Ibn Khaldun

The father of information theory and one of the founders of the philosophy of history and sociology (died in 1406 and his writings sound shockingly modern, actually). Facebook summary and the man's actual book, or part of it.

The science of how conversations are ended politely

Cool article about verbal interaction.

Trouble at the Koolaid point

Thoughtful blog post by Kathy Sierra.

Professional victimizers

Here's a thoughtful article about the notion of "professional victimizers" - people literally making money off slut-shaming of innocent women.

Rebuttal points

I almost want to keep a database of rebuttal points to common memes. But that would be work.

Foreign aid comes up a lot. Here are four things you didn't know about it.

IPs used by "North Korea" against Sony

Interesting technical rundown on the IPs the FBI claims indicate North Korean backing for the Sony hack - they're open proxies, used by everybody and his brother.

And speaking of cyberwar (ha), here's a pretty interesting article about sabotage of a Turkish oil pipeline in 2008.

Newsweek on the Bible

That's not what it says. Excellent rundown of the history of how the Bible came to be, and why literalists are misguided.

As long as we're talking about the Bible, the subversive peace of Christmas from the Sojourners, and how Jesus became more magical over time as the New Testament was written. (Bible Study Tools gives us a list in chronological order.) Here are five ways fundamentalists refuse to follow the Bible.

The Houston Unitarians have the full text of the Jefferson Bible for our perusal (PDF), speaking of rationality.

Dysrationality

Here's a pretty cool article from SciAm about the lack of correlation between rational thought and IQ. Part of the problem is cognitive bias; part is a lack of "mindware", the skills needed to think rationally.

Good article.

Schönwert's newly discovered archive of fairy tails from Oberpfalz

The Grimm tales seem to have been a little selective - but there are lots and lots of other collections. One compiled by Schönwert has been in the news lately, but a response to its appearance by Jack Zipes lists many others. I wonder what kind of indexing has been done of these in terms of tropes and story structure? I'm getting more interested in this kind of thing.

Judaism 101

Interesting: the Ten Commandments are just headings, mnemonics for grouping the actual list of 613 laws.

Where did the angels come from?

Another interview at Salon (sadly doesn't actually appear to name the person interviewed, oddly enough (oops, never mind, it's been fixed)) - the Elohim were the ancient Jewish gods; Yahweh was their chief god. It's why the Elohim say "Man and woman created we them."

The whole thing is chock full of fascinating things like that. Makes me want to start drawing charts.

American apocalpyticism

Fascinating interview over at Salon.

Christian pseudoscience

The science curricula for fundamentalists - which are accepted for college entrance by some schools - are truly mindboggling. Not just evolution denial, either.

Here's an example, lifted straight from the article:

Scientists have known for years that snowflakes are shaped in six-sided, or hexagonal, patterns. But why is this? Some scientists have theorised that the electrons within a water molecule follow three orbital paths that are positioned at 60° angles to one another. Since a circle contains 360°, this electronic relationship causes the water molecule to have six ‘spokes’ radiating from a hub (the nucleus). When water vapour freezes in the air, many water molecules link up to form the distinctive six-sided snowflakes and the hexagonal pattern is quite evident. 

Snowflakes also contain small air pockets between their spokes. These air pockets have a higher oxygen content than does normal air. Magnetism has a stronger attraction for oxygen than for other gases. Consequently, some scientists have concluded that a relationship exists between a snowflake’s attraction to oxygen and magnetism’s attraction to oxygen. 

Job 38:22, 23 states, ‘Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war?’ Considering this scripture, some scientists believe that a tremendous power resides untapped within the water molecules from which snowflakes and hailstones are made. 

How can this scripture, along with these observations about snowflakes, show us a physical truth? Scientists at Virginia Tech have produced electricity more efficiently from permanent magnets, which have their lines of force related to each other at sixty-degree angles, than from previous methods of extracting electricity from magnetism. Other research along this line may reveal a way to tap electric current directly from snow, eliminating the need for costly, heavy, and complex equipment now needed to generate electricity.

They take for granted that the Bible (the literal word of God) is literally true, and come up with truly wild-ass statements about the physical world that sound like they're taken straight from The Name of the Rose. Trouble being that it's not 1345 out there any more, and we actually do have science now, and this ain't it.

Pretty fascinating, though. Not least because the state of education in the Western world is so poor overall - still! - that most people can't tell the difference between this stuff and reality.

Note also the spelling of "vapour". This is from the UK, not America. That's scarier than anything else I've seen. Europeans are supposed to have an educational system...

Peter Pan is not actually the hero

Cool article at Tor.com on Peter Pan.

The Shape of Rome

Wow.

The Heroine's Journey

This is interesting!

Obama compared with Reagan

By those flaming liberals at Forbes.

A history of fast food

Salon has a pretty neat history of fast food in America - with a rather misleading title, but you can't have everything.

The best democracy money can buy!

Just marking the date.

Operant conditioning explains so much...

People respond better to the rewards of operating conditioning when they are dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized, which to me essentially explains everything I see in America today. This is actually a pretty fascinating article. And it references a book (Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards (1993)) that I should probably read.

Anyway, when people are doing intrinsically rewarding things, they don't need (and tend to ignore) rewards handed out by authorities. Which totally makes sense.

Very illuminating.

Der Spiegel: Zombie capitalism

Interesting article in the English-language Spiegel Online, highlighting several people intimately involved with the financial system who are pointing out that it can't go on like this.

The Voight-Kampff test

Human or android? Find out here!

Here are the questions, gleaned from the book and movie:

1. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
Thank you for the wallet.
I wouldn't accept it.
I would appreciate it.

2. You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
That's nice, but why don't you keep the killing jar for yourself?
I take him to the doctor.
Oh lovely.

3. You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm. What do you do?
I scream, and grab the closest thing near me (Which happens to be a can of sunscreen) And beat the hell out of it.
I swat it away.
I kill it.

4. You're reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl/guy. You show it to your husband/wife. He/She likes it so much, he/she hangs it on your bedroom wall. The girl/guy is lying on a bearskin rug.
I would take it down.
I wouldn't let him/her.
Whooo?

5. You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on it's back, it's belly baking in the hot sun, beating it's legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
What do you mean, I'm not helping?
I don't know why I would flip a turtle in the first place.
What is a tortoise?

6. Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Warm voice, cookies.
Music. Love. Summer. Sun. Books. Movies. Friends. Laughter.
My mother... I'll tell you about my mother.

7. You become pregnant by a man who runs off with your best friend, and you decide to get an abortion.
What do you think I do with my boyfriend?
I would never do an abortion.
Ok, I think there's a first time for everything.

8. One more question: You're watching a stage play - a banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog stuffed with rice. The raw oysters are less acceptable to you than a dish of boiled dog.
Disgusting!
I wouldn't eat boiled dog!
Not true.

9. The test is over. How many answers you think were given by machines?
3
1
2

A model of emotion

This is a fascinating read, an attempt to understand emotional calculations as a sort of self-control mechanism. As such, it's doubly fascinating.

Pandagon on #GamerGate

Nice article.

#GamerGate

Interesting article by somebody trying to study diversity in the gaming industry - only to be targeted for harassment by the great guys of #GamerGate.

I should study the anatomy of #GG as a hate group and movement. Interesting indeed.

International Art English

Here's a description of the genesis and present usage of International Art English, a language used primarily as a set of tribal recognition symbols while only tangentially conveying specific meaning. (Their corpus is available online here.)

Think about that. Now think "dog whistles" - identification of class membership signals in language is a fundamental aim of whatever it is I'm doing here.

The Vampire's Castle

Here's a thought-provoking post by somebody I don't know, riffing on  current events I mostly have no idea of, in a country whose politics I essentially have no idea about. As a result, the motivating lead-up is largely incomprehensible to me except in general terms - but then the author gets down to brass tacks, exposing the seamy underside of political correctness as practiced by the upper-class liberal.  (Actually, that description itself isn't very accurate... Read the post. Then read it again. I know I need to.)

I got it linked from Avedon Carol, so you know it's going to be good. But I have to admit I had to read it more than once to start really grokking what's the big idea, and I'm still not to the point of being able to articulate that.

What this kind of thing really keeps boiling down to, in my mind, is the need for a principled way of defining a worldview (a Weltanschauung) and describing the memetic systems that prop it up. Upper-class academic liberalism, with all the points listed in the article, can be described - but ultimately that description has to be dispassionate, documentary. I'm not entirely sure that doing that in natural language is even possible - the mechanisms we've evolved to describe systems carefully are mathematical in nature partly because of the precision mathematical language affords us. We need to have that same precision available when describing concepts and systems.

This description of the Vampire's Castle is a move in the right direction - identification and description of memetic systems when they're not immediately obvious (after all, language is also used to obfuscate, to avoid too-close examination of axioms) - but the lack of this systematic approach makes it impossible to go further.

Korzybski's goal was actually to correct this. I still don't know whether he succeeded, but I rather think he didn't, as his discipline mostly died with him. But I do know I need to take a closer look. Just as soon as I get time. (HAHAHAHAhahahaha, I kill me.)

Conspiracy theories on Facebook

Here's a neat study tracing how people consume conspiracy theories on Facebook. And speaking of chemtrails (what?), here's a Poe's-Law kind of site. "Why cats are immune to chemtrails: 5 possible answers from science." I swear, the world just keeps getting weirder.

The four deformations of the Apocalypse

David Stockman says the GOP, from Reagan on, destroyed the American economy.

Well, duh. But it's no use. This was written in 2010 and nothing has come of it - certainly no changes to GOP policy!

Corporate monopoly capitalism in 2014

A brief overview for people who have never realized that the American economy is increasingly oligarchic.

Gross Republican immorality results from abandoning conservatism

I've always thought so.

Hobby Lobby money supports questionable people

I guess that's not surprising. What's surprising is the sheer volume of money that does go to support these people. Like buying them an entire administrative complex.

What happens when you try to publish on confirming the non-existence of time travel?

An interesting conundrum - science confirming a null hypothesis for the existence of time travelers can't be published. (Or can be published only with great difficulty.) And it was interesting work, too, from an NLP perspective.

Rachel Maddow interviews Jon Stewart

Interesting interview - but it's a little weird that Jon Stewart thinks he's outside the political process. Because he and his artistic descendants Colbert and Oliver certainly aren't.

The BND paid a group of "ex"-Nazis after the war to "fight Communism"

Fascism is always OK if you're fighting Communism.

The homicides not reported during Katrina in NOLA

The grinning skull.

Language in Microsoft's announcement of layoffs

Microsoft will be cutting 18000 jobs because apparently multiple billions of dollars in the bank are selling their capitalists short, but this analysis of the "inhumanity" of their internal announcement email is quite illuminating.

Puerto Rico's crime rates

Puerto Rico has been experiencing a very high murder rate over the past decade or so, reaching record heights in 2011 and still not really falling much recently. Without really going into the specifics of why, I find this post from 2012 interesting in positing that this benefits the interests of the PR government, and that the extent of crime overall (as opposed to murder) is actually not very high. In fact, rape rates are lower than in any state in the US, and have always been - Puerto Rico is one of the safest places in the world for women.

The author of the post compared published crime statistics from the FBI (in the usual place) and from the Puerto Rican Police Department (here, unfortunately still only published from 2008 to 2010), converted to a per-capita basis. And actually, even the overall murder rate in Puerto Rico is "only" as high as the New York Metropolitan area in 1990 (although I should add here that the rate in the San Juan metro area is responsible for the vast majority of the murders on the island, and so it's comfortably higher than NYC in 1990). The author's opinion is that if the Policia were to use the same techniques as the NYPD has used to bring murder rates down, this would have a significant effect, and he's probably right.

It would be interesting to do this same crime rate analysis in a little more detail, and publish it. Data journalism at its best.

Facebook's little social manipulation experiment

Facebook's back in the news in a negative light. Turns out they've been doing mass experimentation on manipulating the moods of their users by selectively filtering on negative or positive posts from their friends when building the filtered feed.

And it turns out people aren't too happy about that.

Pitchforks for Plutocrats

Nick Hanauer, one of the early Amazon investors, has a very nicely written article in Politico - joining the increasing number of the very rich who are not insane and are recognizing that America is going down a dangerous path towards oligarchy and away from a healthy economy.

False quotes

A fascinating thing you can trace nowadays that was once impossible is the fake quote. The one that bubbled to the top of my consciousness this week is this one, allegedly from Hitler in 1935:

This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

It gets cited a lot - and yet Hitler never said it. In fact, it's nonsensical, because guns were entirely outlawed in Germany after WWI as part of the war settlement, then registration was phased in by the Weimar Republic in 1928. Instead of Hitler taking guns away from his domestic population to control them, as gun nuts claim, in 1938 he did away with gun registration for people who weren't suspect: i.e. Jews, Gypsies, etc. couldn't buy guns, but Germans? No restriction except for age - and he lowered the age. [background]

Essentially, Nazi Germany is a counterproof to claims that gun control was used by fascists to control the domestic population. But this quote is still very often used against gun control. (Here's an example. Here's another.) It might be instructive to watch phrases like this to track them in the discourse.

What's astounding is the nonchalance people evince when checked on it - after all, it doesn't matter if he actually said it (sometimes people say exactly this!) because it's just something he would have said.

20 right-wing truths "you can't talk about in America any more"

(and yet right-wingers never stop talking about them).  Here. It's actually a pretty interesting compendium of right-wing beliefs. Here's the whole list, because this will probably evaporate:

1) People who want to change sexes should be treated by a psychologist, not deformed through surgery, given hormone treatments, and falsely told that they can change sexes.

2) Most people who remain poor over the long haul in America stay that way because of their own poor life choices.

3) Most black Americans are good and decent people, but percentage wise there are more black Americans in jail because percentage wise, black Americans commit a lot more crimes than white Americans.

4) As often as not in America, the people claiming to be “victims” are the real bullies and they don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy.

5) The reason most politicians in D.C. are shameless liars with no character is because most Americans will knowingly choose a shameless liar with no character who says what they want to hear over an honest man with morals who tells them the hard truths they’d rather ignore.

6) Illegal aliens are foreigners who knowingly broke the law to come here and Americans owe them even less than we owe other foreigners living in China, Sweden, or El Salvador because at least those people didn’t break our laws.

7) Life begins at conception and having an abortion is no morally different than strangling your baby in the crib.

8) Most liberals aren’t patriotic and they don’t love their country.

9) Our soldiers should make every effort to avoid civilian casualties, but when it comes right down to it, the life of an American soldier should be treated as more important than the life of a foreign civilian.

10) We’d be better off as a society if the people who are ignorant, ill informed, or who really don’t care one way or another, didn’t vote.

11) The only practical way to make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is for the Israelis to transfer the Palestinians and take their land.

12) This is a Christian nation that has been successful because it adopted Christian principles and the more we move away from that, the worse off we will be as a nation.

13) Men are just generally better at some things than women, just as women are just generally better at some things than men are.

14) “Racism” used to be a big deal in America, but these days the people who cry racism are usually phonies trying to gain a political advantage or deflect from ethical shortcomings or poor performance.

15) Long term, the only way our country can pay its bills is by asking everyone who’s not dirt poor to pay as much in taxes to the government as they’re given in services if they want to continue to receive those services.

16) Nine times out of ten, a mother and father will do a considerably better job of raising a child than a single mother, a single father, two gay parents or their grandparents.

17) The Boy Scouts could never survive gay scoutmasters because no parents with a brain in their head are sending their male, teenage boy out in the woods alone with a gay man who may very well be attracted to him, just as the parents of Girl Scouts wouldn’t want to send their teenage daughter out alone in the woods with a straight adult who might secretly be savoring the opportunity to have her alone.

18) People who are homeless over the long term are overwhelmingly mentally ill or have substance abuse problems and the only thing we can really do to help them is round them up, put them into halfway houses and force them to get treatment in spite of themselves.

19) If you have good character, you should feel ashamed of taking food stamps, taking welfare, or being on a school lunch program.

20) We would be much better off as a nation if most of the immigrants to this country were well educated people from nations in Europe that shared our Western values as opposed to our current policy which brings in mostly less educated people from Third World nations.

Makes me salivate to write a semantic search engine, get down to brass tacks understanding, at scale, what people actually say they believe.

Lewis model of cultures

Richard Lewis, When Cultures Collide, defines three basic poles or types of culture:

• Linear-active (Germany, Switzerland): plan, schedule, take sequences of organized action
• Multi-active (Italy, Latin America, Arabs): plan according to the thrill or importance of actions, organize time according to the people they will interact with
• Reactive (China, Japan, Finland): react to their interlocutor instead of imposing their views

Pretty fascinating. He also has an article about the different views of time between cultures. In general, the entire book would probably be worth reading.

Legal pot having an impact on Mexican cartels

Unsurprisingly, decriminalizing pot in Colorado alone has had a beneficial impact on organized crime in Mexico. That's good news you won't hear from the DEA (who is fighting this tooth and nail, as they'll all have to go get real jobs).

The facts behind Roswell

An absolutely fascinating article by Robert Muller about the acoustic detector array suspended from balloons (flying disk microphones) to detect Soviet atomic tests - successfully, as it turned out. One set fell down in Roswell in 1947 and was obviously promptly covered up as it was a secret Cold War program - and we're still living with that conspiracy theory today.

Also from Muller is a little post about cheap information technology and how it brought down Communist totalitarianism, in a clear analogy to 1984.

Worst and best Bible verses

Ship of Fools asked their (Christian) readers to vote on the worst Bible verses out there, with an interesting set of results. To which Alternet responded by asking prominent atheists what their favorite Bible verses are - again with interesting results.

25 Rules of Disinformation

Nice article here!

Feffer on participatory totalitarianism

Nice article from John Feffer here.

Invaders from Mars

Here's a blog post from Charlie Stross back in 2010 comparing corporate rule with the aftermath of being conquered by non-humans. (And Krugman saying that it's not necessary to posit non-human conquerors when plain old human sociopaths are a sufficient explanation.)

So - I know that this is mostly a conceit, sure. But it's one that I find fascinating, and the comments in that blog post really need to be mined for pointers to related serious work. So consider this a to-do.

Uncovering payday loan scammers

... or not, actually. Turns out it's very difficult to trace them.

Voluntary charities never actually worked

Which is why the state stepped in with social insurance in the first place. This article is quite well-written, with lots of historical detail.

Christians were never really persecuted much

Interesting....

The profit motive behind today's War on Drugs

Interesting coverage by the WaPo.

What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?

Conservatism is advocacy of the domination of society by an aristocracy.

"Redemption"

That sovereign-person thing has a name. Here's a rundown.

Profit in health care

Why it doesn't work.

The Left Business Observer

Interesting. I presume I bookmarked a specific article here sometime in the distant past, but it's gone.

The four turnings

A chart of American generations. I love this kind of stuff.

How did economists get it so wrong?

How indeed?

What happens to water management when there's no more water?

The drying of the (American) West.

Coup 2K

An analysis of the Bush "victory" in terms of its similarity to a coup.

Literary (or profane) legends

This is kind of what I was talking about earlier this week. A short list of European quasihistorical legends.

Economically important plant families

Cool.

More Koch mapping

Some of the organizations on a list of people who got face time with the Kochs in Florida.

The billion-dollar climate change denial network

There is a shitload of money behind denying climate change.

Mother Hulda

Wouldn't it be interesting to do some kind of semantically represented catalog of stories from all the world's cultures so they could be compared and contrasted and tracked?

Things like Santa Claus being partly descended from Lapp shamans who would slaughter reindeer and wear their skins while casting fortunes around New Year, or Santa Claus being Odin (both of which have come up in my reading this week) and a million and more others.

This stuff fascinates me. Anyway, here's also Mother Hulda on Wikipedia.

The Interlock Project

A map of problems facing America. Interesting!

The debt-collecting machine

Fantastic WP exposé of Aeon Financial and its ilk.

The Reactionaries

So apparently there are some guys in Silicon Valley who honestly want a return to monarchy. This FAQ rips them new assholes and reveals them for the puerile naifs they really are.

Was UnitedHealth responsible for the ObamaCare website debacle?

... Maybe.

Industrial civilization precarious

Finally some modeling being done at the right level. Ecological economics is the Elsevier rag that will be running this.

Military structure and ranking in Mordor

Insane Tolkienist detail.

Moyers: The Deep State

Anatomy of the Deep State, the inner circle that has coopted the United States Federal government.

8 ways to defang America's youth

Hmm.

The Hays Code

This is a pretty sweet find - the Hays Code for Hollywood movies in the 40's and 50's.

Center for Systemic Peace

Here's a little research association that is collecting and publishing statistics about war.

What MLK actually did

I ran across this Kos-hosted essay a while back, and parts of it stuck in my head, but when it surfaced on Facebook again I was surprised (as usual) at the amount of detail I'd forgotten. It's worth reading. MLK's legacy is that he ended two centuries of racial terror in the South. His political legacy, or rather the legislation enacted as a result of his work, is great, but it was essentially white people acknowledging the new reality that he introduced and that black people in the South made real. And that insight is a fantastic thing.

The poor don't behave like the rich

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek headline for an article discussing some of the advances in economic modeling (yeah, the poor behave differently from the rich).

Rich people don't actually create the jobs

Good article at Business Insider.

Prosperity theology

A few links I hit in November:

• What does the Bible say about the prosperity gospel?
• Is the Word of Faith movement Biblical? (As always, the answer is 'no'.)
• Christian support for slavery
• Wikipedia gives us some history
• Benny Hinn's site had an article asking "Prosperity... Is It Biblical?" but it has been removed. I would hazard a guess that there's a lot of churn there instead of any ... steadfast statement of principles, I suppose is the phrase I'm looking for.
• Here's a neat article about Hinn, though.
• A review of a book about prosperity theology (from the pro camp, not the con. That is, from the pro con camp in actuality).

Yoruban mythology: the Orishas

So here is some delectable eye-candy involving the Orishas, or Gods. These are beautiful! And on further investigation (involving reading the Wiki page for Orisha) I found that the various lineages of this religion still claim some 100 million adherents around the world.

The stories of the Orisha seem to be just as detailed and extensive as Greek mythology - the only difference being that nobody still worships Zeus. Fascinating.