New Tune

And possibly the birth of a new music genre: CEO Death Folk (?)

Today's Onion

Friday Potluck

Today's Dana

We are in need of some national therapy - and maybe that's what we're doing.

I've been thinking lately that In the past, so many "on the left" criticized this country so harshly, that it made a lot of people "on the right" knee-jerk their way into thumping their chests and wrapping themselves in the flag and doing all those annoying love-it-or-leave-it things they used to do.

Well, kids, the script done flipped. "The left" is where you find the flag-wavers now. The pundits said it after the Dems' convention: Democrats have reclaimed the flag, and patriotism, and love of country as a badge they can wear on their sleeve.

And that leaves an asshole like Trump to further twist that old patriotism on the right into an even uglier configuration so he can go on taking advantage of otherwise decent folks, leading them to believe they're righteously justified in tearing down the one thing that makes it possible for Trump (and them) to behave like such assholes in the first fuckin' place.

There's a lot more "political thinking" crashing around in my brain right now, but it's such a big roiling jumble that I can't unravel it - I can't get it to smooth out enough to make it sound like anything but foil-hat nonsense.

(Not that I think anything I ever say makes any sense to anybody. Shit - I can't make even get it make sense to myself half the time)

Anyway - therapy

Let's Be Clear

Anybody complaining about how they "Can't say things anymore" is not actually being prevented from saying those things.

What it means is that now, if they say those things, they're being perceived as the kind of person who says things like that - and they're being chastised for it.

So what they're whining about is what normal people call "being held accountable" - for what they say and what they do - and for who and what their use of the language reveals about them.

Not that long ago:

Things change. Stop being such a whiny-butt pussy about it.

And it's not so much that you're prohibited from saying those things, but we're trying to be marginally better people, and make this world a marginally better place to live, so when you say that kind of hateful ignorant shit, you can expect to get dinged for it. You need some new material.

What is it you find so fuckin' hard about that?

Learn - Teach

... and pass it on.

On Tolerance

In general, we think of tolerance in terms of morality and ethical behavior. And so we end up with the cognitive dissonance of whether or not there are (or should be - or even can be) limits to tolerance.

That dissonance is resolved if we see tolerance not as a moral standard, but as a social contract.

If someone doesn't abide by the terms of a contract, then they're no longer covered by it.

Intolerant people aren't following the rules of the social contract of Mutual Tolerance.

Since they've broken with the terms of the contract, they're no longer covered by it, and we have no obligation to tolerate their intolerant behavior.

Overheard

A study published last year in the Review Of Economic Studies concludes that investments can actually pay dividends down the road.

Huh. Now whooda thunk it?

Is the Social Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? Large-Scale Evidence From the Food Stamps Program 

, , , 

The Review of Economic Studies, rdad063, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdad063

Published: 08 June 2023

Abstract

We use novel, large-scale data on 17.5 million Americans to study how a policy-driven increase in economic resources affects children's long-term outcomes. Using the 2000 Census and 2001–13 American Community Survey linked to the Social Security Administration's NUMIDENT, we leverage the county-level rollout of the Food Stamps program between 1961 and 1975. We find that children with access to greater economic resources before age five have better outcomes as adults. The treatment-on-the-treated effects show a 6% of a standard deviation improvement in human capital, 3% of a standard deviation increase in economic self-sufficiency, 8% of a standard deviation increase in the quality of neighbourhood of residence, a 1.2-year increase in life expectancy, and a 0.5 percentage-point decrease in likelihood of being incarcerated. These estimates suggest that Food Stamps’ transfer of resources to families is a highly cost-effective investment in young children, yielding a marginal value of public funds of approximately sixty-two.

Babies Not Having Babies

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I think my only push-back on this piece by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is the fact that it's coming from someone at the University Of Chicago, which traditionally, is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thinking on sociological subjects. Color me skeptical.

That said, she's not sounding like the usual conservative dick, trying to tell young people they're overreacting or that liberals are being all squishy or some shit.

She's reporting what she's hearing from the people who're going to decide where we live out our old-age. We should probably listen, and take it to heart.

Opinion Don’t want a baby because of climate fears? You’re not alone.

As a college professor, I’m used to hearing young people’s anxiety and even anger about climate change. One of the most striking trends is the number of students who have told me they feel robbed of the ability to have children, cheated out of parenthood by decades of climate denial and inaction by baby boomers and their own Gen X parents.

My students are not alone. A global survey in 2021 of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 shows how widespread these sentiments are. Close to 60 percent told researchers they felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. More than half feared the security of their family would be threatened in the near future, and nearly 4 in 10 said they were “hesitant to have children.”

That’s an awful lot of people. But many older Americans argue that this is absurd, even morally suspect — from Fox News hosts suggesting that even questioning whether to have children amounts to “civilizational suicide,” to commentators in the New York Times who have acknowledged the reality of climate change but then dismissed concerns about the future of the environment in favor of the hope children offer. In both instances, parenthood becomes a moral referendum, separating those who affirm the value of human life, or the value of American civilization, from those who don’t.

But the decision not to have children in the face of crisis is nothing new. In fact, the impulse can be traced not only to our human ancestors but also beyond the human species.

The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has observed that mothers of all kinds, human and otherwise, make choices about how many children they will raise and when, based on ecological and historical circumstances. Primates have been seen to abandon babies born in moments of food shortages or environmental distress, the pressure to survive in their given habitat overriding any reproductive instinct or maternal bond.

Today, we tend to talk about reproductive decisions as though they take place in a vacuum, where all options are available to all people, and the choice you make is determined only by your desire: Do you want to have a child? But for centuries, reproductive decisions have been constrained by people’s economic, material and environmental conditions.

For instance, when Mormon settlers moved into Southern Paiute lands in Utah in the 1850s, bringing violence and disease, births in the tribe plummeted, and not just because women who might have borne children were killed. “My people have been unhappy for so long,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883; after decades of war, death and loss, “they wish to disincrease, rather than multiply.”

People from marginalized communities have long had to weigh their desire for children against the safety and sustainability of the lives they imagined those children would lead. In the face of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and racism, “Black people of the not-too-distant past trembled for every baby born into that world,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote in 2019. “Sound familiar?”

In the spring of 1969, a college graduate named Stephanie Mills made the connection between environmental concerns and reproductive choice explicit, when she delivered a dark commencement speech at a small college in Oakland, Calif. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all,” Mills said. “As an ex-potential parent, I have asked myself what kind of world my children would grow up in. And the answer was, ‘Not very pretty, not very clean. Sad, in fact.’”

Mills gave her speech — and, in the next year, dozens of talks like it — at a portentous moment for environmental activism and contraceptive technology. The Food and Drug Administration had approved the first form of hormonal birth control in 1960, and by the end of the decade, millions of women were relying on the pill to put off having children — or, like Mills, to avoid having them.

This was also just as the American environmental movement was gaining steam. The spring after Mills gave her commencement speech, an estimated 20 million Americans would take part in events for the inaugural Earth Day — a victory, however symbolic, for environmental causes. But onstage in 1969, Mills was far more optimistic about contraception than she was about the promise of environmentalism. Her speech was titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.”

Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated.

To today’s environmentally minded observers, the fact that young people are considering having fewer children might seem like a good thing. Population is a driver of climate change, they might say, and the carbon footprint of a baby born in the United States is gigantic; having one fewer child cuts emissions far more than giving up airplanes, meat or automobiles.

But that kind of thinking — blaming individuals having babies for societal ills — has been used to fuel population control measures with distinctly authoritarian, racist or eugenicist flavors. It also misses the point. My students aren’t talking about the carbon footprints of babies. They’re talking about grief, about a future that has been lost.

If politicians and policymakers want to encourage young people to become parents — and it seems they very much do — history suggests there’s a better path than the one too many of them are pursuing: revoking our right to reproductive autonomy, making birth control harder to access and abortion a crime.

Instead, they should convince us that climate change is being taken seriously as a threat — that the environment we and our children must live in is in good, capable, rational hands.

We have to make better

short-term decisions,

in order to have

a more positive impact

in the long term.

Because those decisions

don't just determine

how our children will live -

they determine how

our children will die.

It's An Affectation

I don't really know if this bit is a real thing, or meant to satirize misogyny, or whatever. But I'm there for it.

Take it from someone who used to sound a lot like this - and is grateful that a friend finally called me on it - the vocal fry is annoying.

Ron Livingston as Loudermilk (on Amazon Prime)

Not Alpha

It's revealing that MAGA rubes and other highly annoying hyper-macho types still insist on referring to themselves as "alpha males".

Their "thinking" is years out of date, and given the new information - which isn't new at all - they're telling us basically that they're captive and subdued, while seeing themselves as (ie: pretending to be) wild and free.

   (from 6 years ago)

There's no such thing as an alpha male

Eric Trump recently suggested that when his father, Donald Trump, bragged about grabbing women's genitals without consent, it was an example of "two alpha guys in a thing."

In addition to shedding some light on how Trump's son views his father and manhood, it's also interesting because "alpha males" aren't actually a thing.

As the writer Saladin Ahmed pointed out, the concept of "alpha male" wolves that assert dominance over their pack through aggression comes from a debunked model of lupine social groups.

David Mech introduced the idea of the alpha to describe behavior observed in captive animals. Alphas, he wrote in his 1970 book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," win control of their packs in violent fights with other males.

But, as he outlined in a 1999 paper, he's since rejected that idea in light of research into the behavior of wolves in the wild.

In nature, Mech writes, wolves split off from their packs when they mature, and seek out opposite-sex companions with whom to form new packs. The male and female co-dominate the new pack for a much simpler, more peaceful reason: They're the parents of all the pups.

Mech writes on his website (with the lovely title Wolf News and Info) that his original book is "currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it."

Another Twitter user, Mike Westphal, pointed out another paper on the misuse of the phrase "alpha males" to describe breeding roosters.

In the 2003 book "Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals," the biologist Marlene Zuk points out that social groups of hens do have "pecking orders." That is, hierarchies among the females with dominance asserted through pecking.

But roosters are not part of those social groups, Zuk writes, and the idea that the top hen is somehow an "alpha male" bizarrely misgenders the dominant bird.

All of which is to say: Humans who enjoy the idea of "alpha males" might want to keep in mind that there isn't really any such thing. And to the extent the term has any meaning at all, it describes the behavior of captive, lonely creatures.

Break It Down For Us

Rachel Parris - BBC Two - The Mash Report

A few romance tips for the lonely Incel guy

A Short Film

American Exceptionalism

It's mostly the self-image thing about being a rugged individualist. We like to think we are proudly independent - we're out there on our own - man against the wilderness - carving a life out of the bounties God himself has given us dominion over, with grit and an unrelenting thirst for self-determination - and blah blah fucking blah.

One thing - we also insist on making it a little easier for ourselves, mostly by taking steps to deny that freedom to others - especially to (eg) women.

see SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v Wade

Anyway, it's not all good and it's not all bad - Kite & Key Media

On Our Differences

Just once, I'd like to see an article like,

"Extroverted? Here are some tips on how you can shut the fuck up and leave people alone."

hat tip = @tomandlorenzo

Milestone Comin'

100,000 is a threshold number.

(paraphrasing):

Imagine an American city of a hundred thousand people. A city that was here celebrating New Year's Eve, and has since been wiped clean off the map.

An American Hiroshima.

About this time tomorrow, we'll pass that threshold.

NYT has done a good job trying to help us visualize the loss.

Scroll down thru the piece and get a sense of what's happening to us - to those around us.

As the Degrees Of Separation get narrower - as the disease gets closer to us personally - it should start to become more of a priority.

But let's not kid ourselves about who and what Americans have become. We've made Reality TV and Pro Wrestling the pinnacle of American popular culture. We love "real-life" drama and tragedy.  Especially when we can take some of it and rub it all over ourselves in order to attract the attention of a world we generally see as uncaring - because we've made it that way.

How's that for "Irony is dead, part ∞"?

It's like we've nationalized some weird version of Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy - or maybe it's the logical outgrowth of the old OPM - except that instead of gaining unearned benefit from Other People's Money, we can tap into the psychological benefits of Other People's Misery. We can manufacture sympathy and reap the rewards without having to go through any of the real suffering ourselves.

We are a nation of sick fucks.

Today's Health Tip

Beck Bennett

Today's PSA

Honest Government

SkyNet Rising

We need constant reminding that we have to address the questions of "Can We Do This" versus "Should We Do This".

There's always a power dynamic at work, so even though "new stuff" is almost always originally intended to "make the world a better place", there are always people looking to devise ways of weaponizing it, and turning it to their own purposes in order to serve their own political agendas.

Media Assignment: Real Genius, 1985 - Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarret, Jon Gries, William Atherton.

MIT Technology Review:

Once it was fashionable to fret about the prospect of super-intelligent machines taking over the world. The past year showed that AI may cause all sorts of hazards long before that happens.

The latest AI methods excel at perceptual tasks such as classifying images and transcribing speech, but the hype and excitement over these skills have disguised how far we really are from building machines as clever as we are. Six controversies from 2018 stand out as warnings that even the smartest AI algorithms can misbehave, or that carelessly applying them can have dire consequences.

1. Self-crashing cars

After a fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in March, investigators found that the company’s technology had failed catastrophically, in a way that could easily have been prevented.

Carmakers like Ford and General Motors, newcomers like Uber, and a horde of startups are hurrying to commercialize a technology that, despite its immaturity, has already seen billions of dollars in investment. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has made the most progress; it rolled out the first fully autonomous taxi service in Arizona last year. But even Waymo’s technology is limited, and autonomous cars cannot drive everywhere in all conditions.

What to watch for in 2019: Regulators in the US and elsewhere have so far taken a hands-off approach for fear of stifling innovation. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has even signaled that existing safety rules may be relaxed. But pedestrians and human drivers haven’t signed up to be guinea pigs. Another serious accident in 2019 might shift the regulators’ attitudes.

2. Political manipulation bots

In March, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company, had exploited Facebook’s data sharing practices to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The resulting uproar showed how the algorithms that decide what news and information to surface on social media can be gamed to amplify misinformation, undermine healthy debate, and isolate citizens with different views from one another.

During a congressional hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI itself could be trained to spot and block malicious content, even though it is still far from being able to understand the meaning of text, images, or video.

What to watch for in 2019: Zuckerberg’s promise will be tested in elections held in two of Africa’s biggest countries: South Africa and Nigeria. The long run-up to the 2020 US election has also begun, and it could inspire new kinds of misinformation technology powered by AI, including malicious chatbots.

3. Algorithms for peace

Last year, an AI peace movement took shape when Google employees learned that their employer was supplying technology to the US Air Force for classifying drone imagery. The workers feared this could be a fateful step towards supplying technology for automating deadly drone strikes. In response, the company abandoned Project Maven, as it was called, and created an AI code of ethics.

Academics and industry heavyweights have backed a campaign to ban the use of autonomous weapons. Military use of AI is only gaining momentum, however, and other companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, have shown no reservations about helping out.

What to watch out for in 2019: Although Pentagon spending on AI projects is increasing, activists hope a preemptive treaty banning autonomous weaponswill emerge from a series of UN meetings slated for this year.

4. A surveillance face-off

AI’s superhuman ability to identify faces has led countries to deploy surveillance technology at a remarkable rate. Face recognition also lets you unlock your phone and automatically tags photos for you on social media.

Civil liberties groups warn of a dystopian future. The technology is a formidable way to invade people’s privacy, and biases in training data make it likely to automate discrimination.

In many countries—China especially—face recognition is being widely used for policing and government surveillance. Amazon is selling the technologyto US immigration and law enforcement agencies.

What to watch out for in 2019: Face recognition will spread to vehicles and webcams, and it will be used to track your emotions as well as your identity. But we may also see some preliminary regulation of it this year, too.

5. Fake it till you break it

A proliferation of “deepfake” videos last year showed how easy it is becoming make fake clips using AI. This means fake celebrity porn, lots of weird movie mashups, and, potentially, virulent political smear campaigns.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve two dueling neural networks, can conjure extraordinarily realistic but completely made-up images and video. Nvidia recently showed how GANs can generate photorealistic faces of whatever race, gender, and age you want.

What to watch for in 2019: As deepfakes improve, people will probably start being duped by them this year. DARPA will test new methods for detecting deepfakes. But since this also relies on AI, it’ll be a game of cat and mouse.

6. Algorithmic discrimination

Bias was discovered in numerous commercial tools last year. Vision algorithms trained on unbalanced data sets failed to recognize women or people of color; hiring programs fed historic data were proven to perpetuate discrimination that already exists.

Tied to the issue of bias—and harder to fix—is the lack of diversity across the AI field itself. Women occupy, at most, 30% of industry jobs and fewer than 25% of teaching roles at top universities. There are comparatively few black and Latin researchers as well.

What to expect in 2019: We’ll see methods for detecting and mitigating bias and algorithms that can produced unbiased results from biased data. The International Conference on Machine Learning, a major AI conference, will be held in Ethiopia in 2020 because African scientists researching problems of bias could have trouble getting visas to travel to other regions. Other events could also move.
The Long Term Hopeful part is that better people than this current crop of Daddy State assholes have been trying to conquer the world for more than 40,000 years, and the world remains undefeated.

The Short Term Worrisome part is that it's always a painful and bloody process convincing them of their folly.

The Daddy State Speaks

Be sure to watch for "bless the memory of those that perished in Toledo" at about 9:45.

Maybe we can ignore the snuffling and the general demeanor of a guy who doesn't wanna do what he's doing here - but fuck, man - Toledo?

Here comes the Daddy State crackdown.

First, on everything and everyone suspected of not supporting this autocratic regime. 

Typical of how these thugs operate, they'll do exactly the opposite of what they want us to think they're saying they'll be doing. 

(yes, that last bit was complicated and convoluted - have you not but following what these assholes are always trying to do?)

So anyone expressing an opinion contrary to the hateful speech of Cult45 will themselves be condemned as "hateful". And at the very least, they'll be harassed - if not shut down completely.

Second - and I think as important - is the attempt to emphasize "the problems of video games and mental health".

This is the typical dodge so they don't have to confront one of their major benefactors - the folks at NRA who have been so helpful laundering all that Russian mob money that pours into GOP pockets.

But it's the part of that meme that's just too fucking obvious is the American chauvinism.

They can expect a huge number of Americans to ignore the obvious fact that violent video games and unaddressed mental illness do, in fact, exist in other countries. But because we never ever go anywhere - and because we know practically nothing about anything outside the US - we buy right into it.

Hear what they say, but always always always watch what they do.

BTW, I wonder what Ajit Pai is cooking up for us over at the FCC.

On Getting Woke

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column.

"Don't be so woke that you can't dream"

There's a very important space between healthy skepticism and self-destructive cynicism.