Loren King

@lorenking.org

1405 Followers 924 Following

"Ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross" Dad, professor, marathon swimmer. Not nearly as smart as @kimdej.bsky.social @lorenking@mstdn.ca @lorenking.gander.social www.lorenking.org www.greatlakestrust.org

Adventure athlete Madhu Nagaraja and 2026 International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame inductee Andrew Donaldson, in conversation about marathon swimming and life: "I think I used to be very driven by results, coming from that competitive pool swimming background where it's very much compare and compete versus celebrate and collaborate. That was a lesson I learned very quickly when doing these these major channels, that the result is not in your control ... if I look back at my career, the swims I'm most proud of aren't the records. It's it's the ones where we found a way to keep going. ... no one's self-made. No one can go these and do these huge things on their own."
A sailboat on Hamilton Harbour
The Hamilton Spectator Opinion | Why universities need more public funding, not less Name a technology vital to our lives. Chances are exceedingly high it originated in pure research conducted at a university. Updated Jan. 25, 2025 at 6:02 a.m. The Fraser Institute’s Matthew Lau has recently opined in these pages that universities may not in fact provide broader public benefits. Indeed, Lau suggests ominously that they may instead generate “negative externalities.” The idea of an externality is drawn from economics. Negative externalities are familiar from recent debates over fossil fuels and climate change — the growth of wealthy industrialized economies has resulted in climate costs largely borne by poorer countries, who didn’t cause the problem. Lau wonders if universities might have comparable negative consequences for society. The evidence: a “search of news reports on York University in the past year, in addition to many stories on its faculty strikes,” which, he hints ominously, suggest that “universities today might well do more public harm than public good.” Hardly the stuff of serious academic research in economics.
Garmin GPS boat track of Loren King's recent Ka'iwi Channel swim between Oahu and Molokai. 47.2km covered in 13 hours 18 minutes and 55 seconds.
A selection of comments on a YouTube post of Angine de Poitrine performing live at ESMA in Rennes, France, during Trans Musicales 2025 ... "I can't even remember what type of music I was into before. Now it's just this." "This is how John and Yoko thought they sounded." "AI: Humans are done with music Angine de Poitrine: Hold my triangular Martian beer" "30 seconds in: "this is fucking stupid" 18 minutes in: "this is the greatest musical performance of the century" ..." "This is what happens when you divide by zero."
BASIC INCOME STUDIES An International Journal of Basic Income Research Vol. 6, Issue 1 RESEARCH ARTICLE June 2011 Winner of the 2010 BIS Essay Prize The Basic Income Road to Reforming Iran’s Price Subsidies* Hamid Tabatabai Independent Researcher Abstract – Iran has become the first country in the world to provide a de facto basic income to all its citizens. This article reviews the development of the main component of Iran’s economic reform plan – the replacement of fuel and food subsidies with direct cash transfers to the population – and shows how a system of universal, regular and unconditional cash transfers emerged almost by default as a by-product of an attempt to transform an inefficient and unfair system of price subsidies. The main features of the cash subsidy system are compared with those of a basic income; then some lessons from this experience are drawn that may enhance the prospects of basic income as a realistic proposition. Keywords – basic income, Iran, price subsidies, reform
16 July 2017 email from Peter Attia to Jeffrey Epstein, stating "Would love you to meet Sabatini", Subject line being "Talk at MIT is Aug 2. Hope you can make it!"
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies The Melian Dialogue of Donald Trump J.F.Keeley 7 April 2025 In 216 BCE, the forces of the Athenian Empire attacked and destroyed the city of Melos, killing the men and selling the women and children into slavery. Before this, however, they called upon the Melians to surrender and become a tributary, or to face the consequences. The Melian leaders disputed the Athenian threats and arguments in what has become justly and darkly famous, in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, as the Melian Dialogue.1 In that, the Athenians from the start called on the Melians not to resort to fancy arguments about right or “justice” but merely to address likely consequences. ... ... The last phrase is sometimes shortened to “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Yule cat installation in Reykjavík, Iceland. (Photo: L King Dec 2019)
A recent Jamelle Bouie thread (that got a bit of pushback largely due to word choices), weighing in on the admonition that 'giving up X means giving up influence', pointing out that social media "influence" and reach tend to correlate with heavy use of video-based platforms, and integration of messaging across video and text platforms.
"A timely concern with capitalism and democracy is that the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. Vast differences in wealth, and especially inherited wealth, tear apart any hopes for a shared civic project, making it difficult to avoid democratic politics swinging wildly between complacent elites insisting (from their yachts, and luxury suites in Davos) that rising tides lift all boats, while the ‘have nots’ seek out populist rulers willing to burn it all down (while quietly selling fire insurance … and flamethrowers). Think through this problem ..."
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on the ridiculous US "Peace" proposal for Russia and Ukraine: "Why is the Trump White House pushing Ukraine to accept a Russian plan that paves the way for another war? The document offers some hints, declaring that the U.S. would also somehow take charge of the $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, for example, supposedly to invest this money in Ukraine and receive "50% of the profits from this venture." Europeans, whose banks actually hold most of these assets, would receive nothing. European taxpayers, who currently provide almost all of the military and humanitarian support to Ukraine, are nevertheless expected to contribute $100 billion to Ukraine's reconstruction."
There is no question that American politics has had its fair share of corrupt acts and corrupt people. But the office of the presidency in particular has never seen anything like the petty jobbery and open malfeasance of Trump and the people around him. All misdeeds are not the same, and there is a real difference between the unseemly revolving door between business and government — the plum position on a corporate board or an easy lobbying gig — and a new status quo in which business leaders and heads of state give the president actual tribute in order to put themselves in the good graces of the White House.
Cover of James C Scott's Art of Not Being Governed (2009)
Somewhere in the English Channel
Sailing in Hamilton Harbour.
Aggressive California squirrel somehow sends to people to hospital, reported in the Guardian
The staggering success of vaccines, by Tara Haelle, Nature Innovations
"Calls for dialogue and discussion — for greater rates of encounter between the professional left and the professional right — make sense when there’s consensus over the character of the overall political order. If we all agree that we are part of a contest of equals — if we take the political equality of all groups and peoples for granted — then we can discuss any number of issues across ideological lines without rancor and needless division. But if the aim of one faction is to dominate all the others — if the explicit goal is to curb the rights of its opponents and force them to submit to conditions of political inequality — then discussion is less useful than a willingness to defend liberal society in the face of tyranny and despotism."
There are many problems with this statement, but Klein’s fundamental error reveals something much more dangerous: he’s mistaking performance for discourse, spectacle for persuasion. Kirk wasn’t showing up to campuses to “talk with anyone who would talk to him.” He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”
Ryan Gosling's character Jared Vennett in The Big Short (2015): "I never hung out with these idiots after work. Ever. I had fashion friends."
My two adorbs dogs, not yet submitted to We Rate Dogs.
The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a “civill Body Politick”—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won’t overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it’s the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights.
Globe and Mail: "Canada ‘caved’ to Trump’s digital services tax demands, White House says" (30 June 2025) Prime Minister Mark Carney “caved” to Donald Trump when he told the U.S. President during a Sunday phone call he would be scrapping Canada’s digital services tax on foreign tech giants, the White House said Monday. Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s chief spokeswoman, told a press briefing Monday that Mr. Carney telephoned Mr. Trump to inform him that Ottawa would be cancelling the tax, two days after Mr. Trump threatened to walk away from trade talks and impose retaliatory tariffs over the levy, and one day before the first payment of the tax was meant to be collected. “It’s very simple: Prime Minister Carney and Canada caved to President Trump and the United States of America,” Ms. Leavitt said. “The President made his position quite clear to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister called the President last night to let the President know that he would be dropping that tax.”