[Winstonm]

Chauvin trial verdict is in, guilty on all counts.

I think this is right and fair but I have no happiness about the verdict; instead, I feel sad and sickened by the whole episode and feel sorry for everyone involved. But that does not bring back George Floyd.

[johnu]

Winstonm, on 2021-April-20, 15:10, said:

Chauvin trial verdict is in, guilty on all counts.

I think this is right and fair but I have no happiness about the verdict; instead, I feel sad and sickened by the whole episode and feel sorry for everyone involved. But that does not bring back George Floyd.

Without multiple video sources that showed exactly what happened, it's a near certainty that Chauvin would have been found not guilty. Even with conclusive video, is there anybody who didn't have doubts that Chauvin would escape justice?

[Zelandakh]

pilowsky, on 2021-April-20, 14:37, said:

If that's the "bottom line", then I'm sorry to hear about your upbringing.

Sorry, what? Are you trolling here or just being unbelievably obnoxious?

pilowsky, on 2021-April-20, 14:37, said:

If you equate the likelihood of success in High School with intelligence, then, well, you are 3 times less intelligent than the person you are talking to.

I was talking to shyams. While I value shyam's intelligent comment here on BBF, I would like to hear your justification for the above statement. Or was it just a continuation of the previous rubbish?

[y66]

Was very happy to see this statement from my County Board which was emailed to the whole county today.

Quote

Arlington County Board Statement on the Derek Chauvin Verdict

The Arlington County Board commends the Minneapolis jurors for returning a guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin murder trial and joins others around the nation in relief. The shocking video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Chauvin while other officers stood by and failed to intervene, showed the disregard for and devaluing of Black lives that is too common. The Board hopes that today’s verdict is a step forward in dismantling the systemic racism that pervades life throughout our nation.

We know that Arlington is not exempt from this racism and its impacts, and we renew our commitment to addressing those inequities and creating a culture of caring and respect. We are proud to live in a vibrant, diverse and inclusive community that champions human and civil rights, and while we know there is more work to be done, we are inspired by the efforts of Arlington community members and leaders who strengthen us as a whole.

[thepossum]

shyams, on 2021-April-20, 07:03, said:

A friend recently stated on our classmates WhatsApp group that his son is more intelligent (IQ) than three other kids combined.

.....

Please opine

I avoid any organisation/group whose members pride themselves in being in the top percentile/fraction of a percentile of anything

Other than that a rhetorical statement to the effect that X is worth more than/better than the rest of them combined is a not unreasonable statement in itself

But following on what Zel said, I am curious as what we can use as our baseline standard for zero intelligence - and before anyone embarks on political insults or slanging matches I'm thinking along the lines of rocks/bricks

On the broader subject of attempts to select/predict based on various measures I'm too tired to even think - but it was almost unnecessary to even consider and explain the high correlation between IQ and various selection processes/tests

But in case its not obvious from my comments, while I know different types of tests are useful for various reasons I have an intense dislike of people making a big thing about any of them. But at one time of my life I think I was in the top fraction of a percentile of something

As Zelandakh said (and I cant remember what I studied about it all), from recollection IQ was restricted to children, it was age relative and was not intended at concepts of merit which people have unfortunately tacked on. For people to brag about their IQ is a meaningless thing. Although I would have liked to take one of the variants for adults such as WAIS to see how my aging brain stacks up these days I am currently reading about someone I had previously never heard of and her record for many years as having the highest recorded IQ until IQ tests started to be challenged as reliable measures. I must admit though, despite my disdain, that for a few minutes of my life I did check a few high IQ societies but some of them had much too broad selection criteria, and some seemed ridiculously impossible/unfeasible and I didn't fancy my chances

[y66]

Fun read: Tyler Cowen in conversation with Shadi Bartsch

[y66]

From Margaret Renkl at NYT:

Quote

https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage

NASHVILLE — Deep beneath the spring-warmed soil, a great thrumming force is beginning to stir. Trillions strong, these insects have been living in the dark since George W. Bush’s first term as president. Now they are ready for the light. They are climbing out of the darkness, out of their own skins and into the trees. They are here to sing a love song. Their only purpose among the green leaves is love.

Well, it’s not singing so much as vibrating. And not love so much as sex. Their only purpose among us is to mate.

There are more than 3,000 species of cicadas worldwide, and they can be divided into roughly two groups. Annual cicadas surface every summer, much later in the year than the cicadas emerging now. The song of annual cicadas is an undulation, a pulsating chant that rises in waves as one cicada begins and others join in, and join in, and join in before falling off gradually, one after another. The song of annual cicadas is the sound of summer itself.

Periodic cicadas emerge in cycles — every 13 years or every 17 — and they are generally smaller than their annual cousins. Grouped according to their emergence in a particular area, each brood of periodic cicadas is identified by a Roman numeral. Brood X includes three species with synchronized life spans. It is one of the largest and most widespread of the cicada broods.

For the past 17 years, these insects have lived as nymphs deep beneath the soil, drinking sap from tree roots. For the past week, they have been emerging in much of the eastern South — Georgia, East Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia — and they will arrive soon in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Look for them when the soil eight inches deep reaches a temperature of 64 degrees. (If you’re in Brood X’s range, you can be part of a citizen-science project that tracks their emergence.)

After a year of weather calamities and pandemic shutdowns, people are already muttering about the apocalypse, but this, mercifully, is a natural occurrence, not a biblical plague. Cicadas are not locusts. They don’t even belong to the same order of insects as locusts. Cicadas don’t strip fields of every grain of rice or wheat, as swarming locusts do. Cicadas don’t sting, and they don’t bite. The strawlike appendage they have instead of a mouth works only for inserting into tree bark. Cicadas don’t even hurt the trees. (Not the mature trees, at any rate; saplings should be protected with cheesecloth before the cicadas emerge.)

The life cycle of the cicada is unique among insects. A nymph tunnels up from deep in the soil, climbs onto a tree trunk or a plant stem — or anything else it can reach that offers a bit of vertical clearance — and then commences to shed its exoskeleton as dramatically and beautifully as any butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. The new adult appears white, almost translucent, but its armor hardens and darkens as the hours pass. Its eyes turn red. Its intricate wings unfurl.

And then it takes to the treetops, where the males begin to sing and the females have their choice of suitors. After they mate, the female deposits her eggs into slits she makes in the bark of tender shoots. When the eggs hatch, the nymphs drop to the ground and burrow into the soil, beginning their lives in the dark. The adults live four to six weeks before they, too, fall to the ground, returning to the earth for a new purpose.

Owing to their mind-numbing numbers — up to 1.5 million per acre — periodic cicadas are louder than summer cicadas, less like a chorus and more like a fire hose blasted directly into your ear canal. At the height of the emergence, the sound appears to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, vibrating in the bones of your ears and in the fillings of your teeth. The sound can feel like a form of madness.

The relentless buzzing, the red eyes — perhaps they explain why so many of the headlines about this phenomenon default to negative metaphors. It’s an “invasion,” according to ABC News, an “infestation,” according to CBS.

It’s no such thing.

The most destructive species the earth has ever known likely emerged some 315,000 years ago, and we have not stopped roaming and eating and pillaging for one minute since. Cicadas, by contrast, benefit the ecosystems into which they emerge, a boon to hungry birds and reptiles and a huge range of mammals. Fish eat them when they fall into streams and lakes. After cicadas die, they decompose and feed the very trees that hosted their brief days in the sun.

Nashville is not in Brood X’s range, but I have lived through two emergences of Brood XIX, a periodic cicada on the 13-year schedule, and I’m jealous of all of you whose skies will soon be blurred by wings and whose trees will be filled with song. At a time when wildlife is being threatened by human activity from every side, your baby birds and possums and lizards and snakes and turtles will grow strong, fed on the cicadas’ bounty. Your hawks and owls and foxes will live this year because their prey has become bountiful, too. And you will be surrounded by reminders that the darkest tunnels always bend, in time, toward the light. That resurrection is always, always at hand.

[y66]

You call that a crack?


Story here: https://www.nytimes....smonth-alpha-01

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2021-May-15, 12:50, said:

You call that a crack?


Story here: https://www.nytimes....smonth-alpha-01

https://www.youtube....h?v=zKhEw7nD9C4

[shyams]

The latest exposé of how the BBC deceived Princess Diana appears to have rocked the foundation of the institution.
* I don't recall any member of the Royal family ever use such pointed language to criticise anyone -- words like "deceitful" and "incompetence" are powerful and potent, and probably unprecedented.
* It is also highly unusual for a member of the Royal family to directly address the cameras instead of issuing a written statement (https://www.youtube....h?v=1tXz438369c).

I fear the end is nigh for the BBC. It might take many years, but it does feel like the dismantling of this global institution is highly probably.

Prince William said:

I would like to thank Lord Dyson and his team for the report.It is welcome that the BBC accepts Lord Dyson’s findings in full - which are extremely concerning - that BBC employees:
- lied and used fake documents to obtain the interview with my mother;
- made lurid and false claims about the Royal Family which played on her fears and fuelled paranoia;
- displayed woeful incompetence when investigating complaints and concerns about the programme; and
- were evasive in their reporting to the media and covered up what they knew from their internal investigation.

It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said.

The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others. It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.

But what saddens me most, is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived. She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions.

It is my firm view that this Panorama programme [Bashir's interview of Princess Diana] holds no legitimacy and should never be aired again. It effectively established a false narrative which, for over a quarter of a century, has been commercialised by the BBC and others.

This settled narrative now needs to be addressed by the BBC and anyone else who has written or intends to write about these events. In an era of fake news, public service broadcasting and a free press have never been more important.

These failings, identified by investigative journalists, not only let my mother down, and my family down; they let the public down too.

[y66]

From Prayer for a Just War -- Finding meaning in the climate fight by Greg Jackson at Harper's

Quote

When I first drafted this essay, almost two years ago, California was on fire. A few months later, Australia ignited. Then the coronavirus hit. By the time I sat down to rewrite the essay last fall, California was on fire again, with three of the four largest wildfires in state history raging simultaneously. The sky above San Francisco turned an unearthly, apocalyptic orange. Sunlight could no longer penetrate the ash, photovoltaic panels stopped working, and the air-quality index in many places exceeded the most polluted cities in Asia, where millions of children have irreversible lung damage. People living in California, Oregon, and Washington State found themselves trapped in their homes. Houses, subdivisions, and entire towns lay in charred ruins. Those who could do so moved their families to safer areas, much as people had done in the early days of the pandemic. As far away as the East Coast, smoke from the fires marred the air, and from where I watched, north of New York City, the evening sun vanished in the haze before it touched the horizon.

Like a spinning wheel that becomes a uniform blur, the relentless pace of unfolding catastrophe is turning into a fixed calendar of disaster that in many places will soon become as regular as the seasons. “Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno,” wrote the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan during the 2019–20 bushfire season. In California, too, the images and stories seemed to belong less to peacetime than to war, and indeed this metaphor has become commonplace in our rhetoric about the climate threat. Al Gore, writing in the New York Times, put it starkly:

Quote

This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11.

Similar martial rhetoric weaves through many of today’s decarbonization narratives, from David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth to Saul Griffith’s Rewiring America, and it gives John Kerry’s climate-crisis coalition, World War Zero, its name.

But for all the rhetoric of war, the shape of the metaphor remains fuzzy. If it is simply meant to justify a certain scale of government response—a warlike reallocation of industry, logistical capacity, and spending—it mistakes the true implication of the metaphor and the source of its power. For as the coronavirus has taught us, the credibility of a threat and our sense of responsibility to protect ourselves and others against it can change our behavior in ways we might have thought impossible. What distinguishes a “just” war—that is, a necessary and nonelective war, fought for survival or defense—is that it involves everyone; it is fought by the country, not only the government and not only those who bear arms in combat. It is a source of meaning in addition to anguish.

To those who still harbor doubts about the justness of this war, who continue to question the scientific consensus on global warming and the ravages it promises, I ask only that you entertain, if there is a chance you are right, that there is also a chance you are wrong. Let us even say, for argument’s sake, that the virtual certainty of scientists were reduced to 50 percent confidence and the forecasted effects of climate violence were reduced in severity by 50 percent as well. That would still justify the most massive mobilization of human energy and resources the world has ever seen, because the likely outcome would still be far worse than any threat we have faced in the past.

Of course, there are some who accept the seriousness of the threat but console themselves with the possibility that we might overcome it without serious disruption to our lives. The cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent in the past decade and shows no sign of stopping. Wind power has followed suit. According to reports by the International Renewable Energy Agency and others, wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in most cases, and there are already many places where building new wind and solar capacity is cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants. Synergistic technologies, such as batteries and electric cars, have improved dramatically over the same period, and there has been progress on more intractable problems such as the decarbonization of air travel and the production of cement, glass, and steel.

But for all the good news, we would be foolish to think technology alone will save us. The fossil-fuel industry will not disappear quietly. Subsidies will not unwind themselves. Legislation to transform our energy system will not enact itself. Politicians must be moved from complicity and intransigence. Minds must be changed. And most crucially, even if we manage in the coming decades to remake our global energy system, we will still need a new form of civic solidarity to deal with the ecological trials headed our way.

That our species has the power to destroy life on earth but not to contain wildfires in California should give us pause as we consider what our ingenuity and determination can do in the face of a violent planet. We can split the atom, construct hydrogen bombs, and send humans to the moon, but that does not mean we can stop tidal waves, prevent ice sheets from melting, or cleanse toxic air. When it comes to arresting fast-moving pandemics, supplying drinking water to eight billion people, or managing refugee flows in the tens of millions, the sheer scale of these problems leaves little hope for after-the-fact technological fixes. The ocean and atmosphere are simply too vast and complex for our minds to finely conceptualize or our tools to fully contain. Our powers are great but narrow, the world far bigger than we imagine.

This sounds grim and it sounds hard. Like you, I have encountered hundreds of versions of this story that cast our unhappy lot in the light of sacrifice and devastation. The crisis is real, and the stakes of inaction are indeed severe, but maybe, for all that, we have gotten the story backward. What if the challenge confronting us isn’t our greatest threat but our greatest opportunity, not a moment of self-denial and self-destruction, but of self-creation and self-discovery? What if, to be more precise, our greatest threat is also our greatest opportunity, because overcoming monumental challenges, when wisdom and heroism are possible, is the great gift of human life, the substance of our proudest moments, and the matter from which ur-meaning is built?

he 2020 presidential election was only the latest milestone on the apparently endless highway of American division. Truth has taken on partisan gradations. Democratic institutions strain and buckle. Norms tremble in the fierce crosswinds of power. We cannot find a way to do even simple things most people agree on: bring down the cost of medications, regulate guns to prevent mass shootings, raise taxes on the rich, or overhaul out-of-date infrastructure. How can we be so far apart when we want so many of the same things? What has gotten so fouled up that vague symbolic fights obscure the irreducible communal basis of our prosperity and strength?

The 2020 presidential election was only the latest milestone on the apparently endless highway of American division. Truth has taken on partisan gradations. Democratic institutions strain and buckle. Norms tremble in the fierce crosswinds of power. We cannot find a way to do even simple things most people agree on: bring down the cost of medications, regulate guns to prevent mass shootings, raise taxes on the rich, or overhaul out-of-date infrastructure. How can we be so far apart when we want so many of the same things? What has gotten so fouled up that vague symbolic fights obscure the irreducible communal basis of our prosperity and strength?

Let me tell a different story about what has gone wrong. Our fundamental affliction is not the magnitude of our problems but our alienation from their manifest solutions. Our tools have never made us more powerful, yet we seem more powerless than ever to effect change. Our primary way of interacting with the world is through a screen, and our principal avenue to changing anything appears to be typing into or clicking on that screen. We are alienated from the earth, from our hands, and from one another. We appear to be part of an efficient system that has brought ever more and cheaper goods to market, but our skills have become specialized to the point of practical uselessness. Our ability to create and cultivate the goods that we rely on and enjoy has shriveled to almost nothing. There is a maddening abstraction to our reality, a virtuality to all life. We are told that we are hopelessly partisan and polarized—patriotic or traitorous, awake to truth or in thrall to lies—but above all we are separate: from one another despite our mutual dependency and from the material reality on which every aspect of our life depends. We are separate from the actions we might undertake, and undertake together, to solve the tangible problems before us, which do not care what brand name or party affiliation their solutions go by. We believe hate is endemic, that we are at one another’s throats, but we don’t know one another. We have never gotten close enough to shake hands, much less see that the throat we mean to grab has wrinkles like our own. We carry the burden of crushing loneliness, and find ourselves isolated from friend and imaginary foe alike. We are trapped in the virtual amber of our paralytic culture, where helplessness and impotence sit on the vine so long they ripen and rot into enmity, vitriol, and rage.

It is a strange irony that climate change has, until recently, had a virtual quality of its own. This is the very essence of what has made it so difficult to combat. The same reason policy disagreements endure for years—that consequences don’t follow actions closely enough to establish irrefutable empirical links—is the same reason our society can recognize the danger posed by a warming planet and do nothing about it for decades. Though nearly every technology in our lives relies on truths (such as electrical or chemical properties) that we apprehend only indirectly, it is in our nature to have a complicated and problematic relationship with the reality—the truth—of our abstract knowledge.

But now climate violence is emerging from the shadows. It is setting fire to forests we can see, scattering the air we breathe with ash, and filling city streets with water. It has begun marching on our offscreen terrain. The past few decades have been what the French call the drôle de guerre, the period after war is declared and before real fighting begins. Except, because what we confront with the climate crisis is war waged on a several-decade delay, the battle started long before the first shots were heard. The challenge of organizing ourselves around this crisis before its worst consequences reach us is no different from the challenge of reclaiming truth from the burning timbers of our smoldering virtual culture—of reknitting a fabric of shared purpose from shared interest. Climate change is the crisis of virtual insouciance stepping terrifyingly into the real.

The more we insist on our separateness and exemption from nature, the more violently nature will educate us otherwise. Where reality gives way to fantasy, politics breaks down; and where politics breaks down, war, revolution, and violence rise up—so Carl von Clausewitz and John F. Kennedy each suggested. If we fail to see the truth of what lies after politics—not the absence of policy, but the presence, the certainty, of violence—we do not bring sufficient determination to the fight to redeem politics. The climate crisis lays this truth bare.

[pilowsky]

It's got be __(http://bit.ly/GotToBePerfectFA)__ Perfect
http://bit.ly/PerfectDeal

[pilowsky]

STARTLING JUXTAPOSITION
In the latest from Australia comes news about Ben Roberts-Smith who is suing the non-Murdoch news media for Defamation because:
it was reported that he "committed war crimes in Afghanistan and punched a woman in the face" (in Canberra - as reported on the news a moment ago).

That was the first item, followed by an item on University students,


Then this headline and story "Warning for pets as rat poison antidote faces shortage"Pet owners in NSW are being urged to be vigilant to protect their animals from mouse baits, due to a critical, national shortage of antidote. Then an item about a COVID-19 outbreak in NSW - remember COVID?

Quote

'Public interest immunity' dismissed in Roberts-Smith case
The Federal Court has ordered a witness in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial to hand over documents about a military inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

In a high-profile trial due to start next week, Mr Roberts-Smith is suing three Fairfax newspapers (now owned by Nine), arguing he has been defamed by reports he committed war crimes in Afghanistan and punched a woman in the face.

The Victoria Cross recipient denies all wrongdoing and the newspapers will use truth as a defence.

In the Federal Court in Sydney, Justice Wendy Abraham has ruled an SAS soldier known as 'Person 35', who will give evidence at the trial, must hand over documents linked to an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Defence into the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

'Person 35' is one of several witnesses who have asked for their evidence to the Inspector-General of Defence inquiry to not be made public.

Justice Abraham said 'Person 35' has not been able to successfully argue the need for "public interest immunity".

The trial is due to open on Monday.

[y66]

Fun read: Tyler Cowen's conversation with David Deutsch

[y66]

I Had Never Faced the Reality of Death’: A Surgeon Becomes a Patient

[y66]

Stephen King on Why ‘Lisey’s Story’ Was One He Had to Adapt Himself by Erik Piepenburg at NYT

Quote

They say the minute / you show the monster, you take / away its power.

[Winstonm]

This is quite cool:

Quote

The alleged drug syndicates, contract killers and weapons dealers thought they were using high-priced, securely encrypted phones that would protect them as they openly discussed drug deals by text message and swapped photos of cocaine-packed pineapples. What they were really doing, investigators revealed Tuesday, was channeling their plots straight into the hands of U.S. intelligence agents.

[y66]

So also was the bitcoin clawback from the ransomware guys.

[y66]

For forum foodies: Mark Bittman talks to Carla Hall

[Cyberyeti]

https://www.bbc.co.u...orfolk-57402743 an interesting subject, but also Phil Jones is a bridge player at my club