Keeping an Eye on Things

by JanieM

Hard to know where to start, so I won't. 

Open thread.

*****

The picture was taken in Belfast, Maine, in May of 2021. The gulls know whose territory it is.

Bigger version here.

 

Comments

[wj]

The challenge is figuring out which things to keep an eye on.

I really feel like we could use more dull in the world. I shudder to think how interesting it will be once we get multiple trials of TIFG going. Combine that with the RWNJs finding innovative ways to fail to run the House, and wars here and there. Then there's whatever the Supremes get up to this term. And an election next year besides.

I really need a pillow to hide my head under until it all goes away.

[CaseyL]

"The Enshittification of the Entire Goddamn World."

[Michael Cain]

On a somewhat more cheerful note...

The last several days have been gorgeous fall days. Blue sky so bright you squint, highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s. The right amount and timing of rain earlier so the trees are full of color.

I've been whining to my son about the difficulty of finding pens, desk, magnifiers, lights, etc to compensate for deteriorated vision and steadiness while working on the drawings for the granddaughters. At his urging I finally tried doing a drawing on the computer. Specifically, in this case, an iPad and Adobe Fresco. He was right about it fixing the physical changes I was trying to deal with. I'll have to call around tomorrow and see if someplace local can print it on 11x17 inch paper.

[JanieM]

We don't have brilliant colors around where I live this year. We had TONS of rain in the summer -- I suppose too much and/or the wrong timing, or maybe that has nothing to do with the lack of color. But it's still gorgeous. Just the light alone -- as you (Michael) say, blue sky and the light at a certain angle....

My mother lived on her own until just after she turned 96, and she had both glaucoma (treated) and the untreatable kind of macular degeneration. By the time she went into a nursing home she could really only see light and shadow, but for years before that she had been collecting magnifying glasses, magnifiers of various kinds, any kind of aid she could get her hands on to help her maintain the independence of being able to read her mail, write checks, etc.

Toward the end of college I had a lackey job with Ray Kurzweil's startup (though we didn't call them that in those days), at a time when he was still developing his first reading machine for the blind. In later years my mother latched on to that memory and insisted that she should be able to buy a reading machine, because after all, Ray Kurzweil invented one long ago.

Well, he did, after a fashion, but he long since veered off into other enterprises. (Including some kooky notions that I have paid no attention to.)

But there *are* reading machines, and my sister and I finally facilitated my mother's purchase of one. It was fascinating to see what it could and couldn't do. For instance, a lot of my mom's mail was bills and medical stuff -- try putting a medical report or bill under a reading machine's screen and see what you get. Or try having it read the return address on an envelope. Or try having it understand that "St." in "St. John" isn't the end of a sentence, and doesn't mean "street."

I suppose for $ an order of magnitude bigger than she could spend, there might be better ones, and technology like that is advancing quickly in any case. But I have stopped paying attention for now.

My main complaint in relation to my aging eyes is that they take a long time to adjust when I go from lighter to darker spaces. I've learned to go slow and be careful. (Kinda the opposite of move fast and break things.)

[Pete]

more dull

BREAKING NEWS! I have a problem with my coolant flange and those wily Germans have seen fit to place it right against the firewall in the center of the engine compartment and underneath a bunch of other stuff!

Tautog (blackfish) season starts today in NY. A couple hundred bucks on fuel (if not more), bait, beer, food... all for - if you're lucky and Poseidon grants it - three 16"+ keepers. The joy of fall fishing.

I would swear that seagull is fake. Who drives the 1940ish(?) coupe back there?

I have no experience with reading machines, but I did mess with optical character recognition software a while back. It was never worth the time and that was just for regular text. I have no idea what result a medical report (or any invoice for that matter) would yield. But I suspect: not good. Even with digital input I can only imagine what text-to-speech would make of an invoice. Maybe AI is doing a better job with it nowadays?

[McKinneyTexas]

This is all bullshit. This site--not at all shy when it comes to moral preening and self-identifying as the good people--has been silent for over three full days.

IIRC, OBWI's current, much diminished presence in the blogosphere is populated mostly by people who lean if not outright support the Palestinian position. The silence, given the last few days news, is deafening, if not much worse.

Question: given the outward manifestation of Hamas' unfathomable brutality, can anyone here credibly deny that the Palestinian mode is to warp the thinking of its citizens to default to completely de-humanize Jews?

I look forward the the contextualization of why Israeli civilians, particularly children, had this coming.

Here are some more questions:

1. Are Hamas/Hezbollah the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian People?

2. If not, why not?

3. If not, who is?

4. If Palestinians in general are not complicit in these atrocities, then please explain the universal celebrations by Palestinians.

4A. Please point out the Palestinian denunciations of Hamas' violence.

5. Since everyone here is vocally--beyond *vocally* actually--anti-fascist, please explain why Progressives are allies of Hitler's successors.

6. Also, please explain why Israel, of all countries, is so high on the Progressive's "Disapproval Radar".

Final comment: Progressives--rightly--demand that conservatives declare their positions on Jan. 6 and the stolen election canard. That's fair. Accountability matters. Today, Progressive/BDS types are now held to account. Please speak up.

Thanks.

[JanieM]

Hi Pete! -- Car problems, yuck. Fall fishing? Sounds lovely. I don't know whose coupe it is -- the pic was taken at a public marina.

Optical character recognition was the phase of Kurzweil's reading machine that I was involved with. His (and his team's) two big breakthroughs (1972) were to create a reading voice that could produce comprehensible English -- it was kind of American with a slight accent -- and to be able to read off the shelf text, so that a blind person could take a Time magazine (let's say) off the rack at the corner store, set it on the reader, and hear the news.

One of my jobs was to feed the machine printed letters in many fonts and to push one button if it read the correct letter and another if it made a mistake. Since its correct rate was approaching 99% at that time, the task was stultifying, and *I* often made mistakes because I was on autopilot for pushing the "it did it right" button.

I was a lit major at that point and had no contact with the hacker culture that was producing this kind of work. In retrospect...it would have been fun to be involved in a different way. At the time, I just wanted to get out of there and be done with it.

[JanieM]

McKinney, you have been demanding that people here answer for the hobgoblins in your head, to which you attach our names, since ... well, forever.

I am not the hobgoblin in your head, your labels are bullshit, and as I have said before, your demanding that I jump is not going to result in my saying “How high?” (Or jumping.)

I am not answerable for the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Hamas, Bibi, or anyone else but myself, and if I express my thoughts, it will be on my own timetable and not yours.

Since this is my thread and you consider it to be "all bullshit," you can just stay out of it, and all my threads, until further notice. Go find someone else to play your rigged game with. I have shit to deal with right now, and my time and thoughts are not yours to commandeer.

If anyone else wants to engage McK, there are a couple of open threads that are still … open.

[JanieM]

lj -- if you see this, send me an email, will you? I am not at home, and I don't have my address book on this computer.

[McKinneyTexas]

McKinney, you have been demanding that people here answer for the hobgoblins in your head, to which you attach our names, since ... well, forever.

Hobgoblins?

Moral cowardice.

Since this is my thread and you consider it to be "all bullshit," you can just stay out of it, and all my threads, until further notice.

You post, you invite comment. You and all of the other headliners here have had plenty of time to square reality with your "we're not anti-semitic, we just don't support Israel" claims. You haven't. Because, fundamentally, you cannot.

I'll comment whenever and wherever I like. Someday, maybe you will muster the intellectual heft and backbone to address ideas you don't like substantively.

[Pete]

This is all bullshit.

That seems a bit harsh.

My take - which is mine - is shock. From what I know, which is virtually nothing, the Palestinians live in an oppressive state. Gaza is Escape-From-NY and the West Bank is increasingly pressed by Israeli settlements (among other things).

I can't answer your questions. The Hamas civilian attacks and hostage-taking are beyond unconscionable. If you want a denunciation of it, there it is. Sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people in no way alters that.

I dunno what a political/military group is. Is Sinn Fein the IRA? If one supports Sinn Fein and a unified Ireland do they automatically condone the guerrilla tactics of the IRA?

I'm a bit more familiar with Ireland through friends and family. I really know nothing of Israeli/Palestinian culture. I have a sense that the powers that be enjoy the chaos of Israel/Palestine as a proxy for US/West and Arab adversity for whatever gains are to be had. But I don't know.

I don't have a position other than that this situation is unsustainable. War is the nadir, not the solution. I can maybe see that some people hope the carnage and destruction is a necessary evil to bring about change. But anyone who celebrates it is trash. All sides suck here and the civilian populations will suffer.

So I'm silent because I don't know what there is to say, whatever moral preening is in that.

As a side note, the mainstream news coverage of this has been absolutely ghoulish and I can't stomach any more of it.

[russell]

Who drives the 1940ish(?) coupe back there?

It's the bird's car. :)

This is all bullshit.

I'll play token lefty.

Hamas is a fucking death cult.

Hope that makes your day.

[JanieM]

I'll comment whenever and wherever I like.

Nope. You're blocked entirely until further notice.

Everyone else -- I will open another thread for this conversation.

[wj]

IIRC, OBWI's current, much diminished presence in the blogosphere is populated mostly by people who lean if not outright support the Palestinian position. The silence, given the last few days news, is deafening, if not much worse.

Other than "a pox on both their houses", what is there to say?

This particular conflict gets exceptional coverage in the US. But there are equally nasty conflict, doing equally bad and unjustifiable thing to children and other bystanders. There's a coup in Niger, for example. Fighting in Mali (again/still). Ethiopia is still having what looks (admittedly superficially) fight with a couple of countries which were once part of it.

And that's just central Africa. The genocidal war in Myanmar is still ongoing, for example. Saudi Arabia's invasion of Yemen, which has been touched on here from time to time, is still happening.

In short, we never touch on everything. Myanmar, in particular, looks worse than things in Israel at the moment, when it comes to killing women and children.

As to your specific questions:

1. Are Hamas/Hezbollah the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian People?

Of the Palestinian people overall? No. Of the people in Gaza? Maybe. Gaza, after all, did elect then some while back. Although at the time the PA had minimal presence, and Hamas was the only group providing relief. Which probably had an impact, just as "kitchen table" issues do in our elections.

2. If not, why not?

See above. These days, the Hamas leadership (mostly safe elsewhere) is merely using the people in Gaza as pawns, recruits/cannon foddrr, and (ineffective) human shields. They still do enough to help Gazans survive; but nothing like enough to get them past subsistence. Which is a big ongoing negative in my mind.

3. If not, who is?

Basically, nobody. And Israel's policies, combined with Hamas' having the guns locally, pretty much guarantee none can arise. Otherwise, see above

4. If Palestinians in general are not complicit in these atrocities, then please explain the universal celebrations by Palestinians.

Define "complicit." If the Uyghurs were to launch an effective attack on their Chinese, I for one, would celebrate. Does that make me complicit? How?!?!?

4A. Please point out the Palestinian denunciations of Hamas' violence.

Given what has been done by Israel to the people of Gaza, not to mention the less-brutal-but-still-rough Israeli behavior towards Palestinians in the West Bank, why would they? I'd expect the Palestinians in the West Bank would, if they could, take military action to remove the Israelis from territory which they have conquered but carefully avoided actually annexing. Plus settlements which are constantly expanding (and definitely buying the land they take), leaving West Bank Palestinians ever less land for themselves.

5. Since everyone here is vocally--beyond *vocally* actually--anti-fascist, please explain why Progressives are allies of Hitler's successors.

Assumes facts not in evidence. You could make a better (not great, but definitely better) case, based on behavior, that the Israelis are treating the Palestinians like they were treated.

6. Also, please explain why Israel, of all countries, is so high on the Progressive's "Disapproval Radar".

Gotta leave that to the progressives here.

Overall, I'd say the proximate cause of this attack is Netanyahu, and especially the ultra-Orthodox members of his coalition and cabinet. It's not like he wasn't warned (by Egypt, even if Israeli intelligence fell down on the job).
It seems like the IDF could have acted preemptively, had they tried. (Instead, Netanyahu had mostly redeployed nearby forces elsewhere. Mostly to support provocative actions be Israeli settlers in the West Bank.) That doesn't justify Hanas' attack. Just demonstrates that there's plenty of blame to go around.

[Donald]

I just gave my opinion in the new thread, Mckinney. I have been ranting online in private emails to an activist friend of mine, not here except for the first day. And shock--you bet I feel shock. For me it is very much like 9/11 and I have no personal connection over there. And my fiancee lived in Brooklyn and commuted to Manhatton 9/11. So maybe don't assume things about what people are thinking.

Dehumanizing rhetoric? Yes, some of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been disgraceful. They make me sick.

I said something about the genteel dehumanizing rhetoric of the NYT towards Palestinians in the other thread, but you are kidding yourself if you think that sort of thing is limited to one side. Westerners are so full of crap on this subject--it comes from privilege. So long as Palestinians are kept caged and don't cause a problem, nobody cares. Does this excuse Hamas? Not in the slightest. The leaders are the lowest scum I can imagine.

Why is Israel so high on the progressive list? Mainly because it claims to be democratic and has a permanent occupation going on. As a human rights violator I find ratings and comparisons rather meaningless. If you live in an authoritarian state they can make your life a constant dehumanizing misery on a daily basis without necessarily killing people every day.

For myself, I have said much less about Israel in recent years--Yemen was a much higher priority when it came to terrible things our government was supporting. But now Israel is back on the priority list, thanks to the mass-murdering fanatics of Hamas.

[Donald]

"You and all of the other headliners here have had plenty of time to square reality with your "we're not anti-semitic, we just don't support Israel" claims. You haven't. Because, fundamentally, you cannot."

Didn't see that. I only glanced earlier and saw red.

It is exactly this sort of claim that has poisoned the well on this subject for so long. If you ever decide to pull your head out of your rear end, you could read B'Tselem, Jewish Currents, Tikkun, and various human rights organizations, along with some more radical groups. You will see two positions.

1. Some people try to be as morally consistent as possible and condemn the crimes as they see them.
2. Some are the classic radical types such as waved NLF flags during the Vietnam War, making heroes out of the "freedom fighters". There was nothing too violent to turn their stomach. As you presumably know, the NLF used extremely brutal methods.

So, for that matter, did the ANC. Remember necklacing?

I am sick to death of the second type of radical. They make it extremely difficult to advocate for oppressed people because people like you come along and point to the idiots and say "you are all antisemitic, terrorist-loving cosplaying Islamofascists."

You could try something like this. Look at the facts--not just the ones that support your prejudices. It is very very painful. Do it anyway. Then maybe, you might see things a bit more clearly.

Finished for now.

[Pete]

Car problems, yuck.

I actually enjoy the troubleshooting and wrenching part of it. Part-procurement, thanks to the intewebs, has become easier. Doing it on a gravel driveway in uncertain weather - not so much. And, of course, time.

I do like being on the Sound in Autumn - the weekend warriors and jet skiers are mostly gone. Especially in snotty conditions there's a remoteness to it and you can concentrate on the immediate - snagged reels, anchor points, not hooking yourself baiting in chop, etc. - no cel phones to bother you (mostly). I cringe at the 1mpg the twin diesels get at cruise, but I justify it somehow. I try not to think about it, if I'm honest. And often the fishing is good right outside the harbor, so no need to motor half an hour to the "I know a great spot!" suggestions.

With OCR, I really wanted to use the tech. Always a bad starting point, but I got this scanner and software staring me in the face, so... it's gotta be easier!

Serif fonts are worse, any skew in the scan orientation borks the process, and even in optimum conditions, the lower case "e" would scan as "-" at a more-than-acceptable percentage. So I'd look at the scanner and... sigh. And just re-key it.

Also, I remember the Liberal Cup, but the neighbor is new. I imagine it's a mutually beneficial situation. :-)

[Pete]

*fishing is good

"good" being a highly dynamic term.

[JanieM]

Pete -- Next time you come we should go to the Liberal Cup. I go at lunch from time to time, and though I'm not a beer drinker, I always get the beer-cheese soup of the day, and it's always great.

There are so many cannabis shops in the area that I would have thought that the market would have to shake out sooner or later. Sooner has gone by, and there are still lots of shops. So -- who knows.

[CharlesWT]

Google image search has a good OCR function. It was able to read some cursive writing that I had difficulty reading.

[wj]

"Teach a man to fish, and he will spend all day sitting in a boat drinking beer."

[Pete]

I always get the beer-cheese soup of the day

I had it on your recommendation! And Bangers & Smash, iirc. Want to go back for the Drunken Pot Roast and any other recommendation you might have!

"Teach a man to fish, and he will spend all day sitting in a boat drinking beer."

What's yer point? ;-)

[Pete]

shake out

The pun is probably unintended, but I'm going with it anyway.

I'm not surprised at the proliferation, given the newness of it all. We got some lobster from a guy in Northport who had some pretty healthy-looking plants in his garden back in... 2017? Legal, but I get the feeling he may have jumped the gun a bit. And I got the impression there were more than a few home-growers around. Then again, one can order from the Cup, The Quarry, & The Maine House without moving, so who knows how much debauchery Hallowell can sustain.

[JanieM]

Hallowell is pretty well able to sustain, or even facilitate, any amount of debauchery. ;-)

I often get the fish tacos at the Liberal Cup -- or sometimes a big salad with smoked salmon. But I've only been there once since covid came along, and ditto for Slates. Only outdoor dining for me, for the time being.

[liberal japonicus]

Just as a marker, I've posted a comment in the other thread. I had been trying (and failing) to come up with a post about the Israel-Hamas conflict, but my post is a comment in that thread. As far as McKinney's assertions, wj has answered them well enough but I will just reply to his comment that

I'll comment whenever and wherever I like.

sez you

[bobbyp]

Currently playing tourist in BarHarbor after brief visit to NYC and Boston. Good to hear from Russell. Where’ya been?

This is all bullshit.

The selective application of this overarching principle is pure comedy.

Do what you can.

[JanieM]

bobbyp -- in other circumstances I would ask if you'd like to get together.... Unfortunately, I am without a car and waiting for the imminent birth of the next grandkid. I hope you enjoy Bar Harbor -- it's a lovely time of year to be in Maine.

[Pete]

Wait. Grandkid = new car? When was this initiative implemented?

A little late in the game for me now, but I coulda used that info ~30 years ago.

[JanieM]

Heh, just too many unpredictable things going on at the same time. When I went to bed last night my laptop was misbehaving, but it has righted itself. Being without a computer while away from home would have been the last straw..... ;-)

[Girl from the North Country]

I think this may be our only open thread. So I am using it to rejoice about Sidney Powell pleading guilty in the Georgia election case, and (most importantly, but also almost impossible to imagine) agreeing "to testify truthfully at trial."

[JanieM]

GftNC: "Be Joyful..." is an open thread.

[Girl from the North Country]

Ah, sorry Janie! I will repost over there, especially since I was indeed rejoicing (perhaps a slight over reaction.