Obsidian Wings

Paper Trails

by wj

I was tempted to title this The Best People. But it's what the "best people" have been doing that boggles my mind.

The blanket refusal to respond to subpoenas has been in start contrast to how previous administrations, all previous administrations, have dealt with Congress. Let's face it, no matter what one's opinion of Trump and all his works, it looks terrible. Considering how obsessed Trump is with his image, the question has to be asked: why?

The latest bits of documents to surface (hand written notes by Lev Parnas) give, perhaps, a glimmer. It looks like the folks working for Trump on his Ukraine efforts wrote down lots and lots of stuff which buttress the case for impeachment and removal. The Gang That Can't Shoot Straight seems to have not only done criminal stuff, not only talked about what they were doing, but actually written down their criminal plans. Stalking a US Ambassador, and suggesting taking actions against her personally (whether assassination or simple assault is not clear to me) is not something normal people would want to make a record of. But there is it.

I have to say, if I was a Republican Senator, the last, the very last, thing that I would want to happen is to find that I voted to not allow evidence and testimony during the Senate trial. And then have conclusive evidence come out before my next election campaign. Considering the rate at which stuff is coming out, even in the face of determined administration stonewalling, there doesn't look to be much chance that won't happen. The question in all of their minds has to be "Do I really want to take a bullet for this guy?" -- especially considering their off-the-record opinions of him already. No matter how fanatically devoted Trumps fans are, there are worse things than offending them. And those worse things look to be on the horizon . . . and closing fast.

let's talk about something else

by russell

Donald J Who?  I'm tired of that human trainwreck sucking all the air out of the room.  Let's take a short break from the clown show and talk about something else.

Stumbled across this and thought it was a combination of interesting, accurate, and dire.  What is it like to be a young person trying to find your way into something like a life, nowadays?  If you're not a tech whiz, a quant, or some other form of bright flaming comet streaking across the sky?

What if you're just... kind of normal?  But you still want to make a living, and live someplace other than your parent's house or with five room-mates until you're 30 years old?

What are the practical effects of wide divergences in income and wealth?  What kind of society do we want to live in?

The author has some ideas for how to make things better.  Some of them might even make sense.

The floor is open.  Talk about You Know Who if you must, but remember - it's not obligatory.  We all know he's an ass.

It's 2,000 & 20: do u know where ur democracy is?

by Ugh

It's interesting times.  The slow motion movement to (soon) U.S. minority white nationalism rule continues apace, aided and abetted by SCOTUS.  Donald the Dove is getting his WAR! on.  For some reason I can't get it through my head that it's all about the 9 rings for some people, thus asking "why" or what the reasoning is behind any action is useless (I'm looking at you, Mitch).  Presently:  bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.  And he did it!  Truly, Donald is President now...

Also, too, love Pompeo saying that US troops aren't leaving Iraq no matter what the Iraqis say.  I suppose it's the same in Japan.

Good times.

2020 2020 2020 2020 y’all

By Ugh

I weep for the future. 

Rocky, rooaad?

I’m your huckleberry.

My car just hit a water buffalo. 

That’s a big Twinkie. 

I am your son mom?!!

TK421 why aren’t you at your post?

You make me want to be a better man  

‘I strenuously object,’ is that how it works?

No, that guy was Mitch Cumstein, my roommate  

They’d be crazy to follow us...

She can’t weigh more than 100 pounds...

She is rather mannish.

Open Thread.

 

In which I attempt to learn new tricks

by Doctor Science

This fall I've started to find out if I am too old a dog to learn some tricks: I am taking a course at the local Adult School in Elementary Mandarin. I tried a couple of apps, but I was an ignominious failure at reproducing the sounds and never really made it to Lesson Two, so I figured it would be worth seeing if a live teacher would do the trick.

So far it seems to be working, but wow: learning Chinese is not a trivial task, even though we're not learning characters in any systematic way. All the writing is in Hanyu Pinyin, a wonderfully WYSIWYG writing system. To my surprise I'm not having particular problems with tones, they seem to "make sense" to my ears. My biggest problem so far are the initial consonants, which don't map exactly to the Roman letters used to write them and which my ear just scrambles.

This particular class turned out to be especially challenging because of who happens to be taking it. There are four of us: me (over 60, interest in China but no personal connection), a 30ish white man whose wife is Chinese and who wants to be able to speak to his in-laws, and two late-50/early-60s women who are native speakers of Cantonese, but who find that travelling in the PRC really requires Mandarin. One of them is native-born American from New York's Chinatown, the other is a naturalized American who was born in Malaysia as part of the Overseas Chinese community there. Both Cantonese-speakers have some reading knowledge of Simplified Chinese characters but are by no means fluent.

Basically, we two white people are scrambling along, trying to keep up with the Cantonese-speakers. At least they're having to do a lot more work than I expected, which means that by working hard the young man and I can almost keep up.

There was a fifth student, briefly: a native speaker of Hungarian (!) who's married to a Chinese woman, but he missed the first two sessions and it quickly became apparent that he wasn't going to be able to catch up, so he dropped the class.

My only advantages are that I've read about China and the Chinese language for many years. In particular, I've been following Language Log for more than 20 years, where Sinologist Victor Mair frequently posts. It's due to Mair's writing about how hard it is for native Chinese speakers to understand "word" as distinct from "syllable" or "phrase" that I knew why the teacher (who's from Taiwan, btw) said something in the first class about how "each character is a word"--while also teaching us two-character words.

Mair also posts a lot about topolects, regional variation in Chinese (such as the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese), and about character amnesia, the fact that most adults start forgetting how to write some characters after they leave school, so they gradually become secondarily illiterate. The Chinese writing system is simply too difficult for most people to retain without *constant* effort.

Hmmmm, in the comments to that last post people are talking about the Heisig method for remembering Chinese characters--have any of you used it?

The textbook we're using is Experiencing Chinese, which comes with sound files for some parts of the lessons. Now that I have a phone that's not completely dumb, I'm using the ChineseSkill app to give me extra practice. Unfortunately, ChineseSkill doesn't seem to have a "review earlier lesson" function (or at least I can't find it), which is currently frustrating me.

What got me started taking Chinese was that back in February some e-friends (you know who you are) persuaded me to try an episode or two of a Chinese web-TV drama, Guardian. Pretty soon I was hooked, but I couldn't help noticing that the English subtitles, which are clearly written by native speakers of Chinese, are *terrible*. So I got involved in a fan project to write better subtitles, for which I was of course hilariously unqualified.

Meanwhile I also started watching Nirvana in Fire, a historicalesque Chinese palace drama that my whole family soon got caught up in, even though many episodes just involve two characters standing or sitting and talking to each other in front of a static camera. The plot is both complex and logical, and the characters are great: everyone, including the bad guys, is doing things for reasons you can understand and even sympathize with.

Although some of the plot elements in Nirvana in Fire are eye-rollingly implausible, it also has things like: a gripping, edge-of-the-seat episode arc where the issue is--will desperately-needed disaster relief funds get to where they're needed, or will the person picked to oversee the effort embezzle most of the money? As Young Science said, "you want gritty realism? Game of Thrones can't compete."

I'm not watching a Chinese drama right now, because the Good Omens TV series came out and roped me in like a calf at a rodeo. And the Cdrama my friends are currently playing with, The Untamed, hasn't grabbed me--though that may just be a matter of time.

I think I need to decide what my goal is for learning Chinese. What do I want to do? Travel to China isn't it. I don't really want to read, or not enough to do the work to get fluency in reading Chinese characters. I guess I want to be able to watch Chinese dramas with their terrible English subtitles turned off. OK, that's a goal, and worth continuing for next semester.

I know a number of the people reading this have experience learning Chinese, so tell me your tips & tricks! For instance, would it help my ear learn to unscramble Chinese sounds if I had Chinese dramas or other shows going on in the background? What type of show would have the slowest speech? Because holy cow, Chinese goes *fast*, it's really difficult for my ear to separate the stream into recognizable syllables.

The Eighteen Scholars: Calligraphy by an anonymous artist of the Ming Dynasty. Calligraphy is one of the Four Arts of the Chinese scholar-gentleman, along with playing the qin, painting, and go (sometimes translated "chess").

I already knew about the Four Arts, but while writing this up I found a list of the Six Arts of pre-Imperial China, which included Mathematics as well as the martial disciplines of Archery and Charioteering. I wonder why math was dropped, and how the history of the world might have changed if the Chinese Imperial Examinations had included a math section.

Is Parliament Burning?

by Doctor Science

This is a thread for our UK friends. It's going up later than I hoped because I've been watching live-blogs of our own Constitutional crisis. Perhaps the most distressing part is that Republican members of the Judiciary Committee are laughing during the markup hearing. I suppose this is tactical, to convey that they think this impeachment is a farce. But it also conveys that they don't take government seriously in general, which I guess is #onbrand.

I still find Brexit baffling, though I've recently read some good explanations--or at least coherent stories. One is Heroic Failure by Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. He talks about Brexit as being part of the English (specifically English, not British) tradition of heroic failures: Scott of the Antarctic, the Light Brigade, the Franklin Expedition, General Gordon, Dunkirk, Kipling's "If". The original Heroic Failures were a mis-direction from Empire, a way for the English to center *their* suffering, to distract from noticing the sufferings of their unfree subjects.

They keep going back to WWII as a touchstone, more than the rest of the EU does, because though the UK was on the winning side it wasn't made better off by the War, while Germany and Japan quickly became economic powerhouses.

It's a particularly English problem because since the late 90s the other nations in the UK have devolved assemblies or parliaments to decide local questions, while England's issues are decided by the general Parliament in Westminster.

My father is Irish-American and his mother emigrated due to The Troubles in the early 20s. Like O'Toole, I am gobsmacked that UK leaders and Brexit voters don't realize that the free, open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a bloody big deal that keeps Ireland (and the UK!) from going back to the status quo ante, which was just bloody. The British in general don't seem to grasp that the core value of the EU is *peace-keeping*, and that the Irish border is not a secondary issue for them.

O'Toole also talks about how Brexitism overlaps with the nihilism of punk, where life is dull and grim and you just want to burn it all down. And how that's connected with the English tradition of masochism (there's a reason French sex workers called flagellation "The English Vice"). Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about Brexitism and England's Ruling Pathology: Boarding School Syndrome, and, like O'Toole, notes that to sustain an Empire you have to grow reliable crops of heartless imperialists.

I have to go to sleep now so I can't really make this a terribly coherent post. Good luck, Britfriends, we're rooting for Team Sanity.

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J.M.W. Turner. (source)

We don't need no thought control

by Ugh

So... Trump is digging in, not gonna give up without a fight, pulling out all the stops, etc. etc. etc. (he has perfected Calvinball in this process, I might add).

Meanwhile, GOPers will excuse anything he does.  The 5th Avenue murder thing was a joke, and yet it was set forth as a serious argument in court by the administration.

Either the GOP breaks or American Democracy dies a slow death over the next 20 years.  

I mean, I'd like to think the next Dem Prez (should we ever have another one) would pull the reigns back on Trump's power abuses, but, sh1t, you mean I can do whatever I want as long as my party controls just over 1/3 of the Senate?  yippie ki yay mother fncker (aka "Single payer, b1tches!)

In sum, the future of the republic is in the hands of Mitch McConnell, I weep for the future.

 

an interesting person

by russell

Stumbled across this interview with Barbara Liskov in the news feed.  Liskov is an important presence in the history of computing for her contributions in areas like type theory, but mostly for her very pragmatic insights into how to structure a code base so that working with it doesn't lead to insanity and an early death from alcoholism.  (slight joke, but only slight).  She has bubbled up into the general consciousness of the software development community due to one of her papers being dragooned into support for one of the latest of software development's maniacal fad diets. But, I digress.

I thought the ObWi community might enjoy this because (a) she's a very intelligent person, and it's always a pleasure to listen to intelligent people think out loud, and (b) she touches on topics that are generally of interest here: software development, the realities facing gifted women trying to make their way in technical (or any) fields, and the emergence of the internet and its effects on society.

Hope you find it interesting!

Enjoy 

Sodom and Sarcasm

by Doctor Science

I don't seem to have talked about it here before, but last year (5779) I leveled up significantly in my Jewish practice by reading the Torah portion (Parsha) every week, and discussing it on Twitter under the #ParshaChat hashtag (usually on Wednesday evenings, though it was on Thursday last week).

Last week's parsha was Vayeira (Genesis 18:1 - 22:24) , which includes the destruction of Sodom. In thinking about Vayeira last year, I realized that there's an interpretation in which everyone's behavior makes a lot more sense and is more relatable than in the interpretations that have been standard for, um, well, thousands of years. Despite the incredible weight of tradition that's against me, I kind of think I'm right:

The men of Sodom are asking for ID, and Lot replies with a sarcastic pun. Nothing in this is actually about sex, it's about immigration, about how you treat outsiders.

Note: the following includes discussions of rape, abuse, and homophobia. Take care of yourself.

Sodom and Gomorrah (1920) by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African-American artist to achieve international fame. (image source)

Nothing really matters, anyone can see, Nothing really matters...

by Ugh

BREAKING:* In June 2019 President Trump pointed a loaded gun at a National Security staffer and attempted to pull the trigger, only to be thwarted by his substandard hand-size.  This according to a White House transcript released today in response to a whistle-blower complaint that, quote, "the President tried to murder someone."  The White House transcript reveals "POTUS then raised the weapon mere feet from XXXXXXX's head and attempted to fire (POTUS was heard grunting and seen sweating profusely), only POTUS' index finger was not long enough to provide the necessary leverage.  YYYYYY staff then calmly disarmed POTUS who was heard shouting 'I'll kill you you son of a b-----!'"

Responding to these revelations, GOP Congressman Jim Jordan stated "What's the problem here?  Did someone get murdered?  No. Even harmed?  Not at all.  And who is this staffer anyway?  He was likely a national security threat POTUS was trying to personally neutralize.  Also, I heard the whistle-blower once talked to a Democrat, so there's obvious bias.  And it's not like there is any evidence the President was shouting 'I'll kill you you son of a bitch' or something similar, is there?  This is all a scheme by Hunter Biden, and what about Hillary?"

.......

We're all gonna die.

*Not really