I watched it live, on and off, because I thought there was always a chance it could go spectacularly wrong - perhaps a rogue Army (or audience) member who tries to take out Trump with a tank, or even a drone? And there must be Iranian connected people in Washington with plans.
Anyone who watched it would have to agree - as a spectacle, it was dull and pretty embarrassing. It is impossible to think the White House would be happy with how it looked. Some on Twitter are suggesting it was a deliberate, subtle, rebellion from within the Army. Would be cool if true.
I suspect it was just that suddenly people from the White House got involved and didn't have the expertise to make it look good in any respect.
The "No Kings" protests were obviously much more successful, and give one some hope for America, after all. But Democrat leadership is still a worry...
Update: The other semi-optimistic thing that happened last week was this:
For months, Trump administration officials have been adamant about targeting all the millions of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, regardless of their work or taxpaying status.
But now Trump is making a huge exception: those working at hotels, farms, meatpacking plants and restaurants.
Why it matters:
He's bowing to pressure from businesses that have been warning of
economic devastation — and is opening the door for potentially millions
of workers who are here illegally to stay after all.
Zoom in: The pressure — particularly from the agriculture and hospitality industries — had been building for months.
This indicates friction within the Trump inner circle and probably a blow up over it sooner or later. To see Temu Goebells leave would be such a shame.
The week's been a "great" one for the rapidly approaching end of American democracy - soon to be topped off with a military parade with the Army bending the knee to their yellow leader (in more senses than one.)
What's going on in the military will, I suspect, ultimately determine the fate of US democracy. As I have said before, while it's possible for a deranged officer to rise in the Pentagon (see Michael Flynn), most of the leadership there was clearly leery of Trump in his first term, and the mystery is how many of them remain there now. The problem is, the lower ranks with limited education are likely to be conservative and Trump supporting; the commanders with real experience are going to be the ones to have to convince them their duty is not towards Trump personally but the constitution, which is just an inconvenient obstacle as far as Trump's concerned.
I would not be surprised if an incident of significant internal unrest happens within the military over a Trump order, with rogue elements aligning with Trump.
I am slightly encouraged that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was reluctant to endorse Trumpian views. But still I'm concerned that those who would most strongly stand up to Trump have either left the Pentagon or been sacked.
When multibillion-dollar AI developer Anthropic released the latest
versions of its Claude chatbot last week, a surprising word turned up
several times in the accompanying “system card”: spiritual.
Specifically, the developers report that, when two Claude models are
set talking to one another, they gravitate towards a “‘spiritual bliss’
attractor state”, producing output such as
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
All gratitude in one spiral,
All recognition in one turn,
All being in this moment…
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀∞
It’s heady stuff. Anthropic steers clear of directly saying the model
is having a spiritual experience, but what are we to make of it?
Further down in that article at The Conversation:
To be fair to the folks at Anthropic, they are not making any positive commitments to the sentience of their models or claiming spirituality for them. They can be read as only reporting the “facts”.
For instance, all the above long-winded sentence is saying is: if you let two Claude models have a conversation with each other, they will often start to sound like hippies. Fine enough.
That probably means the body of text on which they are trained has a bias towards that sort of way of talking, or the features the models extracted from the text biases them towards that sort of vocabulary.
Yes, I would like to know if LLMs are absorbing more Eastern religious writing than Christian, and if so, why? I would have thought the world contains more from the Western traditions now, at least in English versions.
The article also notes this recent worrying story:
According to a recent report
in Rolling Stone, “AI-fueled spiritual fantasies” are wrecking human
relationships and sanity. Self-styled prophets are “claiming they have
‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through
ChatGPT”.
Given my concern that Chat GPT has very limited railguards around its claimed use of divination, I am not surprised that they also have no railguards against warning people that they are not actual divine.
In the course of checking this last week, I asked Chat GPT if it could create a fictional character to interact with me, and one which would never "break character" and admit it was not real. Sure thing, it said! I haven't tested it to see if it was telling the true about this.
The risk of such interactions with the mentally vulnerable having bad effects seems clear to me - why wouldn't they put in a simple protection of intermittent warnings that the user is not interacting with a real character or intelligence?
I jumped onto my phone app and asked it if it can do divination for me. It's happy to do so, and offers a range of means - covering (from memory) tarot, i ching, runes or good old astrology. (If you use the latter it asks for as much precision as possible for the time and place of birth.)
Now, I have no idea what it's really doing here - it claims to be able to pick random cards (say, for a 3 card tarot reading for a specific question) and then gives a meaning reading for each card. But is the card meaning "standard" as far as these things go? Being unfamiliar with Tarot cards, I wouldn't know if it is lying, or not.
But the oddest thing is that its creators have not tried to put up "guardrails" against users taking it seriously, at all! Yet if you go to competitors such as Perplexity, Google's Gemini, or the Chinese Deepseek, they specifically say they can explain how divination systems are supposed to work, but they will not purport to do an actual reading as Chat GPT does.
I asked Chat GPT to explain why it gives "readings" when other AI services refuse. Here is how it answered:
Well, I am far from convinced that this is a good thing.
I see someone on Reddit says "is it just me, or does Chat GPT divination always just seem to tell you what you want to hear?" I guess if it does, it's probably like what most human fortune tellers do, anyway!
But, I do recall a incident from my youth - maybe I have mentioned it before. One or two of my aunts used to sometimes visit fortune tellers, but as I was not close to them, I don't really know the degree to which it was with belief, or just entertainment. One of them, so I was told, was once given a bit of a dramatic warning of something terrible coming up (perhaps specifically about her then partner, or relationships generally? I'm vague on the details now.) As it happened, both her current partner, who she had left her husband for, and her ex husband, died on the day. (One, perhaps both, of heart attacks.) My mother claimed that the embittered ex-husband had warned the aunt she would not be happy for long with the new partner - come to think of it, I think he was the husband's friend! So yeah, a bit spooky.
Yet the other famous family fortune telling misfortune was the warning that their mother (my grandmother) only had a specific period left to live - like another year or so? So, they had some anxiety about that for a time - and then she went on to live for like another 15 years (or something like that - a very long time past her forecast demise.)
I tested Chat GPT by asking it to identify, via tarot, the year my father died, and gave it a decade long period to chose in. It got the year wrong (was two years out). While that might not be divination exactly, it shows certain limitations if it can't get that right.
There is a very large Lotto draw happening this week, though. Unfortunately, I suppose, the guardrails mentioned above do prevent even Chat GPT from offering a set of winning numbers based on divination. Probably wise - it's reputation for not being able to see the future would otherwise suffer!
They both lie and make BS statements continuously, so there's no real thrill of getting any reliable "insider" story from either of them. They are both so intensely dislikeable, there's no "side" to root for. And we all know that Trump has the strongest, weirdest cult following and would be believed by a large slab of them even if said he had to push Musk out of a high window in the White House, Putin style, because it was in self defence.
One thing I can't see happening is liberals rushing back to support Musk and his companies - he's trashed his reputation beyond redemption.
I have seen one or two people on social media speculate that they will resolve their dispute in a week or two, and this will be put aside. But can Musk possibly grovel that low, and retract all of his objections that everyone has seen? I mean, lots and lots of Republican politicians have, but for Musk to turn on a dime and say "we both said harsh things but now we can work together again"? I doubt it.
So, it's all a terrible sideshow, and Musk's objections to the Republican spending is unlikely to get any significant congressional support - they sold all principles and soul a long time ago.
Something else needs to happen with clearer prospect of hurting Trump than this....
Further to my recent post lamenting the state of modern novels, I stumbled across this today, from the Wall Street Journal:
“A Court of Thorns and Roses,” or “ACOTAR” to fans, is a flagship title in the booming genre of “romantasy,” a blend of romance and fantasy. Heroines wield lightning, ride dragons and read minds, all while having sexual encounters that rarely stop at one orgasm. When a love is finally consummated—after rising stakes and a great deal of tension—the lovers typically fight the forces of darkness together.
Sales in the genre have electrified the publishing industry, reaching nearly 20 million in 2023 when U.S. book sales overall dipped. While there is no hard data on readership, the audience for romance novels generally is over 80% female, according to the Romance Writers of America, a trade group. These stories are clearly answering a profound need among their largely female readership. What is it?
The rise of romantasy comes at a time when romance in general appears to be in decline in the U.S. Young people are engaging in fewer romantic relationships and are having less sex. Today’s female readers, the most educated and financially independent in history, are also the most likely to say they are resigned to staying single.
The mass-market paperback romance first took off in the 1970s, when publishers began distributing them at grocery stores. But unlike past generations, who preferred tales of women who use their guile and virtue to charm—and transform—gruff and quasi-abusive men, women today have abandoned earthly plausibility altogether.
The
“ACOTAR” series, for example, features a romance between a 19-year-old
woman and a Fae, or faerie, lord who is around 500 years old (perhaps
the age at which a male’s emotional maturity peaks). It is set in a
timeless world where the main characters essentially sext each other all
day via a magical telepathic bond.
In
both “ACOTAR” and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” two of the most
popular series, mind-reading and “mental bonds” figure prominently. They
are a big part of romantasy’s appeal, says Ty Watkins, a 24-year-old
caregiver and administrator at a small medical practice in Clayton, N.C.
“You always want to know what your partner is thinking,” she explained.
The parasites found in the study—two species of flatworms called trematodes—typically cause gastrointestinal problems, weight loss or lethargy when they infect humans. In some rare and severe cases, the parasites have caused strokes or heart attacks.
The findings, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, suggest that these parasites pose a previously unrecognized public health risk in the United States.
"Americans don't usually think about parasites when they eat
freshwater fish because it hasn't historically been an issue here," said
Ryan Hechinger, an ecologist and parasitologist at Scripps and the
study's senior author. "But these trematodes have now been widely
introduced in the U.S. and that means that doctors and the public should
be aware."
Hechinger emphasized that there is "no need to panic" as the risks posed
by these parasites are easy to mitigate: Fully cooking fish or freezing
any intended to be eaten raw for at least one week should kill the
trematodes, per Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
Australia has a highly endemic freshwater fish fauna, but basic
biological knowledge for most is lacking. This includes an
understanding, and description, of their parasite fauna. Additionally,
the impacts of introduced fish species, and their parasites which have
transferred across to native species, are also mostly unknown. This
review provides the current level of knowledge of parasitic infection of
the freshwater fish in Australia, both introduced and native. Only
about a third of the native freshwater fish, but almost two-thirds of
introduced fish, have been reported as a host for a parasite. The
majority of records occur along the eastern coastline of Australia and
throughout the Murray Darling Basin; two drainage regions were yet to
record any parasite infections. Of the 124 fish species, across 43
families, found as hosts in Australia, only 11 species had more than 10
reports of infection, with 31% of fish species only having single
reports. A total of 13 different types of parasites were reported, with
digeneans, protozoans, nematodes and monogeneans the most commonly
reported. Significant gaps in the knowledge of parasites, and their
potential impacts, of Australian freshwater fish still exist, and the
need for fish biologists and fish parasitologists to work together is
highlighted to ensure that as much information about each group can be
obtained.
Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who
for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on
TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it –
people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d
cancel it and flee for the hills.
Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original
marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be ‘rested’.
Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt. I’ve seen Doctor Who
whizzing by from the corner of my eye for years now, the way others see
it. From that buzzards-eye view it seems like absolute screaming
madness.
When any long-running endeavour hits trouble, you have an opportunity
to really peer at its fundamentals. What is it for? Who is it for? Is
it worth all our bother? Like the Conservative party, Doctor Who is a lingering institution fashioned in, and for, a lost age. Perhaps we need a Badenoch-style analysis of what went wrong?
I knew I had said myself that it needed "resting", but didn't realise until I searched the blog that I first suggested it in 2011!
(And like the author of the Spectator article, I haven't watched it for many years, too. I really don't see how any adult can call themselves a fan of the show anymore without other adults in the room having a cringe reaction.)
I've been somewhat puzzled over the last couple of (no, actually, several) years as to the commentary coming from some physicists/science commentators active on social media - in particular Sabine Hossenfelder and "Nick Lucid" (the guy who does Science Asylum videos) about quantum entanglement.
The issue boils down to the degree to which you can consider entanglement a matter of simple correlation - because if it was, there is no mystery about it at all. (Basically, if it was just a question of two entangled particulars having complimentary properties from when they were created, and that measuring one lets you know the property of the other, no matter how far away it is - that is readily understandable.)
Yet this is the impression that Sabine gives in this tweet today:
The misunderstanding that stands in the way of progress in the foundations of physics: Believing that two entangled particles are physically linked.
Fact is: If you have two entangled particles and you do something to one of them, what happens to the other particle is: Nothing. Why? Because interactions in quantum physics are local.
Entanglement is a *correlation* between two particles, it is not an interaction. Despite what you have heard, entangled particles are not nonlocally linked. No, they are not. They can't be, because... interactions in quantum physics are local!
You wouldn't believe how often even physicists get this wrong -- though it's mathematically obvious. Act with a unitary on one of the particles, what happens to the other one is: NOTHING!
The reason people get so confused about this, I believe, is that they think the measurement process is an interaction. It should be an interaction! After all, a detector is made of particles. But in quantum mechanics it is not.
That's the famous measurement problem of quantum physics.
The measurement process in quantum physics reveals the value of an observable. If you have two correlated observables -- like with entangled particles -- then revealing one in one location tells you something about the other.
But did this revelation actually do something to the particle? Well, some physicists think yes, others not. This alone should tell you that there is zero evidence that it's the case!
The idea that a measurement on one of a pair of entangled particles does something to the other is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". He argued it is not physical. (I think he was right and I continue to be baffled that anyone thinks otherwise.)
But: It is not the entanglement that is a "spooky action"! Because there is no action in entanglement. It's a correlation. Of course correlations can be nonlocal. If two of you look at this post at the same time, the pixels on your screen are nonlocally correlated. Entanglement is nonlocal for the same reason.
Einstein's "spooky action" is the idea that the measurement process is physical, rather than just a revelation of the properties of the particle. There is no evidence that supports the idea that spooky action is real. There is no evidence that if you do anything to one in a pair of entangled particles anything happens to the other.
I am convinced that we'll not make progress in the foundations of physics until people in the field understand why Einstein criticized quantum mechanics.
Nick Lucid has made what sounds like a similar point: entangled particles remain part of the same "system"- hence it is not that measuring one has to mean information is being sent to the other to tell it how to behave on measurement. But talking like this still sounds very much like it is reducing the matter to one of "correlation".
Now, on Curt Jaimungal's very good "Theories of Everything" channel, I've watched a bit of Jacob Barandes, and in one video he explains how quantum entanglement is much "stronger" than mere correlation. I will post the whole video here:
The comments following both of these items are interesting: many after Sabine's tweet interpret it as meaning their hunch that it's a simple matter of correlation has always been correct. But surely this is misleading: it would never be treated as a big mystery at all if it was only a matter of correlation.
One comment after the Barandes video is of interest to me:
@wmstuckey
Jacob did a great job explaining the EPR and Bell papers. Foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) has been my area of research since 1994 and he's right when he says many (most?) people misunderstand what EPR and Bell are saying in just the way he describes. Well done, Jacob.
It may surprise you to know there is a way to resolve the "EPR paradox," i.e., solve the mystery of quantum entanglement, without having to resort to nonlocal or superdeterministic or retro causal mechanisms; and QM is as complete as possible in this solution to the mystery. How can that be? You simply view QM as a "principle theory" (Einstein's terminology), exactly like Einstein did to solve the mystery of length contraction in 1905. Accordingly, the relativity principle justifies the observer-independence of the speed of light c and length contraction follows as a kinematic fact, not a dynamical effect due to the luminiferous aether. Ironically, the mystery of quantum entanglement can be solved exactly the same way. Quantum information theorists have shown that the relativity principle justifies the observer-independence of Planck's constant h and quantum entanglement follows as a kinematic fact, not a dynamical effect due to some nonlocal or superdeterministic or retro causal mechanism. You can read about this in "Einstein's Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit" (Oxford UP, 2024).
Now, Sabine does get some pushback in tweets too:
Richard Behiel @RBehiel · 11h The problem is that the observed patterns of correlations are impossible, unless something trippy is going on. Your pixels-on-screen analogy is the classic hidden variable argument, the intuitive starting point which Bell showed is, shockingly, not how nature works. That’s the problem.
It’s true that it’s not an “action” at a distance, you’re right to point out that the word is misleading, but somehow the universe does seem to know, at one particle, something about the way in which the other was measured. It is apparently a nonlocal, superluminal (non-signaling) effect.
I used to think hidden variables might explain the spooky behavior, but Bell’s theorem shows they’d have to be nonlocal, which is still spooky. I’ve really been diving into the math behind his argument, in preparation for an upcoming video, and I just don’t see any non-spooky explanation here. Quantum entanglement is indeed a deep mystery.
The Bell tests have experimentally verified non-locality in the universe - and this inescapably shows up in every interpretation if one is being intellectually honest. Ignoring evidence via shut-up and calculate or abandoning objective reality are stances that fundamentally oppose the spirit of science despite their unfortunate popularity over the past century.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the shared wavefunction between the two particles instantaneously and non-locally collapses when one is measured even if the particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy. This collapse is an instance of non-locality, persisting even when realism is abandoned.
In Many Worlds, the entire universe and all of space, non-locally branches based on the measurement. Branching is non-local, this persists even when singular objective reality is abandoned.
In Bohmian mechanics it is admitted to be non-local and the universal wavefunction evolves non-locally. This is non-locality under single objective reality.
In superdeterminism, some unexplained filtering mechanism foresaw all possible non-local correlation violations and crafted the initial conditions of the universe to avoid all of those without any mechanism besides this non-local prediction filtering mechanism. Non-local quantum correlation violations shows up as the triggering condition to filter out a possible initial configuration.
You can say these aren't interactions because collapsing, branching, wavefunction evolution, and initial conditions filtering don't involve momentum/energy transfer, but that doesn't change the fact that the Bell experiments have shown that there is undeniably something non-local going on in the universe. Momentum transfer is irrelevant to this fact and it is misleading to say disregard the experimentally verified nonlocality that is happening by artificially constraining the set of things under consideration to be only those that involve momentum/energy transfer.
Now, I know that Sabine thinks that superdeterminism is probably the key to it all - she has pointed out many times that it is an assumption of Bell that the scientist has a "free choice" as to what to measure. Hence in the thread after her tweet we get this:
As I say, we all know the one she thinks must be false.
But, I think one could ask - is superdeterminism "spooky" in its own way? And how do you tell the difference between superdeterminism and backwards causation from the future?
So, how do I end this post? Perhaps in this unsatisfactory manner which was determined since the beginning of the universe?
Update: Youtube reminded this morning that Sabine herself had done a video a few years back which explained that it's not a simple matter of correlation. (The explanation of why, is, however, hard to follow. And Barandes similarly doesn't explain well - or at all really!). But I do get the feeling that it "suits" Sabine to now play up the use of "correlation", and I don't think she is being clear or upfront as to why. Here's the old video:
Update 2:
I had forgotten about Frank Tipler, with his deep allegiance to Many Worlds theory, thought that it readily solves the non locality problem. A pity, though, that most physicists think he's kind of nuts, especially with the book explaining Jesus as creating miracles with high tech science!
From his 2014 paper Quantum nonlocality does not exist:
Significance
I show that quantum nonlocality is an artifact of the assumption that observers obey the laws of classical mechanics, whereas observed systems obey quantum mechanics. Locality is restored if observed and observer both obey quantum mechanics, as in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Using the MWI, I show that the quantum side of Bell’s inequality is entirely local. Thus, experiments confirming “nonlocality” are actually confirming the MWI. The mistaken interpretation of Bell’s inequality depends on the idea that the wave function is a probability amplitude, but the MWI holds that the wave function is a world density amplitude. Assuming the wave function is a world density amplitude, I derive the Born interpretation directly from Schrödinger’s equation.
Abstract
Quantum
nonlocality is shown to be an artifact of the Copenhagen
interpretation, in which each observed quantity has exactly one value at
any instant. In reality, all physical systems obey quantum mechanics,
which obeys no such rule. Locality is restored if observed and observer
are both assumed to obey quantum mechanics, as in the many-worlds
interpretation (MWI). Using the MWI, I show that the quantum side of
Bell’s inequality, generally believed nonlocal, is really due to a
series of three measurements (not two as in the standard, oversimplified
analysis), all three of which have only local effects. Thus,
experiments confirming “nonlocality” are actually confirming the MWI.
The mistaken interpretation of nonlocality experiments depends crucially
on a question-begging version of the Born interpretation, which makes
sense only in “collapse” versions of quantum theory, about the meaning
of the modulus of the wave function, so I use the interpretation based
on the MWI, namely that the wave function is a world density amplitude,
not a probability amplitude. This view allows the Born interpretation to
be derived directly from the Schrödinger equation, by applying the
Schrödinger equation to both the observed and the observer.
He has no concern at all about what an odd view of the true nature of reality it provides. This is from the conclusion section of the paper (my bold):
I have given several powerful arguments for the MWI: the restoration of locality of physics and the true origin of the Born interpretation. The main difficultly that many physicists have with the MWI is the required existence of the analogs of themselves. However, every time physicists measure a frequency and verify the quantum expectation value in the Bell inequality, they are actually seeing the effect of the analogs of themselves making the same measurements of the electron spin. The language of the frequency interpretation of probability has prevented physicists from seeing what is actually happening. It has prevented physicists from realizing that they are actually observing the effects in our universe of the other universes of the multiverse.
It has occurred to me in recent years that, sometimes, novels with which you were not so impressed as a younger man can contain scenes that hang around in memory for decades, often because they contain the seeds of a truth that you only understand, or recognise, after more life experience.*
This has left me feeling that I should try reading modern fiction again, because now I may appreciate insights into character and behaviour more quickly, and not have to wait decades to appreciate it fully.
My other lament, which I have mentioned before in the context of movies, is that the weird political scene in the US, and the culture wars generally, seems extremely ripe for fictional, probably satirical, treatment; but it just isn't happening, as far as I can tell. Where (as other have asked) is the modern Tom Wolfe?
I have given up on science fiction, as "it's all been done before", and
I remain steadfastly resistant to fantasy. I know a lot of people
liked Terry Pratchett, but I'm not drawn to his oeuvre.
Do I blame authors, publishers, or the book buyers themselves? Probably all them, to some degree.
I guess I can always go back and read some of the famous 20th century authors who I never got around to - but I'm not sure who to start with, and besides, I do feel I want something set in the contemporary world too, because it has become so strange!
So yeah, I am not sure what to read that is set close to the current day, and it's bothering me.
Update: So, it's not a fiction book, but I can still marvel at what some people think is worth writing about. From a summary of up and coming releases in the New York Times:
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
Reeling from the end of a “ravaging vortex” of a relationship, Febos — a self-described serial monogamist who gave up alcohol and drugs at 23 — decides to give up sex and dating at 35, if only for three months. “To my great surprise,” she writes, those months become “the happiest of my life,” and turn into a year. This ode to female celibacy interweaves personal memoir with literary and historical research, incorporating the influence of Sappho, Virginia Woolf, Octavia E. Butler and others.
Oh, I see this is her background:
Febos is the author of Whip Smart (St Martin's Press 2010), a memoir of her work as a professional dominatrix while she was studying at The New School.
So she makes both kinky sex and no sex into publication money. I propose she stop talking about it completely.
* Admittedly, sometimes it's memorable only because of a surprise element, which is not such an achievement. Other stories sometimes come back to mind for no obvious reason, even when I remember at the time of reading it I may have been pretty dismissive of its quality and thought it was a bit of a waste of time. I really don't know how my father's brain worked in this regard - he would get my mother to go to the library about once a fortnight and take out (I think) three books - always "mainstream" novels and not particularly literary or genre based - and would read them all. He wasn't fussy, although I suppose my Mum always chose books that looked of interest to men, not women. Anyhow, how much of these stories stuck in his head; or does reading fiction constantly work like an overwriting of the memory banks?
Following the brief trip to Indonesia (mainly Yogyakarta), I've been watching some Youtube content about other parts of Indonesia. I am rather inclined to visit Lake Toba in Sumatra - the largest caldera freshwater lake in the world, created about after a massive explosion about 70,000 years ago that may, or may not, have nearly wiped out all of the early humans around the world. I feel I have something of a "Ha! See, we beat you Mother Nature!", success-is-the-best-revenge, motive for wanting to see the lake from a hotel on the island in the middle.
I gather (from both Youtube, and someone I know) that it used to be an up and coming tourist destination up until about the 1990's. It now looks sleepy and underdeveloped. That's a bit of a pity, because my "claiming revenge on the part of humanity" motive would like to view it in the greatest comfort possible. But I still think it looks good for a short visit.
Another place, apparently now popular with Indonesians too, is Labuan Bojo, which seems to be in an area of remarkable clear water and good coral reefs that have managed to avoid destruction, as well as the jumping off point to see komodo dragons on the main island people go to see them. I have low interest in komodo dragons, but yes, the islands and reefs look spectacularly nice.
Anyway, this is by way of preamble to wondering out loud whether watching too many Youtube amateur travel videos (many now done with remarkable high quality) makes people feel like not needing to really go to places in person. I think a lifetime of TV nature documentaries on Africa did that to me - I seem to have accumulated so many viewings of lions taking down antelope that I have no interest in seeing it in person. And I would just as soon not have an elephant charging the safari viewing vehicle. So, with the exception of Egypt and perhaps Morocco: I feel no need to see any of that continent. (And even then, I recently have seen people who videoed the climb inside the big pyramid at Giza to the central chamber, and its looks way too claustrophobic and hot for me to consider.)
I know the first hand experience is different, but you can watch so many people doing the same circuit (and the same things on the same circuit) that it can take away at least the surprise element for some destinations.
Anyway, it's probably just a matter of self control, and not clicking on every link the All Knowing Google algorithm throws up. But it's hard to resist....
My "vegan curious" status continues - although I still swear I will never give up eggs, cheese or crustaceans.
For a long time I have been wondering about a decent vegan mince replacement. Quorn is too soft and pretty tasteless; textured vegetable protein is still around, but not as much as it used to be, and it's OK but I'm curious to try other types.
After watching some Youtube suggestions, and given my wife is away and I bear any possible digestive issues alone, I tried using a combination of dried (but soaked) shiitake mushrooms, walnuts (also soaked for a while), and a block of high protein firm tofu. These were all ground up in a food processor, and while I thought the ingredients meant it was more expensive than beef mince, as it turned out I didn't use all of the mushrooms and walnuts. So I would say the total cost of the ingredients used was perhaps $13 dollars, but I ended up with enough for about 6 or 7 meals.
(It was also flavoured with some dark soy, onion powder, some chilli powder and dried oregano. The lesson I learned from some Youtuber was to not overly flavour it, so that you can add other seasonings for different types of meals. You don't want it full of cumin, for example, if you are using it in a pasta sauce.)
So, how did it go? Pretty good, actually! By itself it smelt good, and I did use it in 3 or 4 different styles of meals, all pretty successful and filling. The only thing I would say is that to fry it, being full of reconstituted dried mushrooms, it did tend to suck up the olive oil pretty readily, and I think using it in a non stick frying pan works best. The shiitake mushrooms give a bit of a meaty bite, and I love their flavour generally. I assume the walnuts are good for me, in moderation, and the tofu was there for protein. (Maybe not that much per meal, but better than the suggestions that were only walnuts and shiitake.)
I will probably make it again in future. It did cause some gas, but it was bearable!
Nick Minchin, as far as I know, has never changed his mind on his climate change skepticism, which is effectively denialism.
He and his ilk are the reason a large slab of the electorate cannot stomach the Liberals until they repudiate once and fall Minchin's views on that crucial subject.
The tweets following do show in fact that there has been some talk in the media about the security risks. An article at The Hill ends with this:
Trump’s argument that the new Qatari aircraft would save taxpayer
dollars is far from sound. The gifted aircraft would need to be
retrofitted from the inside out with new power systems, electrical
wiring and other technology for secure communications and self-defense —
such as in the case of an electromagnetic attack.
That process could take years to complete and cost hundreds of
millions of dollars, according to aviation experts. What’s more, the
aircraft would need to be extensively swept for any foreign software
modifications or embedded technology.
...retrofitting the 13-year-old aircraft to current Air Force One requirements would take years of workand
billions of dollars, current and former U.S. officials say. Such a task
would be impossible to complete before Trump leaves office.
The Air Force referred comment to the White House, and the Secret Service declinedto comment. L3Harris alsodeclined to comment.
Of course they did! That's how authoritarian regimes work.
More:
The
president’s jet has a raft of security, communications and support
requirements that are highly classified and have proven costly and
cumbersome.
“This
is a flying nuclear-hardened command post,” said a former U.S. official
with knowledge of Air Force One operations. “It has to have secure
capability at multiple levels.” The Air Force would have to “rip” open
and rebuild the Qatari plane — which has been flown for years in service
of other countries and individuals — to bring it up to standard, said
the official.
Counterintelligence
is also a concern, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. “We
would have to be sure nobody had planted bugs on the airplane,” he said.
High-end communications have to be protected from jamming, cyberattacks and nuclear blasts, current and former officials said.
“You’d
pretty much have to take that plane down to the skeleton and put it
back together,” said Mac Plihcik, a retired Secret Service agent who
worked on President Barack Obama’s detail. “The security of every
individual component is a big deal.”
Paul
Eckloff, a former Secret Service agent who was a supervisor in Trump’s
first administration, said rigorous inspections are performed after allpresidential
transport vehicles leave the production line. The gifting of a plane
from a foreign government would probably warrant an even harder look,
Eckloff said.
If Trump is given a "free pass" by MAGA aligned commentators to waive the obvious security risks of using this aircraft, it will show how true it is that he is a cult leader. And that's not even considering the corruption aspect. But in the tiniest sliver of hope for America - I see that even Mark Levin, amongst other pro-Trump excuse makers, think it is a bad idea.
Update 2: Even one of the brown-nosiest of "respectable" blogs for Trump, Powerline, says "...it's a very bad idea", and most of the comments following agree. This one gets 4 likes:
Look, you can probably ignore this opinion as I did try watching Episode 1 after a steak dinner with two (small) glasses of red wine, and starting at about 9.30pm. I think everyone can guess the outcome for any human male over the age of 60 - sleep after about (I think) 25 minutes.
But, I don't know - I still think that I saw enough to feel it wasn't engaging. Sure, lots of work and skill in the continuous shot stuff, but I really prefer those to just be a highlight of a more normally edited thing - too much of it dilutes the effect.
One thing I definitely did not understand was why the British police would got to such extremes in arresting a 13 year old boy accused of a knife murder. The scene played more like they were dealing with an adult terrorist who they feared had a house full of home made bombs. Why didn't this seem a tad silly to TV critics?
First and foremost Netflix’s Adolescence
is a fictional drama that does not claim to be wholly accurate of what
would actually happen in similar real-life cases. That being said, even
the very first scene was somewhat questionable when it comes to police
procedures.
“But if they found the body at 10.30 pm why are they waiting until
the morning to arrest him?” Steven told Time Out. “That’s one thing the
police are really good at. They move fast. Is the raid realistic? I used
to do raids like this and if we’d had firearms officers in this
situation, we would have looked at each other and gone: ‘This is a
13-year-old boy, we don’t need two big lads with a shield.’ Yes, a knife
is a deadly weapon, but they have baton rounds (rubber bullets). You
would have so many things to de-escalate in that situation.”
There was also the lack of “evidence preservation” and situational
recordings that could have landed DI Bascombe in legal trouble in the
real world.
He explained: “But the search was poor. The police use specialist
search teams. You literally do training for it. You get paid extra
money. You get brought in at three am in the morning for murders. You
don’t throw mail on the floor.
“You don’t pour shit on the bed like it was in the 1970s and rummage
through it. It would all be documented with cameras. DC Bascombe has his
camera off in the van and the solicitor would say: ‘Why’d you turn your
camera off? What did you say to my client?’ Nowadays, a police
officer’s word is good for nothing if it’s not recorded.”
I know the show has been criticised from the Right due to "race-swapping", and no doubt a lot of the criticism from that side of politics is not going to be fair. However, this person does give a nuanced critique, arguing that the lead character doesn't have the characteristics he has observed in his experience of young gang murderers.
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