dduane:

How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set “Web” as Default

Here’s something useful.

“On May 15th Google released a new "Web” filter that removes “AI Overview” and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set “Google Web” as your default search engine.“

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this — NPR has always been a news source for comfortable liberals who want soft voices and current events delivered gently, without any trace of alarm. They’ve got tote bags to give away and coffee table books to sell! They’ve responded to the incoming wave of ignorance with a puff-piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that doesn’t use the word “unqualified” even once.

Trump has threatened to appoint RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He doesn’t have any expertise in public health, medicine, or science, but he has a slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” and that’s good enough.

Another word NPR doesn’t use is “conspiracy theorist.” They acknowledge that he has a few wacky ideas, but hey, he wants to stop the chronic disease epidemic in the USA, isn’t that a good thing?

Kennedy’s baseless claims have included that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain”; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender; and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. He’s also long said that vaccines cause autism and fail to protect people from diseases.

NPR never questions whether Kennedy’s policies would actually work, or for that matter, what his policies are. We’ve got a real health problem — obesity, diabetes, narcotics, etc. — but they don’t address his solutions, if any. What he has done is tap into MAGA paranoia.

He knit together an unlikely coalition — some from the left and some MAGA supporters — eager to take on the establishment.

“Bobby Kennedy and Trump have bonded over tying the core of MAGA — which is a distrust of institutions and getting corruption out of institutions — to our health care industries,” says Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy and the Trump transition team, who spoke with NPR before Kennedy’s nomination.

What corruption? Be specific. The corruption I see is that there are an awful lot of quacks getting rich writing pop-sci diet books, and pharma MBAs leading their companies to immense profits at the cost of every day Americans’ health. You’re not going to fix that by hounding doctors and scientists and imposing bogus health treatments on the public.

By the way, Calley Means is a Harvard MBA with connections to the Heritage Foundation but no medical background who wrote pop-sci book about nutrition. I imagine that RFK Jr has the “wrote a book about dieting” demographic solidly locked up.

Means — himself a former lobbyist for the food and drug industry — has emerged as one of the leading voices in the MAHA orbit. He and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, catapulted into the political sphere after publishing a bestseller on metabolic health. Both have business ventures in the health and wellness industry.

But have no fear! Means and RFK Jr have a simple plan to fix everything.

Means says a key to their plan is eliminating conflicts of interest.

See above reference to Means’ own interests.

When the article does cite critics of RFK Jr, it’s always with qualifications and padding, and never goes into much depth.

“There are some things that RFK Jr. gets right,” says former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden. “We do have a chronic disease crisis in this country, but we need to avoid simplistic solutions and stick with the science.”

Great — we have a “chronic disease crisis,” but what’s the solution? It never says. Is it “drink raw milk” (Kennedy has endorsed that)? Is it “end all vaccinations” (he thinks they cause autism, and change children’s gender identity)? Is it “tear down cell phone towers” (he thinks 5G is used for mind control)? Is it “take anti-depressants off the market” (he claims they cause mass shootings)? Is it “replace COVID vaccines with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine” (he thinks those are effective)? Or maybe it would help to insert more racism in science policy.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

Reading NPR’s article, you might come away with the impression that Kennedy is a grounded, qualified person trying to fix a real problem in how we let pharmaceutical companies run rampant — which I think is a genuine issue that resonates with the public — but it completely neglects to point out that Kennedy is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who will make everything worse. But that’s NPR for you.

If you’d like a more accurate perspective on the consequences of Kennedy running the bioscientific and medical establishment, read Science magazine.

Public health researchers are alarmed, especially given Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines. “I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told CNN.

Numerous critics of Kennedy have weighed in with concerns. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine expert Paul Offit told CNN Kennedy is a “science denialist.” Even Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during Trump’s presidency, said at a meeting this week that if Kennedy discourages people from getting vaccines, “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health,” economy, and security.

“We’re all in a state of panic,” this person added. “The damage that he can do is enormous. I don’t know anybody who isn’t worried about this.”

But then, Science isn’t in the business of spooning comforting pablum into the mouths of the well-off.

It’s not just the op-eds — the Times is doing it in ostensibly straight news coverage now:

Most child health experts are adamantly opposed to scaling back fluoridation or immunizations, saying such changes would harm health and trigger outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases.

But many do not reject Mr. Kennedy’s primary diagnosis: There is a child health crisis in America.

“On this particular point he’s right,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.

“But many do not reject Il Duce’s primary diagnosis: there is a train scheduling crisis in Italy.”

Seriously. what the hell is this? Who cares if RFK Jr. has broadly identified a problem if his solutions would make things vastly worse? Like the op-ed Paul discussed yesterday, the idea that if some lunatic SHAKES THINGS UP it can somehow be manipulated to work out in a sensible way you prefer is the kind of logic that leads to President Donald J. Trump in the first place, and unless your top priorities are longstanding priorities of the Republican Party like abortion bans or tax cuts it never works.

One particularly insidiuous sanewashing technique — which this article uses with respect to RFK Jr.s’s crank views on fluoridation, and yet another Times article does straight-up — is to describe RFK Jr. as a vaccine “skeptic”:

At darker moments, contesting this kind of stuff in the wake of the 2024 election—and all the shameless, shameful, unforgivable work the American media did to produce that election’s outcome—feels as absurd as demanding the cannibal presently eating your legs use a knife and fork. In less dark moments, that contestation feels like just about the only form hope can take. The language still exists. Maybe someone will need it, someday, to accomplish some good in the world, while the world still exists. If that’s ever to be possible, then our language has to retain some usefulness, too. It has to be tended.

“Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to be Head of Health and Human Services Dept.,” reads the New York Times headline from Thursday, atop a story by health policy reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about, well, pretty much what the headline says. We’re fine up to that point. Then there’s the subhed (emphasis mine): “Whether the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has unorthodox views about medicine, is an open question.” That formulation repeats in the lead paragraph…

“Vaccine skeptic.” “Vaccine skepticism.” What the fuck are we talking about here? I would rather chew through my own wrist like Shelly in The Evil Dead than deploy one of those “Merriam-Webster defines ‘skepticism’ as …” sentences in a blog. I won’t damn do it. But you don’t often encounter a word being used to describe its exact opposite in the pages of one of the English language’s most prominent publications. It’s difficult to imagine a place where you might encounter that sort of usage. That’s not really how language works.

What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They’re the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.

There is no such thing as an adult “vaccine skeptic” in the year 2024. For all its factual value as a label, you might just as accurately call R.F.K. Jr. an esquilax. Any reasonable questions that a skeptical, critical-minded person might have about how and whether vaccines work can be answered by more hard, clear evidence than a person could exhaust in a year of nonstop research. To practice skepticism in this case, to approach the science of vaccination with a skeptic’s demands, is to learn that vaccines work, and that vaccination as a practice has done incalculable good for humanity. The idea of a “vaccine skeptic” in 2024 is as nonsensical as the idea of a germ theory skeptic. A molecular biology skeptic. A heliocentricity skeptic. A spherical triangle.

The mainstream political press is going to help RFK Jr. bring back polio, because the alternative would be to imply that Donald Trump is totally unfit to be president, and I mean he didn’t use a private email server or something.

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Obviously, the anger people felt about inflation was real. But it’s also true that there are a lot of voters who simply won’t give a Democratic president any credit for good economic performance for reasons unrelated to objective conditions:

Republicans are feeling positive about the economy for the first time in four years, while the Democratic vibes have plunged, per new data from Morning Consult.

Why it matters: Consumer sentiment used to reflect current economic conditions, but for the past several years it’s grown increasingly political.

• Put plainly, when your person is in the White House, or about to be, you feel good and hopeful about the economy. When you’re on the outs, not so much.

How it works: Morning Consult measures sentiment by asking people questions about both current economic conditions (good or bad?) and their expectations for the future ( better or worse?).

By the numbers: Heading into the election, Republican consumer sentiment, as measured by the index, was at about 83 overall— any number under 100 indicates negativity. Now, a week post-Trump victory, it’s at 107.5.

• Democrat sentiment heading into Election day was 116; now it’s at 100.
• Overall sentiment (with everyone included) is higher, and is into positive territory for the first time since June 2021, as the GOP cheer offsets the Democratic gloom.

The asymmetry in the last point is the real key, and constitutes one of the structural advantages that allow Republicans to be very competitive nationally despite.a generally unpopular agenda.

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I heard from a couple of friends today about how fraught their holiday plans are getting.

Kim told me that things are difficult because her parents were hardcore lifelong Democrats — both of them are retired public school teachers — until at some point in the Obama administration, at which point her father went hard right because Obama was going to take away all the guns. (He’s a hunter, grew up on a farm in the Midwest, and has spent his adult life in the Colorado mountains about a half hour from Vail. I gather her mom has pretty much just followed his lead.) They’ve gotten Trumpy enough that they actually drove the “Trump train” at some rally in their small Colorado town awhile back. Meanwhile Kim’s mother in law hates Trump passionately, gets all her news from MSNBC — two guesses on where Kim’s parents get their news and the first one doesn’t count — and is supposed to get together with her daughter’s parents for Thanksgiving (BTW there’s a word for this precise relationship in Spanish — consuegros — which doesn’t exist in English, so we have to get by with the more general term “in-laws”). So that sounds like it could be lots of fun.

Then there’s this from another friend:

My Mom and step dad are Trumpers. The worst kind – the ones who know better and say how they hate his character but like his policies, etc. etc. I’ve gotten into it several times with them and we agreed to just not talk about it with the election going on.

The election happens and I find out that my wife and my 13 year old have been faking calmness the entire time and are incredibly messed up by it, especially my 13 year old. To the extent that she does not want to talk or see my mom or step dad right now.

So, my mom reaches out a few times with minor stuff. I ignore her. Then she texts myself and my sister yesterday wanting our kids to come over soon.

I realize that I need to try to be mature somewhat tell her what is going on. I workshop 10 different versions of a text before settling this morning on “I’m going to be honest- after tuesday, our family needs time and space to be alone. If we get together right now it would not go well. Not trying to make things worse, but we need space.’

Literally as watered down as I could make it.

And my mother, bless her heart, is now having a total meltdown and accusing us of holding her grandkids hostage and choosing politics over family and saying she’s done with us, etc.

As I suspected, she’s making herself the victim when honestly myself and my sister are trying to not make things worse and damage things irreparably.

I don’t really have a point, just bitching.

Honestly – I could probably be around them and likely keep my mouth shut. I’d hate it, and I don’t want to – but I could do it.

But my 13 year old daughter literally does not want to see them – and I’m trying to not permanently damage things by telling my mom that.

These stories got me thinking more about Biden’s White House meeting with Trump yesterday, and the more I think about it the more I’m appalled by this kind of thing. Precisely because these kinds of customary social practices reflect no legal requirement of any kind, they are more symbolically meaningful than a law, say, that would require the outgoing president to attend the inauguration of his successor.

I’m going to be equally if not more appalled if Barack and Michelle and Bill and Hillary show up in their finery on January 20th, which I suppose they will, because there’s a club and we’re not in it.

Good comment about this from Lex Lugar:

I said this on the other thread but whatever the merits of peaceful transfers of power, you just can’t tell people 20 times a week saying that their money is urgently needed to forestall a fascist takeover and then meet amicably with the fascists when you lose.

I know very normie Democratic voters, not firebrands, not “genocide Joe” protesters, not Jill Stein leftier than thou dilettantes, who view this as a personal betrayal.

We’re in other clubs though, and the question of what sorts of social customs and practices should be maintained in a midst of a fascist/authoritarian takeover that 50% of the electorate voted for (50.2% as of this morning, but that will probably drop another tenth of a percent or three by the time California finishes counting) is going to a very difficult one for a lot of people.

The post Thanksgiving with the fascists appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It’s not often that I find myself both rooting for a contender in the UK’s Booker Prize, and discovering that my choice has actually won, but both happened last night when Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was declared the 2024 winner. The Booker has a reputation for favoring the literary and quotidian—the stereotypical limpidly-written novel of middle-class ennui and middle-aged infidelity. This is neither unearned nor always a bad thing. Winners like Milkman by Anna Burns or Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo are surely among the top novels of the 21st century. But as a result its circle of plausible winners can often seem a bit limited. I think that most watchers of the award would have expected this year’s prize to go to Percival Everett’s James—in which an acknowledged master who has been experiencing a late-career resurgence on page and screen tackles one of core works of the American canon—or Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake—in which hot-button issues of climate change, inequality, and the suppression of protest are discussed through a seductive blend of literary style and thriller convention. (For a more in-depth look at the shortlist check out this excellent essay by Dan Hartland.) For Orbital, a slim, virtually plotless novella about a single day on board the International Space Station, to triumph over these heavy hitters is as unexpected as it is delightful.

It’s also a choice that gratifies genre readers like myself. Despite its stuffy reputation, the Booker has been showing more interest in the fantastical genres in recent years. The 2022 winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, is an energetic romp through 1990s Colombo that is strewn with ghosts evading an afterlife bureaucracy straight out of Defending Your Life or A Matter of Life and Death. Last year Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, which is basically a more literary version of Carl Sagan’s Contact, and which also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, was longlisted for the prize. And in 2021 the International Booker Prize, which recognizes work in translation, shortlisted Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which takes place on a spaceship orbiting an alien planet. Harvey’s novel, though set in the present day and featuring no fantastical elements, chimes with a lot of the concerns of modern science fiction (it makes for an interesting paired read with In Ascension, for example). It’s about people who dedicate themselves to pushing back the boundaries of science and human endeavor, and it takes a systemic, science-based view of the world that feels fundamental to how a lot of science fiction writers approach their subject. Not for nothing was it shortlisted earlier this year for the newly-established Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

My review of Orbital, published on my blog earlier this year, is below. Rereading it, I find that the novel has stayed with me all these months. I hope it finds even more readers, now that it has the imprimatur of both the literary and genre establishment.

More a prose poem than a novel, Harvey’s slim, evocative volume is a minutely detailed description of one day aboard the International Space Station. Divided into chapters according to the station’s orbits around the Earth (sixteen in one day), the novel delves into both the personal and the mechanical with equal degrees of sensitivity and emotional remove. We learn about the station’s routines, the compromises and indignities of life in zero gravity, and the mechanics of maintaining the station and caring for the—far from pristine, in fact practically messy—space around it. Back on Earth, a mega-typhoon is forming, which the astronauts observe with dismay. Meanwhile, passing by and beyond the station, a just-launched rocket bids to deliver the first manned lunar mission in decades.

Orbital shifts between the points of view of the station’s six astronauts—two Russians, and four American-backed from various countries. We learn about their lives—Japanese Chie has recently been rocked by the news of her mother’s death, and is musing about her parents’ history and how it inspired her to go into space; Englishwoman Nell exchanges emails with her husband even as she acknowledges that she has no idea what his life looks like, having spent only a few months together during the four years of her training. As they conduct experiments, perform repairs, collect garbage, and observe the aging station’s messiness and disrepair, they frequently muse about the contrast between the grandeur of space travel in the abstract, and its mundane realities. Their days are spent careening between awe at the sights they’ve seen and the experiences they’ve gotten to have, resigned frustration at the cramped, smelly quarters and physical discomfort of life aboard the station, and recognition of the tremendous costs they’ve accepted for this rare opportunity—separation from their families, long-term physical effects of low gravity and radiation. All of them are aware that they are doing something objectively absurd, but also can’t shake their belief that it is profoundly meaningful. Their intense disconnect from the Earth and the rest of humanity causes them to muse about their place in both, about humanity’s conflicting impulses towards destruction and sublime achievement, and about their own internal contradictions—as soon as they’ve achieved the thing they’ve been working towards for decades, they immediately turn back and think about what they’ve left behind.

Orbital, however, is not purely a novel of character. The narrative slips into the astronauts’ minds with ease, but it just as easily leaves them behind. It lets us see them as individuals, but just as often regards them as a singular whole, ultimately no different from any of the people who preceded them on the station, or who will follow them in the future—people who have probably had the same observations about how annoying it is to go to the bathroom in zero gravity, or the mingled freedom and terror of EVA. Just as frequently, the novel pulls back from character entirely, telling us about the workings of the station, the movement of the typhoon, or simply cataloguing the progression of those sixteen orbits and the parts of the planet they overfly.

With a god’s-eye view of the planet, Harvey muses poetically, and yet also with dry precision, about the image of the Earth from space, its shifting colors as the sun sets and rises, the landmasses that emerge and drift away, the typhoon as it forms and heads towards land. The narrative is full of geographical, technical, and historical detail, which creates a somewhat documentary effect, so dry and factual that readers will be expecting something dramatic to happen—for something to go wrong with the lunar mission, for the typhoon to have even more catastrophic effects than anticipated, or something even worse and more unexpected. There is a sense here of a calm before the storm. Eventually, however, one realizes that it is that calm—which is, of course, deceptive, concealing as it does ordinary human ferment and frustration—that is the point. As the station sails around and around the Earth, as its inhabitants are caught between wonder and tedium, and as the whole project of human spaceflight—of human endeavor, really—carries on, Orbital carries us confidently towards its conclusion, which is really just the beginning of another day.

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