joins
3:36:00 New York Post: Ex-CBS News reporter accuses network of ‘defying’ orders from Shari Redstone, CBS CEO to probe Hunter Biden laptop scandal, https://nypost.com/2024/11/26/media/ex-cbs-news-reporter-accuses-network-of-defying-orders-from-shari-redstone-george-cheeks-to-probe-hunter-biden-laptop-scandal/

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