…I don’t want to sound overly callous…because I can barely imagine what it must be like
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/21/titanic-sub-timeline-titan-submersible-missing-vessel
…but…unless I missed an explainer somewhere that confirmed whatever system is used to equalize the pressure differential between the inside & outside of the submersible…unlike the means to exit the thing…can be triggered from inside…oxygen-wise those folks are getting into borrowed time…& that’s the optimistic version…in the sense that it assumes one or other of the triggers to resurface the thing worked…though in a macabre sense…if they weren’t going to make it maybe a catastrophic materials failure…like the not-rated-for-the-depth viewport…or the carbon fibre not sharing the resilient-over-repeated-stress properties of metal…well…at least it would be quick…but…however it turns out
…it’s…with all due respect…something of a niche interest
…& most people have…well…more immediate concerns
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/21/us-extreme-weather-six-weeks-heatwaves-storms
Map: How vulnerable is your neighborhood to excessive heat? [NBC]
…&…grand gestures notwithstanding
https://www.youtube.com/@LiveAid/videos
…the long haul is…a harsh reality
An Orthodox Christian priest, Tesfa Kiros Meresfa begs door-to-door for food along with countless others recovering from a two-year war in northern Ethiopia that starved his people. To his dismay, urgently needed grain and oil have disappeared again for millions caught in a standoff between Ethiopia’s government, the United States and United Nations over what U.S. officials say may be the biggest theft of food aid on record.
“I have no words to describe our suffering,” Tesfa said.
As the U.S. and U.N. demand that Ethiopia’s government yield its control over the vast aid delivery system supporting one-sixth of the country’s population, they have taken the dramatic step of suspending their food aid to Africa’s second-most populous nation until they can be sure it won’t be stolen by Ethiopian officials and fighters.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/millions-ethiopians-hungry-us-un-pause-food-aid-massive-theft
…so…ok…like the things the other day were talking about…timeframes & other aspects of things that are less immediate can be hard to get a feel for…while feelings of despair or apathy in the face of an endless litany of catastrophe & crisis can get the better of us…because that’s kind of a fundamental design flaw in the human brain…but…even if we can’t help it…we can at least attempt to understand it
Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President “Bongbong” Marcos of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.
What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.
But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.
[…] people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.
We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. […] Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.
[…]
Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
…which is not to say the godawful antics of the cavalcade of criminally frightful asshats that fill the news on a reliable basis aren’t everything they appear to be…just that those people are considerably less representative than most of them are at great pains & considerable expense to convince themselves & anyone who’ll hold still long enough to listen to them that they are
Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/psychology-brain-biased-memory.html
…all the same…hard to deny that a certain sense of urgency feels like it would behoove us
The troubling heat in Texas and its ties to climate change in 5 maps [WaPo]
…as opposed to…well…GOP SOP
New Texas law overrides heat safeguards and other labor protections [WaPo]
…or other shit aimed at the dumbest common denominator
Rep. Boebert introduces privileged resolution to impeach President Biden [WaPo]
…we’re none of us immune to the disaster pit of false equivalence
…even if technically the folks that came up with the analogy avoided using the term disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_pit
…but…for some of us…it’s deeper & steeper
…& judging by the people in the business of ramping up that gradient
The Bargain You Make Living in America May No Longer Hold [NYT]
What the New, Low Test Scores for 13-Year-Olds Say About U.S. Education Now [NYT]
…or the who-finds-what-persuasive
‘I am a fan of Modi’: Elon Musk on his friendship with Indian Prime Minister Modi [NBC]
Once a month, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, walks into a studio set up at his government bungalow and takes his seat behind a microphone. The air-conditioning is switched off to quiet its hum. Thick curtains maintain the room’s silence even from Mr. Modi’s favorite peacocks in the garden outside.
Then the prime minister begins his radio show, for which he has recorded over 100 episodes, with a usual greeting in Hindi: “My dear countrymen, hello!”
What follows — about 30 minutes of Mr. Modi playing on-air host to the world’s most populous nation — is one way he has made himself intimately omnipresent across India’s vastness, exerting a hold on the national imagination that seems impervious to criticism of his government’s erosion of India’s democratic norms.
On the program, Mr. Modi is both favorite teacher and empathetic friend, speaking directly to his listeners and selected callers. He offers advice on managing the stress of school exams, even as he reminds his audience that his educational background is as humble as theirs. He champions water conservation while expressing an awareness of the challenges of village and farm life.
His presence on the airwaves may seem anachronistic, more suited to the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, but it is crucial to understanding his overwhelming grip on India’s information landscape. At its core is a transformation of Mr. Modi’s image that will be on full display this week as President Biden hosts him for a state visit, part of a red-carpet effort to court India as a rising economic power and counterweight to China.
The radio shows, sliced into short clips and blasted through his party’s immense social media apparatus, accompanied by text and video, shape a persona wholly disconnected from the stoking of religious divides and the silence on sectarian violence that have marked his years in power. It is a softer Mr. Modi, served up for mass consumption, that counters his more partisan rhetoric in rallies and speeches.
This image, nurtured persistently, has made Mr. Modi immensely popular at home and helped rehabilitate him abroad after he temporarily became an international pariah two decades ago, accused of human rights violations over deadly communal riots and barred from entering the United States.
Why Is Narendra Modi So Popular? Tune In to Find Out. [NYT]
…some questions are begged louder than others
…but
…it’s tricky
Nature at risk of breakdown if Cop15 pledges not met, world leaders warned [Guardian]
Debt relief urgent for poor countries hit by climate shocks, says IMF chief [Guardian]
France to shut down climate protest group citing public safety risks [Guardian]
…all well & good to say we need to pick our battles
Who’s unhoused in California? Largest study in decades upends myths [Guardian]
…but that’s kind of another front in this war to begin with
New electric cars won’t have AM radio. Rightwingers claim political sabotage [Guardian]
…sabotage?
Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights [Guardian]
…takes one to know one, I suppose
…surely it’s a no-brainer to at least mitigate the harms that should be obvious?
…but
…not giving them what they want…which is certainly laudable…doesn’t mean letting them have their head
…a very dangerous game
The High Price of Petulance in the Senate [NYT]
…with the stupidest prizes
…so…even if we eke some out
https://reddit.adminforge.de/r/Blind/comments/14ds81l/rblinds_meetings_with_reddit_and_the_current/
…if nobody remembers the hard learned lessons
The World’s Digital Memory Is at Risk [NYT]
…have we really learned them in a functional sense?
…perspective is tricky when the numbers get big
…but some stuff still seems clear as day even through muddied waters
…it’s all relative though, right? …& that’s not billions with a B like the cashout to kushner…which…let’s not forget…a million seconds…that’s less than a dozen days…a billion seconds…that’s upwards of thirty years…which by sheer coincidence…I think is what a lot of these jokers deserve to serve…not least when you consider the kinds of life sentences they want to enshrine…or possibly bequeath…to others
…& a lot falls by the wayside between talking & walking
…so…I’m not saying none of that shit is a big deal…but…it depends how you look at it?
…how did it go again?
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
There’s only one problem with the epigraph. Twain never said it.
[…]
In his Quote Verifier, Ralph Keynes notes that some variation of the “just ain’t so” quip has been attributed not only to Twain, but also Yogi Berra, Eubie Blake, Frank “Kin” Hubbard, Charles Kettering, Will Rogers, and Artemus Ward. Keynes speculates that several of them may have borrowed the punchline from another 19th-century American humorist, Josh Billings. Among the “affurisms” listed in the 1886 edition of Billings’s complete work is the one-liner, “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so.”
[…]
Gore was not the first politician to recognize the aphorism’s sloganeering potential. Former Vice President Walter Mondale used it repeatedly during his 1984 presidential campaign. One of the highlights of the first debate was when Mondale responded to President Ronald Reagan’s denial that his administration was dismantling welfare by saying, “Well, I guess I’m reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said about Herbert Hoover. He said, ‘It’s not what he doesn’t know that bothers me, it’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so.”New York Times fact-checkers could not confirm the Rogers/Hoover anecdote. They speculated the quote actually came from Billings, Hubbard, or Ward. It seems likely that variations on this punchline were passed around the American humor circuit during the late 19th and early 20th century. Twain obviously belonged to this community, but there is no substantive evidence he created this wisecrack, or stole it.
[…]
From 1994 to 2006, it was increasingly common for Twain, never associated with the quip prior to 1991, to be cited as its source, but Rogers and Yogi Berra were still mentioned with some regularity. After An Inconvenient Truth became one of the most successful documentaries in cinema history, grossing $50 Million worldwide and enflaming the climate change debate, Gore’s promotion of Twain’s illegitimate claim became widely accepted. In the last decade more than fifty newspapers, including several outside the U.S., have attributed the quote to Twain without qualification, as have a dozen law reviews, a handful of academic journals, and, of course, hundreds of websites.
…sometimes, though…who said that shit is less important than whether what was said bears heeding
This apocryphal aphorism has proven itself a convenient untruth.
https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-things-we-know-that-just-aint-so/
…but what do I know?
AM radio is basically the domain of talkzic loud mouth dipshits and Spawrtstalk so I don’t miss it. When I stopped listening to Spawartstalk, I actually got smarter (sort of.)
About the only time I’m listening to AM in my car is when I don’t have Google traffic hooked up on my phone and I need a traffic report ASAP.
…given that these days you tend not to need a converter that runs off the cigarette lighter to charge any number of devices those cars can connect to…it also boils down to “I refuse to accept that there’s something trivially easy I could do myself to make this a non-issue when instead I could bleat like an asshole about how I shouldn’t have to put in thought or effort to be fed my chosen pablum”
…which…well…stuck records got nothin’ on those fools?
They’re delicate snowflakes unable to deal with any sort of change.
GAHH!
Exactly. A quick Google on “are there am radio apps for phones” showed me 29 of them.
Then they came for AM RADIO
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
….
As for the Titan submersible, it was a horrible idea to take actual paying passengers on what is essentially a not fully tested prototype.
All the scenarios of what happened are terrible, but the least terrible is the catastrophic hull failure. At least they would have died quick as opposed to mind breakingly slow (even thinking about it sets off all my fears of being buried alive) in all the other scenarios.
Again, the irony is that if they used a fucking RPV instead of insisting going down in a manned sub to one of the most in hospitable zones for human life where anything can lead to death (painful or quick) then none of this would need to happen.
Of course, some folks point to the reaction of nations dealing with the deaths of 500 poor migrants vs their reaction to the presumed deaths of 3 rich people and one inspirational psychopath/CEO and the Frenchman in a poorly designed coffin/submarine.
Again, I’m sorry the 19-year-old had a stupid father who apparently was incapable of doing basic due diligence on a company before handing them half a million dollars. The kid deserved a better father.
But the sheer expense of this “rescue effort” is staggering. There’s a LOT better ways this money could have been spent than chasing idiots in a jury-rigged fishbowl. If you sign on to do something this stupid, you should not expect rescue. And don’t tell me the billionaires (or their estates) will pick up the tab.
The more we find out about this guy, the bigger a scumbag he is.
CEO of company that owns missing Titanic tour sub faces fraud lawsuit by Winter Park couple
He apparently took these people’s money and then canceled their trip to the Titanic. Without any refund, of course. On the positive side, they are still alive.
Looks like they found some debris. That means catastrophic implosion.
OceanGate says all aboard Titanic submersible ‘have sadly been lost’
Considering all the possible scenarios and failure modes, this was the most merciful.
Who the hell wanted to be trapped in 13000 feet of water sealed in a metal tube?
Some places are best left for robots to visit.
Zuck v Musk cage match…who you got?
Humanity wins if they both kill each other in a cage match.
…I don’t know a heap about the whole UFC style cage fight deal…though I had friends who were pretty into it back around when a seemingly indestructible russian by the name of vovchanchin was toppled from his perch despite an apparent insensibility to pain by the first proponents of the gracie family’s brazilian jujitsu…which I gather is still about as popular as it is dominant in that context…honestly, though…to a casual observer such as myself…as martial arts go it looks a lot less crouching tiger, hidden dragon…& more kneeling man, hitting faces
…so it would play to their strengths in the sense of both men punching down with all their might as fast as they can swing ’em
…& if that’s the crux of the thing…gotta imagine it comes down to who can take it more than who can dish it out…which is kind of a toss up between that pair of tossers…since they both compete with their peers for the thinnest skin award
…so…I’m gonna go arbitrary…& say elon because his jaw’s bigger & that would maybe fuck up zuck’s delicate coding digits quicker…so the other guy scrapes the win by default when his opponent takes himself out
…unless…as in life…the reality is that they both stand at arm’s length & just repeatedly punch themselves in the nuts
…in which case it’s going to be a decision on points with both men on the canvas
…so…kind of a tie…but all of us win?
Zuck is younger and in better shape, and despite getting his ass handed to him in a jiu-jitsu tournament, is probably better trained. Musk’s “brief training” in various martial art styles were probably about as effective as his “brief training” at various universities before conning someone into purchasing a degree for him.
Strategically, Zuck can at least formulate and act on a plan. Musk is proving himself to be deeply stupid, with no ability to exercise any sort of judgement or strategy.
Gonna go Zuck on this one.
I agree — Zuck is dumb but Musk is delusional. Zuck would pick a bad plan to win but Musk would DQ himself within 15 seconds, possibly by not even answering the opening bell.
More on Alito’s billionaire owner…
https://www.gregpalast.com/paul-singer-the-vulture-chewing-argentinas-living-corpse/
The bit about Boebert and the Biden impeachment motion links to what happened at the John Durham hearing.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/06/21/in-the-end-the-leopards-who-launched-the-durham-investigation-ate-his-face/
Long story short, the Durham fiasco kicked off when Bill Barr started chasing Matt Gaetz and company conspiracy theories. Durham, of course, couldn’t make them true no matter how hard he tried, so yesterday Gaetz went ballistic on Durham.
Gaetz went off script just as Boebert did with this resolution and the GOP kooks did by censuring Adam Schiff yesterday after failing just a few days earlier. They’re refusing to be contained by McCarthy’s team.
After the debt ceiling deal, the media story was that both McCarthy and Biden had managed to win control over their parties. As it turns out, only Biden actually did.
As Pelosi pointed out yesterday, the GOP is still getting its strings yanked by Trump, and they can’t move on.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nancy-pelosi-knocks-republicans-pushing-adam-schiff-censure-you-look-miserable
But the both-sides political press can’t handle a post-debt ceiling narrative that credits Biden at the expense of the GOP any more than they could acknowledge the irresponsibility of the GOP’s position or McCarthy’s haplessness before the deal.
There’s an irony in that Biden and the Dems are in a weak position in a lot of ways. Biden isn’t some kind of mastermind, just overall competent.
But they’re hurting the GOP badly in part because McCarthy keeps trying to paper over what’s happening in his endless news conferences with the DC press, only to have reality slap the GOP in the face.
And it’s the same dynamic with Trump’s upcoming legal trials. Both the GOP and the press want a narrative of a feckless Biden making these political cases, but all Biden needed was a few basic insights into the advantages of playing this straight from the start and plowing ahead while the other side shot itself in both feet over and over. And it’s becoming increasingly clear he saw it right and made the right move.
…happy to take the laughs where we can find them
…it’s the little things…like fox news using quote marks
…but the durham thing is too colossal a shitshow to truly do justice to
I don’t think it was more than common sense, but I think Biden was smart enough to leave Durham alone to chase an essentially harmless right wing crusade, so that when the Trump cases started hitting the beach, he had a perfect example of how he didn’t get political.
Durham and the right wing kooks could have seen this coming and minimized Biden’s point by throwing in the towel early. But they’re kooks. And because Durham ran for so long, the timing ended up working extremely well for the Trump prosecution while Biden got to keep his hands clean in the bargain.
If you’re in the mood for comedy, watching these clips of Democrats humiliating Durham are quite fun.
Democrats hammer Jim Jordan’s star witness
…it’s a fine line in some ways…& what constitutes effective is partly in the eye of the beholder so it’s also possible for both sides to claim some things as a win
…like…the whole documents mess…unless there’s a deeper, darker, vastly-more-incriminating-but-as-yet-unseen truth behind it…just never had to get to the stage it has
…he was at pains to repeat how no such steps had been taken against an ex-president ever…because that plays well with the crowd that think he’s some kind of messianic surrogate taking the slings & arrows of outrageous fortune on their behalf
…but he could have done all the same shit & it never would have been public record if he just gave the shit back when they asked like pence & biden did…& probably others before then…they aren’t lowly analysts to be locked up for years over less numerous documents bearing lesser classification markings…plenty of space under the rug for those kinds of sweepings
…&…maybe he’s really just that fucking dumb & solipsistic…maybe…or maybe he knows he gave some of that shit to people who were willing to play quid pro quo…& he couldn’t give it all back if he wanted to
…or…some of that not-classified personal shit would be a bonanza of evidence in other pending cases…or birth whole new ones…fucked up as either of those possibilities are they at least would make it more than solely a vanity-laced grift aimed at avoidance of the bare minimum of consequences
…but letting them carry the idiot ball until they get tired & fall over the way that durham did…while granting them endless managed & curated sound-bites that serve in place of actual red meat for their party faithful…eventually gets around to striking out…so the absence of there, there gets harder to ignore as the surfeit of it in their own ranks reaches ever vaster proportions…& hopefully they’ve got enough ducks lined up to be driving them into a steady hail of buckshot emanating from the peanut gallery in the court of public opinion through the entire campaign cycle?
I do think Biden and his team, at least on some level, see their win as coming in part from people craving some level of democratic norms. They have shown a willingness to sit on the sidelines in the short term while the GOP spins its dumbest shit even if the day-to-day narrative isn’t always in their favor for doing so. So far, the payoff has been getting things done and not always reacting in the moment to idiocy like Mango Unchained *always* did.
Even I, who think many of those norms are beyond their sell-by date, can see the wisdom in that strategy. And so far, it has been successful in getting things done, albeit at the cost of having to hear how unpopular it is in polling.
I agree, and I think the flip side is Biden has figured out something that isn’t a great insight but is still miles ahead of most of official DC. He sees that Trump today is miles away from Trump in the 2016 campaign.
Even if you thought Trump’s main themes for 2016 were dangerous and stupid, you knew what they were. “Build the Wall” “Drain the Swamp” “Lock Her Up” “I’m a Billionaire” weren’t genius marketing themes, but at least they were coherent.
You can’t figure out what the hell he is talking about anymore. He’s only playing to a base that responds to his tone, and that’s a bad strategy for a guy who needs to pick up casually engaged voters, which is how he won in 2016.
He may still come up with something, or Biden may fail. But even if Biden stumbles, without some kind of coherent message it’s going to be hard for Trump to convince enough people beyond his 35-40% base to turn out for him.
I think official DC doesn’t understand how Trump won in 2016, and that’s why they’re missing how bad his basic marketing is now.
…the flip side to people who (understandably) are underwhelmed by a second tour of the “same ol’ same old” offer of joe’s steady hand of experience seems to me that…very much in the way that when the pro-leave brexit lot could promise the moon & contradict one another with abandon because they were peddling fantasy…tinyfinger netted a lot more votes who wanted something new & different & were willing to believe that this time the pie in the sky was real…then
…but it’s a heavily scrutinized post…maybe the most heavily scrutinized in a host of ways…so it’s plenty clear what the reality of that offer looks like now…he’s got form…& it measures up poorly…he was their great white hope
…now he’s a sorry, miserable, squashed thing…& they don’t like the secret sauce, either
All that and also somewhat on RIP’s point: His schtick doesn’t hit the same as it did in 2015 because we’ve heard it for 8 years now. You don’t get to be the new thing forever, and it’s a lot harder to be like “This time we’ll do it!” versus being able to just promise, promise, promise. Even American voters do eventually want to know “So how do you plan to do it this time around?” and we all know it’s not a subject he will be able to address coherently.
A note here that, incredibly, DeSantis is somehow even less able to address non-internet-poisoned voters, which is really not a thing I anticipated.
Grief is … complicated?
He was pretty bad before his stepdad went missing.
https://amp.ebaumsworld.com/articles/brian-szasz-the-stepson-of-lost-billionaire-was-once-arrested-for-stalking-a-dj-and-threatening-to-shoot-up-a-music-festival/87413745/
Yeah, he has a lot of issues.
All the small things, kid.
And not to put too fine a point on this, but the weaponization of “DEBATE ME!!!!!” has been helped immensely by the media orgs that carved out hours a day to let talking heads head-butt each other and pretend it was news (or at least news-adjacent.)
Not everyone needs a platform, and far fewer people deserve one.
The reddit about shit you see when working for the 1% is wild! I could read it all day.
I know. I had to tear myself away because I’m not in the 1% and therefore have a job.
On the subject of nostalgic bias, The Daily Show had a great bit back in the Stewart days. It showed multiple clips of conservative pundits talking about the good old days, and the years they identified before everything went bad.
Some pointed to the 80s, some to the 70s, 60s, 50s or even 40s. None of them agreed when people fell into evil.
But the real kicker came when Stewart did the math. All of them thought the last good days before everyone became awful happened when they were ten years old.
Or in the case of urban transplants, the neighborhood always falls apart when new people move in. As this bit jokes, it happens in an afternoon.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/new-york-city-has-changed-in-the-two-hours-since-i-moved-here
I’ve read or listened to a couple of interviews with Steve Albini this year, and the guy is maybe one of the more grounded and insightful people I’ve read/heard recently. Mostly he talks about his own arena — music and production — but here he is, outside his area of acknowledged expertise, making more sense than anyone in an elected position.
“Albini 2024”, I guess, is what I’m saying. That’s the central idea here.
dunno if anyone here even watched the indy 500 but
thats a nice thing to do
good pr too…but it doesnt take away from the nice