Category Archive 'Uncategorized'
08 Oct 2022
For some reason, the media did not publish a picture of Moose, the deceased Golden Retriever.
Even the NY Times is a bit amused at Urban fashionista liberals squabbling over the “correct” perspective to be taken when a minority crazy wino attacks a bourgeois female in the park and kills her dog.
Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.
In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?
Here’s what happened in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when real-life residents faced this situation.
On Aug. 3, Jessica Chrustic, 40, a professional beekeeper, was walking her dog in Prospect Park a little after 6 a.m. when she saw a man rifling through the garbage outside the Picnic House. She had seen the man before — tall, with dreadlocks wrapped in a turban, carrying a long staff and often muttering to himself or cursing — and she usually kept her distance. But this morning there was no room to avoid him.
According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park, then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.
The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.
Both women called 911, and four patrol cars arrived within a few minutes. But by then, the man was gone. “Moose was bleeding from his mouth and pulling to get home,” Ms. Chrustic said. “My focus was just on caring for him.”
Ms. Chrustic was physically unhurt, but she was shaken. How could this happen in a park where she had never felt unsafe, even walking her dog late at night?
Moose had a shattered tooth that needed to be pulled. Ms. Chrustic posted a description of the encounter on the neighborhood social network Nextdoor, warning others about the man and asking them to report any sightings to the police. Her post elicited more than 280 comments in the coming weeks, mostly expressing sympathy. A total stranger on the forum offered to make her a bracelet with the name Moose on it.
But then the next weekend, Moose developed sepsis from a perforated intestine, caused by a blow Ms. Chrustic had not noticed. After emergency surgery, Moose died.
Weeks passed, and the man who attacked the dog was still at large. People on Nextdoor, working from Ms. Chrustic’s description, posted that they had seen him in one part of the park or another. Ms. Chrustic, who used to visit the park four times a day, now found it too traumatic to enter unless necessary.
She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”
It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.
“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.
“There are a bunch of issues here, a bunch of threats,” he added. “We can deal with them in a compassionate way, or a not compassionate way.” …
Nextdoor, which claims an average of 37 million users per week, started in 2010 with the promise of connecting people with their neighbors and neighborhoods. One slogan went, “When neighbors start talking, good things happen.”
One thing they talked about, a lot, was local crime. In Nextdoor forums for communities all over the country, this included suspected crime and sightings of “suspicious” characters, leading early critics to say that what the platform really propagated was white fear. After complaints about racial profiling in 2016, the company instituted diversity training for its operations staff and new protocols for posts about crime and safety. But even in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized it as an outlet for privileged white people to vent criminal fantasies about their Black and brown neighbors. She tweeted, “@Nextdoor needs to publicly deal w/ their Karen problem.”
A Nextdoor spokesperson said the company enables users to report any posts that they find offensive or discriminatory, which are then reviewed by volunteer community moderators or staff members. In 2021, only 1 percent of posts were reported as hurtful or harmful; about half of these were removed.
When Ms. Chrustic posted about the attack, the first responses were mostly notes of condolence and support. People with dogs posted that they had seen the man in the same area where she was attacked — why weren’t the police arresting him? Donations poured in to offset her veterinary bills.
But gradually, other voices emerged. A vocal minority asked why Park Slope residents, mostly white, were calling for the police to take down a man who appeared to be homeless and emotionally disturbed. Others called the man a “monster,” a “predator” or a “psychopath.” As on other social media platforms, the most ardent voices made the most noise.
Martin Lofsnes, 52, a dancer and choreographer who moved out of the neighborhood in 2020, came across the conversation while trying to sell some stuff and was appalled by the vitriol directed at an impoverished man, and by what he called “this vigilante attitude.”
He urged people on the thread to put their emotions aside and consider “400 yrs of systematic racism which has prevented black people from building generational wealth through homeownership resulting in the extreme disparity we see today.” Arresting the man, he wrote, would solve none of that.
With all the affluence in Park Slope, he posted, maybe critics should raise money to help the man, not throw him to the lethal jail system, from which he would most likely emerge more dangerous, or not emerge at all.
RTWT
08 Oct 2022
London’s Mayor: Sadiq Khan.
Steerpike, in the London Spectator:
What an odd thing Sadiq Khan said following this morning’s stabbings in central London. Shortly before 10 a.m., three people were attacked by a man on a bike in Bishopsgate. The criminal is still at large, according to the Telegraph. This horrifying incident was no surprise to Londoners, so you would think that the Mayor would – from experience – strike the right chord. Instead, Khan had this to say:
“The good news is, it’s not a terror attack. And another piece of good news is the three victims of the stabbing are not in life-threatening situations, thank God. But it’s just a reminder of the dangers of carrying a knife…
Had anyone died this morning, would Khan really have suggested that it was ‘good news’ it wasn’t a terror attack? Just a regular stabbing? It’s not a thought Mr S thinks will be held by the families of those injured.
The Mayor also seemed to apportion blame to a sentient knife – and not, you know, the assailant. He continued: ‘We’ve seen this year, thankfully, we’ve actually seen a reduction in knife crime injuries, a reduction in knife crime injuries in those below 25.’ From a pretty high peak though, eh?
‘I’m determined to continue lobbying the government to reverse their cuts in policing and to reverse their cuts in young people,’ said Khan. Police budgets have, of course, increased by £3.8 billion since Khan took office.
RTWT
07 Oct 2022
Christopher Lee in “Horror of Dracula” (1958).
For years now, Joyce fans have held “Bloomsday” celebrations on June 16th, the date the events described in “Ulysses” were supposed to have taken place.
More recently, we have a substack allowing enthusiasts to follow, day-by-day more or less, the action in Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale “Dracula.”
New York Times
Confined by the pandemic to his home in Lawrence, Kan., in the summer of 2020, Matt Kirkland pulled an old paperback of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” from his bookshelf and decided to reread it.
“Being trapped in a castle, trying to get out, felt like it had a lot of parallels there,” he said.
He shared the epistolary novel with his 11-year-old daughter. As he read, Kirkland noticed the letters from the novel’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, were also dated in the summer. He started to synchronize the readings to the dates on the letters, creating a sense that the events in the book were unfolding in real time, and heightening the drama for his daughter, who asked him daily for updates.
By the end of the year — with a lot of pandemic downtime in his hands — he’d decided to expand on the idea, creating “Dracula Daily,” a newsletter that sends a missive from Harker to subscribers’ inboxes following the book’s chronology. Kirkland queued up the posts and began sending them to subscribers in May 2021.
Count Dracula — a recluse plagued by yearning, a macabre flair for theatrics and existential loneliness — turned out to be an unlikely patron saint for the uncertain times, Kirkland said. The newsletter became a success and internet sensation: Subscribers found that serialization made the 125-year-old novel more accessible and created a community of readers at a time when many were looking for connection.
RTWT
Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for May 3 for the beginning.
02 Oct 2022
President Obama appointed the first black female Librarian of Congress who, naturally, is a fan of Rap music, and who therefore invited rapper/flautist “Lizzo” to sound a few notes on a rare and valuable crystal flute presented to President Madison in 1813.
The grotesquely obese Lizzo performed enthusiastically and indecently attired, accompanying her flute performance with the kind of sexually-explicit movements referred to in the lamentable popular culture of today as “twerking.”
NPR, as you might expect, was overjoyed:
As all iconic moments go these days, it started with a simple social media exchange. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden tweeted out an invitation for Lizzo to visit the world’s largest flute collection, housed at the Library of Congress in D.C.
“@Lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week,” Hayden tweeted. “Like your song they are “Good as hell [with a winking face emoji].”
The singer responded with gusto.
IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!! <link>
— FOLLOW @YITTY (@lizzo) September 24, 2022
After making a stop at the Library of the Congress to tour the collection and practice on a few instruments, Lizzo’s dream became reality when she got the chance to play the historic flute on stage Tuesday night. …
“You never know what you’re going to see with the U.S. Capitol Police!” the agency tweeted Wednesday morning. …
Handlers brought the flute onstage at Lizzo’s concert. She carefully accepted the instrument and carried it to the standing microphone, saying “it’s like playing out of a wine glass, so be patient.”
She performed on the flute, adding a few of her signature moves, of course, as the audience wildly cheered, and then Lizzo gave back the historical flute and ran back to her mic.
“B***h, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” she shouted. “We just made history tonight!”…
Lizzo took the time to thank the Library of Congress for “preserving our history and making history freaking cool.”
Video link.
I’m obviously a racist old fogey since I think placing a relic previously belonging to the Father of the Constitution in the hands of a popular entertainer of the lowest order who accompanies a performance with the kinds of dress and public behavior that for most of my own lifetime would have gotten her arrested is insulting to Mr. Madison, to the country’s history, and to decency and public morals. In a properly governed America, that librarian would be fired.
Today’s Jacobin “elite” culture, of course, absolutely delights in these kinds of revolutionary gestures. That culture systematically inverts all values. James Madison is an evil dead white man, who owned slaves. Lizzo is black and therefore the giant economy-size embodiment of everything great and admirable! For them, the profanation of Mr. Madison’s flute is “historic,” “an iconic moment,” and “freaking cool.” What an age we live in!
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Seeing someone like Lizzo disporting herself pantsless on stage reminds me of the story of the crusty old New Englander who spied an unusually ill-favored woman in church one Sunday, and remarked, loudly, “My God! that must be the ugliest woman in six counties!” “Hush!” admonished his offended wife. “You know the poor thing can’t help it.” “Yes, but, she could, by golly, stay home!”
28 Sep 2022
Nord Stream Pipeline leaking into the Baltic Sea.
CNBC:
Nord Stream AG, the operator of the two pipelines, said Tuesday that three known gas leaks caused “unprecedented” damage. The company added that it was not possible to determine when the gas network system’s capacity would be restored.
Seismologists on Monday reported explosions in the vicinity of the unusual Nord Stream gas leaks, prompting gas to spew into the Baltic Sea.
Denmark’s armed forces said video footage showed the largest gas leak created a surface disturbance of roughly 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in diameter, while the smallest leak caused a circle of approximately 200 meters.
Danish and Swedish authorities declared a no-shipping zone around the location of the leak, which is situated in international waters but inside Denmark and Sweden’s exclusive economic zone.
The cause is not yet known. Some European leaders have suggested possible sabotage, particularly as the suspected attack comes amid a bitter energy standoff between Brussels and Moscow.
—————————
BBC:
Ukraine has accused Russia of causing leaks in two major gas pipelines to Europe in what it described as a “terrorist attack”.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak said the damage to Nord Stream 1 and 2 was “an act of aggression” towards the EU.
He added that Russia wanted to cause pre-winter panic and urged the EU to increase military support for Ukraine.
Seismologists reported underwater blasts before the leaks emerged.
“There is no doubt that these were explosions,” said Bjorn Lund of Sweden’s National Seismology Centre, as quoted by local media.
The operators of Nord Stream 2 warned of a loss of pressure in the pipeline on Monday afternoon. That led to a warning from Danish authorities that ships should avoid the area near the island of Bornholm.
The operator of Nord Stream 1 said the undersea lines had simultaneously sustained “unprecedented” damage in one day.
Denmark’s Defence Command has released footage of the leaks which shows bubbles at the surface of the Baltic Sea near the island.
The largest patch of sea disturbance is 1km (0.6 miles) in diameter, it says.
“Gas leak from NS-1 [Nord Stream 1] is nothing more than a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU. Russia wants to destabilise the economic situation in Europe and cause pre-winter panic,” Ukraine’s Mr Podolyak tweeted in English.
He also called on European partners, particularly Germany, to increase military support for Ukraine.
“The best response and security investment are tanks for Ukraine. Especially German ones,” he said.
Other European leaders have raised the idea that the damage to the pipelines was deliberately inflicted.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki blamed it on sabotage and said it was probably linked to the war in Ukraine.
Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, said it was too early to come to conclusions, but that it was hard to imagine the multiple leaks could be a coincidence.
At the same time, unconfirmed reports in German media said authorities were not ruling out an attack on the undersea gas network.
A Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said he was “extremely concerned” about the incident, and the possibility of a deliberate attack could not be ruled out.
The EU has previously accused Russia of using a reduction in gas supplies as an economic weapon, in response to European sanctions imposed because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, Moscow denies this, saying the sanctions have made it impossible to maintain the gas infrastructure properly.
—————————
Eugyppius suspects that we did it.
Radosław Sikorski, MEP, former Polish defence minister and husband of well-connected neoconservative intellectual Anne Appelbaum, has publicly thanked the United States for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines. (see above)
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for the American political journal National Review, has also praised the attacks in a brief column under the headline “Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Pipeline?” He’s been arguing about the importance of taking Nord Stream 2 offline since February, and suggests that the present attacks reflect his influence.
The biggest detail to break since I went to sleep yesterday, is this claim made by an anonymous intelligence source to Der Spiegel, that the CIA had warned Germany of Baltic pipeline attacks over the summer.
27 Sep 2022
Quora asks:
Will Putin resort to nuclear weapons now that it is becoming increasingly clear, from the many, many posts that I have read on Quora, that he has little or no chance of being victorious in Ukraine by means of conventional war?
and John Mark McDonald dispels the bunkum.
As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to forty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.
Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren’t their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.
The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.
Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.
Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they’re just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.
Secondly, he doesn’t have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn’t have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional expolsives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It’s been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I’m sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.
Currently, the spectre of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up.
I can recall reading a scientific calculation that contended that if you took all the nuclear weapons in existence, put them into a great big pile and fired them off, you would not get a hole as large and deep as the Grand Canyon.
27 Sep 2022
Second Life Avatars.
Tennessee Star reports:
Yale University’s Computer Science Department recently announced a $1 million donation given to them from the Bungie Foundation for a research project that fights against racist hair graphics in video games.
“It is widely assumed that the algorithms used to generate virtual humans are based in biological underpinnings that accurately reflect all races and ethnicities,” the announcement reads. “In reality, however, these algorithms are deeply biased and based on predominantly European features.”
The project will be led by Theodore Kim, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale.
According to Kim, the project will “serve as an example of how to identify the products of systemic racism in computer graphics and demonstrate how to take concrete steps to ameliorate their harm.”
Kim believes that this racial bias in video game hair stems from Computer Graphics Researchers that have “historically favored the simulation and rendering of straight hair, which is racially coded as European or Caucasian hair.
RTWT
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