Among the faithful dead in the last refuge of civilisation

generated via ChatGPT

Literacy crisis: Americans today are outright refusing to read; gambling now more common than books in the former US. {Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic 8 July}

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?gift=9FZn7jkTomfZUUZKAohjmj-cCDVI01zjt7XQQzsljuM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

A new Dark Ages is taking shape, and that is not hyperbole but probably an understatement. Consider this anecdote, FTA: 

Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

That is a staggering decline in less than a decade. Nine years is not even a blip in the course of modern civilisation. The figure is so extraordinary that I can scarcely wrap my mind around it, so I shall not attempt to do so any further at the moment.

The scariest part of the decline in reading for pleasure is that it is being witnessed across all demographics. The youngest generations are the least inclined to read and the most tech-addled, as one might expect, but only an estimated 38 per cent of Americans read a novel last year. Is it any coincidence that this is occurring at the same time anti-intellectualism is running amok and a narcissistic clown has returned to the White House after failing spectacularly the first time around?

Decades of vapid popular culture, political gaslighting that convinced people to oppose their own interests, and immersion in technologies designed to fragment attention have combined to produce a society that no longer practises critical thinking. A kind of mass zombification is underway, and I want out of this timeline and away from everyone in it. It is not the sort of life I wish to live, nor the sort of society in which I wish to live. #Murica.

FTA: Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.

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🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Elegy for the knowledge worker

generated via ChatGPT

Goldman Sachs: AI to eliminate approximately 15 million jobs in the next decade, but also generate new jobs ‘over the long run’.  {PYMNTS 25 June}

https://www.pymnts.com/economy/2026/goldman-sachs-says-ai-will-eliminate-15-million-us-jobs/

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The breaking of Columbia

generated via Grok

More than one-third of Americans doubt US will still exist in 250 years, survey finds. {Reuters 16 June}

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-us-nears-250th-birthday-reuters-ipsos-poll-shows-many-americans-doubt-it-will-last-another-250-years/ar-AA25LrWA

Newsflash: it is already dead in all but name. Much like the Soviet Union or the Roman Empire, it is simply too big, too unmanageable, too polyglot to stay together in perpetuity, and the cracks are showing all around us. Great powers often linger in a strange intermediate state, neither fully alive nor entirely deceased, sustained by habit, momentum, and the inability of their inhabitants to recognise that the world has changed around them. 250 years is a good run, and the nation hath endured chaos and division many times over, but that was then and this is now, and something fundamental hath changed in the collective character of the people. Not for the better, obviously.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Are we seriously going to allow our history to be rewritten, real-time information to be suppressed, and the voices of reasons to be silenced? (Spoiler alert: Yes)

AI generated image

A legitimate crisis of nightmarish, dystopian proportions unfolding right now: The 2020s will be remembered - that is, if they are remembered with any degree of accuracy, or if the earth is still standing - as an era of extreme crisis. And the biggest crisis of all is the ‘crisis of trust,’ where everything is becoming a facade and nobody will be allowed to think for themselves anymore. Not that most Americans have bothered to think for a long time now, but we are now moving into something that is beyond Orwellian - or beyond anything Huxley could have envisioned - and it is already too late for any hope of stopping it. All hands are dirty, and I genuinely believe myself cursed to be living in these times. An excerpt from a must-read Ted Gioia piece: ‘Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time. Big corporations and institutions are the worst offenders—they actually get rich by polluting our data streams. But individuals are adding to the raw sewage too.’ {Ted Gioia - Thirty signs you are living in an information crap-pocalypse 6/30}

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on TWITTER, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and POST - @arthurnewhook.

DHS issues memo to government and law enforcement agencies warning that violent threats against gays, lesbians, and transsexuals are on the rise

AI image generated via Hotpot API

America has never really been the ‘live and let live’ country most of us would like to believe that we are. Perhaps some of us are seeing this truism more clearly now, in this post-COVID, post-Trump, and post-truth hellscape we are navigating; where large portions of our fellow Americans are violently rejecting liberal democracy, and liberal democratic values. A renewed moral panic has been whipped up against the LBGTQ community, and I would have to advise that many of us who are not in that community will nonetheless be targeted (or already have been) by extremist homophobes. Think of the witchcraft hysteria that my Puritan ancestors shamefully engaged in during the 17th century (a great-grandmother of mine was actually hung in early Hartford, CT, after accused of being a ‘witch’ because the community did not approve of her remarrying at age 72; her husband was also hung right alongside of her.) #Cult45 is eager to punish anybody not standing with them, and I have a feeling a lot of us are about to be deemed ‘witches’ of sorts (or ‘groomers,’ or any number of aspersions) in our new 1692. {ABC News 5/15}

MORE

‘Russian authorities will launch construction of a village outside Moscow for conservative-minded Americans and Canadians next year, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.’ {The Moscow Times 5/11}

David Smith: As Trump’s lies and scandals deepen, the GOP responds as usual - with silence. {The Guardian 5/13}

‘OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman delivered a sobering account of ways artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world” during his first congressional testimony, expressing a willingness to work with nervous lawmakers to address the risks presented by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.’ {WP 5/16}

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on TWITTER, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and POST - @arthurnewhook.

Global supplies of rice at a twenty-year low

Getty Images

The severe effects of climate change in Asia, the war on Ukraine, and export restrictions enacted by the Indian government lead to higher prices for one of the world’s most consumed staples. {CNBC 4/19}

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on TWITTER, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and POST - @arthurnewhook.

SpaceX: Another massive Elon Musk failure

Eric Gay/AP

SpaceX, the world's largest rocket ever built, fails to launch due to technical issue. {AP 4/17}

Copyright 2023, Arthur Newhook. @Sunking278 and @FloydEtcetera on TWITTER, and at the same handles on FACEBOOK. MASTODON - @ArthurNewhook@mastodon.world, and POST - @arthurnewhook.

Abandon all hope: U.S. COVID death toll surpasses 900,000

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

It was only in mid-December that the 800,000 mark was passed, and less than two months later we are at 900,000. To avoid reaching that one million mark would require a miracle, I.e. no more variants emerging, but alas we are all out of luck on that front as BA.2 is coming. I do remember, toward the start of the pandemic, that even some of those who were taking the threat seriously – taking the proper precautions - scoffed at predictions of upwards of 250,000 dead. Now, nearly two years later, we sit at close to four times that number, and it barely seems to phase most anymore. The psychological and societal fallout has been immense in just two years, and we'll be dealing with that fallout for decades to come. America is going to be an extremely dark place to live for decades to come. Abandon all hope; the little Fascists and other assorted misfits all around us destroyed it. From the AP -  

Propelled in part by the wildly contagious omicron variant, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 900,000 on Friday, less than two months after eclipsing 800,000. 

The two-year total, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte, North Carolina. 

The milestone comes more than 13 months into a vaccination drive that has been beset by misinformation and political and legal strife, though the shots have proved safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and death. 

“It is an astronomically high number. If you had told most Americans two years ago as this pandemic was getting going that 900,000 Americans would die over the next few years, I think most people would not have believed it,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. 

He lamented that most of the deaths happened after the vaccine gained authorization. 

“We got the medical science right. We failed on the social science. We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this,” Jha said. “Those are the places where we have failed as America.” 

Just 64% of the population is fully vaccinated, or about 212 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Nor is COVID-19 finished with the United States: Jha said the U.S. could reach 1 million deaths by April. (Read more)

Copyright 2022, Sunking278. Stay up-to-date: Twitter – @Sunking278 and Facebook – click here. DONATIONS - click here.

Amazon’s servers go down, and half of the Internet with it

Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

I do not pretend to know exactly how servers and networks operate, but these sorts of outages are becoming more common and having a more widespread effect on peoples’ lives. The ‘Internet of things’ is a bad idea and needs to be reevaluated. -

Problems with some Amazon Web Services cloud servers are causing slow loading or failures for significant chunks of the internet. Amazon’s widespread network of data centers powers many of the things you interact with online, including this website, so as we’ve seen in previous AWS outage incidents, any problem has massive rippling effects. People started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET, and just after 6PM ET the AWS Status showed “Many services have already recovered, however we are working towards full recovery across services.”

While some affected services that rely on AWS have been restored, the internet is still a bit slower and more unsteady than usual. The most important app impacted by the outage might be the ones that Amazon employees use. CNBC points out Reddit posts from Amazon Flex, warehouse, and delivery workers who say the apps that keep track of packages, tell them where to go, and generally keep your items on time went down, too. (Read more)

Copyright 2021, Sunking278. Stay up-to-date: Twitter – @Sunking278 and Facebook – click here.

Russia and the USA - ‘The diminishing quality of … human capital’

Getty Images

‘(A)cclimatization to deteriorating conditions as the new normal.’ Vladimir Putin has stagnated Russia’s economy and society. Meanwhile in America, we have millions demanding much the same sort of anachronistic, paternalistic, and nationalistic garbage, and a political establishment that is delivering it for them. Any sense of balance has all but disappeared. And the results of our stagnation are just as sobering – or more, in the long run – as they are in Mother Russia. Two former world powers that now lay, slowly dying, and each by their own hand. This is a very long report by the Carnegie Moscow Center, but well worth reading. 

Copyright 2021, Sunking278. Stay up-to-date: Twitter – @Sunking278 and Facebook – click here.