…some excuses are

The Victorian upper house MP Georgie Purcell has lashed Nine News in Melbourne for using an image edited to make her breasts look bigger and expose her midriff, which the network blamed on “automation by Photoshop”.
[…]
“Our graphics department sourced an online image of Georgie to use in our story on duck hunting. As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs,” [The program’s news director, Hugh Nailon] said.

“During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original. This did not meet the high editorial standards we have and for that we apologise to Ms Purcell unreservedly.”

I endured a lot yesterday.

But having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet was not on my bingo card.

Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing.

Can’t imagine this happening to a male MP.

What gives? pic.twitter.com/NhnkDRMidc

— Georgie Purcell (@georgievpurcell) January 29, 2024

…transparently bullshit

But in a statement on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Adobe said use of its generative AI features would have required “human intervention”.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/30/georgie-purcell-mp-photoshop-automated-image-nine-news-apology-victoria-animal-justice-party

…for now, anyway…who knows about stray thoughts…implicit biases…or the minds that might entertain them in the future?

Elon Musk, Neuralink’s billionaire founder, said the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup on Sunday and is recovering well, in a post on Twitter/X on Monday.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/29/elon-musk-neuralink-first-human-brain-chip-implant

…shame he didn’t have the stones to be his own guinea pig…though…that’s probably because he knows what happened to all those pigs…& sheep & monkeys…& generally things doing less harm than a man making a determined bid to demonstrate that the maxim more-money-than-sense might be scale-able in all its inversely proportional “glory”…so…pray for the flip-side?

In 2018, Bhatnagar, a University of Louisville medical school professor, decided that he wanted to “do something” about air pollution in Louisville, which has repeatedly earned failing grades for air quality from the American Lung Association. His contribution, he decided, would be to find the connection between trees and better heart health using the gold standard for evidence: clinical trials.

“The idea is to learn to examine everything, no matter how obvious they may seem,” he says.
[…]
To get beyond that, he proposed the Green Heart Louisville initiative, which launched in 2018. Over time, contractors and volunteers have planted nearly 8,000 trees and shrubs in a cluster of lower-to-middle-income neighborhoods in southern Louisville and measured health data from nearly 500 residents.
[…]
The work is focused in neighborhoods that — like many poor urban areas — have fewer trees compared with more affluent parts of the city. The neighborhoods are mixed racially and ethnically: 54 percent White, 29 percent Black and 11 percent Hispanic. A highway runs right through the areas — providing an unhealthy baseline of air pollution.

Bhatnagar collects an almost-obscene amount of data that includes blood panels, urine, hair samples, wastewater runoff, air pollution samples, soil and leaf samples, bat sounds, LiDar scans, temperature and humidity measurements, crime data, psychological surveys and sleep surveys. It is all being parsed, and relationships are starting to emerge, he said.

Among the tantalizing hypotheses Green Heart is testing: whether trees filter air pollution that can stiffen human arteries. Another is whether trees reduce stress and improve sleep by buffering noise. Some trees seem to be better at filtration than others — evergreens, for instance, filter air throughout the year and those with needles absorb harmful pollutants more efficiently than broad-leafed trees.

Another hypothesis is that trees release a suite of chemicals into the air that reduce blood pressure and stress. Bhatnagar has seen these chemicals’ metabolites show up in urine samples at higher concentrations where people have more exposure to trees and other greenery.

Cities around the country are set to receive funding from the Inflation Reduction Act this year to plant trees, and already many local governments spend millions every year on planting and maintaining trees. Cities often maintain detailed records of size and health of every tree for every block, and LiDar scans from aircraft paint a more complete model of the urban tree canopy. Medical professors also study green spaces and trees’ effects on aging. And psychologists have observed that stress levels and depressive states are less in greener areas of the city.

But Bhatnagar’s research will add new, concrete health data. “There’s this idea that we should just plant some trees and things will be better,” Bhatnagar said, “but who, what, where, and how? These are the questions.”
[…]
In conversation, Bhatnagar likes to reference the Bradford Hill criteria of causation which states, among other things, that a cause must precede an effect in time and there must be a dose-response relationship.

Bhatnagar wanted this deeper level of causal understanding. He wanted clinical trial experimental data, in which “doses” of trees were introduced to a population with a nearby control group and extensive measurements over time.

Everyone says trees are good for us. This scientist wants to prove it. [WaPo]

…still…when it comes to doses…seems pretty obvious some folks got steeped the way that obelix did in the magic potion…but…how do we tell in what?

The question of Donald Trump’s misogyny is something I’ve been thinking about recently, as he was ordered by a jury to pay E. Jean Carroll $83 million — and as he is supposedly simultaneously considering several female politicians as running mates. Donald Trump is a vulgar man. A vindictive one. Self-centered, all of it. But … exactly how sexist is he?
[…]
Because I have a wild theory.

If you’ve read along this far, you might think I’ve just asked a very stupid question. The answer seems self-evident. During Trump’s first presidential campaign eight years ago, some two dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct (he denied all of it); last year, a jury found him liable for sexually abusing Carroll in 1996. If you believe those jurors were competent — and I do — and if you believe it would be truly extraordinary for some two dozen women to have independently cooked up a sexual misconduct conspiracy, then you could argue that he’s not only sexist but criminally so.
[…]
But the other thing about Trump is that he is cruel. To women, to men, to immigrants, to the media, to Democrats and often to fellow Republicans. He is cruel to anyone he sees as an enemy, and his insults are regularly recycled. As I was familiarizing myself this week with the oeuvre of Trump’s attacks, I noticed something interesting. News outlets have published lots of lists with headlines like, “11 insults Trump has hurled at women.” But when I cross-checked the so-called women-specific insults, I found that many of them were actually levied against men as well.
[…]
Parsing his insults sometimes requires some subjective judgment: Is it worse to call Stormy Daniels a “horseface” than it is to call Adam Schiff a “little pencil-neck”? Is it appreciably different to call Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” than it is to get on a podium, as Trump once did, and say, of Chris Christie, “He’s eating right now; he can’t be bothered”? (Trump then playfully reminded his audience that they weren’t “allowed” to call people “fat pigs” anymore.) He referred to journalist Mika Brzezinski as a “ditzy airhead,” which definitely seemed sexist. But the attacks he lobbed at her husband and co-host Joe Scarborough — “psycho,” “dumb and sick” — don’t seem much better.

How do we measure sexism anyway? Do we measure it by insults? Do we measure it by policy positions? Do we acknowledge that every one of us was born into a society with sexist roots, and that many men of Trump’s generation might have been raised to see nothing wrong with calling female aides “sweetie” or “honey,” as former Trump official Miles Taylor has alleged the former president did?

There’s definitely a lot of evidence that Trump is a misogynist! But how much more sexist is he than his cohort?
[…]
Trump also nominated a woman to the Supreme Court, which leads to another question: Do we measure misogyny by intention, or by effect? Because whether or not Trump thought that he was championing women by nominating Amy Coney Barrett, her support of the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (which was also backed by Trump’s other appointees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh) had disastrous effects for millions of women around the country. Trump seems to view reproductive rights as a malleable political tool — years ago he said he was “very pro-choice,” then later said abortion should be banned, then later said Florida’s ban was “a terrible thing.” His promise to nominate antiabortion judges was probably a political calculation to shore up support from evangelical voters — but in effect it harmed women.
[…]
He’s swum in such a swamp of sexism, is the thing. Such a Roger Ailes-y, Rudy Giuliani-ish, gross-feeling swamp.

‘Women sit next to abusers at music industry parties’ MPs warn [BBC]

Here is my theory, which is based on a lot of reading, watching, scrolling and living over the past seven years — and which, at the end of the day, is also my fallible gut instinct. As a columnist, there is no way for me to know what is in someone’s heart, only to try to make sense of what has flown out of their mouth.

I think Trump sees women as his playthings, something to provide him amusement, which is why he feels free to comment on their bodies and appearances and weight, as he allegedly did backstage at the Miss USA pageant. I think Trump also sees men as his playthings, which is why he amassed a collection of “my generals” and seemed obsessed with military parades, little toy soldiers lining up in a row.

I think he takes what he feels is entitled to him; I think he feels everything is entitled to him. I think he talks about grabbing women’s crotches because that’s what he wants to grab; I think if he were attracted to men he would talk about grabbing men’s crotches instead.

Neither act would be about whether he’s a misogynist or a misandrist, it would be about Trump feeling with certainty that he should be allowed to have what he has stated he wants to have: full immunity.

I think he thinks most women are lesser than him. I think he thinks most men are lesser than him. I think he wants admiration and power, and he is shrewd enough to know that in this society, power over women looks different from power over men. Please note that when he tells one of his “sir” stories — the made-up-sounding anecdotes in which a constituent is groveling in front of him or praising him — it’s almost always the male constituents who are fully abasing themselves, blubbering like children, saying, “Sir, you gave me my life back.”

I think that it is hard to parse which sexist things Trump is doing because he is sexist, and which sexist things he is doing because he is, as former White House attorney Ty Cobb once said on a CBS podcast, “a deeply wounded narcissist,” who is “incapable of acting other than in his perceived self-interest or for revenge.” Because he is, as his niece Mary L. Trump once wrote, unable to “experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” including empathy for others. Because he is, as former aide Cassidy Hutchinson told ABC News, “a weak and feeble man who has no sense of character and integrity.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/01/29/is-trump-sexist/

…ok…sure…there’s all manner of other stuff I could…or arguably should…be occupying my thoughts with…like linking my way through the chain of events that takes you from the Common Agricultural Policy

[…it’s been a thing since the ’60s…& its current incarnation covers the ’23-’27 period]

…&…on the one hand paris getting encircled by a shit-ton of tractors…& on the other…a lot of hot air about how one rishi sunak fasts from 17:00 on a sunday through 05:00 on a tuesday…which…I dunno…sounds like something I wouldn’t really give a shit about if…you know…there was maybe a bit more distance between the potential hangry man & things like launch codes…what does his girlish figure have to do with an ability to govern, anyway…& I don’t really give all that much of a fuck if he considers it an act of devotion…or flatters himself that it somehow makes him familiar with privation…or how that might make him different from previous tory PMs to whom UK farmers have gone not so much cap in hand as brandishing CAP & eyeing up the pitchforks…but…that would probably take longer than either of us has to spare…explanations for shit in the news do be that way

Kemi Badenoch is a member of a Conservative WhatsApp group called “Evil Plotters” despite telling party rebels to “stop messing around” and get behind Rishi Sunak, the Guardian can reveal.

The business secretary, who consistently comes out as the favourite cabinet minister in polls of Tory members, has criticised party colleagues for “stirring” up suggestions that she could replace the prime minister.

In a round of broadcast interviews on Sunday, she dismissed speculation over the plot to topple Sunak as “Westminster tittle-tattle” and said colleagues who put her name forward as an alternative were “not my friends”.

However, the Guardian has been told that Badenoch and Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, who is regarded as a key backer, are members of a WhatsApp group of similarly minded Tory MPs who are rallying round the business secretary’s longer-term ambitions.

…that’s why we develop shorthands…like…michael gove = self-involved shitbag always willing to take a breaking bad style approach to finding the line it seems you wouldn’t cross & then crossing it in the worst way he can think of…because that’s how you know he’s a player & not a middle aged failure of a man with nothing to live for…still…evil plotters…I know they aren’t the most imaginative of folks…but that’s somewhere between appallingly lazy & absurdly on the nose, no?

Speculation has swirled at Westminster after a group of anonymous Tory donors funded a poll suggesting Sunak was leading his party to electoral oblivion at the next election, prompting speculation over who may be behind a plot. There is no suggestion Badenoch is involved.

However, the Guardian understands that when Suella Braverman was sacked as home secretary two months ago, some of Badenoch’s allies advised her to lay low and wait for the row to blow over so that she would emerge as “the reasonable face” of the Tory right.

“Kemi won’t try to oust Rishi herself, she knows that the hand that wields the knife never wears the crown,” said one Tory insider. “But she’s got a campaign ready for when the moment does eventually come.”
[…]
“She won’t be having meetings with people saying”: ‘When are we setting up the phone banks?’ She finds all of that distasteful. She isn’t going to be doing what Penny Mordaunt is doing, which is endless little drinks parties stroking people’s egos. She hates that.”

Tory MPs say Badenoch remains close to Gove, despite reports last year that the pair had fallen out, and that they have re-established a working relationship and speak regularly.

In recent weeks they have also messaged on the Evil Plotters WhatsApp group, perhaps an ironic nod to the former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries’ book The Plot, which claimed Gove was trying to install Badenoch as leader, which allies of both have denied.
[…]
A spokesperson for Badenoch did not deny the WhatsApp group claim but said: “This is exactly the sort of stirring Kemi was referring to when she told people to stop messing around on Sunday.

“Having lunch, speaking to MPs, and having a parliamentary special adviser is not a plot, it is the day-to-day job of being a secretary of state. This utter nonsense is clearly part of a targeted campaign against Kemi and anyone reading it should treat it as such.”

…funny how many targeted campaigns of utter nonsense seem to be doing the rounds, I’m sure you’ll agree

On Tuesday, the former cabinet minister Simon Clarke, a Liz Truss ally, claimed the Tories faced electoral “massacre” under Sunak. The latest turmoil for the Tory leader was triggered by the opinion poll that put his party on course for a 1997-style wipeout.

At the same time, the Tory peer David Frost argued that the party would “lose and lose bad unless we do something about it”. He was named as the contact on the YouGov research, but it was commissioned by a mysterious group calling itself the Conservative Britain Alliance.

Lord Frost is understood to have been warned by Nicholas True, the Conservative whip in the Lords, that he could have the Tory whip withdrawn if the donors behind the group had given money to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Frost has refused to provide names.

Sources at Tory headquarters said Frost was hoping to be selected for Basildon and Billericay, the party’s 35th safest seat, but raised doubts over whether he would be permitted. “It’s very difficult to see how he would stand as a candidate,” one said.

Kemi Badenoch is member of ‘Evil Plotters’ Tory WhatsApp group [Guardian]

…still…she’s a black lady…so…arguably it’d be even harder for her to tap that hateful white racist core vote than poor sacrificial rishi…maybe that’ll ensure she’s another of those mythical compassionate conservatives of legendary days of yore…it’ll be one of them market forces things, I shouldn’t wonder

So goes the courtship of Supreme Court law clerks by Washington’s top law firms. Only around three dozen law clerks work for the justices during each one-year term, which means these lawyers — and their unparalleled knowledge of the court — are in incredibly high demand. Jones Day, the leader in the race to recruit and hire as many clerks as possible, announced last month that it snagged 8 law clerks, all of whom worked for conservative justices during the term that began in October 2022.
[…]
During the courting process, the city’s top law firms treat this elite group of lawyers to perks like an expensive dinner at the Wharf or Penn Quarter or a trip to a baseball game or spa. The recruitment is so competitive that signing bonuses for Supreme Court law clerks have reached a new high — $500,000, according to a spokeswoman for law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Such a sum far exceeds the salaries paid to the justices — the clerks’ former bosses — who are paid slightly less than $300,000 a year.

The bonuses — alongside annual starting salaries of more than $200,000, which alone are nearly triple Americans’ median household income — are the product of a decades-long competition among elite law firms seeking any advantage they can find in arguing high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. They view the clerks’ experience and knowledge of the court as profitable assets that attract clients in a highly specialized sector of the law, and they see clerkships as effective filtering devices in identifying promising hires, according to interviews with former Supreme Court clerks, lawyers and experts.

In this way, the clerks are like many former aides across Washington — whether on Capitol Hill, at regulatory agencies or in the White House — whom law firms value because of their time spent in proximity to power and relationships with influential officials.
[…]
But some critics, including at least one former justice and some former clerks, have questioned whether the clerks are worth these enormous signing bonuses — which reached six figures in the early 2000s — and whether spending millions of dollars is sustainable.
[…]
The half-million-dollar bonuses come as many other aspects of the court are under scrutiny. The public increasingly sees the court as a partisan institution rather than impartial arbiters of justice, polls show. And under pressure after news reports documented benefits like lavish trips that Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. received from wealthy members of the conservative legal world, the justices released an ethics code for themselves in November.
[…]
Even adjusted for inflation, signing bonuses are now nearly 20 times greater than the first $10,000 offer made 37 years ago.
[…]
Clerking is “a crash course in appellate advocacy at the highest level,” said Daniel A. Rubens, a partner at Orrick who clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2013.

Phillips said a former clerk’s knowledge of how the court operates and what clerks who review petitions are looking for enhances their ability to write successful petitions to the court.
[…]
Law clerks also understand how the justices think and approach cases, said another former Supreme Court law clerk, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions to their work before the court.

When former clerks return to the court years later as appellate litigators, they are 16 percent more likely than non-clerks to win the vote of the justice they clerked for when deciding a case, according to a 2020 study in Political Research Quarterly. The justices are also 14 percent more likely to side with their former clerk over one of their colleague’s former clerks, the study found.

To avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of impropriety, the high court has placed conditions on the hiring of their law clerks. They are barred from working on “any case pending before this court or in any case being considered for filing in this court” for two years.

…uh huh…barred from directly billing hours for it on the books, maybe…but…that’s something of an inverted loophole in terms of what it actually bars

But the clerks’ court experience still offers firms plenty of value from the start, Rubens said. Most of their work is done in lower appeals courts, which requires the same researching, writing and speaking skills as Supreme Court cases, he said.

Others say the guidance for clerks lets them discuss the court’s dynamics. “There’s nothing that stops them from talking about their evaluation of where the court may be heading and what arguments might be more useful in particular situations than in another,” said Stephen Gillers, a judicial ethics expert at New York University’s law school.

…it’s…just how the thing works, right…if it ain’t going broke we don’t fix shit…wait…that’s not how that goes, is it?

Six of the nine sitting justices are former clerks. Firms want to hire and nurture these “superstar” lawyers, Lazarus, the Harvard Law professor, said.

But firms also want to bring in revenue. They do that by using clerks’ knowledge and potential to attract clients.

“That’s what the firms are about. They’re about making more money,” Lazarus said. “They’re doing it because they think it will lead to more clients. That’s the bottom line.”
[…]
In 1986, New York-based law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore began offering $20,000 bonuses to “beginning lawyers arriving directly from a clerkship who have clerked for at least two consecutive years in two different courts,” according to previously unreported internal court documents found in former Justice Harry Blackmun’s papers at the Library of Congress.

That March, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger sent a memo to the other justices, calling the letter “a curious kind of solicitation.” He wrote that he looked into whether the bonus violated a law prohibiting government officials and employees from receiving outside payments for performing their official duties. Burger concluded the firm’s bonus did not break the law.

Twenty years later, when the Supreme Court signing bonus eclipsed the nearly $200,000 salaries of federal judges, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy complained during a congressional budget hearing that it “devalues the position of the judiciary.”

“Something is wrong when a judge’s law clerk, just one or two years out of law school, has a salary greater than that of the judge or justice he or she served the year before,” Kennedy told senators the following year.

Little has changed since Kennedy’s complaint to lawmakers nearly 20 years ago as one-time signing bonuses continue to outpace the justices’ salaries.
[…]
Although a clerk who went to the Jones Day dinner said that the firm spoke to clerks who worked for every justice, all of the firm’s 2023 hires clerked for a conservative justice during the October 2022 term. The recruitment is part of a five-year trend that corresponds with the emergence of a revolving door between the firm and Trump administration officials, including Donald McGahn. McGahn worked at Jones Day both before and after he served as Trump’s first White House counsel.

“The firm’s profile is not attractive to clerks who have clerked for liberal justices and themselves have liberal views,” Gillers said. “I think this is self-selection.”
[…]
It’s unclear if or when the bonus rate will hit a ceiling.

“As long as it’s viewed as a valuable commodity, the market is going to continue to value it in a competitive way,” Phillips said.

Clerks for hire: The Supreme Court recruiting race [WaPo]

…not exactly a thing of beauty…much less a joy forever…still…helps to distract from…well…you know

The widespread or systematic destruction of homes has long been a feature of modern warfare. But what is often lost in the images of rubble and statistics of destroyed buildings is the profound effect of this loss at a human level.

For a home is so much more than a structure: It is a repository of past experience and future dreams, of memories of births, deaths, marriages and intimate moments with our loved ones, amid neighbors and a familiar landscape. The idea of home brings comfort and gives meaning to our lives. Its destruction is the denial of a person’s dignity and humanity.

It is for this reason that the systematic and indiscriminate leveling of entire neighborhoods through explosive weapons — as happened in Aleppo, and Mariupol, and Grozny, and towns in Myanmar, or most acutely these days, in Gaza — should be considered a crime against humanity. A growing number of legal and other types of scholars agree.

It’s called domicide.

…stands to reason…where do you think we get phrases like “bomb them into the stone age”?

Scholars have used the concept of domicide in the context of dam projects that displaced people in Canada and warfare in Syria, and it has been used to call attention to the systematic demolition of Palestinians’ homes and the denial of permits to build new ones in the West Bank by Israel.

As an independent expert tasked by the United Nations with promoting and protecting the right to adequate housing, I believe the crime of domicide should be enshrined in international humanitarian and criminal law so that governments and armed groups can be held to account. In an increasingly urbanized world, where densely populated cities are becoming common battlegrounds, the need for such action is all the more urgent.

We all understand that killing can be a murder, a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide, depending on the gravity and intention of the act. The same should apply for the destruction of homes.

In Gaza, we are witnessing destruction that is overwhelming in terms of its scale and impact, and far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city. In Gaza, more than 70,000 housing units have been destroyed and more than 290,000 partially damaged. Recent conflicts are all proving to be equally destructive: In parts of Aleppo, up to 65 percent of structures were damaged or destroyed in five years of conflict, while in Mariupol, approximately 32 percent of the structures were damaged or destroyed in a year over 2021 and 2022. In about three months of conflict, a shocking 60 percent to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in parts of northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.
[…]
The ferocity of the attacks is unprecedented: Israel is reported to have already dropped the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima almost twice over. Much of the infrastructure in Gaza that makes it possible and worthwhile to live in homes there — water and sanitation, education, electricity and health systems, and cultural infrastructure like mosques, churches, and public and historic buildings — have been damaged or destroyed. This crushing of Gaza as a place erases the past, present and future of many Palestinians.
[…]
I drew the same conclusion about domicide following the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities in my report to the U.N. General Assembly in 2022. But right now, the accusation of domicide is largely a moral judgment. The preciousness of home, unlike the preciousness of life, has little recognition under international humanitarian or criminal law.
[…]
Though attacks on individual homes, schools and hospitals can be crimes under humanitarian law, which applies to all international armed conflicts under the Geneva Conventions, the widespread or systematic destruction of homes is not by itself considered a crime in either international or noninternational armed conflicts. It is not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions or in the definition of crimes against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court or in the U.N. draft articles on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.

We should act to update these treaties to include domicide.

There is precedent for updating what we legally define as international crimes. The Rome Statute proscribed starvation as a weapon of war, and under a 2019 amendment, the proscription was extended to cover crimes in noninternational armed conflicts.

Accountability for domicide in Gaza cannot stop with potential criminal prosecutions or declaratory judgments by courts someday in the future. The enormous cost of rebuilding Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories, where homes have been destroyed for decades during occupation, should be borne by Israel and the countries that contributed to this destruction, including the United States, through its supply of weapons and political support.
[…]
And even if Gaza is physically rebuilt, the trauma of losing homes — the shattered lives, erased landscape and obliterated memories — will last for decades. Enshrining domicide in law may make countries think twice about inflicting such trauma in the future.

Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity [NYT]

…well…be nice to think it would, anyway…imagine the people who used to live in the homes…particularly the ones who aren’t…you know…dead & all…might feel like the deterrent might have a ways to go from there before the threat stopped looming…but then it’d be nice to think that while things remain threats…that we can avoid the reducing everything to sticks & stones & broken bones bit…fuck knows that seems to be what both sides of the rhetoric between iran & the US has been placing some fucking irresponsible bets on

There is an obvious logic to the US approach. If it – and its allies – do not show the Houthis and their Iranian backers that there is a price for attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, then there is no reason for its adversaries to halt. That is even more clearly the case when it comes to the attack that killed three US soldiers and injured dozens more in Jordan on Sunday. It has been claimed by Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a loose coalition of Iranian-backed militias; though Tehran denied involvement, Mr Biden blamed “Iran-backed” groups and vowed to respond.

He could hardly do otherwise, especially as an unpopular president in an election year – though for the same reason, he will want to avoid the kind of escalation that will see gas prices soar, still more a direct clash with Tehran. But that does not mean that tit‑for-tat will take the US or the region where Mr Biden wants it to go. For the same logic also pertains to Iran’s thinking. If the US hits it hard, it will feel obliged to retaliate – almost certainly via proxies – to shore up or advance its position and undermine America’s.

Both Washington and Tehran say they are not looking for war. But calibration is an art and not a science. However carefully chosen the target, the damage caused is unpredictable – though the deaths of US personnel were probably a matter of time given the scores of rocket and drone attacks by Iranian‑backed groups in recent months. The other side’s assessment is also uncertain. Domestic pressures weight the response. The Houthis and Islamic Resistance in Iraq pursue their own interests as well as Iran’s. Most worryingly, a gradual and apparently containable escalation can suddenly gather pace.

The regional war that the White House hoped to stave off is already happening. Jordan is only the latest to be drawn in. This spiralling crisis will not end while the conflict at its heart rages. More than 26,600 have been killed in Gaza, according to the health ministry, and survivors are in desperate need. Yet the US, UK and eight other countries have withdrawn funding from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees following Israel’s allegations that 12 employees participated in the Hamas atrocities of 7 October.

The UN is right to urgently investigate these horrifying claims, and anyone responsible must be held fully accountable. The withdrawal of support, however, is wrong. The agency employs 13,000 people in Gaza – itself testament to how bleak things were already – and is supporting almost 2 million. The UN special rapporteur on food has warned that famine is now “imminent” and “inevitable”.

For many in the region and beyond, the suspension of funding over as yet unproven allegations against individuals stands in glaring contrast to the dismissive reaction to the international court of justice’s finding on Friday that there is a plausible case for Israel to answer on allegations of genocide in Gaza.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/the-guardian-view-on-escalation-in-the-middle-east-the-region-is-inching-towards-the-abyss

…&…look…ketosis is totally a thing…& if you’re bordering on starving in a cave in the early days of homo sapiens maybe a bit like a superpower that lets you hunt & kill that all important life saving dose of protein…it might not be so much intuitive as inuit-ive…but there’s something to it…on the other hand…when it comes to the part where it’s such a big part of what rishi considers to be his well-being…something he assured everyone he thought ought to be available to all at the “lifestyle” level…volunteering to endure mondays without recourse to so much as a chocolate biscuit to improve his blood-sugar levels the way you might…say…a cranky kid…might not be worth the risk, if you ask me…or…it turns out…him…since when asked among the things he replied was the suggestion that it was worth it for him because it meant he needn’t deny himself all the unhealthy snacks his heart desired the rest of the time…& still not need to buy new suits…though…that last bit may have been silent…either way…according to a proponent or two of the whole idea I’ve heard more than I volunteered to about it…with, I might add, considerably more credentials in fields related to understanding how it works than mr gaunt-is-an-aspirational-lifestyle-aesthetic-actually…that approach pretty much defeats the object of the exercise in more respects than it doesn’t

Chaos theory is a definitively established scientific truth about how complex systems are sensitive to tiny changes – that small flukes can have enormous effects. It’s not really a theory; it’s been proved over and over again. It’s why we can’t predict the weather more than a week in advance. If our calculations are off by even a tiny amount, all bets are off.

Those dynamics are simply ignored when we consider humans instead of physical matter. There’s no good reason for it – we’re subject to the same laws of physics as everything else – but we just pretend it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s because what might happen to our future selves if we squished the wrong bug are so overwhelming that it’s easier to pretend the world works differently. But it doesn’t.

That’s why history is often made by seemingly insignificant moments that don’t always make sense. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima rather than Kyoto because a US government official holidayed in Kyoto 19 years earlier; Trump may have decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama publicly humiliated him with one joke in 2011; the Arab spring was sparked by a vegetable vendor in central Tunisia who decided to set himself on fire. We’re told to focus on big, obvious variables – the “signal” – while ignoring “the noise”. But the noise – the buzz of the complexity of society – often profoundly alters our world.

In a broader sense, our species only exists because of a series of flukes. Two billion years ago – and never again – a single bacterium bumped into a prokaryotic cell and ended up inside it. It evolved into a mitochondrion, making complex life possible, from grass and trees to snails and humans. One hundred million years ago, a shrew-like creature got infected with a retrovirus, eventually leading to the placenta and, by extension, the reason why we don’t lay eggs. Sixty-six million years ago, a tiny oscillation in the Oort cloud flung an asteroid towards Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs, allowing mammals to flourish. If the asteroid had been slightly delayed, humans wouldn’t exist. Everything we’ve achieved would be gone, but for a distant oscillation and a giant space rock. The story of our existence is often written in the margins.

But those are just the examples we can observe. The more profound and bewildering reality is that we’re living in “sliding doors” moments constantly, totally unaware of how our paths through life – and the trajectory of our societies – are constantly branching, infinitely, as a result of tiny, accidental shifts. We ignore these invisible pivots, the moments we will never realise were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. And yet, because our brains have evolved to detect patterns (a useful trick for keeping us alive long enough to reproduce), we ignore a mystifying fact: that our world and our lives are swayed considerably by chance, contingency and chaos.

Science, especially the field of complex systems, knows this is how the world works. Social science mostly ignores it. Instead of facing reality head-on, we’ve invented a fake conception of our world that writes out all the wrinkles of life because they’re hard to model. A misleading image is reflected back at us from these models, from economics to public health to politics. In models – always wrong, but sometimes useful – every cause has a straightforward effect. Every big event has a big cause, never a tiny bit of “noise”.

But when we live according to models that reduce the complexity of our chaotic existence into a neat and tidy version of it, we start to believe that we have more control than we actually do. Because if it is swayed by a few key variables we can manipulate, then we have control. But if the world is swayed by squished bugs and populist presidents can emerge from a single joke, well, then we’re bewilderingly out of control.
[…]
The paradox, then, is that we control nothing, but we influence everything. As chaos theory proves, in an intertwined system, every action has an unforeseen ripple effect. Nothing is meaningless. And that yields a profound truth: that everything we do matters.

You are the contingent culmination of the entirety of cosmic history. Everything had to be exactly as it was for you to exist, just as you are, in this precise moment, in this exact world. That leads us to a simple, wondrous idea: that we all are the living manifestation of 13.7bn years of flukes.

We will never be able to fully understand our own existence. Nonetheless, Kurt Vonnegut gave us good advice on how to live fully within that uncertainty: “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

We like to pretend that momentous events have big causes, but science says otherwise [Guardian]

…still…given the available crop of politicians “gracing” the world stage…for the time being we seem to be in a familiar situation

…so…let’s show a little love for…among others…your boy jamie raskin

On the day Mike Johnson (R-La.) became House speaker, 18 Americans were massacred and 13 injured by a mass shooter in Lewiston, Maine — but Johnson’s comments the next day already showed deft command of what is obviously the GOP’s Mass Shooting Rhetorical First-Response Protocol. In the event that Johnson is deposed and another Republican is chosen as speaker and needs a primer — and for the benefit of all members of Congress following National Rifle Association message discipline — I have compiled this guide.

Beginning with a quote from Johnson, it assembles phrases that have worked well to bury the vast majority of mass shootings in the United States — including the more than 600 recorded in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive — in pious nonsense, logical contradiction and legislative inaction. Please copy and paste as needed.

…&…look…this is already typically over-long…& you aren’t allowed to quote a whole piece from top to bottom without it failing that whole fair use thing I pretty much cling to like some sort of digital limpet…but…if you ask me…everyone should not only be able to but, if they reside stateside & do things like vote probably ought to have to…read the thing in full…so…with all due respect to the profit margins residing in the WaPo paywall…this doesn’t care about that part…anyway…skipping most of the way through…you get to this part

But after any firearm massacre, you never say:

America has more firearms than people, a gun homicide rate 26 times the rate of other high-income countries and notoriously weak gun laws that make us a global outlier. The United States stands alone among peer nations in the number of children dying by firearms, and guns are now the No. 1 leading cause of death of children under 18 in our country. Ninety-seven percent of Americans support a universal criminal background check on all gun purchases, a measure that could save a lot of lives.

It’s time to pass the universal background check and restore the expired ban on military-style assault rifles, which was constitutional and effective. Weapons of war are unnecessary for hunting, recreation or self-defense in the home, which are the purposes of individual gun ownership outside of military service protected by the Second Amendment.

Gun violence is a massive threat to innocent life and limb, a horrific burden on our country and a danger to the social contract in America. The time for action was long ago.

Opinion:  A handy manual for Republicans commenting on mass shootings [WaPo]

…call me a cynic…but it seems like there’s a lot of things killing folks we could say that about…even go so far as to suggest it might make sense for most people to think that sort of thing might be what they were entitled to…what with holding up their end of the social contract…speaking of which…when is that sucker up for renewal…& can we get…I dunno…that UAW guy to head up the negotiations…&…judge shop our way into a swedish jurisdiction?

…ok…my time is up…& clearly I’m way past done…but if I come back around & my senses haven’t entirely taken leave of me…I’ll see about some tunes?