Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

It's easy to forget how relatively recently it was that Florida (and Texas) grew into very high-population states. Check this Electoral College map from 1948: FL had 8 EVs! NY had 47, PA had 35, OH 25, MI 19. Iowa had 10! Compare to the 2024 map.



Why did this happen? A lot of reasons.
1. "Pent up demand" - Economist term that refers to a situation where demand for a service or product is unusually strong.

2. Cheap land and labor

3. Low taxes & regulations

4. New infrastructure

5. Defense & technology

6. Vacationers & Retirees

7. Migrant Farm workers

8. Oil

9. Climate & comfort.

Hotel/motel & residential air conditioning came to the sun belt. While air conditioning of public buildings in the north began to take root in the late 1920s and 1930s, it was not until post WWII that it became more commonplace in the south. Roughly 70% of my relatives now live in Florida.


April 4, 1924: British radio makes its first broadcast intended for schools, a music appreciation talk by a professor, Walford Davies. The program is a precursor to BBC School Radio, which supplements the primary school curriculum with lessons and entertainment.




LOL, tweet of the year so far...




2024 vs. 1921:





The literal translation from arabic:

"From here rose the first written letter, (finding its way) to every point on earth." - Uruk, Iraq


Ha, Lord Pickles...

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, said: “Hella was an incredible force and an inspiration. She had unrivalled contacts and immense knowledge about world affairs and was always steely in her determination to find out the facts.

Pick was born in Vienna in 1927, and spent her early childhood in what she described as a “very conventional middle-class environment”. But after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and attacks on Jews rose sharply, her mother decided to put her 11-year-old daughter on a Kindertransport train for the UK.

Simon Tisdall, another former foreign editor of the Guardian, said: “Hella was a force to be reckoned with. Fiercely intelligent, passionate about all she did, incredibly well connected in the exclusive world of international diplomacy – and ever courageous in navigating a male-dominated journalistic profession that feared powerful women.

“Well into her 90s she was writing elegant long-form pieces for Prospect magazine, including an article drawing sobering parallels between the war she fled as a Kindertransport child in 1939 and the rise of Putin. She was one of a kind.”

Describing her as a “trailblazer for a generation”, he wrote: “Pick is testament to the necessity of having a broad intellectual hinterland and an open mind, the value of cultivating sources and finding things out. There is no better manifesto against the current clickbait culture and narcissistic social media obsession.”

“She was probably the oldest working journalist in the UK, and was deeply engaged with the world, even as she was leaving it. The days before her death, weak and in hospital, she still wanted to talk about her horror at the situation in Gaza and her fear for Ukraine’s future, with Europe and America distracted and divided.

Hella Pick, pioneering Guardian journalist, dies aged 96

Gordon-Michael Scallion was a futurist, spiritualist, and self-proclaimed "prophet" who had an "awakening" after losing his ability speak and becoming restricted to a hospital bed. During that time, he had a vision of a lady who told him apocalyptic earthquakes and astronomical events would reshape the earth. After he healed from his strange condition, he made this map:

Offered here is Scallion’s Future Map of North America, which “illustrates the way I see North America by 2012, with many of the more significant changes occurring by 2002.” The map is a “before and after” image, the base a relief map of North America and part of Latin America with national, state and provincial boundaries shown in white. Vast areas are overprinted in blue, reflecting Scallion’s prophecy that by 2012 much of the region would be inundated following “three separate magnetic pole shifts… each comprised of a six to eight degree westerly shift.” Surrounding the map are long blocks of text summarizing Scallion’s predictions of the geophysical, climactic and demographic consequences of these successive shifts.

This parade of cataclysms will cause mass migrations, with much of the population ending up concentrated in huge “survival camps”. Making things worse, these survivors will be afflicted by “new plagues… as the body’s electrical system becomes imbalanced by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and electromagnetic pollution”. Further, “infrasonic waves” from shifting tectonic plates will leave humans “vulnerable to pronounced mood swings, depression and even something akin to possession”. On the other hand, there’s also some really good news, at least for those who’ve had it with the patriarchy: The magnetic pole shifts will (somehow) “cause the moon to orbit closer to the Earth. This will cause a move towards a lunar society with more feminine than masculine overtones. As a result, both men and women will experience increases in intuitive capabilities.”

On the off chance things don’t work out as expected (hoped?), Scallion gives himself an out: “Predictions are given as probabilities. Even at this time, consciousness can alter an event, modify changes in a particular area, or at the very least, help prepare for what is to come.” It’s worth noting that similar hedging appears on his 1992 Future Map of the United States, which predicted that the magnetic pole shifts and attendant cataclysms would occur in 1993-95. It’s all reminiscent of the Millerites’ recalculation of the Second Coming of Christ after the “Great Disappointment” of 1844.

Boston Rare Maps with larger map with readable text and his related Prophecy Maps.


Words for the Weekend:




I must live a certain way...


McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. Unlike most members of the SFI, McCarthy did not have a scientific background. There was another person of interest who had deep involvement with SFI concerning genetics...Jeffrey Epstein. The name that won't die.


"I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!" - Heisenberg.