Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Harvard undergraduate makes a pitch for audio books, and explains the value of fiction
I thought I would share this video from Harvard
undergraduate John Fish on the value of reading fiction.
He makes a case for the idea that in identifying with a
character you can learn about yourself. He
presents the all too familiar experience of studying Shakespeare in high school. I remember reading “Julius Caesar” (10th
grade), and “Macbeth”, “King Lear”, and (for a book report) “Hamlet” in twelfth
grade.
I think I can turn this around and imagine this idea from an
author’s point of view. Many of my older manuscripts are about “me” as the
central character, who migrates through apocalyptic change and finds success,
in his own terms, in relationships through this navigation. Finally, for the manuscript (“Angel’s Brother”)
that I am working on now, I tell the outer story through other two characters,
a very gifted graduating college-student (whom Fish, ironically, I might be
able to compare to based on his videos), and a middle aged covert CIA agent
whose family and marriage is on the verge of breakup. The student, a gifted
hacker, has discovered “the plot”, so to speak, through decoding the
unpublished works of “Bill” (me) and now wonders if he is an alien himself
(that’s a little bit the idea of NBC’s “The Event”, where Jason Ritter’s
character doesn’t know that he is an alien). Of course, this leads to heavy layering
of levels of plot.
Fish also makes a (sponsored) pitch for Audio Books, and
recommends Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932) . Conservative author George Gilder, in
his book “Men and Marriage” in 1986, and probably even “Sexual Suicide” in 1973,
mentioned this book and often made the point that the retreat from the
traditional family (as already developed in society by the 1980s) would invite
genetic engineering of babies for perfection and remove the personal risk of
dealing with people with disabilities. Yup, the idea could be made to sound
fascist.
Getting audio books made sounds like an expensive process,
probably not practical for many self-published authors. It also takes much longer to listen to a book
than read it, and often the books are abridged. I have had friends who buy them.
Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Fish has several other videos describing his relation to reading books by well-regarded authors, one a week.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Anthology of psychiatric assessments of Trump's mental health
Donald Trump’s behavior the past week has rattled markets
and seemed to indicate instability.
There is a book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists
and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”, edited by Bandy X. Lee, from
Thomas Dunne Books, ISBN 978-1250-17945-6, 2017, 384 pages, publisher link.
A former staff member of Trump wrote this piece in the NYTimes
about being the adult in the room back in Sept. 2018
The same writer put a piece in “The Conversation”.
This book seems especially relevant now that Mattis is gone.
Some of the pieces admit reluctance by some psychiatrists to discuss a patient they haven't treated/
Attention by Congress, especially Republicans, should need to be placed on the president's cognitive fitness.
Labels:
anthologies,
book previews,
Trump presidency
Sunday, December 23, 2018
David Mixner's work and the birth of "don't ask don't tell" under Clinton recalled in Blade, right after Mixner's own book "Stranger Among Friends" (1996)
Karen Ocamb has an article about David Mixner and how “Don’t
Ask Don’t Tell” happened in the Washington Blade (p 12) and Los Amgeles Blade,
Dec 21.
The subtitle is “Mixner on how it happened – and Clinton’s
Betrayal”.
That refers to Clinton’s DADT policy announcement at Ft. McNair
on July 19, 1993. But it was an “honest compromise” with Sam Nunn at the time,
and included the other logline, “don’t pursue’.
The article includes details about the cases of Keith
Meinhold and Tracy Thorne. The video above comes from the 1993 March on Washington.
This all brings up the issue of David Mixner’s 1996 book “Stranger
Among Friends”, Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10073-4. I read this while working on my DADT-1 book in the 1990s.
Mixner had recounted how he was “setup” in 1969 by imposters
from the FBI to find out he was gay.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
"Wind-up Train Book": a model train little toy world (3 of them) inside a children's book
Here’s something different, and maybe a Christmas present.
It's a mechanical train-set that offers three micro worlds to live in, as if they were O'Neill nodes on a space station.
It's a mechanical train-set that offers three micro worlds to live in, as if they were O'Neill nodes on a space station.
Usborne Farmyward Tales presents the “Wind-Up Train Book
with Model Train and 3 Tracks”.
It is illustrated by Stephen Cartwright. It’s based on stories
by Heather Amery, designed by Helen Woodm rewritten by Alex Forth, edited by
Gilliam Dpherty, with additional illustrations by Erica Harrison and Non
Taylor.
There are three layouts where a windup engine can run and
switch directions through loops, which is not possible when a rail is
electrified. You could prove mathematical theorems about how many times a train
can change directions in a particular.
Maybe you could make a toy like this with a true Mobius strip.
I bought this at the Greenberg trains show at Dulles Airport in Virginia.
There is an ISBN 978-0-7945-2192-9.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Two major reports sent to the Senate on Russian leveraging of US social media
Here are two of the reports sent to the Senate regarding
Russian infusion into American politics since about 2014, maybe earlier.
One is from New Knowledge, in Austin, TX is “The Tactics andTropes of the Internet Research Agency”. It is authored by Renee Di Resta et al
from NK (see the pdf for the list), and Jonathan Albright (Tow Center for
International Journalism, Columbia University in NYC, and Ben Johnson (Canfield
Research, LLC).
The other is from the Computational Propaganda Research
Project at Oxford University in London., and at Graphika. The authors are Philip N. Howard, John Kelly
et al (see link). The title is “The IRA and Political Polarization in theUnited States”,
The New York Times has several articles and editorials today.
Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel have a long analysis.
The IRA (“Internet Research Agency”, not “Irish Republican
Army” or “Individual Retirement Account”) particularly targeted African
Americans. They would show truthful videos about police mistreatment of African
Americans after profiling, and get them fed through the algorithms of many
social media platforms (esp. Instagram), not “just” Facebook and Twitter. (I doubt they bothered with Gab.) Then once
they had an audience, they would send out posts recommending that POC vote for
the Green Party, or at least not for Hillary, breaking up her coalition and
allowing Trump a better chance through remainder math of plurality.
Legally, of course, it may be a crime for a foreigner to
impersonate an American when using an online service (that’s what the
indictments are about), Were Facebook
able to identify their origin, they could have labeled them as such and not fed
them into the algorithms (they missed the signals – the use of rubles, and the
Russian language – like they should have hired “Paul” from Language Focus on YouTube
to help ferret out non-US sources.
But the content itself would be perfectly legal and ethical. There would be nothing wrong with a domestic
user pumping the system with valid videos of police misconduct, and then encouraging
people not to vote for Hillary. That’s the First Amendment. If you don’t want this to happen, get rid of
the Electoral College (which gives rural “places” more electoral clout). As “Economic Invincibility” has pointed out
on YouTube, you can consider major changes in voting systems if you want. It is
very hard to change the Constitution, of course (as it must be).
The Russians were amazingly fluent on American culture, and
were especially uncanny on the divide between the intellectual elites and the
less educated “proles”, and on the deep divisions over gender and sexuality –
and even the prospective population demographics (fewer children in higher
income people). They may have gleaned
that from “elitist” blog posts, from people who would not fall for their mass “spammy”
campaigns.
Alex Ward has a higher-level analysis on Vox.
Here is New Knowledge’s own high-level takeaway on its work.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
"Content or Context Moderation?" Booklet by Data and Society looks at challenges for platforms with user-generated content, but seems to miss some big developments
Data and Society published, in mid November 2018, a 50 page
paper “Content or Context Moderation? Antisanal, Community-Reliant, and
Industrial Approaches”, by Robyn Caplan, at this link (downloadble PDF)
The three basic strategies parse according to the kind of
service. Patreon, Medium, and Vimeo are
said to you antisanal (context-based) approaches; Reddit and Wikipedia use community volunteers;
Facebook and Google (especially YouTube) use industrial approaches with
considerable automation (such as Google’s ContentId).
There are many areas the report doesn’t mention. For one
thing, the upcoming implementation of the European Union’s Copyright Directive
(especially Articles 11 and 13) could increase moderation problems for platforms
even for users in the rest of the western world.
The article discusses Section 230 of the 1996
Telecommunications Act in the US, with a “good Samaritan” policy to allow platforms
to set their own moderation standards. Recently CDA230 has been weakened by FOSTA,
the new ant-trafficking law. Violet Blue’s Engadget article (“Congress JustLegalized Sex Censorship: What to Know”, March 2018) gives a detailed rundown
on the self-protective behavior of many platforms.
Caplan doesn’t mention the parallel DMCA Safe Harbor
for copyright. It does compare how downstream liability works in Germany, where
there is a visitor size threshold and where hate speech is illegal, to the US.
The recent bannings by Patreon (crowdfunding) on a rule
based on “manifest observable behavior” as defined in 2017 by CEO Jack Conte,
seem to be based on an inflexible (rather than context-antisanal) approach to
the use of bad words or slurs. Increasingly platforms are willing to ban for
off-platform behavior (beyond the obvious cases of criminal convictions) and
associations, partly out of fear of the alt-right and of covert and hostile foreign
(especially Russian) influence.
Friday, December 14, 2018
Two big reports show how many people self-radicalize on social media, esp. toward the alt-right by reinforcing algorithms
VOX-Pol (no connection to Vox in the US), in Europe, recently
published a large booklet report as a PDF, by J. M. Berger, “The Alt-Right
Twitter Consensus: Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content
on Twitter”, link here.
A shorter but more explosive report comes from Bellingcat
and Robert Evans. It is titled “From Memes to Infowars: How 75 Fascist
Activists Were ‘Red-Pilled.”.
The term “red-pilling”, from the Matrix movies, means
converting someone from a moderate ideology to a much more extreme and combative
one, usually emphasizing loyalty to the group or tribe.
Vox (in the US) analyzes these reports in a piece by Zach
Beauchamp, suggesting that YouTube has become “infested” as a honeypot for the alt-right. It's interesting, though, that the Bellingcat report read literally doesn't point to YouTube (75 cases) but the Vox piece does, perhaps jumping to conclusions.
Before going to far, it’s good to give the Wikipedia
reference for “alt-right”, which shows the wide variations in the meaning of
the term. But generally many of these forms are quite extreme and emphasize
extreme tribalism, such as “national anarchists”. They are generally
anti-intellectual and anti-individualistic, and want “socialism” within a
patriarchal tribal structure. They see
this as a way to rectify individual inequality of ability
The Vox article shows how the algorithms, in a manner
similar to Facebook, drive repeated users into echo chambers. More moderate users will never be aware of
the problem, as they will generally not even see the content.
However, the article shows that populations are susceptible
to propaganda, and that less cognitively intact people can be driven into radical
areas and convinced to join radical movements. Intellectually sound people will not even
notice this is going on.
Practically all the speech involved is protected under the
First Amendment and downstream liability largely protected by Section 230. This is quickly shaping up as an enormous
public policy problem.
Oddly, the danger of promoting radicalization may be greater
from users who don’t sell anything or raise money for causes in a conventional
way. Independent journalist Tim Pool has been especially skeptical of reports like this from larger media, who are challenged by low-cost competition from independent media.
Labels:
extremism,
meeting radical Islam,
periodicals
Thursday, December 13, 2018
"The Tablet" looks at hidden "intersectional" bigotry within the Women's March
Leah McSweeny and Jacob Siegel have a booklet-length analysis
on “The Tablet” about the Women’s march movement, “Is the Women’s March Melting
Down?” There is a correction on Twitter
by Yair Rosenberg.
The Washington Times, a conservative paper, has boiled down
the problem in a short summary by Valerie Richardson, “Women’s March leaders
blame bigotry for issues; didn’t address report on anti-Semitism” (p. A8, Thursday,
December 13, 2018).
But the Tablet article, in various places, gets into
intersectionality and the idea that groups are systematically oppressed by
those in privilege, as such, and need to be dealt with that way.
My own take is that we are finding out that individual
rights work well locally, but when they are deployed publicly and
internationally in a world with such gross inequality, it is inevitable that
runaway abuses with what seem like legitimate self-expression, will occur. There is a problem that many less educated users
don’t grasp meta-speech or the use of abstract conjectural thought. Frankly, there is also a body of thought emerging
saying nothing gets done until everyone is organized (which is how it is in
socialist countries, though).
Kevin Roose had continued this idea with a piece about “frictionless”
apps, especially on Facebook, “Is Tech too easy to use?”, which makes it too
easy for extremist groups (or undemocratic governments) to use social media against
people in more vulnerable groups. This
comes back to other recent suggestions to “slow the Internet down”.
See my International Issues blog post today for a preview of Van Jackson's "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War".
See my International Issues blog post today for a preview of Van Jackson's "On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War".
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Scammell writes that Solzshenitsyn, as a writer who emigrated to the US, may have brought down the Soviet Union himself
Michael Scammell is author of “Solzhenitsyn: A Biography”
(W.W. Norton, 1984).
Today, Wednesday, December 12, 2018 he has an op-ed in the
New York Times, p. A27, “The writer who beat an empire.” Solzhenitsyn started out with a novella “A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” about a Stalinist labor camp, where he (the
person) was sent to a labor camp for writing to a friend criticizing the soviet
system. As in early colonial America,
letters were read by authorities.
The little book was published in the west in 1962 by a small
literary magazine Novy Mir. Further autobiographical
novels would include “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward”, and then “The Gulag
Archipelago” in 1973. The Soviets
expelled him, and his arrival in the US out to prove to conservatives and especially
Trumpians the desirability of some immigration.
His writings helped bring down the Soviet Union in 1991. But Solzhenitsyn
did want a nationalist country with religious and conservative family values, rather
than Boris Yeltsin’s freewheeling republic, but he got what he wanted with
Putin in 2000.
The op-ed also discusses the clandestine publication of
Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” which had become a massive motion picture by
1966.
When I became a patient at NIH for the second half of 1962,
my roommate had a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky. We would scape
past the Cuban Missile Crisis will I was still a patient.
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Sandy Hook papers on and by Adam Lanza released and published by Hartford Newspaper
The Hartford Courant is making available all the court
papers in state police custody concerning Adam Lanza, perpetrator of the Sandy
Hook killings on Dec. 14. 2012.
The main link for the publication is here, as a Courant Exclusive.
The reporters are Josh Kovner and Dave Altimari.
The article provides a link to an editorial explaining why
the newspaper decided to release the papers.
There is no “manifesto” as such, but many scrapbooks and
loose writings, like “Big Book of Granny”.
Lanza’s mental state seems to be extremely disturbed,
starting with autism, which usually does not take this kind of path. He hated any kind of personal contact with
anyone. There are references to what he perceived as sexual abuse from physicians,
doing normal examinations.
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
The "Homebrewed Christianity" series:Bill Leonard's "Flaming Heretics"
Author: Bill Leonard
Title: “Homebrewed Christianity: Church History: Flaming Heretics
and Heavy Drinkers”
Publication: Nashville: Fortress Press, 2017, 238 pages,
paper, 8 chapters, endnotes.
This orange book is one of a series called “Homebrewed Christianity”,
edited by Tripp Fuller.
The basic premise is that Christianity is practice has been
a bottom-up religion, defined by how it is practiced by real people, who are
compared to chess pieces (Bishop, Elder, Deacon, Acolyte). Yet the tone of the book presumes people want to act together and belong, not be so much on their own.
Indeed, the first chapter is called “herding ecclesiastical
cats. As the reality of actually witnessing
a resurrection and ascension, which would have seemed like ultimate truth to those
who happened to live at a time and place where they could see it, receded, and became
a matter for “men of faith”, it became a member of socialization and
organization to figure out who really should be in charge and who should
deliver the messages and how people would follow.
Perhaps that has meaning today as individual speech itself becomes
questionable and we wonder who has the “privilege of being listened to” in a
secular sense.
The church has always had to deal with the paradoxes of
hypocrisy. It doesn’t know who walks
with the Lord. Only people do. The latter part of the book gets into specific episodes,
like the Jim Crow laws and Scopes Trial (movie “Inherit the Wind” and the “old
time religion” scene).
Copies of this book were sold at the First Baptist Church of
the City of Washington DC last spring.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Independent bookstores can now do print-on-demand on the premises (some of them)
CBS News reports that independent bookstores are making
strong returns after being almost wiped out in the middle 2000s.
The resurgence of independent bookstores is related to “localism”,
and some bookstores can now to print-on-demand on the premises, which could be
an interesting development for me.
One of the largest indie bookstores in the DC area is Kammerbooks
at Dupont Circle. Recently I went to a
reading at One More Page Books in Falls Church VA.
CBS has a story in 2003 concerning some bookstores' purging customer records when Congress passed the Patriot Act!
Heavy rain hampered “shop small” Saturday in the DC Area, although
I had a chance in Ellicott City MD Sunday.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Time offers "Great Scientists" for your coffee table
Time Magazine sells a supermarket coffee table booklet “Great
Scientists: The Geniuses and Visionaries Who Transformed Our World.” The Editor
is not named.
The book starts out with a lot of material on Stephen
Hawking (by Brian Greene, who passed away of ALS in 2018 at age 76, living
extraordinarily long since it started when he was in college.
Hawking came up with the theory that black holes may not be
completely black, but could evaporate with Hawking radiation. That could
theoretically mean that (mini) black holes could store and retransmit
information (about someone’s life).
Hawking also believed that the Universe might have started
with a singularity inside a black hole.
On p. 72 the booklet presents Paul Crutzen, who discovered the
ozone holes which, adjunct to climate change, can threaten future generations.
On p 31, the booklet shows how Muhammad al-Khwarizmi
invented Algebra I around 800 AD.
It would be nice if a booklet like this could cover Jack
Andraka’s “Science Fair” which appears to have invented a cheaper blood test
for many cancers (not just pancreatic).
I would be nice also to cover the work of Taylor Wilson, who
invented a fusion reactor in 2008 at age 14.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
"The Land that Failed to Fail": New York Times starts massive booklet on what makes China work
Philip P. Pan and photographer Bryan Denton are offering a
serialized book about China “The Land that Failed to Fail”, link.
The byline is "China rules." That is, "They didn't like the West's playbook. So they wrote their own."
The byline is "China rules." That is, "They didn't like the West's playbook. So they wrote their own."
It seems that statist capitalism (what Ted Koppel called “The
People’s Republic of Capitalism” ten years ago in a Nightline series) has
worked out very well.
There is a curious combination of nationalism, consumerism,
and psychological socialism – personal right-sizing and forced participation in
social capital – that seems to be working.
The idea seems very threatening.
But in a sense China expects everyone to know their place and act before
speaking.
There will be more installments, particularly about the
Internet censorship.
Wikipedia photo attribution: By Alex Needham - English wikipedia , Public Domain, reference.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Author of novel "Occupation" in China gets prison time for depicting gay sex; book had sold well online
A female fiction author, “Liu”, in China has been sentenced
to ten years in prison for writing and publishing a novel called “Occupation” that
describes male homosexual acts.
The sentence was laid down by the People’s Court in Wuhu in
Anhui Province.
All this despite the fact that homosexual acts are legal in China.
The situation seems parallel to the 2013 Russian anti-gay propaganda law, but
Chinese attitude toward gay rights gets much less attention than Russia’s (and
the middle East and sub-Saharan Africa).
The book had sold well online in China.
The Metro Weekly in Washington DC had a detailed story by Rhuaridh Marr.
Friday, November 16, 2018
NYTimes offers booklet giving a chronicle of Facebook's gradual change of heart on the need to monitor user speech
On Tuesday’s New York Times, five writers: Sheera Frenkel,
Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia King, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, describe
the Facebook saga: "Delay, Deny and
Deflect: How Facebook’s Leader’s Fought Through Crisis", in a booklet-length
article.
At this point I need to mention Siva Vaidhyanthan’s book “Anti-Social
Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy” here as well as several films and articles on that
blog concerning Facebook. I attended a panel discussion about this matter in San
Francisco in mid September, 2018.
The article notes that Sheryl Sandberg was at first angry at
general counsel Alex Stamos for “throwing the company under the bus” as
evidence of foreign (especially Russian) misuse of the site mounted in 2016.
Zuckerberg, as late as 2015, insisted that Facebook was a
utility, not a publisher, and could not screen content for political consequences. That is partly about Section 230.
Now the company is very choosy about accepting page boost for issue-oriented content separate from normal commercial business advertising, and seems unwilling to monetize controversial independent journalism (as News2Share and Ford Fischer have recently found out).
Now the company is very choosy about accepting page boost for issue-oriented content separate from normal commercial business advertising, and seems unwilling to monetize controversial independent journalism (as News2Share and Ford Fischer have recently found out).
Vanity Fair has a special issue “Moguls and Masterminds” in
supermarkets now, with an article by Nick Bilton “Status Change” about Mark Zuckerberg
on p.42. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains”, according
to Facebook ex-president Sean Parker (from “The Social Network”).
Thursday, November 15, 2018
"Illegal", by John Dennehy, self-published on a blockchain site (Steemit)
I have started looking into Steemit (with the idea of signing
up soon with some special material) and I did find that some authors, at least
one, publish e-books on it.
There is a book “Illegal”, by John Dennehy, first chapter
link is here. The subtitle is “A True Story of Love,
Revolution, and Crossing Borders”.
The author, a “naïve New Yorker”, travels to Ecuador and
falls in love with Lucia, and gets deported back to the US after “getting
involved”.
He is up to Chapter 20.
To buy a copy, it looks like you have to join Steemit (which
I will do soon) and get your cryptoaccount set up first. It can take some time to get your account
verified first.
Wednesday, November 07, 2018
"Inside Animal Minds", from NatGeo
Brandon Keim’s “Inside Animal Minds”, 112 pages, National
Geographic, is available in supermarket checkout stands in November 2018.
The subtitle is “what they think, feel, and know”. It's a lot that we don't know. They're already doomsday preppers.
There are three main sections in the book: Intelligence, Feelings, Relationships.
But there is a great emphasis on the likelihood that every individual
animal has some minimal self-awareness.
Even a worker bee in a hive knows that it is a prole and obedient to the
will of the hive.
Animals (even birds) have more language capabilities than we
realize, and more tool-using. They engage
in altruistic behavior. Among some fish,
males will guard the females eggs, and if a male is eaten by a shark, another
male, like a soldier on guard duty, will take its place.
Even some invertebrates, especially mullosks, have surprising
intelligence.
There is a YouTube video of a cat encountering a stranded
octopus on a deck near the ocean. You
find yourself “rooting” for the cat because she seems more like us than a mullosk,
but an octopus may have intelligence comparable to a cat or dog.
Biologists disagree on the significance of the mirror
recognition test (elephants, cetaceans, primates).
Some dolphins (especially orcas) may have human-equivalent
problem solving ability and arguably should have the legal rights of persons.
Mammals vary as to whether they are solitary or live in
colonies, which tend to have authoritarian tribal structures like early human
tribes. Lions and tigers are very similar genetically, but split off, with
lions living in prides and males developing manes as a sexual secondary characteristic
not needed by solitary tigers.
There are many videos which show that wild animals, especially
carnivores (including most wild cats) learn to recognize people in their
environment. In Colorado, a rancher
finds that the same four mountain lions appear on his property for water, and seem to remember and trust the rancher as a human individual. When I had a house, a fox got to the point
that he did not run when he saw me in the yard.
When I lived in a garden apartment in Dallas, a male cat simply
invited himself in. He would disappear
for days and then return and remember the apartment, and bring birds to
me. He was called "Timmy" and seemed to have an interesting life. He knew who he was.
A friend and tech journalist and his wife have two daughters and a female cat who preceded them. The cat watched each baby as if the cat thought they were hers to raise (to learn to hunt).
Bobcats are common in the Dallas area and often become
illegal pets if they get used to finding food on a homeowner’s premises. They cannot usually live inside a house but
some will roam a large territory and return to people whom they like (who fed
them).
In South Africa, in one film, a cheetah became a member of
the family despite being allowed to roam.
He would always return and even knew how to turn on a television with a
remote and knew that the images were not real.
There are some controversial videos on YouTube of bobcats and servals grooming and playing with teenage boys. Maybe dangerous. But for an adolescent to learn to communicate with a wild animal is a great way to develop social skills for life.
Back in 1993 there had been a Time magazine cover asking, “Can
animals think?” Yes they can.
Thursday, November 01, 2018
Prager U exposes far-Left propaganda in established children's book industry
I open November with a video from Prager U, “Leftist Books
for Brainwashing Kids” (Oct. 30)
"Story Time with Will" (that is, Will Witt), presents children’s
books “Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights” (Rob Sanders and Jared Andrew Schorr) (from Barnes and Noble) and “The Little
Book of Little Activists” (by Penguin Young Readers, a corporate author). Yup, would
four year-olds have jobs they can go on strike from? What should they “resist”? Maybe the volunteer banner is OK.
Will (the presenter) is certainly photogenic in the video (and youthful).
Maybe this video helps explain the “snowflake generation” with its
safe spaces and trigger warnings.
I looked up these booklets on Amazon, but I will refrain from emedding my usual Amazon Associates ads on these ones (my own "censorship" as a private person). It rather scares me that major publishers seem to support books like with age-inappropriate borderline Marxist propaganda, when some Big Tech companies are deplatforming conservative voices (although the lines between constructive speech and what may be hate speech are very subjective-- especially given "intersectionality").
Imagine what it would be like if, to be online, I had to write for pay what other people demanded of me. Somebody got paid to do all this. I can also remember in a summer "notehand" class in 1961, when I practiced my note-taking skills at a GWU class on "children's literature" in the English Department.
Imagine what it would be like if, to be online, I had to write for pay what other people demanded of me. Somebody got paid to do all this. I can also remember in a summer "notehand" class in 1961, when I practiced my note-taking skills at a GWU class on "children's literature" in the English Department.
If the Left were really able to get most individual Internet
speakers shut down so the Left could control the message, I hate to think what
the next generation would grow up to be like.
As it is, super Leftist (sometimes almost Marxist) columnist Umair Haque
is optimistic in what looks like an open letter to David Hogg, here. But David is actually much more “capitalistic”
in the way he can use the media to grab attention and pull levers on irresponsible
companies (related to the NRA issues) than a true socialist could ever accept.
Outside of nature (the Universe, cosmology, the biosphere) wealth
and standard of living do not create themselves. Any alien civilizations far enough along to discover
the mathematics of blockchain know that.
Monday, October 29, 2018
"Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?" Controversial Foreign Affairs issue to end 2018
The November/December 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs has an eye-catching
issue title, “Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?”
There are six articles. “Nuclear weapons don’t matter, but
nuclear hysteria does”, by John Mueller; “The vanishing nuclear taboo? How
disarmament fell apart?”, by Nina Tannenwald; :”If you want peace, prepare for
nuclear war; a strategy for the new great-power rivalry”, by Elbridge Colby; :”Armed
and dangerous: when dictators get the bomb:, by Scott D. Sagan; :”Beijing’s
nuclear option; Why a U.S.-Chinese war could spiral out of control”; “Moscow’s
nuclear enigma; what is Russia’s arsenal really for?”
The most critical piece might be the Sagan one, where the
writer characterizes North Korea as the first “personalist” dictatorship to
acquire nuclear weapons, especially possibly thermonuclear with ICBM’s. The
writer fears that this will set examples for other small state dictators (most
of all Iran). But in much of 2017 there was increasing talk of the reach of
DPRK missiles and, along with Trump’s reckless rhetoric at the time, the
growing idea that an area of the continental US could face a nuclear strike
someday, or at least an EMP incident, as a result of Trump’s intransigence to
wipe out the country. We all know that during the February winter Olympics things
started to change and the result was the controversial Singapore embrace of Kim
and Kim’s unconvincing claimed start of disarmament. That logically can lead to
doomsday prepper ideology (and influence the domestic gun control debate). But it could also lead to a broader idea about
the contingent responsibilities of citizenship.
The last article posits Russia’s (post Communist) “escalate
to de-escalate” idea. Russia could have an incentive to develop novel tactical
nuclear weapons (or flux devices) for action in the Baltics, or even conceivably
Finland (where there was a bizarre assassination at the border in May 2016). Russia created controversy last spring with
claims of a new missile that could evade any NORAD defense.
When I was in the Army (1968-1970), at both the Pentagon and later Fort Eustis, there was a common belief among many enlisted men that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real peril. The willingness to draft men to fight on the group in Vietnam was seen as a buffer.
When I was in the Army (1968-1970), at both the Pentagon and later Fort Eustis, there was a common belief among many enlisted men that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real peril. The willingness to draft men to fight on the group in Vietnam was seen as a buffer.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Connecticut Supreme Court rules Adam Lanza's(from Sandy Hook) book-like manuscript notes must be released
CBS and other news outlets report that a court (the
Connecticut state supreme court) has ordered the release of the writings of
Adam Lanza, the perpetrator in the Sandy Hook shootings in Connecticut on
December 2014, link. This contradicts and reverses a ruling
reported two years ago in the video below.
Lanza apparently had maintained a child-like notebook (maybe handwritten, maybe like a scrapbook)
of a compendium called “The Big Book of Granny”. It is reported to include a number of disturbing
rants and stories. It would seem likely
that it (the text) will eventually be available for free browsing available
online (as with Eliot Rodger, etc) but it is conceivable that, given recent public
pressures since Charlottesville, that protest activists would pressure any hots
to take it down. Sandy Hook families had
sued Alex Jones over his conspiracy theories and no doubt these plaintiffs had
a role in the eventual deplatforming of Alex Jones from social media.
In retrospect, the Lanza incident, however tragic, shows the
difficulty of keeping weapons away from very determined if demented people.
Picture: New London, CT, Coast Guard Academy, personal 2011 trip
Saturday, October 20, 2018
"The Nation" examines an activism handbook ("Hegemony"), and its use in Trump country around Lancaster PA
The Nation (now with a paywall) offers a detailed booklet length article by Jimmy Tobias, Oct. 18, “Can a Group of Scrappy Young Activists Build
Real Progressive Power in Trump Country?”
The narrative describes a couple Jonathan Schmucker and
Becca Rast, who returned to Lancaster County, in SE Pennsylvania, in order to
organize a “populist” bi-partisan presence to resist extremism in both parties,
somewhat reminiscent of “Better Angels”.
The article does describe “door knocking” and “bird dogging”. Now, when I had a house, I had a
no-soliciting sign and tended to regard unannounced knockers as a possible home
invasion, so I don’t know how you get past that mentality.
The article mentions a book by Schmucker “Hegemony How-To: A
Handbook for Radicals” (2017, AK Press).
Monday, October 15, 2018
Ben Sasse's new book "Them" recalls an earlier book by Charles Murray
Here’s another preview, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE): “Them: Why We
Hate Each Other, and How to Heal” (288 pages, St. Martin’s).
CBS carried an interview with him on “Face the Nation” on
Sunday, Oct. 14
Like Charles Murray (“Coming Apart”, March 14, 2012) .Sasse criticizes
the erosion of social capital, particularly in stable neighborhoods. It’s easy, got example, to be critical of
people who “choose” to live in riskier areas (hurricanes, as recently, floods,
wildfires, maybe earthquakes) but often it’s the social capital of their
communities that enables them to see things through.
His views are well explained in his Wall Street Journal
article, “Politics can’t solve our political problems”. His concept of “mobile”, “rooted”, and “stuck”
is interesting. I am definitely a “mobile”,
partly because I don’t form intimate relationships easily (as to create or
adopt children). “Rooted” implies social competitiveness. What he describes as “loneliness” may be the
way introverted or even mildly autistic or schizoid people outflank or lowball
the system and manage to live very productive lives as individual contributors
(even though some people find their ability to lowball others as disruptive).
Sasse is also author of “The Vanishing American Adult: Our
Coming-of-Age Crisis, and How to Build a Culture of Self-Reliance”. Yes, he is concerned with trigger warnings, microagressions, and pseudo-safe spaces. But
self-reliance can contradict widespread social cohesion, although it does
encourage social capital within extended families.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Former NSA Director Michael Hayden discusses his "The Assault on Intelligence" at the "Fall for the Book" fair.
I wanted to offer a preview of former NSA Director Michael
V. Hayden’s “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age
of Lies”, May 2018, from Penguin.
I attended a session today where Hayden spoke at 1:30 PM at
the “Fall for the Book” fair in Merten’s Hall at George Mason University in
Fairfax VA. The session was called “The
Assault on American Security”.
Hayden talked about the post-truth era, after the influence
of the “age of enlightenment”.
He also discussed Trump’s lack of “meta-cognition”, and the
idea that truth for people is whatever their leadership creates for them.
He did discuss how social media had unintentionally driven
people farther way into their own echo chambers. The Russians exploited this capacity of Facebook and Twitter because Russia understood that American "elitists" did not care personally about illiterate people who were targeted by Russian bot campaigns. He explained this in the context of how enemies can conduct combat without contact. He discussed the difference between cyber war and information war.
He gave a detailed answer to my question on EMP, here.
(Something bizarre happened when I opened the video I’ve embedded. An ad appeared for a depilatory, that shows
men epilating themselves with one wipe, and played for 1:45. It did not identify the product. It was almost like soft core. What if they showed doing it to somebody else? Then the time tracker for the video would not
show until I closed and reopened YouTube.)
Monday, October 08, 2018
Anthology on mental health in young adults: "(Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation About Mental Health"
Editor: Kelly Jensen
Title: “(Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation
About Mental Health”.
Publication: Oct. 2, 2018: Algonquin Young Readers, paper
and Kindle, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1616207816, five chapters, parsed into 33
essays.
I learned about this book from Reid Ewing (@media_reid on Twitter)
who has an essay on p. 95 “I underwent cosmetic surgery for my body dysmorphia
and I wish I hadn’t”. The detailed account
is harrowing. Reid sought the attention
in 2008 of a plastic surgeon at age 19 when he thought he had to make his face “better”. He got taken by unscrupulous doctors, it
sounds like. There were a few micro surgeries
to fix this an that, and at one time he was mistaken for a “monster” in the
California desert. What’s amazing is that in his public shows (including “Modern
Family” and various films starting with “Fright Night” in 2011) and YouTube there
is absolutely no hint of this history in his appearance (nor is there on Twitter). Following “In the Moonlight (Do Me)” he
actually made a second spirited song-video in 2012 called “Imagine Me Naked”. While I’m at it, I’ll mention that I haven’t
been able to find a potentially powerful (and now suddenly even more relevant,
given politics) film about unwanted pregnancy that he appears in, “South Dakota”
(2017), by Bruce Isaacson from Lionheart Films). Reid has developed an interest
in manga and animation and may be moving in that career direction for film
projects.
I’m getting ahead of myself here. The five mega-chapters are (1) “What’s Crazy”;
(2) “Where ‘Crazy’ Meets Culture”; (3) “The Mind-Body Connection” (where Reid’s
piece appears); (4) “Beyond Stress and Sadness”; (5) “To Be Okay”.
The very first chapter gets into the idea of “Defying
Definition” (Shaun David Hutchinson). The
Ashley Holstrom follows with essays on topics like hair pulling and various habits.
Heid Heilig has an important piece in Part 2, “What we’re
born with and what we pick up along the way”.
She talks about how mental illness is portrayed today in young adult
fiction.
All of this is somewhat relevant to me because my own
experience at NIH in the fall of 1962, which I describe in detail . I recall displaying a certain tendency to berate
other less intact patients for having even more trouble conforming to the
demands of “society” to fit in to proper social and gender roles than I did. I remember a ping pong tournament where I
used a strategy of “keep the ball on the table” and let the “crazies” beat
themselves with wild slams, and then scream with anger at how I was lowballing
them.
It strikes me that some of the more violent members in all
of “these” demonstrations (either on Antifa or the alt-right) have disguised
mental health problems. And the paparazzi
love to film them to make themselves look well and strong in comparison.
By the way, "33" is the number of variations in a major Beethoven work (the Diabelli Variations).
By the way, "33" is the number of variations in a major Beethoven work (the Diabelli Variations).
Friday, October 05, 2018
Scientific American: "Wonders of the Cosmos"
The editors of Scientific American offer a challenging
e-book “Wonders of the Cosmos” (2018).
There is an introduction by Andrew Gawrelewski, “Mysterious
Universe”.
There are four sections: (1) “How did the universe begin”?; (2) “Cosmic Cartography”; (3) “”Life Wild
Phenomena”; (4) “Life Off Earth”.
The book opens with an essay by Niayesh Afshordi et al “The
Black Hole at the Beginning of Time”. The essay offers the idea that our
Universe is a three-dimensional shell around a four-dimensional black hole,
after an implosion. There is an interesting image “Before the Big Bang” at the
7% page.
Adam G. Riess and Mario Livio discuss “The Puzzle of Dark
Energy” which exists essentially because of the asymmetric weak nuclear force.
Npam I. Libeskind and R. Brent Tully discuss “Our Place in
the Cosmos” with particular attention to how gravity has a locus with out own
galactic cluster Laniakea, and this could predict the eventual cold end of the
Universe (ours, at least). It could also
explain emptiness like the Bootes void.
Juan Maldacena discusses “Black holes, wormholes, and the
secrets pf quantum space time.” Maybe
the wormhole would give the possibility
of a teenage Clark Kent to live among us.
In the last section, Lee Billings discusses “The Search for
Life on Faraway Moons”. He mentions Triton but does not seem to discuss Titan.
Kimberly Cartier and Jason T. Wright bring a gospel, “Strange
News from Another Star”, that is, Boyajian’s Star (or Tabby’s Star), about 1450
light years away. Is there an alien
megastructure, a Dyson’s Sphere, around the star? I want a hotel room with a view, and Internet
access (assuming Mark Zuckerberg is an alien himself and has conquered the
speed of light).
Frank Postberg et al discuss “Under the Sea of Encedalus”
with some persuasive arguments for some kind of primitive bacteria-like life
around the vents. Titan is a much more
interesting place geographically.
Christopher McKay and Victor Garcia explore how to look for
life on Mars.
Rene Heller discusses the idea of a “superinhabitable earth
II”. It’s likely such a planet might be
a little larger than Earth, and around an unusually stable M star (old enough
to give enough time for life) or perhaps a main sequence star a little smaller
than our Sun. A bigger planet would have
fewer mountains, likewise a large water surface, and a somewhat thicker
atmosphere (maybe people could fly like birds, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s
End”) – like the crow that keeps visiting my balcony and watching me as if I
were his own “human”.
In the video above, note how the surface of a black hole (3D to 2D) is viewed as a hologram saving all the information falling on it.
Wednesday, October 03, 2018
Andrew Sullivan opines on tribalism in NYMag: "America Wasn't Built for Humans"
Andrew Sullivan has a searing booklet-length piece in New
York Magazine Sept 18, 2018 (not “The New Yorker), “America Wasn’t Built for Humans”. His byline is “Tribalism was an urge the
Founding Fathers assumed we could overcome. And so it has become out greatest
vulnerability”.
The link is here.
Once again, we’re confronted with the fact that most of us
are genetically hardwired for tribal preferences. Rooting for a favorite sports
team is at least mild tribal behavior. (Yes, the Cubs lost last night, at
home.) It does seem that lot of this
discussion started with Amy Chua.
I’d like to think that the smartest among us overcome tribalism,
and in setting our own goals, some of us do – the more unbalanced personalities
in Rosenfels polarity theories. But that generates some of the problem: the
winner-take-all economy expressed by extreme capitalism, especially as it
developed, surprisingly, post 9/11 (but had started during Reagan) simply
leaves most people behind to scrabble now with the no-benefits “sharing”
economy.
That’s one reason why I’ve paid so much attention to
morality on an “individual” basis – the “pay your dues” idea (2004). Now that
seems to miss “the point”.
Sullivan is particularly chilling as he explains how
tribalism has infected a lot of academia, and how the idea of “hate speech” has
expanded to incorporate crime. Even my
speech, because of its gratuitous funding, could be reviewed as indirect “hate
speech” by some – this gets into the area of “implicit content” that I have
described.
He also gives the story of journalist Chadwick Moore, who
was sacked by the gay mainstream after showing intellectually balanced
appreciation for Milo Yiannopoulos. In
fact, if you actually read Milo’s book (“Dangerous”), it is not as extreme as
everyone thinks.
Likewise, he sympathizes with James Damore – whose work I
have mixed feelings about. The comments
on Sullivan’s article are not sympathetic.
The problem is that for many people, they have to stick
together and live in solidarity with one another to survive – so they must
become combative, and not tolerate any insults to “the group”. That explains the malignant growth of “hate
speech” as a concept.
Sullivan describes two mega-tribes: the urban-coastal (globalist
and intellectually elite), vs. the rural (local and socially driven). He notes that the end of conscription after
the Vietnam war helped keep the tribes apart (and like me, Sullivan made this
point in the 1990s during the debate over gays in the military).
I have to admit that I snicker with some degree of personal
contempt when I hear people chanting “lock her up” at Trump rallies, as if they
were Manchurian zombies who had abandoned their own personhoods.
But tribal social orientation – and the capacity to put the
local group above the self, and regard outsiders as enemies (even if that feeds
racism) probably got hardwired into the genes of most people in pre-modern
generations. Some of us seem to have fewer
of these genes, stand out, and find ourselves watching our backs.
Sullivan recommends “individuality” as opposed to
individualism (in 2004, people were just starting to talk about hyperindividualism
-- Ayn Rand style – as the opposite of
solidarity). And he recommends
forgiveness.
Monday, October 01, 2018
City of Philadelphia has literacy program offering books to families with newborn babies, and literacy by all by fourth grade
The City of Philadephia Department of Public Health
has announced a couple of literacy programs in a press release today.
One of these is “Read by 4th”, which means “Read
by Fourth Grade”, with site (no https yet) here It is offered with the sponsorship of
the Free Library of Philadelphia.
There is also a “Baby Book Club” which will distribute
children’s books and other literacy materials to every family with newborns in
Philadelphia.
The press release from Lauren Ryder from the
Department of Public Health did not have a URL to give, so here is a brief
excerpt:
“The Health Department
will be working with medical staff from each of the city’s six delivery
hospitals to ensure every infant born in one of the centers will leave home
with at least one book appropriate for babies to start his or her first library.
“Books will be in English and Spanish and will be distributed based on inventory and family preference. The books will also include a code for parents to sign up for a free one-year subscription for National Wildlife Foundation magazines for babies.”
“Books will be in English and Spanish and will be distributed based on inventory and family preference. The books will also include a code for parents to sign up for a free one-year subscription for National Wildlife Foundation magazines for babies.”
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