Man, It’s a Hot One: The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/santana-rob-thomas-smooth-oral-history-841189/

How Carlos Santana scored his first hit in decades with help from Matchbox Twenty's frontman — and how it almost didn't happen. The making of the unlikely 1999 smash

Care for an old wounded soldier

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/14uxaci/intensive_care/

Dad was a WW2 paratrooper with the independent 509th. His nickname in the unit was Magnet because he was always getting shot. He had 4 Purple Hearts among his other awards.

In the end, near the town of Sadzot in December of 1944 dad was grievously wounded in the chest, face, throat and arms. After some battle field surgery he was evaced to a series of hospitals with each one triaging him as unlikely to survive.

He eventually got out of hospital in 1948 with 100% disability, married a Navy nurse and built a modest life and a large family.

It was in the 60's that dad's war wounds began to complicate his life and he was scheduled to go to Pittsburgh to a general hospital for major surgery which we were told he would likely not survive.

Dad's case came to the attention of Dr P, ( a Greek name which is unspellable and unpronounceable) the Chief of Surgery at the hospital and Dr P decided to perform the operation himself. It turned out that Dr P had been a battalion surgeon in WW2 with the 29th Infantry Division from D Day to Germany.

As my mom and my sister were both nurses, we got first rate information from the staff.

The story told was that as Dr P approached the table to begin the operation, the Chief Resident, who was assisting, tried to lighten the mood. He looked down at Dad on the table, noting the mass of scar tissue and wound marks on him and said; "This guy looks like he's already had an autopsy. I think we have the wrong patient."

Dr. P stopped moving, looked up and said; "The men who did this surgery were being shot at while they operated on him.... You're fired. Get out of my hospital"

Dr P performed the surgery and gave dad another 22 years. When he came out of the theatre he came straight to mom and said "He's fine. He will stay with us for as long as he needs to. There will be no fees, charges or bills. Here is my home number, call me any time if you have the slightest issue."

As a young teenager, I was in awe. There was perspiration on Dr. P's face and perhaps a hint of mist in his eyes. I think he may have lost enough soldiers in his career and wasn't losing any more.

After he departed, one of the senior nurses spoke to mum, "We've never seen him like this. He said that if any of the patient's vital signs change, he wants to be notified immediately." Consequently,, dad received excellent care as the staff were terrified that something would go wrong on their shift.

In 1975, dad pinned his Airborne wings on me at Fryer Drop Zone. I still have them.

Noah Rothman on the indictment

The @NRO editors’ view is that Jack Smith’s latest Trump indictment is an overreach that seeks to “criminalize protected political speech” and undermine the rule of law.

I dissent from our editorial.

"January 6 Was a Crime" https://t.co/aKQE6BmYQ5

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 2, 2023

/u/flyingkumot on love

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/14ydf8f/whose_abuelita_is_this/

Met an elderly hispanic lady at a bus stop in Albuquerque. We went back and forth in Spanish for a bit (I’m a white guy so she was pleasantly surprised) and she told me about her travel plans to go to her son’s wedding–a real cute story involving him and his high school sweetheart finding each other after a long time being broken up.

I had recently been dumped, and said something a bit mopey like “I wish I could find love like that someday.”

She smiled, shook her head and said “Chico, love like that isn’t just found. It’s built. How many perfect, decorated temples do you think my ancestors stumbled across in Tikal or Tenochtitlan? No. They found a good, level spot, maybe some water nearby, and said ‘Here. We can build something here.’ Look for a clearing in the forest, young man. Not a hidden city.”

That one will stick with me for years.

How to Blow Up a Timeline

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline

One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson.

However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed.

The same is true of social networks. As anyone who has tried to start one knows, it’s not easy to jump-start a social graph. But if you manage by some miracle to conjure one from the void, and if you provide that group with a reasonable set of ways for everyone to hang out, network effects can keep the party going long after last call. The group inertia that is your enemy before you’ve coalesced a community is your friend after it’s formed. Anyone who’s ever hosted a party and provided booze knows it’s often hard to get the last stragglers to leave. We are a social species.

Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champions-of-affirmative-action-had-to-leave-asian-americans-behind

Affirmative action, in my view, was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force. It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used

I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html

Many prestigious institutions have themselves racially gamified the admissions process, finding ways to maximize diversity without making dents in their endowments. For example, some colleges and universities boost diversity statistics on the cheap by accepting minority students who can pay full freight. And even purportedly need-blind institutions seem to have a remarkable track record of recruiting minority students who don’t need financial aid. (By some estimates, over 70 percent of Harvard’s Black, Latino and Native American students have college-educated parents with incomes above the national median.)

ROBERT A. CARO ON THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/desktopnew.html

Every time a youth from a poor family gets to go to college because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, and thus to escape from a life in the ghetto, and every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth and cast a vote because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Acts, that is a more significant example of political power. And so, unfortunately, is the fact of a young man dying a needless death in a useless war in Vietnam. In order to demonstrate and illuminate political power through a biography of a single individual, the biography has to be of the right individual. I selected Robert Moses because in The Power Broker what I was aiming at was to show how urban political power worked in America in the middle of the twentieth century--how power worked not just in New York, but in all our great cities; to show what was the true essence of urban political power, not the trappings but the heart, the raw, naked essence of such power. I selected Moses because he was never elected to anything. But for forty-four years he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected--more than any mayor, more than any governor. Therefore, I felt, if I could show what Moses' power consisted of, and how he got it and how he wielded it, I would be showing the true essence of urban political power. Since no one else ever wielded such power, Moses was the ideal subject.

It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/opinion/rfk-jr-joe-rogan.html

But now I see where I went wrong. Not on the merits; there’s still no case that Kerry actually won in 2004. My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.

After getting in the mud with Kennedy all those years ago, I realized something important that we’d do well to remember now, as Kennedy mounts a long-shot run against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination: You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.

u/ubercorey on western meditation culture

https://www.reddit.com/r/HubermanLab/comments/14cizcn/you_dont_suck_at_meditating/

It's so important I'm going repeat it. You cultivate what the mind is best at, instead of against it. WE DO NOT FORCE IT TO BE QUIET, we encourage it to roar, but very channeled. Like you were saying, into laser focus. The defuse power becomes a beam, focused on a specific goal. You use its natural tendency to be extremely active and constantly create. Instead of fighting it, you use that to create what you want. That is what the meditation masters discovered. That mind has a superpower and we can harness it. This is what NBA coaches know, that we can improve free throw shots just as much using visualization as on the court practice.

The way pop culture teaches meditation now, without the foundational practices first, would be like taking a wild horse who's kicking and smashing his stall and just the keeping the wild horse in his stall all day today to force him to calm down, he would start to go stir crazy in his muscles would waste. So messed up... This is how we treat children in schools who have a lot of energy. And what happens, it breaks their spirit.

In contrast, the foundational practices are like like taking the horse out and running on a certain path that horse gets better and better on that path

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

https://kk.org/thetechnium/103-bits-of-advice-i-wish-i-had-known/

Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write up more bits of wisdom on my following two birthdays. On my 70th birthday I wrote up 103 bits of advice I wish I had known earlier, which were also widely shared. The first six bits are here:

• About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.

• No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.

• Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.

• Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.

• Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.

• If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.

The Procedure Fetish

 https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/

If America has a procedure problem, it may be because it has a lawyer problem. Among lawyers, anxiety about agency legitimacy is reflexively invoked to defend the legally imposed procedures that structure agency decision-making. Here’s Richard Stewart, a titan in the field: “The traditional conception of administrative law . . . bespeaks a common social value in legitimating, through controlling rules and procedures, the exercise of power over private interests by officials not otherwise formally accountable.” Similar statements abound in the literature. Every procedure under the sun has been defended, at one time or another, as a guarantor of the fragile legitimacy of the administrative state.

But it pays to be precise. It is reasonable to believe that procedural regularity is an important facet of government legitimacy. But legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair. Mandatory procedures may sometimes advance those values. They can focus agencies on priorities they may have ignored, orient bureaucracies to broader public goals, and improve the quality of agency deliberations. But procedures can also burn agency resources on senseless paperwork, empower lawyers at the expense of experts, and frustrate agencies’ ability to act. When procedures impair an agency’s ability to do its job, they can drain an agency of legitimacy. 

In Defense of The West Wing

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

I find the way “The West Wing” came up in the 2016 primary interesting because one of the main themes of the show actually illustrates the way that entire dynamic ran off the rails. I think it’s easy to understand why Sanders liked a show about a cantankerous politician from northern New England who took on the Democratic Party establishment in an underdog primary campaign and captured the White House. But it’s also easy to see why Whitford felt that Sanders’ “political revolution” concept was entirely contrary to the ethic of the show.

And that’s because “The West Wing” correctly illustrates that traditionally, the voters have appreciated outsiders in presidential politics but not radicals. If you look at Bartlet and Matt Santos, they don’t have much in common biographically. But they are both alternatives to the establishment insiders (Hoynes and Russell) and both inspired idealistic people on their staff and in the electorate. They are fresh, interesting characters who promise a break from the grubbiness and opportunism that people see as endemic to the political system. But in terms of public policy, neither of them is anything particularly special. They are both pretty banal liberal incrementalists. In ideological terms, Bartlet breaks with his base a bit on free trade and Santos with the teachers unions on tenure. But their outsider-ness is meant to convey honesty, integrity, and realness, not policy radicalism.

This is a template that we’ve seen over and over again from John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, and it’s exactly what makes the 2016 and 2020 races a little bit odd.

People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

Of the 30 participants who were told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (71%) were classified as having developed a false memory of the crime; of the 20 who were told about an assault of some kind (with or without a weapon), 11 reported elaborate false memory details of their exact dealings with the police.

A similar proportion of students (76.67%) formed false memories of the emotional event they were told about.

Intriguingly, the criminal false events seemed to be just as believable as the emotional ones. Students tended to provide the same number of details, and reported similar levels of confidence, vividness, and sensory detail for the two types of event.

Shaw and Porter speculate that incorporating true details, such as the name of an actual friend, into an account that was supposedly corroborated by the student’s caregiver likely endowed the false event with just enough familiarity that it came to seem plausible.

I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients.

https://inflecthealth.medium.com/im-an-er-doctor-here-s-how-i-m-already-using-chatgpt-to-help-treat-patients-a023615c65b6

In doing so, I’ve come to realize that dealing with ChatGPT is like working with an incredibly brilliant, hard-working — and occasionally hungover — intern. That’s become my mental model for considering the usefulness of ChatGPT.

Now, for any potential application, I think, “Would a dedicated but occasionally hungover intern working on this make things easier for me and my staff — or would the work required managing them end up being more effort than just doing it without their involvement?”

Seen from that perspective, ChatGPT or a hungover intern can still, for instance:

• Take down my patient’s history
• Create long-form written communication for patients and staff
• Explain highly technical information to patients simply with empathy and compassion

Super-rich abandoning Norway at record rate as wealth tax rises slightly

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-abandoning-norway-at-record-rate-as-wealth-tax-rises-slightly

A record number of super-rich Norwegians are abandoning Norway for low-tax countries after the centre-left government increased wealth taxes to 1.1%.

More than 30 Norwegian billionaires and multimillionaires left Norway in 2022, according to research by the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv. This was more than the total number of super-rich people who left the country during the previous 13 years, it added. Even more super-rich individuals are expected to leave this year because of the increase in wealth tax in November, costing the government tens of millions in lost tax receipts.

Many have moved to Switzerland, where taxes are much lower.

Two friends were denied care after Florida banned abortion. One almost died.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/10/pprom-florida-abortion-ban/

She had intended to deliver the fetus in a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies. The condition can cause significant complications, including infection and hemorrhage, that can threaten the health or life of the mother, according to multiple studies.

At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show. Then she was sent home to wait.

Cook’s experience reflects a new reality playing out in hospitals in antiabortion states across the country — where because of newly enacted abortion bans, people with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications are being denied care that was readily available before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

The Texas Legislature Finally Comes for Ken Paxton

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/ken-paxton-impeachment-texas-house/

But it’s important to understand the latest allegations of Paxton’s wrongdoing as an extension of a pattern that dates back to when he was a lowly state representative, from 2003 to 2013. Among other infractions, he took money from a company that benefited from a state contract, and he invested in a property in his district that a local government would soon buy at a markup. In private life he was a probate lawyer, adjudicating wills and estates, and he stood accused of improperly skimming money off the top from a wealthy deceased client. He infamously stole a fellow lawyer’s Montblanc pen at the Collin County Courthouse, and only returned it after he was caught red-handed on security camera footage.

He nonetheless rose through the ranks: first to the state Senate, and then to the AG’s office. In his 2014 race for AG, it was reported that in private practice, Paxton made a habit of advising his legal clients to invest in his friends’ companies or investment firms without telling them he was getting a cut for referring them. In the baroque terms of the legal profession, that type of behavior is known as “criming,” or “doing crimes.” This did not stop Paxton from winning office, but shortly afterward he was indicted for felony securities fraud. This was an earthquake. If convicted, he would be booted from office: felons can’t be attorneys general.

Wow. What did the jury say?

Nothing, yet! The indictment came down nearly eight years ago. Paxton got the case kicked back to Collin County, his home base, where he would be “among friends,” as a mobster might euphemistically say. He and his lawyers have used a long series of procedural and political maneuvers to postpone the trial. As it stands, there’s no resolution in the criminal case.

The New Media Goliaths

https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths/

“Manufacturing Consent” ended with an optimistic take: that what was then a burgeoning cable media ecosystem would lead to more channels with varying perspectives, a recognition that truly independent and non-corporate media does exist and that it would find ways to be heard. But Chomsky and Herman also cautioned that if the public wants a news media that serves its interests rather than the interests of the powerful, it must go find it. Propaganda systems are demonstrably effective precisely because breaking free of such a filtered lens requires work. Perhaps by articulating to today’s public how the system has shifted and highlighting the new incentives that shape the media-of-one ecosystem, we may reduce the public’s susceptibility to the propaganda it produces.

Don’t Pretend the Ugandan Homosexuality Law Is Christian

https://christianitytoday.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=9acf7769aeea55e2b2505c88710d4293.13289&s=e48749d03c8696b506b573b494dffd71

One does not honor the authority of Scripture if one obscures its meaning. Leviticus 20 explicitly condemns almost every form of sexual immorality—premarital sex, extramarital sex, and nearly every other kind of nonmarital sexual expression. Sexual sins are included alongside occultic practices, necromancy, and the cursing of one’s mother and father.

Of course, this is consistent with the rest of the biblical witness (whatever one thinks of its authority). Yet the penalties of death that come with those violations are situated in a very specific context in redemptive history. God revealed that the theocratic civil code, as well as its punishments, was for a purpose: to separate his people from the rest of the nations to prepare them to enter the inheritance of the land (Lev. 20:26).

To cite such passages of the old-covenant civil law as a mandate for a civil state outside that covenant is a misinterpretation that doesn’t fit with any historic, apostolic teaching of Christianity. In fact, it’s in line with those who would argue against any ethical content of the Christian faith by saying, “Yeah, well, if the Bible’s true, we couldn’t eat shellfish either.”

[I still don't agree with this post but this is interesting because of the author]

A SONG LED THEM HOME

https://www.harrisnecklandtrust.org/amelia-s-song

In 1933 African American linguist Lorenzo Turner and musicologist Lydia Parish visited Harris Neck and recorded 53-year-old Amelia Dawley singing a song that had been taught to her by her mother.  The song, in a language unknown to Mrs. Dawley, had been passed down in her family from mother to daughter as far back as anyone in Harris Neck could remember.

 

In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior.  There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time.  Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.

 

Through a series of amazing and perhaps miraculous events – and lots of hard work – beginning in the late 1980s, anthropologist  Joseph Opala first rediscovered this song and then, with the help of musicologist Cynthia Schmidt and others, traced the song from Senehun Ngola to Harris Neck.  

The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/opinion/rural-voters-republican-realignment.html

Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.

Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the calcification of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded in the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human. 

The First Interview with the Panama Papers Whistleblower

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-first-interview-with-the-panama-papers-whistleblower-the-russian-government-wants-to-see-me-dead-a-9f830d70-297a-472a-b0cc-9632ff2f514a

DER SPIEGEL: What kind of instability do you mean?

Doe: The rise of fascism and authoritarianism globally, from China to Russia to Brazil to the Philippines, but especially now in the United States. America has made some terrible blunders in its history, but it has served as a balancing force against the absolute worst regimes when needed most. That balance has functionally ceased to exist.

DER SPIEGEL: Tax havens seem to be of crucial importance for strongmen in autocratic regimes.

Doe: Putin is more of a threat to the United States than Hitler ever was, and shell companies are his best friend. Shell companies funding the Russian military are what kill innocent civilians in Ukraine as Putin's missiles target shopping centers. Shell companies masking Chinese conglomerates are what kill underage cobalt miners in the Congo. Shell companies make these horrors and more possible by removing accountability from society. But without accountability, society cannot function.

The Problem with Polling Might Be Unfixable

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-problem-with-polling-might-be

But what if the problem is that Republican voters are the type of people that don’t talk to pollsters? And the few Republicans that do talk to them are unrepresentative of the party itself? If this were the case, then there would be no clear fix. A recent paper by Vanderbilt University professor Joshua Clinton and two colleagues called “Reluctant Republicans, Eager Democrats? Partisan Nonresponse and the Accuracy of 2020 Presidential Pre-Election Telephone Polls” indicates that this is exactly what is happening.

The authors looked at 12 competitive states in the 2020 election. Telephone surveys as part of the National Exit Poll by Edison Research were conducted between October 19 and November 1, 2020. In some states, those making the phone calls had access to the party registration of the people they were trying to reach, while in others potential respondents were given an imputed partisan lean based on demographic characteristics. Republicans were 3.2 points less likely than Democrats to cooperate with pollsters, and Independents were even more non-responsive. 

The Soldiers I Remember

https://www.thefp.com/p/hr-mcmaster-the-soldiers-i-remember

In World War II, America lost 291,557 military lives in combat. But, as Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rick Atkinson wrote, “each death is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. The most critical lesson for every American is to understand, viscerally, that this vast host died one by one by one; to understand in your bones that they died for you.” 

Perhaps back then, it was easier for more Americans to feel that reality in their bones. These days, with a relatively small all-volunteer force, the American people are more distant from those who fight in their name.

Combat veterans suppress dreadful memories of battles, but never forget their comrades who fell alongside them one by one. Their countenances, often smiling or laughing, flash before our mind’s eye. I see them unexpectedly. Sometimes they come in waves.  

How to Raise $89 Million in Small Donations, and Make It Disappear

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/14/us/politics/scam-robocalls-donations-policing-veterans.html

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.

Federal inquiry details abuses of power by Trump's CEO over Voice of America

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/21/1177208862/usagm-michael-pack-voa-voice-of-america-investigation-trump-abuse-of-power

The 145-page report independently corroborates many of the whistleblower complaints. It also lends new weight and depth to earlier reporting by NPR, inquiries by a U.S. inspector general and rulings by a federal judge and a local District of Columbia judge.

Taken together, they depict Pack's brief tenure as an ideologically driven rampage through a government agency to try to force its newsrooms and workforce to show fealty to the White House.

Pack punished executives who objected to the legality of his plans, interfered in the journalistic independence of the newsrooms under his agency, and personally signed a no-bid contract with a private law firm to investigate those employees he saw as opposed to former President Donald Trump. The law firm's fees reached the seven figures for work typically done by attorneys who are federal employees. 

Ecosystem Success Metrics

https://developer.squareup.com/blog/ecosystem-success-metrics/

For each individual product, there are focused success metrics to prioritize for different product milestones (e.g. free trial starts, first revenue event, etc).

However, for shared spaces such as our public web page (squareup.com), our general web signup flow, and our internal seller dashboard, we often have to make decisions that involve a tradeoff between different products. For example, during onboarding, we can suggest certain products over others, so the question becomes: how do we prioritize them? What is our criteria for making tough decisions between products? How do we measure the impact of a specific change to the overall ecosystem? Our strategy is to get the right fit for sellers - but there are many different ways to measure this with different pros and cons. Let's take a look at some possible ecosystem success metric approaches:

u/toketsupuurin on trauma baggage

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/12q9mfs/oop_is_asked_out_by_a_girl_who_used_to_bully_him/jgpr5iv/?context=3

Getting past baggage can be both impossible and stupidly easy all at the same time.

The thing about trauma baggage is that you carry it around partly as a coping mechanism. You brain says "no! You can't let this happen again! You have to remember! You have to do these things! You have to be safe!"

As you work through the healing process you start to unpack those bags and they get lighter and lighter. But you have to deal with them every day and the change is so slow that you don't notice. You just keep thinking "these bags are so heavy and they make me miserable. I hate carrying them."

Eventually you hit a point where the bags are unpacked. Everything has been handled. You are, effectively healed. You have scars, true, but you're recovered. The problem is that by this point carrying those bags is a habit. Your brain thinks you need them. You've defined yourself by these bags for so long that it feels like they're a part of you. You've defined yourself as a victim of trauma and made those bags part of your identity.

The very last step in healing is to put the bags away in the closet and recognize that you don't need to drag them around anymore. They should no longer define you, and you no longer want them to.

Some people never figure this out. They spend their entire life collecting luggage to drag around with them, because it's who they decided to be.

Some people learn to do it through therapy. They practice putting the bags down and going out for the day without them. One day they realize that they haven't picked the bags up in a month.

And some people are like OP. Something happens in their life, and they take stock of themselves. And then they see that they've been dragging around an empty bag that they no longer need. So they just set it down and abandon it.

You can't get rid of baggage until it's empty. It will absolutely crop up if you don't deal with it. But if you have actually dealt with it, it can be the easiest thing in the world to toss the empty bag. The tricky part is recognizing that it's empty and you don't need it anymore.

u/lightiggy on Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/12gpbsq/benjamin_ferencz_was_the_last_surviving/jflesk4/?context=1

I genuinely believe that this man is one of the greatest Americans in this entire country's dark history. He is up there with John Brown. I will not give you a summary.

Instead, I will give you Ferencz's entire life story.

Ferencz wasn’t a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, the trial which everyone knows about. Instead, he was a chief prosecutor at one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials.

The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials were a series of major war crimes trials conducted after the International Military Tribunal. There were differences between the two.

The Nuremberg Trials which people know about were conducted by an international tribunal consisting of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials were conducted exclusively by the United States.

There had been plans for more international trials, but worsening relations between the West and the East made that impossible. However, the major Allied powers agreed that they were still obligated to prosecute suspected war criminals in their respective occupation zones of Germany.

Now, some people know that many war criminals were treated leniently, ignored, or even outright protected for political or other reasons. That said, there were still hundreds of trials conducted against thousands of defendants.

The British conducted most of their minor war crimes trials in Hamburg, the French in Rastatt, the Americans on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp (they found that the prison bunker was convenient for housing suspects), and the Soviets in various parts of Eastern Germany.

Shortly after the international tribunal issued its verdicts, the U.S. high command established the Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (OCCWC), a war crimes investigation team. The OCCWC was instructed to prepare major war crimes trials in the American occupation zone.

The likes of Dachau Trials handled mostly concentration camp guards and soldiers who murdered POWs. Sometimes, more important war criminals were tried in those trials.

The OCCWC was different; their sole purpose was to pursue those more important war criminals. They were supposed to pursue of the more important people who'd managed to avoid prosecution in the likes of the Dachau Trials.

At the time, Ferencz was a nobody. The only thing special about him was his height.

Sunset: Hunkering down for the winter!

https://brr.fyi/posts/sunset

At exactly 90° South latitude, the sun rotates in a near-perfect counterclockwise circle around the sky. There is no difference whatsoever between “night” and “day”. On any given day, 2pm looks the same as 2am. The sun is at the same height, just in a different part of the sky.

The sun reaches its highest point in the sky, about 23.5° above the horizon, around the December Solstice (December 21).

After the sun reaches its peak, it begins to set. It’s still rotating in perfect circles around the sky; they’re just getting lower and lower each day.

The Masters Tournament At Augusta Is Leaving $269 Million On The Putting Green

https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinteitelbaum/2022/04/07/the-masters-tournament-at-augusta-is-leaving-269-million-on-the-putting-green/?sh=569a142c5eb1

Augusta has just six sponsors—AT&T, Delta, IBM, Mercedes Benz, Rolex and UPS—which split a minimalistic four minutes of commercial time per hour of event coverage. Most of the sponsorship money goes directly to Augusta’s media partners, CBS and ESPN, to cover the cost of production, with the rest going to pay to host hospitality events for VIP patrons. Given that the U.S. Open generates at least $15 million per year in sponsorship revenue, it is safe to assume that the Masters could pull in at least $20 million, thanks to its much higher TV viewership.

The Masters generates no domestic TV revenue because its agreements with CBS and ESPN allow Augusta complete control of the broadcast in exchange for no compensation. In comparison, the USGA receives $93 million per year from NBC to air the U.S. Open. Lee Berke, who runs consulting firm LHB Sports, Entertainment and Media, said that Augusta could command $100 million or more if the club were ever to fully commercialize and auction its domestic media rights.

u/GruntMarine's 9/11 poem

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/120hmfg/me_20_years_ago_today_32403_3rd_day_of_the_iraq/jdhl899/?context=1

9/11 MASQUERADE. A poem, by me

We came from all around
Pledged allegiance with resound
And gave to Uncle Sam our rights away

A soldier corps
Built just for war
With ranks of those
Who yearned for more
Were drilled and taught to kill both night and day

We stood in line
Time after time
Were stripped of thoughts
Issued a mind
And told to hate and who to hate as well

As time went on
It wasn’t long
All childhood innocence
Was gone
We new recruits bought all that they could sell

/u/breckenridgeback on technical advances

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/eli5_if_humans_have_been_in_our_current_form_for/

There were, broadly, roughly eight major turning points in that time. Most of them didn't involve any fundamentally new idea - they just used the advancements going on in the background to make a new thing work. And since those advancements became more and more enabled by each progressive step, so too were we able to make more and more things work.

The first was language, around 60,000 to 100,000 years ago....

When My Father Got Alzheimer’s, I Had to Learn to Lie to Him

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/opinion/alzheimers-dementia-lying.html

When my father was declining from Alzheimer’s disease, one of the things my siblings and I used to argue about was whether to correct his confusions.

For example, my father, in his impaired state, expected his live-in aide to work for room and board and would lash out at her (and us) whenever he learned that she had been paid. My siblings tended to think that it was fine to lie to him about matters like this if it helped him (and us) get through one of his rancorous moods.

I fought against this practice as a matter of principle. As a doctor, I had seen how even well-meaning deception, such as withholding bad news, could be damaging. To me, a healthy relationship with our father, even in his debilitated state, could be based only on truth and trust. Small lies, even if told with the best of intentions, would undermine his dignity and erode what little connection we had left with him.

As it happens, the disagreement between me and my siblings mirrored a larger debate in the medical community over the past few decades about how best to treat dementia patients. Should the ethical demands of truth-telling give way to the everyday needs of dementia care? Or is telling the truth always the best way to uphold the dignity of patients and serve their mental health? 

A Good Friday funeral in Texas. Baby Halo's parents had few choices in post-Roe Texas

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/06/1168399423/a-good-friday-funeral-in-texas-baby-halos-parents-had-few-choices-in-post-roe-te

Her name was Halo, and she was born last week, on March 29, two months early and weighing 3 pounds. She lived for four hours, dying in the arms of her father, Luis Villasana.

Her mother, Samantha Casiano, knew their baby wouldn't survive long because she had anencephaly – part of Halo's brain and skull never developed.

Now, they can't afford to give their newborn daughter the funeral they would like to give her. 

‘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.