Why we all need subtitles now

“It’s not you — TV dialogue has gotten harder to hear.”

Edward Vega at Vox:

Have you ever been watching a show or movie, and then a character delivers a line so unintelligible you have to scramble to find the remote and rewind? For me, this moment came during the climax of the Pete Davidson film The King of Staten Island, where his most important line was impossible to understand.

I had to rewind three times — and eventually put subtitles on — to finally pick up what he was saying.

This experience isn’t unique. Gather enough people together and you can generally separate them into two categories: People who use subtitles, and people who don’t. And according to a not-so-scientific YouTube poll we ran on our Community tab, the latter category is an endangered species — of respondents who are not deaf or hard of hearing, 57 percent said they use subtitles, while just 12 percent said they generally don’t.

Fascinating. Watch the video.

by Paul on January 29, 2023 at 11:22am | Permalink
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Vox: The fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, explained

Nicole Narea, Sean Collins, and Ellen Ioanes reporting for Vox:

As Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, told Vox in an interview Friday, “so many of the high-profile police killings that we’ve seen in recent years have started out as a traffic stop — started out as an expired tag, reckless driving, fines or warrants due.”

“One thing I’d say about the murder of Tyre in particular is that these officers were all part of a specific unit that was essentially designed to engage in, more or less, broken-windows policing, enforcing low-level offenses in order to identify higher-level crimes,” Bonds said.

The unit that Bonds referred to is called SCORPION, or the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods; it was founded in 2021, ostensibly to address violent street crime in Memphis by flooding high-crime areas with officers from the hand-picked special unit. In 2021, according to the New York Times, Memphis had 346 homicides; in September, the city was on edge after a teacher was abducted and murdered, and days later a gunman shot and killed four people.

 

On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department announced that it had disbanded its SCORPION unit, which had previously been suspended after Nichols was beaten by officers in the unit.

The fact that both Nichols and the officers accused of his murder are Black isn’t unusual, either in Memphis or in other incidents of police brutality. Memphis is “a pretty Black city,” Bonds said; both the city and its police department are majority Black, and the department is led by a Black chief of police.

Ultimately, Bonds said, the race of those carrying out the violence is incidental.

“It’s systemic, and it’s ultimately state violence, which doesn’t really have a color except for the color of the people who are in power in this country,” she said. “So to say that there are no racial implications because there’s a Black victim and Black officers involved is a really myopic way of looking at the problem.”

This is a comprehensive article, and is an absolute must read.

by Paul on January 29, 2023 at 7:57am | Permalink
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Nearly Half of All Sheriffs in Louisiana Are Violating Public Records Laws

Richard A. Webster reporting for Verite News and ProPublica:

Nearly half of Louisiana sheriffs are in violation of a state law regulating the preservation and destruction of public records, according to documents provided by state officials.

The disclosure follows an article this month by Verite, also published by ProPublica, on accusations that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office illegally destroyed documents in a lawsuit involving an autistic boy who died in custody. It also comes on the heels of increased scrutiny on the outsize power wielded by Louisiana sheriffs.

“[I]ncreased scrutiny on the outsize power wielded by Louisiana sheriffs”: My dad — a lawyer for the State of Louisiana and one of the most brilliant men I ever knew — used to love to say that, “there’s nothing bigger than a small town cop.” He was referring to ‘small town cops’ in Louisiana1, where he lived his entire life.

The lack of governmental oversight of elected sheriffs — despite years of complaints and allegations of civil rights abuses — has made it difficult for alleged victims of police abuse to prove misconduct. It has also led to impunity for bad actors, according to civil rights attorneys, community activists and criminal justice experts.

And the lack of state approval for the disposal of public records means sheriffs offices are not fully accounting for information about alleged deputy misconduct, which can be crucial in investigations and litigation over claims of civil rights violations. These records can include internal affairs investigations into the use of excessive force and in-custody deaths, as well as more mundane documents such as payroll records.

And, let’s be honest, Louisiana2 has a long history of law enforcement “misconduct”.

yeah, in a minute…
1 Most areas of Louisiana, save for the more well-known cities (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Shreveport, Monroe) are what you’d probably consider ‘small towns’.
2 Not to say that Louisiana is the only state with such a long history, but it is one of the more prominent ones, for sure.
by Paul on January 28, 2023 at 6:44pm | Permalink
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Anti-cancer drug shows promise in human clinical trials

Diana Yates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

A phase I clinical trial of PAC-1, a drug that spurs programmed cell death in cancer cells, found only minor side effects in patients with end-stage cancers. The drug stalled the growth of tumors in the five people in the trial with neuroendocrine cancers and reduced tumor size in two of those patients. It also showed some therapeutic activity against sarcomas, scientists and clinicians report in the British Journal of Cancer.

[…]

The findings from the clinical trial are noteworthy because the drug was tested in a small number of patients with advanced disease, said study clinical director Dr. Arkadiusz Dudek, an oncologist with the HealthPartners Cancer Center at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, and at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Phase I clinical trials are designed to test whether a new drug compound has worrisome side effects or toxicities in human patients, Dudek said. But scientists also can look for early evidence of therapeutic benefits. The trial enrolled cancer patients with advanced disease who had run out of other treatment options.

by Paul on January 28, 2023 at 5:33am | Permalink
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Brutal.

The City of Memphis, Tennessee has released four videos on Vimeo depicting the police stop and beating of Tyre Nichols:

These videos are absolutely fucking brutal.

Heartbreaking.

by Paul on January 27, 2023 at 8:21pm | Permalink
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Republicans Want to Force AT&T to Carry Trumpy Propaganda Network

Nikki McCann Ramirez writing at Rolling Stone:

The party of free-market capitalism has responded to DirecTV booting Newsmax by arguing that the network should carry the Trump-loving propaganda network, financial considerations be damned. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told Newsmax, which is still available for free on their website, that the “censorship” of conservative voices has “got to stop.”

Good riddance to that piece of shit.

by Paul on January 26, 2023 at 12:53pm | Permalink
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The People Who Don’t Read Books

Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Atlantic: The People Who Don’t Read Books: Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character

We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential—not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom. This much is widely understood and discussed. The ease with which we can know things and communicate them to one another, as well as launder success in one realm into pseudo-authority in countless others, has combined with a traditional American tendency toward anti-intellectualism and celebrity worship. Toss in a decades-long decline in the humanities, and we get our superficial culture in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought.

by Paul on January 26, 2023 at 12:03pm | Permalink
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Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots

As many of you already know, a couple weeks ago Elon Musk pulled a really shitty move, and locked out 3rd party Twitter clients with no notice whatsoever. Well, that sucks, because my Twitter client of choice was TweetBot, and I loved it — I’ve been using TweetBot since it’s initial release in 2011.

Of course this sucks for all the independent developers who have created interesting Twitter clients, but it also sucks for us users, because, well, the “official” Twitter app for iOS really sucks balls, and it has sucked to some degree ever since Twitter acquired it from Tweetie back in 2010 and started changing things (Tweetie was a nice app).

So, this incredibly shitty situation has led to a number of independent developers retiring their Twitter clients, TweetBot among them. This has caused me to, basically, quit Twitter, the way I quit Facebook back in 2015 for different reasons1. So what to do now?

Well, I’ve decided to join Mastodon, and I’ve been experimenting with the available iOS and macOS clients. There are some interesting apps available, but none gave me the user experience I was hoping for.

The silver lining is that this shitty Twitter situation has caused Tapbots to fast-track the release of their Mastodon client, Ivory for Mastodon. Ivory is now available as an “early access” app on the App Store. Now, understand, Tapbots has done with Ivory what Apple is famous for doing with it’s products: release a minimally viable product, and constantly interate for improvement.

For my money (and I subscribed to Ivory’s Premier tier immediately upon initial launch of the app) Ivory is the best of what’s available. And, if you were a TweetBot user, then it’s a no-brainer.

Check it out!

yeah, in a minute…
1 I quit Facebook when I realized that it was just a horrible, horrible platform that made my life worse, not better.
by Paul on January 24, 2023 at 6:11pm | Permalink
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Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of the King of Rock ‘n Roll, dies

Priscilla Presley:

It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us. She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.

R.I.P.

by Paul on January 13, 2023 at 5:56am | Permalink
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U.S. Insurrection +2 years

 

On this day in 2020, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by Trump-supporting domestic terrorists*. Full stop.

 

Peter Wehner writing at The Atlantic:

Two years ago today, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Seven people died as a result of that attempt. More than 140 police officers reported suffering injuries. One was pulled down the steps of the Capitol and then stomped on and beaten with a pole flying an American flag as the crowd chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” A makeshift gallows with a noose was built outside the Capitol, not as a generalized threat but to cow one man. “Hang Mike Pence!” the mob shouted. If the insurrectionists had had the opportunity, they would have. Most stunning of all, the president of the United States encouraged the bloodlust. According to one witness, Trump’s chief of staff said at the time that the president “thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think [the mob is] doing anything wrong.”

The many millions who watched the events unfold instantly knew that it would rank among the most anguished and horrifying days in American history: an effort to halt the peaceful transition of power. But it was worse and more wretched than we imagined.

Indeed it was.

At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”

We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.

Never forget: It’s not just for 9/11 anymore.

 

For a good “by the numbers” report, see Arianna Johnson’s piece at Forbes Jan. 6 Insurrection 2 Years Later: How Many Arrested, Convicted And What Price Donald Trump May Still Pay.

 

yeah, in a minute…
* To be clear, I am a Libertarian (of the non-crazy sort), so I’m all about freedom. I have no problem with people having different opinions than me; I have no problem with people expressing those different opinions. I have no problem with people criticizing the government. Hell, our nation was founded upon the principle of dissent. I have no problem with people peacefully demonstrating or peacefully attending a rally.

And, while it can be pointed out that that is precisely what was happening at the “Trump rally”, it simplhy cannot even be argued that the attack on the Capitol was protected speech. No sir.

by Paul on January 6, 2023 at 9:06am | Permalink
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