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.

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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.

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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

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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.

Abortion on the ballot

Most focus on the 2024 US election is rightfully on the Presidential election, where the is a stalk choice between Harris and Trump. A lot of focus is also given to races at the secondary – for the US congress and the US senate. But it also important to focus on the state level, where there are both elections to political positions, that are incredible important, as well as propositions on a number of issues. One of these issues in many states is abortion.

Ballot Tracker: Status of Abortion-Related State Constitutional Amendment Measures for the 2024 Election

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, voters in 6 states have weighed in on constitutional amendments regarding abortion, and the side favoring access to abortion prevailed in every state. In 4 of these states – California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont – measures amending the state constitution to protect the right to abortion were approved by voters and in the other 2 states – Kentucky and Kansas – measures seeking to curtail the right to abortion failed. In 2024, up to 10 states may have abortion measures on their ballot seeking to either affirm that the state constitution protects the right to abortion or that nothing in the constitution confers such a right.

There is a map showing the states, but here is the list as well:

  • Arizona (for abortion)
  • Colorado (for abortion)
  • Florida (for abortion)
  • Maryland (for abortion)
  • Missouri (for abortion)
  • Montana (for abortion)
  • Nebraska (one measure for and one against abortion)
  • Nevada (for abortion, first of two needed elections)
  • New York (for abortion)
  • South Dakota (for abortion)

If you are in one of these states, make sure to vote to help protect abortion

Lazy linking

A few interesting reads on the internet

Pro-Trump defamation attorney Lin Wood must pay former law partners $4.5 million after defaming them as ‘criminal’ extortionists on social media

This sounds like it started out with normal stuff happening when a company split, but clearly Lin Wood have learned from Trump and started defaming his former partners

How Black female science fiction and fantasy writers are upending the narrative

Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, “the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.

What I especially love about this article is that I became aware of it because John Scalzi shared it on Threads. He is always trying to promote diversity and promote other people.

Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia

Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

It is a long read, but well worth reading. It is a important view into people who are actively trying to destroy democracy by violent means.

Did Hemingway say “write drunk, edit sober”? Nope—he preferred to write sober.

Writers love to cite Ernest Hemingway’s famous advice, “write drunk, edit sober.” But not only did he not actually say that—he practically said the opposite.

It is one of those annoying quotes that goes around, and it is nice to get it debunked

Congratulations Imane Khelif

Imane Khelif won gold in boxing at the 2024 Paris Olympics. I am happy that she managed to win, even while under harassment from some of the most powerful people in the world.

I also see to my happiness that her lawyer, Nabil Boudi, has filed a complaint about her harassment: Imane Khelif files legal complaint for harassment over gender controversy

Esquire wrote a list of the 75 best sci-fi books of all time – all such lists are by nature subjective, but I think they do a fairly good job of arguing why each is worth reading.

As a sci-fi reader, who has been bad at reading much the last few years, I love such lists. It allows me to see what I have missed, and to agree or disagree with the choices.

I have copied the list below, starting with number 75 moving towards 1. I will bold the books I have read, mark books I already wanted to read with italics. Books I own will be marked with a star *. I will add occasional remarks as well.

75 The Echo wife – Sarah Gailey
74 The calculating stars – Mary Robinette Kowal *
73 Redshirts – John Scalzi *
72 Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino
71 The ten percent thief – Lavanya Lakshminarayan
70 Midnight robber – Nalo Hopkinson
69 Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson *
68 Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
67 Contact – Carl Sagan
66 Under the skin – Michael Faber
65 Way station – Clifford D Simak *
64 Sea of rust – C Robert Cargill
63 What mad universe – Fredric Brown – I have read his fantastic Martians, Go Home! and his haunting short story “With Folded Hands”, both of which leads me to want to read anything he has written.
62 The book of phoenix – Nnedi Okorafor
61 Semiosis – Sue Burke
60 Excession – Iain M Banks
59 The Claw of the conciliator – Gene Wolfe * – Dark and complex, but certainly worthy on being on the list.
58 Lord of light – Roger Zelazny * – A masterpiece by a master of science fiction. I have in the past heard of Zelazny that is is probably more read by sci-fi authors than by the general sci-fi audience. If that is true, it is a pity.
57 This is how you lose the time war – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone * – I am actually currently reading this. For me it is interesting, but a bit of a slog.
56 The Resisters – Gish Jen
55 Rosewater – Tade Thompson
54 Children of time – Adrian Tchaikovsky
53 Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
52 A Clockwork orange – Anthony Burgess
51 The Moon is a harsh mistress – Robert Heinlein *
50 A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle – A much beloved classic which I didn’t think much off. It is one of those books that probably blows you away if you read it at the right age, but if you read it when you are older, is heavy handed, and is of dubious morality.
49 The Time Machine – HG Wells
48 The Body Scout – Lincoln Michael
47 An unkindness of ghosts – Rivers Solomon
46 The mountain in the sea – Ray Nayler
45 Neuromancer – William Gibson *
44 The stars my destination – Alfred Bester
43 The sparrow – Maria Doria Russell
42 The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams * – I have reread this book more times than I can count.
41 A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M Miller Jr * – Read it as both the brilliant short story, and the novel, which was a lesser work, in my opinion.
40 Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
39 Zone one – Colson Whitehead – I didn’t know about this book before, but after reading the description I definitely want to pick it up.
38 The long way to a small angry planet – Becky Chambers
37 Engine Summer – John Crowley
36 The Children of Men – PD James
35 Radiance – Catherynne Valente
34 The City & The City – China Mieville *
33 A memory called empire – Arkady Martine *
32 Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie *
31 The Stand – Stephen King
30 In Ascension – Martin MacInnes
29 Dhalgren – Samuel R Delany *
28 The Forever War – Joe Haldeman *
27 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
26 Future home of a living god – Louise Erdrich
25 Ammonite – Nicola Griffith
24 Annihilation – Jeff Vandermeer *
23 Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood *
22 Hyperion – Dan Simmons * – I got the book long before Dan Simmons turned out to be such rightwinged asshole. I plan on reding the book one day, but I won’t buy more of his work.
21 Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson *
20 Shikasta – Doris Lessing
19 The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
18 Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
17 Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
16 The Complete Robot – Isaac Asimov – I find these books rather dated
15 How to live safely in a science fictional universe – Charles Yu
14 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – This one has been on my to-read list for longer than I care to admit.
13 The Employees – Olga Ravn – A, for me, new Danish author that I hear really great stuff about
12 1984 – George Orwell *
11 The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu *
10 Do Androids dream of electric sheep? – Philip K Dick
9 Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel
8 Exhalation – Ted Chiang
7 Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
6 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin * – I am unsure if I have read it in my youth
5 Kindred – Octavia Butler *
4 The Fifth Season – NK Jemisin *
3 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury *
2 Dune – Frank Herbert *
1 Frankenstein – Mary Shelly *

There are a lot of new books for me on the list, and I will definitely check most of them out and some stage.

https://proxy.freethought.online/kriswager/2024/07/28/796/

Consequences, Vietnam edition

It often seems that rich people can break the law with no consequences, but once in a while, you come across a story where this isn’t the case.

Vietnam sentences real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death in its largest-ever fraud case

Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced Thursday to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever, state media Vietnam Net said.

I am against the Death penalty, and I think it cannot be defended in any case, least of all an economic case, but it is hard to overstate how large this case is

The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.

Lan illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and allowed 2,500 loans that resulted in losses of $27 billion to the bank, reported state media VnExpress. The court asked her to compensate the bank $26.9 million.

Despite mitigating circumstances — this was a first-time offense and Lan participated in charity activities — the court attributed its harsh sentence to the seriousness of the case, saying Lan was at the helm of an orchestrated and sophisticated criminal enterprise that had serious consequences with no possibility of the money being recovered, VnExpress said.

When your fraud can be measured as a percentage of the country’s GDP, you have done some serious fraud, and it will effect a lot of people, either directly or indirectly

Her actions “not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organizations but also push SCB (Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank) into a state of special control; eroding people’s trust in the leadership of the Party and State,” VnExpress quoted the judgement as saying.

I don’t care for a second if someone’s action lead people to loose trust in the leadership of Party and State, but the fraud also led to a more serious type of lack of trust

Analysts said the scale of the scam raised questions about whether other banks or businesses had similarly erred, dampening Vietnam’s economic outlook and making foreign investors jittery at a time when Vietnam has been trying to position itself as the ideal home for businesses trying to pivot their supply chains away from China.

The real estate sector in Vietnam has been hit particularly hard. An estimated 1,300 property firms withdrew from the market in 2023, developers have been offering discounts and gold as gifts to attract buyers, and despite rents for mixed-use properties known in Southeast Asia as shophouses falling by a third in Ho Chi Minh City, many in the city center are still empty, according to state media.

I think few of us will cry for the rich factory owners and property tycoons who are loosing money, but underneath them, are a lot of everyday Vietnamese whose job opportunities disappeared because of the foreign investment staying away.