That photo is nauseating. Elon Musk is not at all pious — he’s blatantly pandering to conservatives who are often religious. Now he’s calling himself a “cultural Christian,” a phrase I’ve heard a few times before, and never fails to make my stomach churn.

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

And then applying his First Principles mindset, Musk extrapolated that what follows from that goal is to have “consciousness expand in scale and scope” by increasing population and allowing differing perspectives. Or put differently, more babies and free speech.

Yeah, that’s short for “white nationalist”. He’s also claiming to have been a thoughtful scholar of religion…until he discovered that science fiction was a better fit.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

I don’t believe he ever read those religious texts or those philosophers, making him similar to Donald Trump. But I can believe he read Douglas Adams, although he didn’t understand him.

Elon is a perfect example of a real-life Otto.

I wouldn’t have guess the Irish, but the Irish would notice.

“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? ” Vance queried at a press conference held at the Milwaukee Police Association. “That’s what I’m talking about.

“We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” Vance stated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.”

This is what happens when you base your policy on what movie you’ve seen. The facts are a bit different, though.

However, studies have indicated that migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The fictional film is set in 19th-century New York and centers around a feud between rival gangs of different backgrounds. The protagonist is an Irish immigrant seeking revenge for his father’s murder, reports the Journal Sentinel.

The Danes better watch out if he ever watches The Salvation.

Or maybe he’ll center immigration policy on a viewing of Alien: Romulus.

This weird.

Even if it’s just pretend, this is a gross concept.

A trio of economists, Card, Angrist, and Imbens, won the Nobel Prize in 2021 for a natural experiment that showed that a commonly held belief about the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment wasn’t always true. That seems reasonable to me — economics is basically about human psychology, and psychology sometimes gets strange. One strange psychological aspect of some economists, though, is that they have the notion that economics is as robustly mathematical and predictable as physics, and questioning the reliability of economics is heresy. Some economists were furious about an experiment that called their assumptions into question.

Their research didn’t conclude that an increase in the minimum wage would boost employment in every circumstance. Far from it.

But it challenged the view that an increase in the minimum wage would always lead to unemployment.

However, their findings weren’t welcomed by the establishment.

In fact, they sparked an emotional debate in the economics profession.

American economist James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate himself (in 1986), was scathing of the suggestion that a core “law” of economics might not be universal after all.

“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made,” Mr Buchanan told the Wall Street Journal in 1996.

“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.

“Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.

Cool. Keep in mind, Buchanan is defending economics with that statement.

Also worth keeping in mind: Buchanan was a Libertarian with a capital L, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and has been called The Architect of the Radical Right. But as we all know, conservative politics is totally apolitical, so his strong advocacy for ideological interests doesn’t count.

An additional comment: it turns out that considering evidence counter to dogma is the behavior of whores.

“Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”

He sounds like a fun guy.

Oh dear. I replied to a question on Threads, which was asking what to do with a collection of right-wing media. I suggested that it ought to be burned.

imajazzbaby: I am in a quandary. I am currently cheating clearing out my late father’s house. His red neck MAGA house. It’s actually not too bad, flags, war eagles, “United We Stand” stickers on the windows. But there’s a huge stack of Dennis Prager books. Plus the complete works of Ayn Rand 🤮
I don’t believe in burning books. But I don’t want to donate that crap and send it out into the world either.
Any ideas on what to do with them?
pzmyers: Nothing is sacred. Burn the trash. You are not saying others can’t read them (although they shouldn’t) but that you are decluttering your personal property.
I am sorry that your father had such poor taste in books. That does not mean you are obligated to propagate it.

Note: this is very different from denying others the right to read these books — no one is obligated to preserve every item a deceased parent once owned, and that includes books. I’m going to have to clean out my mother’s bookshelves, and she used to be a regular reader of books, mostly detective stories, murder mysteries, that sort of thing. They’re all getting tossed, one way or another. I know well that irrational feeling that every item the loved one touched should be preserved and passed on to generation after generation, but I don’t think my children, or my children’s children, would actually be grateful to someday inherit a few houses full of old stuff.

Here’s a completely different situation:

“Hundreds of New College of Florida library books, including many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies, are headed to a landfill,” Sarasota Herald Tribune reports.

“A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.”

Purging a library of every book on certain topics is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Traditionally, they ought to have all the jugend gathered around a bonfire.

By the way, I have a bookshelf full of truly awful creationist books, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I’d leave them to a library as a historical resource, but not if they would just check them out to readers who might consider them validated because they are in a formal collection. I’ll probably suggest that they be incinerated or placed in a landfill.