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When I mentioned my virtual-reality experiment to people I know, several reacted with an instinctual discomfort. Perhaps they were reminded of a recent video, in which Mark Zuckerberg, performing with the mechanistic mannerisms of a cyborg running outdated software, introduces his vision for a virtual-reality “Metaverse.” In the video, he selects an outfit to wear from a virtual mannequin, then teleports to a space station where he plays cards with a robot and a human friend who is inexplicably floating face down. Not surprisingly, this pitch fell flat. Few seem eager to spend their free time in a Facebook-sponsored, evil nerd panopticon. And that video, of course, is just one layer in the thicker patina of silliness that covers so much of virtual-reality boosterism, with its emphasis on the fantastical and its easy dismissal of analog experience.

What differentiates immersive single-tasking from this more speculative futurism is its concentration on office productivity, a context that’s already inextricably cybernetic. The reality is that the way we currently toil, with our lives so mediated by the demands of cramped screens and incessant in-boxes, is undeniably unnatural. Is an experience like the app I described to Bijoy really any more artificial than checking e-mail a hundred times a day, or spending seven straight hours staring at Zoom?

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From Octavia Bulter's "Parable of the Sower"

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The patriarch of this wholesome family is a Republican congressman from Kentucky. Who are they planning to shoot? AMURIKA!!

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In a country where millions of people are under the illusion of being millionaires-in-waiting, tax increases on the broad class of the rich scare many thousandaires away.

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Trump's trip to Iowa brings up another thing that's unprecedented: the false claims he's pushing about the 2020 election being stolen. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but Iowans are asking about it at town halls.

At one last month for Grassley in rural western Iowa, a man in the back of the crowded room told the senator he doesn't trust the outcome of the election.

"I feel in my heart that there was a lot of cheating going on," the man said.

Grassley didn't directly correct the claim. Instead, he defended Iowa's elections and criticized congressional Democrats' plan for a federal voting overhaul.

Bardwell says misinformation has taken hold in the GOP.

"You can't put the genie back in the bottle, in terms of once this accusation is unleashed," he said. "And once it's believed by a large percentage of the Republican base, there's kind of no going back at that point. Mainly because kind of the psychological dynamics of misinformation are such that at that point, people will just find and then rationalize the position that they already have."

Trump's lies about 2020 haven't dissuaded Iowa Republicans from wanting to appear with him.

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Opium of the people?

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FOX News home page on the day the latest IPCC report came out warning that humanity should take immediate action to forestall climate disaster.

Criminal.

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Six years into the Age of Trump, the American people cannot claim ignorance of Trump and his movement. They have been warned repeatedly. They have witnessed the consequences....

....All Donald Trump has to do to command more political violence is to tell his followers the place, date and time. Can anyone doubt they would eagerly follow his orders? The rest of the American people would be shocked. The mainstream news media would tell readers and viewers that this was "unprecedented" and "unimaginable" and that no one could have imagined such a thing in America. Democratic leadership would bray on about "bipartisanship," "democratic institutions," "norms" and "rules." Such reactions are a choice, born of willful ignorance and learned helplessness — a choice that may well doom American democracy.

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For McConnell, politics is sport. He’s won and lost and is now aiming to recapture his old title of Senate majority leader in the 2022 midterm elections. “If you’re a football fan, it’s like the difference between being the offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator,” McConnell told me. “The offensive coordinator has a better chance to score.” But for many Americans, rarely has politics been less of a game.

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How did one of our two major political parties come not only to reject democracy, but to exalt ignorance and despise competence of any kind?

I don’t know, but if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention.

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As of June 2021, according to the CDC, 80 percent of the people who have died from COVID were over 65. And more than half -- 57 percent -- were over 75.