News bits: Ancient human footprints; Normalizing the banality of crazy

The WaPo writes:

Ancient footprints upend timeline of humans’ arrival in North America

New evidence adds to work showing people made these prints sometime between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago

Two years ago, a team of scientists came to the conclusion that human tracks sunk into the mud in White Sands National Park in New Mexico were more than 21,000 years old. The provocative finding threatened the dominant thinking on when and how people migrated into the Americas. Soon afterward, a technical debate erupted about the method used to estimate the age of the tracks, which relied on an analysis of plant seeds embedded with the footprints.

Now, a study published in the journal Science confirms the initial finding with two new lines of evidence: thousands of grains of pollen and an analysis of quartz crystals in the sediments.  

The thousands of footprints found in White Sands are an extraordinary but evanescent record of life around Lake Otero, the body of water that rested inside the basin during the Pleistocene. The ancient tracks are the remnants of complex interactions. Children played. Humans stalked giant sloths. A person walked a mile, carrying a child and placing them down occasionally.  

Fossil footprints were first seen in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin in the early 1930s and were initially thought to be evidence of a bigfoot, said David F. Bustos, a resource program manager at White Sands National Park. They turned out to be from a giant ground sloth, a 2,000-pound mammal that went extinct around 10,000 years ago. Researchers also found tracks from trudging mammoths, a dire wolf and other ice age creatures.

The WaPo reports that some experts are still not convinced the footprints are that old, but conceded this new analysis makes the age assessment significantly more plausible. Bustos commented about the skepticism “it was hard to believe that humans could be walking along with the mammoth prints nearby, and that the prints could be of the same age.”  

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

A WaPo article postulates that the increasingly deranged, violent rhetoric from Trump and far radical right authoritarian Republicans is normalizing crazy:

After eight years of Trump in politics, is a ‘banality of crazy’ setting in?

Last week, the Republican Party’s leading presidential candidate proposed executing suspected shoplifters.

“Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” former president Donald Trump said in Anaheim, Calif., outlining his vision for a second term at the convention of the state’s Republican Party. As the audience applauded, laughed and cheered, Trump added for emphasis, “Shot!”

The Anaheim speech was part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive rhetoric by Trump — and a somewhat muted response by the news media to his repeated exhortations to violence.

During his speech in Anaheim, Trump also mocked Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, who was gravely injured last year in a hammer attack by an assailant who reportedly believed the former president’s lies about a “stolen” 2020 election.

A few days before his appearance in California, Trump suggested on his Truth Social platform that the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, deserved “DEATH!” for reassuring Chinese officials that the United States had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration.

He has also hinted darkly about seeking retribution against judges, prosecutors, witnesses and officials involved in his multiple criminal and civil cases. In April, Trump said that an indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg (D) would result in “potential death and destruction.” On Monday, facing a civil suit alleging business fraud, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James (D), the New York state attorney general who filed the suit.

The latest comment received only scattered attention.

Trump’s intimations of violence have received relatively less press coverage because they have become so routine, said Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London. Klaas says this reflects “the banality of crazy” — a tendency for the news media to ignore or downplay statements once considered shocking but which now, due to repetition, are taken more for granted.

“Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, [journalists] have lost all sense of scale and perspective,” Klaas wrote in the Atlantic last week, in a headline that felt both jarring and unsurprising: “Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.” Klaas continued: “But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power.”

Qs: Is there such a thing as a moderate Republican in view of the behavior and rhetoric coming from the ARRRP and its leaders? What about all of these decent, otherwise normal rank and file Republicans who are deceived and cannot see or accept that they support corrupt, bigoted dictatorship -- are they moderates?

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

Anecdote: A couple of opinions in the WaPo today argue, e.g., that there is such a thing as “moderate Republicans”, the Dems should have saved McCarthy's speakership and Dems need to step up to fill the sanity gap that arose with the collapse of the ARRRP into total violence-fomenting insanity and moral breakdown. 

FWIW, most of the comments I looked at to those opinions push back hard. They reject blame shifting to Dems for the breakdown of government and democracy that radical right authoritarians have intentionally created. 

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

In a morality-focused opinion piece, another source notes the pro-violence rhetoric rising in Musk's X hellscape:

The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X

The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users 

A video of [a horrific public murder], obtained initially by the New York Post, was soon seized upon by one of X’s newest “stars” — one of those users who has thrived under the new Elon Musk regime at the former Twitter. His feed (which I will not publicize) is a stream of incendiary incidents from around the world, posted several times a day to an audience that is approaching a million followers.

I don’t follow this account, but X’s algorithm makes absolutely sure that I see what it has to say. A senseless murder is apparently a content opportunity not to be missed. The user’s post on Tuesday contained all the ingredients for success: It was timely. It was shocking. It was an innocent 32-year-old man dying on the streets of New York City. It was a chance, duly taken, to write an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming.

.... I watched as the video clocked 1 million views, then 2 million. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.  

.... it’s time to step back as an engaged user, one who for the past decade has posted several times a day and scrolled countless times more. My eyeballs are no longer for sale to Musk and whatever grotesque content he wants to serve up in front of them.  

Decency long left the building at X. It flows from the very top. When former executive Yoel Roth, whom Musk wrongly accused of being a pedophile, warned recently about hate speech on X, CEO Linda Yaccarino’s first reaction was to play down his concerns. On Monday, Musk followed up: “I have rarely seen evil in as pure a form as Yoel Roth.”