Foreign "troll firms" run Facebook's Christian pages

As reported by MIT Technology Review:

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm...

Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks—were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds...

The report found that troll farms were reaching the same demographic groups singled out by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) during the 2016 election, which had targeted Christians, Black Americans, and Native Americans...

As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.

Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.

The troll farm pages also combined to form:

*the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

*the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

*the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

*the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

More at the link; I don't want to borrow too much.  The source article is worth reading and worth sharing.  Top image from the via.

Sorry for all the gloom and doom posts today, but we are really so fucked...

Petroglyph of whale hunting

I found this photo in an interesting article about the petroglyphs of northern Siberia.

The spectacular art gallery - scientists found 350 stone planes, each with dozens of drawings - was ‘opened’ at least two thousand years ago, when ancient artists embossed petroglyphs on rocks of what is now  Chukotka, Russia’s easternmost corner. 

The Pegtymel petroglyphs were found by Soviet geologists in 1967, high above the right bank of the Pegtymel River, a short distance from the East Siberian Sea...

The most striking part of the gallery are petroglyphs of ‘mushroom people’ - women and men with large mushroom on their heads, or with one or several mushrooms replacing heads. In some cases their legs are shaped as mushroom stems, too. 

Russian experts have christened them the 'fly agaric people’ after the hallucinogenic mushrooms it is believed they consumed.

North Pacific salmon are dwindling

Two articles today on this subject.  First from Bloomberg re Alaska:

In a normal year, the smokehouses and drying racks that Alaska Natives use to prepare salmon to tide them through the winter would be heavy with fish meat, the fruits of a summer spent fishing on the Yukon River like generations before them.

This year, there are no fish. For the first time in memory, both king and chum salmon have dwindled to almost nothing and the state has banned salmon fishing on the Yukon, even the subsistence harvests that Alaska Natives rely on to fill their freezers and pantries for winter. The remote communities that dot the river and live off its bounty — far from road systems and easy, affordable shopping — are desperate and doubling down on moose and caribou hunts in the waning days of fall.

“Nobody has fish in their freezer right now. Nobody,” said Giovanna Stevens, 38, a member of the Stevens Village tribe who grew up harvesting salmon at her family's fish camp. “We have to fill that void quickly before winter gets here."

Opinions on what led to the catastrophe vary, but those studying it generally agree human-caused climate change is playing a role as the river and the Bering Sea warm, altering the food chain in ways that aren't yet fully understood. Many believe commercial trawling operations that scoop up wild salmon along with their intended catch, as well as competition from hatchery-raised salmon in the ocean, have compounded global warming's effects on one of North America's longest rivers.

And this from The Guardian re Northern California:

As a lifelong reservation resident, Gensaw recalls when fresh food was abundant. “I grew up with fish patties, rice and fish, noodles and fish, salmon sandwiches, dried fish,” she remembers fondly. “We never understood how lucky we were, that it was going to go away.”

The Yurok reservation where Gensaw lives sits on a remote strip of land that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the final 44 miles of the Klamath River along the misty northern California coast. In 2001, drought descended on the Klamath Basin, the watershed that feeds the river. Due to a history of water mismanagement in the basin, combined with a historic drought, the river is sick – and the Yurok are too.

The salmon they have long depended on as dietary staple and cultural cornerstone have become scarce... Earlier this year, a fish kill of enormous magnitude left 70% of juvenile salmon dead, according to Yurok biologists. Tribal scientists later found the deadly pathogen Ceratonova shasta, which spreads when water quality is low and fish are stressed, present in 97% of the fish they captured...

For Gensaw, that means restoring the river and its salmon population to health, because when the fish thrive, so do the children and families. “No fish means no food,” she says. “Our communities depend on the river for sustenance.”

"I wouldn't want to offend my Board of Directors"

“The board decides what I make,” Dimon told Axios co-founder James VandeHei, echoing a response he gave Congress in May, before the panel awarded him a surprise five-year retention bonus. When VandeHei countered by suggesting they could ask their boards to cut their pay, Dimon says his would take offense. The CEO’s compensation is part of a broader “umbrella” designed to retain senior management, he said.

The board awarded Dimon $31.5 million in compensation for 2020. 

Indian Air Force helicopter

Comments at the via indicate that the photo was taken about 40-50 years ago. "It was a small helicopter, modified to resemble a “dancing elephant“ and flew over the Republic Day grounds during the Republic Day parade."

Bird migration heat map

This is a screencap from an interactive map at The Cornell Lab's BirdCast website.  The intensity of the colors reflects the intensity of the migration in terms of number of birds in the air (750,000,000 at just after midnight), and obviously the arrows show direction of movement.  For comparison, here is the image from 10:30 this morning (one-tenth as many birds migrating, the others presumably having landed to feed or rest).

  

There is a pull-down that lets you view any day going back to 2018.  Awesome.

Modern radar equipment is also capable of detecting airborne insects.  I've seen reports that they are now learning to analyse the data by adding radar "signatures" of different types of insects in order to distinguish butterflies from locusts from mayflies etc.  Amazing.

What will it take for the world to ameliorate climate change?

An excerpt from "Ruina Mundi: did climate change create modern civilization?":

Philipp Blom is not particularly optimistic. “The rich Western societies of today are no more effective in combating climate change than those that existed around the year 1600,” he writes. “The occurrence of some kind of dramatic collapse seems to be only a question of time.” We are rapidly approaching the inevitable end point of an economic system that relies upon exploitation of resources, workers, the poor, he argues. We are too stubborn, too enraptured with the free market, to save ourselves in time.

Yet Blom’s own history suggests another possibility. If changes in climate spur profound changes in economic thought, philosophy, and the political and social order, might not such a profound shift occur again? It will have to. Blom thinks such a transformation can only occur if we abandon our faith in the invisible hand of the market—a faith “theological in nature”—and understand the degree to which our fate is tied to the protection of our physical environment.

An analogous intellectual transformation occurred in the 1670s in the Dutch provinces, where the Jewish lens grinder Baruch Spinoza overcame the ideological divide that had stymied Western thought for centuries. (Heinrich Heine: “All our modern philosophers . . . see through the glasses which Baruch Spinoza ground.”) Before Spinoza, intellectual thought had to square with the letter of the Bible, under the penalty of death; Blom recounts the cautionary tales of Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for speaking of parallel worlds and an infinite universe, and Lucilio Vanini, the author of wily essays about the incompatibilities between Christian doctrine and rational thought, who was also burned, but only after having his tongue ripped out and being strangled.

In Blom’s telling, Spinoza’s Ethics marked the break between the medieval and modern worldviews. Spinoza’s method is to turn theological doctrine inside out, until it devours itself. Taking literally the notion that God is perfect and omnipresent, he deduces that God and nature are synonymous. (This is a convenient solution to the theology trap, for if God is everything we see, think, and feel, then He is also nothing.) It follows that an ethical life is one lived in accordance with nature. This requires liberating ourselves from ungoverned passions, which only cause suffering and confusion, and appealing instead to reason and the pursuit of knowledge. Spinoza does not call for the abandonment of self-interest but calls instead for an enlightened self-interest, which recognizes that we are most free when we act with shared purpose: “although men are generally governed in everything by their own lusts, yet their association in common brings many more advantages than drawbacks.” Blom, overlooking certain passages of the Ethics (such as those calling for human beings to exploit nature when it suits us), summarizes Spinoza’s conclusion this way:

"if we analyze our situation, it becomes clear that our best chance to survive well, and with the least degree of restraint, lies in acting in solidarity with others in order to create a world in which people can live with dignity.'

Activists, philosophers, and politicians are increasingly beginning to make this very claim about climate change: that inaction is not only irrational, a profound threat to our own sense of self-preservation, but immoral. It is immoral exactly because it threatens our self-interest. You hear a version of this argument in Bruno Latour’s insistence that favoring short-term interests over long-term human survival is not an instinctual behavior but one conditioned by economic and political factors. You hear the same argument when South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, likely the only millennial who will run for president in 2020, speaks of “intergenerational justice,” when the pope calls for solutions to climate change “not only in technology but in a change of humanity,” and when the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg tells world leaders that they are stealing their children’s future right in front of their very eyes. You will hear this argument grow louder and louder until, before very long, you won’t be able to hear anything else.

The source article is a review of Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present, by Philipp Blom.  Liveright. 352 pages. $27.95.  I have requested the book from our library and am #2 on the "hold" list for 8 copies.  Hope to review it later this fall or winter.

Step back from your monitor

View this image from a distance (or perhaps at an angle). 

Art by Lee Wagstaff.

Blue-eyed Indonesians of the Buton tribe

Relevant discussion at Wisma Bahasa.

The ongoing myth that plastic is being "recycled"

"Pay us to take care of your garbage," they say.  "We'll recycle the plastic," they say.  But what they do (everywhere, including the U.S.) is to ship the trash to some other country, where it gets dumped in the ocean or in landfills.  I don't believe the crap about plastic getting recycled in any meaningful amount.

Hanoi 50 years later

I came of age in the late 1960s when the word "Hanoi" was emblematic of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.  Then today I encounter this:

Billed as the world’s first gold-plated hotel, the Dolce by Wyndham Hanoi Golden Lake opened its luxurious doors in Vietnam’s capital city on July 2... The five-star hotel is filled with golden touches, including gold-plated tubs, sinks, and yes, even toilets, according to Reuters. Plus, there’s a 24-karat gold tiled infinity pool on the rooftop... Duong also said that about a ton (or 2,000 pounds) of gold was used to decorate the hotel. 

At the via most of the comments were about the "golden shower" on the rooftop.

Interesting idea

"Solar-powered lasers are installed in the Saudi desert to help guide the lost to water sources."  But no useful information at the via.  My first question would be whether it has any adverse effect on migrating birds.

"Markland" known in Genoa 150 years before Columbus

"Markland" was the name given by Leif Erikson to part of North America north of Vinland (presumably the Labrador coast of present-day Canada).  The Viking discovery of North America around 1000 A.D. is well documented; what has not  been known is the extent to which this information may have circulated beyond Scandinavia.

Now the diffusion of that geographic knowledge to mainland Europe has been confirmed, by the discovery and translation of a manuscript written by a Dominican friar in Milan in the mid-fourteenth century.  

Here is the abstract from a fascinating longread at Terrae Incognitae:

The Cronica universalis written by the Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma (it. Galvano Fiamma, d. c. 1345) contains an astonishing reference to a terra que dicitur Marckalada, situated west from Greenland. This land is recognizable as the Markland mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America. Galvaneus’s reference, probably derived by oral sources heard in Genoa, is the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region, and gives evidence of the circulation (out of the Nordic area and 150 years before Columbus) of narratives about lands beyond Greenland. This article provides a transcription of the passage, explains its context in the Cronica universalis, compares it to the other (Nordic) references of Markland, and discusses the possible origin of Galvaneus’s mention of Markland in light of Galvaneus’s biography and working method.

And selected excerpts from the article:

Galvaneus was a Dominican friar who lived in Milan and was connected to the Visconti family, which held at the time the lordship of the city... The Cronica universalis is thought to be one of his later works, perhaps the last one, and was left unfinished and unperfected; the approximate date is 1339–1345...

The work, written in Latin, is still unpublished; an edition is planned, in the context of a scholarly and educational program promoted by the University of Milan. It is preserved in a single manuscript held by a private owner, who kindly gave permission to photograph it. The manuscript was written in Milan at the very end of the fourteenth century... His sources are both scholarly treatises, such as Isidorus and Solinus, and recent accounts of travelers, such as Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone... Here is the text, with an English translation; I preserve some underlining of sources, visible in the manuscript. In italics are the most relevant passages, which we are going to discuss:

Sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway say that northwards, beyond Norway, there is Iceland; further ahead there is an island named Grolandia, where the Polar Star remains behind you, toward the south. The governor of this island is a bishop. In this land, there is neither wheat nor wine nor fruit; people live on milk, meat, and fish. They dwell in subterranean houses and do not venture to speak loudly or to make any noise, for fear that wild animals hear and devour them. There live huge white bears, which swim in the sea and bring shipwrecked sailors to the shore. There live white falcons capable of great flights, which are sent to the emperor of Katai. Further westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build with them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds. However, no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features.

Lots of discussion at the source article, for those with an interest in history.

The lands called Yslandia and Grolandia do not pose problems of identification, since they are easily recognizable as Iceland and Greenland. Concerning the terra que dicitur Marckalada—not specifically defined insula, as Galvaneus does for Greenland...

All these scant sources are Icelandic; no mention of the name Markland has ever been reported outside of the Nordic area. Scholars agree in identifying Markland, as with Vinland and Helluland, as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America, where Icelanders and Greenlanders made explorations and marginal settlements, as is demonstrated by archeological evidence. Markland is usually assumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland, Helluland Baffin Island or Labrador, Vinland Newfoundland or some southern seaside.36 This is obviously a matter for specialists, and we do not dare to enter the field...

What makes the passage exceptional is its geographical provenance: not the Nordic area, as in the case of the other mentions, but northern Italy. We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area...

The giants who are said to inhabit Marckalada are common in Old Norse epic traditions, although they are usually reported to live north-eastward (and not westward); an exception is the Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, which sets giant people in Helluland...

Therefore, we are allowed to trust Galvaneus when he says that his knowledge comes from an oral report (dicunt): had he had some written source at his disposal, he would have most likely declared it (as he does customarily), in order to gain a stronger authority. Compatible with oral sources is also the conflation of elements drawn from various stories, legendary or real, belonging to previous traditions on different lands, blended together and reassigned to a specific place. Moreover, Galvaneus identifies his source as seafarers: marinarii qui conversantur in mari Datie et Norvegye, and I do not see any reason to disbelieve him...

Where might Galvaneus have heard, directly or indirectly, about sailors’s experience? He lived in Milan, an inland city, not exactly a customary destination for seafarers. Our assumption is that he is reporting firsthand or secondhand information coming from Genoa, the closest seaport to Milan...

The news reported by Galvaneus about Marckalada/Markland, just like those about the less evanescent Greenland, remain isolated, and there is no trace of an early reception either in Latin geographical treatises or in the Mediterranean cartography...

Despite its isolated position, and regardless of the assumptions that can be made about its provenance, Galvaneus’s narrative bears witness to the circulation of geographic knowledge between the Nordic and the Mediterranean world in the first half of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, it brings unprecedented evidence to the speculation that news about the American continent, derived from Nordic sources, circulated in Italy one and half centuries before Columbus.

Shakespeare in Italy

This is a fascinating book, which will be appreciated by any serious reader of the plays, but will be of extra interest to those familiar with the Shakespeare authorship question.  The author of this book does not express an opinion on the authorship question, but what he does do is to delve in intricate detail into Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian geography, history, and social relations - all of which are relevant to the authorship puzzle.  He did this by traveling around Italy to see in person the locations described in the plays.

Casual readers of Shakespeare may not realize to what extent Shakespeare focused on Italy.  It really is quite remarkable, and I didn't appreciate it myself until I encountered this table in the book:

Note that of all the plays that are not historical, only one is set in England (Merry Wives) and only one most other places - but ten are set in Italy.

Some are obvious from the titles (Verona, Venice), some from the text (Romeo, Othello) and two by implication (The Tempest set on an island that matches Vulcano next to Sicily, and the "Duke's Oak" referenced in the A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a tree, but rather a passageway well-known in the sixteenth century in the Porta della Vittoria in Sabbioneta.)

So, how extensive was Shakespeare's knowledge about Italy?

Consider Romeo and Juliet.  The plot is not original to Shakespeare.  It was already an old tale back in the 1530s before Shakespeare was born; it was published in 1535, then rewritten by other Italian authors.  In the first act of the first scene of the version in the First Folio, Romeo's mother asks where her son is, and the reply is "... underneath the grove of sycamore/ That westward rooteth from the city's [Verona's] side..."  This detail is unique to the First Folio text ("there and nowhere else, not in any other Italian or French or English version - has it been set down that at Verona, just outside its western walls, was a grove of sycamore trees.")  And it is true.  To this day there are still sycamores in that exact location.  And Shakespeare knew that.

Also to be found in Shakespeare's version of Romeo and Juliet (and not in any previous versions) is reference to St. Peter's church in Verona - which does exist and is located in the same neighborhood described in the play.  

The Two Gentlemen of Verona "is the play with the most, and most highly varied, descriptions of and allusions to things Italian in the entire Shakespeare canon.  Indeed, if critics were to choose one single Italian Play to criticize, this is that play.  Critics say it has an absurd Italy, with seacoasts and harbors that never existed, and historical events that never happened...."  Chapter 2 of this book documents in detail that everything described by Shakespeare about Verona and about Italy is in fact correct (or was in fact correct in the 16th century).  

"The Riverside Shakespeare is not alone when it footnotes "road" as meaning a "seaport," which any mariner would know is exactly what a road is not... Along rivers the world over, there are wide places for ships to anchor called "roads."

Ports are on seacoasts, and are not synonymous with roads (or roadsteads), "and nowhere in The Two Gentlemen of Verona did Shakespeare write that there was a port of seaport at Verona, nor at Milan either." (as is often claimed).

Shakespeare has been lambasted by modern critics for placing a "sail-maker" in the city of Bergamo (Taming of the Shrew) because Bergamo is in the Alps, not on the coast, which is "claimed as proof of the author's ignorance of Italy's geography."  What these critics blithely ignore (or didn't know) is that "Bergamo is a city, from medieval times until now, devoted to the manufacture of textiles, which... has included velvet, silk, woolk, broadcloth... and always sailcloth, that ever-needed fabric made from hemp... The playwright knew that Bergamo was the principal source of sails for the Mediterranean world, and knew that Tranio's father could, indeed, have been a sailmaker there."  Sails were made close to the source of the textile; one didn't ship raw materials to a seaport to make the sails there.

In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare exhibits extensive knowledge about the Jewish community in Venice and about Jewish customs, kosher food, and clothing ("hardly everyday knowledge for an Englishman who'd never been beyond his native shores, or met a known Jew.") (Jews had been banned from England by the Edict of Expulsion in the 13th century and not allowed formal return until 1655).

Also interesting:  Of the 36 plays in the First Folio, 35 have men with swords.  "Only one Shakespeare play has no sword whatsoever: The Merchant of Venice."  When Portia dresses as a man, she wears a dagger instead.  Why?  Because "A sword was considered a weapon of aggression: while a dagger was ore often thoguht of as defensive.  Carrying a sword in the City of Venice was strictly against the law."  Shakespeare knew this.  Few people in sword-happy England would have.

And finally consider Othello.  

"For the plot of Othello the playwright drew upon one of a collection of stories by the Italian scholar and writer, Giovanni Battista Geraldi, called "Cinthio" (1504-1573)... published in Venice in 1565...  No English translation of Cinthio's work appeared before 1753, resulting in speculation over the years about how the playwright got hold of Cinthio's story.  Here, with my emphases added, is an extract from Appendix 3 of the Arden Shakespeare Third Edition of Othello:

A French translation by G. Chappuys appeared in 1583, and the first extant English translation not until 1753.  Chappuys kept close to the Italian version except for a few details, and Shakespeare could have read one or the other, or perhaps a lost English translation... Yet a lost English version, one that perhaps made use of both the Italian and the French texts, cannot be ruled out."

"This "lost English translation" proposition pervades nearly all analyses of the Italian Plays when the analyst cannot find an English version of the Italian, or Latin, source materials... the Arden continues:

"... whether we consider Cinthio or Chappuys or a lost English version as Shakespeare's original, a surprising number of verbal parallels found their way into the play from Cinthio, with or without intermediaries..."

The Riverside Shakespeare in its commentary says:

"Such verbal evidence as can be found tends to show that he looked at Cinthio's Italian.""

If one applies Occam's Razor, the most logical explanation of all this is that Shakespeare not only traveled to Italy, but also could read Italian.  

The feet of a ??dragon ??dinosaur

A distant cousin of the dinosaurs.  These are the feet of a cormorant.  via.