Leading experts warn of a risk of extinction from AI
Please, continue to put me in the "not at all convinced" column.
I mean, this is one of the dangers listed in the BBC report on the warning:
Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"
[Insert roll eyes emoji]
I noted last week that I cooked with Sichuan (or Szechuan) pepper for the first time, and I liked the result.
I didn't mention, though, that there was an issue with the pepper being gritty, which I assumed was the result of my not having ground the roasted pepper hard enough.
However, on further investigation, apparently you're supposed to remove the hard inner seed completely, as it will never be ground far enough to not feel "gritty" in the cooking. Despite initial appearances, these are not similar to peppercorns in any way, and you only use the (pretty light weight) outer shell, even though this seems like a pretty fiddly job when you have a packet of whole Sichuan pepper.
Learn something new every day.
Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who in 2020 accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, said on Tuesday she had defected to Russia.
“I’m still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik, a Russian press outlet supportive of President Vladimir Putin, while sitting with Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent jailed in the US but now a member of parliament in Russia.
From The Guardian.
Vietnam is turning off street lights and manufacturers are switching operations to off-peak hours to keep the national power system running amid record temperatures in some areas that have caused a surge in demand.
As weather officials warn the heatwave could run into June, several cities have cut back on public lighting and government offices have been urged to cut power use by a tenth after state utility EVN said the national grid faced strain in coming weeks.
"It's so harsh and hot outside that people have to wear protective clothing to cool down and not get burned," said Hanoi resident Tran Van Hung, 67.
Temperatures this week are expected to range between 26 degrees Celsius and 38 degrees Celsius, weather officials say.
To tackle the problem, Hanoi has shortened the duration of public lighting by an hour each day, while halving illumination on some major roads and in public parks.
"If people all save energy, all will have enough electricity to use, but if not, there will be a partial electrical overload that will put the power grid at risk," said Luong Minh Quan, an electrician with EVN in Hanoi.
Last week Vietnam called for electrical devices to be turned off when not in use, and for air-conditioning to be kept above 26 degrees Celsius.
I have to say, the second half of February was a pretty good time, weather wise, to be in Hanoi. March might be even better, if going to the seaside areas especially. But clearly, May is too late.
Last weekend was pretty irritating: our main refrigerator died, after lingering with what seemed to be decreasing cooling for quite a while. Turns out it wasn't just our terrible habit of loading up the thing with half used jars of pastes, pickles, jams and condiments of one type or another, only to throw them out a few years after their expiry date. I'm not joking: I found a large jar of home made, souped up soy sauce my wife had labelled in 2012! Maybe refrigerated soy sauce with plums in it lasts for more than a decade, but I did have approval to throw it out.
Anyway, looking for a new refrigerator, I have realised that the general design of them seems to have gotten deeper as the years go on. Already, the deceased fridge stuck out past the cabinetry it is beside; the new one is going to have 10 cm more protrusion. (Maybe it will come down to 5 cm, as we have left about a 10cm gap between the back of the current one and the wall, as you are supposed to do. I suspect that gap can be smaller without disaster, though.)
The other thing of interest is how many refrigerators come from China, and although they make some reasonable looking ones, I figure that these days, if you are buying any product for which you might want a spare part in even 5 or 10 years time, it feels a risk to be relying on having access to stuff from China in that period. I mean, I still don't care if I have a Chinese built phone - no one expects spare parts for them - but cars and whitegoods - you don't throw them out and just get a new one lightly.
Or is this why China might think it can invade Taiwan without long term consequence: it makes 90 million refrigerators a year, although I don't know how many of those are exported. "You can't keep your trade bans on us forever - you have millions of fridges needing spare parts, and people hate replacing fridges unless they really have to!"
But I'll be OK - the one I intend buying was built in Vietnam.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I finally watched the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix on the weekend.
I hadn't read any reviews, except I assumed that it must be OK to have had a Best Picture nomination.
I would rate it pretty highly, with some reservations which I see were shared with some critics, mainly to do with it having too light a touch on character development. The one we (eventually) get to feel closest to is not even the main character, and for the first 30 minutes, I wasn't even sure that the distant feeling given to characterisation was going to put me off the movie completely.
But it does improve in that regard, and the obscene pointlessness of the war is well made by the end.
It's depressing to think that, more than 100 years later, we can see watch aggression borne of militaristic nationalism causing pointless destruction in Ukraine:
* The late Tina Turner: pop music not being all that important to me, it's not like she was a performer I would ever have bothered seeing, and I rate her songs as being in the "inoffensive to sometimes catchy" range. But, she seems to have been a genuinely nice person, and I have to agree - the Rugby League marketing campaign featuring her and her songs was, like, probably the best campaign of its kind we will ever see in a lifetime? (And again, it's not as if Rugby League is important to me, even though I may watch about 3 games a year - it's just that the quality and likeability of that campaign was undeniable.)
* There seems to be an awful lot of gullible promotion of alleged evidence of UFO's lately. That Mick West manages to debunk most with relative ease, but there is still some kind of mystery going on, especially at sea, I reckon.
* This certainly belongs in the "funny because it's true" category:
* And although this is very old, in light of another Fast and Furious silly movie being released, this is also very amusing:
* Here's an idle thought: back in 1982, in ET, a kid wore big headphones while riding his bicycle and I think audiences were meant to, and did, take it as a geeky, not cool, look. Fast forward 40 years, and adults now walk around with headphones anywhere: in the supermarket, on the bus, etc; and no one - except me perhaps - seems to thinks it's a bad look. Discrete earphones I can handle, but headphones just look too anti-social to me. A "don't bother me, I'm in my own world" kinda vibe.
It seems that research on the benefit of taking supplementary vitamins (at least if you are a person with a reasonable diet and no obvious cause to have deficiencies) are pretty rarely positive, so it is a surprise to read this in the Washington Post:
It was the second such multivitamin clinical study within the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS) — a larger body of research examining the health effects of certain dietary supplements — to reach the same conclusion.
The most recent study found that those taking multivitamins showed an estimated 3.1 fewer years of memory loss compared with a control group who took a placebo. Put another way, the multivitamin group was an estimated 3.1 years “younger” in terms of their memory function than the placebo group.
The full report is here.
Former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters did a concert in Germany a few days ago, which featured this:
Roger Waters projected Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, leading Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical association to call for a ban on Waters’ performances in the country.
Observers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman known as a leader in the boycott Israel movement, has lumped Anne Frank together with Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in on-screen projections at concerts on his current tour. Abu Akleh was killed on an assignment in the West Bank last year.
The screen at Waters concerts also frequently shows a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with the logo of an Israeli armaments firm. He reportedly at times dons an SS uniform and symbolically shoots a machine gun into the crowd.
But - he's been doing this for years, as it would seem this report is from 2013:
Former Pink Floyd rocker Roger Waters is one musician who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on Israel.
Waters performed July 20 in Belgium wearing a black leather jacket with a red and white arm band, similar to that of a Nazi uniform, while pretending to fire a machine gun. The concert also featured a giant pig balloon floating above stage with the Star of David stamped all over it.
Waters has openly urged other performers to boycott Israel and has compared Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the South African apartheid. The Anti-Defamation League said that Waters has a long history using these symbols in his concerts, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Not caring for the band, I had missed this recent story:
Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and a lyricist on the band’s two most recent albums, has spoken out against former bandleader Roger Waters on Twitter, describing him as an antisemite and a “Putin apologist”.
“Sadly [Waters] you are antisemitic to your rotten core,” she wrote. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”...
Samson’s tweet is seemingly in reference to an interview Waters did with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper earlier this month, reposted in translation on Waters’ website, in which he wonders if “Putin [is] a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II”, and says that Putin “governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”
In the interview, Waters also said that “Israel Lobby activists” were trying to have his concerts in Germany cancelled, and that “the Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period … We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine.” He also expresses his continued support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and that he would still play in Moscow, “given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.”
Not sure that I should highlight this, given I don't independently know any details of her life struggles, but surely I can't be the only person to read this and not conclude that it sounds like a case of neuroticism (or some other mental health diagnosis) which finds a convenient blame outlet in claims of extreme racism. (She's not the only neurotic sounding indigenous woman - including several in academia - who are on Twitter. They really are going to explode if the Voice referendum fails.)
As with Sandy O'Sullivan, there seems to be an awareness that they are known as "difficult" or "too much", even within their own group, who they get upset with if they don't take the same line.
What bothers me most about it is that this rhetoric is extremely unhelpful messaging to young indigenous who we want to succeed in the system they live in (a modern, capitalist State with a pretty good, if imperfect, welfare system), rather than live lives of continual resentment.
This looks and sounds nice to me:
The recipe is: Orange-Sichuan Pepper Chicken. I want to cook it because I don't think I have ever used Sichuan pepper in a recipe before, and I only learnt recently that the type of heat it brings is (apparently) distinctive. (I also quite like savoury dishes that include fruit - a matter of some contention in my household, as half line up on the "meat and fruit don't really belong together" side.)
Which reminds me: on Saturday I cooked lamb saag, successfully, following this recipe. It called for three green chillis, and as they seemed hot to me, I de-seeded them with my hands. (I know - most of the heat is supposed to be in the white fibres that the seeds are attached to. I pulled them off with my hands too.) The result was an interesting "chilli hand" effect that lasted for hours, and when I was having a shower it was particularly noticeable that the hot water made the affected hand parts tingle very strongly. It wasn't exactly painful, just very noticeable and very long lasting. I have never had the same sensation from other chillies, perhaps because I usually am only using small ones which affect the fingertips at most; and truth be told, I do find myself 95% of the time using dried chilli flakes when I want chilli heat in a recipe.
I also watched a video recently that spent about 40 minutes explaining why vegan diets are not (long term) healthy, due to the great difficulty in getting all nutrients needed from a purely plant based diet. It was citing a lot of studies, and cases of internet vegans who had to give up because of digestive and other issues they just couldn't solve on a vegan diet, and it all sounded very convincing. But then I discovered that the guy's Youtube channel also contained Jordan Peterson content, in an unironic way. This gives me a trust issue.
A second video I watched on another channel cited a lot of health benefits of plant diets, but it was obvious when watching it that the studies referred to "vegetarian/vegan diets", which is a bit of a cheat, given that (unfortunately, in my view) veganism has replaced vegetarianism as the "go to" alternative to the normal omnivore diet, and studies that lump both types of diet together are not going to reliably say much about veganism alone.
Obviously, I am still eating a lot of meat, even though I am just curious enough about some vegan recipes to occasionally (very occasionally!) try them.
But I still say, if ever I choose to give up meat for animal cruelty reasons, I would never worry about eating animals low on the intelligence/emotional capacity scale, such as most seafood, with the possible exception of octopus. And I would also be hard pressed to ever give up dairy and eggs, even though both routinely mean the early killing of "unnecessary" offspring. (That may soon change with eggs, though.)
And if you are going to include eggs, dairy and seafood in your diet, but leave out all other meat, I presume that it's easy to get all nutrients from that diet. But someone should do a Youtube confirming that. The "Everything but Meat" diet, and its benefits.
Update: made the chicken dish last night - it's good! Just used jar crushed garlic - mincing 9 fresh ones is a bit of effort and I was in a hurry. And yeah, Sichuan pepper does have a distinctive smell and flavour.
As I have mentioned before, there is an online world of Right-ish movie/culture critics who writhe about how "woke" feminism (and, to a degree, queer promotion) has ruined the Star Wars franchise, the Tolkien franchise, the Marvel franchise, etc. Prime amongst them is the guy called the Critical Drinker, and I do watch some of his Youtube videos, as well as some of those by Nerdtronic.
I have to confess that, to a significant degree, they have a point. (I mean, I posted about the huge female presence in The Last Jedi at the time, and how a major thread in the story was about how stupid and impulsive men are.) And there is no doubt that Marvel has been working to promote stories with female leads, with increasingly diminished critical and audience returns. And Disney cartoons now feature gay characters, not that I think that is necessarily a bad thing. But still, none of this feels organic: it is just too obvious.
That said, it's not as if the problems with the Star Wars franchise are just due to this: I have argued before that the fundamental issue is the lack of a clear and consistent treatment of the Force throughout the series. And I think it is just not that interesting a universe without some consistency on a fundamental thing like that. As for Marvel: it is a mistake to base a meta theme on the multiverse, because it is an idea that can drain away tension in dramatic storytelling - if anything can happen, nothing much matters.
Anyway, a key figure of hate - the key person the Right wing critics attack for this - is producer Kathleen Kennedy. And as she is behind the latest Indiana Jones movie (Dial of Destiny), they have been slavering about how she is going to ruin it like she's ruined everything else.
I think it's kind of funny: the movie has so far been getting mixed reviews from its showing at Cannes - it has 50% on the not always reliable Rottentomatoes - and I think quite a few are putting it below the first three movies but a tad above Crystal Skull (which I think is unfairly demonised.) If that is the true positioning, the movie is bound to make a squillion dollars regardless of these bearded critics say.
But boy, have they been pre-emptively promoting the critical and audience downfall of this movie.
They are, just like the woke producers who they hate, being just too obvious that there is no way they are going to give the movie anything like an objective viewing.
And who knows - I may not like it, either. The ending apparently is divisive, and a bit fantasy-ish, and my biggest concern is that I will read what it is before I get to see it.
I still think the trailer looks quite OK, though...
When I search his name in my search bar at the side of the blog, I see that I have been complaining about the waffle of Stan Grant for many, many years.
His parting shot on Q&A is a spectacular example of his pompously earnest word salad style - and now he adds apparent indigenous spirituality that is as obscure in meaning and consequence as is about half of all commentary he makes.
No doubt he does get purely racist rubbish thrown at him continually on media and social media.
But I still think his style is grating in a way that has nothing to do with his skin colour.
I'm also against Q&A as a format, as many people I follow on Twitter are. I haven't watched more than short bits of it for quite a few years.
Probably a good idea that the Guardian not provide for comments to this piece, because it is bound to invite skepticism, if not ridicule, of the whole gender ideology that seems to have leaked out of universities' humanities departments and infected a surprising large number of younger people. Here's the subheading:
Madison Godfrey inhabits gender beyond a binary, but transition isn’t what makes them trans
Here's part of her piece:
Not every non-binary person labels themselves under the transgender umbrella – but some do. My transness is not about feeling uncomfortable in my body; it is about feeling uncomfortable with the gender that was allocated to this body. Although I was once assigned female at birth, on days when I wear winged eyeliner and a crop top that makes my boobs look great, I am still non-binary. Medically transitioning, sometimes involving hormone therapy or surgical procedures, can constitute an integral part of a person’s journey of gender affirmation – but pursuing this process is not a prerequisite of being trans or non-binary, and does not determine the validity of anyone’s gender identity. Imagining it as a checklist overlooks the barriers often encountered by trans people who want to medically transition – such as inaccessibility, costliness, wait times and stigma perpetuated by some practitioners. To suggest that being trans requires a specific type of transition is to enforce a hierarchy that is ultimately elitist.
The assumption that every trans person wants to transition also reproduces stale discourse that all trans folk feel “born into the wrong body”: a stereotype that shouldn’t be uniformly applied. As poet Sam Rush writes, “I wasn’t born into the wrong body, I was born into the right lesson.” For some people, transitioning is literally lifesaving – but squeezing all trans narratives into a narrow trope erases individual experiences, minimises us into a caricature of ourselves, and is ultimately boring. Trans and non-binary folk inhabit more than one character description. Besides, just because someone pursues transition doesn’t mean they hate their body. Consider the moment when you change your outfit just before leaving the house; it’s not that you necessarily hated the initial fit, you just want to wear something that makes you feel more like yourself.
So, rather than simply acknowledge that some men have apparently feminine traits, and some women have "butch" traits, and may or may not be fully (or partially) same sex attracted with it, and everyone has known this forever; people now spend an incredible amount of time on what is increasing hard for me to not see as an intensely narcissistic endeavour of self analysis and self justification for their own tastes in how they want to present themselves.
Incidentally, I think the gist of this article is the same line that Eddy Izzard takes: he has been "out" forever as an occasional transvestite who only sleeps with women, but now he has decided he is "transgender", although one with no problem going forward with penis intact (and, I think, only sleeping with women.)
This is kind of weird to most people, but harmless up to a point: it becomes problematic when they insist that we all have to accept a dubious and faddish intellectual framework ("trans women are women!", "being non binary and trans is a thing") and all of its consequences because that's what suits them.
Update: The column has attracted some comment on Twitter:
I mean, I don't want to be negative about the idea of the federal government having to give due consideration to an indigenous "voice" on legislation that affects the indigenous community. It sounds fair as a concept, and there is precedent from other countries.
But I find this week's argument between Mick Gooda and Noel Pearson about the wording of the relevant amendment pretty much an endorsement of my prediction the concept is going to have serious practical problems even if it gets up.
I happened to see Gooda on 7.30 talking about his concerns, and he came across as very reasonable and cautious and well intentioned. Pearson's response comes across as bullying and unfair, and perhaps someone needs to have a word in his ear (and Langton's, and that of anyone else who takes this line) that the more belligerent they sound (and the more they claim it will be disastrous to the future of indigenous politics if the referendum fails), the more they are likely to push skeptics to voting "no". [I can imagine a huge number of aboriginal activists outraged that it's racist and paternalistic to effectively tell them to "behave" if they want to get their way - but I would say it's more a case of realism and pragmatism based on the history of referenda in this country.]
Long story short: if there is already strong friction between long standing, mainstream aboriginal leadership figures on the implementation of this system, why shouldn't we expect that the instituional "Voice" will also routinely be the subject of criticism from within the indigenous community that it has given the "wrong" advice to government on particular issues? And if so, how will that changes things going forward?
I suspect that the problem in Australia may come down to the size of the country and hence the number of groupings of indigenous here:
Aboriginal people belong to Mobs (tribes) and within those are Clans (family groups). There are over 250 Mobs in Australia and even more Clans (some Mobs have upwards of 7 clans). Most Aboriginal people will have a ‘moiety,’ ‘totem’ or ‘spirit protector’ and usually an individual will have more than one – tribal, gender, family, personal.
All Mobs have their own ‘Country’ with boundaries that are typically marked on trees and by natural landscapes such as a river being a boundary between two neighbouring tribes or clans.
I would bet that most countries with successful institutionalised indigenous advisory bodies that are formalised just don't have that problem.
Goff has been mentioned at least once before here, but I don't recall if I have read much about him before. I have found his views on Wikipedia. A defender of some form of panpsychism, I see.
Well, I do like the way he is trying to find a path forward between religion and scientific materialism.
I was just thinking how I hadn't had a new, interesting thought about Buddhism for a few weeks, Googled the topic, and turned up this good essay at Aeon:
It deals with my long standing concern about Buddhist approaches: while teaching a fairly simple or straight forward moral behaviour code on one level, on another, an emphasis on the source of suffering being desire (and teaching the importance of meditating that away) can surely lead to a kind of passive acceptance of other people's bad behaviour (as well as "natural evil", such as illness), even if it impacts you directly and an non-passive approach may be what is really required. In the essay writer's case, this related to sexual abuse, and she talks about "compassion" teaching in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism and the way it can led to a passive response to wrongdoing.
Here are some extracts:
So perilous is the habit of self-cherishing that Mahāyāna teachers devised radical methods for extricating oneself from it. These moral-psychological therapies require that the practitioner take up dramatically counterintuitive attitudes in order to reveal and unravel the depth of their self-cherishing. Among the most celebrated of these teachers is the 8th-century Indian scholar Śāntideva, whose text the Bodhicaryāvatāra is widely admired and studied as the guide to Mahāyāna ethics. There, among his philosophical expositions of the way of life of the bodhisattva, Śāntideva encourages his reader to reflect upon the fundamental equality of all beings and the indefensibility of pursuing one’s own self-interest on the basis of a dubiously reified ‘I’. He also proposes that one can counteract one’s tendency toward selfishness by taking a pointedly critical perspective toward one’s own shortcomings, including negative emotions such as anger. Rather than directing our anger at the people we believe have done us wrong, Śāntideva advises that we should depersonalise the problems that befall us and chalk them up to the inevitable vicissitudes of a complex and interdependent world. In other words: ‘Them’s the breaks.’
This is a practice that strikes right at the logic that inspires self-cherishing. The thinking goes: if I weren’t so heavily invested in my own selfhood as something intrinsically real, with discrete interests to defend, then I would not experience others’ slights with such a personal charge. This is not to say that I wouldn’t experience them at all – that they wouldn’t be happening or that I wouldn’t notice them – but rather that I would be able to let those misbehaviours slide off me, simply regarding them as the product of innumerable, impersonal causes and conditions rather than targeted attacks on me and my ability to have things always go my way. When someone does this, Śāntideva argues, they become invincible to suffering not by changing others’ behaviour but by cultivating the mental fortitude to withstand life’s provocations with forbearance. Śāntideva suggests a contemplative practice for inculcating this radically diminished sense of self known as ‘exchanging self and other’, in which the practitioner imaginatively ‘exchanges’ their own happiness for others’ suffering. Being willing to give up happiness and take on pain enacts the kind of unbiased, boundless altruism that is the hallmark of the bodhisattva....
Experimenting with reversing habitual responses like defensiveness or selfishness is profound. Relaxing our territoriality and letting go of our need to always be ‘right’ (or at least our need to make sure others know when they are wrong) can have a salutary effect on how we engage with others. But there are also profound problems with this approach.
And the downside:
Some time ago, a friend who works with survivors of sexual violence put a challenging but tactful question to me: what about her clients, whose trauma so often shows itself through self-blame? The majority of sexual assaults occur between people who know each other, often through methods of coercion that falsely lead victims to conclude that they ‘let it happen’ or are in some other respect to blame for the abuse. In cases like these, it is incredibly important to be able to say (and be heard in saying): ‘They were in the wrong. This was not my fault.’
A similar pattern holds, I suspect, for many people who have experienced abuse and certain forms of oppression. The fact is that there is a lot of explicit and implicit social encouragement not to be hard on others, to be accommodating, to get over it – in other words, to internalise the costs of the harm that has been done to them rather than force the awkwardness of asserting a boundary. In cases like these, ‘banishing all blames into the single source’ becomes the emotional labour of ‘taking one for the team’.
Essentially, what my kind critic was telling me was that this ideal of viewing all of our problems and struggles as stemming from self-cherishing was actually a great way for victims of abuse never to be able to heal. Sometimes expressing and holding a boundary – a boundary between self and other, between one’s own needs and theirs, between the workable give and take of harmonious social discourse and occasions that require a hard ‘no’ – can be necessary and even therapeutic. Especially for someone who is already well practised in the habit of taking on the burden of other people’s wrongdoing, the instruction to ‘banish all blames to the single source’ may come all too naturally, re-inscribing their existing trauma rather than helping them heal and grow through it.
All pretty interesting, if you ask me.
The article also links to this other Aeon essay, which I think I noticed before, but never got around to reading: The Problem of Mindfulness. Must read it later.
The news:
Disney’s venture into an immersive, very expensive Star Wars experience is ending.
The company said that its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida, which costs nearly $5,000 per couple for a two-night stay, will take its final voyage on Sept. 28.
It is hard to credit that Disney executives could not work out that most people into role playing games (which essentially was the whole point of staying at this hotel - or at least, the only basis on which the cost could be justified) are not rich. More like college age dudes who haven't started making money yet.
Whenever I see her looking like this:
Exce that Homer may be dumb, but he's not nasty. And he is still married.
The short parody videos of the distinctive looking comedian Alasdair Beckett-King are nearly always good, and I'll show this one as an example. (One joke in the middle of it struck me as very funny).
It's why MAGA types are just not worth engaging with - there is not a sensible brain cell left in their heads.
Update: the fine print, as discussed in the Washington Post story on the Durham report:
When the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued his findings in 2019, Durham took the unusual step of publicly disagreeing with him on a key point — disputing Horowitz’s finding that the decision to open the investigation into Trump’s campaign was justified.
“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said at the time.
Yet on Monday, he appeared to back away from that criticism, writing “there is no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” allegations brought to the agency by an Australian diplomat who told them of alarming statements made over drinks by a low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.
Durham’s report suggests he thinks the FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation, rather than a full investigation, based on the Australian’s tip. The report highlights a conversation between two FBI officials at the time who appeared to bemoan the weakness of the new case.
“Damn that’s thin,” wrote one FBI official in early August 2016. “I know,” replied another, “it sucks.”
Durham’s final report comes against a backdrop of two failed prosecutions. Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a dossier of allegations about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — was acquitted in October of lying to the FBI about where he got his information. Durham personally argued much of the government’s case in that trial, in federal court in Alexandria.
Update: I quite liked this column by Paul Waldman about the Durham report. Here's a gift link.
I'm quickly reading some of the huffing and puffing on the Right wing commentary side*, which is full of outrage about how no one is being prosecuted for this, and once again, it's the following familiar story.
They build themselves a house of cards on certain issues by selecting the narrowest range of facts that are spun for partisan, self promotional reasons. (As with, of course, climate change, where they have always been welded to a mere handful of contrarian, ageing scientists and commentators, while ignoring the vast amount of work the mainstream has confirming the mainstream view.) When an issue is somewhat complicated and some discrepancy comes to light, they leap onto it to try to boost it into a narrative that reads "Ha! Your story is now destroyed!". In other words, they con themselves into not being able to see, or acknowledge, a "big picture". Then, when the facts continue to accumulate against them (increasing natural climate disasters, increasing record temperatures, Durham fails at prosecutions) their only reaction is to scream "I don't understand - the nation is about to fall because the people just can't see that I'm right."
Truly, they gaslight themselves via continual hyper-partisan hyperbole of self serving narrative into never being able to see (or admit to) a "big picture" truth, and therefore can't understand why their view isn't having the consequences they want.
* The New York Times has a piece with lots of links to the cites hyperventilating about it. As the writer says:
Mr. Trump had termed the Russia investigation “the crime of the century,” and with no one doing time for that crime, the Durham report could still prove to be Exhibit A in how the American right seems to be living in its own universe — and how Mr. Trump still dictates the parameters of that separate reality.
On his Truth Social website, Mr. Trump said the special prosecutor had concluded that “the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!” In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation.
My only quibble: it's not that the American right "seems to be living its own universe": they undoubtedly do. And they just can't understand when a majority won't join them there, leading them to believe they are being "persecuted".
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Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.
One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.
Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.
“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.
Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”
The worst part (from a corporate response point of view) was this:
Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. ...
Autocomplete suggestions in search bars are a common feature on many social media platforms, and they can often surface disturbing content. The terms for “dog” and “cat” autocompleted viral animal cruelty videos in Twitter’s search box Thursday, when NBC News contacted the company for comment. Twitter’s press account automatically responded with a poop emoji, the company’s standard response for the last month.
Can't wait for the apparent successor of Twitter (seems like it will be BlueSky?) to kick in fully.
I don't know why, but I have been remembering dreams more often lately, even though with the cooler weather I have been sleeping with less interruption than I usually have in summer.
The levitating/flying dream has made a welcome return. The only thing is, as I explained in two posts way back in 2006, my variation of the dream usually involves great interest in, and satisfaction at, being able to prove it is real (such as by being videoed while off the ground, or having a sufficient number of witnesses that I think that, surely, they must be believed.) My elation in the dream is not just with the pleasant sensation of being able to think my way into the air, but with the intellectual knowledge that this is revolutionary for science and humanity, and people will see it is real.
Of course, that then makes for a somewhat disappointing sensation on waking up into the more mundane world.
Anyhow, on the whole "why do we dream we can fly" issue, I see now that there was an article about that appeared in 2016 in Slate (and Atlas Obscura), and I'm pretty sure I had missed until now.
It would seem that the dream is virtually universal (although I am still pretty sure there are people who claim never to have had it), and an interest in what it means, or what causes it, has been around a long time. Some extracts:
Psychologist Dr. Rainer Schönhammer has compiled scientific flying-dream explanations going back to the early 19th century. Many of the earliest guesses were physiological—1860s German psychologist Karl Scherner thought that the rising and falling of the chest inspired dream flight, while his peer J.E. Purkinje believed that the relaxation inherent in sleep makes dreamers feel like they’re floating. The more Freudian Paul Federn pinned it on nighttime erections, which, author Diedre Barret explains, he “viewed as an overcoming of gravity,” but this theory has since been discounted. More recent theories have focused instead on the brain stem and the inner ear, which controls balance.
Although he doesn’t knock the potential physiological causes of dream-flying, Dr. Michael Schredl, a psychologist with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, is more interested in what such dreams and such distinctions might say about the dreamer. “Flying dreams are a fascinating topic,” Schredl writes in an email. In a series of studies, Schredl has sought to connect the prevalence of flying dreams with particular personality traits or life choices. By compiling dream data gathered since 1956 and performing both broad and deep surveys of his own, he has come to a few zooming conclusions.
First of all—anecdotally at least—”persons with waking-life flying experiences dream more often about flying,” Schredl writes. Hang gliding instructors, for instance, often practice their professions in dreams, only without their equipment. And the fact that the frequency of flying dreams has picked up since the 1950s suggests that more real-life airplane trips equals more somni-flight. This would be consistent with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, a somewhat controversial theory that posits that our dream experiences are just weird remixes of our waking ones.
To dig deeper into these hypotheses, Schredl analyzed the 6,000-entry dreambank of one particular anonymous subject, who has kept a diary since 1984. Schredl found that although this subject had more airplane dreams after his first ever real-life transatlantic flight, more creative flying dreams weren’t affected. The subject sometimes flew with the help of a house, a magical juggling ball, or a unicycle, and he did so in order to illicitly cross borders and to impress a girl (“and he succeeded!,” the study makes sure to point out).
Airplane journeys, Schredl writes, may be less important than general happiness. A broader Schredl-helmed study shows that overall, people with more “positive emotional states” while awake tend to get to fly in their sleep, too.
It has just occurred to me while writing this post: did flying dreams have much to do with belief in witchcraft, such that it would have been dangerous in those days for a woman to admit to having a flying dream?
Googling that topic has led me to a 2009 article in Folklore on this very topic: The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible. Those with knowledge of a certain site* might be interested to use this citation to read it: https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802647833
It turns out that the Spanish Inquisition (as well as other European inquisitors) was (and were) very interested in the question of whether witches really could fly. Seems that for the most part, they were were actually pretty skeptical that there was a physical reality to it.
Interesting!
* Sci-Hub
* My goodness, Diane Feinstein looked as if she's on death's door when she turned up in Washington. She did turn up to her committee, though.
* Amongst the most convoluted commentaries on the Trump CNN "townhall" (that oddly featured a 100% pro Trump audience - not a common feature of the "townhall" format, I thought) is that by Ben Shapiro on Twitter, which starts by saying CNN did Trump a massive favour (true), but then ends on this contorted conspiracy note:
Collins asked zero of the questions Republicans cared about and all the ones Democrats cared about. So, in other words, this was billed as a GOP primary night, and it was just Kaitlin Collins asking questions Democrats have about Trump. Republican voters sensed this. So when Trump took out the kitchen sink and began hammering Collins into the wall with it, they cheered. Republicans will -- ALWAYS AND CORRECTLY -- cheer biased moderators being steamrolled by Republican candidates, no matter what those candidates actually say. Trump wins more favor with Republican voters; Democrats remain offput; independents continue to wonder why we're relitigating 2020. Ridiculous failure by CNN on all fronts -- unless, of course, their goal is to renominate Trump for the ratings and because they think he's most beatable (NOTE: this, by the way, is precisely their goal).
Mind you, a lot of people have said that the event did help him from a Primary point of view, but hurt him in terms of motivating Democrats and Independents (and the rare sensible Republican) to make sure he loses at the actual election. For example:
* Google's Bard does sound as if it will be a significant improvement to Chat GTP:
In a bid to tackle the issue of AI hallucinations – whereby the AI creates a sourced text or information that it claims to be true – Bard will include an annotation on the information sourced elsewhere and provide a link to it.* I'm curious still about what other physicists think of this argument by Sabine:
It's not like I think I am an instant expert on modern land wars in Eastern Europe, or Western Asia?, as so many at the MAGA nutjobs seem to think they are: but it's hard not to conclude as a result of recent news stories that things are not going well for Putin at the moment.
I am therefore somewhat curious as to the amount of copium the conservatives with a culture war hard on for Putin (at the later day Catallaxy blogs, for example) might be huffing at the moment.
Of course, things could turn again, I presume.
Just noticed this on Twitter:
Sure, sure: nothing to see there.
A pretty good point made by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. I'll gift the piece, and take some key points from it:
Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.
“When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an ascendant political crusade, which grew more extreme over the course of his lifetime and beyond.”
Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution....
The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”
The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits.
True, the killings in Allen led a committee in the Texas House to pass a bill raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18, but, as The Times reported, in the unlikely event it passes the full chamber “it would face almost certain rejection by the State Senate, where the hard-right lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, holds powerful control.” Today’s Republican Party can scarcely tolerate anything getting between an eager buyer and a deadly weapon.
It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed. “In the nearly 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a former president (also possibly a future president) who reflected the bomber’s values,” wrote Toobin.
As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.
Update: This is also the first time I had realised that Steyn was back at work, after nearly dying of a couple of heart attacks not so long ago.
I had missed that in February he quit his job at GB News, in a very petulant manner:
In his video today, Steyn claimed that GB News had sent him a new contract while he recovered from his illness. “I was all set to return to GB News,” said Steyn, “but the habitual liar who runs the joint decided that we needed a defibrillator in the studio for me to be able to go back.”
Steyn had more trouble than sourcing a defibrillator though. “He [Frangopoulos] has chosen to change the terms by which we do the show… There’s this new clause, ‘editorial responsibility’.”
The new clause would make Steyn personally liable for any Ofcom fines given out due to the show’s output. As Steyn ranted about the contract, he described Frangopoulos as a “homocidal maniac intent on bringing about a third fatal heart attack”.
This isn't the first time that he has fought with an employer. I get the distinct feeling he does not play well with others.
So Glenn Greenwald, the guy so devoted to attacking abuse of US governmental power that he makes excuses for both Putin and Trump's minions actually trying to overturn democracy (he's a complete crank, in other words), tells us on Twitter that his Brazilian husband has died at the "too early" age of 38. (And yeah, as far as I can tell, his late husband did genuinely work against Right wing forces in Brazil, which makes his partnership with "I'm appearing on Tucker Carlson again" Glenn all the more puzzling.)
But I just thought it a typical sign of the weirdo, topsy turvy world of Right wing politics now that, in the thread following, one of the first messages of condolence is from arch conservative weirdo Rod Dreher:
Before the current inquest and news reports about it, I had never heard of the New Age-y Kambo ceremony, in which people were deliberately made sick by Amazonian frog toxin applied to the skin, and/or drinking ayahuasca.
Sounds an awful way to die, if it goes wrong:
Before his death at a festival where he consumed a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants and had secretions of a frog administered to his skin, Jarrad Antonovich was “gentle, kind, never aggressive, a talented musician”, an inquest has heard.
Antonovich died in October 2021, at the age of 46, while attending the Dreaming Arts festival, a six-day retreat at Arcoora near Kyogle in northern New South Wales.
An inquest into his death, being heard in Lismore, was told that at the festival he had consumed ayahuasca and participated in a “Kambo” ceremony, involving secretions harvested from an Amazonian tree frog. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic substance made from boiling plants that is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Amazon basin.
Antonovich died from a perforated oesophagus from vomiting, the inquest heard. When paramedics arrived they found him unresponsive and blue in colour, while people continued a healing ceremony nearby.
The inquest heard that ayahuasca had been offered at the festival during sacred spirit music ceremonies run by self-described spiritual guide and healer Lore Solaris. The ceremonies ended at sunrise.
This bit is appalling:
Counsel assisting the crown, Dr Peggy Dwyer, told the court an ambulance was not called until 11.30pm and took an hour to arrive because of the remote location.
The inquest heard that one ambulance officer reported that a female told them to “move away from Jarrad because it was affecting his aura”. Another woman was massaging his feet. No one told them he had consumed Kambo.
The inquest had earlier looked into the death of a woman:
Over several days he heard three medical experts – a toxicologist, a cardiologist and a pathologist – discuss the nature of her death and the likelihood of its relationship to the secretions of an Amazonian frog, which had been applied to burns on her skin during a “Kambo” ceremony moments before she died.
He heard from the woman who applied that frog mucus, a self-described experienced Kambo practitioner. Another woman told the inquest about how she had only just trained Lechner to conduct ceremonies deemed safe by the International Association of Kambo Practitioners (IAKP).
Fortunately:
Kambo was legal in Australia at the time and – until it was banned in October 2021 – relatively easy to obtain.
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