Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Chess Grandmasters Do Not Burn 6000 Calories Per Day (June 28, via) "Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate."

2. How a Nazi Helped the New York Times Smear Zohran Mamdani (July 29) "So the New York Times accepted hacked data that a 'scientific racist' got from a violently racist Nazi and chose to publish the data as an indictment of a Brown African-born South Asian Muslim man who wants all children to have access to pre-K education, instead of asking themselves, 'Hey, is the real story here something about how a self-described violently racist Nazi currently has the private data of millions of people, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, family members’ information, and citizenship status?'"

3. ChatGPT will apologize for anything (August 8, via) "I'm sorry for advising you to accept the trade of your cow for three beans."

And: Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem (July 22) "Think about that. A product owned by the world’s richest man was spewing Nazi propaganda on his social media platform. That's a scandal that should have Musk answering tough questions about his company's engineering practices, safety protocols, and values. Instead, we get 'Grok issues apology.'"

4. The Scholars Helping to Keep WWII Sex Slavery From Being Forgotten (August 14) [content note: rape] "The history of 'comfort women' represents one of the most horrific, systematic violations of women’s rights in modern history."

In high school history class, I remember reading that the Japanese army had "comfort women"- I think there was 1 line about it in a textbook- but somehow I didn't get that it meant sex slavery. It meant rape.

5. New study: State medical examiners wrongly excused homicides committed by Maryland police officers (July 21) "And of course all of this has been really complicated by the emergence of bullshit medical theories about about deaths in police custody, and particularly this theory of excited or agitated delirium."

6. The Existential Horror of Thomas Riker (August 13, 18-minute video) "Then, he finally gets rescued off of that planet, which should have been the happiest day of his life, but the first face he sees is you. And then he finds out what happened, and he realizes that in the eyes of the rest of the world, he's not Will Riker- you are."

7. What is identity? (August 17) "However, sometimes when people talk about identity, they simply mean, 'this word describes what I am'. Under this definition, you could identify with a word even if you never actually heard of the word. Therefore, if a survey asks you whether you identify with a word you’ve never heard of, you have to look it up to discover the answer."

8. One neurosurgeon, 8 million patients (August 17) "'Before Dr. Kamara, there was no hope,' said Dr. Kehinde Oluwadiya, acting chief medical director of the University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospital Complex. 'If you are lucky and rich, you will go to another country and be treated. But if you are not, it's either you die or you live with a lot of disability.'"

9. Amid growing 'scandal' of elder homelessness, health care groups aim to help (August 16) "'It's a national scandal, really, that the richest country in the world would have destitute elderly and disabled people,' Culhane said."

10. Al Jazeera reporter's death a 'significant escalation' of dangers media face, CPJ says (August 15) "Al-Sharif was among six journalists killed in a targeted Israeli strike on Aug. 10. The Israeli military said al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas 'rocket-firing brigade,' and published spreadsheets that it said showed he was on Hamas' payroll. Salah Negm, Al Jazeera's director of news, rejected those allegations calling them 'completely fabricated' in an interview with Morning Edition, adding al-Sharif was 'a journalist doing his job, nothing more.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Understanding MAGA’s Obsession With Pedophilia and No Other Sex Crimes (July 24) "A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?"

2. Hundreds march to White House to protest Trump's D.C. crackdown (August 16) 

3. Our leading papers failed to stand up to Trump's criminal justice authoritarianism (August 18) Wow, look at this completely wild sentence from the New York Times, in a paragraph supposedly giving background on the trends about crime, in relation to that felon's claims: "A close presidential election eventually led to a violent attack on Congress."

Blogaround

1. My Body, Their Baby: Grace Y. Kao on the Christian Ethics of Surrogacy (August 21) "So, in terms of the progressive Christian values that I hold, I want to say if you truly affirm marriage equality—and many mainline Protestant denominations do, as do progressive Catholics—and you also affirm the traditional idea that children are a good of marriage, not a requirement (because I also believe parenthood is a vocation to which not everyone is called), then there needs to be a pathway for two men to become parents. And unless you’re going to hold the position that their pathway is adoption and everyone else’s pathway is natural birth, then I think surrogacy is the next step, especially since a lot of these progressive or mainline Protestant denominations have also officially affirmed the conscientious use of IVF for infertile, married, heterosexual couples."

2. See moment India becomes 4th country to land on the moon (August 23) Cool! And it's the first spacecraft to land near the south pole of the moon.

3. The one-child policy is gone, but many of its old trappings remain (August 22) "In the end, the mother and her three kids had to buy five tickets, raising questions about the logic of the situation." 

China's one-child policy ended in 2016, and now the government is trying to create new policies to incentivize people to have more kids ("more" means like 2 or 3, Chinese people can barely imagine having more than 3), but it's not going that well. The one-child policy was in effect for 30ish years, so the entire society has adapted to this norm of families only having 1 kid. In particular, everything related to children's education/extracurriculars is SO EXPENSIVE, like the intention is you spend all your money on the one kid- so then how on earth can you have a second kid? 

And this article which I've linked is about a parent on a flight with 3 children, and the airline said she can't bring 3 children, so she needs to buy an "unaccompanied minor" ticket (???). A lot of things in Chinese society are set up with the expectation that families have 1 child, or maybe, in rare cases, 2. 

For example, when you take kids to fun places like parks, children's play areas, etc, usually the options for ticket pricing are like, 1 adult, 1 adult + 1 child, 2 adults + 1 child. Like they don't expect there would be a group that's 1 adult + 2 children.

(Also very funny how the header image on that article on "large families" seems to be 2 adults and 2 children.)

4. Responding to this bit of an AJC article on aces in fiction (August 23) The Ace Journal Club discussed an article on ace romance novels, which claimed that "Crafting a credible path to HEA [happily ever after] is less challenging for authors writing demisexual or gray-asexual characters since these orientations experience sexual attraction under certain circumstances." Coyote disagrees with this.

5. Federal District Court Refuses to Halt Florida’s Discriminatory Housing Law (August 17) "Under SB 264, people who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and whose 'domicile,' or permanent home, is in China, are prohibited from purchasing property, including homes, in Florida." Wow not cool.

6. Let's Read A Paper: The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence From A Randomized Evaluation (August 18) "For many people, microcredit actually ends up functioning like a bank account. The global poor save too little money for it to be worthwhile for large banks to offer them interest-bearing savings accounts, so they typically save by paying someone in the neighborhood to keep an eye on the money. Most microcredit organizations allow participants to take out larger loans if they successfully pay off smaller loans. If you pay off your loan and then immediately take out another one, mathematically this is equivalent to a savings account you have to pay for: in the long run it doesn’t matter if you got the money at the beginning or the end of your first month. Microcredit organizations may charge lower fees than local money guards. They also have better security and are less likely to flee in the night with the money. The loan officer will show up at your door and complain if you miss your payment, so there’s an incentive to save."

7. Fukushima wastewater released into the ocean, China bans all Japanese seafood (August 25) and The science behind the Fukushima waste water release (August 27) So, Japan has started dumping wastewater from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster into the ocean. I don't know what to think about this... the levels of radioactivity are very low, scientists are saying it's probably safe, but it still seems like we don't really know what the effects could be. And China has now banned all seafood imported from Japan- that kind of feels more politically-motivated, in my opinion, rather than strictly based on science. 

8. Bob Barker, Longtime Host of ‘The Price Is Right,’ Dies at 99 (August 26)

9. i wish that i could wear hats (2022) lollll

Blogaround

1. A spot of good news in an Ebola crisis: Vaccine supplies are expected to last (posted January 22)

2. The Kind of Sex I Thought I Wanted (posted January 24) "I thought that my partner would be dissatisfied and leave me because I wasn’t giving him sex. I thought that I was being a terrible wife because I couldn’t please my partner. I thought that my body was broken and betraying me because it couldn’t do the one sex act it was made to do."

3. Japan’s Supreme Court rules transgender people still have to get sterilised (posted January 24) "The Supreme Court of Japan has upheld a law which forces transgender people to get sterilised before they can legally change their gender." Whoaaaaaaa not cool.

4. Black Children Don’t Have Nick Sandmann’s Rights (posted January 25) "A black teen exercising his right to stand there or walk there or drive there or play there or exist there can be guilty of a capital offense in this country. But a white teenager can block a national freaking monument and get a pat on the head from the president of the United States?"

5. The Supreme Court Just Ended My Military Career (posted January 22) "The court is saying that government discrimination based not on evidence, but solely on animus against transgender people, is permissible."

6. The United States Is No Longer the World Leader in Resettling Refugees (posted January 23) "After the United States adopted the Refugee Act of 1980, it resettled more refugees than every other country in the world combined for more than 30 years in a row."

7. 打首獄門同好会 (Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai) - I don' t wanna get out of futon (posted 2018) A Japanese song about how it's too cold to get out of bed in the morning. OH MY GOD SO RELATABLE.

Note: The word they are translating as "futon" in the English subtitles is the Japanese origin of the English word "futon" but it doesn't actually mean a futon, it's just the Japanese word for a regular bed. So uh... something to keep in mind when you're watching the video and reading the subtitles.

Perfect Number: [watching video] [every 10 seconds] "... but why is it a futon?"

(Then I had to explain to Hendrix what a "futon" is. It's a couch that can turn into a bed, and therefore it's not comfortable as a couch and it's also not comfortable as a bed. Every American, when they hear the word "futon", thinks, "remember that time I was at my grandparents' house and there weren't enough beds and I had to sleep on that horrible couch?" So, uh, this mistranslation kind of changes the whole feel of the song...)

8. Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences (posted January 25) "Researchers played audio recordings of a series of sentences spoken in African-American English and asked 27 stenographers who work in courthouses in Philadelphia to transcribe them. On average, the reporters made errors in two out of every five sentences, according to the study."

9. Teaching children about racism (posted January 28) "The goal is not to achieve respectability, to awkwardly brush a comment aside with, 'Don’t say that. That’s not nice.' The aim, rather, is to teach the child that such language is based on an unjust racial hierarchy. 'We don’t say this word because this is what people have said in order to treat people unfairly.' Get straight to the heart of the issue—that the injustice of racism harms human bodies in real and oppressive ways."

10. I Learned Latin and Memorized Old Poems–and I Wish I Hadn’t (posted January 28) "They were surrounded by people who told them that this was what a good education looked like; they believed them. That was that."

Japanese Incarceration was an Appalling Human Rights Violation. Don't Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise

Photo of a Japanese-American family that was incarcerated in WWII. Image source.

During World War II, the United States forced 120,000 people of Japanese descent- most of whom were US citizens, to leave their homes and live in concentration camps. Yes, this is a real thing that happened. Innocent people, not accused of any kind of crime, rounded up solely because of their ethnicity. This was bad. This was really really bad.

Last week, Trump supporter Carl Higbie was interviewed by Fox News's Megyn Kelly, and Higbie mentioned Japanese incarceration while talking about why he believes there should be some kind of registry for Muslims in the US. We should all be horrified at this. What the United States did to Japanese people (both immigrants and US citizens) during WWII was REALLY REALLY BAD. It's shocking. The more I read about it, the more I'm like "how could this happen? Isn't the US supposed to be all about freedom and, you know, not imprisoning innocent people for extremely racist reasons?" (And also, "why didn't I learn about this in school?")

Anyway I've gathered a bunch of links here, because every American needs to know about this:

George Takei: They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.

I was just a child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall. It was a devastating blow to my parents, who had worked so hard to buy a house and raise a family in Los Angeles. After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said. We disembarked in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was a prison: Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.

JACL Comments on Carl Higbie Statements

Higbie’s attempt to cite Japanese American incarceration as a precedent for this type of action is frightening and wrong. It’s a statement intended to lay a marker for a misguided belief that ignores the true lessons of Japanese American incarceration. This lesson was captured in the words of a federal commission that said, “…The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions (to incarcerate Japanese Americans) were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

JACL believes that some of these same conditions exist today, where Muslim Americans are being singled out and unfairly targeted, and where the voices of leadership that should be speaking out against unfair treatment are not.

We must not misinterpret our history by believing the Japanese American incarceration was justified as a precedent for similar actions today, and further, we must not use the wrongdoing perpetrated against Japanese Americans during World War II as a justification for the mistreatment of Muslim Americans.

Japanese-Americans Visit A WW2 Incarceration Camp

George Takei on the Japanese internment camps during WWII

Power of Words (thanks Kenji Kuramitsu for the link)

During WWII, the U.S. government used euphemistic language to control public perceptions about the forced removal of Japanese American citizens from their West Coast homes to desolate American concentration camps further inland. The public was told that Nisei and Issei (non-citizens) were being “evacuated” to “relocation centers” and “internment camps.” Terms like “evacuation” of people sounded like they were being rescued from some kind of disaster (like an earthquake). To obscure the unconstitutional nature of these forced removals, the government referred to the Nisei victims as ‘non-aliens’ instead of ‘citizens’, which might provoke public inquiries like: “Why is the U.S. imprisoning citizens’ without due process of law?” Once in camp, Nisei could earn back their citizenship by embracing their “right” to defend their country and to serve on the “same basis” as other Americans in the military (but in the segregated U.S. Army 442nd Regimental Combat Team) (Lyon, 2012).

Blogaround

Image source.

1. Interrupting Bernie: Exposing the White Supremacy of the American Left (posted August 9) "What was true in King’s time is true in ours: the greatest stumbling block to racial justice is not the KKK; it’s well-meaning White people who would rather maintain injustice than risk the decentering of our Whiteness and White comfort."

2. Hiroshima: An Anti-Transfiguration and Nagasaki: The Sufferings of Christ (posted August 8) "Why do we so readily agree that the Holocaust was a sin, but defend the atomic bombings?"

3. After #Ferguson (posted August 10) "I am literally putting myself in the place of people who are now dead, wondering if there is any way I can protect myself, escape, live."

4. Why Sex Still Dominates Christian Focus On Human Trafficking (posted August 11) "The vast majority of modern slaves are in chains not for sex, but so that you and I can save a few bucks at the store."

5. Wildlife Experts Say Not Climbing Into Gorilla Enclosure Likely Saved Man’s Life (posted August 13) Lol. The Onion.

6. Planned Parenthood Gets Religious Support (posted August 12) "A total of 56 faith-based groups have sent a letter to members of the Senate voicing their support for Planned Parenthood and urging them to reject efforts to defund the organization."

7. This Is What Happens When You Come Out As A Gay Christian Rock Star (posted August 13) "She said she knew she was gay when she was 13, and she’d wept into her bedroom carpet wishing God would end her life."

8. The Problem We All Live With (posted July 31) A radio podcast about school integration. This is really worth listening to.

9. 9 Affirmations You Deserve to Receive If You Have a Mental Illness (posed August 10) "You are worthy of love."

10. The Scarlet Letter: The A-word doesn’t apply when the Right People choose it for the Right Reasons (posted August 12) "For Walker et. al., the word “abortion” refers to evil baby-killing performed on behalf of irresponsible sluts for unknown — but presumably evil and indefensible — reasons. The termination of a pregnancy by good, white, Christian people may be the same procedure, but since they’re good, non-slutty people, they get to call it something else."

11. Two essential ways we need to support pregnant workers (posted in June) "Right now, if you’re pregnant and need a workplace accommodation — even something simple like being allowed to take extra restroom breaks — you have to show that you are medically impaired by the pregnancy (the whole fetus-in-womb thing isn’t enough)."

12. This Study Should End The Debate About Whether Women Regret Having Abortions (posted July 13) "According to a new study that tracked hundreds of women who had abortions, more than 95 percent of participants reported that ending a pregnancy was the right decision for them."

13. You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4 (posted July 27) "You've heard of actors getting typecast. But there is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels."

14. An Atheist On The Worst Passage In The Bible (posted August 13) 1 Corinthians 1:17-31

Blogaround

1. A couple good ones from xkcd: Now and Frequency.

2. The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary (posted March 3) "He was shocked to learn that women don't just use old rags, but other unhygienic substances such as sand, sawdust, leaves and even ash."

3. Three highly ignored teachings of the New Testament: Sabbath healings, circumcision, and unclean food (posted February 22) "That is a tremendously revolutionary statement that calls out one of the most pious-sounding things that Christians always say about worship and life in general: It’s not about you; it’s about God’s glory. Nope, the Sabbath is made for humankind, not for God’s glory." This post hits it out of the park.

4. What Really Changed After The Resurrection? (A Challenge For Lent) (posted March 5) "In other words, if the kingdom of God is really at hand, the only way people are going to notice is if we become the physical embodiment of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven."

5. Sex, Divorce, and Good Christian Kids (posted February 5) "I’m watching too many couples play Russian roulette with their lives because they aren’t listening to their gut instincts about who they want or need to spend their lives with because they happened to have found one person somewhat enchanting and willing to play the Christian marriage game and the stakes are: your whole future on this decision, made in the worst possible state of mind, horny celibacy."

6. Fake Magazine Covers That Expose Real Inequality (posted March 8)

7. 40 Ideas for Lent 2014 (posted March 5)

8. Fukushima disaster: Plan to send residents home three years after nuclear accident labelled 'irresponsible' (posted March 10)