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My pourpoint is down several buttons, and we still have a bunch of lapis to glue to the buttons, but only one un-bejeweled button. So D. suggested casting some more in pewter, mail-ordered some casting compound, and we watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to do this. Last night I built a 2"x3" MDF mold box, filled the bottom third of it with plasticine, embedded the remaining button in the clay, and poured the first half of a two-part mold. After it's cured tonight, I plan to open the box, pull out the chunk of clay and plastic, flip it over, remove the clay, put it back into the box, and pour the other half of the mold. Although it might need to be a three-part mold, with a secondary split along the loop in back. Anyway, once the mold is done, we'll try filling the mold with pewter and make some more buttons. Pictures eventually.
Apr. 18th, 2023
So Fox has settled with Dominion
Apr. 18th, 2023 10:49 pmfor $787 million, which is not spare change even for Fox, but may not be enough to significantly change their behavior. Fox made a public statement that "we acknowledge the court's finding that certain of the statements about Dominion were false."
Note: they don't acknowledge that the statements were false, only that the court says they were. And they don't acknowledge that Fox knew at the time that the statements were false. They don't even say "our statements about Dominion" or "statements about Dominion aired on our news programs"; from the public statement you would think Fox had no role at all.
Ideally, I would have liked to see the settlement include an official statement, included in at least several days' worth of prime-time Fox news shows, to the effect that "We aired a lot of allegations that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. It wasn't, there was never any evidence that it was, and we knew it, but we told you what we thought you wanted to hear rather than the truth." That's not going to happen... except that SmartMatic, another maker of voting technology, is bringing a similar lawsuit, and will presumably have similar demands.
The settlement has been a top headline on every news network except Fox, which has pretty much buried it.
Update, Wednesday morning April 19: My phone wakes me with a few minutes of news headlines from each of five different major news organizations: Reuters, CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, and DW (Deutsche Welle). On Reuters, CNN, and Bloomberg, the Fox News settlement was the first headline. On Fox and DW it wasn't mentioned at all; Fox's headline stories were (as best I recall) a mass shooting in Maine, a shooting in Missouri, the upcoming SCOTUS decision on mifepristone, and the debt-ceiling showdown in Congress, of which only the first was "news" (the other three were slight updates to ongoing stories until something new happens). Just to make sure, I opened a browser window to foxnews.com, whose top ten news stories didn't mention the settlement. The "Opinion" section didn't either. Neither did the next 32 news stories. There was, however, one story about Fox News: "Fox News Digital finishes first quarter as No. 1 news brand across key metrics, topping CNN, New York Times".
Update, Monday April 24th: Near the top of the New York Times headlines is the news that Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox News. In initial reports it was just "leaving"; later in the day it became "was fired from Fox News". Reuters and CNN also gave this story high billing. Fox doesn't seem to have mentioned at all the abrupt departure of its most-popular news host.
Note: they don't acknowledge that the statements were false, only that the court says they were. And they don't acknowledge that Fox knew at the time that the statements were false. They don't even say "our statements about Dominion" or "statements about Dominion aired on our news programs"; from the public statement you would think Fox had no role at all.
Ideally, I would have liked to see the settlement include an official statement, included in at least several days' worth of prime-time Fox news shows, to the effect that "We aired a lot of allegations that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. It wasn't, there was never any evidence that it was, and we knew it, but we told you what we thought you wanted to hear rather than the truth." That's not going to happen... except that SmartMatic, another maker of voting technology, is bringing a similar lawsuit, and will presumably have similar demands.
The settlement has been a top headline on every news network except Fox, which has pretty much buried it.
Update, Wednesday morning April 19: My phone wakes me with a few minutes of news headlines from each of five different major news organizations: Reuters, CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, and DW (Deutsche Welle). On Reuters, CNN, and Bloomberg, the Fox News settlement was the first headline. On Fox and DW it wasn't mentioned at all; Fox's headline stories were (as best I recall) a mass shooting in Maine, a shooting in Missouri, the upcoming SCOTUS decision on mifepristone, and the debt-ceiling showdown in Congress, of which only the first was "news" (the other three were slight updates to ongoing stories until something new happens). Just to make sure, I opened a browser window to foxnews.com, whose top ten news stories didn't mention the settlement. The "Opinion" section didn't either. Neither did the next 32 news stories. There was, however, one story about Fox News: "Fox News Digital finishes first quarter as No. 1 news brand across key metrics, topping CNN, New York Times".
Update, Monday April 24th: Near the top of the New York Times headlines is the news that Tucker Carlson is leaving Fox News. In initial reports it was just "leaving"; later in the day it became "was fired from Fox News". Reuters and CNN also gave this story high billing. Fox doesn't seem to have mentioned at all the abrupt departure of its most-popular news host.
I'm thinking of two things in particular.
First, the principle that men use men's bathrooms and women use women's bathrooms, and anybody who goes into the wrong one is imperiling the whole moral basis of society. Obviously, normal people don't have "men's" and "women's" bathrooms in their homes; this is only an issue about bathrooms in public places. And it really doesn't make much difference for "single-seater" bathrooms, even in public places: the gas station probably has a men's room and a women's room, both single-seat, but if one of them is out of order, most civilized people even in the US are OK with everybody using the one that's working. So we're only concerned with bathrooms in public places that are large enough for multiple people to use simultaneously. And these days we're only concerned with segregating by sex, not skin color, religion, or social class, all of which have at various times and places determined which bathroom you could use.
Until the 19th century, many of the "public places" where there might be a multi-user public bathroom were themselves single-sex institutions (abbeys, schools, government, military), so who walked into which bathroom wasn't a concern. Aside from those, I don't think multi-user public bathrooms were very common at all, and at least at some times in recorded history they were mixed-sex, or people just excreted in the woods or by the side of the road. So the whole sex-segregated-bathrooms thing is an attempt to preserve a God-given rule that God only gave us about 150-200 years ago (while apparently dropping the equally-God-given rule about racially-segregated bathrooms).
The second is the notion that a photograph or a video depicts reality. AI and computer-graphics advances in the last five years have made it entirely feasible for someone (without the resources of a major film studio) to produce something that looks utterly realistic but never actually happened. Of course, it was always possible to produce a realistic-looking picture of something that never happened, but it was so much easier and cheaper to mechanically produce a picture or (later) a moving picture of something real that we jumped to the conclusion that "realistic means true". Now it's still easier and cheaper to produce a picture or moving picture of something real than something fake, but the price differential has dropped substantially. Which means we're in danger of returning to the epistemological situation of... 150-200 years ago. You know it's real if you saw it directly with your own eyes; other than that, your assessment of truth depends on how much you trust your information source. The fact that it "looks realistic" tells you nothing about whether it's true, only about the artist's skill.
The species H. sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years. For 99.95% of that time, we didn't have single-sex public bathrooms or mechanical recording, and somehow we survived.
First, the principle that men use men's bathrooms and women use women's bathrooms, and anybody who goes into the wrong one is imperiling the whole moral basis of society. Obviously, normal people don't have "men's" and "women's" bathrooms in their homes; this is only an issue about bathrooms in public places. And it really doesn't make much difference for "single-seater" bathrooms, even in public places: the gas station probably has a men's room and a women's room, both single-seat, but if one of them is out of order, most civilized people even in the US are OK with everybody using the one that's working. So we're only concerned with bathrooms in public places that are large enough for multiple people to use simultaneously. And these days we're only concerned with segregating by sex, not skin color, religion, or social class, all of which have at various times and places determined which bathroom you could use.
Until the 19th century, many of the "public places" where there might be a multi-user public bathroom were themselves single-sex institutions (abbeys, schools, government, military), so who walked into which bathroom wasn't a concern. Aside from those, I don't think multi-user public bathrooms were very common at all, and at least at some times in recorded history they were mixed-sex, or people just excreted in the woods or by the side of the road. So the whole sex-segregated-bathrooms thing is an attempt to preserve a God-given rule that God only gave us about 150-200 years ago (while apparently dropping the equally-God-given rule about racially-segregated bathrooms).
The second is the notion that a photograph or a video depicts reality. AI and computer-graphics advances in the last five years have made it entirely feasible for someone (without the resources of a major film studio) to produce something that looks utterly realistic but never actually happened. Of course, it was always possible to produce a realistic-looking picture of something that never happened, but it was so much easier and cheaper to mechanically produce a picture or (later) a moving picture of something real that we jumped to the conclusion that "realistic means true". Now it's still easier and cheaper to produce a picture or moving picture of something real than something fake, but the price differential has dropped substantially. Which means we're in danger of returning to the epistemological situation of... 150-200 years ago. You know it's real if you saw it directly with your own eyes; other than that, your assessment of truth depends on how much you trust your information source. The fact that it "looks realistic" tells you nothing about whether it's true, only about the artist's skill.
The species H. sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years. For 99.95% of that time, we didn't have single-sex public bathrooms or mechanical recording, and somehow we survived.