Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy…
Category Archives: Society
Juneteenth 2025
Today is Juneteenth, formally Juneteenth National Independence Day, a national holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the USA. Here is the official Juneteenth flag:
It uses the same colors as the American flag because the descendants of slaves are Americans. (It has been suggested that these days that any Americans protesting a tyrannical government should wave as many American flags as possible to highlight that they are Americans protesting an unamerican government — unamerican as defined by our founding and 200+ year history.)
Here is a good post giving some background on the flag, and here is another good post pointing to more background on Juneteenth.
P.S. If you’re a science fiction fan and have never read Octavia E. Butler, I highly recommend checking out her work. She’s among the best I’ve ever read, and each book is a unique gem. [see Octavia E. Butler for details].
Stay antiracist, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
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US Elections in the 2000s
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this:
With all the post-game analysis, and all the pearl-clutching about the future, it boils down to a simple fact: Americans are fucking stupid children.
It’s Still an Easy Choice
The “Grand” Old Party has, at this point, descended into naked fascism marching in lockstep led by their would-be tyrant. It’s hard to believe it has gone this far. It is mind-bending and disturbing that a large segment of America — apparently blinded by propaganda or willfully ignorant — can’t see the problem. What’s even worse is the sense many indeed agree with the program.
Almost as disturbing is that, even now, many Americans apparently remain undecided. Yet the choice we face becomes clearer every day as the Republican party increasingly drops any pretense of upholding the Constitution or traditional American values.
When it was Biden/Harris, the choice was obvious. Now that it’s Harris/Walz, the choice is even more obvious. I made a scorecard…
Vote Blue, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
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Social Entropy
Someone on another platform used the phrase “social entropy”, and it has been echoing in my head ever since. It strikes me as perfectly encapsulating what feels like the fraying of our social fabric. I almost wonder if the new millennium blew some of our mental fuses.
It’s hard to know what to make of things now. Is this just another pendulum swing along humanity’s path or a genuine sign of decline. Has humanity peaked, been found unworthy, and slid into a dumb and numb acceptance of our lot?
What the hell is even going on anymore?
Still An Easy Choice
My President.
Okay, the debate was disappointing, let’s get that out of the way. There’s a long history of dismal first debate outings. Sometimes they are followed by stellar second debates. I’m ever hopeful, but there is a fundamental problem here with the Democrats that worries me.
I’ll get to that, but I want to stress my other point right away. Biden and the Democrats are far (far!) from perfect, but the alternative right now is unthinkable. What is offered by the Republicans is contrary to long-established conservative American values (let alone progressive ones).
I have no plan here, no notes, just some thoughts.
Stillness and Solitude
In the Science Notes post published last Friday, I didn’t have room for the last article that caught my eye in recent issues of New Scientist. This article was, I thought, a bit different from the others and seemed to require its own post.
Firstly, it has a meaty heft and ties in with an old post of mine as well as some notes I have for a post I thought to call Stillness Redux (in reference back to that old post).
What’s ironic to me is how what the article offers as possible anodyne for modern life is very much the life I’ve lived since I began navigating my own course across life’s seas.
The COVID Toll
A bit more than three years ago (on February 3, 2021, to be specific), I posted a Wednesday Wow about COVID-19. Seeing the reported numbers in the news back then inspired me to obtain my own dataset and do some analysis. The results then were jaw-dropping, hence the Wow!
For quite a few months now I’ve been meaning to do an update to see what’s happened since then. Yesterday I pulled a new dataset and re-did the analysis.
The results are still jaw-dropping. And horrific and sorrowful.
BB #91: Modern Childrearing
The old saying “Spare the rod, spoil the child” has fallen into, shall we say, severe disfavor these days, even as just a metaphor for strict childrearing. And forget about actually spanking your kid — that’s child abuse by modern standards.
At the same time, we seem to be in the midst of a serious and growing mental health crisis among teens, especially in the USA (but also the UK and Australia).
A new book by Abigail Shrier suggests these may be connected.
BB #90: The Growth Paradigm
My final post in 2023 was about growth curves. It focused on the difference between geometric growth versus exponential growth — which turns out to be not much — and compared them to polynomial growth (see that post for the math-y details; this post isn’t a math post, so relax and read on).
A key characteristic of all these growth curves is that they grow without limit. If we treat the horizontal axis as time, then the longer the growth continues along the curve, the greater whatever growing grows.
The problem is that nothing in the real world can grow infinitely without limit. At some point, something has to give.
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