Zaftig:
adjective, Slang.
- (of a woman) having a pleasantly plump figure.
- full-bodied; well-proportioned. [Dictionary.com]
Noted in “The Venus of Vlakno,” Zach Zorich, Archaeology (March/April 2018):
A 15,000-year-old bone pendant found at Vlakno Cave in Croatia may be a late type of Venus figurine, such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, which dates to more than 24,000 years ago. The Croatian Venus is a more slender and abstract human figure than the zaftig woman of Willendorf.
A Rough Second Quarter for Crime in New Orleans
I saw that on Jeff Asher’s NOLA Crime News blog, and I thought, well, police are kicking ass in New Orleans, aren’t they? Alas:
NOPD released their unofficially official Uniform Crime Report statistics recently for the second quarter of 2017 and the numbers aren’t particularly pretty. Overall crime is up 11.9 percent relative to the first half of 2016 with a 9.2 percent increase in person crime (murder, rape, robbery and assault) and a 12.6 percent increase in property crime (burglary, theft and auto theft).
I did appreciate Jeff’s thoroughness:
It’s important to remember that New Orleans has grown considerably since Katrina. The Census does not provide quarterly population counts, but the New Orleans Data Center provides a monthly population indicator for every month starting in mid-2006 (I guesstimated the population of the first two quarters of 2006 using that data).
Applying the population data enables the calculation of a crime rate per 100,000 households for both person and property crime. This is provided in the below chart which shows the rate of crimes per quarter in the second quarter of 2017 was the worst since the third quarter of 2007 for person crimes and the third quarter of 2008 for property crimes.
Ever wonder about crimes in your neighborhood? LexisNexis may be able to help. The City Of Falcon Heights sent this link to a map of reported crimes. I have no idea if it’s really accurate. Here’s a sample shot:
That cluster of green and white crime markers on the lower left is Rosedale, a local shopping mall, and surrounding environs. The date range is 1/18/18 to today, or about a month.
But this sort of thing is only as valuable as the data is accurate, and to that point I’ve been sitting on a FiveThirtyEight post by Jeff Asher, the title of which gives the game away – Fewer Crimes Get Counted When Police Are Slow To Respond.
For this piece, I analyzed 2016 data from three cities, New Orleans, Detroitand Cincinnati,3 and found that as response times go up, the likelihood that a crime will be found goes down. Indeed, in all three cities, when police took more than two hours to respond, they were over 2.5 times more likely to report they’d found no evidence that a crime had occurred.
Nationwide, about 86 percent of all major crimes reported by the FBI in 2016 were property crimes (theft, auto theft and burglary). Violent crimes (such as murder and armed robbery) were much less common across the country and often received faster police responses in the cities analyzed here. Looking more closely at 911 calls reporting property crime, therefore, can show how longer response times may deflate the number of crimes that get investigated and ultimately reported.
It’s a good article, giving caveats where necessary – it’s worth a read.
In Detroit, only 16 percent of property crime incidents in which an officer arrived in under two hours received a disposition of unfounded, compared to 40 percent of dispositions following police response times of two hours or longer. Similarly, in New Orleans, 13 percent of incidents with a response time of under two hours received an unfounded disposition, compared to 46 percent of incidents with response times longer than two hours.
The problem was less acute but still apparent in Cincinnati’s data, which showed that 4 percent of 2016 property crime reports that were responded to in under two hours received an unfounded disposition, but 18 percent of such crimes where the response time was over two hours got the same designation. These three cities point to long response times as a contributing factor in the rate of recording of property crimes, though it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about the impact long response times have on national crime figures from such a limited sample.
My takeaway? There’s definitely an opportunity for unscrupulous politicians to reduce their police forces and have their official crime statistics drop. That said, the unscrupulous politician is often a hard-on-crime type, so a municipality with some sort of watchdog of the NGO sort would definitely be a hindrance to that politician.
On the flip side, the scrupulous politician who actually increases the police force may also find their official crime statistics rise. However, the rise might imply the police are investigating these crimes, resulting in arrests and prosecutions. Will this deter other potential crimes? Hard to say.
The whole thing seems to turn into a bit of a conundrum, but I suspect that in the unscrupulous scenario, the community would become unhappy with the general crime wave, whether it’s reported or not, and eventually rid themselves of the politician(s) at fault, either through denying them their seat of power – or the ambition of those politician(s) resulting in their promotion to higher seats of power.
Jessica Hamzelou in NewScientist (3 February 2018, paywall) has a bit of a rage at President Trump’s empty declaration of an opioid crisis, and then goes on to explore the problem of addiction a little further.
A similar approach used scare tactics in an attempt to warn teenagers off methamphetamine in the 2000s. The Montana Meth Project increased people’s awareness of the drug, but did nothing to reduce drug use, says Perry Kendall, a provincial health officer in British Columbia, Canada. In fact, the advertising was associated with increased risk of drug use, says Kendall. “The campaign was so over the top that people dismissed it,” he says. Some teenagers might have started using the drug in order not to feel left out, he says.
Wow. Taking drugs just so you don’t feel left out. Yet, a couple of years ago I was talking to an elderly friend of mine who’d lost his soul mate to lung cancer years earlier. The man’s lover had been a heavy smoker during an era in which we know that smoking is a bad habit to have, so I asked my friend why his lover had continued.
Peer pressure, he said. I’m still shocked. So should I really be astonished that some folks would take dangerous drugs just so they didn’t feel left out? Remind me to tell you the story about the supposed TV show test in which I was an audience member and evaluator someday …
Continuing …
Considering that Trump has said “it’s really, really easy not to take [opioids]”, it’s no wonder that public health officials are worried that the current administration might go down the same route.
Efforts in Canada show this is the wrong approach. There, advertising campaigns target people with addiction, offering advice on where and how to seek treatment. What’s more, they don’t paint drug dependence as a moral failing, and so avoid stigmatising people who need help. …
“Treating it as a crime is the worst thing you can do,” says Scott Weiner at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “If we start to recognise it as the disease that it is, we can treat it and get people back on track. If you criminalise it, you take away a person’s chance of a normal life.”
But it’s not a disease as we typically define disease, is it? Most diseases involve pathogens, bacteria and viruses which infect us and make us feel poorly until our immune systems kill the invaders – or we die. Of course, if we stare more closely, things get a bit fuzzier. Spanish flu, for example, didn’t kill humans directly, but rather by causing our immune systems to rev up and destroy our lungs – victims were literally asphyxiated. Or allergies, where often innocent, non-living debris – pollen, pet dander, even just dust – causes a similar, if less-pronounced reaction. Is that a disease? Well, it’s debilitating, but it’s not caused by bacteria or viruses. We theorize that it’s brought on by childhood environments being too clean.
So, like many specialists in the field of addiction, Weiner wants to call this an illness, but for many people, such as President Trump, they see it as a choice, and they’re not that far wrong, now are they? How can it be a disease if it starts with a free will choice to take the drug?
Skipping the argument about juveniles’ brains not being fully developed and how most addicts start young and thus free will is a problematic assertion, there’s an assumption here: that it’s always a choice. But this is a false assumption because these drugs often rewire the brain (perhaps it’s more accurate to say the brain adapts to the drug) so that there’s a craving for that drug, and there’s no known way (I hope someone tells me I’m wrong) to undo that rewiring. One or two shots and your brain is adapted to the drug. And when it’s a legal drug, prescribed by a physician for, say, pain? Is it still free will?
Yet that’s still not an invasion of the body by some pathogen. I think it’s clear that even if we restrict ourselves merely to an urge for precision, a new term is really needed to properly describe the properties of this condition and how it differs from traditional illness. Addiction is an old, worn-out term, so we may need something better. Mal-adapted Brain Disorder might be properly mystifying.
But I will not adhere to the restriction I mentioned, because I have two worries about this confusion of terminology.
First, it confuses the public, leaving them uncertain as to what to consider addiction. Disease? Possibly illicit choices? Moral simpleton? Uncertainty makes it a little harder to develop that public push to find ways to treat this family of conditions.
Second, and more importantly, I worry that this may place unconscious limits on our studies as to how to solve this problem. Many linguists have suggested that our limits on what we can think are directly traceable to our vocabulary, if I may simplify outrageously (I hope I have not misrepresented this position). Scientists, having taken up the position that addiction is a disease, may unconsciously limit themselves to researching therapies related to those already in use for other diseases. The applicability, to my untrained mind, may be uncertain.
A reader remarks about corporate political giving:
There are likely parallels in other industries whose fortunes rise and fall with the trade winds of political priorities. Defense, law enforcement, construction, healthcare, and others come to mind. As an active investor I am directionally indifferent. Unlike Bob Dylan, I am always looking for a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Those industries have close ties to government spending, while the gun manufacturers do not – you’d think.
My conservative friend replies concerning the closed mind. I’ll intersperse comments:
If the media as truth seekers is silly, then why have a free press at all? Is it all so ridiculous to seek a media which transmits the full facts of a situation, and purveys clearly labeled editorial content as well? That stories are told is both undeniable and highly desirable, given how most human minds function, but the best are fully informed by all the facts, and if they suggest a certain point of view over another, they should do so in a manner testable by the common audience.
The reason we have a free press is so we can have free expression, and a free marketplace of ideas. The good ones get traction, the bad ones get rejected. We rely on the good judgement of readers to separate the good from the bad.
And is the ‘good judgment’ rendered in a vacuum? Such was the point of my post – to suggest to the conservative reader that their favorite media may be mis-serving them.
I can buy the free expression argument for free press, but it’s a leap of faith to suggest that, in a vacuum, “The good ones get traction, the bad ones get rejected.” It assumes a natural rationality that does not exist. That’s why I want to pierce the vacuum and suggest that multiple sources of information are necessary for forming good judgments.
The identification of certain past stories as defective and even malevolent, whether they’re from the Fox News of today or by the yellow journalists of WR Hearst encouraging the Spanish-American War does nothing to evaluate the contention under examination; …
… we may fall short, but we should continue to strive for that perfection we so happily envision.
By all means, choose the news source you believe to be pleasing to your idea of “facts” and to what pleases you. That’s what free press is all about. Don’t suggest that some outlets should be censored, and others certified as “correct”. (and by whom?)
Nor am I suggesting that anyone but the people do the (metaphorical) censoring. But I am suggesting that careful evaluation of evidence, such as that provided by Bruce Bartlett, is in order.
However, it’s critical to differentiate between defective and malevole
nt. The former, so long as it’s recognized as a problem and processes are developed to remediate and remove defective stories, are of limited concern – and if those responses are not undertaken, I should hope the publication is deserted by its readers and soon shutters its doors. But I worry about the deliberately malevolent stories, as we often see them today. The specialized technician, by which I mean journalist, has the tools to recognize such stories for what they are. Organizations such as Media Matters are in fact specializing such work (although it’s a poor example, as they apparently only watch conservative media, rather than all media, which I would prefer).
I fail to see the point of this separation. You have a right to choose your news sources. So does everyone else. Beyond that, what are you suggesting to “fix” the problem?
That people think more about their sources. When certain sources are deliberately used for attacks on the entire paradigm of free press, when certain services are vilified despite decades or more of honorable service, is it not worth using the free press (an awkward phrase, to be sure, in these days of digital) to suggest to the citizens who seem to be acting in an irrational manner that perhaps they should reconsider?
But the general audience? I honestly belief that the average audience member does not have the capacity to search out and absorb the information necessary to form judgments about media stories. We are not rational creatures, after all, merely creatures capable of rationality; many of us are controlled by our emotions, which can be deliciously played on by stories in the media written by actors who want specific reactions. That these actors are not acting as ethical journalists is not and should not be expected by members of the free press.
I am always disappointed when I see such condescending attitudes. Clearly *I* am smart and discriminating and can properly digest the results of a free press, but the unwashed masses are just not up to the task. Sorry, if that’s true, we should not have voters. Democratic principles are misguided. We should have a wise elite making decisions for us, because those unwashed masses should not be making major decisions, as they currently do.
Ah, yes, everyone’s an expert – or experts suck. I’ve discussed this problem before. Nevertheless, this has little to do with intelligence, and mostly to do with the pressure of time, not to mention lack of interest.
…We (for the most part) believe that our system is best, and so we broadcast it, clearly labeled, and we believe there’s is antithetical to ours. Since then we’ve seen the Soviet Union collapse, but now Russia attempts to meddle in our system without attribution.
Since when does anyone have control of all messages from all people? If our people are the judge of the quality of news gathering, as must be under a free press, why should foreigners be un-free, even hostile foreigners? Who will be the arbiter of who may speak and what he may say – domestic or foreign? When the USA did VOA and Radio Free Europe, we thought our free speech to the captive citizens of the communist world was more than a right. We saw it as a duty to tell them the truth as we saw it. The Soviet Union & pals worked hard to deny us the right to speak to their citizens, as all good totalitarian governments do. Should we become the Soviet Union, restricting the messages our citizens can receive from them? I think not.
Because foreigners, by definition, don’t have the best interests of America at heart. But if we do choose to permit them play in the field of the free press – or have it thrust upon us – how would my reader suggest they be identified as hostile players?
And, incidentally, there was no duty to tell the truth as we saw it. VOA et al were simply part of our quiver of arrows during the Cold War. To go further is to attribute sentimentality to government, a dubious assertion at best.
And, yes, many nations prohibit private American citizens and public American servants from meddling in their politics, as I suspect do we. Whether it’s right or wrong is another question.
I fail to see the difference between “meddling” and “propagandizing”, and “advertising” and “lobbying”. All boil down to speech. We believe speech should be free. We believe that we (Americans) have a right to hear messages from anyone – domestic or foreign. We do not believe that Americans are too stupid to make good judgements. (see above)
What are you suggesting be done?
First, clarify the remark. The reader confuses motivation with mechanism. Each of the four categories implies a separate motivation; that they can boil down to speech is irrelevant.
Second, I’m suggesting Americans work harder on not hearing speech that plays to their biases, and more to hear speech that gives complete facts – even uncomfortable facts. That was the basic point of my post.
…Russian meddling had no motivation for quality, because quality would ill-serve their goals; the audience merely had to be convinced that the “news” is true when it’s not. A malevolent agency backed by government funding is on a different playing field.
So lies backed by a big bullhorn are irresistable? Who decides what is “malevolent”? Speech is speech, and having a free press leaves people free to mislead and propagandize. That’s inescapable.
But it’d be lovely if we were deluding ourselves, no? Not being deluded by outsiders who, inescapably, do not have the best interests of the United States at heart?
• As part of educating the voters and enhancing their diligence, the Mueller investigation is not mis-guided – it’s critical.
The dueling media armed with FOIA should be able to dig up all relevant facts. If not, the FOIA and friends should be fixed. A special prosecutor does not produce an op-ed. A special prosecutor prosecutes – puts people in jail. A case of free speech should not put people in jail.
The very idea that the American electorate is not smart enough, or wise enough, to withstand a little propaganda should be insulting. Somehow, instead, we are little snowflakes totally snookered by those Russians, and our elites spring into action to “protect” us from those nasty Russians. Nonsense!
Ummmmm, sure. FOIA refers to information that is written down; investigations often dig information out of people. I think suggesting that FOIA is sufficient is a delusion.
And the suggestion that we run across crimes during the investigation to better educate the public – or at least Congress – and then not prosecute them is appalling.
… old WC also responsible for the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I, an awful disaster for the Allies, so I try not to mistake WC for being particularly wise – just very quotable.
WC was wise. Careful with the Gallipoli history. Not everyone agrees that it was WC’s fault.
On the scale of Gallipoli, fault is always shared. WC saw a lot and thought a lot and had more than one talent. I enjoyed his history of the Duke of Marlborough, for example, although I don’t recall much about it, now (long time ago). Nevertheless, his statement isn’t something I’d base a philosophy on. It leads to a certain complacency. As an engineer, I’d like to minimize the revisiting of dead-ends.
That said, the close reporting on the President, the investigations, the recognition of the closure of the conservative mind and its manipulation by malevolent actors and the attempts to break those closures, this is all part of the Americans trying to do the Right Thing. It’s what I worry about and gnaw on and worry the rest of us might also be attracted to such closed ways of thinking – …
Be careful of the difference between facts and lies versus opinions. “My ideas are always better than yours.” and “I’m right and you have a closed mind” is the kind of thoughtless “tribalism” that the last article decried.
It is very seldom that a narrative does not have some grain of truth. Free expression allows us to explore all the musty corners of the intellectual and factual landscape to divine The Truth. What scares me is those self-appointed elites who declare other peoples opinions invalid rather than disputing them with their own logic and facts. The left is adroit in its demonization of people it finds inconvenient. The derisive sneer is its specialty. This should not become our standard method of political discussion.
I just call the progressives ‘smarty-pants’, but ‘derisive sneer’ is just as good. Did the right adopt the derisive sneer from the progressives, or vice-versa? I’m not sure.
My reader’s concern is my concern – applied mostly to the conservative “fake news”, “climate scientists are in a big [Chinese] conspiracy”, etc But it certainly applies to the left as well, though, as anyone reading The Daily Kos is aware. I’ve commented on my perception of the progressives’ communication skills – or lack thereof. And I don’t think the left, or at least the non-extreme left, has as much to worry me.
Derek Grossman of the RAND Corporation remarks in Lawfare on the Presidential intelligence briefing process, which is interesting in itself. He concludes:
There are reasonable critiques to be made of the story Pompeo told. Many observers in this politically-charged environment may discount or minimize Pompeo’s observations of Trump’s intelligence-consumption habits. They can argue that Pompeo is a Trump loyalist who would never publicly describe his boss in a negative light. And Pompeo’s comment that Trump can absorb intelligence on par with that of a “25-year intelligence veteran”—when he has no prior intelligence or government experience—might be an example of overstatement. Moreover, tensions exist between the administration and the intelligence community over the Russia investigation, particularly between the president and the FBI. And of course, media reports that Trump prioritizes information from “Fox & Friends” or other television and online sources seem to diminish Pompeo’s account that the president takes his intelligence briefing seriously. Any president should trust that analysis from his intelligence community is produced by experts and, as such, is rigorously vetted and undergirded by multiple, credible sources. This may not always be true with media reporting.
It is impossible for outsiders to fully evaluate what goes on inside the Oval Office. But even if details of Pompeo’s account are questionable, there are reasons to think the presidential intelligence briefing is working well. At a minimum, the president is briefed on a fairly regular basis and, regardless of how the information is presented, he appears engaged in discussions with senior staff and the intelligence community about content. Ideally, this process is informing his national security decision making over less authoritative and distracting sources of information, but unfortunately this may not be the case.
Which, if you worry about the safety of the country with regard to its foreign adversaries, is a mixed bag. I know more liberal critics become more frantic about such things; the RAND Corporation is considered non-partisan, which is a valuable attribute when looking for objective evaluations.
Remington, a gun manufacturer, is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hoping to reorganize and shed death debt [a typo I found & fixed this morning just before publishing]. To some extent, the election of President Trump is to blame, reports Forbes:
While the Remington name is unlikely to disappear, the company’s travails highlight the shifting fortunes of the firearms industry and its fraught position in the nation’s economic and political life. The company’s fortunes took a hit after the election of Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “true friend” of the gun industry, because Hillary Clinton’s defeat erased fears among gun enthusiasts about losing access to weapons. Sales plummeted, and retailers stopped re-ordering as they found themselves stuffed with unsold inventory.
But this throw-off line from WaPo caught my eye:
But it’s not all gloom and doom for Remington or for the firearm business, in general. Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, told Bloomberg that the company’s problems stemmed from normal “see-saws” in the industry.
“I suspect that if the Democrats make a resurgence this November,” Feldman said, “gun company stocks will come roaring back with them.”
If I were a gun manufacturer, would I be donating money to Republican campaigns – or Democrat’s campaigns?
It’s an example of colliding Sector optimization strategies, no? If you’re of a political mindset, the answer to the above question is straightforward – the party which best exemplifies what you think is good for the country is your probable pick in an ideal world where the candidates themselves are generally acceptable in terms of personal behavior and competency and that sort of thing. But when you’re the CEO of a company? Then, in all probability, your optimizations are focused on making money. In the current political climate, gun owners and enthusiasts spook like a herd of prey animals, as they’ve been fed a diet of gun rights absolutism and, not unjustified, the idea that the Democrats want to implement gun-control. Obama’s in office, the NRA sang the song of confiscation, and they all ran to the gun and ammo manufacturers and bought and bought and bought.
But with Trump in office, that song is a crow’s call. Recent examples of NRA entreaties to their members have been quite laughable.
So if you were a gun & ammo manufacturer, would you give to those who sooth their customers into somnolescence? Or those who cause the customer to soil themselves in their panic?
The circus in the American capital tends to take my eye off of international developments, but this one is a doozy and shouldn’t be missed: Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, under investigation for corruption, may now be facing indictments on bribery and corruption charges. AL Monitor‘s Ben Caspit has the report:
The police described Netanyahu’s relationship with billionaire Arnon Milchan as “based on bribery.” They determined that on more than one occasion, Netanyahu acted counter to the country’s interests to receive benefits valued at around $280,000. The police similarly described his relationship with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes as one of “give and take,” or in other words, bribery in every sense of the word. In the case of Netanyahu’s relationship with Australian billionaire James Packer, the police recommended that he “only” be indicted for fraud and breach of trust.
The recommendations by the police on Feb. 13 kicked off a political earthquake, rocking Israel’s political and legal systems. Netanyahu has yet to be deposed. The last word must come from Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. Nevertheless, Netanyahu has become a lame duck. Going forward, the slightest injury could end Netanyahu’s political career. Olmert found himself in the same situation right after the Second Lebanon War, in 2006. Right now, the keys to Netanyahu’s political survival lie with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon. Everything will come to an end once the finance minister decides that holding on to them is more painful than the thought of cutting his successful tenure short over the Netanyahu investigations. It might never happen, but it could also come about much quicker than Netanyahu imagines.
And Ben says there’s more shit flying Netanyahu’s way. I’m going to assume he’ll be out of power soon, no matter how hard he dances.
There’s little point in trying to find lessons between Trump and Netanyahu. The Israeli politician has had more than 12 years of power and has been exceedingly devious, even as he considered Trump to be his ally – until Trump’s random moves left Netanyahu flat footed. Trump is little more than an amateur, with a gift for campaigning, and even that gift may be overwhelmed by his continuing gaffes in the governance department.
The real question is where Israel will go once Netanyahu is gone. Will they continue their rightward slide into something not really resembling a democracy any longer? It’d be lovely to think that the shock of the corruption would make the Israeli citizen reconsider their judgment, but quite honestly it’s easier – and even more sensible – to blame the man, not the ideology.
Therefore, I’m not really expecting any substantive changes in Israeli policy because I expect another Likud victory in the next elections, and simply another face at the helm. Perhaps a more honest politician will take over, but I’m not sure that’ll really help matters all that much.
From Forbes:
Who says food trucks have to be on land? For those yachters, jet skiers and other aquatic adventurers with sudden hunger pangs, here’s a sustainable floating kitchen to satisfy your needs.
Named Aqua Pod, this sustainable floating drive-through with a capacity of up to six staff will serve The Dubai Palm Lagoon, Al Sufouh and Kite Beach of Dubai’s Jumeirah region starting on February 2.
he special project is created and developed under the helm of award-winning architect Ahmed Youssef—Founder of Aquatic Architects Design Studio (AADS) in Dubai—who spent a little bit under a year with his team working on everything from concept development, design development alongside expert marine consultants, and commercial licensing to about four months of construction.
Lloyd Alter on Treehugger is delighted to discover this food truck picks up after its customers – and he likes the design:
If only every food truck picked up after their customers. We have been going on for years about dubious designs in what we called Dubious Dubai, but this isn’t dubious at all, and I hope a version of it comes to Algonquin Park soon.
It makes me smile.
Akiva Eldar discusses the madness going on in Israel in AL Monitor:
On Feb. 5, Rabbi Itamar Ben-Gal of the West Bank settlement Har Bracha was murdered in a terror attack outside Ariel, another
settlement. Eliezer Melamed, the rabbi of Har Bracha and founder of the rabbinical seminar located on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Nablus, delivered a eulogy at his graveside. “Recently, Rabbi Itamar and his wife Miriam spoke about the possibility that one of them would be killed for the sanctification of God’s name, and agreed that they were prepared to courageously rise to the challenge,” Melamed said. This spiritual leader of a significant religious Zionist group, a community rabbi whose salary is paid by Israeli taxpayers, consoled the mourners by saying, “Blessed is one who merits dying for the mitzvah [godly command] of settling the Land of Israel.” Ordinary people watching four children accompany their father to his grave see a human tragedy. For some, the murder of an Israeli citizen by an Arab is further proof that there’s no partner for peace. For others, it shows that the time has come to vacate the Israeli settlements. Melamed and his disciples view the death of a friend or relative at the hands of a terrorist as the realization of a divine mission. “The best revenge is to keep building, to build another neighborhood and another neighborhood, and to turn Har Bracha into a city,” Melamed exhorted the mourners.
Followed by:
The two-state solution — the only alternative to Israel’s becoming a binational or apartheid state — would involve vacating isolated West Bank settlements such as Har Bracha, Itamar and Havat Gilad to make way for a Palestinian state. However, successive Israeli governments have taught the settlers that every murder of one of their own holds the potential for another outpost, for another obstacle on the road to compromise. For example, following the March 2011 murder of five members of the Fogel family from Itamar, their friends established a new outpost adjacent to the settlement, and the government approved the construction of hundreds of new housing units in the occupied territory. Thirty days after the terror attack, the cornerstone was laid for a rabbinical house of study in Itamar that would bear the name of the head of the family, Ehud Fogel.
To me, it’s slow-motion imperialism. For them, it’s fulfilling some imagined will of God. And if the outposts are eventually pushed down, will there be acceptance? No. It’s the will of God.
And Hell on Earth.
Spaceweather.com has a warning:
On Feb. 12th, the magnetic canopy of sunspot AR2699 exploded–for more than 6 hours. The slow-motion blast produced a C1-class solar flare and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) almost directly toward Earth. This movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observtory (SOHO) shows the CME leaving the sun:
[omitted – go see the link, though, it’s a cool movie]
My oh my. Gotta remember to take a look outside at night the next few nights.
Along with simply not liking the taste of fish, I also cringe whenever some medical authority recommends some X helpings of fish a week because I know from reports that a lot of fisheries have shrunk or even collapsed. So this report from Katherine Martinko on Treehugger came as unwelcome confirmation of my concerns:
[fish biologist Laura] McDonnell is not alone in choosing to eliminate seafood from her diet. Famed marine biologist Sylvia Earle will not eat any fish, based on the sharp decline in fish populations she’s observed over a lifetime of work. Similarly, Lori Marino, president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, chooses not to eat fish because, “just like land animals, they are ‘sentient beings and we do not need to eat them to live healthy lives’.” (via NewsDeeply)
Of course, if we all follow along then either we become land meat eaters – or vegans. If the former, then we push along industries which use up vegetable matter at alarming rates or may put chickens in inhumanely crowded quarters.
There’s too many of us, and we’re eating too much meat. And I’m one of them.
Feckless:
Used by my Arts Editor as we discussed French Impressionists:
They were rather feckless.
Loving Vincent (2017) is a novelty movie concealing a rather darn good story. The story is about the events surrounding the death of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, the early Impressionist artist who, obscure during his lifetime, cut off one of his ears and eventually committed suicide. The motivation driving this movie isn’t the story, good as it is, but the desire to bring van Gogh’s artistic style into a movie. To that end, 100 and more artists hand-painted every single frame of the movie (minus the ending credits, I think).
The story is told from the viewpoint of the son of a French postmaster who had known Vincent, and has come into possession of a letter addressed to Vincent. Knowing Vincent had a brother, Theo, the postmaster gives his son, Armand, the task of delivering the letter to Theo. Armand grumpily agrees.
Upon arriving at Theo’s address, however, he finds the man died months ago, and the family has moved away. He has one clue: a Dr. Gachet, who was treating Vincent’s psychological condition, may know the address of the widow of Theo. Armand had met Vincent briefly, and thus takes it upon himself to visit the scene of Vincent’s death, visit Dr. Gachet, and investigate a little bit.
Characters are vividly drawn and the story is told through flashbacks, enacting key scenes in Vincent’s life, letting us see the man behind the artist. Contradiction is piled on confusion as characters bring their own needs and viewpoints into the mix. This isn’t a retelling so much as a mystery – was it murder, accident, or suicide?
But the real stars here are the endless paintings making up the movie, some so thick with paint as to distort the scenery, others, indicating flashbacks, nearly photo-realistic in their careful renderings. My Arts Editor had a single word for the effort: Gorgeous. (Me? I actually got a little queasy. But this should be put down to illness.)
Fascinating visual treatment and a darn good story to boot? How can I not?
Recommended.
As cryptocurrencies get a lot of attention, this report in NewScientist (27 January 2018) certainly does nothing to encourage me to buy any bitcoins:
Decentralisation is key to cryptocurrencies, because there is no Federal Reserve or European Central Bank to lend legitimacy to the cause. Instead, decentralised networks authenticate transactions so no individual user has the power to manipulate the process, but everyone has the power to check it.
Emin Gün Sirer at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues monitored the bitcoin and ethereum networks from 2015 to 2017 to see how decentralisation was faring. “There is a lot of noise made about decentralisation, and then when you look at it, it’s not all that decentralised,” Sirer says. On top of this, bitcoin has halved in value since last month, with other cryptocurrencies having similar declines.
With bitcoin, the top four miners control more than half of the computational power of the bitcoin network, called the “hash share”. With ethereum, a well-established cryptocurrency that uses smart online contracts, more than 60 per cent of the computational power is controlled by only three miners. These may be individual miners or groups of people who share their processing power.
This is dangerous, because any person or group with a hash share of 51 per cent or more could potentially game the system by either censoring other users’ bitcoin transactions – making sure that they can’t send or receive currency – or by double-spending their own coins, according to Garrick Hileman at the University of Cambridge.
Or, as they point out, welcome back to central banking – with none of the governmental oversight.
Is this suggestive that we cannot replace that function of government, tainted as it is with human corruption potential, with the clean objectivity of algorithms? Well, honestly, I have no idea – one data point doesn’t make for an argument.
Except there is a second data point. There have been observations that certain AI applications are exhibiting sexist or racist behaviors when it comes to situations where humans might be sexist or racist as well. This is put down to the data used to train the artificial intelligence.
As ever, our constructs are vulnerable to corruption, as they are our inventions – which means we need to monitor them, just as we monitor ourselves.
I can just see the “common-sense” man shaking his head at the report that scientists adorned praying mantis (surely one of the greatest pun-names every constructed) with glasses. What a waste of money, I can hear muttered.
Well, sorry. They discovered something. From The Verge, who can probably produce a better interpretation of the scholarly paper than I can:
Photo: Newcastle University, UK
Praying mantises willing to wear 3D glasses and sit through bizarre, abstract movies have revealed a new way of seeing the world in three dimensions. The findings could help improve machine vision for robots that need to judge distance, like drones. But most of all, thanks to this research, we now know what bug-eyed mantises look like in glasses: adorable.
These carnivorous — frequently, cannibalistic — insects are well known for their pious posture, and the female’s habit of devouring her mate after sex. Praying mantises also have an unusual perspective for a bug: they’re the only insect we know of that can see in 3D, like we can. But figuring out how their bug-brains judge distance has been a challenge, because you can’t exactly ask a mantis to describe what it’s seeing. So scientists developed what they call a “3D insect cinema” and the bug versions of 3D glasses to test mantis vision. They discovered that mantis brains tune out confusing background information to judge distance to a moving target, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
That’s completely different from how our own brains sense depth. To create a 3D perception out of each eye’s slightly different 2D picture of the world, the human brain has to merge both images. By comparing where the images match and where they differ, the brain can calculate what’s nearby and what’s far away. But if the images differ too much — like if one eye is seeing a picture of a forest and another is looking at a car on a road — that merging process breaks down.
A discovering with immediate application, if we can only implement it.
The silliest studies can surprise you, can’t they? Worth keeping an open mind.
Gallimaufry:
A confused jumble or medley of things.
‘a glorious gallimaufry of childhood perceptions’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]
Noted in “Identity U.” Heather Mac Donald, City Journal:
As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, de la Torre presided over a division made up of a whopping 28 departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars. This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression.
From WaPo:
In a call center, somewhere on Earth, a telephone rang. John picked up. On the other end of the line was a man who spoke in a preposterously fake Russian accent and introduced himself as “Vicktor Viktoor,” which was not his real name.
It’s very possible that John used a fake name, too, as the call center was in actuality an Internet scam headquarters — something “Vicktor” knew very well, though he had no intention of telling John right away.
Not for hours, if he could help it.
Yep, waste scammers’ time. I’ve been contemplating constructing an interview form for use with scammers. When a scammer calls about my computer, the idea is to override their desires and begin answering questions. Perhaps give them a ‘promise’ that once the interview is over, they may ask their questions, but in the meantime, Mr … Jones, for purely statistical purposes, I need to know your age? Income level? Educational level?
See how far I can drag it out.
I once asked a scammer if his mother was ashamed of what he was doing. He said he was very ashamed, but he was desperate for money. Persistent.
(It helps to think of The Muppets Show, at least for the rhythm.)
These are not attached to the roofline, but rather to the ivy branches encrusting my neighbors garage.
Not all that impressive, sure. But unusual.
In news that has been rattling around for a week, SCOTUS refused to hear a GOP appeal from Pennsylvania lawmakers regarding a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that Pennsylvania districts have been gerrymandered and must be redrawn immediately. Their response?
Talk about impeaching the judges. Paste Magazine reports:
Pennsylvania Senate President pro tempore and Republican Joseph Scarnati told the state supreme court on January 31 that he would openly defy the court’s recent ruling on gerrymandering.
A letter from Scarnati’s legal counsel states that Scarnati will not be complying with the court order. The statement reads, “Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders.” Scarnati’s previously said that his defiance was due to his belief that the court’s January 22 order “violates the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause.”
Yesterday, pollster Matt McDermott tweeted a screenshot of an email from Pennsylvania Republican Cris Dush that was sent to all Pennsylvania House members. In the email, Dush calls for the impeachment of the state supreme court members that found the state’s congressional map unconstitutional.
The email reads:
The five justices who signed this order that blatantly and clearly contradicts the plain language of the Pennsylvania Constitution, engaged in misbehavior in office. Wherefore, each is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office and disqualification to hold any office or trust or profit under this Commonwealth. I would ask you to please join me in co-sponsoring this legislation.
Does the legislature have the right of interpretation of the law? No, by design the judiciary has that right and responsibility. Impeachment is typically for bad behavior.
How this turns out for both the judges and, later, the GOP should be quite interesting.
But more interesting is that, according to Carolyn Fiddler on The Daily Kos,
Supreme Court elections in Pennsylvania are partisan … Subsequent elections for these justices will be “retention” (yes-no) elections, which incumbents very rarely lose, so open seats present the only real opportunity for either party to gain seats.
So rather than select hopefully non-partisan judges who take their responsibilities seriously and needn’t worry about their job security so long as they act like adults, we have judges who are keenly aware that an unpopular judgment could end their careers. I don’t say a bad judgment, but an unpopular judgment. Just let biased “media” who would prefer some other, more malleable creature in the seat, and a PA Supreme Court judge may find themselves the target of a hate campaign.
I’ve discussed the election of judges before, starting here, or just run a search on “Yulee” to find more discussion. I’ve come down on appointed for either lifetime or for an unmodifiable period of time; the practice of selecting judges through voting seems like madness in a system which requires some form of disinterested law interpretation.
Wait, you made me do what?
A large, darkened room, filled by an elegantly dressed audience of men and women, seated in rows. The huge screen, in front of them. The shadows it’s destined to host begin their flicker.
The first hiss of a shocked, in-drawn breath, the enlarged pupils of the eyes, the clutching at the arm of a neighbor.
“Oh, my God, I’m in this?”
The squirming starts, as every member of the audience begins to realize they’ve been part of a travesty. And then, heralded by the tittering that sweeps through the crowd, a transition comes. A hairy hand tries and fails to cover cackle. And then the horse-laugh.
And now, as unstoppable waves of hilarity sweep through the helpless audience, the director of the shadows on the screen begins to weep, his dream mocked. Soon, the big bully of a man leaves, his sight in the dark auditorium fractured by his tears.
And salvation comes in the form of his once-best and only friend, who trots out into the lobby to find the man who tried to ruin his life. In the face of the director’s incoherent lamentations concerning the treatment of his dream, this autobiographical film, he has a simple rejoinder.
“You hear that? D’you hear that? Do you think Hitchcock ever achieved that?”
As they return to the auditorium, the lights come up and the audience stands for an ovation, of their director and themselves, in a horrifyingly successful conclusion to a tremendously fore-doomed flop, for it’s the opening for the supposedly autobiographical cult classic The Room (2003), the first movie by Tommy Wiseau.
This is The Disaster Artist (2017), which is all about how mystery man Tommy Wiseau made his first movie, from his recognition that you have to be the best you can be, to the agonizing realization that his best, as an actor, would not be enough to get him in the door of any studio to make a movie, and then back up the rollercoaster again as he determines to make a movie himself. Drawing on mysterious resources and a bottomless pit of self-confidence and arrogance, that movie gets written and made, destroying relationships and many other unnameable things in the process – and, soon enough, perhaps Tommy himself.
This is the sort of movie, if you choose to go, that may chase you from the theater, as both my Arts Editor and myself agreed afterwards. There are parts that are predictably painful. But persevere.
Because it gets worse. Several times it gets worse. You’ll wonder if that was a prosthetic or a paper bag. And then it gets worse. And the predictability disappears. And all along, the WTF factor keeps going up. Because why the hell is Seth Rogen and James Franco in this movie? Why is J. J. Abrams IN this movie. I mean, What The Fuck?
In the end, this is an enormously painful, probably honest, and yet affectionate gesture from Hollywood to one of their own, for pursuing and achieving his artistic dream – and then transforming it into something else.
It’s not quite Recommended, but if you’ve seen The Room or are interested in the artistic process, or just want to see artistic madness before the warts are shaved off, this is quite the example.
Meta-punning:
Literally, a pun about a pun, meta-punning occurs when a pun is attempted, but the purveyor of the pun realizes the pun stretches the boundaries of the material of the pun beyond its capacity to absorb, and so the purveyor then attempts to absolve themselves of the pun’s failure by making a pun about the failure, or more precisely about why the material “stretched out of shape” by the pun could not properly contain the pun’s structure. [Hue’s Defiant Imagination]
Sadly, I have forgotten the example my Arts Editor and I made up.
One of my more conservative friends who received my post concerning the closed conservative mind replied nearly immediately; I apologize for not publishing and responding as quickly, and plead illness as my excuse.
I’d like to say beforehand that his definition of tribalism and mine are not congruent. I pointed this out and offered to await a revision of his response in light of my definition, but he declined and agreed his initial response could be published.
You may not be looking for a lengthy response, but I disagree with so much of what you say.
First, tribalism is not wrong. It is inevitable. It is even good. We all have some idea of who is “us” and who is “them”. These “tribes” overlap and come in many forms – engineers, Americans, tall people, men, christians, corvair lovers. Most tribes are trivial, some vital. One form of tribe is “family”. I don’t think that you can make a case that treating family better/differently than “outsiders” is “wrong”. Duty and responsibility to family holds society together. That tribalism gives us small groups that take care of each other, and provide a measure of discipline more than any government can do.
As mentioned, our definitions of tribalism are different. This I have no disagreement with, provided that leaders do not replace the functions of truth and honor. That is, they should be expected to measure up to the highest standards of truth and honor, not define the meanings of those words. This might be the central lesson of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The idea that the media is about “truth” is ridiculous. It has never been, and never will be. Throughout history there are numerous stories that have been pushed by “media” that were self serving, malevolent, or pure propaganda. Media in this country exists to make money. This is true even of “public” media, because they serve their donors, and their donors have opinions. It is the job of the citizen to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat. It has always been so, and will always be so.
If the media as truth seekers is silly, then why have a free press at all? Is it all so ridiculous to seek a media which transmits the full facts of a situation, and purveys clearly labeled editorial content as well? That stories are told is both undeniable and highly desirable, given how most human minds function, but the best are fully informed by all the facts, and if they suggest a certain point of view over another, they should do so in a manner testable by the common audience.
The identification of certain past stories as defective and even malevolent, whether they’re from the Fox News of today or by the yellow journalists of WR Hearst encouraging the Spanish-American War does nothing to evaluate the contention under examination; indeed, given human inclination towards errors in their endeavours, it can be seen as a sign that, per normal, we may fall short, but we should continue to strive for that perfection we so happily envision.
However, it’s critical to differentiate between defective and malevolent. The former, so long as it’s recognized as a problem and processes are developed to remediate and remove defective stories, are of limited concern – and if those responses are not undertaken, I should hope the publication is deserted by its readers and soon shutters its doors.
But I worry about the deliberately malevolent stories, as we often see them today. The specialized technician, by which I mean journalist, has the tools to recognize such stories for what they are. Organizations such as Media Matters are in fact specializing such work (although it’s a poor example, as they apparently only watch conservative media, rather than all media, which I would prefer).
But the general audience? I honestly belief that the average audience member does not have the capacity to search out and absorb the information necessary to form judgments about media stories. We are not rational creatures, after all, merely creatures capable of rationality; many of us are controlled by our emotions, which can be deliciously played on by stories in the media written by actors who want specific reactions. That these actors are not acting as ethical journalists is not and should not be expected by members of the free press.
The idea that the Russians did something bad and “interfered” in our election is just silly. Nations try to do “marketing” all the time. They always have, and always will. They often want to push an ideology, like the US did with Radio Free Europe and VOA. Are you going to tell me that VOA was improperly “meddling” in other nations? I thought we – as a nation – (tribe?) believed in free expression and free press. Are American’s prohibited from trying to influence people beyond our borders? Are foreigners prohibited from influencing us? It is illegal for Russian Jews to lobby for help to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Really?
Indeed. In the competition between nations / government systems, one must ask if the same ethical system applies as within each country. Perhaps the ethical system of the Soviet Union should have applied, rather than the United States? I do not see how to properly select one over the other; the fact of the matter is that there is often an existential war, declared or not, progressing between borders, and applying our intra-country ethical system to it seems like a fool’s task. We (for the most part) believe that our system is best, and so we broadcast it, clearly labeled, and we believe there’s is antithetical to ours. Since then we’ve seen the Soviet Union collapse, but now Russia attempts to meddle in our system without attribution.
Our notions of free press originated in a nation into which foreign information penetrated only after traveling an ocean in a dubious sailing ship; perhaps free press needs some change, although I’d indulge in such an exercise only after the consumption of alcohol :). I believe it was developed as a way to strengthen our nation and assumed the agencies would be American; nowadays, they are often international corporations, and sometimes I do actually wonder if that was a wise thing to do, although generally I dismiss those notions using arguments concerning the grave importance of having multiple sources of foreign information – for the same reason we have multiple press organizations.
And, yes, many nations prohibit private American citizens and public American servants from meddling in their politics, as I suspect do we. Whether it’s right or wrong is another question.
The goals of Russia and the United States are not congruent, they are in conflict, at least in my amateur’s view of the situation – which accords with many experts as well. Convincing enough Americans to vote against the hard-ass Clinton vs a Trump who appears to be quite concerned about keeping the Russians happy through subversive means is not a use of the free press (which will ideally try to deliver stories with correct and full facts), because these stories will generate certain emotions in the vulnerable reader while using false facts (a phrase I’ve always found uncomfortable) and omitting true facts, all in the search for turning a voter against the undesired candidate. The fact that the voter lacks the resources to check the facts of all stories makes them vulnerable. See below, also.
I think not. It is the duty of the citizen to sift through the propaganda and find the truth. I believe in the free marketplace of ideas, and trying to stop ideas and information from crossing national borders is a fool’s errand. I go farther and suggest that information from “foreign sources” is necessary and valuable. For instance, Al Jazeera should have a place on cable, if it wants. How else do we get a window on the arab media?
But the reference to al-Jazeera is a red herring, is it not? In the ‘market’ of the free press, there is an assumption that each organization has a relatively limited funding source which will run dry, or be withheld, if they fail to attract an audience, and that the audience will demand high quality journalism. My understanding is that al-Jazeera is exactly that. But Russian meddling had no motivation for quality, because quality would ill-serve their goals; the audience merely had to be convinced that the “news” is true when it’s not. A malevolent agency backed by government funding is on a different playing field.
I covered the loss of Al-Jazeera America here. When I want news these days from the Middle East, long time readers know I go to AL Monitor. Back before the Internet, I read World Press Review avidly, but its website is not as interesting as the magazine, sad to say.
Byt the same token the Meuller “investigation” is misguided. Even if it were found that Trump had weekly meetings with Putin and talked over the Russian’s Facebook ads, I don’t think law enforcement should be involved. Next election, I would have some hard questions to ask the candidates, but it is not a legal issue. In this country we have freedom of expression, and the voters decide. That implies that we trust the electorate. That implies that the electorate carries a major burden – to be wise, and diligent. If wisdom and diligence fail, we are in a world of hurt.
Two points.
I do not believe that application of force, either via prosecutors, FBI agents, new laws, etc, will make up for a failure of the electorate. If we, as a nation (tribe?) fail to carry our burdens, and follow fashion and passion rather than wisdom and truth, it is the electorate that has failed. If the electorate rules, then we’re in trouble.
But the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are not foreign entities – they are tools of the American government and public for discerning what is happening. If law-breaking occurs, they must properly make the proper arrests and bring the proper information to the judiciary for final disposition. As cadres of specialized investigators, what is wrong with using them to check on the behavior of our proposed and current leaders? In fact, the suggestion that we not use the FBI leaves me a little chilled, as it suggests (although I doubt my reader meant to) that the President should not be constrained by the laws which constrain the rest of us.
I believe as Winston Churchill did. He once said (paraphrased) : America will always do the Right Thing, once they have tried everything else.
I’d love to join the reader in that belief, but old WC also responsible for the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I, an awful disaster for the Allies, so I try not to mistake WC for being particularly wise – just very quotable.
That said, the close reporting on the President, the investigations, the recognition of the closure of the conservative mind and its manipulation by malevolent actors and the attempts to break those closures, this is all part of the Americans trying to do the Right Thing. It’s what I worry about and gnaw on and worry the rest of us might also be attracted to such closed ways of thinking – in a world moving so fast that sometimes a single unfortunate error has no potential for recovery from.
And so I hope what I am doing helps us all do the Right Thing. By waking up minds to bad thinking, be they on the right or the left.
In a separate mail, the same reader sends:
Speaking of tribes….
I’ve glanced at the first couple of paragraphs, but haven’t time to read it now. It looks like another out-of-control college, maybe.
