And maybe politics will kill us.

First off, it's clear that our refusal to discuss politics has left our ability to discuss politics at a very rudimentary level.

The truth. You hear that bandied about a lot these days, especially in political circles. It seems most individuals and groups have their own form of the "truth", and many are adamant in their conclusion, to the point of extremism. You can witness the many forms of "truth" in every day life but nowhere as controversial as on the internet where folks scream their "truth" at each other incessantly.

But, have you really given the concept of the "truth" any thought? In the end does the "truth" not boil down to subjective personal bias? We can convince ourselves that we know the "truth", but do we really? Or is it confirmation bias, that which supports our views, that leads us to the "truth", while ignoring opposing viewpoints and evidence?

Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination^© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

I think it's safe to say that we all here at c99 are political junkies. Have you ever wondered why?

I, like many others, became politically active when I was young because certain policies affected my life. I became politically aware in the late sixties. Ever more so as I approached age 18.

The Vietnam War had that affect on me.

So, my question is twofold:

What was the catalyst that got you involved in politics?

Why do we torture ourselves with politics when blissful ignorance is more soothing.

Johnny was a young lad whose mind was stuck on puppies, fishing, baseball and teasing Jane, his little sister who lived to torment him. If Johnny didn't play the games she wanted to play she would make fun of him and ban him from her playhouse, pointing a wagging finger of superiority and haughty otherness. Johnny hated Jane and she hated him. They didn't see eye to eye on anything and Johnny had long ago decided that Jane was only good for harassing and teasing. Both gave no quarter to the other.

The freedom of the summertime filled Johnny's life with adventure, from sun up to sun down, with nary a thought of the wide world around him. School was a distant memory and he was going to make the best of it while the days were still long. The warm pie on the windowsill, kicking the tin can down the road and pulling Jane's pigtails were the things of a small boy's wonderment. But, the one thing, at the top of the list, that was even better than a birthday cake, even better than the Saturday matinee at the theater, and yes, even better than hitting that home run over the fence into the neighbor's window.

The circus was coming to town!

Science, in its quest for understanding the world around us, both within and without the human condition, has made great strides forward in developing techniques to better help us comprehend the complex structure and pathology of the human brain. One of these advancements are organoids.

Organoids are 3D cell cultures derived from pluripotent stem cells that mimic the structure, function, and cellular complexity of human organs. These in vitro, miniaturized versions of organs are especially well suited for studying complex multicellular organ structures, such as the brain, retina, kidney, and lungs, and are now widely used to study organ development and disease.

Source

Recently scientists have for the first time grown mini-brains from fetal brain tissue that are about the size of a grain of rice. Tiny brains were previously grown from fetal stem cells but now, for the first time, from actual fetal brain tissue, opening exciting possibilities for the future.

I wrote a diary titled 'Riley and Brenner's astonishing piece in NLR" which got into an assessment of the current situation which hasn't received publicity. Rather, each political faction operates on a different level of delusion, and very few people believe in a reality-based radicalism which would actually change the situation if it could attain some level of critical mass.

I am not sure I want to add anything to this book review:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/david-goldblatt/how-to-get-on-tv

How to Get on TV

1) As we settle in for another settler-colonial holiday, it appears that the time is ripe for an intrusion of those ugly matters of politics into our entertainment fare. There will, as you all well know, be sports spectacle on your tee-vee screens today. For the purposes of this article we will be referring to "spectacle sports," namely, the sports you see on that tee-vee.

[upon reading posts on this thread, I edited what I thought was a non-controversial side note:

I'm not sure what I think about this, but it is interesting: