‘He’s a war criminal’: Elite Putin security officer defects

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hes-war-criminal-elite-putin-security-officer-defects-98350058

LONDON -- On Oct. 14, a Russian engineer named Gleb Karakulov boarded a flight from Kazakhstan to Turkey with his wife and daughter. He switched off his phone to shut out the crescendo of urgent, enraged messages, said goodbye to his life in Russia and tried to calm his fast-beating heart.

But this was no ordinary Russian defector. Karakulov was an officer in President Vladimir Putin’s secretive elite personal security service — one of the few Russians to flee and go public who have rank, as well as knowledge of intimate details of Putin’s life and potentially classified information.

Karakulov, who was responsible for secure communications, said moral opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his fear of dying there drove him to speak out, despite the risks to himself and his family. He said he hoped to inspire other Russians to speak out also.

“Our president has become a war criminal,” he said. “It is time to end this war and stop being silent.”

The age of average

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

This, however, was the point. The art was not the paintings themselves, but the comment they made. We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit....

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

 

After a 1935 tragedy, a priest vowed to teach kids about menstruation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/25/florida-schools-bill-menstruation-crisis-suicide-hotline-mcclain/

Nine decades ago, a 13-year-old girl’s death by suicide after getting her first period sparked an effort to educate kids about their bodies to prevent fear and confusion — a once-settled issue that new legislation in Florida is resurfacing.

That teenage girl in 1935, who had never been taught about menstruation, thought her period was a “terribly shameful, retributive disease,” says one account of the history. The fact that this British girl who believed she had a venereal disease had no one to teach her about her body, and no one to talk to, deeply impacted Chad Varah, the 23-year-old deacon who officiated her burial.

Standing over her grave, Varah, who later became a priest, promised to devote his life to battling ignorance and despair about sexual issues.

The Legacy of inBloom

https://datasociety.net/pubs/ecl/InBloom_feb_2017.pdf

Many people in the area of educational technology still discuss the story of inBloom. InBloom was an ambitious edtech initiative funded in 2011, launched in 2013, and ended in 2014. We asked ourselves why the story of inBloom is important, and conducted a year-long case study to find the answer. For some, inBloom’s story is one of contradiction: the initiative began with unprecedented scope and resources. And yet, its decline was swift and public. What caused a $100 million initiative with technical talent and political support to close in just one year? A key factor was the combination of the public’s low tolerance for risk and uncertainty and the inBloom initiative’s failure to communicate the benefits of its platform and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders. InBloom’s public failure to achieve its ambitions catalyzed discussions of student data privacy across the education ecosystem, resulting in student data privacy legislation, an industry pledge, and improved analysis of the risks and opportunities of student data use. It also surfaced the public’s low tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and the vulnerability of large-scale projects to public backlash. Any future U. S. edtech project will have to contend with the legacy of inBloom, and so this research begins to analyze exactly what that legacy is. 

Saved from the grave (2005)

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9666591

Years after her death, the record keeping of a forensic scientist is freeing innocent men in Virginia.

‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/mar/25/suzanne-heywood-round-the-world-sailing-trip-stolen-childhood

Almost without thinking, I picked it up, flicked through its pages and dialled the number for Childline.

“I don’t understand,” said the counsellor. “Where are your parents?”

“They’ve gone sailing.”

“When are they coming back?”

“November, I think,” I said, and the tears started.

I took a breath.

Then, in a rush: “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know when they’ll call again.”

“Are there any adults who can help you?”

“My parents have a friend called Pam, but she lives several hours away.

I caught my breath and kept answering the counsellor’s questions: “No, I’m not going to school. I sit here on my own all day, trying to teach myself.” My voice quavered.

Famed Antiwar Protester Was Once Cog in Russia’s Propaganda Machine

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/world/europe/russian-antiwar-protester-ovsyannikova.html

For 20 years, Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state TV. What compelled her, shortly after Ukraine was invaded, to storm a live broadcast and tell viewers they were being lied to?

As refugees, Ms. Ovsyannikova and her mother relocated to the outskirts of Krasnodar, in southern Russia. After studying journalism in college and working as a regional TV anchor, Ms. Ovsyannikova joined Channel 1 in Moscow in 2002. Her job: monitoring Western broadcasts to cherry-pick news that showed the West in a bad light to air on the network’s shows.

“In the minds of Russians, there had to be an image that all Americans were L.G.B.T supporters who killed Black people and abused adopted children from Russia,” she writes in “Between Good and Evil,” an autobiography to be released in the United States this month.

For those too young to have lived through what happened twenty years ago, a thread of self-styled left/liberal types endorsing the invasion of Iraq

https://twitter.com/NicholasGuyatt/status/1637840296569438215

"Goes without saying that virtually everyone in this thread continued to fall upwards thereafter; also that the effect of their work in 2003 was to legitimise the claims made more honestly (though less decorously) by the neocons - see Jonah Goldberg (from 2002) below"

u/Sariel007 on parole

https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/11vm625/new_mexico_governor_signs_bill_ending_juvenile/jcud9gt/?context=1

Am I advocating for my brother to go free? Every parole hearing requires an extensive psychological examination that confirms that is what is wrong in his brain is too severe to respond to treatment. It’s very nature tells itself that it does not need treatment or change. So, no. I do not. My brother is diagnosed as a psychopath and a narcissist. He is and will always remain a danger to society. It is clear that had he not been caught after his first murders he would likely have continued killing as it suited him. So, with the victim’s families at my side, supporting each other, I address the parole board and ask that they do not grant him parole. We try and hold each other up, listening, crying, and even celebrating happy occasions.

The victim’s families and I also share one other thing… the belief that if my brother had put in the extraordinarily hard work to accept responsibility for his crimes, to understand and empathize with those he left behind, devoted himself to help others, and could show evidence of a sincere and prolonged effort to do everything in his power to make the world better a better place going forward we would all support giving him a second chance. Not because we don’t value the lives he stole but because we acknowledge the normal, healthy life that was stolen from him and the belief that a society that failed the child owes the man a second chance to be who he could have been.

My mother, the troll: ‘I think she lost sight of the McCanns’ humanity’

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/18/my-mother-troll-of-madeleine-mccann-parents

Brenda Leyland spent her life hiding – by making things up, and concealing herself behind fake names and avatars. After she died, Ben examined her Twitter account closely. There were friends in the McCann trolling community who grieved her passing. But, by and large, after she was exposed people on social media were cruel and unforgiving. In her final days, the troll was trolled mercilessly. “On Twitter people said things like, ‘I hope you beg for mercy, I hope you get gang raped orally, anally and vaginally,’” Ben says. “They Photoshopped pictures of her to make her look like she had fangs and was a zombie with blood pouring out of her.” As Brenda had forgotten about the McCanns’ humanity, so her critics forgot about hers. Ben believes in her final hours she would have read some of these tweets.

Nine years on, he no longer blames the Sky News exposé for his mother’s death. It was inevitable that at some point she would be exposed for one thing or another, he says. There were so many things she was ashamed of that she had never addressed – her mental health problems, her mythomania, her anger, her lack of purpose. “That’s what killed my mum,” Ben says. “It was encrusted layers of shame over the years that made it impossible for her to do more than allude to stuff that she had to deal with. Her inability to say, ‘I need help’; her inability to say, ‘I am not OK.’”

The Secret Weapons of Ukraine

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a42929480/ukraine-secret-weapons/

A journey through the strange, semiprofessional world of volunteers and foreign fighters who, one year into Russia’s invasion, are risking everything to defeat the invaders.

The air-raid siren sounded again through the defiant city, but William McNulty refused to be bothered by it. After a long morning of meetings in Kyiv with Ukrainian partners in need of medical tourniquets and cold-weather clothing, the man had earned an afternoon nap. The air flowing through the hotel room’s open window nipped of brittle autumn, and sunlight was leaking through gray clouds; winter, as the Ukrainians liked to quip, was coming.

Fuck it, McNulty thought. The chances of getting hit by a drone strike in a city of three million people seemed low. A U.S. Marine veteran from Chicago who’s served in Iraq and done humanitarian work in dozens of conflict and natural-disaster zones, he’s grown numb to the frequent sirens that are now a mainstay of life in Ukraine. Since Russia’s latest invasion began in February of last year, he’s traveled throughout the country, by train and van, to rural villages and the front, delivering supplies to those fighting at democracy’s edge. His nonprofit group, Operation White Stork, makes no quibble about supporting Ukraine in the war. He’s had his fill of messy wars and ambiguous purposes. He believes this is it, the real deal, the righteous cause that people of action always not-so-secretly crave.

Toxic school: How the government failed Black residents in Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley'

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/toxic-school-government-failed-black-residents-louisianas-cancer-alley-rcna72504

For decades, a rubber plant near an elementary school has been spewing a carcinogenic chemical into the air. Residents wonder why it’s still allowed to remain in operation.

I am now the voice of my parents

https://web.archive.org/web/20160216014205/https://jewishjournal.com/travel/article/i_am_now_the_voice_of_my_parents_20080502

I remember how, during the Passover seders, after we finished our meal, my father and I would try to set up the 16-millimeter projector, threading the film of a 1953 episode of "This Is Your Life" to watch my very young-looking mother become the first Holocaust survivor to appear on national television. As it played, my mother, Hanna Bloch Kohner, would stay in the kitchen doing dishes. I guess she didn't want to watch it. But for me, it was part of our annual ritual: When Ralph Edwards said, "....upon arriving at Auschwitz, they handed you soap, and you went to the showers. Your shower had water, others were not as fortunate, like your mother, father and your husband, Carl. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz."

In a strange way, I think I just took the idea of this for granted.

I don't know when I learned about it, but by the time I was a teen I knew that my mother had had an abortion in Auschwitz in order to survive. Her first husband, Carl Benjamin, was killed upon arrival, but, miraculously, my Uncle Friedl was a doctor in the camps and arranged for her procedure, which saved my mother's life. However, she was told that she would never be able to carry a child again. That didn't stop her from trying, however: After eight miscarriages and months of bed rest, I was born on July 4, 1955.

Louis DeJoy's Surprising Second Act

https://time.com/6263424/louis-dejoy-trump-election-postal-reform/

There have been other victories and vindications. Last winter, he worked with the White House to deliver half a million COVID-19 test kits to Americans nationwide. Tim Manning, then the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 supply coordinator, says his team arranged a call with DeJoy’s underlings in December 2021 to float the idea. DeJoy heard about it and invited himself. “Louis jumped on and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll make this happen,’” Manning tells me. A month later, the test kits went out; roughly 60% of the orders were fulfilled within 24 hours, 90% within 48 hours. Meanwhile, there’s no longer an ethical cloud hanging over DeJoy’s head. Both the Federal Election Commission and the FBI closed investigations into him related to campaign contributions, and the USPS Inspector General said he met “all applicable ethics requirements related to disclosure, recusal, and divestment” pertaining to his holdings with Postal Service contractors upon taking the job. And the midterms went exceedingly well—99% of all 2022 election mail was delivered within three days.

Yet it hasn’t all been a redemption tour for perhaps the most famous Postmaster General since Benjamin Franklin. DeJoy remains a favorite target of the left. Over the last three years, progressive organizations have sent out “Fire Louis DeJoy” fundraising emails like clockwork. In the last few months, Democrats like Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and groups like the Democratic Governors Association have bought Facebook ads to raise money off calling for DeJoy’s ouster. Some of DeJoy’s allies, on both the right and left, cynically suspect that some Democrats secretly relish having DeJoy in his role as a foil, especially with Trump out of office. Neither Baldwin nor the DGA responded to a request for comment.

I was wrong about Israel. I apologized. Then President Carter gave me a lesson in grace

https://forward.com/opinion/539385/president-jimmy-carter-apology-israel/

Perhaps Carter’s most important achievement was the Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt. This peace treaty has endured for 44 years, and spared thousands of lives on the Israeli-Egyptian border. It also saved hundreds of billions of dollars in military costs that the two countries would have needlessly spent.

President Carter warned everyone in 2006 that we all had the choice of Peace Not Apartheid. Some have made deliberate choices on the matter of Israeli occupation; some have walked in a stupor, blaming the other for their shortcomings. Others still blame the messenger for the message.

In his response to my apology, Carter wrote a simple and touching message:

“You have no reason to apologize, but I accept your wonderful letter as you obviously intend it. I sympathize and understand the feelings of my many friends, who reacted as you did. Best wishes, Jimmy Carter.”

I was shaken and inspired by his humility. Carter owed me nothing, yet gave me a sense there is a capacity within us all for unconditional love.

Asteroid lost 1 million kilograms after collision with DART spacecraft

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00601-4

One factor is that the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 metres from the asteroid’s centre, maximizing the force of its impact. Another is that large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory. Researchers estimate that this spray of rubble meant Dimorphos’ added momentum was almost four times that imparted by DART4.

Although NASA has demonstrated this technique on only one asteroid, the results could be broadly applicable to future hazards, researchers say. “It means that we can quickly design a mission to deflect an asteroid if there is a threat, and we know that this has a very high chance of being effective,” says Franck Marchis, from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California who is also chief scientific officer at the telescope manufacturer Unistellar in Marseille.

“If you had asked me 30 years ago, ‘Can we be confident we won’t be wiped out by a giant killer asteroid a week from next Tuesday?’ I would have had to say no,” adds Tom Statler, DART’s programme scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. Now that astronomers have surveyed the skies to identify nearly all the dangerous asteroids — and now that DART has been shown to work —“we will know what to do about it when something new is found”, he says.

The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/magazine/china-spying-intellectual-property.html

Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.

Two Different Versions of ‘Cancel Culture’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/opinion/lab-leak-dilbert-cancel-culture.html

But there’s a problem — the more that America polarizes, the more it contains not one but two Overton windows, the “red” window and the “blue” window. Speech that is squarely mainstream in Red America is completely out of bounds in Blue America, and vice versa.

We could list any number of topics where shifting standards and changing norms breed intolerance at the extremes and confusion in the middle. Millions of Americans thus tread lightly, fearful that even the tentative expression of a dissenting thought could lead to a vicious backlash.

The Playing Field

https://grahamduncan.blog/the-playing-field/

One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. “Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” the analyst instinctually responded. But to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset, whether on the road or in the market: a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It is a mindset that is hard to change. But from what I’ve seen, great investors don’t have it. Instead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.

One way to relocate your locus of control is to frame investing (and even life more generally) as a game. This allows you to experience luck as luck, to separate the hand you drew from the playing of that hand. As David Milch, the creator of the HBO show Deadwood, put it, he realized late in life that “it’s the way you learn to play the cards you’ve been dealt, rather than the hand itself, that determines the worth of your participation in the game.”

‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757

GEN. MARK MILLEY: People don’t think about war — even today. When I say to people, “There have been 35,000 or 40,000 innocent Ukrainians killed in this war, a third of their economy has been destroyed, an estimated 7 million internally-displaced persons, and another 7 million refugees out of a pre-war population of 45 million — you’re looking at 30 to 40 percent of that country displaced out of houses.” People sit there and go: “Oh?”

Tip O’Neill — I’m from Boston, he was a Boston guy — and he said all politics are local. If it’s not happening to you, or in and around you, there’s a sense of remoteness. It doesn’t strike through the same way it does if it happens to you and your family. But for some of us, who have a lot of combat experience, who have seen a lot of war, it’s very real. For many people — good people, smart people — it’s very difficult to get your head around this stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. Just the other day, there were 1,100 Russians killed in a single day — more than that, closer to 1,200 — down around Bakhmut. That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh. 

One Year Inside a Radical New Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/drug-crisis-addiction-harm-reduction.html

The streets are a terrifying and deeply uncomfortable place to live. Ms. Corso found that poor personal hygiene was often strategic — a woman who smelled disgusting was far less likely to be raped — and that sleep deprivation and sleep psychosis were at least as common as serious mental illness. She and Mr. Webb knew people who used heroin to sleep or meth to stay awake when they were too afraid to close their eyes.

She also found that a snack, a cigarette, a drink of water and a nap could solve 90 percent of a client’s immediate distress and that providing those things was the fastest way to build rapport. She liked to joke that her experience as a cocktail waitress was at least as useful as any coursework or prior counseling jobs she had done. “It’s not like people are summoned to our office for sit-down therapy,” she said. “It’s more like I walk the intake room striking up conversations and trying to upsell people on services. I am basically a cocktail waitress who serves mental health.”

It was tricky work, she said. Most of the people she sees have survived severe traumas — rape, molestation, physical abuse — that they had never discussed with another human or even grappled with themselves. For many of them, conversations in her office or around OnPoint are their first meaningful human interactions after something horrific.

They Were Married. They Shared a Trench. They Died in It Together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/world/asia/ukraine-russia-war-death.html

Taras and Olha Melster signed up to help the war effort. Like many other urban professionals in Ukraine, they never expected to be sent to the front line. 

The Impact of Russian Missile Strikes on Ukraine’s Power Grid

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-impact-of-russian-missile-strikes-on-ukraines-power-grid

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, its attacks had periodically damaged energy infrastructure near the front lines. “That we were used to,” Dmytro Sakharuk, the executive director of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said. “But then they changed strategy.” Starting last fall, the Russian military began targeting coal-fuelled power plants, substations, and transformers across the whole of Ukraine. Russian officials wagered that by depriving Ukrainians of electricity—and, as a result, heat and water—during wintertime, they would sap the country’s resolve. “They wanted to initiate a long-term blackout and to freeze our big cities,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the C.E.O. of Ukrenergo, told me. “The idea was to force us to negotiate not through emerging victorious on the battlefield but by terrorizing the population.”

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko jailed for highlighting Mariupol killings

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64647267

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been jailed for six years for posting on social media about a deadly attack by Russian warplanes on a theatre in Ukraine.

The court in Barnaul in Siberia found her guilty of spreading "fake news", under laws introduced aimed at stifling dissent about the invasion of Ukraine.

She was also barred from activities as a journalist for five years.

Hundreds of civilians died when the Mariupol theatre was bombed last March.

Ponomarenko was detained last April, weeks after the bombing, for posting that Russian warplanes had carried out the attack even though the Russian defence ministry had denied it.

She is one of a growing number of Russian dissidents jailed for criticising the war in Ukraine.

Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1624780476605923331

🧵Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

Okay, this is a hyperbolic title. I will be told this is a straw man. Fair! I do try to avoid extreme statements about religion because I do think

— Laura Robinson (@LauraRbnsn) February 12, 2023

The Death of the Smart Shopper

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/02/online-amazon-shopping-informed-consumer-quality-control/673017/

Last week, the journalist John Herrman published a theory on why, exactly, Amazon seems so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience: The company would rather leave the complicated, labor-intensive business of selling things to people to someone else. To do that, it has opened its doors to roughly 2 million third-party sellers, whether they are foreign manufacturers looking for more direct access to customers or the disciples of “grindset” influencers who want to use SEO hacks to fund the purchase of rental properties. In the process, Amazon has cultivated a decentralized, disorienting mess with little in the way of discernible quality control or organization. According to Herrman, that’s mainly because Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses—things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

Pluralistic: Tiktok's ens***tification

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this ens***tification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

Revealed: secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The highly unusual cross-party nature of the gathering of Brexit opponents – and the seniority of those who agreed to attend – reflects a growing acceptance among politicians in the two main parties, as well as business leaders and civil servants, that Brexit in its current form is damaging the UK economy and reducing its strategic influence in the world.

Concern is growing at the top of the Labour party that it poses a real threat to the success of any future Labour government unless problems such as increased trade friction can be addressed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that, over the 15 years from 2016, Brexit will reduce the UK’s GDP per capita by 4%. 

What the New York Times Got Wrong About ‘Rural Rage’

https://dailyyonder.com/what-the-new-york-times-got-wrong-rural-rage/2023/02/02/

Krugman uses a tweet from J.D. Vance to prove that rural politicians can spit vitriol at urban people but urban politicians could never reply in kind. If that’s the case, how do you explain the deluge of degrading tweets from Democrats about Appalachia when it was hit by deadly floods in July of 2022? Is it ever excusable for someone to say, after seeing the devastation of such a disaster, that “these people got what they voted for”? 

The problem with using J.D. Vance as an example of what’s wrong with rural America is that he shows exactly why the rural stereotypes Krugman shrugs off as a non-issue are so dangerous. 

Just because Vance dissed New York City does not mean that all rural people hate cities, nor should it give a pass for urban politicians to disparage rural America. Perhaps – perhaps! – politicians (and the public) shouldn’t disparage either place. 

It’s Not Just What Manchester City Won. It’s What Others Lost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/sports/soccer/manchester-city-premier-league-rules.html

Manchester City deserved to win all of those games, of course. On each occasion, it was much the better team. Its opponents accepted their fates with good grace. They did not quibble with the result. “We know how far ahead of us they are,” Gray said, even as his teammates were coming to terms with their humiliation in the sanctuary of the changing room.

That City was better is not in question. What is at stake, instead, is whether it was in a position to reach all of those finals, to win all of those trophies, while operating under the same rules and restrictions as everyone else. If it was not, then there is no punishment, no matter how harsh, that restores what has been lost.

The Founding Fathers Favored a Liberal Immigration System

https://www.cato.org/blog/founding-fathers-favored-liberal-immigration-system

Alexander Hamilton argued that the “advantage of encouraging foreigners was obvious and admitted,” asserting that “persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here where they will be on a level with the first Citizens.”

Father of the Constitution James Madison “was not averse to some restrictions on this subject, but could never agree to the proposed amendment” in part “because it will discourage the most desirable class of people from emigrating to the U.S.” In other words, not only were the Founders opposed to restricting the free movement of people into the United States, but they opposed restrictions on citizenship that they felt would discourage immigrants from using that freedom. Madison spoke of “great numbers” who would wish to come to the United States.

 

Coming Of Age | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2022

Ravi Zacharias’ sins of sexual abuse went undetected for years. Here are the lessons the Church needs to learn

https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/ravi-zacharias-sins-of-sexual-abuse-went-undetected-for-years-here-are-the-lessons-the-church-needs-to-learn/14737.article

“One of the things that we identify around culture is that if we’re not sufficiently attentive on an ongoing basis, then what we call ‘shadow cultures’ emerge – those things which become custom and practice by mistake, because we weren’t alive to them and didn’t challenge them when they first arrived.”

According to Humphreys, shadow cultures run in parallel to an organisation’s existing culture, but largely go unacknowledged or unopposed. They are the behaviours displayed by colleagues, or the privileges conferred on particular members of staff, which demonstrate “an alternative set of rules are being used”. 

In the case of RZIM, this might include Zacharias’ use of a personal phone and email address instead of official work ones, or the encrypted BlackBerry he owned, from which messages were not retrievable once deleted. These kinds of “low level” concerns can be a subtle indicator of deeper organisational health issues, warns Humphreys. They should be called out in an appropriate way and “without fear of retribution or penalty”. 

UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis

After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims.

Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview"

https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/sbf-ftx-pre-mortem-overview

Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing.

Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of the story he's trying to spin all in one place, rather than cobbling his narrative together from multiple sources.

It's remarkable the extent to which SBF outright lies, or at the very least twists his version of events to distort reality in his favor. I don't intend to annotate further posts from him—which I suspect will be many—but instead hope that this will be sufficient to give some idea of just how thoroughly misleading his statements are.

Eight Women Say the Same Man Raped or Assaulted Them. Now They’re Out for Justice

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-rape-assault-abuse-justice-social-media-avengers-1234660588/

When the system failed to help them, these survivors banded together and took matters into their own hands

A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/us/russian-asylum-boat-alaska.html

In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.

The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/

I rode high on those words when, in 2016, I arrived at UChicago, one of the top physics departments in the country. I was one of two Black women in a department of about 200 grad students. It quickly became clear that she and I were novelties. “I’ve dated a mulatto like you before,” a peer told me in an attempt to make conversation. When I showed up at a weekly meeting that discussed articles in scientific journals, a professor handed me an abandoned backpack near his seat—as if the only reason I could be in that room was to collect a forgotten bag. (He blushed when I shook my head and sat down.) Another time, my adviser asked me to pose for a picture for his grant application. “Of course, I have other photos,” he said as he tossed me a wrench. “But it looks better if it’s a woman.”

One day, worn out by always feeling like an alien, I opened my laptop and poked around the department website. I was searching for signs of Black women who had come before me—to reassure myself that someone had once done what I was trying to do. No luck. So I turned to Google, where I stumbled on a database simply titled The Physicists, maintained by an organization called African American Women in Physics.

I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.

That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three.

Wrestling with an Approach to Karl Barth, and some Advice from D Stephen Long

https://growrag.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/wrestling-with-an-approach-to-karl-barth-and-some-advice-from-theologian-x/

I also think that no single, individual theologian [WLS: and I would say this applies to anyone speaking on morals] is responsible for his or her theology. Each one lives from and depends on the communion of saints, on those who come before us and those who receive our work. An individual theologian’s work should not be discarded because of her or his failures because it is never solely their work. I do think we must raise questions as to the connection between theology and ethics that could lead a Barth or Yoder to their self-deception, especially when they themselves refused a sharp distinction between theology and ethics. Is there something in their theology that contributed to it?

So I have come to terms with these failures by thinking: 1. their theology cannot be wholly discarded because their theology was never their’s. They do not own it, and theologians are not individual heroes. 2. Theologians’ failures cannot be overlooked but must be considered as part and parcel of their theology. Many of us were attracted to Barth because he saw the failures of theology to resist the Nazis. If we easily overlook ethical and political failures, then we would have to say that theology makes little difference in the world and that would be devastating to the theological task.

An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster

https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-broken-arrow-obituary

Dr. Jack ReVelle disarmed two hydrogen bombs that accidentally fell near Goldsboro during the Cold War. But a military career of cleaning up nuclear accidents may have cut his life short.

Obama: I Underestimated the Threat of Disinformation

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/barack-obama-interview-disinformation-ukraine/629496/

What we’re seeing is a reversion back to old ways of thinking about power and place and identity. And I think part of our complacency grew out of the notion that once the Berlin Wall fell and Nelson Mandela was released and the world was flat and you had McDonald’s everywhere, and now suddenly that was it—we were done. And we forgot that that post–World War II 50-years stretch to 60-years stretch—that’s the anomaly. And that there is millennia of brutality and pillage and violence and displacement and cruelty, and we created a set of institutions out of 60 million people dying in World War II and tried to reconfigure how we might organize our societies. But it is not self-executing. It’s something that we have to continually nurture and respond to new circumstances, whether that’s changes in technology, changes in globalization, climate change—all those things require us to say, All right, what does that mean for our capacity to maintain human dignity and freedom and self-governance? And that’s the prism through which we should be examining these questions and being willing to modify, adjust, reform our institutions to keep up with that. And that’s something that I think we have not done as well as we need to.

Heresy

 

http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html

A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see you punished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed an actual crime. There are many on the far left who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.

There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago, and even those who are happy about this would have to agree that it's so.

In defense of "The West Wing"

https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing

And something “The West Wing” deeply gets about politics is that there are a lot of people like that kicking around. Are there kooks and grifters and opportunists and criminals and morons? Sure.

But you genuinely can’t understand key developments in American political history — good ones like the Affordable Care Act or bad ones like the Dobbs decision — without understanding the large and often critical role played by earnest people who sincerely believe in what they are doing. Even a lot of the really bad characters in politics — Paul Ryan, for example — are extremely sincere. And when you look at someone who is both bad and also non-sincere like Donald Trump, you can’t understand Trump’s successes without understanding the sincerity of many of his collaborators. For better or worse, helping Trump beat Clinton seemed like a good way to try to advance the causes of making abortion illegal and taking health insurance away from poor people, and unless you grasp the sincerity with which lots of Republicans believe in those causes, you won’t be able to make sense of how he related to the party’s professionals.

Mapping out the tribes of climate

https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes

Climate is a gravity well for talent, but why don’t other, equally impactful topics attract talent in the same way? Why isn’t everyone dropping everything to work on homelessness, or global poverty, or curing cancer? With many peers in tech now working on climate issues, I tried to understand why this topic holds such purchase for so many people – and its incredible staying power over the decades.

Initially, I started with the idea that climate was an attractive industry for “doomer” types, and I painted their motivations monolithically. I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space.

What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?”

Pass through the asteroid belt of climate doomerism, and the universe expands into a rich panoply of different climate tribes. People who work in and around climate don’t all believe the same things. Instead, they inhabit a parallel, mirror world that looks a lot like the non-climate world. Just like in the regular world, there are factions, politics, and competing belief systems. 

Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam

https://medium.com/@newyorkteacher/guessing-c-for-every-answer-is-now-enough-to-pass-the-new-york-state-algebra-exam-93bac55b3e24

My student, River, spent more time in the courtroom than the classroom last year. One Friday night in September, a drunk friend called and asked for a ride home from a party. River obliged. That’s a problem when you’re 14 years old. On his excellent adventure with his drunk friend, River drove over the landscaping of several local businesses and ended with his car in the woods caught in a web of maple sugaring lines. Things spiralled from there.

All of which is to say that River didn’t learn algebra last year.

I mean it: zero algebra was learned. He wasn’t even present in my classroom for most of three marking periods. At the end of the year, he asked me how he was supposed to pass the state test.

“No problem,” I said. “Just pick all Cs.”

“What?”

“Try it. I bet it will work.”

It worked.