Finally finished this. The early scenes with the young Méret as she studies with Vicktor are often lyrical, helped perhaps by the numerous allusions to classical music. If you love the classics you will enjoy those references. It's 1934 through the beginning of the war in Austria at the start. The Nazis have begun to show their true colors and some Jews who had already fled Germany were now trying to get to England. I love the way Lawton describes the English naïveté: "Think of them as children. Think of Europe as the drawing room and England as the kindergarten of Europe. They are innocents. They actually boast of not having been invaded since 1066. When in fact all that means is that they have lived outside the mainstream of Europe. They are innocents.. . .Good God, why London? Why not Paris or Amsterdam? What does London have to offer? The madman Thomas Beecham. Beecham waving his baton in the pouring rain for a nation of philistines in wet wool and false teeth!”
But I thought the book dragged once they all got to England and I just didn't find it as interesting nor comprehensible.
Friday, November 29, 2019
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Another Pseudo Maelstrom in the YA World
Sarah Dessen is a self-described YA author who recently twittered herself into a maelstrom of controversy. She had taken issue with a student at a small South Dakota university who had recommended Just Mercy (an excellent book by Bryan Stevenson) and several other adult books to be placed on the school's Common Read list as an alternative to one of Dessen's books, which she felt, as a YA book, was not up the appropriate college reading level.
Brooke Nelson, the student, noted in an email to the author of a Slate article that "“In 2017, I was a college junior who joined a committee because I wanted to have a voice in what text was selected for a college reading program. I was only one vote on a large committee of college students, faculty, staff, and community members.”
What happened was that Dessen clipped a piece from an article in the university's newspaper and tweeted a sarcastic comment about it to her 260,000 followers. The inevitable reaction is a case of classic YA juvenile behavior that amounted to nothing less than extreme bullying. YA author Siobhan Vivian tweeted, “Fuck that fucking bitch.” (“I love you,” Dessen replied.) Fellow YA writer Dhonielle Clayton chimed in: “Can I add a few more choice words for Siobhan’s brilliance … fuck that RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch.” Vivian replied with the clapping, cigarette, and nail-painting emoji."
The juvenile and scatological content of the comments are unfortunately representative of the YA crowd. Just check out the YA stuff on Goodreads and you'll find a viciousness one would hope to be characteristic of teenagers rather than adult authors pretending to be teens in their writing.
Nelson has deleted her social media presence in an attempt to hide from the viciousness and worries it may impact her future career. The reaction of Northern State University was disappointing. “We are very sorry to @SarahDessen for the comments made in a news article by one of our alums,” the school wrote. “They do not reflect the views of the university or Common Read Committee.” The lesson one takes from that statement is that students there need not have any opinions.
A larger issue, and one that bugs me constantly, is the somewhat arbitrary designation of books as YA or adult. There are many teenagers who read at above grade levels and many so-called YA books that deal with adult issues. The are books written for younger readers and then books about teens. One can imagine a lengthy debate, as intense as the one over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, as to whether Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, and innumerable others should be shelved in the YA section where adults readers and those wishing to read "adult" book will never find them. The categories become even more ridiculous when aimed at ages. "This book is for those from ages 7-8." Ridiculous, but parents and administrators demand those designations, assuming that reading levels are monolithic and immutable and change from one age to another. Authors are told to remove words that are appropriate to the story but which may not meet some mythic age or reading level.
It's perhaps ironic that had Dessen never said that she wrote for teens (and after all what does she know about teens, not having been one for several years) but about teen issues as she understands them, or better issues of justice or racism, something Nelson wanted to emphasize,
Brooke Nelson, the student, noted in an email to the author of a Slate article that "“In 2017, I was a college junior who joined a committee because I wanted to have a voice in what text was selected for a college reading program. I was only one vote on a large committee of college students, faculty, staff, and community members.”
What happened was that Dessen clipped a piece from an article in the university's newspaper and tweeted a sarcastic comment about it to her 260,000 followers. The inevitable reaction is a case of classic YA juvenile behavior that amounted to nothing less than extreme bullying. YA author Siobhan Vivian tweeted, “Fuck that fucking bitch.” (“I love you,” Dessen replied.) Fellow YA writer Dhonielle Clayton chimed in: “Can I add a few more choice words for Siobhan’s brilliance … fuck that RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch.” Vivian replied with the clapping, cigarette, and nail-painting emoji."
The juvenile and scatological content of the comments are unfortunately representative of the YA crowd. Just check out the YA stuff on Goodreads and you'll find a viciousness one would hope to be characteristic of teenagers rather than adult authors pretending to be teens in their writing.
Nelson has deleted her social media presence in an attempt to hide from the viciousness and worries it may impact her future career. The reaction of Northern State University was disappointing. “We are very sorry to @SarahDessen for the comments made in a news article by one of our alums,” the school wrote. “They do not reflect the views of the university or Common Read Committee.” The lesson one takes from that statement is that students there need not have any opinions.
A larger issue, and one that bugs me constantly, is the somewhat arbitrary designation of books as YA or adult. There are many teenagers who read at above grade levels and many so-called YA books that deal with adult issues. The are books written for younger readers and then books about teens. One can imagine a lengthy debate, as intense as the one over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, as to whether Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, and innumerable others should be shelved in the YA section where adults readers and those wishing to read "adult" book will never find them. The categories become even more ridiculous when aimed at ages. "This book is for those from ages 7-8." Ridiculous, but parents and administrators demand those designations, assuming that reading levels are monolithic and immutable and change from one age to another. Authors are told to remove words that are appropriate to the story but which may not meet some mythic age or reading level.
It's perhaps ironic that had Dessen never said that she wrote for teens (and after all what does she know about teens, not having been one for several years) but about teen issues as she understands them, or better issues of justice or racism, something Nelson wanted to emphasize,
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Methena v Malvo
In 2012, in Miller v Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that awarding a life sentence without parole to a juvenile violated the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2016, the court, in Montgomery v Louisiana amplified that ruling by ruling that because Miller was substantive, i.e. of constitutional import, that the prohibition against life sentences without parole for juveniles was retroactive. This time Roberts added his vote to the 5-4 Miller decision making it 6-3. “When the Court establishes a substantive constitutional rule, that rule must apply retroactively because such a rule provides for constitutional rights that go beyond procedural guarantees.”
Come to the present case of Methena v Malvo. Malvo, at the time, 17 years old, was convicted of participating in the sniper shootings in Virginia in 2002. His older colleague was sentenced to death and executed in 2009. In Malvo’s case, the jury was asked to decide between the death penalty and life without parole. They chose the latter. Then along came Miller and Montgomery and Malvo’s lawyers are asking that since Montgomery made the prohibition retroactive, that Molvo’s sentences (he had ten life sentences) be vacated. Much of the questioning revolved around the issue of just using youth as a criteria, or whether incorrigibility, needed to be considered, as well.
It seemed to me rather straightforward given the outcome in Montgomery, but trying to guess how the justices would vote was not apparent from the oral arguments. Of course Scalia and Kennedy, both there for Miller and Montgomery, have been replaced by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, but with Roberts the deciding vote plus one in Montgomery I would have to guess they might send it back to the 4th Circuit that had ruled for Malvo to bring in the idea of incorrigibility and the distinction between mandatory sentences of life as opposed to simply the application of a life sentence without parole. Semantics, indeed.
Come to the present case of Methena v Malvo. Malvo, at the time, 17 years old, was convicted of participating in the sniper shootings in Virginia in 2002. His older colleague was sentenced to death and executed in 2009. In Malvo’s case, the jury was asked to decide between the death penalty and life without parole. They chose the latter. Then along came Miller and Montgomery and Malvo’s lawyers are asking that since Montgomery made the prohibition retroactive, that Molvo’s sentences (he had ten life sentences) be vacated. Much of the questioning revolved around the issue of just using youth as a criteria, or whether incorrigibility, needed to be considered, as well.
It seemed to me rather straightforward given the outcome in Montgomery, but trying to guess how the justices would vote was not apparent from the oral arguments. Of course Scalia and Kennedy, both there for Miller and Montgomery, have been replaced by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, but with Roberts the deciding vote plus one in Montgomery I would have to guess they might send it back to the 4th Circuit that had ruled for Malvo to bring in the idea of incorrigibility and the distinction between mandatory sentences of life as opposed to simply the application of a life sentence without parole. Semantics, indeed.
Monday, November 11, 2019
https://qr.ae/TWx5Po The following is an answer by Salman Khan found on Quora to the question: "Do atheists secretly or inwardly pray to God in their moments of desperation? Who do they look to when all seems lost?"
I will actually give a serious response to a question like this!
I’ve seen people complaining about such questions and how annoying they are. It occurred to me that I could actually write serious responses to such questions and try and make this site a better place. So, are you ready?
Do atheists secretly or inwardly pray to God in their moments of desperation?
The short answer to your question is no. For the long answer, please keep reading.
It doesn’t actually surprise me that some believers might feel like we need to pray to something in our darkest hours. I don’t really blame them. I understand why they feel that way. They were probably raised in a way that they never got to develop a coping mechanism. Despite being raised by Muslim parents, I didn’t suffer through that. I was taught by my parents to deal with reality on reality’s terms. If I needed something, I was taught to work for it. If my work failed, I was taught to reflect on it and learn from it and never make the same mistake twice. Never was I asked to not put in any effort and hope some magic will solve things for me.
Don’t get me wrong! I was taught to pray to God. However, prayer was taught to me as a form of humility, not as a means to a desired end. As such, I never relied on prayers to get anything done. Therefore, logically, I had no reason to resort to praying if things got really difficult. Maybe your parents/teachers/pastors/imam taught you differently. Maybe they taught you to ask for miracles to solve your problems. As such, you probably see no option but to ask for a miracle when things get tough.
The thing is, even if I did believe in a God, I’d still not pray to them in my darkest hour. Why? Well, please consider the following. Some 21,000 people starve to death on this planet everyday! Most of them are kids. A God that refuses to hand a sandwich to these poor souls should not be expected to show up to solve my life problems. I mean, what would praying to such a God make me seem like? How much arrogance must my heart harbor for me to think that the same God who refuses to save those 21,000 people from starvation even takes interest in my problems?
For these reasons, people like me don’t pray and wouldn’t have prayed even if there was a God.
Who do they look to when all seems lost?
We engage in some introspection. We talk to friends/family. Sometimes we talk to strangers too. That way, we share things and somehow it makes us feel better.
Actually, it’s not only about the emotional comfort that we get out of it. Often times, our social network can actually help us out of such situations. People don’t need to be Gods to offer to help you. Even a total stranger can change your life and pull you out of your misery. As far as I am aware, people have a higher track record of helping other people than any God ever did. Please look at the above image. When your God sent Hurricane Katrina to drown those kids and devastate the lives of people, it was people who came together to save them.
That is why people like me don’t feel the need to look up to such Gods for anything. If anything, we look up to our fellow mortals. We respect such mortals who may be limited in their abilities but does more to help us than the seemingly impotent and potentially evil Gods.
I will actually give a serious response to a question like this!
I’ve seen people complaining about such questions and how annoying they are. It occurred to me that I could actually write serious responses to such questions and try and make this site a better place. So, are you ready?
Do atheists secretly or inwardly pray to God in their moments of desperation?
The short answer to your question is no. For the long answer, please keep reading.
It doesn’t actually surprise me that some believers might feel like we need to pray to something in our darkest hours. I don’t really blame them. I understand why they feel that way. They were probably raised in a way that they never got to develop a coping mechanism. Despite being raised by Muslim parents, I didn’t suffer through that. I was taught by my parents to deal with reality on reality’s terms. If I needed something, I was taught to work for it. If my work failed, I was taught to reflect on it and learn from it and never make the same mistake twice. Never was I asked to not put in any effort and hope some magic will solve things for me.
Don’t get me wrong! I was taught to pray to God. However, prayer was taught to me as a form of humility, not as a means to a desired end. As such, I never relied on prayers to get anything done. Therefore, logically, I had no reason to resort to praying if things got really difficult. Maybe your parents/teachers/pastors/imam taught you differently. Maybe they taught you to ask for miracles to solve your problems. As such, you probably see no option but to ask for a miracle when things get tough.
The thing is, even if I did believe in a God, I’d still not pray to them in my darkest hour. Why? Well, please consider the following. Some 21,000 people starve to death on this planet everyday! Most of them are kids. A God that refuses to hand a sandwich to these poor souls should not be expected to show up to solve my life problems. I mean, what would praying to such a God make me seem like? How much arrogance must my heart harbor for me to think that the same God who refuses to save those 21,000 people from starvation even takes interest in my problems?
For these reasons, people like me don’t pray and wouldn’t have prayed even if there was a God.
Who do they look to when all seems lost?
We engage in some introspection. We talk to friends/family. Sometimes we talk to strangers too. That way, we share things and somehow it makes us feel better.
Actually, it’s not only about the emotional comfort that we get out of it. Often times, our social network can actually help us out of such situations. People don’t need to be Gods to offer to help you. Even a total stranger can change your life and pull you out of your misery. As far as I am aware, people have a higher track record of helping other people than any God ever did. Please look at the above image. When your God sent Hurricane Katrina to drown those kids and devastate the lives of people, it was people who came together to save them.
That is why people like me don’t feel the need to look up to such Gods for anything. If anything, we look up to our fellow mortals. We respect such mortals who may be limited in their abilities but does more to help us than the seemingly impotent and potentially evil Gods.
Saturday, November 02, 2019
Review: Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All by Arthur Holland Michael
It wasn't long into the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that Rumsfeld realized the quantum difference between earlier wars and the new situation. Formerly, satellites and airplanes would take still pictures which would then be analyzed and bombed or whatever. Airfields and buildings did not move so there was time. Even tanks moving on a road had limited options where they might proceed and their speed was easily known. Now, the bad actors didn't even belong to a state, they were an amorphous group of individuals who could disappear from a location with the start of an ignition.
Predator drones had been around for a while and had increased in sophistication. They could now fly higher and had cameras with resolution such that they could pick out an earring from 20,000 feet. What Rumsfeld wanted was video to follow a moving target. Enter "Stare". These video cameras coupled with a drone like the Predator could follow a man for hours, circle and wait if need be. One great missed opportunity was the targeting of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. He was spotted and followed but for some unexplained reason it was decided not to fire on him. A lost opportunity, but then perhaps it was figured he hadn't done anything yet.
Technical problems in developing the Gorgon Stare were overcome by melding commercial hardware and software. Cell phone cameras were linked together in an array that provided 176 times the megapixel of just one cell camera and then they discovered the best software for manipulating the huge number of images the cameras collected was in video game boxes. The result was stunning.
The result was wide-area extremely sensitive cameras and recording. It has been tested by several agencies under the guise of those manufacturing the devices, usually done in secret because of fears the public might not be especially receptive to the idea of being under constant surveillance. Proponents point to assorted successes: catching bad guys after crimes have been committed by following them back to their dwellings, maximizing resources in wildfires, traffic control in real time, even something as prosaic as helping drivers find parking spots at large events. NASCAR hired one to watch over a race and the operator, bored to tears, realized after watch a car spend two hours trying to find a parking place when he could see several available, that had drivers had access to his information, and they had purchased just one soda during the time saved, that NASCAR would have paid the fee for the surveillance several times over.
There are myriad uses for such wide-area-surveillance, the technology for which has exploded. It used to be thought that 100 megapixels (your phone camera has about 10 megapixels) would be plenty. The latest model now sports 40 GIGApixels and there is no end in sight. The cameras are smaller, the processing power and storage cheaper. The civilian applications are numerous. One demonstration over an unnamed city in the south suggested the expensive (but getting cheaper) flights could pay for themselves in catching traffic violations. Hit-and-run drivers were identified as were the causes of accidents not to mention blown through stop signs and traffic signals. Another use has been to monitor the health of underground pipelines. The technology is already there to share usage, so you could have firefighters monitoring wild fires while others watched traffic patterns, and still others looked for crimes being committed especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated and able to make split-second decisions.
A good book to read in connection with Paul Scharre's An Army of None [book:Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War|40180025]. It's fascinating if a bit frightening; another case of technology outstripping policy. (Bear in mind the Supreme Court is populated with justices who don't know how to use email.)
Check out https://www.pss-1.com/what-is-wide-area-surveillance
Predator drones had been around for a while and had increased in sophistication. They could now fly higher and had cameras with resolution such that they could pick out an earring from 20,000 feet. What Rumsfeld wanted was video to follow a moving target. Enter "Stare". These video cameras coupled with a drone like the Predator could follow a man for hours, circle and wait if need be. One great missed opportunity was the targeting of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11. He was spotted and followed but for some unexplained reason it was decided not to fire on him. A lost opportunity, but then perhaps it was figured he hadn't done anything yet.
Technical problems in developing the Gorgon Stare were overcome by melding commercial hardware and software. Cell phone cameras were linked together in an array that provided 176 times the megapixel of just one cell camera and then they discovered the best software for manipulating the huge number of images the cameras collected was in video game boxes. The result was stunning.
The result was wide-area extremely sensitive cameras and recording. It has been tested by several agencies under the guise of those manufacturing the devices, usually done in secret because of fears the public might not be especially receptive to the idea of being under constant surveillance. Proponents point to assorted successes: catching bad guys after crimes have been committed by following them back to their dwellings, maximizing resources in wildfires, traffic control in real time, even something as prosaic as helping drivers find parking spots at large events. NASCAR hired one to watch over a race and the operator, bored to tears, realized after watch a car spend two hours trying to find a parking place when he could see several available, that had drivers had access to his information, and they had purchased just one soda during the time saved, that NASCAR would have paid the fee for the surveillance several times over.
There are myriad uses for such wide-area-surveillance, the technology for which has exploded. It used to be thought that 100 megapixels (your phone camera has about 10 megapixels) would be plenty. The latest model now sports 40 GIGApixels and there is no end in sight. The cameras are smaller, the processing power and storage cheaper. The civilian applications are numerous. One demonstration over an unnamed city in the south suggested the expensive (but getting cheaper) flights could pay for themselves in catching traffic violations. Hit-and-run drivers were identified as were the causes of accidents not to mention blown through stop signs and traffic signals. Another use has been to monitor the health of underground pipelines. The technology is already there to share usage, so you could have firefighters monitoring wild fires while others watched traffic patterns, and still others looked for crimes being committed especially now that artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated and able to make split-second decisions.
A good book to read in connection with Paul Scharre's An Army of None [book:Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War|40180025]. It's fascinating if a bit frightening; another case of technology outstripping policy. (Bear in mind the Supreme Court is populated with justices who don't know how to use email.)
Check out https://www.pss-1.com/what-is-wide-area-surveillance
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