v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

A Small Voice- Podcast Conversations with Photographers

 

 

About a month ago I became aware of an excellent podcast that I've been listening to on a daily basis. Ben Smith, a photographer himself, leads the discussion with very talented photographers and allows the photographers to describe how they have come to where they are and how they go about making photographs. For me its an incredible opportunity to see how people go about making their photographs. The selection of photographers is excellent because many of them I have not heard of, but when I'm exposed to their images its obvious they have unique visions.

Here's a link to the podcast site:

A Small Voice

 

 

 

Disinformation

Just ran into a crazy video from a guy who claims many things, most of them untrue about the virus, masks, and vaccines. What follows is a takedown of his insane quackery at a School Board meeting in the enlightened state of Indiana. Some one please save us from these buffoons.

From Edward Niremberg at Deplatform Disease:

A surprisingly large number of people have sent me a video that is inundated with disinformation about COVID-19 and its reach seems considerable so I have deemed it significant enough to address. In the video, one Dr. Dan Stock from Indiana at a school board meeting opines at length about all the things we’re supposedly doing wrong with COVID-19 (by the way, the FSMB has now stated that spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination may put medical licenses at risk, though state medical boards have final say it seems; rest assured I will be examining the rules in Indiana quite closely). The speech is little more than a verbal gish gallop: a tactic used by science denialists wherein they post a bunch of links that they claim to support their points but in reality most of the citations are unsupportive or even unrelated to their claim- but this serves the appearance of evidence. He is doing this but with words- he is making a series of incorrect arguments (that are self-contradictory) and essentially seeking to overwhelm opposition with the volume of arguments he makes. The thing is, as I’ll discuss, he discredits himself very early on, so you don’t have to subject yourself to listening to his vile nonsense because I did it for you.

To begin, the speaker describes himself as a “functional family medicine physician,” which per him “means [he] is specially trained in immunology and inflammation regulation.” Firstly, this isn’t even how most sources define functional medicine. The Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine defines functional medicine as

a personalized, systems-oriented model that empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working in collaboration to address the underlying causes of disease.

This definition, admittedly, is completely meaningless because the foundation of literally all medicine is built on understanding the pathophysiology of conditions and addressing their underlying cause whenever that is possible (which unfortunately isn’t always feasible) and the implication that other clinician specialties do not do this is on its face pretty offensive. It is furthermore not what Stock describes, which most closely seems to describe an allergist/immunologist, which he is not. The title of “functional medicine physician” is usually a red flag for quackery and he’s already misrepresented his own expertise, so this isn’t off to a great start. An explanation of the problems with functional medicine generally may be found here. Also functional medicine is not a specialty recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties nor the American Medical Association.

Next he claims that coronaviruses and all respiratory viruses are spread by aerosol particles which are small enough to go through your mask, which is a misleading in several ways. Aerosols refer specifically to very small droplets which in general can linger in the air for prolonged periods of time. While there is evidence that during certain medical procedures like intubation, SARS-CoV-2 can become aerosolized, most contact tracing studies do find that prolonged close contact with individuals is needed for transmission to occur (but obviously there are exceptions). There is definitely a role for aerosol transmission in COVID-19 but precisely how much is not well-defined. He then argues that masks don’t work because viruses are small enough to pass through them. The problem with this reasoning is viruses do not travel as individual viral particles- they are inside the aerosols and droplets. That’s what the masks block. The IDSA has graciously compiled the multitudinous, surfeit evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of masking here which anyone is free to peruse at their leisure.

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Truth or Dare

From the blog The Ad Contrarian:

"It becomes harder and harder to overstate the corruption and treachery of the online ad industry. Lord knows I've tried...Facebook has become famous for its lunatic metrics and bizarre rationalizations...This week it was reported that Facebook was claiming to reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18-24...There are only 31 million of them."

Pinochet & Israel

 

From Lobel Blog, this is a post from John Brown, a pseudonym of an Israeli academic and a blogger:

Two Israeli women who immigrated from Chile are taking Israel’s attorney general to court, demanding that he open a criminal investigation into Israeli officials who were involved in arms deals with the regime of Augosto Pinochet, for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. Lily Traubman and her daughter Tamara Santos Traubman moved to Israel in the 1970s after being persecuted by the Pinochet regime, which also disappeared Lily’s father.

The suit, filed by Attorney Eitay Mack, seeks to compel Attorney General Avichai Mendelbit to open criminal investigations into the involvement of personnel from the Israeli ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, the Israeli army, and civilian arms traders.

Pinochet took over Chile on September 11, 1973, overthrowing its elected government and its Marxist prime minister, Salvador Allende. The next day began purges of anyone suspected of having leftist leanings, throughout Chile but particularly in the school system, which lasted until 1990. During the first years of the new regime, around 3,000 persons were abducted and murdered and over 35,000 people were tortured by DINA, the Chilean secret services. The regime never admitted these crimes. Israel was reportedly involved in training the DINA.

One of the victims was Ernesto Traubman, Lily Traubman’s father and Tamara’s grandfather, who was abducted at the outbreak of the coup, tortured to death in the Chilean Ministry of Defense in Santiago, and went missing for about 20 years, until his remains were located and given to the family.

For the past several years the Traubman family has been struggling to expose the connections between Israel and the Chilean regime at that time. The two women filed freedom of information requests in 2015 seeking to gain access to documents related to the arms trade and Israeli political support of that regime. Like the Israeli collaboration with genocide in Guatemala and the Argentinian dictatorship in those years, there is an abundance of publicly available evidence of the ties between Israel and Pinochet’s Chile.

For example, according to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Chile sent April 24, 1980, which was attached to the women’s freedom of information request, Israel was a major arms supplier to the Pinochet regime. According to a cable quoting the American undersecretary of state from April 10, 1984, Israel was one of the main arms suppliers of the Junta, which made it difficult to enforce effective sanctions against Chile, considering that American sanctions did not apply to Israel.

Hugo Harvey’s 2012 book on the covert relations between Israel and Chile in those years also contains revealing evidence from the Chilean side of the arms trade between the two states. Israel, however, still refuses to disclose evidence from the Israeli side, including tens of thousands of documents. In response to the Traubmans’ freedom of information request, the Israeli Ministry of Defense claimed that the extent of such documentation is so vast that it is unlikely to be able to review them all in order to decide what can be exposed. Although the court rejected the state’s reasons for refusal, to date the State of Israel continues to drag its feet and has not released the relevant documents.

Patty & Michael

From Codex99:

The Corner of Jennings and Illona

At 5:07 am on Friday, August 9th, 1963 patrolman Jack Leach was traveling northwest down Japonica Drive in one of the two patrol cars owned by the Greenhills Police department. As he turned left at the corner of Jennings Road and Illona Drive his headlights swept across Alphonse Udry’s side yard and he saw what he described as a “peculiar-looking mound.” He stopped his car, grabbed his flashlight, walked through the dew-covered lawn and found the body of 15 year-old Patricia Ann Rebholz.

Leach had been with the department for four years but had never encountered anything even remotely like this before. His first instinct was to radio for backup and within minutes—13 minutes to be exact—patrolman Randolph Morgan arrived. Morgan began circling the body taking photographs. Patty was lying on her side next to the wire fence at the property line—her moccasins doubled over her heels, her disheveled skirt pulled up around her waist and her handbag still dangling from her shoulder. Her hair, face and blouse were covered in blood. The grass beneath her was saturated with it. Next to her head was a two-foot section of fence post which Leach noted was covered in dark stains, hair and “particles of what I believe to be flesh.”

As Morgan’s flashbulbs lit up the pre-dawn darkness, police from neighboring departments arrived and fanned out into the yard, securing the crime scene. Dr. Roemer, the local physician, was summoned and confirmed what the assembled officers already knew—Patty was dead. Later, while the volunteer life squad was loading her body onto a stretcher, someone— it’s unclear exactly who—alerted 15 year-old Michael Wehrung, Patty’s boyfriend of four months who lived just across the street. Only half-awake, Michael looked out his front door which had a direct view of the activity in the yard, turned to his sister Cheryl and asked “Is she dead?” He then went back to sleep on the sectional sofa in his living room.

Why the police had taken all night to find Patty was one of the first of many questions about the case. Why Michael responded the way he did that morning was another. Its now been more than a half century since Patty’s murder and for her friends and classmates—indeed, for the entire community of Greenhills—there are still more questions than answers.

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AI Poetry

Madness

by Deep Gimble I

madness in her face and i
the world that i had seen
and when my soul shall be to see the night to be the same and
i am all the world and the day that is the same and a day i had been
a young little woman i am in a dream that you were in
a moment and my own heart in her face of a great world
and she said the little day is a man of a little
a little one of a day of my heart that has been in a dream

Deep Gimble I is a proof-of-concept Recurrent Neural Net, minimally trained on public domain poetry and seeded with a single word.

Making Traces

Vallejo Nocturno 2016- flowers seen

From the blog, The Meaning of Life, writing about philosopher Owen Flanagan's essay:

In his essay, “What Makes Life Worth Living?” Flanagan does not assume “that life is or can be worth living.”^[i] Perhaps we are just biologically driven to live worthless lives. So he begins by asking: “Is life worth living?” And if it is then “…what sorts of things make it so?”^[ii] He notes that reflecting on this question may be a waste of time, as life might be better for the non-reflective. Reflection may lead to despair, if one determines that life is worthless, or to joy, if one concluded to the contrary. The question of whether life is worth living and what makes it so is connected with another bewildering question: “Do we live our lives?”^[iii] In one sense the answer is obvious—we spend time not dead—but Flanagan wants to know if we act freely or are merely controlled like puppets. So questions about the value of living involve issues about who we are and what kinds of things are true about us.

Flanagan argues that even happiness is not enough to guarantee that life is worthwhile, inasmuch as a life may contain much happiness and still be meaningless. Happiness is not sufficient for meaning, since one might derive happiness from evil things, and it may not be necessary either, since a meaningful life may be devoid of happiness. But even if happiness is a component of a worthwhile life, he argues that identity and self-expression are more crucial. “Wherever one looks, or so I claim, humans seek, and sometimes find worth in possessing an identity and expressing it.”^[iv] Identity and self-expression are necessary but not sufficient conditions for worthwhile living, since we need to clarify what forms of identity and expressions of it are valuable.

But what if there is no self to find meaning through self-expression? There are three standard arguments supporting the idea that we are not selves. First, maybe I am just a location where things happen from a universal perspective. Second, I may simply be the roles I play in various social niches, with self just a name for this apparent unity. Third, my apparent unity may be just various stages which change as we age. Regarding this last argument, Flanagan concedes that there is no same self continuing over time, but that this does not show there is no self, just that it changes over time. Even granting the second argument that I am a social construction; I am still something, so the death of self does not follow. The first argument suggests determinism; but even if I am determined, I am still an agent who does things. So these death-of-subject arguments, while deflating our view of self, don’t destroy it. Flanagan agrees that humans are contingent and don’t posses eternal souls—but this does not mean they are not subjects.

But why is there anything at all? And why am I one of the things that is? Such questions invite answers such as: 1) the gods decided that the universe and creatures should exist and I have the chance to join them if I follow their commands; or 2) we don’t know why there is anything except to say that the big bang and subsequent cosmic and biological evolution led to me. Flanagan notes that neither answer is satisfactory, because both posit something eternal—gods or physical facts. But that does not answer why there is something rather than nothing. (Reminiscent of earlier claims that we can’t answer ultimate why questions.)

And yet many find the first story comforting, presumably because it links us with transcendent meaning. The second story has less appeal to most since it raises questions about one’s significance, moral objectivity, concept of self, and ultimate meaning. But is the first story really more comforting than the second? How do the gods’ plans make my life meaningful? And if the gods are the origin of all things are they really good? Thus it does not seem that either the theological or scientific story about origins can ground meaning in our lives.

Thus Flanagan suggests that we look elsewhere for meaning. Perhaps a person’s meaning comes from relationships with others, or with work, or from nature—from things we can relate to in this life. After all, the scientific story never says that life does not matter. In fact a lot of things matter to me, from mundane things that I love to do—hiking and travel—to more long term projects that matter even more—learning, loving, and working creatively. This means that we are creatures that thrive on self-expression and, to the extent that we are not thwarted in this desire, can ameliorate the human condition and diminish the tragedy of our demise by this expression. As Flanagan concludes:

This is a kind of naturalistic transcendence, a way each of us, if we are lucky, can leave good-making traces beyond the time between our birth and death. To believe this sort of transcendence is possible is, I guess, to have a kind of religion. It involves believing that there are selves, that we can in self-expression make a difference, and if we use our truth detectors and good detectors well, that difference might be positive, a contribution to the cosmos.^[v]

Roland Grabkowski

at Melt

Memory Is

From Aeon:

Dementia is caused by a range of medical conditions (the best-known being Alzheimer’s) that eat holes in the short-term memory of sufferers and degrade their capacity to process new information. Memory becomes like a flickering signal from a faraway shortwave radio station: people can do and say things, then promptly forget them, and then do and say them again. They can no longer read obvious social cues. They become easily distressed as a thickening fog descends upon them, causing them to lose track of everything. As the disease progresses, only fleeting glimpses of the once capable person can be seen; for the rest of the time, everyone is stuck with an uninvited guest. Eventually, the sufferer fails to recognise even loved ones.

Dementia raises deeply troubling issues about our obligations to care for people whose identity might have changed in the most disturbing ways. In turn, those changes challenge us to confront our philosophical and ethical assumptions about what makes up that identity in the first place. Everyone touched by the disease goes through a crash-course in the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy is not of much practical use with most illnesses but in the case of dementia it provides insights about selfhood and identity that can help us make sense of the condition and our own reactions to it. Broadly speaking, there are two accounts of how personal identity is formed and sustained. Each has different implications for how we understand dementia and so seek to care for people with it.

Our commonsense understanding of the self has been dominated by an individualistic idea that goes back to René Descartes and John Locke in the 17th century. Descartes found certainty within himself – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The inner, mental life of the self was also grounds for knowing our experience to be real, and that we were not dreaming. Locke, for his part, identified the self with the ordered flow of sense experiences that the mind recorded. That tradition, more recently updated by the British philosopher Derek Parfit in books such as Reasons and Persons (1984), argues that identity and memory come from the same place: a psychological connectedness and continuity maintained inside our heads. Selfhood hinges on our ability to order memory, and connect a set of experiences to form a coherent autobiography of who we were and how we became the person we are now. The theory has implications for dementia, because dementia destroys the temporal binding that sustains our identity.

According to Baldwin van Gorp of Leuven University in Belgium, who studies how the media reports dementia, this individualistic, inward looking, memory-based account of identity is the default way that dementia is framed in most public debates. That framing carries clear implications for how we might hold dementia at bay: keep your brain as fit as possible; do lots of physical and mental exercise. It explains why dementia self-help books lean so heavily on the provision of external supports: Post-It notes and other visual reminders that jog the memory. Google – that instant memory-jogger – might already be helping to forestall the dependency created by dementia. Before long, no doubt, little robots will accompany us to make sure we remember to take our pills and flush the toilet.

This idea that identity is based in memory underpins the excitement that greets the brain implants being developed by US firms such as Medtronics and Boston Scientific as potential ‘cures’ for Alzheimer’s, and the BRAIN initiative founded in 2013 by the US President Barack Obama to fund university research into treatments for common brain conditions.

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From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

gnossienne

n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.