Obsidian Wings

The stuff you break

by liberal japonicus

(to be sung to the last lines of the Beatles The End)

Well, here's something for you. (the original research is here if you want to check it out)

The seeds for the Christian loss were sown in the early and middle Paleolithic, hundreds of thousands of years before the fateful battle in the Lower Galilee that doomed the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, postulate archaeologists – the husband-and-wife team of Rafi Lewis and Rona Avissar Lewis, with Meir Finkel – in a paper published in “Landscapes,” a leading journal of landscape archaeology.

Maybe I'm drawing the wrong conclusion, (so sue me) but it seems that enough things have been broken the past 4 years (and longer) that there is going to be a hell of a time trying to fix them. But that's just me. Others may be drawn to the photo in the article of the recreation of the Battle of Hattin. I thought that battle reenactors was something that only Americans did. (though now that I think about it, a lot of Japanese martial arts is tied up with historical reenactment, so I suppose I'm as much to blame as anyone)

I guess we have to look on the bright side, climate change is giving way to glacier archeology. I've mentioned my fascination with Ötzi, and the alerts I have (and the rabbit holes I run down) keep turning up articles like this
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/105-1309/letter-from/1165-glaciers-ice-patches-norway-global-warming
https://secretsoftheice.com/climate/glaciers/

https://www.sciencealert.com/melting-alpine-glaciers-yield-archaeologic-troves-but-clock-ticking

Of course, it isn't just glaciers. This story suggests that strange women in ponds distributing swords could be making a comeback

And Happy Halloween.

Two-Topics and an Open Thread

by
JanieM

This quotation, apparently from Clickbait's favorite fixer Michael Cohen, highlights some interesting issues about the current state of our information culture.

I tried from the time of the 2016 election to never type a certain name, for reasons related to the passage at the link. I have also spent minimal time listening to Clickbait -- I can't stand the sound of his voice, the sight of his orange face and hair, or the vicious lying word salad that comes out of his mouth. But I have also been far too fixated, both on the circus he has generated and on the internet in general. Retiring from my job didn't help; now I don't even have programming deadlines to make me stop staring at yet another comment thread on the two or three blogs I read, or the two or three Twitter users I look at fairly regularly, or the handful of news sites I get headlines from. I have had spells of abstinence, where I've stayed away even from Obsidian Wings, but my will power fails every time. If I were being simple-minded I would say that the internet is ruining us. But it's also a great treasure, so . . . it's complicated.

Maybe more on that in the comments, but if that's not a conversation starter, then here's another one.

The statistics in this article about active court cases related to voting are depressing. I saw a clip yesterday (sorry, didn't keep the link) of a Biden campaign lawyer saying he was absolutely sure that this election was going to be conducted successfully. But it's hard to keep the faith in the face of the kind of information cited in the linked article.

Also, in cranky mode, and even though I think the author is probably right overall, I don't like his "we this" and "we that," a dozen times worth in one article. I think "we" is a weasel word, because which "we" is he talking about? This country is not a functioning "we" -- there is no consensus about a single thing he writes about in that article; if there were, he wouldn't have had to write it.

If it isn't one damned thing it's another.

Open thread.

Restaurants in Tokyo post COVID

by liberal japonicus

This article from the Asia-Pacific Journal is a nice look at subject that might give folks interesting perspectives on their local food scene. My takeaway is that it is a lot more complicated and we are going to be dealing with the fallout for a long time afterward.

A Covid thread

by liberal japonicus

While not a break, I thought I'd open a thread for covid speculation, though I imagine a lot of you are sick of it. But two things that caught my eye recently.

Here in Japan, while Covid is still a problem, statistically, we have fewer deaths than would have been predicted in a normal year.

here and here.

There has also been this news, that COVID severity may be linked to blood type. Which is interesting because Japanese are primarily O. In fact, Japanese are convinced that blood type is related to, well, everything so it is going to be ironic if it turns out that Japan's advantage does turn out to be blood type distribution. Wikipedia take here and this has a nice infographic

There are a shit ton of articles now about Covid and blood type, and I think my link above is a secondary source. This points to some of the problems in our news flow, we have the primary research, we then have secondary sources summarizing this research followed by tertiary sources summarizing the summaries. Not wanting to dump on journalists, but if they don't have excellent training and the moral fibre to not juice up stories, we are screwed in our news sources. But that is nothing new to anyone here.

Anyway, petit morceau to chat about. See if you can leave off the politics until the second page of comments!

That second debate

by liberal japonicus

A thread for your thoughts about what was essentially a second debate, separate by distance. Savannah Guthrie put paid to my notion that a woman would get overwelmed, though as moderator rather than debate opponent, she had some protection from Trump going all crazy uncle on her. The Guardian live blog was (and continues to be, as they are collecting various reactions) interesting, feel free to add things you catch or your own observations.

a cautionary tale

by russell

Ayn Rand vs nature cage match.  Guess who wins.

Don't let this happen in your town!!

:)

 

jazz trigger alert

by russell

Barry Harris is a jazz pianist who came up in bop era.  He was one of a cohort of brilliant players who came up in Detroit, and over the years he's played with everybody.  He's 90 now, and is kind of one of the last guys standing from that time and generation.

Harris is probably best known as a teacher.  He has, for decades, run regular teaching sessions from a storefront in NYC.  They're basically open to anyone who wants to show up and study.  He runs a community choir, including a children's choir, that is open to folks with really no musical background, and he painstakingly teaches the choristers fairly complicated arrangements by ear.  He's still playing and teaching, now into his 90th year.

He is, briefly, a beautiful player and a beautiful person.

There's a pretty good film profiling Harris, and you for the month of October you can watch it for free on his website.  It's about an hour, but it goes by pretty fast.  If the weirdness and stress of daily life under Trump and COVID are getting to you, and you need a refreshing dose of lightness, love, and beauty, you can check it out here.

I don't think you even have to be a jazz fan to enjoy it.  :)

Art rewards love and devotion with beauty and an uplifted spirit.  If you don't think the jazz part will put you off, check it out and treat yourself to an hour in the company of a humble and humorous master.

Dig it if you can dig it!!

The wages of toxic masculinity

by liberal japonicus

Hope I'm not stepping on Ugh's (greatly appreciated) thread (and that's your place for your COVID bon mots), but I thought I would crack a thread open after a comment by novakant on my observation that a woman going up against Trump would have been the recipe for disaster. I was thinking of American female politicans, novakant suggested that some foreign women might come out better, which is hard to say. (Would Trump pretend he was fluent in German when talking with Merkel? Would the English that came out of his mouth be comprehensible to a non-native speaker? Though I did learn a lot of Japanese phrases when I could make them out)

Just to restate it for folks who just read the posts, I expressed my sympathy for what Hilary must have gone thru having to deal with Trump and I thought that Trump might have even come out as a 'winner' of the debate had he been against any of the previous female candidates (or indeed, any female US politician), because a woman behaving like Biden did would have had her marked as a bitch and any other kind of attempt to get Trump to adhere to some norms would have had the candidate marked as not strong enough to be the president. (one can only imagine the mansplaining) There was a previous potential parallel, when Keir Starmer was quarantined and Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader stood in for him at the PMQ, and BoJo seemed to really dial down his typical clownish behavior. Would that have happened with Trump? No one knows, and I hope everyone realizes that we have the nominee we have, so any refighting of that is a waste of time. (which I hope this post isn't taken as doing). I just find it to be a way to grant perspective if, when these situations come up, to imagine what would have happened had a woman been doing that.

To which novakant replied:

The interesting question is how much of this is due to Trump, US society at large and the current candidates - and how to get out of this bind.

My own take is that very little is "due" to Trump, he's just harnessing it. Likewise for current candidates, though that might have some suggest that it was the Marxist left's fault that they nominated Hilary 4 years ago, like it's the liberals' fault that Dreher votes for Trump. Whatevs.

I'd suggest that the problem is toxic masculinity. Some data, faintly connected. As you scan down the list of celebs who came out, you can notice the ratio of women to men. Of course this plugs into some typical notions of lesbian women (hawt!), gay guys, (not so much), which is nothing new to most of you. But clearly, it seems more of a problem for men to come out than it is for women, largely, I would argue, because masculinity makes the reaction worse.

And I'd juxtapose it with this article on Kimberley Guilfoyle that I think I got from a comment. I won't quote it, but it seems like Guilfoyle is behaving like any number of male execs have. I imagine that she believes (and possibly other women, presumably who support Trump do as well) that women's liberation means that women can act just as badly as men.

Which brings us to novakant's question-how to get out of this bind. The time-honored pattern for this in the US, it seems, is to demand the put upon group behave well enough so as to show the people doing it the error of their ways. Indeed, if the group behaves in any other way, they are disruptive, they don't understand norms, and therefore aren't deserving of enlightened behavior. That sucks imho. It also requires that the group treat themselves as a block. I have some foreign feminist friends who often lament why Makiko Tanaka or Yuriko Koike don't break out, yet to my jaundiced eye, the fact that they are women does not erase the taint of being in the LDP. It's like cheering on Michele Bachman as a representative of feminism. Ivanka got 3/4 of a million in consulting fees, free at last, Thank God almighty, women are free at last!

This takes on an added resonance when we start to deal with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. This Lithwick piece hits a lot of these points in the context of feminism.

A lot to unpack, but maybe a place to talk about anything other than Trump and Covid.

These scriptwriters are overpaid

by Ugh

I mean, come on.  My 9 year old could have come up with that.  

I haven't been around in a while, I hope everyone is healthy and otherwise doing well.

Open thread.

"It smells like... victory"

by liberal japonicus

The other thread has turned to questions of accent (nothing wrong with that), but if you are like me, and can't help turning that shitstorm around in your head, here's another thread.

Some observations.
Biden was not on the top of my list, but it is hard to imaging a woman 'winning' that debate. Maybe Elizabeth Warren, but having to deal with all of that would probably, I wager, have made the woman come off as unlikable. Might even provide people with a rationalization. So it seems that to defeat an old white man, we had to put up another old white man. Which is telling, in and of itself.

This debate, if anything, has me keenly appreciate what Hilary had to go thru.

Word is that the debate commission is thinking about mic cutting. I cannot tell you how afraid I am if that happens. If Trump were cut off, and it was a situation where Biden could hear him and the audience couldn't, irritation and anger would peg Biden as the grumpy old man. Imagine, the fate of the election being decided by the sound engineer...

This USA today article was interesting
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/30/why-therapists-ibram-x-kendi-others-called-debate-triggering/3589329001/

The thing is, if you point this out, the own the libs crowd are going to claim that it is a case of not being able to handle the heat. In fact, it is interesting that all of this moves along the lines of standard abuse tropes, and suggests that these are buried deeply in our society.

I'm wondering what Biden could do. Some have suggested that Biden simply not accept again, though Harris said that Biden is not going to do that, and it is not hard to imagine how it would be spun. Similar would be things like Biden walking off the stage after trying to deal with it, doing something similar to what I heard Edward James Olmos did when asked to do a reboot of Miami Vice, which was to send a video tape of substantial length of him, just staring at the camera silently for the whole time. I know that I said that a woman probably could not 'win' a debate with Trump, but I do wonder what would happen if Biden just had Harris take over for him. Would it fluster Trump? Or would it have him behave even more atrociously?

So, in order to keep the language talkiing going over there, here is this.