I see wonderful things

What is life.......never give up!pic.twitter.com/JdkqfuiMk4

— Figen (@TheFigen_) July 25, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

The Pentagon: We accidentally sent $6.2 billion to Ukraine

The US Treasury: We’re unable to track $5 trillion of pandemic spending

Sam Bankman: I don't know where $10 billion of my users' funds went

The IRS: You just sent $602.17 on Venmo report it or you're going to jail

— Chairman (@WSBChairman) August 5, 2023

 

Data Talks

According to the UK government tax statistics for 2020-2021, men paid 70% of all tax revenues, while women paid only 30%. pic.twitter.com/5fvesRu6IA

— Carl Benjamin (@Sargon_of_Akkad) July 25, 2023

 

Rhythmic European Champions

Astonishing.  From Israel - 2023 Rhythmic European Champions, junior group all-around.

Double click to enlarge.

History

Today 306AD Constantine I is proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops. He was also the first Roman emperor to claim conversion to Christianity and is thus a significant figure in the history of Christianity. Constantine was hailed emperor in the Roman city of York known as Eboracum pic.twitter.com/T39GQfY2yb

— Roman History (@romanhistory1) July 25, 2023

 

The Waif

The Waif 

by A. C. Smith

He went into the bush, and passed

Out of the sight of living men,

None knows the nook that held him last,

None ever saw his face again.

It may be, in the wildering wood

He wandered, weary, spent of breath,

Till the all-mastering solitude

Sank to the deeper hush of death.

Perchance he crawled where the low bush,

More verdant, whispered streams were nigh,

Hopeful, but desperate, made a rush,

And found, O God! the bed was dry!

He was a waif, and friends had none;

Who knows but in some distant land

A mother mourns her errant son,

A sister longs to clasp his hand?

He was a waif, but with him died

A world of yearnings deep within—

Yearning to loftiest things allied,

But wrecked by cruel fate, or sin.

None heard the lone one’s dying prayer

Save Infinite Pity bending o’er,

Who, haply, bore him quietly where

They hunger and they thirst no more.

O ye vast woods! what fond life-dreams

Ye close! what broken lives ye hide!

Darkly absorbed, like hopeful streams,

That in dry desert lands subside.

Stranger the tales ye could unfold

Than wild romancer ever penned,

Remaining buried in the mould

Till time shall cease, and mystery end!

The more virtuous sounding the title or role, the more probable the serious and persistent transgression.

From The misinformation of Marianna Spring.  The subheading is With some delicious irony, the BBC’s ‘disinformation correspondent’ has been accused of lying on her CV. by Tom Slater.

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Whatever you do, don’t ask Marianna Spring. If new revelations are to be believed, the BBC’s ‘disinformation and social-media correspondent’ – who has been showered with awards, praise, broadsheet profiles and glossy photoshoots for her putative one-woman stand against online lies and conspiracy theories – can’t even be trusted to produce a relatively factual CV.

According to the New European, when Spring was in her early twenties, trying to get work as a Moscow stringer for US news site Coda Story, she flat-out lied about her past experience, claiming to have worked closely with then BBC Russia correspondent Sarah Rainsford. In truth, she had never worked with Rainsford at all. In correspondence seen by the New European, Coda Story chief Natalia Antelava checked with the BBC and then confronted Spring, who fessed up on the spot.

[snip]

In this regard, Spring has been responsible for spreading some outrageous misinformation of her own. As part of her recent podcast series, Marianna in Conspiracyland (apparently we’re on first-name terms with her now), the BBC commissioned a survey that improbably suggested that a quarter of Brits believe ‘Covid was a hoax’ and that vast swathes of us are attending conspiratorial demos and reading obscure conspiratorial newspapers – statements which fail the basic sniff test. The survey has since been ripped to shreds by the i paper’s Stuart Ritchie, who says the claims are ‘100 per cent false’. He puts the alarming figures down to a mix of tiny sample sizes and woolly worded questions. Still, it was uncritically pushed by the BBC and the Guardian, and Spring has so far failed to respond to Ritchie’s and others’ concerns.

This is precisely why even reasonable people are so irked by Spring – because she’s utterly blind to the misinformation pushed by herself and her own organisation. BBC journalists have at various periods acted as little more than government mouthpieces, amplifying Tony Blair’s Iraq War propaganda or, more recently, becoming glorified Covid marshals during the pandemic. The BBC has also been prone to a string of conspiratorial moral panics that have ruined peoples lives. Its behaviour during the VIP Paedophile scandal – in which various men in public life were wrongly accused of past sex abuse – was particularly appalling, culminating in BBC News broadcasting a police raid on Cliff Richard’s home and defaming Lord McAlpine, both of which cost the corporation dearly in court.

Why does this keep happening?  People charged with being exemplars for something estimable end up being the worst perpetrators.  Professors of Philosophy are a standing joke in this regard.

But then you have much more in-your-face instances such as the woman who orchestrated University of North Carolina's program for faking athlete's academic scores and performance.  She was a professor of ethics.  From Wikipedia.

Jeanette Marie Boxill (née Bozanic)[1][2] is an American academic who was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was also Chair of the Faculty and Director of Parr Center for Ethics. Her writing and teaching relate broadly with ethical issues in social conduct, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and ethics in sports. She is editor of Sports Ethics: An Anthology and Issues in Race and Gender. She is past president of the International Association for Philosophy in Sport, serves on the board of the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium Committee.

[snip]

From 1991 to 2011, Boxill was an academic advisor for the North Carolina Tar Heels women's basketball team at UNC Chapel Hill.

Boxill resigned from her employment at UNC in February 2015, after it was alleged that she had steered athletes toward 'scam courses' in order to qualify for the school's sports teams. Boxill, who had been the faculty chair, a senior lecturer in ethics, and an academic counselor for athletes had been told on October 22, 2014, that her employment with the university would be terminated, but she had been appealing that institutional decision. Then, she announced her resignation on February 28, 2015.

The BBC is yet another of so many examples.  Marianna Spring is supposed to focus on the issue of disinformation yet is a prime practitioner of it herself, including straight out lying for career benefit.

Bleh.  A pox on them all.

An Insight

"communities are reservoirs of knowledge that can be used for supporting human flourishing...imperative to balance our focus on individual skills alongside broader concerns related to structure...to create sustainable outcomes" https://t.co/lCTypaUEih pic.twitter.com/bCLNxFW79j

— David Schmitt (@PsychoSchmitt) July 27, 2023

 

Of course, if we stop burning fossil fuels society will collapse. Yet this is what our leaders are determined to do.

One of those essays where you find much to disagree with but also some interesting insight.  From The Totalitarian Takeover, Part I {With Assorted Videos} by J.R. Nyquist.  

Of course, if we stop burning fossil fuels society will collapse. Yet this is what our leaders are determined to do. Their radical stupidity tends toward totalitarian measures, leading to total destruction. Such is the nature of today’s ruling elites (who believe in cutting back fossil fuel use). Andrew Lobaczewski, who described the psychologically abnormal profile of the totalitarian politician, warned that many people spend their lives under the influence of abnormal personalities. Lobaczewski wrote, “When I explained … that they had been under the influence of a psychologically abnormal person for years, accepting her delusional world as real and participating (with perceived honor) in her vindictiveness … the shock temporarily stifled their indignation.”

When people wake up to being manipulated by abnormal personalities, they do indeed experience shock. Some of them suffer a “disintegration of their human personality” discovering “they have been under the spellbinding and traumatizing influence of a macrosocial pathological phenomenon, regardless of whether they were followers or opponents therof.”

I see wonderful things

An Eden's Whale trap feeding in the gulf of Thailand.pic.twitter.com/oBMn5oH9Ng

— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) July 25, 2023