All down to hard work and talent

Bona Mugabe owns Dubai mansion, Zimbabwe court papers allege

Divorce court papers seen by the BBC allege that the daughter of Zimbabwe's ex-President Robert Mugabe owned 25 residential properties, including a Dubai mansion, worth a total of around $80m (£64m).

Bona Mugabe filed for divorce from former pilot Simba Mutsahuni Chikore in March.

Mr Chikore wants to split their assets, which also include 21 farms, he says.

It's all down to hard work and talent - anyone can do it.

Haunted House

 

Seems harsh

Samsung bans ChatGPT-like AI after security breach, warns of employee termination

The South Korean company found that employees had uploaded sensitive code to AI platforms, raising fears that the data may be made available to other users.

Consumer electronics from the corporation, such as Windows laptops and Android smartphones, are unaffected. Samsung issued a warning that violating the new rules could result in termination.

On the other hand, the threat of termination could do much to liven up our public sector.  

Read the label

But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures.

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth (1905)


Many people will have noticed a common orthodox reaction to ideas which are contrary to mainstream mantras. When conventional folk encounter unorthodox ideas, their reaction can be an almost visible search for familiar labels such as far-right, racist or outdated - symbols of their unwillingness to engage further.

There are many social and political labels available to the orthodox as any sceptic knows well. In general they seem to be associated with what is sometimes called confirmation bias, although that too can be used as a label. Used in this way, labels can be paths of least resistance, avoiding the effort of coping with anomalies, or indeed sceptics.

Regular commenter Sam Vega recently recommended a book by Martin Amis titled Koba the Dread. I haven’t read it yet, but I have a sample downloaded onto my Kindle. The book is about Stalin and the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals, "Koba" being Stalin's nickname. Here is a negative comment on the book copied from the Amazon website.

The book is just anticommunist propaganda, written by a pillar of the bourgeois establishment, Stalin crushed those who opposed socialism and turned a backward country into a nuclear superpower that stood against American capitalist imperialist aggression, revolutions are not a tea party, make no mistake the enemies of socialism must and will be crushed.

This comment is little more than a series of labels and to my mind, so exaggerated that it is likely to be a parody of communist rhetoric. Labels are essential to totalitarian politics, but in this case, padding the labels out would have made the comment slightly more authentic. Could still be authentic though.

We all have to make use of labels of course and there is no rule to distinguish the useful from the evasive. There are clues such as a refusal to engage with reliable facts, uncertainties or inconsistencies, but even these tools cannot deter the labellers. Oops I’ve labelled the labellers.

It's all there

 

At the other end of the age-continuum we find the verbal behavior of senility—slow halting speech under faulty stimulus control, “forgotten” intraverbals, the rambling of trivial intraverbals and self-echoics, the reduced audience-control which makes for irrelevance, unchecked repetition, and so on.

B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957) 

Idiot Chic

David Mikics has a fine Tablet piece on communist chic in US schools.


Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools

Angela Davis was a dedicated fangirl of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev and cult leader Jim Jones. So why is she presented to children as a hero?

Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.

I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.


The whole piece is well worth reading because the horrors of the past are so easily and conveniently forgotten by modern fans of totalitarian rule.


The state of Virginia also officially discourages teaching about the criminal behavior of communist regimes. In February the Virginia Senate’s Democrats killed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have required public schools to teach students about the victims of communism. Public school teachers in Virginia are already required to cover slavery and the Holocaust. So why not communism? Because, a representative of the Virginia teachers union explained, “There is a strong association between communism and Asians,” and so studying communism could lead to anti-Asian hate.

Idiots will attack anyone for any reason—a fact to live with. But the Virginia teachers union explanation is plainly bunk. It seems exceedingly unlikely that high school students, after learning about the many millions of Chinese peasants sacrificed at Mao’s whim, would pin the blame for the dictator’s atrocities on the Chinese American kid sitting next to them in class—perhaps a descendent of one of Mao’s victims.

World-famous names

BBC announces more world-famous names for Coronation Concert

The concert, produced by BBC Studios Productions, will feature artists including Paloma Faith, Steve Winwood, Lang Lang and Nicole Scherzinger, whilst stars including Tom Cruise, Dame Joan Collins and Sir Tom Jones will appear via video message.

The eclectic mix of artists are part of the line-up alongside previously announced performers including Take That, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, Andrea Bocelli, Sir Bryn Terfel, Freya Ridings, Alexis Ffrench and a collaboration of five Royal patronages.

All of them dedicated to making the world a better place I suppose - otherwise I'm sure they wouldn't be there. Unfortunately I've never heard of the majority of world-famous people in this piece but I don't feel bad about it. Curmudgeons are not supposed to include themselves in this kind of thing.