Roots of the Riots - BLM isn't the whole story

May 2020 Protests/Riots

 If you really want to know what's going on. Here are the three things that are causing the unrest:

1) Three solid years of dog whistle racism from the top and constant suppression of black concerns. "Taking a knee (peacefully, respectfully) is anti-American!" and "Black Lives Matter? How selfish! Blue lives matter. All lives matter." So, the protests (90% non-violent) are the bottled-up response to that tone-deaf, "don't you get uppity now", patronizing pat-on-the-head racism that ignores real life-and-death grievances of black people and their relationship to law enforcement.

2) Systemic indifference to police prejudice and violence against people of color. Is criminal violence more common than state violence? Yes, very. Does that make it worse? No. Car crashes are "worse" (more common) than airplane crashes, right? So, we should do nothing to regulate and prevent airplane crashes?
We, as a society, actually find airplane crashes "worse" than car crashes because we are at the mercy of the airline, its procedures, its mechanics and its pilots.
In the same way, individual thugs doing violence is sad, maybe even tragic (like everyday traffic accidents), but institutionalized, racist practices of violence are abhorrent to the idea of a civil society because we are all dependent on the training, procedures and attitudes of police. People are marching because the risk of being the target of police violence (no matter how small you think it is) shouldn't depend on baked-in racism and belief of cops that they nearly always get away with it, even when it is outright murder. That's not a minor, snowflake issue. It's a major, systemic injustice that has got to end.

3) Economic and health injustice exposed by the bungling of the COVID-19 crisis. While the Federal government was diverting shipments of PPE and ventilators from blue states and handing out $trillions in aid to millionaires, billionaires and corporations, millions of people are unemployed and a stingy, one-time $1200 check doesn't cut it for the under-class just fired from three jobs that barely made ends meet anyway. At the same time, 60% of C19 deaths in Chicago, for example, are black people that represent only 14% of the population. The looting is a response to all that, basically, "if you don't give a flip about us and aren't doing anything for us, we'll take something for ourselves." It's not right, just a gut response to deep neglect. and finally ...

4) There's quite a lot of evidence that some of the initial vandalism and graffiti was kicked-off by far-Right, anarchist militia groups (especially the Boogaloo Bois) who have been seen in video at these protests casually breaking windows, throwing the first stones, flashing white supremacist hand signs and otherwise seeding the violence. They've been plotting online to start a race war and while Bill Barr and the intelligence community have have known these groups were a major domestic terror threat for years, they choose to publicly blame Antifa instead, without any evidence.

So, in short: Ignoring Black Lives Matter didn't make it go away. Economic and health injustice has only gotten worse under this administration and, as it was said about Joker in the movies "Some people just want to watch the world burn."

Some people argue that there are black millionaires in America so cries of injustice are just sour grapes from people wanting to blame their plight on something that happened to their great-great-great-grandfather.

The problem with that argument is that exceptions don't prove a rule. So, we had a black president and black quarterbacks (except Kopernick), black doctors and lawyers. Does that mean systemic racism is over? That's like seeing one daisy pushed through a crack in the pavement of an abandoned parking lot and calling it a garden.

Here's a better litmus test of progress for you: Would any white person in America (say, your son or daughter) be willing to swap places (and skin colors) with anyone in this country chosen at random without you fearing the outcome? In the kind of America we believe in, it is not enough that success is as possible as a lightning strike. It needs to be as likely as sunshine and how cloudy it is shouldn't depend on your skin color.

Here's why you wear a mask. Don't be a psycho or moron.

Here's why you wear a damn mask. If you don't, you are either a Maskless Moron thinking you won't get the virus or a Maskless Psycho who doesn't care if you spread it or not. Don't be a psycho or moron. Wear a damn mask.

Also, here's another important point: Because you can get the virus and not show symptoms for 48 hours (sometimes never), you can go from Uninfected Maskless Moron to Maskless Psycho Carrier without any clue that you switched. All those tough guys and gals crying "'Merika! and Freedom!" don't realize that the virus will make them their bitch and dupe them into spreading itself before they have any chance to do the right thing and seek treatment or self-quarantine.

Some people point out that cloth masks don't work and cite articles like this or this. Note that the first article undermines itself right at the top: "because no studies have been done on the effectiveness of cloth masks in preventing transmission of coronavirus to others, it is impossible to assess their benefits, if any. "

The "no studies" part is false (see below) but even if the rest of the article is 100% accurate and truthful all it is saying (same as the 2nd article) is that wearing a mask doesn't protect YOU but the authors aren't sure whether it might protect OTHERS if you are infected.

In fact, we do know: Masks help stop the spread of coronavirus – the science is simple and I’m one of 100 experts urging governors to require public mask-wearing.

Also, many cloth masks allow inserts such as vacuum filters and coffee filters which add additional (not perfect, N95-level) protection to the wearer.

I like the pee analogy: If you aren't wearing pants and pee in my direction, I'm going to get wet whether I'm wearing pants or not. (Although, maybe I'll get less wet if I'm, in fact, wearing pants.) However, if YOU wear pants and pee in my direction, I'm probably not going to get wet (but I will laugh at you).

Here's another analogy: Fire retardant shoes make us safer. Normally we don't need them but people have suddenly developed a problem where their feet catch on fire (invisibly) and leave invisible, burning footprints.  Anyone who steps in their footprints gets it, too. Therefore, until we have invisible-fire-detecting glasses and have perfect invisible-fire-resistant socks it is safer for everybody to wear the less-than-perfect, fire-retardant shoes we have. To flaunt the risks and ignore recommendations is to cave to the tyranny of individual stupidity where we, as a society, are held hostage by the worst instincts and short-sightedness of a few individuals who are willing to foist significant risks on others because of a slight inconvenience or, worse, a twisted sense of personal liberty.

Also, I find it ironic that even the staunchest Libertarians will argue that the sole, legitimate role of government is protection and security, etc. Yet, when government actually does its job in a crisis to do just that, the tough guys w/ "thanks for your service" ribbons on their cars go running to the hills away from personal responsibility and small sacrifices for their fellow humans. Man up. Wear a damn mask.

H. G. Wells: A Gamer, Writer and Flawed Creator of All the Things

Response to: H. G. Wells Invented Everything You Love

We sometimes forget that there was a science fiction writer (besides Jules Verne) who was "old school" before the Golden Age of science fiction.

This article reminded me that H.G. Wells was that and more. He was:

Feminist. Socialist. Pacifist. Non-Monogamist. Utopian. Campaigner against racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism.

Like many of the great men of that age, he was also a royal bastard who mistreated women, egged on Nazi ideas of eugenics and may have been partially responsible Harry Houdini's death.

First, the good bits:

In a short span of six years at the turn of the century when the Western world was choked with coal smog, open sewers and horse manure, Wells churned out wildly imaginative works that literally invented many of the genres of science fiction:

• 1895: Time Travel - The Time Machine
• 1896: Bio-Hacking - The Island of Doctor Moreau
• 1897: Enhanced Humans - The Invisible Man
• 1898: Alien Invasion - The War of the Worlds
• 1901: Space Travel, First Contact - The First Men in the Moon

To this list I'd add to this list 1899's When the Sleeper Wakes where Wells extrapolated such an astonishing number of ideas and inventions that you'd have to at least consider whether he himself was an actual time traveler. In this novel of a man who wakes up in the future, Wells describes:

• Everyday air travel
• A 3D printer for clothes
• A DVD player (sort of), a television with cartridges for viewing news, entertainment and educational programs

Remarkably, for a guy that imagined the most horribly monstrous weapons of war, he was at heart a pacifist. Yet, he also was largely responsible for the popularization of war games. Single-handedly, he introduced the non-military public to large-scale strategy games with miniatures. Why would a pacifist do that? He laid out his reasons pretty clearly:

You have only to play at [games of war] three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion.

Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and [war games] bring you to it as nothing else.

Now the dark side

Was H. G. Wells a visionary? No doubt. Still, the man was no saint or intellectual god of rationalism.

As pointed out by @joatsbuddy in a comment:

[Wells] was a tom-catting bastard who used the ideology of “free love” as an excuse for being extremely selfish. 

In his wildly successful non-fiction bestseller ANTICIPATIONS, his outline of his ideal future world-state ... scientist-engineer rulers of his World State will engage in “mercy killing” of the “unfit” [including] blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people ... [who should] die out and disappear.

In short, in his 30's Wells was a staunch believer in the deliberate "perfection" of the human race and believed that while the enlightened leaders of the future might be reluctant to control their populations with pain (such a shame), they will hold no superstitions about using "the method of death" to scientifically improve society. Many critics believe that these ideas helped fuel some of the "scientific" fascism and racism infested Europe leading up the World War II.

Having unleashed that cultural virus on the world in 1901, Wells did eventually renounce most of these ideas, advocating against anti-Semitism and for civil rights for blacks. Still, you'd think that a  man of vision and grand ideas would have understood better than anybody how bad ideas backed by authority and "reason" could gain a dark momentum of their own that even their own author couldn't hold back.

Finally, toward the end of his life Wells and his wife became obsessed with the greatest hokum of his day, Spiritualism. They helped elevate the reputations of spiritual mediums to celebrity status. Some biographers suggest that when his former friend, Houdini, mounted a lifelong campaign to expose all spiritual mediums as money-sucking charlatans, Wells essentially hired a thug to rough him up, resulting in Houdini's death.

So, H. G. Wells was a giant of imagination who's visions exerted a huge and lasting influence (both good and bad) on the 20th century and helped shape the future in so many ways. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise anymore that pioneers make mistakes, sometimes nasty ones. Jefferson, Churchill, MLK were all flawed men who sometimes wore dirty boots but took great strides that we can admire anyway.

Three Deadly Sins of Agile Development

My counterpoint to a LinkedIn discussion: Why Most of Developers are Not Happy with Agile?

While I'm a true believer in Agile development and someone who has suffered through many of the miserable alternatives, I think it is fair to acknowledge that Agile has distinct points of failure that could cause developers to hate it.

First and foremost is BUS Syndrome: The disease of Bad User Stories run rampant. Without proper buy-in from management, frequent involvement with end-users and proper story grooming, developers are left sifting through the weak tea leaves of vague requirements for what needs to be actually built. Iterations can become nothing but demoralizing re-writes and reversals.

Second, Death Sprints. These are the same as Death Marches harking back to the age of 6-to18-month Waterfall life cycles only shorter and more brutal as 160-hours of work gets regularly coerced down to 80-hours to fit into each sprint. As always, bad management can find  excuses to blame their bad planning on developers doing the work. "Velocity" just becomes another whip and two-week sprints just provide more frequent whipping posts in the slave yard of a dysfunctional organization.

Third, Procrastination by Sprint. This is sort of the opposite of Death Sprints, where indecisive management can't set goals or rally support for clear initiatives and so is perfectly happy to put off decision-making from sprint to sprint, populating user stories with fluff and busy work. There's nothing worse than having to solve tough technical problems that you know will be made obsolete by upcoming initiatives or shifts in technology that everyone (except management) sees coming.

Again, I'm an enthusiastic proponent of Agile and see it as a tremendously humane agent of change in software development. However, every revolution has its Dark Side where its weaknesses, like the ones above, can be corrupted. So, it is worthwhile to acknowledge cracks in Agile's shiny armor to protect ourselves from being wounded by them.

What Good is Consciousness? An Evolutionary Fable

Response to: Evolution and Higher Purpose by Robert Wright

Sociobiologist and journalist Robert Write has a terrific essay that explores how a "higher purpose" could be compatible with strict, Darwinian evolution.

What I enjoyed most was his grappling with the question of how consciousness could have evolved at all:

How exactly does a consciousness that was previously epiphenomenal, incapable of exerting influence on the organism harboring it, suddenly acquire causal force, provoking discussions about itself?

To which he offered this answer by analogy:

Suppose there was an organism that had no eyesight, no perceptual sensitivity to light whatsoever. Then suppose it developed eyesight and every once in a while looked at its shadow and reacted to its shadow. Well, at this point its shadow would have gone from being epiphenomenal—having no effect on the organism’s behavior—to having an effect on the organism’s behavior. Strictly speaking, nothing about the nature of the shadow would have changed—the changes all came in the physical constitution of the organism—and yet the shadow would now have a new capacity for interaction with the organism.

This analogy is a brilliant insight on consciousness and very much as persuasive as earlier arguments about altruism. The old argument used to be that "Evolution is red in tooth and claw and so altruism serves no purpose." If survival is all that matters, screw everyone else. Yet, examples of altruism kept being observed in nature, from army ants to chimpanzees. So, the revised consensus became "Well, individual survival may be important but altruism can also confer advantage to the gene pool." That helps explain the widespread occurrence of homosexual behavior in many species even though strictly non-reproducing members won't pass their genes directly to future generations. Your gay uncle or aunt shares genes with you and by contributing to your survival increases the chance that a version of their DNA is carried on, nonetheless.

Given the fall of the anti-altruism theory, "consciousness serves no purpose" starts to sound like an equally short-sighted argument. So, how could consciousness, a useless "shadow" on the wall of our mind possible effect evolutionary fitness? Or, an even harder puzzle, how could the seed of partial, incomplete consciousness take root at all and be worth passing down to your progeny?

Well, take one feature of consciousness, self-awareness. At a base level, primitive self-awareness kicks in to prevent a lizard from eating its own tail, for example. At a higher level, if a mammal's mental model includes itself, it might better be able to able to recognize its place in the pack status hierarchy and allocate its energy less to sparring with the pack leader and more on hunting and mating. Also, a short hop from self-modeling is wariness and empathy toward other members of your species. Predicting who your allies and rivals are could be a powerful secret weapon against those who lack the ability. Which of these traits, modeling of others or modeling of self, came first might not matter since either would yield great dividends.

So, just as Dawkins step-by-step disproved the "What good is a half-evolved eye?" argument, it should be possible to show that half-evolved consciousness (say, self-awareness alone) could confer significant evolutionary advantages.

As for finding higher purpose, it seems like a pretty direct line from "modeling self" to "modeling others" to "modeling the environment" to "modeling the universe."

As Carl Sagan said so profoundly, "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself."

Bots are Buttheads - Why we need "Content Courts" for Social Media

Response to "Why was I Demonetized?" by HealMyTech

HealMyTech is a YouTube channel that does helpful videos on diagnosing and fixing problems with P.C.s and other tech. Pretty innocuous, right?

Still, YouTube found some arbitrary and completely opaque reason to demonetize one of his videos.  

This isn't anything new and complaints are rampant of this happening. Clearly this video, like so many others, didn't deserve to be demonetized but that's what happens when bots are allowed to police content. They take it out of context or interpret keywords or keyword combinations in the worse possible way.

I don't know for sure but the content bots might have thought (stupidly) that HealMyTech's video was aggressively political because it used the keywords "give you authority" and "rule them all" along with many uses of "pc" that could be (again stupidly) confused with "politically correct" (often used by Alt Right channels as an insult.) So, as dumb as it sounds HealMyTech may need to avoid keywords and phrases that sound even vaguely political and maybe use "desktop", "laptop", "workstation" or just "computer" more often instead of "pc."

Collectively, though, we need to fight this nonsense. Even if bots get smarter, I strongly believe viewers and creators need to lobby YouTube (and Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to create the equivalent of "Content Courts" on each platform with clear rules and appeal processes with the following features: 1) No channel should be deplatformed and no video demonetized without "due process" i.e. specific charges are sent that explain a violation. 2) There should be a probation period and chance to correct the offending content, and 3) Creators should be able to argue their case and viewers should be able to petition YouTube to appeal a ruling.

Anyway, keep on creating your great content and keep advocating for fair platforms. They'll come eventually.

Can corporations justly govern content communities? No

Current examples: OnlyFans banning porn. Tumblr, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Twitter.

Yahoo bought Tumblr after it had already established itself as a massive haven for sex-positive content and a thriving community of support. It's valuation (like all Web properties) was utterly contingent on Tumblr's immense daily traffic and engagement. Inevitably after the sale, the Yahoo "suits" got involved (lawyers worried about copyright infringement and liabilities based on capricious "community standards") and summarily committed community genocide. They didn't just kill the Golden Goose but ground its eggs and bones into dust. (FYI: Yahoo's track record on nuking communities it bought into is consistently bad, having previously alienated similar thriving sites like Flickr, a photo sharing site, and del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.) 

Of course, YouTube, Twitter, etc. are also guilty of some of the same corporate cowardice, cancelling and demonetizing legitimate content for spurious reasons or on behalf of corporate interests.

Bottom-line: Private enterprise can never be the safe cradle of community because it ultimately is not beholden to the community only to its shareholders and accountants. Instead, we need to develop "Content Co-ops" run by and for content creators themselves. It's the only model that avoids unaccountable censorship by 'bots and content dictated by corporate fear.

Hologram Circus Animals: Humane or False Cause?

Response to: German Circus is using holograms instead of live animals

An Austrian circus company has responded to a general outcry against animal cruelty by replacing its performing animals with larger-than-life holograms. They're stunning and hugely innovative while preserving much of the wonder and spectacle of traditional circuses.

Article & Video: TheDodo.com | This Animal-Free Circus is such a Stunning Show

Still, here's the thing. All the well-meaning people that cry "Animal cruelty!" at circuses and "Don't cage animals!" at zoos aren't wrong but are also missing the big picture. The more we sanitize and distance ourselves from nature, the fewer people will give a damn. If your children never see the charm, mystery and grandeur of animals up close and only see animals as timeless, invincible characters in HDTV, holograms, or CGI then it won't be long before the actual existence of the real things won't matter anymore.

In short, let's stamp out cruelty wherever we can but not whitewash or hide our utter dominion over these creatures. Keeping them out of circuses and zoos doesn't somehow erase or negate our absolute power over them away from the spotlight and our responsibility to not exploit them out of sight or wipe them out entirely. In the end, every species is precious but if a few ambassadors of their kind have to suffer the most humane treatment we can provide in order to leave an indelible impression on the hearts and minds of human adults and children, then that's a price well worth paying.

Response to: The Lie of "Judeo-Christian" Science

Response to:

YouTube | Ben Shapiro and the Lie of "Judeo-Christian" Science

The video argues against Ben Shapiro's claim in a debate that Judeo-Christian values are the root of democracy and scientific reasoning. Rebecca Watson seems to be saying that neither democracy nor scientific progress owes anything to Judaism or Christianity. In fact, American democracy was explicitly created as a non-theistic state and the seeds of science were planted by Greek and Arabic scholars long before Christianity asserted itself.

I mostly agree, especially about democracy. However, there were two "Judeo-Christian" values that helped scientific reasoning to survive _despite_ religious fantastical thinking and myth-making:

1) The vigorous Jewish tradition of Talmudic debate where Jews young and old were expected to reason and challenge each other about meaning and application of doctrine. This even played out in the New Testament story of young Jesus in the temple. That tradition possibly contributes to why so many great scientists were Jewish because of the cultural esteem for scholarship and critical thinking. I am not sure the concept of peer review and adversarial defense of proofs would be as strong without that tradition.

2) Christian devotion to understanding God's works. The same "fanaticism" that made monks argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin also led to (as one commentor pointed out) aristocratic patrons and the church to support scholars and monks exploring how stars and planetary orbits work or how peas inherit their characteristics (genetics). These pursuits often generated ridiculous astrological, alchemical, numeralogical, and cryptozoological ideas but also gathered essential data and a few not-so-crackpot theories of astronomy, chemistry, math and biology.

To be clear: It may be merely a happy accident or side effect of religion that reasoned debate and pseudo-scientific exploration helped keep the flame of Enlightenment alive during the Dark Ages but we can be grateful for that, nonetheless.

Digital Victorian Music Box

Muro Box sounds exactly like a 20-note steel comb music box your great grandmother might have had on her nightstand as a little girl but this isn't a Victorian-era relic. This digital update gives you an infinite playlist that you can program via a smartphone app.

Already a successfully crowdfunded campaign in Taiwan, Muro Box will soon kick off its Indiegogo campaign.

VR Lets You Live Bug's Life

ABCNEWS.com: 3-D Machine Lets People Explore World of Bugs
An HP researcher has hooked up twin microscopes to motion-tracking VR headgear so that you can immersively experience life at millimeter scale.

The Grid: Worldwide Web for CPU Power

The Grid: The Next-Gen Internet?
An international conference of scientists is discussing how to put together The Grid, a worldwide network for the allocation and exchange of processing power, something like the successful SETI@home project on steroids.