Morgan Housel with a capsule history of the US economy from 1945 to 2020; says all the radical movements of recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the Trump campaign, have been a protest against how the economy changed between 1980 and 2016.
Radio Free Asia reports that Kim Jong Un has responded to an increase in suicides by banning suicide.
In response to wargames showing enormous losses in a war with China, the Pentagon wants to massively ramp up US arms production. This new "era of war" is going to impose huge costs on all of us.
Today's mind-stretching exercise: very interesting, somewhat technical description of how ChatGPT and other Large Language Models work.
"Egypt bans Dutch archaeologists over exhibition linking Beyonce and Rihanna to Queen Nefertiti." In the rest of the world it may be commonplace to see ancient Egyptians as black or African, but the Egyptian government is not having any of that.
Famouse Edward Tufte essay, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: "Many true statements are too long to fit on a PP slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better way to make presentations."
On the small island of Kythnos, Greek archaeologists report "countless" ex votos from a shrine Demeter used from the 7th century BC to the 4th century AD.
The devastation caused by Burmese pythons in the Everglades.
This Canadian fire season has been historically bad and looks set to continue being awful.
Tigers in Chinese art, from the British Museum.
Ukrainian officials are already talking about rebuilding the Kakhovka dam, but enormous dams are now out of favor with both environmentalists and economists; maybe it could be replaced with a series of smaller structures? This article doesn't mention it, but the EU and other international agencies that could help fund Ukraine's reconstruction may balk at a huge dam.
Exploring China's flooded cities.
Study of siblings who did and did not go to college finds that attending college has no impact on political orientation.
CalTech scientist successfully beam power from a satellite with solar panels down to earth. The technology is very cool but does anybody know what would happen if we were beaming terawatts of power through the atmosphere all day for decades?
Chatbots aren't reliable enough for doctors to use them in diagnosis, but they are already better than doctors at expressing empathy for patients. (NY Times; Kevin Drum has an ungated summary)
The prayer book shown by Thomas Cromwell's elbow in the famous Holbein portrait has been identified as a Book of Hours that belongs to Trinity College, Cambridge.
The EU is moving faster than the US toward regulating AI; the draft bill in the EU Parliament focuses on performing risk assessments for any new AI systems in "critical areas." Also restricts the use of facial recognition software. (NY Times)
Creepy monochromatic but otherwise lifelike polyester sculptures by Hans Op de Beeck.
The rough life of an urban mountain lion.
The water being shot into space from the underwater ocean at Enceladus contains lots of Phosphorus. Which is cool, but despite the hype it doesn't have much to do with finding life there; the elements central to earth life are all common in the universe, but life doesn't seem to be. Show me some complex organic molecules.
News outlets are reporting that the Campi Flegrei supervolcano, which includes all the volcanic features around Naples, may be close to erupting. But this video argues that the eruption is likely decades away. Still, a new eruption is inevitable in the future, which makes it bizarre to look at overhead photographs showing dense urban neighborhoods wedged between old calderas and cinder cones.
Kenyan tea pickers are destroying mechanical harvesting machines. In this case the plantations belong to international companies and the machines are made abroad, so hand picking may actually be better for Kenyans.
Kevin Drum on the complicated question of whether Oak Flat, Arizona is "sacred" to the Apache. The problem is that the dichotomy of sacred vs non-sacred is not really how many people think about the world; consider how nationalists refer to the "sacred soil" of their countries.
American conservatives find common ground with Muslims in protesting against LGTB books in the public schools. A friend of mine who spent time in rural Turkey told me 15 years ago that she didn't understand why conservative rural Americans hated Muslims, since they seemed exactly the same to her.
New claim of quantum computer progress from IBM (NY Times, ungated press release). Interesting approach, using randomization to smooth out the quantum errors, but it still seems to me like another problem specifically designed to be solvable by a quantum computer.
Politics in our time: "54% say govt doing a bad job but only 26% think the mainstream opposition would do better." From Germany, but could be from anywhere. The math would work out something like 40% for the government, 26% for the mainstream opposition, 18% for the radical right, 6% for the radical left, 10% no clue. Not a formula for stability.
Ukraine Links
Part 4 of that long interview with Prigozhin: "If I was in charge of the Ukrainian armed forces, we'd would be on the outskirts of Moscow. They're just being coy."
Falling water in the Kakhovka reservoir exposes human bones that some people say are German soldiers from WW II.
Crazy video of Ukrainian drones knocking out all three trucks in a Russian column. Related: Ukraine announces plan to train 10,000 more drone operators.
Breaking Defense: "With Ukraine losing up to 10,000 drones a month, mostly to Russian electronic warfare, it’s tempting to invest in anti-EW protection – but, experts agreed, it’s probably more cost-effective to accept high losses and just buy more bare-bones drones."
Putin just held a meeting with all the prominent Russian milbloggers. As Rob Lee says, this suggests that he values them as an alternative source of information to what he receives from his own MOD.
Detailed, zoomable map of Russian field fortifications in Ukraine.
Global culture watch: "A European [Ukrainian] unit with a samurai patch puts a bluegrass cover of a mid-2000's rap song onto the live drone footage of artillery strikes. From SPGs that are likely covered in hentai stickers."
Short video showing two Russian self-propelled artillery pieces destroyed by GMLRS rocket strikes; the detonation of these missiles sprays their targets with high velocity tungsten balls, creating the distinctive pattern you see.
Jack Watling of RUSI summarizes the Ukrainian offensive as of June 14.
Kyiv Independent on the first week of the southern offensive.
Ukraine is already asking for and receiving more Patriot missiles, so they must be firing them at a good rate.
Russia is recruiting a volunteer battalion from Roscosmos, their space agency. Another sign of how they are wrecking their whole country to fight this war.
Russia's use of helicopters to blunt Ukraine's offensive and what sort of air defense might be needed to fight them.
7 comments:
Creepy monochromatic but otherwise lifelike polyester sculptures by Hans Op de Beeck.
These look almost exactly like 3D computer model renders after being light mapped, but before being painted / textured. I wonder if that was the inspiration - I also wonder, given the materials used, how much of this is literally just made from high resolution 3D printing?
American conservatives find common ground with Muslims in protesting against LGTB books in the public schools. A friend of mine who spent time in rural Turkey told me 15 years ago that she didn't understand why conservative rural Americans hated Muslims, since they seemed exactly the same to her.
Aside from the old historical Christian / Muslim , Europe / Middle East feud of centuries past, much of the current hatred has its root in 20th century geopolitics, particularly post-war and Cold War.
American interest in Israel is a major factor - when you've aligned yourself with the Middle East's only Jewish nation, you're automatically moving yourself further away from the Muslims who don't get along with them very well.
American reliance on oil is obviously another huge factor - aside from the Muslim Arabs who historically controled the bulk of the world's oil export market not being fans of America's support for Israel, there's also all the bad blood and bad faith negotiations and interactions between America and those countries to sour relations. The anti-colonial wars of independence, the 1973 oil crisis, and the looming specter of the Cold War's "first world", "second world", and "third world" sphere of influence is all a great way to foment mutual resentment between Americans and Muslims.
Then, of course, there's the whole debacle with Iran - I feel I scarcely need say more.
We have a long history of bullying and picking fights with the Muslim world, and when you make enemies in that way, you tend to go out of your way to blame your victims as justification, both for your prior misdeeds and for potential future ones you might care to carry out.
Conservatives hate Muslims because they were told their entire lives that Muslims are the enemy, because that was what was most politically expedient.
@Verloren
All the factors you cite are important, but I feel compelled to cite another one: actual religious/theological conflict. For conservative Christians, Christ is God, and the Qur'an repeatedly and explicitly denies Christ's divinity (going so far as to say that the heavens and the whole universe rebel against the blasphemy).
John's friend seems unable to consider this a factor, and thus seems to have drunk the social science Kool-Aid that religions are entirely about social rules and behavior and hot-button political issues.
There's a lot of complexity here, of course. There is *some* force to the social-science view, obviously: law IS absolutely essential to both Islam and Judaism in their non-modernist forms, and Muslim and Jewish "clergy" are both essentially legal authorities (and some aver that rigorously following the law is more important than believing).
The Qur'an's message on Christianity and Judaism is also highly ambiguous. Christians and Jews are both declared repeatedly to be unbelievers, but the text also explicitly declares their scriptures to be God-given laws that they (Christians and Jews) should follow and will be judged by on the Last Day. Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual founders of modern fundamentalist Islam's hostility to the West, followed this in a very direct way by stating that the modern West was bad because it had adopted a secular law, as opposed to a God-given one. People like Bill Barr seem to have the same idea.
And there are some prominent examples of sympathy/envy of Islam in the contemporary American right--Houellebec, D'Souza, etc. I have this memory of some right-wing American militia leader admitting after 9/11 that he wished he and his people had al-Qaeda's kind of guts (that may be a factoid).
But John's friend's bald statement that conservative Americans and Muslims are "exactly alike" reflects, I'm sorry, deep ignorance as well as a some insight.
@David
If we go with your view, then why isn't there comparable hatred for Jews, who likewise outright deny Jesus as divine, or even merely as a prophet? If the problem is a denial of "Christ", then why is there such fervent conservative support for Israel? Yes, there has long been Antisemitism in America, but it is fairly limited and pales in comparison to modern conservative Islamophobia.
Or what about completely different religions, which have even less in common? Where is the conservative hatred for Buddhism, which not only denies Jesus as a prophet, but entirely discounts Yahweh as a deity? Why aren't they incensed by Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Taoists, Shintoists, Sikhs, etc?
I'll tell you why - because they haven't been conditioned to be. They are barely even aware of the existence of those other faiths, if at all. They haven't spent their entire lives being told by American media that such people are evil. They haven't been told to cheer for US troops invading foreign countries that primarily follow such faiths, or been told to blame failures of American geopolitics on them.
Conservative Christians have so much more in common with conservative Muslims than they ever could with, say, Hindu Vaishnavas - and yet they have such tremendous hatred for the former, and such total indifference toward the latter. How could that possibly be a product of doctrinal differences? How could that ever be anything except a political and propagandic outcome?
Fox News doesn't spend hours breathlessly demonizing Burmese Buddhists the way they pillory Arabic Muslims. Heck, they don't even devote that much attention to Atheists, or to literal Satanists! There are people out there who don't just see Christianity as doctrinally wrong, but who actively oppose the entire religion on a fundamental level, and American conservatives STILL hate Muslims FAR more than them! Ask yourself - why?
@Verloren
Well, you know, 9/11 was a thing.
@Verloren
More to the point, I don't necessarily disagree with everything you say. I'm not saying the theological/scriptural issues are the *only* important thing, the sole explanation of all events. But I am saying that religion, belief, God, theology, and scripture, really, truly, actually do matter to these people. True believers are not just generic social conservatives.
This is, for example, why the supposed fondness of American evangelicals for Israel is really quite conditional and not the theologically open-minded love-embrace some imagine it to be. It has to do with a lot of things, like admiration for Israeli toughness and capacity for violence, but it also has a non-negligible amount to do with literalist readings of the Book of Revelation and expectation of a near End-Time (when the same thing will happen to Jews, who are not among the 144,000 prophesied to accept Jesus at the last minute, as will happen to everyone else who isn't theologically Christian). Which is why a lot of American Jews are NOT happy when synagogues cozy up to the likes of Pastor John Hagee.
(It's also why even reactionary Catholics like Adrian Vermeule fit both oddly and hopelessly into the MAGA coalition. The evangelicals who make up the vast bulk of religiously-motivated MAGA voters are not much interested in the same kind of religion as rightist Catholics are. They have an alliance over things like abortion, but it's only an alliance. The religious distinction remains, and is important.)
At the risk of running on, I would like to add a thinkie-thought I've been having. Consider that one could argue contemporary MAGA-oriented evangelicalism has at its heart a combination of deeply-felt (if, inevitably, selective) scriptural literalism combined with a sort of sectarian sacralization of remembered small-town white American culture of the 1920s-50s, plus nostalgic memories of legal self-help, cultural self-confidence, and independence from cosmopolitan power and authority. Consider also that, from a certain point of view, that is almost word-for-word a definition of Talibanism as well--and one might, without reflection, think that here we have two natural allies. But the reality is that, with intense localism and xenophobia and love of their own customs at the heart of their movements, combined with devotion to very different, in some ways mutually-hostile scriptures, and a valorization in both cases of a certain paranoid truculence--such an alliance would be cold, practical, and occasional at best.
Contrast the natural affinity among liberal elites all over the world. These folks (I include myself) are cosmopolitan; weak in their devotion to specific customs, wedded to a kind of politeness and patience in social interaction (John's "niceness" for which we pay a price); respectful of some local differences and old customs, but mainly in an ineffectual, occasional, sadly museum-ish way (I regretfully admit this for myself) while in practice encouraging homogenization (consciously or not). There you have a recipe for a powerful alliance based much more in real behavioral and ideological commonality, warmth of feeling, and shared projects funded by shared resources. There's a unity and drive there that goes beyond mere alliance.
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