Oh, boy. Won’t this be fun? According to the Wall Street Journal:

A team of researchers from China believe the Earth’s inner core has reversed its rotation after they analyzed earthquake-driven seismic waves as they pass through the Earth … the reversal of the inner core rotation would shorten the length of the day by a fraction of a millisecond over the course of a year, and might have a small effect on Earth’s magnetic field, but wouldn’t affect life on the surface.

The timing of this couldn’t be better. With latter-day shibboleths like climate change and the efficacy of liability-proof, ersatz COVID vaccines being debunked faster than the fallacy of the honest politician, we were in dire need of something to freak out about. Here it is, served on a silver platter — made in China, of course. And since the Chinese are giving us free balloons to shoot down every week, why wouldn’t we believe them?

Let’s Get Going

Hunter Thompson famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I wonder if he had any idea how correct he was. We have more weird professionals cranking out more weird shit faster than the IPCC is fabricating climate models. And it’s about to get exponentially, astronomically worse because it’s only a matter of time until someone decides to use AI to aggregate all of the crackpot notions of history and make them available to every generative idiot with an internet connection.

The British novelist and short story writer, L.P. Hartley, wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” He, too, gets more correct all the time. We’re accelerating the creation of the past more rapidly every day. This minute is radically different from the last minute. And the next minute may very well be unrecognizable.

The Death of Truth

It’s been said we live in a post-truth age. That one statement, at least, is true. Reasoned objectivity has been replaced by emotional subjectivity. (“Everyone’s entitled to their own truth.”) Empiricism has been replaced by selectivity and manipulation. (“The science is settled.”) Individual responsibility and individual agency have been replaced by group identities and identity politics, both of which encourage and pander to ideology. (“An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways, and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.” [Kenneth Burke, from Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method])

When the fallacious contentions of those in power — the purveyors of subjectivity, settled science, group identity, identity politics, and ideology — are exposed, they simply reverse the narrative.

The only thing worse is that we accept every reversal without question.