Lazy linking

First of all, I have created a bluesky account – feel free to follow me. I don’t know how active it will be, but I will try to give it a chance.

—

In These Times has reprinted two works by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison on Fascism and Censorship

In this reprint of “Peril” and “Racism and Fascism,” Toni Morrison warns of the creative depths of fascism’s reach.

From 1977 to 1979, June Jordan and Toni Morrison were both a part of The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in a New York City apartment to eat and drink together while discussing liberation. Whether addressing genocide, imperialism or the American literary establishment, the writers in the group, which included Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, saw their work as a means to make interventions against dominant narratives of colonialism and oppression.

Their words ring prescient.

In ​“Peril” (2008) and ​“Racism and Fascism” (1995), reprinted below, Morrison recognizes what the creep of fascism looks like, particularly the censorship of dissent. Found here, in an excerpt of the essay ​“Life After Lebanon” (1984), Jordan reflects on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (funded by American taxes, of course), the backlash she faced after publicly condemning it and the fearless women who supported her in spite of it all. And in an excerpt of ​“Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams” (1986), Jordan underscores the dire need for coalition-building across differences.

The article (and the excerpt I copied) also links to June Jordan’s works

—

In the upcoming times, some of this might be useful for people

Anonymous — The Uber-Secret Handbook Version 3.0

This is not an endorsement of Anonymous, a group too undefined for me to have an overall opinion about, but rather a reference to a bunch of advice and practices that can help you stay safer on the internet in a changing future.

—

Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’

Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.

It is early days yet, but Bluesky seems like they take moderation seriously, and they allow you to filter messages on a much more fine-grained level than Twitter ever did.

—

Concern Grows Around Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Period-Tracking App

Peter Thiel — the billionaire venture capitalist, Gawker destroyer and top dollar conservative campaign donor — is now backing a “femtech” app called 28, according to Vice News.

The app, created by a controversial women’s publication called Evie Magazine, claims to be a “cycle-based” nutrition and wellness program that helps women “reclaim control of [their] bodies, in the most natural way possible.”

This is important. Thiel is a big funder and backer of both Trump and the draconian policies to remove female autonomy

Neither the billionaire’s venture firm Thiel Capital nor Thiel himself are strangers to health and life science investments, but funding a fertility startup is a bit of a turn, especially at a moment during which a lot of Americans have just lost, rather than reclaimed, a significant degree of bodily autonomy.

And a closer look at the app, and those who made it, illuminates a powerful political intersection between tech, health, the wellness industry, and modern conservatism in which conspiracy theories and dubious pseudoscience are feeding a growing counter-counter-culture.

For starters, the science is sketchy. The core premise of the app appears to get women off modern birth control methods, like the hormonal pill or an intrauterine device. Its website is almost comically vague on what the alternative might be, but a focus on “cycles” suggests that it’s essentially the rhythm method, which basically entails attempting to avoid sex during ovulation. That’s fine in principle, but the rhythm method is statistically quite ineffective, with about a quarter of couples using it accidentally becoming pregnant over the average year.

The publication behind the app raises even more questions. Evie appears to be somewhat of a Cosmopolitan-meets-MindBodyGreen-meets-Tomi Lahren situation: makeup, workout, and holistic wellness tips and tricks are sandwiched between transphobic essays and anti-vaxx arguments. Its anti-birth control cycle-tracking app — which, yes, requires that women input potentially incriminating menstruation data — seems like a natural extension of that apparent mission: the rejection of a very specific version of “feminism” in order to embrace an old-meets-new version of traditional femininity.

The app seems like an attempt to gather data, while providing a pseudo-scientific method of birth control. It is easy to foresee a future where the app data will be used to force people to give birth in pregnancies which was caused by people trusting the method promoted by the app.

Thiel, and the companies he control, should never have access to any kind of health or personal data!

 

Shellshocked

Sorry for the quiet here, but I have been shellshocked since the US election.

As most people who follow US politics, I knew that it wouldn’t be an easy win for the Democrats, but given the candidate and campaign, I had expected that Harris would win the election. What I had to not taken into account, is the misogyny and racism of the US. White people, especially men, in the US turned up for Trump, just like they did during the 2020 election, but across all demographics, there were a move from Democratic to GOP – a lot of this was because more people from the Democratic voting block stayed home this time. This makes absolutely no sense, when you look at what was at stake – Trump in 2024 was arguably more dangerous than Trump in 2020, where he had not yet gotten immunity from the SCOTUS , and where Project 2025 didn’t exist yet.

Let’s not mince words, Trump is the worst presidential candidate ever to run. He has been this every time he has run – somehow getting worse every time. He was the worst the first time he ran, the first time he won, the time he lost his position, and now when he won again.

Even though he is a rapist, a racist, and a monster at every level, people voted for him. Not only did they vote for him, they made sure to give him near-unlimited power by also giving the GOP the Senate and the House.

At this point, our only hope is the incompetence and infighting of the GOP – unfortunately their game plan has been made by the Federalist Society which have clearly shown that they can take advantage of these situations – just look at the current Supreme Court of the United States.

 

The Onion buys Infowars

This sounds like a parody article from the Onion, but it is true: The Onion wins auction for Alex Jones’ media company

Alex Jones’ media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion. No Joke.

The satirical news outlet bought Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, backed by a group of Connecticut families. Jones said on today’s show that security has notified him he needs to vacate the premises this morning.

Proceeds of the sale will go to paying down Jones’ nearly $1.5 billion debt to families of Sandy Hook victims who won two defamation suits against him for spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which Jones said never happened. He accused the families of being actors, faking the killing of 20 children and 6 educators, in an effort to drum up support for gun control, and Jones supporters who believed the lies threatened and harassed the families for years.

It is no secret that Alex Jones was hoping for some of this allies to buy Infowars and let him keep the brand. Alas, for him, this was not to be. And he is not taking it well:

“We’re going out like vikings with swords in our arms,” he said. He’s accusing the auction house of rigging rules against him to benefit the families.

“At the last minute, the rules of the auction changed,” he alleged yesterday. “What was going to be an open auction where you […] could offer more money and top [previous] bids, but now they’ve decided that it’ll just be sealed and there’s one bid and whoever’s the highest gets it.”

For a tough guy, he whines a lot, doesn’t he?

As to why the Onion, or rather its parent company, bought Infowars, I think I will let the explain themselves

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.

Infinite Growth Forever,

Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO

Sweet justice with a twist of satire. What more could we want?

It is always a white man

One of the many Twitter accounts spewing conspiracies and lies is Black Insurrectionist, who, to no ones surprise, turns out to be a white man.

The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there

“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.

He’s also white.

With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

Unsurprising he has defrauded people and owes millions in back taxes.

Learn some real archaeology

A bunch of archaeologist and other online creators have come together to do an online event where they teach real archaeology – they call this initiative real archaeology:

Real Archaeology was started by a collective of online creators who produce fact-based content about the past. Our goal is to collaborate in creating, promoting, and sharing entertaining and educational media with the wider public on the wonders of our shared history.

We use peer-reviewed sources and our experience as researchers, teachers, archaeologists, historians, and more to bring history to life and make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible. As a part of our efforts to spread our message, we have created the Real Archaeology online event that spans three days in October.

During this time, our speakers will be releasing a myriad of archaeology-related content across multiple platforms including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Follow our creators (list below) or search #realarchaeology to find and engage with our material.

The event started yesterday, but there is still time to catch the schedule today and tomorrow

Goodbye Kris Kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson died a couple of days ago, and the world is somewhat poorer for it. He was a talented songwriter and actor, and by all records a decent human being, fighting for a better world.

Kris Kristofferson, singer-songwriter and actor, dies at 88

Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and an A-list Hollywood actor, has died.

Kristofferson died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, family spokeswoman Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.

McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given.

Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such country and rock ‘n’ roll standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”

One thing I will always remember Kris Kristofferson for, is that he supported Sinéad O’Connor when very few others did, Sinéad O’Connor would of course turn out to be right

Lazy linking

Here are a few links that might be of interest

Lady Gaga Never Spoke Out Against Rumors Claiming She’s a Man ‘Because I Didn’t Feel Like a Victim With That Lie’: ‘I’m Used to Lies Being Printed About Me’

Lady Gaga explains why she would not fight against these rumors, since she thought her fighting against them might harm someone else.

—

A graph exploration method for identifying influential spreaders in complex networks

The problem of identifying the influential spreaders – the important nodes – in a real world network is of high importance due to its theoretical interest as well as its practical applications, such as the acceleration of information diffusion, the control of the spread of a disease and the improvement of the resilience of networks to external attacks. In this paper, we propose a graph exploration sampling method that accurately identifies the influential spreaders in a complex network, without any prior knowledge of the original graph, apart from the collected samples/subgraphs. The method explores the graph, following a deterministic selection rule and outputs a graph sample – the set of edges that have been crossed. The proposed method is based on a version of Rank Degree graph sampling algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments in eight real world networks by simulating the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) and susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic models which serve as ground truth identifiers of nodes spreading efficiency. Experimentally, we show that by exploring only the 20% of the network and using the degree centrality as well as the k-core measure, we are able to identify the influential spreaders with at least the same accuracy as in the full information case, namely, the case where we have access to the original graph and in that graph, we compute the centrality measures. Finally and more importantly, we present strong evidence that the degree centrality – the degree of nodes in the collected samples – is almost as accurate as the k-core values obtained from the original graph.

An interesting paper from 2017.

—

Five Russian GRU Officers and One Civilian Charged for Conspiring to Hack Ukrainian Government

Defendants Are Alleged to Have Committed Cyber Attacks in Advance of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine; Also Targeted 26 North Atlantic Treaty Organization Countries

It is the official release of the charge against Tenet and the Russian paymasters that was release a couple of weeks ago. For a good overview of the case, I recommend this article from the Columbia Journalism Review: The Tenet Media Incident

—

A rare link in Danish: OPLEVET ETNISK DISKRIMINATION I DANMARK (pdf)

Denne rapport udgør den hidtil mest omfattende undersøgelse af racisme i Danmark
med udgangspunkt i oplevet diskrimination og fordomme. Mens enkeltpersoners egne
oplevelser ikke kan give et præcist billede af det faktiske omfang af diskrimination
og fordomme, så kan oplevelser i kombination med den omfangsrige forskning, der
henvises til i rapporten, tydeliggøre, at der er problemer, der skal løses.

Undersøgelsen tager udgangspunkt i voksne minoritetsetniske personer med
opvækst i Danmark – dvs. personer der enten er født i Danmark eller kommet hertil
som børn (herefter betegnet som minoritetsetniske personer). Overordnet viser
besvarelserne i undersøgelsen, at over 8 ud af 10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver,
at de har oplevet diskrimination eller fordomme inden for det seneste år. Over 6 ud af
10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver, at de har oplevelser, man som udgangspunkt
kan karakterisere som ulovlig diskrimination. For mange er der ikke tale om en enkelt
hændelse, men gentagne negative oplevelser på tværs af bl.a. arbejdsmarkedet, i det
offentlige rum og i kontakten med myndigheder.

This is a report about experienced/perceived ethnic discrimination in Denmark, made by the Danish Institute for Human Rights in 2023

Lockdowns and Teen girl brains

There is currently some news going around that Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’

Adolescent girls who lived through Covid lockdowns experienced more rapid brain ageing than boys, according to data that suggests the social restrictions had a disproportionate impact on them.

MRI scans found evidence of premature brain ageing in both boys and girls, but girls’ brains appeared on average 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years older for boys.

This certainly sounds like something we should be worried about, even if it is not clear what the effect of these differences are.

There are two things that should make you stop up, before getting two worried. It is the fact that the study is based on “MRI scans” and that it is about COVID political measures. MRI studies are rife with problems – as explained in Annual Research Review: Current limitations and future directions in MRI studies of child- and adult-onset developmental psychopathologie

The widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the study of child- and adult-onset developmental psychopathologies has generated many investigations that have measured brain structure and function in vivo throughout development, often generating great excitement over our ability to visualize the living, developing brain using the attractive, even seductive images that these studies produce. Often lost in this excitement is the recognition that brain imaging generally, and MRI in particular, is simply a technology, one that does not fundamentally differ from any other technology, be it a blood test, a genotyping assay, a biochemical assay, or behavioral test. No technology alone can generate valid scientific findings. Rather, it is only technology coupled with a strong experimental design that can generate valid and reproducible findings that lead to new insights into the mechanisms of disease and therapeutic response

The subject the review focus on is not the one that the prematurely aged brains study fall under, but the same general problem exist.

And then there is the fact that the study is linked to COVID political measures. Any time this is the case, we have to stop up and be extra careful. There are a lot of biases related to this subject, both from the scientists and by the people reporting on the study.

Unsurprisingly this is also the case here. As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, the Health Nerd, explains:

Lockdowns Didn’t “Prematurely Age” Teen Girl’s Brains

Why the new viral study is extremely misleading

…

The study in question is a neurological examination of teen brains. The researchers put a bunch of adolescents aged 9-17 into MRIs before the pandemic, and then looked at their brains again a few years later. They used this data to look at what had happened to the brains in the interim using a variety of statistical techniques.

The Health Nerd goes through the study, explaining the setup and limits of the study. Unsurprisingly, it is a small study, and it is hard to make broad conclusions based on it. And when it comes to the effect of lockdowns?

Which brings us to an interesting point – what does any of this have to do with lockdowns?

Simple answer, really: nothing. The study does not, in any way, examine the effects of lockdown on teen brains.

Rather, the study shows that teen girls’ brains after the pandemic were different to the expected trends from brains before the pandemic. This could be caused by many things. Maybe the virus itself, which can cause some changes to brain chemistry, is to blame. Perhaps it was the global disruption brought about by a novel pandemic. Maybe the girls were more vulnerable than boys to things like relatives dying of COVID-19. We have no idea, because the authors didn’t do anything to investigate these myriad explanations. They don’t even report that the children in the study were present in Washington State for the lockdowns, nor whether they experienced similar lockdown impacts (i.e. school closures).

To make any inferences about lockdowns, the authors would’ve had to find some control group who’d had a different exposure to their intervention. Perhaps MRIs from kids in Florida, which had different COVID-19 restrictions, or a longitudinal sample from before the pandemic. These would all be inadequate samples for one reason or another, but they would’ve at least given some insight into whether lockdowns were associated with the cortical thinning seen in the research. As it stands, the study tells us nothing at all.

So, this is a somewhat doubtful study, which doesn’t tell us what is claimed about the study. The claims however are not sensational reporting by the press, but directly made by the scientists:

You can’t just blame the media here – the authors put the word “lockdown” into their study. It’s the second word of the title of their paper. Despite the paper having nothing to do with lockdowns.

This is, in a word, bad. Bad science. Poorly thought-through. Inadequate in a very serious way.

The Health Nerd  explains how such a paper could be published in PNAS.

A bit of history

As some of you might know, I have a double citizenship. I am Danish/Australian. I have lived my whole life in Denmark, but have close ties to Australia, where I have a lot of family that I try to visit regularly. As a matter of fact, I am going to visit them in a few months.

My parents met each other while my father was living in Australia, mostly traveling from place to place, doing odd jobs. They met in Alice Springs, where my mother had arrived at, after leaving her parent’s home, and traveling around. My father’s travels where much more extensively and over a much longer time than my mother’s travels.

For some reason, I today thought about the fact that when my father first arrived, he had gone by ship. This lead me to wonder if I could find any record of what ship he had traveled to Australia on.

It turns out that the National Archive of Australia (NAA) has a passenger record search for passengers arriving up to 1972.

Searching my father name, turns up two records, both from 18 Mar 1965.

The first record shows that my father arrived on the ship GUGLIELMO, which upon closer inspection turns out to be Guglielmo Marconi of Lloyd Triestino. The record from the NAA contains the passenger manifest, which should my father is getting of at Melbourne.

Front page of passenger manifesto of Guglielmo Marconi Page of passenger manifesto with my father's name

 

The NAA also contains the disembarking papers of my father (the incoming passenger card)

Disembarking papers of my father

 

Both the NAA record and the disembarking papers for my father, shows that he was going to stay at “ICEM, Bonegilla Camp VIC.”. This is the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, which mainly handled non-English immigrants. Since my father was from Denmark, he fell into this category.

I looked at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience website, and found out that it was possible to look up the id cards of the people who lived at the camp. As the website says:

Each person or family group at Bonegilla was registered with an identity card which recorded dates of arrival and departure, the ship or flight they came on, the block they lived in and more.

Using the lookup tool, I found the ID card for my father

First page of camp ID belonging to my father
Second page of camp ID belonging to my father
It shows that he arrived on March 23rd 1965 and left just over two weeks later on April 7th 1965, where he was going to take up residence at the Maribyrnong Hostel in Melbourne. The Maribyrnong Hostel was a migrant hostel, originally named Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Center, and later renamed to Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, and finally Maribyrnong Hostel. The buildings of the hostel seems to still exist, even though it seems that there has been a proposal to demolish them in recent years.

Unsurprisingly, there are no further clues about my father’s travels from there.- At least not for now.