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Carrying the water [away]

The metaphors become really complicated at this level, given the thirsty water requirements of LLMs. But give Bloomberg its due for the most succinct cut-line in history of such things:

It cuts way down past the chase, to the quick, and presents what seems an unlikely reveal, inevitable as it may be. We can be relatively sure that neither Fallon nor Google is ashamed to be called out like this. And Photographer: Google really adds that special something.

The clown show is hard, one would imagine. When making people laugh is what keeps the audience coming back, eventually the comedian will become a water carrier for the status quo. It’s the raisin debt of every influencer, about which they are quite open. The question is what it does to us and everything around us, shaded in this light, as it were. The quick can still burn, if the numbness isn’t total.

Pay attention to what ‘becomes the norm.’ It’s certainly not as passive of an activity as the construction suggests.

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Shocker

A new poll indicates that growing numbers of Republicans don’t believe global climate change is real.

The quality of anecdotes, alas, is also showing steady declines:

Lisa Woolcott, another Republican poll respondent, said she doesn’t think that burning fossil fuels is “causing all the global warming,” adding: “We can’t control what happens in the atmosphere.” But Woolcott, a physician’s assistant who lives in Kansas City, Kan., said she supports the idea of a bill that would cap the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and doesn’t think the United States should predicate its actions on what other nations do. “We need to do what’s best for us,” she said. “I don’t think we should back down.”

No, I don’t know, either.

But it brings up a pretty fair point about public opinion, as a detector of trends in attitudes as the basis for policy. Attention to global warming has much to do with pending legislation, of course, the opposition to which itself mirrors hardening opposition to Obama. But reliance on governing by public opinion would vary by the same factors – the ebb and flow of legislative priorities, the relative popularity of leading politicians. What won’t change is our relationship to growing problems, that are in-progress, tied to our behavior and representative of the need for broad changes in the disposition of society. Public opinion and good policy are not two great tastes that go great together; they may coincide; they may switch off being in the lead from time to time. But while public opinion shouldn’t be ignored, developing good policy must not be. How we do elevate policy considerations without basing them on public opinion or giving short-shrift to both?

You can always never force people to be informed and have opinions on non-local phenomena.