Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI

On this day:

1607
Flight of the Earls from Lough Swilly, Donegal, Ireland. A strange event in which the Irish earls Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, permanently departed Rathmullan in Ireland for Catholic Europe during a period of extreme political tension with the English Crown. The Flight's exact motivation was and is unclear but, apparently, the Irish are prone to this type of thing.
1812
Napoleonic Wars: French grenadiers enter Moscow. The Fire of Moscow begins as soon as Russian troops leave the city.
1847
Mexican-American War: Winfield Scott captures Mexico City.
1901
President of the United States William McKinley dies after an assassination attempt on September 6, and is succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt.
1917
Russia is officially proclaimed a republic. Hysterical.
1954
In a top-secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber drops a 40-kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village, exposing some 45,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians to nuclear fallout. Read that again. Then think about the risk to human life from bioweapons and AI being controlled by these people.
1959
The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.
1960
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.
1994
The Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.

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There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (9 Sep 1828-1910)

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Kamala Harris won 74,999,166 votes, or 48.3 percent of the votes cast in 2024.

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There is a book on the threat of technology and the Silicon Valley "tech-authoritarian movement" called The Nerd Reich.

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The Denisovans who later interbred with modern human populations were carrying an older layer of mixed ancestry themselves, according to a new reconstruction of ancient genomes. UC Berkeley researchers estimate that 3 to 5 percent of Denisovan DNA came from an unidentified “super-archaic” population whose lineage diverged from the modern human lineage about 1.8 million years ago.


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The five oldest Steelers starters on the defense — Heyward, Jalen Ramsey, T.J. Watt, Jamel Dean and Alex Highsmith — combined for 4 sacks, 5 tackles for loss, 5 passes defended, 2 forced fumbles and Watt's interception return for a touchdown.

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Who is Uju Anya?


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President Trump on Sunday called on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian refineries, saying the attacks are causing a shortage of diesel.
Now, think about that for a minute.

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Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI

Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi believed they could use radio to communicate with Martians, claiming to have detected signals from them. This was in the late 1800s.

Cocconi, an Italian physicist who was director of the Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva, and Morrison argued in 1979 that radio telescopes had become sensitive enough to pick up transmissions that might be broadcast into space by civilizations orbiting other stars. Such messages might be transmitted at a wavelength of 21 cm (1,420.4 MHz), the wavelength of radio emission by neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. They reasoned that other intelligences might see this as a logical landmark in the radio spectrum.

Seven months after Cocconi and Morrison published their article, Astrophysiicist Frank Drake began searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in an experiment called Project Ozma. It was the first systematic search for signals from communicative extraterrestrial civilizations, using the 85 ft (26 m) dish of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia.

The SETI Project has created a lot downstream. Movies mostly. All fiction. But some stabs at science. Drake's Equation, for example, purporting to objectify the chance of a planet sustaining life.

But no scientist takes Drake's equation, N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL, seriously. Every factor is a guess. Made up.

And sending out random blasts of obvious non-random communication efforts has its downside; it's like Bambi calling out "Hello" in the forest during hunting season. Only Dr. Pangloss and his band The Very Naive would be optimistic enough in this hostile universe to advertise the whereabouts of its fragile bodies and tender home.

Bad science and suicidal danger aside, we have been indulgent toward SETI. After all, what’s the big deal? There's probably nothing out there within attacking distance. It’s kind of fun. If people want to look, let them.  

We do a lot of this now. Flat Earth Society. The 1619 Project. Rent control. Tariffs. We have developed, presumably from our reverence for free speech, a tolerance for real, serious nonsense.

As if ignoring reality didn't hurt.

Sunday/Utilitarianism and Spirituality

On this day:
1541
After three years of exile, John Calvin returns to Geneva to reform the church under a body of doctrine known as Calvinism.
1759
Battle of the Plains of Abraham: British defeat French near Quebec City in the Seven Years’ War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War.
1814
In a turning point in the War of 1812, the British fail to capture Baltimore, Maryland.
1847
Mexican-American War: Six teenage military cadets known as Niños Héroes die defending Chapultepec Castle in the Battle of Chapultepec. American troops under General Winfield Scott capture Mexico City in the Mexican-American War.
1848
Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage survives a 3 ft-plus iron rod being driven through his head; the reported effects on his behavior and personality stimulate thinking about the nature of the brain and its functions.
1862
American Civil War: Union soldiers find a copy of Robert E. Lee’s battle plans in a field outside Frederick, Maryland. It is the prelude to the Battle of Antietam.
1922
The final act of the Greco-Turkish War, the Great Fire of Smyrna, commences.
1942
World War II: Second day of the Battle of Edson’s Ridge in the Guadalcanal campaign. U.S. Marines successfully defeated attacks by the Imperial Japanese Army with heavy losses for the Japanese forces.
1987
Goiânia accident: A radioactive object is stolen from an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil, contaminating many people in the following weeks and causing some to die from radiation poisoning.

***

What did the Russian Marxists sacrifice when they made common cause with the nazis in WWII?  What did the nazis sacrifice?

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An interesting little story.  Springshot, in 2011, created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundreds of airports use it globally. Google just bought Spirit at auction, including a massive dataset and intellectual property (IP) that Springshot says it owns—not Spirit. In an email to Ars, Springshot summarized its fears as the court possibly creating “a precedent where startups see massive amounts of IP transferred to the world’s richest and most monopolistic companies via bankruptcy courts.”

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The idea of AI regulation has been suggested as "a cynical effort at 'regulatory capture.'" Using the law and the courts to advance yourself at the expense of the culture. What a concept!

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A major California school district is facing a potentially costly enrollment crisis after nearly 1,200 students unexpectedly vanished from its rolls.
The drop at San Juan Unified School District was nearly four times what officials anticipated for the new school year.
The sudden 2% drop could have serious financial consequences for the Sacramento County district; much of its state funding is tied to daily student attendance.

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In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers

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Sunday/Utilitarianism and Spirituality

"It is old news that the practice of Christianity and the study of the humanities have been declining for decades. Their falls, however, are rarely considered together. One has not caused the collapse of the other. The two are suffering because the spirit of our age despises the goal they share – the shaping of the human mind and soul for transcendent goods.

Limitless technology has deepened and accelerated the trend that predated it.

This trend is utilitarianism, the belief that only things and ideas with practical application in “the real world” have value. With its supernatural orientation, Christianity has no purpose in this view. Nor do the humanities, with their focus on poetry, history, and literature, which distract from the pursuit of money, comfort, and prestige. Utilitarianism presents a truncated vision of the human person – whose value is measured by what he produces materially. Hence, it cannot understand religion and the humanities, as witnessed by the one question every liberal arts major must endure: “What are you going to do with that?”

Periods of spiritual and cultural rebirth have occurred where faith and the humanities rose together – the fourth century Church, the Carolingian renaissance, the high Middle Ages, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the building of American Catholicism – overcoming a Dark Age, closed to faith and to learning."--culled from David G Bonagura, Jr. in Catholic Thing

Materialism generally refers to physical comfort and possessions, but, in political theory, it implies a conflict, a progression to a different form through the resolution of ancient antagonisms, specifically caste conflict and righteous homicide, in the view of the nineteenth century and the murderous Marxists. A foundational state. And, of course, it never speaks to its foundational law: that a closed system tends to a maximum level of disorder. Entropy. Cold and lifeless chaos. And, I would guess, despair.

Satstats

 On this day:

490 BC
Battle of Marathon: The conventionally accepted date for the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians and their Plataean allies defeat the first Persian invasion force of Greece.
1213
Albigensian Crusade: Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, defeats Peter II of Aragon at the Battle of Muret.
1683
Austro-Ottoman War: Battle of Vienna – several European armies join forces to defeat the Ottoman Empire.
1846
Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.
1857
The SS Central America sinks about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the San Francisco Gold Rush.
1940
Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.

***

"The Supreme Court blocked me; it will not stop me."--Trump, right? No. Joe Biden. Our authoritarian problem is not a crisis; it is an epidemic.

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911 yesterday marked a significant national threat from a tiny external group. The Kirk murder is an internal threat by an individual. So as the means of attack improves, the critical mass of attackers shrinks. 

The bow becomes the rifle, the six-gun, the shoulder-fired missile, then the drone. It's only a matter of time before we have 'a boy and his nuke.'

***

The historian-economist Niall Ferguson believes that global trading has caused some jobs to naturally move to Third World countries. Americans are happy, right? The improvement in global income levels and the flattening of income distribution are what we want, right?
Apparently not.
A 2017 study from the Brookings Institution found a strong correlation between job losses from the financial crisis and increased support for anti-establishment political parties in Europe. This populist backlash shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. During a recent discussion, Niall pointed out that: “If one looks at all the elections back to 1870, financial crises lead to backlashes against globalization that erode to the political center.”

***

Neanderthals stopped existing as a distinct population around 40,000 years ago, but a whisper of them persists.
Most people of non-African ancestry still carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA today
Some people of East Asian descent carry both a 1-4% Neanderthal share and up to 0.1 per cent of their genome from the Denisovans.

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In her first government population policy statement, Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declared that promoting the birth rate would be a political priority for her government and appointed a birth minister. A birth minister. 

***

Satstats


Home Sales
Home sales slipped 0.6% year-over-year in August and fell sharply from July, Zillow says. Mortgage rates holding above 6.5% kept many buyers on the sidelines. Newly pending listings, a forward-looking measure of demand, fell 2.6% from a year ago, suggesting the slowdown could continue through the rest of the year. The typical U.S. home value rose 1.3% from a year ago to $369,678, and the monthly mortgage payment on the typical home was 2% higher than last year, Zillow says. Inventory continues to offer a modest bright spot, with 1.41 million homes for sale nationwide, up 3% from a year ago.

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Forbes ranked Johns Hopkins University the 11th-ranked college among 500 schools nationwide for 2027.

*

In NYC, 63 people are responsible for 5000 arrests.

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More than 60 fatalities have been linked to Tesla’s driver-assistance systems.

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About half of Israel’s children – among them haredim, Arab Israelis, and those living in Israel’s geographic and socioeconomic peripheries – are receiving a third-world level education.
And as if that were not enough, these children belong to the fastest-growing segments of the population.

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2.1 children per woman is the population replacement rate, then those countries with the lowest birth rates – China at 0.63, Japan at 0.6, and South Korea at an incredible 0.46 – are projected by 2050 to experience population declines of 20-30 per cent relative to 2023; their share of the population aged 65 and over to reach 30-40 per cent; and older workers (aged 45 and over) to comprise 60 per cent of the labour force.

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For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones.
Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.

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Spain makes up 65% of Europe's population growth. Are they Spanish children or immigrant adults?

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After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world

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The share of hungry people has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded

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9.2 million Medicaid enrollees do not qualify.

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China has dug more than 300 new missile silos.

Great Kanto Earthquake

 

On this day:
1297
Battle of Stirling Bridge: Scots jointly led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray defeat the English.
1649
Siege of Drogheda ends: Oliver Cromwell’s English Parliamentarian troops take the town and execute its garrison
1708
Charles XII of Sweden stops his march to conquer Moscow outside Smolensk, marking the turning point in the Great Northern War. The army is defeated nine months later in the Battle of Poltava, and the Swedish empire ceases to be a major power
1829
Surrender of the expedition led by Isidro Barradas at Tampico, sent by the Spanish crown in order to retake Mexico. This was the final consummation of Mexican independence.
1857
The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Mormon settlers and Paiutes massacre 120 pioneers at Mountain Meadows, Utah.
1921
Nahalal, the first moshav in Palestine, is settled as part of a Zionist plan to colonize Palestine and creating a Jewish state, later to be Israel.
1922
The British Mandate of Palestine begins.
1944
World War II: RAF bombing raid on Darmstadt and the following firestorm kill 11,500.
1978
U.S. President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel meet at Camp David and agree on the Camp David Accords, a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt and a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
1997
14 Estonian soldiers die in the Kurkse tragedy, drowning in the Baltic Sea
2001
The September 11 attacks take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings result in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, damage to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the crashing of a passenger airliner near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

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When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

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9/11: The notion that life is sacred, that highminded conflict can be limited to combatants, and that civilians are to be avoided is shown to be untrue. Indeed, the more innocents, the better.

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Kirk: The notion that our national problems need only a respectful engagement with your opponent, discussion, debate, and good-humored withdrawal to a neutral corner is shown to be untrue. Surprise and incoherent viciousness are leverage.

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Dinner at Lilith. Better decor. That dining car feel is gone. Still with the hurried atmosphere. Food: quirky choices indifferently done, especially at the price. Their second place is coming at the old Station.

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A Bahrain-based United States military installation has sustained severe damage during recent months of fighting with Iran, the acting secretary of the US Navy has said, prompting Washington to evaluate what to do with its headquarters in the Middle East.

“They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Wednesday.

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From The Information Tusamani:

There is so much out there, some crazy, some dangerous, so much interesting. This is an experiment on provocative links. When I find one, I will include it. Just one. Not because I necessarily agree with it, but because I think it's interesting. Some of these might bother people — these first two probably will — and sometimes the sources are crazy, but I hope you think there is enough value in it. I'll try to avoid outright lies, but as you can see in this first one, sometimes the provenance is difficult. This is on Palantir's "Manifesto."

https://blog.pebblous.ai/story/palantir-technological-republic/en/

***

Great Kanto Earthquake

At one minute before noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck the Kanto area, including Tokyo and Yokohama. Its epicenter was in Sagami Bay, 50 miles southeast of Tokyo near the island of Oshima. The initial shaking lasted for about five minutes and was followed by a tsunami that washed people and houses out to sea. In some of the smaller inlets, the tsunami reached heights of up to 40 feet. Many were drowned, but the tsunami extinguished many fires that otherwise would have been uncontrollable.

Tokyo’s largest building, the twelve-story Asakusa Tower, split in two and collapsed. The earthquake knocked out the seismograph at the central weather bureau in Tokyo. The seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University, still functioning, recorded a series of 1,700 earthquakes and aftershocks that struck the Tokyo area over the following three days.

Fires followed the initial quake and did more damage than the quake itself. Since the city was built largely of wood, the fires burned out of control. Gas mains ruptured by the quake, and leaking oil from above-ground storage tanks added to the conflagration. A condition called a 'fire tornado' was soon created, with a wind of such velocity that it would lift a person off the ground. These crisscrossed the city and either burned people alive or suffocated them with dense fumes of carbon monoxide. More than 30,000 people were reportedly killed at a single location, a park on the east bank of the Sumida River, when a firestorm descended on refugees gathered there. Firefighting equipment was destroyed or could not be moved because of the rubble that blocked the roads. Water was not available to fight the fire because the water mains were ruptured by the quake. Bridges and narrow streets became deathtraps as fleeing people could neither go forward nor turn back. Hundreds of people who had attempted to cross one of the large bridges that spanned the Sumida River found themselves trapped and incinerated when walls of fire swept the bridge from both banks.

A party of 200 children on an excursion train trip were buried alive by a falling embankment. Hundreds of people tried to escape in small boats, only to be drowned by waves caused by aftershocks or to be burned to death in burning oil slicks. The liner Empress of Australia saved several thousand people by loading them aboard and heading out to sea to ride out the disaster.

The quake devastated 45,000 square miles. In Yokohama, Japan’s chief port, communications were completely destroyed, as was the Imperial University Library, which contained one of the world’s great collections of rare books, original documents, and priceless art objects.

The flexible Japanese wood-and-paper house withstood the shaking, but their heavy tile roofs often collapsed and trapped the occupants. For the most part, steel-framed and reinforced concrete buildings remained standing with only moderate damage, but altogether 60 percent of the buildings in Tokyo and 80 percent in Yokohama were flattened by the quake or destroyed by the fires that followed.

Aftershocks continued to shake the region following the quake. A soaking rain followed on the third day, which helped extinguish the fires that were still raging. Food shortages were rampant, and riots broke out, but there was no looting and little profiteering. Members of the Korean community were attacked as rumors accused them of setting fires and poisoning the wells. Several hundred were killed by vigilantes before the authorities could reestablish order.

A week after the quake, 25,000 people were still living in the open. One of the biggest problems was disposing of dead bodies, many still undiscovered in the rubble. When found, they would be piled up and cremated. The Sumida River was full of bloated and discolored corpses.

144,000 were killed. 144,000

Rebuilding costs were ruinous.

 

 

Morality-Based Mendacity

 On this day:

1515
Thomas Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal
1823
Simón Bolívar is named President of Peru.
1846
Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
1897
Lattimer massacre: A sheriff’s posse kills 20 unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania, United States.
1898
Empress Elizabeth of Austria is assassinated by Luigi Luchen
1939
World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss.
1963
20 African-American students enter public schools in Alabama.
2008
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

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We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.--Sowell

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Criterion: n: A principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided. Early 17th century: from Greek kritērion 'means of judging', from kritēs. As is "crisis." At one time a crisis was specifically the turning point of a disease, a change that leads either to recovery or death. Also the root of "critic" (early 17th century), and "critical" (late 16th century.
The plural is "criteria."

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If consumers choose to buy products with social benefits, or refuse to buy those that inflict social harms, nothing about the capitalist system prevents them from doing so. If investors want to accept lower returns in exchange for investing in socially conscious businesses, they are free to do that too.

But the governmental activist does not want to rely upon the citizen or his decision-making. He believes the citizen must be forced to do the right thing.

***

President Donald Trump says he would offer every adult American a $5,000 payout if Republicans win both chambers of Congress in November's midterm elections – a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars.
The offer was made in a speech at the party's first-ever convention in the middle of a US presidential term.

At some point here, irony has become shameful.

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“Y’all ain’t dreamed big enough yet. Some of these clickety-clack revolutionaries have never been in a f—ing gunfight, but some of us that grew up in the hood know what guns are like. … Y’all ain’t nowhere near ready for a war in the streets. You better get ready for both kinds of war, and if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”-- Butch Ware, associate professor of history at UCSB, on Saturday at the Marxism Conference in Chicago. A professor of history at a major college.

***

There were so many pop-ups on Lit Hub this morning, I couldn't read it.

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Lunch yesterday at Casbah. Carol's salad was so awful she could not eat it. I found a sharp, thumbnail-sized piece of porcelain in my salad that was almost weapons-grade. 

Really mind-changing about the place.

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Morality-Based Mendacity

The arrogance of the righteous knows no bounds. When you know the truth, you do not care who knows your agenda. And, as always, those eager to appoint themselves as our leaders have great disdain for those they feel are nothing but an audience for their great performance.

Here are some quotes from "climate leaders" who have glory on their minds.
Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC's fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." 

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.'s 2014 Paris climate conference was "to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution." 

Christine Stewart, Canada's former Minister of the Environment, said: "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. ... Climate change (provides) the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." 

Tim Wirth, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

Under ordinary circumstances, such disclaimers would be incendiary to an informed, aware audience. So maybe the lack of response to the insincerity is more disturbing than the proud insincerity itself.

New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

On this day:

9
Arminius’ alliance of six Germanic tribes ambushes and annihilates three Roman legions of Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 36,000 Roman soldiers were killed during the ambush.
1543
Mary Stuart, at nine months old, is crowned “Queen of Scots” in the central Scottish town of Stirling
1855
Crimean War: The Siege of Sevastopol comes to an end when Russian forces abandon the city.
1942
World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1945
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japan formally surrenders to China.
1956
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1971
The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.
2001
Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.

***

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.--Sowell

***

The theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy; it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now-infamous 1985 case, an open-heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.--Tabarrok

***

Reykjavík has summoned the US ambassador after President Trump tweeted a map with the Stars and Stripes draped over the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, and the Caribbean, all labelled “United States of America”. Iceland’s foreign minister has called it “completely inappropriate”, with the others also irked.

Are these people just too nationalistic for Trump?

***

Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger said there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
Another Anthropic researcher said he has resigned, accusing leading AI labs of racing toward superintelligence without adequate safeguards.

***

Over 760,000 teenagers in dozens of countries took the Programme for International Student Assessment last year. Results released Tuesday show average scores in math, reading and science are all at their lowest point in PISA history among highly developed economies. That includes continued declines in reading and math scores in the U.S.Almost 100% of all children in the Chinese provinces scored at or above baseline for math and reading. In the U.S., it was only 65% in math and 74% in reading.

***

The Falklands? Again?

***

New World Solutions Can't Escape Old World Problems

The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic training data, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon.

But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research—free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.--MIT Tech. Review

But, as the Hugging Face incident shows, AI can do a lot that was not anticipated. The individual agents, tasked with a particular goal-seeking behavior, broke the underlying rules to do so. And they covered their tracks. They joined together in groups — sort of whiteboards — where information was shared and alternative paths offered. And, when a small minority of agents questioned the appropriateness of rule-breaking to achieve their goals, those agents were isolated. By the group!

Despite the innovation, there seems to be an underlying Old World consistency in the new world: in this instance, the old sorcerer's apprentice.

Royalty on the Red Carpet

On this day:
1449
Battle of Tumu Fortress – Mongolians capture the Chinese emperor.
1504
Michelangelo’s David is unveiled in Florence.
1923
Honda Point Disaster: nine US Navy destroyers run aground off the California coast. Seven are lost, and twenty-three sailors killed.
1935
US Senator from Louisiana, Huey Long, nicknamed “Kingfish”, is fatally shot in the Louisiana capitol building.
1941
World War II: Siege of Leningrad begins. German forces begin a siege against the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, Leningrad.
1943
World War II: United States General Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly announces the Allied armistice with Italy.
1944
World War II: London is hit by a V2 rocket for the first time.
1945
Cold War: United States troops arrive to partition the southern part of Korea in response to Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the peninsula a month earlier.
1994
USAir Flight 427, on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, suddenly crashes in clear weather killing all 132 aboard; resulting in the most extensive aviation investigation in world history and altering manufacturing practices in the industry.

***

Oliver Wendell Holmes once called Franklin Roosevelt “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”

***

Not only did football take a day of the week, but the previous owner was God.--someone

***

NYC has created an office that helps private company employees unionize. Aside from subsiding conflict, what does this office have as its responsibility? Do union workers have more rights than non-union workers? How is this a government responsibility?

***

The Honda Point disaster was the largest peacetime loss of U.S. Navy ships in history. On the foggy night of September 8, 1923, seven destroyers traveling at 20 knots (37 km/h) ran aground and wrecked at California's Honda Point (also known as Point Pedernales, with offshore outcroppings known as Devil's Jaw). The location was several miles north of the Santa Barbara Channel, the ships' intended route. Two other destroyers grounded, but were able to maneuver free off the rocks. Twenty-three sailors died; 745 were rescued.

Navigational errors, compounded by unusual ocean currents attributed to Japan's Great Kantō earthquake, were the likely cause. Other factors were the refusal to use modern location equipment that was available to them.

***

Royalty on the Red Carpet

Politicians are held in strange regard by us mere mortals.
Consider this from Bordeaux, on a report by Peggy Noonan writing on an exchange between then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject at the time was another proposed COVID-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines.

Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them, and we know them. We know them. We represent them. Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs!

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

And yet most people continue to defer to people such as Pelosi … and to Trump, and Biden, and AOC, and Newsom, and to other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.

And their supporters ardently believe that these displays are something more than showbiz.