More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.
They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away.
If you don't have your old Atari defensive gear, T-Rex Labs has some interesting thoughts on defending against drones.
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.
Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma
I came across this link on Twitter, and it leads to a post not just presenting the video, but the history, language, and musical evolution of the carol. Quite interesting. Reading that I came to suspect that the term for young ladies in the UK in the 60s- "bird"- may not have to do with the animals, but rather with a Middle English term (berde) that was resurrected with a modern spelling and understanding. Turns out that may not be exactly the case, but perhaps there's a relationship there regardless. Turns out she did a whole thread of carols, but I've not had time to go through them all yet. Something to help get you in the spirit of Advent.
Come for the riot-worthy recipe, stay for the story of Cadet Jefferson Davis's eggnog rebellion.
Events are moving quickly in Syria after Hezbollah was crushed. The Turkish terrorists have taken Hama, the Iraqi parliament has authorized troops to enter Syria, and Russia has pulled its fleet from Tartus. Because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to them, the Russians will have to sail to northwest Russia to reach a friendly port. What a mess. I blame Israel ;-).
In 1997 an experimental archeology project was begun near Treigny, France. The project was to build a new castle, Guédelon Castle, using only the materials and methods available in the 13th century, in order to learn more about how castles were built. It took 25 years and involved hundreds of craftsmen, bringing about whole new generations of masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc., who had years of experience in medieval building methods. In 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down and many of these craftsmen went to work on the rebuilding project.
Wikipedia article explaining the castle project -- lots of pics
Guardian article on the Guédelon Castle craftsmen going to work on Notre Dame
For anyone who is interested in 13th century castle building, I can't recommend the five episodes of the BBC series Secrets of the Castle highly enough. It seems to be available for free on YouTube. (That said, if you already know a great deal about the topic, the series was made for a popular audience and may not be all that exciting.)
Here is the Guédelon Castle website, especially useful if you plan to visit.
As a feminist historian, I study the ways in which women were able to pursue and achieve their goals in spite of the restrictive patriarchy of the Middle Ages. In my study of X, I examined the way that she/they were able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in pursuing her/their goals. Even more surprisingly, given the strident patriarchy of the era, I found that her/their chief allies were often the men in her/their lives rather than other women.
When historian Erika Graham-Goering checked the number of women who were in power worldwide five years ago, she was surprised. The proportion was the same as it was in France in the 14th century: one in five.
Graham-Goering’s area of expertise is power, who held it, and how it was exercised in the late Middle Ages....
Graham-Goering focuses on how society was organised. An important finding is that the exercise of power was much less authoritarian and more productive than the impression created in later times. It was about finding practical solutions to situations that arose in the moment....
“Women were somewhat more vulnerable to coups, but nonetheless, one in five of those in power were women. When Jeanne married, she remained the legitimate owner of the land.”Noblemen and women performed many of the same leadership tasks, although few women went to war. An important exception here is Joan of Arc (1412–1431), now a saint in the Catholic Church. For a period during the Hundred Years’ War, she led the French army in the war against England.“It’s a thought-provoking fact that women lost power after the French Revolution and the introduction of democracy. They could neither be elected nor vote themselves. Whereas when positions were inherited, they actually had a reasonably good chance of being at the top of the hierarchy and in power,” Graham-Goering concludes.
The rise of science in the early modern period has a similar feature: people like to think that history is the story of progress, so that the rise of science should align with a greater acceptance of women and an end to superstitions like witch-burning. In fact, we invented science when we started burning witches. The rise of science and superstition went hand in hand, accompanied with a rise in cultural misogyny.
By the way, in the US Congress it's a about one-in-four: 25 Senators plus the Vice President as a tiebreaker, 127 of 435 in the House. The fact that I didn't know that without looking it up suggests that we don't really view it as that big a deal; I know how many Republicans and Democrats there are in the Senate without having to look, for example. Among governors, it'll be 13 of 50. It's interesting that these very different times and places have settled on about the same ratio, in spite of having completely different methods of selection. That might also be worth studying, but it is not properly a question for historians.
Headline: "Rebels Seize Control over most of Syria's Largest City."Subhead: "The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise opposition offensive that is the most intense escalation in years in the civil war."First paragraph: "Rebels had seized..."Second paragraph: "...antigovernment rebels..."Third paragraph: "...some rebels..."Fourth paragraph: "...surprise rebel offensive..."
"The timing of the assault suggested that the rebels could be exploiting weaknesses across an alliance linking Iran to the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Assad regime in Syria and others."
"Within hours from Friday into Saturday, Syrian government soldiers, security forces and police officers fled the city, according to the war monitoring group. They were replaced by the Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels sweeping through on foot, motorbikes or on trucks mounted with machine guns."
That was back in September. Here's a much shorter video from today that shows more of the cathedral.
This would be worth going to see.
As an American, I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed or offended, since we have a splendid and relatively uncommercialized holiday just the day before that expresses the best in American civic instincts. What could be more wholesome than giving thanks? And what do Europeans import? The parasite without the host, consumption without gratitude.
If you can't have sympathy for the Left this Thanksgiving, maybe a little for the Devil?
NEW: The University System of Georgia has:-Banned DEI statements in hiring and admissions.-Added free expression training to student orientation.-Declared political neutrality.-Required the teaching of the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and more.
Students often oppose free speech for their enemies while relying on it themselves. Georgia has hosted a number of pro-Hamas demonstrations that walk right up to the line of First Amendment protection by asserting support for a State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Often it's those same students who join such protests and yet tend to support speech suppression towards their political opponents. It's not that they don't have principles, it's just that power rather than liberty tends to be behind those principles.
UGA compares well to a lot of academic institutions in that there has remained some room for sanity there. Georgia's Board of Regents are early adopters of this movement to recommit to founding principles.
Meanwhile, most of the college is much more concerned about Georgia's admission to the upcoming College Football championships. This has been the wildest college football year I can remember. Georgia whipped UMass last week by 21 points, but has lost to Alabama and Ole Miss; Alabama lost to Tennessee; Georgia beat Tennessee; Georgia also beat Texas, which it may play again in the championships if Texas beats Texas A&M, who just lost to Auburn, who usually can't beat North Korea. (Georgia beat Auburn by 23 points.) Alabama will also be admitted, in spite of losing to Tennessee, Oklahoma (who also lost to Tennessee, Texas, and Ole Miss but who beat Auburn), and, incredibly, to Vanderbilt.
Sanity, then, prevails in having more interest in the football than the politics; but sanity definitely does not prevail in determining who is going to win the championship games. You'd do as well to flip a quarter as to try to understand the stats.
We had free speech on 1 social media app for less than 2 years and won the White House, Senate, House, and the popular vote
This is why they freaked out when @elonmusk bought Twitter
Their regime can’t survive without censorship
When hundreds of Jews left Germany, including 16 who had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Adolf Hitler declared, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!”Your terms are acceptable, as they say these days.There follow some observations on recipients of Nobels in economics that I will pass over in dignified silence on the ground that competence is no more associated with prizes in that field than in the field of world peace. The article then gets to the real meat:
Of the 117 Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000, 45 went to immigrants. Since 1960, nearly a hundred immigrants have won the “hard science” Nobels. Legal immigrants. In some years, such as 2016, the majority of people in the entire world recognized by the Nobel Committee were American immigrants.As the author argues, we might want to look harder at EB (employment-based) green card policy while we're tightening up the border obstacles to Tren de Aragua members in the next four years.
As I walked that day, I thought a lot about what we’re doing when we elect a president of the United States. This country is the most powerful and arguably the most violent empire that has ever existed, and to the extent that we have an emperor, it’s the president. Through policy choices at home and military action abroad, every president kills people. It could be thousands of people or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, depending on circumstance and their inclination. Killing people, choosing who will die both here and abroad is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time. Is “Emperor of the Violent Hegemony” the kind of job that’s possible to be a good person in? Is it the kind of job where anyone, however well-intentioned, can effect positive change?
Is it possible to be a good person while being a farmer?*
Killing is what happens on farms. Seriously. I'm saying this as a farmer.
City people think that farms are "where life happens." Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. I don't even raise livestock or poultry and I have to kill stuff.
I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I've trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels - before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I've shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.
And none of that starts in with helping neighbors slaughter steers, lambs, chickens, etc.
That's farming: killing. Lots of it.
I suppose one could make an argument about the USA being 'the most violent empire that has ever existed,' although one would have to argue both that it was "an empire" and also that it was more violent than some obvious alternative contenders. Still, there is a point to be made that a whole lot of killing is necessary for cultivation -- of a civilization, or a culture, or of a field of crops.
Killing is inevitable for life; that is one of the basic facts of reality. The question isn't whether you kill, but whether what you killed for was worth it.
*The citation on that from 2008 is dubious; Cassandra posted it here and ascribed it to me, but the dead hyperlink points to National Review; I think it sounds like VDH. I've only ever written one thing for National Review, and it was not on this subject; and we don't have jackrabbits or pocket gophers, so I'm sure I didn't write it.
On "Fox News @ Night," Washington clarified that bypassing properties that sport Trump signs is part of a broader policy designed to protect the safety of FEMA personnel. So, staffers have the right to skip over houses displaying Trump signage if they feel "uncomfortable," she said, similar to the fear of aggressive animals that are unchained and running loose.So, the policy isn't specifically about avoiding Trump supporters per se, Washington insisted. The guidelines instruct FEMA workers to avoid any situation that may make them feel unsafe — such as an off-leash dog, she suggested...."So the people [with] FEMA were fearing the Trump houses like they were fearing people with vicious dogs in their backyards?" Fox News host Trace Gallagher pressed."Exactly," Washington replied. "Unfortunately, the passionate supporters for Trump, some of them were a little bit violent."..."This was the culture. They were already avoiding these homes based on community trends from hostile political encounters. It has nothing to do with the campaign sign. It just so happened to be part of the community trend," Washington went on.
I don't claim to have any definite information about this beyond having never met a FEMA person in the whole rescue operation. As I said above, that could simply be understandable triage of the sort that is normal and necessary. Her testimony invites questions, however. I'm sure we'll all be interested in the answers.
The system could defend itself more powerfully by discarding the illusion, and like Egypt just openly stating that only certain candidates will be allowed to win. That would do away with the challenge, but also a major source of the system's power -- somewhat like destroying the Ring unmade Sauron and his challenge to the freedom of the age, but also destroyed the work of the Three and the ability of the world to sustain magical things like elves. The system seems to think of its challenger as being Sauron-like in evil, given their choices of analogies for him. Will they destroy the Ring to stop him? The loss of this illusion would protect the powerful, but they would retain only a shadow of their power, only what they could hold onto by naked force and coercion.
That hoary left-wing idea for functionally disposing of the Electoral College is still a terrible idea. It technically only comes into force if ratified by enough states to make it binding, but it’s still worth pointing this out.
Their backgrounds make them well-suited for a disaster response of this magnitude. “This is what we do when we go to war. We go into bad scenarios with towns turned upside down,” said Mark Elkhill, an Army veteran with the relief group Christian Rangers. (The name Christian Rangers is taken from an exercise in Robin Sage, the nearly two-week special field “final exam” for would-be Green Berets.)Most of the group with Elkhill are former U.S. Army Green Berets and this is exactly their mission: to train local people to recover, sustain and protect themselves, he said while taking a break from cutting firewood that locals will use to heat their homes this winter. “The only difference is we’re not getting shot at here, which makes it a thousand times easier,” Elkhill said.
I told somebody I was with during emergency operations that it was like 'the good-parts version of war.' It's all the eudaimonia without the downsides. It's small wonder that veterans are 'finding purpose' in it, to use the Post's chosen language.
“Obviously this is a major reckoning for the Democratic Party in terms of, particularly as it relates to young men, Black and Hispanic voters and rural voters,” said Jef Pollock, a Biden and Harris campaign pollster. “If the economy were perceived by voters as swimming, things might be different. But for now, it’s clear these voters I’m talking about — particularly young men, Black men, Hispanic men, and rural White voters — do not see the Democrats as addressing their everyday needs, and that’s something we need to think about holistically.”We certainly need to see a lot more political speeches emphasizing the holistic approach. More cowbell!The linked article contains an excerpt from a WaPo piece, presumably behind a paywell, not that I'd go there anyway.
Many of them, of course, have arrived at that conclusion thanks to outright bigotry.
Never and forever are neither for men.You’ll be returning again and again.-Fritz Leiber, “The Circle Curse,” Swords Against Death
My wife of 25 years did something I warned ‘never’ to do: she put a piece of my cast iron through the dishwasher. This is the classic offense against Southerners’ sensibility that people from the north do after they move down here. This was a grill press rather than a skillet, but still
Cast iron really is indestructible, though. It took some work to clean the rust and reseason it today, but it came out just fine. I shouldn’t have worried about it.
It’s good as new, which is to say, not as good. But it’s good enough to get started rebuilding a new layer of seasoning.
Illinois just lost its assault weapons ban, based on a philosphical argument about the famous rabbit/duck graphic.
Always nice to see philosophy used for the good.
In a move that feels straight out of sci-fi, SpaceX has proposed “Marslink,” an adaptation of its Starlink satellite network, to deliver internet connectivity on Mars.Presented to NASA, Marslink aims to establish a high-speed data relay system—capable of transmitting 4 Mbps or more—across 1.5 astronomical units, the distance between Earth and Mars.The concept envisions multiple satellites in Mars orbit, leveraging Starlink’s advanced laser communication tech to maintain a constant, near-instantaneous data flow between planets.This network could serve Mars missions, allowing real-time images and data streams from Mars to Earth, as well as supporting future ground operations and Mars orbit assets.
Let's go to the stars.
[T]he staffing decisions this time around will be designed intentionally around individuals who will not work to undermine his agenda from within. . . .
