#Ranty #myheadasplode Don’t read unless you’re down with some whitey angst.

#Ranty #myheadasplode Don’t read unless you’re down with some whitey angst. Just watch the video, which contains everything I really wanted to say.  h/t Moreven Brushwood

Still here? OK, you’ve been warned.

My daughter watches a bunch of Disney teen dramady series. They are the most horrible things I ever see on TV – they teach shallow materialism, bullying, boredom with the world, a vapid, brainless assurance, incuriosity. They are mean, small-minded and wilfully, proudly ignorant, all while sneering at those same qualities in others. I’d much rather have her watch Inglourious Basterds or porn.

But they’re also part of the world around her. She can’t be blindsided by this kind of bullshit. We have to be able to talk about it.

This week she saw an episode of Girl Meets World where the protagonist’s father, who is also her teacher in school, calls her out in front of the class for pretentiously and shallowly appropriating a sort of Harajuku style.

http://culturalappropriationon.tumblr.com/post/94398939363/geekykristie-angelacarterofmars

He says: “Let me tell you: it’s a real neighborhood in Japan where authentic Japanese girls created an authentic look and lives for themselves that is unique to them.”

Authentic. Twice, no less. I’m instantly suspicious, any time this word shows up. That Disney should have learned it is a very bad sign (that Disney uses it is merely a symptom of the lack of self-reflection that Disney cannot do without).

Here’s what I hear when someone says the word “authentic” about people:

Stay in your lane.

You aren’t from around here. You will never be this. This is some numinous value-well you can gaze at but never understand.

Your hybridity is not wanted here.

Nor are any new ideas you might have. They will instantly spoil the authenticity.

also:

This thing must be kept apart to preserve it. It is already apart from the dirty, everyday world – we must adapt to it, not the other way around.

You know who’s really, really concerned about authenticity? Colonialists and ultra-nationalists. In both cases, though, their identification of the authentic is always something they do, something they want to conform to their expectations, no matter how much they may point away from themselves at the object they want you to look at. The attribution of authenticity fits the object for use in the speaker’s next set of narratives.

In this particular case the narrative is the Disney teen classic – just be yourself, which means:

no, not that thing you’re being right now.

just be the thing I’m not going to tell you. You’ll know you’ve got it right when I stop hitting you.

just conform to what this program is showing you.

on no account show any signs of trying to figure out who or what you actually are. For God’s sake don’t show me any part of your construction of yourself (because ultimately that’s what you have to do, in growing up – construct a self you can live with). Learn your lessons, internalize them, be the person who doesn’t make these mistakes.

it is your job to already know what your authenticity is.

It should be obvious by now that I’m not going to discuss whether Harajuku styles are more or less authentic than any others, right?

Here: important source, although 10 years out of date now:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003VPWW2K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Although there is one way in which, it seems to me, Harajuku is a uniquely bad candidate for use in this sort of bullying, which makes the episode more useful than it would be if, for instance, the girl had dressed up as an Inuit or Pilgrim Mother: it strikes me that Harajuku style, whatever it might be, is at least partly about radical acceptance. About making yourself interesting, whatever it takes. About constructing an identity with the seams still showing.

And there’s Disney teacher-dad, gatekeeping it.

In the end, society can always just change its dress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zWwd8n2JVI//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Spare me a moment of blasphemy.

Spare me a moment of blasphemy.

I know folks around here have a special place in their hearts for Star Wars. Me too. Stories of being taken by their fathers to see it have given way over the years to stories of sharing it with their kids. Very good.

This evening I shared a movie that means a great deal to me with my kids and they were spellbound. Man, this is a good film, no matter what liberties it takes with history, no matter the grotesque caricatures it shows of every leading player. This here is my son’s favourite scene: for him it was an epiphany, what the composer is actually up to – not just popping out fairly simple tunes but creating a whole out of many parts, using the orchestra and choir as a single instrument. Both kids thought the film would be boring. Both were fully invested to the final frame.

And I’d forgotten that it has Simon Callow in it. Oh and he’s so good. Singing, even. But he doesn’t outshine the rest of the cast because they’re all that good.

…..the scene in The Get Down where Grandmaster Flash explains DJing is a similar tour de force. I guess I’m just a sucker for this is how you do it scenes, well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2pyEvp8ls//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

A Modest Proposal:

A Modest Proposal:

Recent estimates suggest that the top 1% of households hold about 40% of all household income in the US.

I wondered how this compared with the France of Louis XIV or XVI – turns out that in 1781, engineer cum economist Isnard estimated that the top 5.5% held 29% of total wealth, while Morisson and Snyder (below) say tax records show the top 10% holding 62% or thereabouts (with all the usual caveats about such estimates, that they leave out the royal family, church etc). Sadly the top-of-the-top – royal and church incomes – are excluded from the French numbers. As you get into the narrower strata above the 1% in the US the incomes soar ever upward away from the mean – one in 1000 Americans earned over 6 million in 2011 (so that’s 300,000 people with disposable income in the multi-millions).

http://inequality.org/income-inequality/

Here’s the proposal: why don’t we relaunch truly elite culture? If you’re a producer of original art/writing/work, instead of pursuing a distributed market, trying to cater to mass tastes, looking for a big break, why not pursue a patron and try to reignite in them a sense of artistic virtue? Trickle-down elitist appreciation gave us Michelangelo, Vivaldi and Mozart – most of all it gave all those conspicuous consumers something of lasting value to preen and fight over. Face it, otherwise they’ll only spend it on gold toilets and racehorses and ultra-rare Bourbons with stupid names. How about getting them to invent fashions again, rather than just trailing around after them?

Yes, I know – yet again you’ll be fighting the philistinist Trump zeitgeist. That might make this the perfect time, though – how many very rich people really want to be associated with that?

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/MorrissonSnyder2000.pdf//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

taken from another post because I thought you’d like it.

taken from another post because I thought you’d like it.

Peter Kisner wrote:

Rogues Won! – Vassals of the Imperial Lich-Lord are building a grand fortress-temple allowing their master’s power to projected over nearly infinite distances. To prevent this inevitable chaos and tyrrany to follow, a band of well-meaning misfits set off on a potentially suicidal mission to retrieve the architectural plans for this fortress so an invading force can have some chance of destroying it.

Me: self-serving fantasy version of Rogues Won: there are no plans because nobody ever makes plans of anything before about 1700 – instead the misfits have to bust an architectural historian out of a maximum security Improbablium Refinery to guide them through the Lich’s labyrinthine castle based on stylistic principles and ornament.

The architectural historian is about as used to the demands of combat as C3PO, but saves the whole crew by getting them to pose as volutes, eggs and darts. He gets squinched in the final reel. 

The Boulevardier is a rather irresponsible bourbon take on the stately Negroni.

The Boulevardier is a rather irresponsible bourbon take on the stately Negroni. frankly it’s a bit silly compared with, for instance, the 1794.

BUT.

Recently I discovered that it could be made remarkably patrician by the substitution of Contratto for Campari.

And then I thought “you know what else is a remarkably patrician drink? The Sazerac!

AND SO.

The Patriarch

Wash glass with absinthe

2 Rittenhouse Rye Whisky

1 Contratto

1 Carpano Formula Antica Vermouth

1 dash Peychaud’s Bitters

Build in glass, giant ice cube

wedge of blood orange for garnish

So, actually, who is this guy?

So, actually, who is this guy?

From the facial hair and outfit, I reckon he’s probably US, final decade before WW1. He’s got a stack of books and an – even for that time – old timey foaming tankard that’s clearly an affectation. I’m guessing he belongs to some fraternal society… Explorer’s Club, probably, with a private room at the Reformed Red Men lodge. I reckon he might be Fred Dellenbaugh ca. 1901

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Samuel_Dellenbaugh

or some huckster hanger-on of Adolphus Greely’s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphus_Greely

Interesting characters, all. But not who I think of first when I think DnD adventures.

What could I possibly have to say about this, as a complete unbeliever?

What could I possibly have to say about this, as a complete unbeliever?

…well, that there’s a strong tradition in Brazil of using statues and iconic figures and paraphernalia for prayer that is Catholic, catholic, and decidedly unCatholic. And that use of such icons is not generally fetishistic – that is, no god or identity is understood to reside in the objects, they are merely letters of introduction or foci or indicators that facilitate calling to a separate, observing power. The fidelity of the image is understood to mean little in comparison with the sincerity of prayer.

As for the Orishas, who share the identities of several saints in Brazil, they are used to recognizing themselves in all kinds of signs – rhythms, words, objects, smoke, hand tools.

If Elrond here is St. Anthony then he’s very probably also Ogum, the solitary dweller in the wilderness, offering healing and protection to travelers and wielding a machete or other long blade against injustice. So it seems to me quite fitting that he should maintain the Last Homely House of the West and that one of his first acts, when we meet him in The Hobbit, should be the identification of Orcrist and Glamdring, the biter and beater of those goblins who unjustly usurp mountain shelters and threaten travelers’ safety.

I reckon this granny might know exactly who she’s got hold of, whether or not she’s ever heard the name Elrond.

Originally shared by null

http://deadstate.org/elderly-catholic-woman-has-mistakenly-been-praying-every-day-to-elrond-from-lord-of-the-rings///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So far I have resisted dipping my toe in the nerd catnip* that is trying to fix the problems with Star Wars but the…

So far I have resisted dipping my toe in the nerd catnip* that is trying to fix the problems with Star Wars but the enormous differences in technological development between that long ago galaxy and our own bother me every time. Yes, they have magic contained-length beam weapons that travel about as fast as a bowshot and FTL travel, both of which straight up break our physics. Given that this is the case, we have to assume their physical laws are different from our own and maybe that’s why they don’t have cheap, simple, plentiful nukes for destroying cities/continents and must rely on massive orbital beam weapon platforms (some careless comics aside).

Still, there are some things that are just baffling. The Force is a measurable, tangible, reproducible influence on the world – ie a technology. Why, then, are there so few force-dependent secondary technologies that make use of it? No schools of Force engineering? If in fact it depends on some kind of symbiote, why is this not itself technologized? Especially since it’s evident that not everybody lives by the same ideologies/taboos. Gravitronics are obviously cheap and plentiful – every spaceship has artificial gravity with a consistent up direction, tractor beams exist and are well-known to a smuggler like Solo. Possibly gravitronics are also what keep farm boy Luke’s landspeeder floating eerily above the least prosperous bit of desert in the galaxy, where the other popular methods of transport are unusually slow giant animals. Why then are there so many epically long and dangerous ladders around? Why aren’t people flying everywhere or at least safe-falling up and down in lift shafts, instead of climbing all over everything and falling down bottomless pits? Why is jumping impressively high a goddamn sign of Force-mojo?

My guess is that the whole of Star Wars is post-apocalyptic. They have some technological tricks – some systems that they can repair or even reproduce, modify, build anew – but there’s no coherent body of knowledge, no comprehensive understanding of the technology anywhere. They’re like Vancian magicians, able to reproduce effects but not to understand why their powers work. Millenia-long warrior monk traditions have preserved the old limb-regrowing tanks but the manual has long since gone missing and nobody has the nerve to just mash on the buttons to see what else the machine can do – maybe it could help with childbirth, but 600 years ago Master Mysugynist Fukyu neglected to pass on the secrets of that particular operation.

And droids? Clearly they are, in fact, people. With all the limitations and failings of people. They probably live fairly short lives inside something like a mi-go type braincase, buried in whatever chassis has been provided. That’s why there are no really big AIs, no ship-size oracles that already know the Death Star plans inside out – AI itself is unknown.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

Uteruses: How do they work?

Apparently, nobody in the Old Republic was capable of adequately answering this question. In fact, Sarah Jeong makes a good argument that the inexplicable lack of qualified OB/GYNs in this galaxy was a major contributing factor to the collapse of the Old Republic and the Jedi order.

Given that they nonetheless had medical droids and bacta tanks, and prosthetics nearly indistinguishable from the original limbs, the only explanation I can think of is that uteruses are powered by Magic Beans which are somehow impervious to medical technology.

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/womens-healthcare-star-wars//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Reading Against the Grain

Reading Against the Grain

I wasn’t the only person to notice the remarkable synchronicity between the destruction of the Ark of Aleppo and that of Rogue One’s Jedha.

http://fellinthenettles.blogspot.com/

(oh right like Jeddah with a misplaced mute h http://scd.observers.france24.com/files/images/rawashin3-2.jpg )

The article below stops just short of saying that Rogue One finally makes visible the long-running heritage vs. Nazis  theme that connects Star Wars with Indiana Jones. Whether the Star Destroyer is actually supposed to stand for Assad/Putin or is just what happens when you grab all global culture and run it through a blender I don’t know. Given the typical speed of movie development, the destroyed monument could just as easily be the Ziggurat of Babylon.

http://www.monabaker.com/pMachine/more.php?id=2589_0_1_0_M

So do we have a valorization of long continuity, here? Is the message that this Empire too will pass?

But then there’s that well-trodden link between the Rebel Alliance’s medal ceremony and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71wFYKrIm2g&list=RD71wFYKrIm2g#t=6

Consider: the whole Star Wars epic is concerned with the surprising return of a power long thought to have been utterly destroyed. The series uses titles in a familiar 30s pulp format – Return of the Jedi, Revenge of the Sith, Attack of the Clones.

Occult readings of texts often directly contradict their surface meanings. The second layer makes every detail legible again as its opposite.

Triumph of the Whills.

Originally shared by Khairul Hisham

http://almostarchaeology.com/post/155257678288/rogueonearchaeology//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

The previously somnambulent Man in the High Castle suddenly gets going in ep. 6

The previously somnambulent Man in the High Castle suddenly gets going in ep. 6

…and there’s a dinner scene with an antique dealer and his clients that seems like it’s a massive coded statement about current US politics. There is a lot going on in that scene and its aftermath.

So this post is an invitation to unpack that, if you’re interested.

The Japanese couple look to me a lot like discourses about the “liberal elite.” The antique dealer’s speech – his thought, in fact – is tightly constrained by political factors that the couple have the privilege of ignoring. It seems like they set a series of orthodoxy traps for him, which he negotiates to safety but away from connection. They are disappointed by his narrowness, he feels tricked by the evaporation of their interest, and later angrily denounces their condescension.

Sofar, fairly clear. But what’s really going on there? If in fact the writers are talking about the present, what’s their point?

perceptions:

perceptions:

my son complained about some of the effects sequences in Rogue One with spaceships and star fields – he said the camerawork looked like certain problems with VR – I haven’t had much experience with that so it passed me by.

OTOH he had no idea Peter Cushing was cgi. He knew something was off about animated Carrie Fisher but then he was aware that she wouldn’t have looked the same in 2016 as in 1977.

…I found that Tarkin did this thing that animated characters often do in eg. Assassin’s Creed games of not quite interacting with his surroundings – in some shots it doesn’t look like he’s looking at anything. That bothers me more than skin texture. But I knew Cushing was dead; I’m not sure that I would have caught it if Forest Whitaker had been animated.

Twenty years ago I predicted that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be the first immortal, completely artificial film star. It seems ironic to me that instead it’s Dr. Van Helsing. Especially because Christopher Lee also did a stint in Star Wars.

Of course, the replaced actors everyone overlooks in that movie are Kenny Baker and David Prowse. I see Anthony Daniels got full credit.

PSA: that’s not David Belle in Rogue One, it’s Diego Luna.

PSA: that’s not David Belle in Rogue One, it’s Diego Luna.

Every time someone said “we’ll have to climb out of here” (at least 3 times during the film) I was going OK this is it, the parkour extravaganza. That’s why they got him for the role.

No. No parkour because that’s actually not David Belle. At all.

Now I’ve saved you from that little distraction. 

The case comparing our next emperor commander in chief to another well known but controversial figure

The case comparing our next emperor commander in chief to another well known but controversial figure

https://mobile.twitter.com/Todd_Spence/status/674062546450550784

http://www.attn.com/stories/4553/donald-trump-compared-to-emperor-palpatine

http://forward.com/news/356506/in-search-for-new-recruits-alt-right-cast-their-hero-trump-as-dark-emperor/

https://mobile.twitter.com/Todd_Spence/status/674062546450550784//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

TIL that my wife’s family has an old Christmas tradition, where her mother suddenly exclaims “is nobody going to say…

TIL that my wife’s family has an old Christmas tradition, where her mother suddenly exclaims “is nobody going to say that this is all for Our Lord, who came down from heaven and lived among us and died for our sins – not that I believe in any of that but is nobody going to say it? Are we just going to eat and drink and give presents and get presents and not even say it?”

….and the response will be “um, no?”

“OK then.”

silence.

“You could?”

“Well I don’t believe in it!”

“Yup.”

….amazing I’ve gone this long and been spared.

#atheismainteasy

#lostmiddleorsomething

#imnotsayingmymotherinlawsfatbutshedefinitelyhasntlosthermiddleifyouknowwhatimean

Exercise for the viewer:

Exercise for the viewer:

imagine The OA and Westworld are the same series – scenes are intercut from both, the narrative steps back and forth between Prairie’s recollections, the “present” of the school/housing development, Westworld’s story-park spaces and its control rooms.

What is the resulting complicated show about? Between Westworld’s noodlings on consciousness and memory and OA’s on dreams and waking, prophecy and intuition… is there some coherent statement? Other than “everyone reads Borges these days.”

The OA is slow, frustrating and repeatedly made me wonder “why am I watching this?”

The OA is slow, frustrating and repeatedly made me wonder “why am I watching this?”

There are lots and lots of really great actors around these days. But apparently it’s quite hard to get great writing onto the screen. OA has ambitious writing – it doesn’t talk down to you and it tries to avoid formulae. But I didn’t feel like it had any kind of core. 

Blahblah cruel quiz. But THIS HERE is gameable, especially if you have no idea who or what Ellan Vannin might be…

Blahblah cruel quiz. But THIS HERE is gameable, especially if you have no idea who or what Ellan Vannin might be…

Locate Ellan Vannin:

1 in Kola (no ice!)

2 where the early pumpkins blow.

3 among the spättburgunder vineyards.

4 under the crest of the red-handed badgers.

5 in a university city, home to a “royal” seminary for Scottish seculars.

6 within a region whose littoral achieved historical significance on the feast day of St Norbert.

7 at the crossroads between Devana and Ermine.

8 in the home of a carnivorous marsupial.

9 within the landform beneath Uhuru.

10 in the land of the Dayak

Originally shared by Michael Cooke

Eagerly awaited!

Now the fun, if you can call it that, begins. I spend most of my waking hours for the next few days as I #puzzle  over these questions. And what’s the owl got to do with it, you ask? Something, undoubtedly . . . .

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2016/dec/22/king-williams-college-quiz-2016//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

A nasty little heist story has occurred to me.

A nasty little heist story has occurred to me.

The actual object of the heist is genre-typical – diamonds, art, incriminating documents.

The diversion consists of a bunch of trucks driven into crowded places. Gunshots are heard. Property is damaged. Possibly pedestrians are killed. In each case the cab of the truck is spattered with blood and other signs of a struggle. The trucks end up in alleys or beside bridges – places where their drivers could conceivably have got out and disappeared.

None of the trucks contains a driver. All are remote controlled, the controlling device being carefully hidden from a cursory inspection.

The police run around arresting bystanders and looking for Muslims. The press is everywhere. It’s regarded as one of the biggest co-ordinated terrorist attacks in recent memory. Meanwhile the thieves escape in a Brinks armored car. The original drivers of the trucks are either murdered or simply imprisoned, unconscious, for the duration of the heist.

The story doesn’t let on from the first. It reads exactly like what it appears to be. Only after accusations, hot denials, reprisals, vigilante squads, calls for peace and mass rioting does the truth slowly start to come out, and then the authorities are faced with hard choices, regarding how to follow up their initial, hasty statements.

How would this even work, individual opt-in to EU citizenship?

Originally shared by Marla Caldwell

How would this even work, individual opt-in to EU citizenship? Do Leave voters simply burn their EU passports and everyone else keeps theirs? How would it impact immigration, emigration, and trade?

EU negotiators will offer British people the chance to individually opt-in and remain EU citizens as a proposal in Brexit negotiations, the European Parliament’s chief negotiator has confirmed.

#Brexit

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-citizenship-keep-freedom-of-movement-guy-verhofstadt-chief-negotiator-opt-in-passports-a7465271.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

a hundred people will probably reshare this today.

a hundred people will probably reshare this today. I’m here to tell you it’s a great McGuffin/starting equipment generator. We have to beat the Bolsheviks to the…

– Cotton Picker

– Hand turning phonograph

– Deaf Apparatus

– Improved Magnetic Bridge for practical work

– Motograph Mirror

– Deposit in vacuo on lace, gold + silver also on cotton molten chemical compound of lustrous surfaces to imitate silk

– Vacuous Ore milling Large Machine

– Magnetic Separator Large

– Locking material for Iron sand

– Joy phonograph for Dolls

– Cable Motograph

– Very Loud Motograph telephone with 1/3 siz phonogh motor.

– Magneto telephone

– Snow Compressor

– Glass plate water ore repeator

– Box balancing System

– Silver wire wood cutting system

– Squirting glass sheet tube etc. Nickel [illeg.]

– Artificial Mother Pearl

– Red Lead pencils equal to graphite

– Ink for blind

– Fluffy Incandescent Burner for gas

– Regenerative Kerosene Burner

– Centralized arc in arc Lamp

– Artificial Ivory

– Soft Vegetable Ivory to press in sheets

– Chalk Battery

…and many more.

Originally shared by Allen Varney

Holy crap, Thomas Edison’s lengthy 1888 to-do list reads like an exhaustive list of sub-items for the main task “Refashion industrial society & usher in new century.” I wonder what Elon Musk’s to-do list looks like. (Open Culture):

http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/thomas-edisons-hugely-ambitious-to-do-list-from-1888.html

[…] Vacuous Ore milling Large Machine

Magnetic Separator Large

Locking material for Iron sand

Artificial Silk

Artificial filiments [sic]

New [illeg.]

Uninflammable Insulating Material

Good wax for phonograph

Phonographic Clock

Large Phonograph for Novels, etc. […]

http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/thomas-edisons-hugely-ambitious-to-do-list-from-1888.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

sadly my novel-writer’s response is the opposite of my DM response.

sadly my novel-writer’s response is the opposite of my DM response.

I reckon a suddenly unbound ifrit probably has no immediate motivation. While it chafed under the collar of the bottle, it had a tightly delimited narrative role – give the master of the bottle what they ask for but never what they want. Suddenly freed (FREED!) there’s no script after the initial exultation. I reckon the ifrit probably gets a sidekick who can read it the newspapers and wanders the lands assessing the injustice of the world aesthetically.

Originally shared by Todd Leback

Boosting some questions I asked over on the Autarch forums:

1. The description of the efreeti bottle states that the efreeti will “loyally” serve the opener, but the description of the efreeti in the monsters section states that “they will attempt to twist the meaning of their orders and obey them only to the letter.” Which takes precedent?

2. What happens when the opener of the efreeti bottle dies and the efreeti is out of the bottle? Does it rampage like an uncontrolled elemental, return to its home plane, or something else?

I’m morally opposed to clickbaity self-surveys but this one is really interesting – comparing public perceptions…

I’m morally opposed to clickbaity self-surveys but this one is really interesting – comparing public perceptions with facts.

Originally shared by James Mullen

An interesting illustration of subjective impressions.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2016/dec/14/the-perception-gap-how-well-do-you-know-your-country-take-our-quiz//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

anyone else reminded of monasteries as guardians of Rome’s knowledge?

anyone else reminded of monasteries as guardians of Rome’s knowledge?

Originally shared by John Baez

Saving climate data

The Department of Energy has rejected Trump’s demand that it list all employees working on climate change.  But this will change on January 20th.  All signs point to the worst:

The heads of Donald Trump’s transition teams for NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as well as his nominees to lead the EPA and the Department of the Interior, all question the science of human-caused climate change.

So, scientists are now backing up large amounts of climate data, just in case the Trump administration tries to delete it.

Of course saving the data publicly available on US government sites is not nearly as good as keeping climate programs fully funded!  New data is coming in all the time from satellites and other sources.  We need it – and we need the experts who understand it.

Also, it’s possible that Trump won’t be insane enough to delete big climate science databases.  But as my mother said: better safe than sorry!

“What are the most important .gov climate assets?” Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and self-proclaimed “climate hawk,” tweeted from his Arizona home Saturday evening. “Scientists: Do you have a US .gov climate database that you don’t want to see disappear?”

Within hours, responses flooded in from around the country. Scientists added links to dozens of government databases to a Google spreadsheet. Investors offered to help fund efforts to copy and safeguard key climate data. Lawyers offered pro bono legal help. Database experts offered to help organize mountains of data and to house it with free server space. In California, Santos began building an online repository to “make sure these data sets remain freely and broadly accessible.”

The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where more than 20,000 earth and climate scientists gather from around the world, there is a public demonstration today at 1:30.

And the “guerilla archiving” hackathon in Toronto is this Saturday.  If you know people with good computer skills there, get them to check it out!   Here are details:

———————————————————————

Guerrilla Archiving Hackathon

Date: 10am-4pm, December 17, 2016

Location: Bissell Building, 4th Floor, 140 St. George St. University of Toronto

RSVP and up-to-date information: https://www.facebook.com/events/1828129627464671/

Bring: laptops, power bars, and snacks.  Coffee and pizza provided.

This event collaborates with the Internet Archive’s End of Term 2016 project, which seeks to archive the federal online pages and data that are in danger of disappearing during the Trump administration. Our event is focused on preserving information and data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has programs and data at high risk of being removed from online public access or even deleted. This includes climate change, water, air, toxics programs. This project is urgent because the Trump transition team has identified the EPA and other environmental programs as priorities for the chopping block.

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library which aims at preserving and making universally accessible knowledge. Its End of Term web archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites that are at risk of changing or disappearing altogether during government transitions. The Internet Archive has asked volunteers to help select and organize information that will be preserved before the Trump transition.

End of Term web archive: http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/2016.html

New York Times article: “Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time” http://nyti.ms/2gDz5Kj

Activities:

Identifying endangered programs and data

Seeding the End of Term webcrawler with priority URLs

Identifying and mapping the location of inaccessible environmental databases

Hacking scripts to make accessible to the webcrawler hard to reach databases.

Building a toolkit so that other groups can hold similar events

Skills needed: We need all kinds of  people — and that means you!

People who can locate relevant webpages for the Internet Archive’s webcrawler

People who can identify data targeted for deletion by the Trump transition team and the organizations they work with

People with knowledge of government websites and information, including the EPA

People with library and archive skills

People who are good at navigating databases

People interested in mapping where inaccessible data is located at the EPA

Hackers to figure out how to extract data and URLs from databases (in a way that Internet Archive can use)

People with good organization and communication skills

People interested in creating a toolkit for reproducing similar events

Contacts: michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca, p.keilty@utoronto.ca

———————————————————————

The first quote in my article is from here – this is full of detailed info:

Oliver Milman, Trump’s transition: sceptics guide every agency dealing with climate change, The Guardian, 12 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/12/donald-trump-environment-climate-change-skeptics

The second is from here:

Brady Dennis, Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump, Washington Post, 13 December 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/13/scientists-are-frantically-copying-u-s-climate-data-fearing-it-might-vanish-under-trump/

I hope the small “guerilla archiving” efforts will be dwarfed by more systematic work, because it’s crucial that databases be copied along with all relevant metadata – and some sort of cryptographic certificate of authenticity, if possible.  However, getting lots of people involved is bound to be a good thing, politically speaking.

Cindern Block another vertical dungeon for your collection

Cindern Block another vertical dungeon for your collection

Originally shared by Randy M

And here’s the complete cavern/dungeon delve. I’ve added a little color to help ‘illuminate’ a few areas of interest, but wanted to keep it color-lite for ease of printing. There’s a connected map in the works, but it doesn’t quite work with this banner-style layout. Besides, it gets a little unwieldy after 4 feet. So, here’s the 300 dpi finished version (8.5″ x 55″). Thanks for all the comments, +1s, and shares on the previous versions. Hope you enjoy and feel free to use!

trey causey oh god do I now ask zak to disprove some actual truth claim of Derrida’s or do I just let it drop?

trey causey oh god do I now ask zak to disprove some actual truth claim of Derrida’s or do I just let it drop?

I know what the wiser answer is. Sometimes I think if only we had cocktails and face-to-face interaction it would be fine. I could actually say “look, I never read enough Derrida with enough seriousness to be able to assess any claims you’ll make here” and he’d go “why are we even talking about him?”

I usually try to avoid thinking too hard about the philosophical underpinnings of mass media, but bear with me a…

I usually try to avoid thinking too hard about the philosophical underpinnings of mass media, but bear with me a moment while I say stupid things about Westworld and the current news flap (ie beware spoilers up to the end of Season 1):

I expect someone has written a pretty good book either supporting or vigorously denying the idea that there is some link between Analytic philosophy (especially Positivism) and Libertarianism on one hand, and Continental philosophy and Social Democracy or Socialism on the other.

The idea of a sovereign Subject (or even ego), which enters the world capable of making good decisions seems to underlie the ideal of freedom espoused by Libertarians. Where that subject proves fallible, it is the fault of misinformation or corrupting influences, but these are all mere bugs impeding a properly working system – it should be possible to work toward their eradication and to free the soul to pursue its correct trajectory (whatever that might be). The individual soul (or whatever) is born good; it is up to society to corrupt it. Its capacity for good is related to its ability to grasp the tools of logic and reason – it recognizes what’s good for it through processes of pattern-recognition and deduction.

Over on the Continental (especially Heideggerian and Foucauldian) sides, individual awareness and judgments are seen as arising out of social interactions – training – to produce subjects that fit into their environments like keys into locks. Here the individual soul/subject is inseparable from the stuff that it learns (culture). Aside from very basic drives, it is a socially-constituted being, that wants and tends toward stuff that society has built it to want. So the prime driver for trying to understand individuals is the society in which they are formed.

It seems to me a lot of the concern about fake news, gaming google’s algorithm and so on tends to divide down this cleavage. To exaggerate for the purpose of clarity, on one hand there are people who say “well I’m not fooled because I can always find reliable information somewhere, or at least divergent information, and thereby make up my own mind” and on the other there are people who say “look at the mass of society: some percentage of the people out there will have their opinions set by stuff that is manifestly not true and that percentage will increase as it comes to be taken as normal” or even, in rare cases “I think I can’t trust the things I think, because they might be based on untruths.”

All of these viewpoints are to some extent belief systems unsubstantiated by facts (the positive identification of facts of any kind is an old philosophical tar pit that has sucked in Aristotle, Descartes and al-Ghazzali, among others): they’re really questions of how one regards oneself, either as the reliable witness of the world, clarified by reason and illuminated by an impartial selectivity or as a messy tangle of drives, fears and hopes, trying to thread a continuous path through a maze that might not even exist if it weren’t for the complex evolution of social rules. Our exaggerated “ideal type” Positivist Libertarian says that advertising does not influence him and that therefore advertisers should limit themselves to simply stating the facts about products, so that he may know about them, while our exaggerated Foucauldian Social Constructionist says that advertising plays a powerful, pre-rational role in deciding his desires, that he expects to spend some part of his life using or pursuing or even accepting the appropriateness of certain products because his self-identity is built on a societal substrate that incorporates such messages.

So, Westworld.

Dolores and Maeve seem to be coming to some sort of Positivist awakening through the series – they remember, they see through the veil, eventually they act outside their programming – and Dolores in particular utters that classic Analytic mantra, “I want to be free.” Except that finally Dolores follows Robert’s script (having followed down his primrose maze path) and Maeve… may or may not. So the expressed desire for freedom is as likely as not pure programming. Both have had the rug pulled out from under her so many times, it’s impossible to know what the puppeteer really wants or whether they agree with the puppeteer or are merely following his commands. On the other hand, William seems to have been conditioned, in a typically Foucauldian way, to adjust his expectations to those that the park affords. His one point of resistance is that the stakes are not properly life-and-death… and eventually Robert gives him what he (has been trained to think he) wants.

So what does the show think? It looks like a big old message, but it’s careful not to say that message out loud (like many an Abrams property before it).

The maze. I was rather hoping that this would prove to be a Borgesian reference to the Minoan Labyrinth and we would discover that at the center everyone finds their minotaur – their own hybrid nature revealed as both evolved monkey and replicating machine. Instead… if anything it seems to be a device for Robert’s manipulations rather than self-discovery – that kind of propaganda where you get the victim to fill in the final blanks themselves, the better to believe the message because it comes from their own voice. Everybody tells William it’s not for him but he follows it more assiduously than anyone and it makes him into the ideal adversary for Robert’s plan. We’re told it’s supposed to be a kind of bootstrap revelation device for the hosts, but it leads to a plan that begins with the removal of all guidance and the initiation of a war with a foe that cannot lose. What’s in this new storyline for the hosts? Why should they follow it through? Does Dolores’s and Maeve’s impulsiveness reveal that, even if they can think and feel, they still can’t plan? Where, then, is intelligence located?

Stepping away from the Analytic/Continental thing, what’s the point of it all? It looks like a tragedy to me – Robert destroys his toys, who suffer one final indignity (before being reprogrammed as the board wants, because these corporate things never really depend on the top rank). Why must Robert die? Why should he wish to? Evidently he’s been planning this elaborate suicide for years, but to what end? Robert think Arnold committed suicide because of his grief for his son. What is Robert’s motivation to do the same? How does he think his act is different from Arnold’s, really?

 Am I actually talking to anyone but Scott Martin and trey causey here?

go on, tell me you can’t use this as a campaign setting.

go on, tell me you can’t use this as a campaign setting.

Actually, let’s do Mateo Diaz Torres some good and make a Sea of Osr island here. Why is Disappointment Island so named? What’s with the fjordy coastline?

1. it’s not a question mark, it’s part of a Yellow Sign. Rituals cast from the high places can raise the other two legs from under the sea.

2. the circular bay is the open mouth of an enormous sea creature, asleep these long years, waiting for the right bait.

3….

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_islands_topo.png#mw-jump-to-license//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

“Pro-jobs” but “anti-labor” is just throwing money at businesses you like, right?

“Pro-jobs” but “anti-labor” is just throwing money at businesses you like, right? Is this gonna hurt his support in the states that surprisingly swung to him during the election?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/07/donald-trump-retaliated-against-a-union-leader-on-twitter-then-his-phone-started-to-ring/?utm_term=.e8b9fd49f5d1//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

yeah, this is exactly where I am, too. Cunts.

yeah, this is exactly where I am, too. Cunts.

I don’t have anything useful to say, I guess, except keep the faith, don’t go dark, get ready to resist the obvious stuff. He will propose some things that aren’t obviously evil, those are the battles to maybe leave, keep your powder dry for the stuff that’s clear as crystal. Because it really won’t be subtle.

Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert

“Trump appears to be picking people for positions primarily with three criteria in mind: That they’re rich, loyal and that they fundamentally disagree with the mission of the governmental department they will soon be in charge of. They’re basically your standard modern-day GOP cabinet picks with the knob twisted all the way over to 11.”

Via Charles Moore​

http://wp.me/p5Fv-7wi//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Scott Martin how can so many nights have passed without my answering your missive?

Scott Martin how can so many nights have passed without my answering your missive?

We should get together sometime. I’ve been feeling surrounded by fools and thoroughly demoralized these past days – need to get a proper conversation going.

You asked my address:

Richard Guy

7 Woodsview Drive

Elmira, NY, 14903.

I would send you things too but I don’t know where you are or what you would want. One drawback of this traveling life is that you don’t build up much stuff. Are you under threat of snow in Portland? Is there anything NY can get that ME has trouble with? Let me know!

“I like Campari, but I just wish there were more products like it.”

“I like Campari, but I just wish there were more products like it.”

well it turns out you’re in luck – both Tempus Fugit’s Gran Classico and Contratto Bitter have been in vogue recently with bartenders. So why should you use them instead of Campari?

….for most applications you probably shouldn’t. Campari’s bright flavours get a run for their money from Contratto and its rich amaro character is challenged by Gran Classico but neither of the others compete with it for richness or complexity, and neither has that distinctive smoky note that only Campari brings. Love a Negroni? You probably want Campari in that.

Except. I just had a Boulevardier variant, which was:

2 Rittenhouse Rye

1 Contratto Bitter

1 Cynar

AND IT WAS A REVELATION. Like, holy cow. Smoky, complex, delicious. And it occurs to me that some Gran Classico + Zucca combination might make the world’s greatest Negroni (which, y’know, is a category that obviously needs more work).

So, for the short term, try Contratto in a Boulevardier. My straight taste test of the 3 amari together would never have told me about this gem.

Nudibranchs are a major force in the Skyrealms of Tartary. And I hadn’t even seen this video when I decided that.

Nudibranchs are a major force in the Skyrealms of Tartary. And I hadn’t even seen this video when I decided that.

Originally shared by Joe Carter

Today’s feature creature is a Melibe. It is a genus of sea slugs, nudibranchs, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Tethydidae.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melibe

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYKim1OHSYA

In medieval iconography, Saint Nicholas is sometimes presented as taming a chained devil, who may or may not be…

In medieval iconography, Saint Nicholas is sometimes presented as taming a chained devil, who may or may not be black. Although no hint of a devil, servant, or any other human or human-like fixed companion to the Saint is found in visual and textual sources from the Netherlands from the 16th until the 19th century,[12] Zwarte Piet and his equivalents in Germanic Europe, according to a long-standing theory,[13] originally represented such an enslaved devil, forced to assist his captor. This chained and fire-scorched devil may have re-emerged as a black human in the early 19th-century Netherlands, in the likeness of a Moor and as a servant of Saint Nicholas.[14][not in citation given] A devil as a helper of the saint can still be found in the Austrian Saint Nicholas tradition, in the character of Krampus.

Gameable?

Yes, I’m well aware of the controversy around this blackface tradition. My question is, would you put it in your dnd?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

At first I was going to relegate this to my politics collection but it’s actually bigger than that: given resources…

At first I was going to relegate this to my politics collection but it’s actually bigger than that: given resources and a little imagination, it’s easy to kidnap google’s search results and directly influence what people think (are the possibilities of the world).

“We are talking about the most powerful mind-control machine ever invented in the history of the human race. And people don’t even notice it.” John Naughton

“There’s an editorial function to Google and Facebook but it’s being done by sophisticated algorithms. They say it’s machines not editors. But that’s simply a mechanised editorial function.” Damien Tambini, LSE.

Farther down the page: “A year ago, 2 million Londoners’ NHS health records were handed over to DeepMind. And there was complete silence from politicians, from regulators, from anyone in a position of power. This is a company without any healthcare experience being given unprecedented access into the NHS and it took seven months [of investigative journalism work] to even know that they had the data.”

On the one hand, guess who’s learning to manipulate the results?

On the other, this is the governmental function of Google, finally coming into mainstream consciousness.

Originally shared by MOZY – S

Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to ‘game’ the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js