Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[y66]

From Prayer for a Just War -- Finding meaning in the climate fight by Greg Jackson at Harper's

 

When I first drafted this essay, almost two years ago, California was on fire. A few months later, Australia ignited. Then the coronavirus hit. By the time I sat down to rewrite the essay last fall, California was on fire again, with three of the four largest wildfires in state history raging simultaneously. The sky above San Francisco turned an unearthly, apocalyptic orange. Sunlight could no longer penetrate the ash, photovoltaic panels stopped working, and the air-quality index in many places exceeded the most polluted cities in Asia, where millions of children have irreversible lung damage. People living in California, Oregon, and Washington State found themselves trapped in their homes. Houses, subdivisions, and entire towns lay in charred ruins. Those who could do so moved their families to safer areas, much as people had done in the early days of the pandemic. As far away as the East Coast, smoke from the fires marred the air, and from where I watched, north of New York City, the evening sun vanished in the haze before it touched the horizon.

 

Like a spinning wheel that becomes a uniform blur, the relentless pace of unfolding catastrophe is turning into a fixed calendar of disaster that in many places will soon become as regular as the seasons. “Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno,” wrote the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan during the 2019–20 bushfire season. In California, too, the images and stories seemed to belong less to peacetime than to war, and indeed this metaphor has become commonplace in our rhetoric about the climate threat. Al Gore, writing in the New York Times, put it starkly:

 

This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11.

Similar martial rhetoric weaves through many of today’s decarbonization narratives, from David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth to Saul Griffith’s Rewiring America, and it gives John Kerry’s climate-crisis coalition, World War Zero, its name.

 

But for all the rhetoric of war, the shape of the metaphor remains fuzzy. If it is simply meant to justify a certain scale of government response—a warlike reallocation of industry, logistical capacity, and spending—it mistakes the true implication of the metaphor and the source of its power. For as the coronavirus has taught us, the credibility of a threat and our sense of responsibility to protect ourselves and others against it can change our behavior in ways we might have thought impossible. What distinguishes a “just” war—that is, a necessary and nonelective war, fought for survival or defense—is that it involves everyone; it is fought by the country, not only the government and not only those who bear arms in combat. It is a source of meaning in addition to anguish.

 

To those who still harbor doubts about the justness of this war, who continue to question the scientific consensus on global warming and the ravages it promises, I ask only that you entertain, if there is a chance you are right, that there is also a chance you are wrong. Let us even say, for argument’s sake, that the virtual certainty of scientists were reduced to 50 percent confidence and the forecasted effects of climate violence were reduced in severity by 50 percent as well. That would still justify the most massive mobilization of human energy and resources the world has ever seen, because the likely outcome would still be far worse than any threat we have faced in the past.

 

Of course, there are some who accept the seriousness of the threat but console themselves with the possibility that we might overcome it without serious disruption to our lives. The cost of solar power has fallen by more than 80 percent in the past decade and shows no sign of stopping. Wind power has followed suit. According to reports by the International Renewable Energy Agency and others, wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in most cases, and there are already many places where building new wind and solar capacity is cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants. Synergistic technologies, such as batteries and electric cars, have improved dramatically over the same period, and there has been progress on more intractable problems such as the decarbonization of air travel and the production of cement, glass, and steel.

 

But for all the good news, we would be foolish to think technology alone will save us. The fossil-fuel industry will not disappear quietly. Subsidies will not unwind themselves. Legislation to transform our energy system will not enact itself. Politicians must be moved from complicity and intransigence. Minds must be changed. And most crucially, even if we manage in the coming decades to remake our global energy system, we will still need a new form of civic solidarity to deal with the ecological trials headed our way.

 

That our species has the power to destroy life on earth but not to contain wildfires in California should give us pause as we consider what our ingenuity and determination can do in the face of a violent planet. We can split the atom, construct hydrogen bombs, and send humans to the moon, but that does not mean we can stop tidal waves, prevent ice sheets from melting, or cleanse toxic air. When it comes to arresting fast-moving pandemics, supplying drinking water to eight billion people, or managing refugee flows in the tens of millions, the sheer scale of these problems leaves little hope for after-the-fact technological fixes. The ocean and atmosphere are simply too vast and complex for our minds to finely conceptualize or our tools to fully contain. Our powers are great but narrow, the world far bigger than we imagine.

 

This sounds grim and it sounds hard. Like you, I have encountered hundreds of versions of this story that cast our unhappy lot in the light of sacrifice and devastation. The crisis is real, and the stakes of inaction are indeed severe, but maybe, for all that, we have gotten the story backward. What if the challenge confronting us isn’t our greatest threat but our greatest opportunity, not a moment of self-denial and self-destruction, but of self-creation and self-discovery? What if, to be more precise, our greatest threat is also our greatest opportunity, because overcoming monumental challenges, when wisdom and heroism are possible, is the great gift of human life, the substance of our proudest moments, and the matter from which ur-meaning is built?

 

he 2020 presidential election was only the latest milestone on the apparently endless highway of American division. Truth has taken on partisan gradations. Democratic institutions strain and buckle. Norms tremble in the fierce crosswinds of power. We cannot find a way to do even simple things most people agree on: bring down the cost of medications, regulate guns to prevent mass shootings, raise taxes on the rich, or overhaul out-of-date infrastructure. How can we be so far apart when we want so many of the same things? What has gotten so fouled up that vague symbolic fights obscure the irreducible communal basis of our prosperity and strength?

 

The 2020 presidential election was only the latest milestone on the apparently endless highway of American division. Truth has taken on partisan gradations. Democratic institutions strain and buckle. Norms tremble in the fierce crosswinds of power. We cannot find a way to do even simple things most people agree on: bring down the cost of medications, regulate guns to prevent mass shootings, raise taxes on the rich, or overhaul out-of-date infrastructure. How can we be so far apart when we want so many of the same things? What has gotten so fouled up that vague symbolic fights obscure the irreducible communal basis of our prosperity and strength?

 

Let me tell a different story about what has gone wrong. Our fundamental affliction is not the magnitude of our problems but our alienation from their manifest solutions. Our tools have never made us more powerful, yet we seem more powerless than ever to effect change. Our primary way of interacting with the world is through a screen, and our principal avenue to changing anything appears to be typing into or clicking on that screen. We are alienated from the earth, from our hands, and from one another. We appear to be part of an efficient system that has brought ever more and cheaper goods to market, but our skills have become specialized to the point of practical uselessness. Our ability to create and cultivate the goods that we rely on and enjoy has shriveled to almost nothing. There is a maddening abstraction to our reality, a virtuality to all life. We are told that we are hopelessly partisan and polarized—patriotic or traitorous, awake to truth or in thrall to lies—but above all we are separate: from one another despite our mutual dependency and from the material reality on which every aspect of our life depends. We are separate from the actions we might undertake, and undertake together, to solve the tangible problems before us, which do not care what brand name or party affiliation their solutions go by. We believe hate is endemic, that we are at one another’s throats, but we don’t know one another. We have never gotten close enough to shake hands, much less see that the throat we mean to grab has wrinkles like our own. We carry the burden of crushing loneliness, and find ourselves isolated from friend and imaginary foe alike. We are trapped in the virtual amber of our paralytic culture, where helplessness and impotence sit on the vine so long they ripen and rot into enmity, vitriol, and rage.

 

It is a strange irony that climate change has, until recently, had a virtual quality of its own. This is the very essence of what has made it so difficult to combat. The same reason policy disagreements endure for years—that consequences don’t follow actions closely enough to establish irrefutable empirical links—is the same reason our society can recognize the danger posed by a warming planet and do nothing about it for decades. Though nearly every technology in our lives relies on truths (such as electrical or chemical properties) that we apprehend only indirectly, it is in our nature to have a complicated and problematic relationship with the reality—the truth—of our abstract knowledge.

 

But now climate violence is emerging from the shadows. It is setting fire to forests we can see, scattering the air we breathe with ash, and filling city streets with water. It has begun marching on our offscreen terrain. The past few decades have been what the French call the drôle de guerre, the period after war is declared and before real fighting begins. Except, because what we confront with the climate crisis is war waged on a several-decade delay, the battle started long before the first shots were heard. The challenge of organizing ourselves around this crisis before its worst consequences reach us is no different from the challenge of reclaiming truth from the burning timbers of our smoldering virtual culture—of reknitting a fabric of shared purpose from shared interest. Climate change is the crisis of virtual insouciance stepping terrifyingly into the real.

 

The more we insist on our separateness and exemption from nature, the more violently nature will educate us otherwise. Where reality gives way to fantasy, politics breaks down; and where politics breaks down, war, revolution, and violence rise up—so Carl von Clausewitz and John F. Kennedy each suggested. If we fail to see the truth of what lies after politics—not the absence of policy, but the presence, the certainty, of violence—we do not bring sufficient determination to the fight to redeem politics. The climate crisis lays this truth bare.

[pilowsky]

It's got be __(http://bit.ly/GotToBePerfectFA)__ Perfect

http://bit.ly/PerfectDeal

[pilowsky]

STARTLING JUXTAPOSITION

In the latest from Australia comes news about Ben Roberts-Smith who is suing the non-Murdoch news media for Defamation because:

it was reported that he "committed war crimes in Afghanistan and punched a woman in the face" (in Canberra - as reported on the news a moment ago).

 

That was the first item, followed by an item on University students,

Then this headline and story "Warning for pets as rat poison antidote faces shortage"Pet owners in NSW are being urged to be vigilant to protect their animals from mouse baits, due to a critical, national shortage of antidote. Then an item about a COVID-19 outbreak in NSW - remember COVID?

'Public interest immunity' dismissed in Roberts-Smith case

The Federal Court has ordered a witness in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial to hand over documents about a military inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

 

In a high-profile trial due to start next week, Mr Roberts-Smith is suing three Fairfax newspapers (now owned by Nine), arguing he has been defamed by reports he committed war crimes in Afghanistan and punched a woman in the face.

 

The Victoria Cross recipient denies all wrongdoing and the newspapers will use truth as a defence.

 

In the Federal Court in Sydney, Justice Wendy Abraham has ruled an SAS soldier known as 'Person 35', who will give evidence at the trial, must hand over documents linked to an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Defence into the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

 

'Person 35' is one of several witnesses who have asked for their evidence to the Inspector-General of Defence inquiry to not be made public.

 

Justice Abraham said 'Person 35' has not been able to successfully argue the need for "public interest immunity".

 

The trial is due to open on Monday.

 

 

[y66]

Fun read: Tyler Cowen's conversation with David Deutsch

[y66]

I Had Never Faced the Reality of Death’: A Surgeon Becomes a Patient

[y66]

Stephen King on Why ‘Lisey’s Story’ Was One He Had to Adapt Himself by Erik Piepenburg at NYT

 

They say the minute / you show the monster, you take / away its power.

[Winstonm]

This is quite cool:

 

The alleged drug syndicates, contract killers and weapons dealers thought they were using high-priced, securely encrypted phones that would protect them as they openly discussed drug deals by text message and swapped photos of cocaine-packed pineapples. What they were really doing, investigators revealed Tuesday, was channeling their plots straight into the hands of U.S. intelligence agents.

[y66]

So also was the bitcoin clawback from the ransomware guys.

[y66]

For forum foodies: Mark Bittman talks to Carla Hall

[Cyberyeti]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-57402743 an interesting subject, but also Phil Jones is a bridge player at my club

[y66]

Feeding the Hungry, One Wholesome Meal at a Time

 

In recalling the events of her own life, and in plumbing those memories for meaning, Ms. Quinn prods readers to find meaning in their own struggles, to recall the too often overlooked beauty in their own lives.

[y66]

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain[/i]']Just assume the El Salvador Bitcoin thing is absolutely as dumb as it looks, and you’ll make correct predictions.

 

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/06/11/el-salvador-passes-its-bitcoin-law-and-its-a-tether-scam/

[y66]

From a conversation between Terry Gross and Michael Pollan (2018):

 

GROSS: When we started our interview, you were telling us how you gave up coffee cold turkey when you were writing your book "Caffeine" because you wanted to know what's it like - what impact does caffeine have on you and, to find out, you stopped it to see what the difference was. And to see how addictive it was, you did it cold turkey, so you could get the full force of ending your addiction.

 

POLLAN: Yes.

 

(LAUGHTER)

 

GROSS: And then after how many months you decided to start drinking?

 

POLLAN: After three months, yeah.

 

GROSS: And...

 

POLLAN: It was three months on herbal tea.

 

GROSS: And when you started drinking it again, was that still part of the experiment, or just 'cause...

 

POLLAN: Yeah.

 

GROSS: ...You couldn't bear to live without it anymore?

 

POLLAN: Oh, no. No, it was part of the experiment. I went as long as I could. But I knew before I finished the book that I would want to describe, you know, getting back on caffeine. I fully intended to get back to it. There - I didn't learn - you know, aside from the sleep issue I mentioned earlier, there are not a lot of reasons to avoid caffeine. I mean, there are a lot of health benefits to drinking coffee and tea in moderation. Coffee and tea are protective - appear to be protective against several kinds of cancer, Parkinson's disease, cardiovascular disease. There's been a suspicion that coffee must be terrible for you. From the very start, in the 1600s, they claimed that it reduced male potency. And...

 

GROSS: (Laughter).

 

POLLAN: But it's been cleared of that, too. So there isn't a good reason not to drink it unless you have a problem with it - it makes you jittery, or, you know, your doctors told you not to. So I fully intended to get back on it. And I looked forward to the day, and I planned it very carefully. Initially, I thought I'd go to the original Peet's, and that would have a kind of poetic logic to it, but it's a little strong for me.

 

So my wife and I, Judith, we went to this local cafe where we used to go every morning before I had my fast, and I got my coffee and sat outside. It was a Saturday morning, and it was kind of a beautiful day. And there were lots of dads with little kids, you know, eating pastries. And I had this cup of coffee, and it was mind-blowingly good.

 

GROSS: (Laughter).

 

POLLAN: I just - I - you know, I just had this sense of well-being suffusing my body that, you know, rose to the level of euphoria. And I was like, wow. And it seemed like I had taken some kind of illicit drug, that this was cocaine or something. And that lasted for maybe 20 minutes, and then I got a little jittery and a little tetchy. And there was a garbage truck that was, you know, violently shaking these garbage cans into it across the street, and I was like, let's get home. I have to - I want to get some stuff done.

 

And I felt this incredible surge of almost compulsive desire to get to some - get some stuff done. And I sat down at my computer, and I unsubscribed from about hundred listservs that were really bugging me (laughter) that - you know, these things come up on your computer every day, and you never have time to deal with them. Well, I dealt with them. And then I turned to my closet, and I saw that the pile of sweaters was all scrumbled (ph), and I organized all my sweaters. And I was incredibly productive for a couple hours.

 

Anyway, the experience made me realize that getting back on coffee and tea is very different than having your maintenance dose. And so I thought, is there a way I could hold on to the power of this drug experience? Otherwise, I was going to slip back into the ranks of, you know, normal caffeine addicts. So for a long time, I said, all right, just have coffee on Saturdays. And for a long time, I did that, and it worked pretty well. And I looked forward to Saturdays. I got a ton of stuff done. But eventually, the slippery slope intervened.

 

GROSS: So what is caffeine doing for you now?

 

POLLAN: What caffeine is doing for me now is kind of organizing the rhythms of my day. I mean, something, you know, I missed when I was off caffeine is there is that - you know, that morning surge and that sitting down to work and having that kind of real focus as you attack whatever you're doing for the day. And then even - I enjoyed even the subsiding after lunch and that lull that you got around 3 o'clock, and you could have a cup of tea and that would kind of restore your energy for another hour or two. It just - the rhythm of the day was shaped by ingestion of this molecule. And it's doing that for me now, and I understand that rhythm, and I can - you know, I thread my work through that rhythm, and it works for me. And I did miss it. You know, would I do another fast? I might. I mean, it - you know, I have to say that the pleasure of breaking that fast (laughter) was so great that it's almost worth the work.

 

GROSS: So some people say, in comparing coffee and tea, that coffee is such an upper that it gets you to lose focus, whereas tea gets you to increase focus. What do you think?

 

POLLAN: I think it all depends on how you kind of titrate it. When I have a cup of coffee by my side and I'm writing, I don't take a bunch of sips because you can get - you're right; you can kind of overrun yourself, outstrip your mind and get a little too forward, get ahead of yourself. So I think though that we kind of automatically do that. I mean, if you look at when people take a sip of coffee, something's going on. It's not just that they're thirsty. They're reaching - you know, there's some rhythm of the experience that they're modulating, and we do this subconsciously. I think you can do the same with coffee or tea. I don't think it's inherent. But for me, writing, sipping coffee is, you know, really helpful. I didn't feel the same when I was doing that, certainly with herbal tea. You know, I say in the book, what masterpiece has ever been produced on chamomile tea?

 

(LAUGHTER)

[y66]

From She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away by Franz Lidz at NYT:

 

“For my parents, the rainforest station was a sanctuary, a place of peace and harmony, isolated and sublimely beautiful,” Dr. Diller said. “I feel the same way. The jungle was my real teacher. I learned to use old Indian trails as shortcuts and lay out a system of paths with a compass and folding ruler to orient myself in the thick bush. The jungle is as much a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash.”

 

Before 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic restricted international air travel, Dr. Diller made a point of visiting the nature preserve twice a year on monthlong expeditions. Much of her administrative work involves keeping industrial and agricultural development at bay. She estimates that as much as 17 percent of Amazonia has been deforested, and laments that vanishing ice, fluctuating rain patterns and global warming — the average temperature at Panguana has risen by 4 degrees Celsius in the past 30 years — are causing its wetlands to shrink. A recent study published in the journal Science Advances warned that the rainforest may be nearing a dangerous tipping point.

 

“After 20 percent, there is no possibility of recovery,” Dr. Diller said, grimly. “You could expect a major forest dieback and a rather sudden evolution to something else, probably a degraded savanna. That would lead to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the preservation of the Peruvian rainforest is so urgent and necessary.”

 

Under Dr. Diller’s stewardship, Panguana has increased its outreach to neighboring Indigenous communities by providing jobs, bankrolling a new schoolhouse and raising awareness about the short- and long-term effects of human activity on the rainforest’s biodiversity and climate change.

 

“The key is getting the surrounding population to commit to preserving and protecting its environment,” she said. “Species and climate protection will only work if the locals are integrated into the projects, have a benefit for their already modest living conditions and the cooperation is transparent.” And so she plans to go back, and continue returning, once air travel allows.

[pilowsky]

Yesterday I was unable to do my banking because Akamai technology broke the internet.

Fortunately, they had a backup computer - here is a rather prolix description of it. http://bit.ly/WaterComputer.

[y66]

Good read: Noah Smith interviews Marc Andreessen

[y66]

From William Poundstone's review of "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson

 

Von Neumann was no stereotypical mathematician. He was urbane, witty, wealthy and (literally) entitled. At his 1926 doctoral exam, the mathematician David Hilbert is said to have asked but one question: “Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?” He had never seen such beautiful evening clothes.

[kenberg]

From William Poundstone's review of "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson

 

 

 

Thank you.I will buy it. I will even read it.

 

While I was in high school I toured Remington Rand in Minneapolis. This would have been in 1955 or 1956. Huge vacuum tube computers.

 

A couple of years later I was in college taking a programming course. The review cited above speaks of using numbers both as numbers and commands. Yep. And locations. The idea was to take a number stored in one location, add it to a number stored in another location, and ut the result in a third location. So the command to add was part of what was written in numbers, then the various addresses where the various numbers were to be found.

 

This was all done by punch cards in binary. We would write up the sequenceof commands and give the list to a secretary. To make life easier, the secretary learned how to convert octal to binary, so we could write our programs in octal.

 

 

I can't quite say that I was there at the beginning, but thinking back at what was so stunning in the mid-50s and what it has all come to is a kick.

 

Von Neumann and Turing and Godel. No fiction writer could make this up.

 

A completely irrelevant personal note. Remington Rand was a computer tour. Earlier in life, I toured the Ford Motor Company and the Pepsi-Cola bottling company. And a sewage treatment plant. I remember it all as a lot of fun.

 

I look forward to reading this book. Thanks again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[y66]

The Plaid’s signature trick: the instant, seamless, soft-singing surge of scarcely endurable thrust, from whenever, until you see Jesus. On a deserted road in Nevada, I romped it from a slow roll to 160 mph in less than 18 seconds and I wasn’t even at 100%. Good brakes, too.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/2021-tesla-model-s-plaid-feel-the-force0-60-in-2-seconds-11624562135?mod=hp_featst_pos3

[y66]

Past, present and future walk into a bar. The situation was tense.

[Winstonm]

Past, present and future walk into a bar. The situation was tense.

 

But was it perfect?

[Winstonm]

Donald Rumsfield passes into the known unknown.

[y66]

re: kids and grandkids, I love this this line from Giri/Haji:

 

It's a long walk around the garden of my pride.

The protagonist mentions it to describe his feelings for his rebellious teenage daughter and adds that his mother used to say these words about his brother but never him. :)

 

The writing is uneven but there are some really good performances. On Netflix.

[y66]

Zaila Avant-garde, the winner of the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

 

Ms. Avant-garde has also set Guinness world records for her

.

 

More.

[y66]

I don't want nothin', just all you got to give.