Week 44
After more than a week of local and international condemnation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel issued a statement on Friday retracting his accusation that it was a Palestinian cleric who gave Hitler the idea of annihilating Europe’s Jews during World War II.
That wasn't too hard now was it?
Dumb-ass.
Gun nut
Gun ownership is like owning a car; We need cars, but once in a while you might run into someone and kill them. Do we ban cars because of a few accidents?
Ha ha
Good one. But I believe the analogy is incorrect. A better analogy would be owning a tank, not a car. This owner (of the friggin tank) insists on driving it on a regular road with "normal" cars and passengers. The tank might come in handy of course, say, while a person is out of his home someone quickly built a wall around it (hey things happen), and when dude comes back, he can't get into his own home. A travesty. But since he owns a tank, he can roll right through the wall - with his friggin tank. Or, maybe while on the road a car is coming at you with intense speed with the intension of crashing in to you; the tank owner can simply fire at this car, blowing it up from a distance, before the impending crash.
Then, continuing with the analogy, what the rest of the populace is simply asking is "does anyone truly need a friggin tank to get to point A from point B"? Because as a side effect of driving a tank on the regular road with normal cars and passengers, the tank runs over cars, people, more often than usual because some being scared like a little bitch, they insist a regular car will not protect them, they need a friggin tank.
With every new piece of information that has come to light about the perpetrators of the Paris attacks, it has become clearer that the intelligence services in France and Belgium knew about their jihadi backgrounds. Several had dossiers identifying them as radicals. At least five had travelled to fight in Syria and returned to homes in France or Belgium.
There
Link
The director of the CIA has criticised “hand-wringing” over the role of spy agencies in hunting terrorists and called for legal constraints on surveillance to be reviewed in the wake of last week’s Paris attacks.
See above
The agencies have everything they need to stop attacks.. and they don't have to wait until the day-of to take care of business u know what I mean?
If by surveillance, dude means bulk collection of data without warrant, that's a no go. Yes agency employees have a lot of fun with that kind of system by passing around intercepted naked pictures of regular people amongst themselves while having a gas at their expense, but I don't think it is serving the public in any other (!) meaningful way.
Glenn Greenwald
[B]laming technology companies [for efforts that make "surveillance" "harder"] is a tactic to shift the blame away from government shortcomings.
Exactly
But since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, beauty, and even humour, have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.
Partly true
Ian Morris
Historians normally trace the roots of the rebirth back to the twelfth century, when northern Italy’s cities [..] began wondering how to govern themselves as independent republics, and increasingly concluded that they could find answers in classical Roman literature. By the fourteenth century, when climate change, famine, and disease undermined so many old certainties, some intellectuals expanded their interpretation of the ancient classics into a general vision of social rebirth.
Antiquity, these scholars started claiming, was a foreign country. Ancient Rome had been a land of extraordinary wisdom and virtue, but barbarous “Middle Ages” had intervened between then and modern times, corrupting everything. The only way forward for Italy’s newly freed city-states, intellectuals suggested, was by looking backward: they must build a bridge to the past so that the wisdom of the ancients could be born again and humanity perfected.
Scholarship and art would be the bridge. By scouring monasteries for lost manuscripts and learning Latin as thoroughly as the Romans themselves, scholars could think as the Romans had thought and speak as they had spoken; whereupon true humanists (as the born-again called themselves) would recapture the wisdom of the ancients. Similarly, by poking around Roman ruins, architects could learn to re-create the physical world of antiquity, building churches and palaces that would shape lives of the highest virtue. Painters and musicians, who had no Roman relics to study, made their best guesses about ancient models, and rulers, eager to be seen to be perfecting the world, hired humanists as advisers, commissioned artists to immortalize them, and collected Roman antiquities.
The odd thing about the Renaissance was that this apparently reactionary struggle to re-create antiquity in fact produced a wildly untraditional culture of invention and open-ended inquiry. There certainly were conservative voices, banishing some of the more radical thinkers (such as Machiavelli) to drain the bitter cup of exile and intimidating others (such as Galileo) into silence, but they barely blunted the thrust of new ideas.
The payoff was phenomenal. By linking every branch of scholarship, art, and crafts to every other and evaluating them all in the light of antiquity, “Renaissance men” such as Michelangelo revolutionized them all at once. Some of these amazing characters, such as Leon Battista Alberti, theorized as brilliantly as they created, and the greatest, such as Leonardo da Vinci, excelled at everything from portraiture to mathematics. Their creative minds moved effortlessly between studios and the corridors of power, taking time off from theorizing to lead armies, hold office, and advise rulers. (In addition to writing The Prince, Machiavelli also penned the finest comedies of his age.) Visitors and emigrants spread the new ideas from the Renaissance’s epicenter at Florence as far as Portugal, Poland, and England, where distinct local renaissances blossomed (Why The West Rules - For Now, pg. 883).
That's better
So Renaissance thinkers thought they were "learning from" that era, but they were actually creating something completely new. This is a case of let's-go-back-to-the-thing-before-the-thing mentality (which reminds me of this scene from Analyze This dunno why); whatever historical situation these people were in (the thing before) had run its course, so thinkers created this mythical place in their heads (the thing before the thing) and tried to "learn" from it. Except there was nothing to learn from. Romans were barbarians, just like Byzantium, Ottomans after them, or now, ISIS.
We can see the traces of this type of thinking in nationalists in Russia, or Egypt, whenever people try to create a myth out of a block of history and worship it.
"But isn't such delusion useful?" one might ask, it helped the Renaissance after all. Maybe. But there is no rule that says every Renaissance has to be the same, no? I prefer the current crop of thinkers in their respective lands pulling their heads out of their respective ... sands and start thinking for themselves, for the right reasons.
[After the Paris attack, some p]eople seem concerned to make sure that Islam gets its full share of the blame, so we get the unedifying circus of neocons invoking God as much as the killers. “Well, Isis say they’re motivated by God.” Yes, and people who have sex with their pets say they’re motivated by love, but most of us don’t really believe them.
ROFL
News
Final Myanmar results show Aung San Suu Kyi's party won 77% of seats
Not surprising
The results in immature democracies are always like this - it's either 90% for the dictators, or 70-80% for the first genuine party. TR has been through this many years ago. I wish Myanmar luck.
Question
How can parties-with-quotas system be implemented?
An idea..
The existing parliamentary systems around the world are a middle ground between the wants of a party and the wants of the electorate, at regional level. Internal party politics decides on candidates who are both 1) compatible with their party politics, and 2) have a chance to win at a certain region. As far as mass politics is concerned, this is not such a bad system.
Before our final destination direct democracy, though, if we want a system that is still elite-oriented, has stability, representative and will work everywhere (areas that are unstable, have long-running ethnic, religious divisions) we can simply swap the idea of region with the idea of "declared identity".
First, an electronic registry is built that allows citizens to declare their political identity. Someone might chose that identity to be gay, someone else liberal, someone else conservative, or Shite, atheist. Then, let's say 6 months before an election, a snapshot of the existing identity allocations are tallied up - i.e. 30% conservative, 30% liberal, etc..
There are only two parties. For a parliament of, i.e. 300 members, each party appoints candidates internally according to the allocations; 30% of 300 = 90 liberal candidates, same for liberal, 90 ppl, then maybe 10 gay, etc, from each party. Parties also assign a rank to each candidate within each identity group.
Primaries: each party holds "identity group primaries" where every identity group can downvote any candidate put forth by either party. Let's say even 20% of nays would be enough to knock out any candidate from any party's list. This way only genuine representative for each identity blocks are represented in each party.
During the election day the voters would naturally try to strike a balance between the candidates they see from each party that fits their identity best, and also try to judge the greater party's merits. So they cast their vote - party A or party B.
After the election, all votes are counted, say 60% for party A, 40% for party B. Then top 60% of 90 liberal candidates, of 90 conservative candidates, etc. go to the parliament from party A. 40% of each allocation goes to parliament from party B.
This way the make-up of the parliament reflects the identity allocations exactly. Both within each party, and in the entire parliament overall.
People would have a strong incentive to declare their identity correctly, since the allocations would effect the make-up of each party, as well as the parliament.
The word "registry" might irk some, maybe ppl would not like the government to know they are gay, or Shite, or atheist, whatever. These are implementation details - allocation records could be based on pseudoanonymous identifiers, which can somehow be tied to an individual through an encryption mechanism, that allows the election commitee to ensure everyone votes only once, and the person voting is elligable, but the government cannot tie an individual to an identity directly... There are ways to implement this.
Comment
Success is so important.
To whom?
I'd suggest everyone who likes to give such wide-ranging self-help suggestions to filter it through their personal make-up first. I was reading an interview with the famous actor Ethan Hawke once; he was asked about success, he was irked by the question because he cared so little about it, at least about the way it is traditionally defined. So I profiled the man, turns out Hawke is an High Horse . Same type as Putin :) albeit Hawke is more in the positive.
We covered this type before: Their life journey is about seeing the equality in men, experimenting with unorthodox ideas. Others in this group are Elon Musk, Thomas Friedman, Marc Andreessen, to name a few. In the negative they want to be at the center stage, all the time, with morons clapping all around them, for all they do, they want to bask in this glory, bathe in this shit. What they need to do however is support others to gain their success. Hawke for example, seems to have formed a symbiotic relationship with a director Richard Linklater (very good, less me, more us) and together they've done some freaky-ass unorthodox movies, even one, Boyhood, that many years to complete, showing its actors age inside the movie! I bet Hawke loved that, that is a HH being in the positive. Big time.
Andressen is the best example of supporting others - his investment firm AFAIK takes great care to coach, nurture the start-ups they take under their wing.
Of course, the positives take a while to develop since they revolve around the weakest parts of a man's psyche; for example Leave the Child Behind types must take responsibility, manage things better, but the "positive negative" of this type is becoming controlling intead of managing. For HH, they need to deal with unorthodox ideas, but things can get superfreaky, or freaky for the sake of being freaky to the point it becomes mindless, inane non-sense. But they will, as each type does, get feedback from others on that stuff immediately.
"If the zombie horror genre teaches us anything, it is never to celebrate too soon. Beware the hubris of a character who walks from the graveyard victorious, failing to anticipate an undead hand pushing up through the soil. And so it was with defeat of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA — a surveillance bill introduced under the pretext of cybersecurity, which died in the Senate in 2012. [..]Last week the Republican-controlled Senate passed CISA by a vote of 74-21. CISPA had failed in a Democratic Senate. [..]Like CISPA, CISA claims to protect against cyberattacks by enhancing information sharing between private corporations and federal government agencies. CISA supposedly protects individuals’ privacy more than CISPA would have, because the data sharing goes via the Department of Homeland Security, not directly to the National Security Agency. But it is not remotely clear that DHS will scrub private information before sharing data with other agencies, or even that it would have time to do so — near-real-time sharing with the NSA is written into the legislation. DHS itself admitted that CISA can’t and won’t protect user privacy"
Araud is the Ambassador of France to the United States BTW.
At best the gov might have, in part, thought up this internment business in order to protect Japanese Americans from potential hate attacks... but imprisonment is imprisonment. It sucks. The society would have managed without it, and be better for it at the end.
"On Wednesday, David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, VA., piled onto the backlash against Syrian refugees led by state governors, in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 129 people. Mayor Bowers requested that all local agencies "suspend and delay any further Syrian refugee assistance until these serious hostilities and atrocities end...and normalcy is restored." Then he attempted to draw this historical parallel:
"I'm reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then".
Within hours, Bowers's statement drew fierce criticism [..] And then actor and social media sensation George Takei weighed in. The Star Trek cast member has long been outspoken about his family's history inside American-held Japanese internment camps, a story chronicled in his Broadway musical, Allegiance.
From Takei [..]: "
Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:
1) The internment (not a "sequester") was not of Japanese "foreign nationals," but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.
2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected "enemies" then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the US already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.
3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.
Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you, too, will come away with more compassion and understanding.
-- George Takei""
Since 1973 no change eh? Very interesting that year: 1973.
BTW the title of the book is a jab utilizing Popper's falsifiability dictum, according to Woit SS theory does not propose anything falsifiable therefore is dubious in terms of science.
Changing the model to go to whatever direction that makes it prettier and better fit - this is an odd form of theoretical overfitting it seems to me; overfitting is well known in statistics, you keep adding more knobs, more flexibility to the model until it "explains" the data perfectly, but it's ability to predict suffers as a result.