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peterconnelly

Debunking 3 Viral Rumors About the Texas Shooting - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.
  • Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.
  • he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.
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  • Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.
  • where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.
  • “There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”
  • On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”
  • False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.
  • “Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”
Javier E

Nepal Bans TikTok, Saying It Disturbs 'Social Harmony' - WSJ - 0 views

  • NEW DELHI—Nepal is banning TikTok over concerns that the video platform is “disturbing social harmony,
  • “Through social-media platform TikTok, there’s a continuous dissemination of content disturbing our social harmony and family structures,” said Sharma.
  • Nepal has faced increasing problems with TikTok, including cases of cyberbullying,
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  • Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.
  • Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.
  • India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.
  • Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.
Javier E

Football and racist language: Reclaiming the Y-word | The Economist - 0 views

  • Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.
Javier E

Break All the Rules - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
Javier E

The Science Behind 'They All Look Alike to Me' - The New York Times - 1 views

  • the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.
  • It is not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between people of another race. It is the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often struggle to do the same for others.
  • That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate
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  • Psychologists say that starting when they are infants and young children, people become attuned to the key facial features and characteristics of the those around them. Whites often become accustomed to focusing on differences in hair color and eye color. African-Americans grow more familiar with subtle shadings of skin color.
  • Minorities tend to be better at cross-race identification than whites, Professor Meissner said, in part because they have more extensive and meaningful exposure to whites than the other way around.
  • Professor Malpass, who has trained police officers and border patrol agents, urges law enforcement agencies to make sure black or Hispanic officers are involved when creating lineups of black and Hispanic suspects. And he warns of the dangers of relying on cross-racial identifications from eyewitnesses, who can be fallible.
  • “I don’t think we should be offended,” he said. “This is really an ability issue.
Megan Flanagan

Paris ringleader directed killers in Bataclan theater - CNN.com - 0 views

  • ringleader of the Paris attacks last month appears to have directed the three terrorists inside the Bataclan theater by phone from a few blocks away,
  • Abdelhamid Abaaoud standing in a doorway yelling into his phone for about an hour.
  • Abaaoud's head was shaved and he was wearing layers of loose clothing, but when photographs were later published in the media the witness immediately recognized him and alerted the authorities.
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  • "the presence of Abaaoud in the immediate vicinity of the attacks provides an indication of his degree of implication in the supervision and control of the plot, and suggests he was giving direct orders and instructions to his team inside the Bataclan."
  • right until the moment the three suicide bombers at the Stade de France started blowing themselves up.
  • Abaaoud's phone was geo-located in the vicinity of the attacks between 10:28pm and 12:28am that night, inlcuding in proximity to the Bataclan before the attack was over.
  • Abaaoud had previously appeared in videos produced by ISIS
  • He was killed five days later when police raided an apartment in the Paris district of St. Denis
  • Salah Abdeslam, who drove three of the suicide bombers to the Stade de France, is still being sought.
  • Abdeslam and Abaaoud are believed to have planned and co-ordinated the attacks. Abdeslam had made several trips between the French and Belgian capitals in September and October, and he had also traveled to Italy, Hungary and Austria.
  • Paris attacks have focused attention on the substantial French contingent within ISIS
  • Fabien Clain -- who is now thought to be a senior figure within ISIS according to Brisard.
  • "More than 2,000 French citizens and residents are involved in Syrian and Iraqi jihadi networks. Among them, 600 are believed to be fighting alongside terrorist organizations abroad and 250 are believed to have returned," he says.
  • Abaaoud had been in contact with that group by cell phone from Greece, according to investigators.
  • rench foreign fighter told investigators he had attended a training camp for a week in Raqqa, ISIS' headquarters in Syria, before being told by Abaaoud to launch an attack
  • "Abaaoud had provided him a USB stick containing encryption software and 2,000 euros,"
  • Paris attacks "demonstrated major failures in European border control policy and the exchange of information between European Union member states.
proudsa

More Than 3,700 Migrants Rescued In Mediterranean - 0 views

  • Italy's coastguard
  • 3,700 migrants from overcrowded and unsafe boats in the last two days
  • 18 different boats
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  • six rescue operations
  • traveling in a fishing boat and five rubber dinghies
  • Authorities also brought ashore a corpse in a metal coffin
  • shot dead
  • Sicilian court is investigating the death
  • waves of migrants arriving in overcrowded boats from North Africa
  • Italy
  • trying to convince the EU to help
  • EU this year agreed to triple funding for sea rescues off the coasts of Italy and Greece
  • deeply divided
  • manage the migrants once they come ashore
  • distribute 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers
  • Commission pla
  • "hot spots"
  • identify migrants and refugees
  • calls for those
  • France is increasingly turning back migrants
  • thousands of new boat arrivals each week
  • Italy's train stations
  • Rome and Milan
  • 100 migrants have been sleeping rough along the Italy-France border for almost two weeks
proudsa

UN: World's Refugees And Displaced To Exceed 60 Million This Year - 0 views

  • The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, the United Nations said on Friday.
  • Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first half of the year, it said.
  • Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the lion's share of the refugees, the report said, warning about growing "resentment" and "politicization of refugees."
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  • Syria's civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of mid-year, UNHCR said.
  • Many refugees will live in exile for years to come, it said. "In effect, if you become a refugee today your chances of going home are lower than at any time in more than 30 years."
proudsa

CDC Director Calls It 'Shameful' This Curable Disease Still Kills Millions - 0 views

  • "Drug-resistant tuberculosis threatens to reverse the gains that we've made. It's not just the threat overseas, it's the threat here,"
  • Drug-resistant tuberculosis knows no borders, and we risk turning the clock back on antibiotics and making it very difficult for us to stop tuberculosis from spreading around the world and in this country if we don't improve our control efforts.
  • We do prioritize addressing MDR-TB. We have done that for more than 20 years; that's why we've been able to drastically reduce U.S. cases of MDR-TB.
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  • How will you and the CDC help ensure a well-executed program?
  • Right, and one of the things that will help tuberculosis control is the test and treat approach, and increasing the proportion of HIV-positive people that are treated. The majority of TB cases currently occur before people are started on anti-HIV medicines.
  • Partly it's the characteristic of the bacteria: You require long-term treatment for many months, we don't have a vaccine as we do with measles or polio, but partly it's the nature of the control program.
  • Fundamentally, what happens with tuberculosis will depend on two things. First, how well we implement what we know today, and second, how quickly we get better tools to stop tuberculosis.
  • If we could figure out which of them are going to develop active TB and provide shorter, more effective treatments for them, then we might really be able to knock down tuberculosis cases.
kortanekev

Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue | Color Perception - 0 views

  • Anyone with normal color vision agrees that blood is roughly the same color as strawberries, cardinals and the planet Mars. That is, they're all red. But could it be that what you call "red" is someone else's "blue"?
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    An example of personal knowledge vs. shared knowledge-- e.g. is my green someone else's yellow? (Evie Kortanek 9/21/16)
Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Wa... - 0 views

  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
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  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
maxwellokolo

Woman busted smuggling refugee in suitcase - 0 views

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    Authorities stopped the 22-year-old woman last week at a border crossing into Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves in North Africa, from neighboring Morocco. A 19-year-old migrant from Gabon was found concealed inside. The man was immediately offered medical attention due to the lack of oxygen inside the compact travel bag, Spain's Civil Guard said in a statement.
Javier E

Quitters Never Win: The Costs of Leaving Social Media - Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Seling... - 2 views

  • Manjoo offers this security-centric path for folks who are anxious about the service being "one the most intrusive technologies ever built," and believe that "the very idea of making Facebook a more private place borders on the oxymoronic, a bit like expecting modesty at a strip club". Bottom line: stop tuning in and start dropping out if you suspect that the culture of oversharing, digital narcissism, and, above all, big-data-hungry, corporate profiteering will trump privacy settings.
  • Angwin plans on keeping a bare-bones profile. She'll maintain just enough presence to send private messages, review tagged photos, and be easy for readers to find. Others might try similar experiments, perhaps keeping friends, but reducing their communication to banal and innocuous expressions. But, would such disclosures be compelling or sincere enough to retain the technology's utility?
  • The other unattractive option is for social web users to willingly pay for connectivity with extreme publicity.
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  • go this route if you believe privacy is dead, but find social networking too good to miss out on.
  • While we should be attuned to constraints and their consequences, there are at least four problems with conceptualizing the social media user's dilemma as a version of "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen".
  • The efficacy of abandoning social media can be questioned when others are free to share information about you on a platform long after you've left.
  • Second, while abandoning a single social technology might seem easy, this "love it or leave it" strategy -- which demands extreme caution and foresight from users and punishes them for their naivete -- isn't sustainable without great cost in the aggregate. If we look past the consequences of opting out of a specific service (like Facebook), we find a disconcerting and more far-reaching possibility: behavior that justifies a never-ending strategy of abandoning every social technology that threatens privacy -- a can being kicked down the road in perpetuity without us resolving the hard question of whether a satisfying balance between protection and publicity can be found online
  • if your current social network has no obligation to respect the obscurity of your information, what justifies believing other companies will continue to be trustworthy over time?
  • Sticking with the opt-out procedure turns digital life into a paranoid game of whack-a-mole where the goal is to stay ahead of the crushing mallet. Unfortunately, this path of perilously transferring risk from one medium to another is the direction we're headed if social media users can't make reasonable decisions based on the current context of obscurity, but instead are asked to assume all online social interaction can or will eventually lose its obscurity protection.
  • The fourth problem with the "leave if you're unhappy" ethos is that it is overly individualistic. If a critical mass participates in the "Opt-Out Revolution," what would happen to the struggling, the lonely, the curious, the caring, and the collaborative if the social web went dark?
  • Our point is that there is a middle ground between reclusion and widespread publicity, and the reduction of user options to quitting or coping, which are both problematic, need not be inevitable, especially when we can continue exploring ways to alleviate the user burden of retreat and the societal cost of a dark social web.
  • it is easy to presume that "even if you unfriend everybody on Facebook, and you never join Twitter, and you don't have a LinkedIn profile or an About.me page or much else in the way of online presence, you're still going to end up being mapped and charted and slotted in to your rightful place in the global social network that is life." But so long it remains possible to create obscurity through privacy enhancing technology, effective regulation, contextually appropriate privacy settings, circumspect behavior, and a clear understanding of how our data can be accessed and processed, that fatalism isn't justified.
Javier E

Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | Wired Science | Wired... - 1 views

  • I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.
  • He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.
  • Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.
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  • Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).
  • The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).
  • Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?
  • Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.
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maxwellokolo

A nation of immigrants enters dark chapter - 1 views

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    Virtually everyone who is in the country without documentation is now eligible for deportation, and some in an expedited fashion. These memos, signed by DHS Secretary John Kelly, were rolled out on Tuesday. There are two memos at issue here; one dealing with interior immigration enforcement, and the other with border security.
dicindioha

Why coal-fired power handouts would be an attack on climate and common sense | Environm... - 0 views

  • The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
  • According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.
  • Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).
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  • The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
    • dicindioha
       
      This claim seems a bit extreme, saying that the only people still interested in coal are in the coal industry. It might be true, but I also feel as if some people do not think of where their power source comes from.
  • In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
  • “As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”
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    This article is really interesting because I think it goes to show that there is still some side of the global warming/climate change argument that is making progress. As we learned today, it is important to walk that middle line between over-skepticism and gullibility. Here people recognize that coal emissions are bad, and countries are taking a stand to try and lower that. It does make me wonder though what the future with coal holds, and if one day, we really will resort to renewable energy. It seems increasingly important. One more interesting thing I found was the use of the graphs to support the information, for graphs used to seem to me something people trust, but now I realize we have survival instincts associated even with data, and I wonder if some people would remark this as "fake news."
Javier E

The Greatness of Ron Paul - Robert Wright - Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value. It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.
  • A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to American ones
  • I've long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of "moral imagination"--the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.
Javier E

"Wikipedia Is Not Truth" - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • entriesOnPage.push("6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c"); facebookButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; twitterButtons['6a00d83451c45669e20168e7872016970c'] = ''; email permalink 20 Feb 2012 12:30 PM "Wikipedia Is Not Truth" Timothy Messer-Kruse tried to update the Wiki page on the Haymarket riot of 1886 to correct a long-standing inaccurate claim. Even though he's written two books and numerous articles on the subject, his changes were instantly rejected: I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles. One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views."
  • "Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. ...  Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."
Javier E

New Statesman - All machine and no ghost? - 0 views

  • More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse. They are collapsers rather than deniers. Though not avowedly eliminative, this kind of view is tacitly a rejection of the very existence of consciousness
  • it occurred to me that the problem might lie not in nature but in ourselves: we just don't have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery. Ontologically, matter and consciousness are woven intelligibly together but epistemologically we are precluded from seeing how. I used Noam Chomsky's notion of "mysteries of nature" to describe the situation as I saw it. Soon, I was being labelled (by Owen Flanagan) a "mysterian"
  • Dualism makes the mind too separate, thereby precluding intelligible interaction and dependence.
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  • At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion
  • idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit?
  • pan­psychism: even the lowliest of material things has a streak of sentience running through it, like veins in marble. Not just parcels of organic matter, such as lizards and worms, but also plants and bacteria and water molecules and even electrons. Everything has its primitive feelings and minute allotment of sensation.
  • The trouble with panpsychism is that there just isn't any evidence of the universal distribution of consciousness in the material world.
  • The dualist, by contrast, freely admits that consciousness exists, as well as matter, holding that reality falls into two giant spheres. There is the physical brain, on the one hand, and the conscious mind, on the other: the twain may meet at some point but they remain distinct entities.
  • The more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it's just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity - all machine and no ghost.
  • mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding
  • The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden. How everything fits together is particularly elusive, perhaps reflecting the disparate cognitive faculties we bring to bear on the world (the senses, introspection, mathematical description). We are far from obtaining a unified theory of all being and there is no guarantee that such a theory is accessible by finite human intelligence.
  • real naturalism begins with a proper perspective on our specifically human intelligence. Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?
  • The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would reg
  • rd as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history - as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.
Duncan H

Egypt's Step Backward - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now — after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution — these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.
  • Egypt is running out of foreign reserves, its currency is falling, inflation is rising and unemployment is rampant. Yet the priority of a few retrograde Mubarak holdovers is to put on trial staffers from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are allied with the two main U.S. political parties, as well as from Freedom House and some European groups. Their crime was trying to teach Egypt’s young democrats how to monitor elections and start parties to engage in the very democratic processes that the Egyptian Army set up after Mubarak’s fall. Thousands of Egyptians had participated in their seminars in recent years.
  • It is the tendency to look for dignity in all the wrong places — to look for dignity not by building up the capacity of Egypt’s talented young people so they can thrive in the 21st century — with better schools, better institutions, export industries and more accountable government. No, it is the tendency to go for dignity on the cheap “by standing up to the foreigners.”
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  • After 30 years of Mubarak rule and some $50 billion in U.S. aid, 33 percent of men and 56 percent of women in Egypt still can’t read or write.
  • What is her priority? Is it to end illiteracy? Is it to articulate a new vision about how Egypt can engage with the world and thrive in the 21st century? Is it to create a positive climate for foreign investors to create jobs desperately needed by young Egyptians? No, it’s to fall back on that golden oldie — that all of Egypt’s problems are the fault of outsiders who want to destabilize Egypt. So let’s jail some Western democracy consultants. That will restore Egypt’s dignity.
  • Not surprisingly, some members of the U.S. Congress are talking about cutting off the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives Egypt’s army if these Americans are actually thrown in prison.
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    Cutting off aid would seem to make an already unstable situation more dangerous.
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