skeptict

[skeptict]

Two notes, Aug 26 & 27

August 26, 2022

James Risen sees danger in the GOP

Elvis Costello in 1980 calls Ray Charles, James Brown, niggers.

Via 

Too long on tour, too many drugs, too much drink. Fatigue and irritation on a mammoth scale. A scenario common to the vocation which rarely comes to good. And there were the Attractions: stranded in an Ohio hotel bar with castoffs from the love generation. “Whatever the larger argument,” Costello recollected in his 2015 memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, “the petty sniping over a few cocktails soon escalated from snide remarks to unspeakable slanders. I’ll have to take the word of witnesses that I really used such despicable racial slurs in the same sentence as two of the greatest musicians that ever lived, but whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight and finally put the lights out.”

[…]

“Does anything else that I’ve done in the other 59 years and 525,550 minutes suggest that I harbor suppressed racist beliefs?”

August 27, 2022

Via The Economist https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief

Officials in Pakistan said that the death toll from floods after heavy monsoon rains that have afflicted the country since mid-June had risen to nearly 1,000. In appealing for international help on Friday, the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said that 33m of Pakistan’s 230m people had been affected by the floods.

Heat and drought in China

The end of summer cannot come soon enough for tens of millions of residents in the megacities of Chengdu and Chongqing. For weeks Sichuan province in south-west China has experienced record-breaking heat. Temperatures are supposed to cool at the end of August—but much of the damage is already done.

The energy system has been strained by greater demand and weaker supply. A drought reduced hydroelectric output by about 50% year on year in the province. Industry has been hit hard. Provincial officials have been forced to tell thousands of manufacturers to cease production. That includes important multinationals such as Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, and Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics group that supplies Apple. The load-shedding ended on August 25th. But the power crunch, the second in as many years, has raised serious questions about China’s ability to cope with the effects of climate change.

[skeptict]

[skeptict]

why isn’t there a short film based on the thing where diana wynne jones refused to drop out of tolkien’s college class even though he was intentionally making it as boring and dense and unintelligible as possible so that everyone would drop out and he could get out of teaching it and write lotr instead. just imagine the potential of a 1940s Female College Student sitting in an empty classroom with Secretly Furious professor resentfully lecturing a meandering incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness inner monologue about The Structure of Narrative to this kid determined to get her money’s worth out of this chump. and them both getting way more personal and intellectual development out of this song-and-dance than they thought they would. hey guys why isn’t there a

[skeptict]

Hold On Loosely

I was walking the dogs this morning and as often happens, a song from my early years came into my stream of thought. I replayed it in my head, laughing at it and feeling smug. And, as happens, I realized once again that you can’t escape your roots.

Princess Leia warns Tarkin that the more he tightens his grip, the more will slip through his fingers. The singer of “Hold On Loosely” recalls similar advice:

… my mind goes back to a girl I met Some years ago who told me Just hold on loosely But don’t let go If you cling too tightly You’re gonna lose control

Princess Leia wasn’t, of course, advocating that the Empire “hold on” at all, but in my mind the one phrase recalled the other.

I think 38 Special came along in a transitional period of pop music. My memories are vague. They were “country flavored” and wore cowboy hats, but I don’t know anything about music history — they remind me of Michael MacDonald or Bob Seger, post yacht rock stuff. When I saw one of their music videos I remember them having something like six guitar players and two drummers, but I don’t trust my recollections. They looked like their music, anyway.

As a side note, I recall being disappointed when I finally saw pictures of Molly Hatchet. After seeing their album covers, how could it not be a let down to see that they were not Nordic adventurers wielding battle axes?

Anyway. The song starts with the hook:

You see it all around you Good lovin’ gone bad And usually it’s too late when you Realize what you had

And then switches immediately to the chorus, and after that into a bridge of sorts… It keeps switching up, hook after hook. There’s not really much to the song after that, just variations on what came before, but it all must have hit my psyche at a formative time, because it remains there to this day.

In any event, I listened to it this morning, and enjoyed it thoroughly, not ironically. The guitar solos at the end were satisfying in a way I hadn’t anticipated. And as so often happens I found more seeds of my musical tastes that I’ve since forgotten.

(I’m reminded that they also did “Rockin’ Into The Night,” which is more like T-Rex or Kiss, but similarly formative for me.)

[skeptict]

It's a challenge for humans not to see a puppy jumping on them as an "I love you" or a "hug." The truth is, sometimes puppies are just anxious, and they have learned that if they jump on the human, the human will pick them up and bring them toward them and calm them down. A lot of people say, "Well, as soon as I pick him up, he calms down." Unfortunately, this is a Band-Aid solution. The behavior you want to remove is not gone. It's only put on pause. When you stop a puppy and scoop her up in the middle of an anxious moment, you are never allowing her to develop the vital life skill of learning to calm herself down, on the ground. As always, I advocate that prevention is the best medicine. You can avert a jumping-up problem from day one by practicing the simplicity of the no touch, no talk, no eye contact rule whenever you first greet your puppy. This sends a calming signal and helps a puppy to stay focused on her nose. Her nose will keep her on the ground, and her eyes and ears will react differently. Chris and Johanna Komives took the prevention route with Eliza from day one, and the results have paid off. "We don't give affection if she's jumping on us. We wait until she's seated (or better, goes to her place) before acknowledging her when we return from work.

How to Raise the Perfect Dog, Cesar Millan, p. 231

#dog

[skeptict]

NYTimes: George Lucas Criticizes Latest ‘Star Wars’ Installment This makes me sad.

[skeptict]

Visual Guide To Marvel Character Movie Rights

This is a great chart. It’s a handy way to explain to people why Spider-Man hasn’t sown up in any Avengers movies (despite being an Avenger) and why there are so many X-Men stand alone movies (because Fox needs something).

It’s the shared rights that confuse me a little. Universal has Namor? What are you going to do with Namor all by himself? Also the Scarlet Witch / Quicksilver thing is odd. They’re mutants, but Marvel won’t be allowed to call them Mutants in Avengers 2.

I’m probably going to link back to this a lot as I continue to rant about the mistreatment of Spider-Man in film.

[via Laughing Squid]

[skeptict]

Remote control robot

[skeptict]

New York Times reporter James Risen, via Twitter.

James Risen recently won the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Journalism Award for excellence in journalism.

The Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporter has long been hounded by the US Justice Department to disclose his confidential sources from his 2006 book State of War.

As the Washington Post wrote back in August, “Prosecutors want Mr. Risen’s testimony in their case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official who is accused of leaking details of a failed operation against Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Risen properly has refused to identify his source, at the risk of imprisonment. Such confidential sources are a pillar of how journalists obtain information. If Mr. Risen is forced to reveal the identity of a source, it will damage the ability of journalists to promise confidentiality to sources and to probe government behavior.”

While accepting the Lovejoy Award, Risen had this to say:

The conventional wisdom of our day is the belief that we have had to change the nature of our society to accommodate the global war on terror. Incrementally over the last thirteen years, Americans have easily accepted a transformation of their way of life because they have been told that it is necessary to keep them safe. Americans now slip off their shoes on command at airports, have accepted the secret targeted killings of other Americans without due process, have accepted the use of torture and the creation of secret offshore prisons, have accepted mass surveillance of their personal communications, and accepted the longest continual period of war in American history. Meanwhile, the government has eagerly prosecuted whistleblowers who try to bring any of the government’s actions to light.

Americans have accepted this new reality with hardly a murmur. Today, the basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in American politics is to accept the legitimacy of the new national security state that has been created since 9/11. The new basic American assumption is that there really is a need for a global war on terror. Anyone who doesn’t accept that basic assumption is considered dangerous and maybe even a traitor.

Today, the U.S. government treats whistleblowers as criminals, much like Elijah Lovejoy, because they want to reveal uncomfortable truths about the government’s actions. And the public and the mainstream press often accept and champion the government’s approach, viewing whistleblowers as dangerous fringe characters because they are not willing to follow orders and remain silent.

The crackdown on leaks by first the Bush administration and more aggressively by the Obama administration, targeting both whistleblowers and journalists, has been designed to suppress the truth about the war on terror. This government campaign of censorship has come with the veneer of the law. Instead of mobs throwing printing presses in the Mississippi River, instead of the creation of the kind of “enemies lists” that President Richard Nixon kept, the Bush and Obama administrations have used the Department of Justice to do their bidding. But the effect is the same — the attorney general of the United States has been turned into the nation’s chief censorship officer. Whenever the White House or the intelligence community get angry about a story in the press, they turn to the Justice Department and the FBI and get them to start a criminal leak investigation, to make sure everybody shuts up.

What the White House wants is to establish limits on accepted reporting on national security and on the war on terror. By launching criminal investigations of stories that are outside the mainstream coverage, they are trying to, in effect, build a pathway on which journalism can be conducted. Stay on the interstate highway of conventional wisdom with your journalism, and you will have no problems. Try to get off and challenge basic assumptions, and you will face punishment.

Journalists have no choice but to fight back, because if they don’t they will become irrelevant.

Bonus: The NSA and Me, James Bamford’s account of covering the agency over the last 30 years, via The Intercept.

Double Bonus: Elijah Parish Lovejoy was a minister in the first half of the 19th century who edited an abolitionist paper called the St. Louis Observer. He was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837. More via Wikipedia.

Images: Selected tweets via James Risen.

[skeptict]

"He makes me want to know about little things, so that I can teach him. Like when we sit by this lake, I wish I knew what kind of turtle that was, so I could tell him. And I want to figure out what kind of duck that is, so I can tell him all about it the next time we come." "What do you want most for him?" "Whatever his dreams are, I’m down to ride for him." "What’s your biggest fear for him?" "That he won’t try. If he doesn’t try, I’ll be hurt. Cause then we’ll never know how far he’d get."

[skeptict]

[skeptict]

Try it.

*Tenorion musical web toy.

http://jabtunes.com/labs/jtenorion.html

[skeptict]

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

The ICC will probe possible war crimes in the Central African Republic.

Fighters in Nigeria’s Boko Haram drive fear in neighboring Cameroon.

The number of refugees fleeing violence in South Sudan nears 2 million.

French mountaineering guide Herve Gourdel was beheaded by Jund al-Khilafah, an Algerian extremist group who has aligned themselves with ISIS.

The Syrian army has overrun the town of Adra al-Omalia, about 30km from Damascus.

A great visual guide to ongoing strikes in Iraq and Syria. 

The British debate joining the airstrikes.

The Al-Nusra Front leader Abu Yousef al-Turki was reportedly killed in strikes.

International law and strikes inside Syria - from Just Security.

The UAE’s bombing mission against ISIS targets was led by its first female fighter pilot, Mariam al-Mansouri. Fox News correspondents later joked that she represented “boobs on the ground”* and that she had probably been unable to park her jet. 

A newly-discussed terrorist element, Khorasan, appeared in the news this week. Khorasan is often misleadingly characterized in reports as a separate terrorist group, but this AP report is a really comprehensive explanation of who these people are.

The White House has said that any ISIS prisoners captured will not end up in Guantánamo.

The main theme of President Obama’s speech at the UN this week was ISIS and the plans to combat them.

The US believes about 20 to 30 Americans are currently fighting in Syria. 

Sameera Salih Ali al-Nuaimy, an Iraqi lawyer who fought for women’s rights, was executed by an ISIS firing squad after several days of torture — another instance of the group’s targeting of professional women.

The IAEA rejected an Arab bid to push Israel to sign the global anti-nuclear weapons pact. 

Hamas and Fatah have reached an understanding that paves the way for a unity government.

Radical cleric Abu Qatada was acquitted of terrorism charges in a Jordanian court.

The US has ordered some diplomats out of Yemen. Is the country on the brink of civil war?

Adam Baron on the myth of the “Yemen model” of counterterrorism.

Ashraf Ghani is now officially Afghanistan’s president-elect. 

Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan seized the Ajrestan district of Ghazni province Thursday night, killing 70 people.

A suspected drone strike killed 10 Uzbek and Pakistani militants near the border with Afghanistan on Wednesday. 

Photographer Massimo Berruti documents the injuries and traumas of victims of drone strikes.

The US transferred 14 Pakistani prisoners from military detention to Pakistani custody.

Human Rights Watch calls out abuses of political prisoners in Uzbekistan.

50 people were reported killed in Xinjiang last Sunday in what Chinese police are calling an act of terrorism.

The US is preparing to ease the Vietnam arms embargo.

Pro-Ukrainian residents remaining in the east live in a world of intense scrutiny and propaganda.

Latvia fears Kremlin aggression.

Hungary suspended gas supplies to Ukraine.

The Treasury Dept named 12 Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Interpol is expanding its foreign fighters database.

The FBI has identified the killer responsible for the beheadings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines, but is not revealing that information to the public.

The US is undergoing a major atomic renewal, an overhaul and update of its nuclear weapons systems (despite previous ideas floated about disarmament).

The Boston bombing trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been delayed two months. 

Elliott Ackerman wrote a beautiful essay for The New Yorker about the two photos marking a beginning and a kind of end for his war.

*As well as being sexists, Fox correspondents also apparently do not have the greatest grasp of the difference between aerial bombing and ground warfare.

Photo: Suruc, Turkey. Syrian Kurd refugees gather at the Syrian-Turkish border. Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

[skeptict]

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Arthur C. Clarke, Hazards of Prophecy

This is Clarke’s Law

(via stoweboyd)

Nice.  Nice reminder of the nature of our world.

[skeptict]

CU Boulder’s Paul Ohm writes about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender...

[skeptict]

Hyperlapse is fun. Everyone will take this for granted in a month, but this is impressive technology.

[skeptict]

[There is a] stubborn power of politeness over time. Over time. That’s the thing. Mostly we talk about politeness in the moment. Please, thank you, no go ahead, I like your hat, cool shoes, you look nice today, please take my seat, sir, ma’am, etc. All good, but fleeting. […] Here’s a polite person’s trick, one that has never failed me… When you are at a party and are thrust into conversation with someone, see how long you can hold off before talking about what they do for a living. And when that painful lull arrives, be the master of it. I have come to revel in that agonizing first pause, because I know that I can push a conversation through. Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.”

I have my reservations about politeness as a kind of vacant template for communication that lacks human intimacy – a shabby substitute for authentic kindness – but Paul Ford’s essay on how to be polite is worth a read.

In many ways, it all boils down to the basic do’s and don’ts laid out in this 1866 guide to the art of conversation – an art, it seems, that remains timeless.

(via explore-blog)