Look, it's the understudy

I've always thought that Grace Collier was a lightweight, look-at-me-I-used-to-be-vaguely-Left contrarian with nothing interesting to say,  but with her silly, silly piece in the Spectator, I see she's gone into auditioning for the role of  "Hyperbolic and Somewhat Unhinged Culture Warrior" currently being played by Mark Latham.  It's true, you never know when he may next blow a fuse.

The funniest thing about the piece is one of the comments following:

This is all makes so much sense to one person

False flag in Connecticut

Trumpkins here always suspicious of the Left sometimes doing "false flag" vandalism on Mosques, etc, so they should be interested to read of this:

A supporter of President Trump in Connecticut says he wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on elementary school equipment hoping to frame Democrats because he believes they are "disrespectful to our government." 

Stephen Marks, 32, wrote “Kill Trump,” “Left is the best,” "Bernie Sanders 2020" and “Death to Trump” on playground equipment at Hartford's Morley Elementary School last month, according to the Hartford Courant.

Hand avoidance

Pretty hilarious, the look on Trump's face as the Polish First Lady wisely avoids the chance of a handshake with him:

via GIPHY

Update:  I've read since that she shakes Trump's hand after Melania's.  Maybe that made President Manbaby feel better...

About Yassmin

I haven't really paid that much attention to her - just as I find it easy not to read opinion pieces by rude feminists like Clementine Ford, who wingnuts similarly obsess over.  But I did think the reaction to Yassim's ANZAC Day tweet was completely over the top and out of proportion.  However, that Guardian column she wrote about cultural appropriation was extremely self indulgent, and it may well be that her Muslim apologetics re feminism  are semi to fully ludicrous to many ears.

But it's surely the case that it should be possible for someone like her to be both attention seeking, hold annoying opinions, and wrong in much of what she writes, yet still not warrant the vicious obsession of aggro wingnuts in attacking her.  I might be wrong, but I strongly suspect that she probably has received scary death threat type of messages.   And don't say that Andrew Bolt has received them too as if that makes it right.    Neither of them deserve that. 

Boys fighting

A somewhat amusing account here of a famous altercation between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman.   Eastman didn't care for Hemingway's romantic fondness of bullfighting:

In a passage that would come to haunt Max later, he likened writing that derived pleasure from such senseless bloodshed—writing like Hemingway’s, in other words—to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.” To Papa Hemingway’s supporters this was blasphemy. “I don’t know when I have written anything that I have heard more about from various sources than that article,” sighed Max. Not bothering to read Max’s review carefully, Hemingway’s defenders engaged in the kind of public posturing and muscle flexing that ironically confirmed Max’s concerns. 

Which led 3 years later to this:

On August 17, 1937, Max was visiting his editor Maxwell Perkins’ office, discussing a new edition of Enjoyment of Poetry, when Hemingway sauntered in. He was not in a particularly generous mood: his marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer was on the rocks, and he was about to return to Spain, where the civil war he had been covering had reinforced his contempt for literary refinement. Opening his shirt, he encouraged Max to assess the authenticity of his chest hair, while he mocked Max’s chest, which was, remarked Perkins, as “bare as a bald man’s head.” Then everything went haywire. Seeing the well-fed, white-clad, good-looking Max, tanned from tennis and hours spent napping on the beach, Hemingway erupted. The way Max remembered it, Hemingway was crude and  aggressive. “What did you say I was sexually impotent for?” he snarled. Conveniently, a copy of Art and the Life of Action was sitting on Perkins’ desk. Max attempted to point out a passage—a positive one, we might imagine—that he thought would clarify that he had never wanted to trash Hemingway. But Hemingway, muttering and swearing, zeroed in on a different passage, and a particularly good one it was, too: “Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.” This was Max at his best, the use of the plural “evidences” giving the line a rhythmic lilt: “évi / dénces of / réd-blooded/ máscu / línity.” An altercation ensued, during which Max, as both parties agreed, got “socked” on the nose with his own book. Everything was happening very fast after that. Max charged at Hemingway. Books and other stuff from Perkins’ desk went flying to the ground. Convinced that the much younger Hemingway was going to kill his friend, Perkins rushed in to help. By the time he had reached the two men they were both on the floor. Max was on top, although Perkins felt this was by accident only. But Max would later tell everyone who cared to listen that he had been the winner. Recognizing the disadvantage imposed on him by age and lack of physical fitness (“I would have kissed the carpet in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway”), he claimed he had used a wrestling move to throw Hemingway on his back over Max Perkins’ desk. Hemingway assured the Times no such thing had taken place, that Max instead had taken his slap “like a woman.” He went on to challenge Max to meet him in a locked room and read to him his review in there, with “all legal rights waived”—the Hemingway equivalent to challenging his adversary to a duel. There is one detail, however, that does make Max’s account credible: he did know how to wrestle.

Very early practice

The title says it all:   Fetal Onanism: A Surprising Scientific Debate.

Ok, well here's the opening paragraph, too:

The medical journal Prenatal Diagnosis recently played host to a vigorous debate over whether a male fetus was spotted engaging in masturbation on ultrasound. 

The whole debate (no "mass debate" puns, please) was about the proper interpretation of anatomy on ultrasound images. 

On your skin - a continuing story

Gee, they are still working out what sorts of things are living on our skin.   Not just bacteria, but archaea:

The researchers conducted both genetic and chemical analyses of samples collected from human volunteers ranging in age from 1 to 75. They found that archaea (pronounced ar-KEY-uh) were most abundant in subjects younger than 12 and older than 60. Their study has been published in Scientific Reports (a Nature journal) in an article titled, "Human age and skin physiology shape diversity and abundance of Archaea on skin."

"The skin microbiome is usually dominated by bacteria," said Hoi-Ying Holman, director of the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology (BSISB) Program and a senior author on the paper. "Most of the scientific attention has been on bacteria, because it's easier to detect. Based on the literature, six years ago we didn't even know that archaea existed on human skin. Now we've found they're part of the core microbiome and are an important player on human skin."

These are usually tough bugs:

It was not until the 1970s that scientists realized how different archaea were from bacteria, and they became a separate branch on the tree of life -- the three branches being Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (which includes all plants and animals). Archaea are commonly found in extreme environments, such as hot springs and Antarctic ice. Nowadays it is known that archaea exist in sediments and in Earth's subsurface as well, but they have only recently been found in the human gut and linked with the human microbiome....

This study stemmed from a planetary protection project for NASA and the European Space Agency. "We were checking spacecraft and their clean rooms for the presence of archaea, as they are suspected to be possible critical contaminants during space exploration -- certain methane-producing archaea, the so-called methanogens, could possibly survive on Mars," Moissl-Eichinger said. "We did not find many signatures from methanogens, but we found loads of Thaumarchaeota, a very different type of archaea that survives with oxygen."

At first it was thought the Thaumarchaeota were from the outside, but after finding them in hospitals and other clean rooms, the researchers suspected they were from human skin. So they conducted a pilot study of 13 volunteers and found they all had these archaea on their skin.

As a follow-up, which is the current study, they tested 51 volunteers and decided to get a large range in ages to test the age-dependency of the archaeal signatures. Samples were taken from the chest area. The variations in archaeal abundance among the age groups were statistically significant and unexpected. "It was surprising," Holman said. "There's a five- to eightfold difference between middle-aged people and the elderly -- that's a lot."

Plastic rice - the urban myth

Well, maybe "urban" is not quite the right word, since the BBC explains that the myth that rice sellers are adding plastic fake rice in with their real rice seems to be most popular in some poor African countries now, after starting in China.

The internet is terrific, except when it's not.

One other thing about the baby Gard case...

All of those Right wingers complaining that it's outrageous that a court should be supplanting the parents decision about what's right for their child - where's your outrage when courts intervene to override Jehovah's Witness parents' refusal to allow blood transfusions?   In cases such as this.

As I argued in my previous post, sometimes parents can't be relied on to make reasonable decisions, and it's appropriate the courts intervene.  

And don't think that Catholic thought on this is uniform.  The rather conservative columnist priest Fr Lucie-Smith in the Catholic Herald wrote back in April:

On initial reading of the case, it seems that the court has condemned Charlie to death. But the decision in fact may be the right one to make. It is absolutely true, of course, that we should do our best to preserve life, but not at any cost. There comes a time in all cases where doctors can, and indeed must, tell patients that there is nothing further that medical science can do for them. For there may well come a time when further medical intervention is either useless or counter-productive, and nature must be allowed to take its course.

However, while it may well be the case that families are ready to accept the sad decision that palliative care only is to be offered from now on in the case of a beloved grandparent in her 90s, it is quite understandable that the parents of a very young child may not be willing to accept a similar medical judgment. That presumably explains why this case has ended up in court. Charlie’s doctors and Charlie’s parents found themselves in profound disagreement, of the sort that could only be resolved in the High Court.

Analysing the Republican voter

David Brooks at the New York Times has a go at analysing why it seems that Republican voters seem happy to vote against their own economic interests. 

He takes the "they have a residual sense of independence and dislike of government that came from the American frontier communities" line, which puts a somewhat noble sheen on the matter.  Who can dislike a person who declines a government handout on the grounds that they would rather make their own way in life and fully control their own destiny?

The trouble is, as a very large number of people in comments are saying, lots of Republican voters actually want to hold onto their government benefits (in the form of Medicare, veteran's entitlements, etc) as strongly as they want the right to have an armoury in the basement.   Hence, Trump support comes from his promising everything to his base - less government and more government at the same time.   Also, there's no doubt that Trump played up to resentment of others - countries that have done well with globalisation, migrants (both legal and illegal, when you think about it), blacks and feminists. 

I think Brooks was too generous - he should have been more critical of the urge of Republicans to vote for their emotional interests, especially when they have been conditioned and informed by the grossly misleading echo chamber of the Right wing media - which has to take an enormous amount of blame for the sad state of American politics.    (He could have then spread the same criticism around to argue that for those on the Left for whom identity politics is everything might also sometimes be voting for their emotional interests.   The thing is, though, someone for whom - say - gay marriage is the most important issue is at least not as likely to jeopardise generations of descendants to planet wide problems by denying science on climate change.)  

Movies

July might turn out to have a couple of good movies.   Despite my Nolan skepticism, I still think the trailer for Dunkirk makes it look very realistic and worth seeing (let's see if he can stuff up the dialogue enough to make it a failure); and this new Spiderman has such good reviews, most indicating that it's pretty funny, that I think I need to see it.

Incidentally, I have never seen Memento, by Nolan, and for some reason it is not available on Google Play.  I wonder why. 

More evidence for the sad (angry) sacks

I noted recently that Catallaxy is mentally unhealthy for its commenters, because its misleadingly reassuring echo chamber effect isolates them from reality, increasing their anger at why the media/rest of the world just don't get it.   More evidence:

Turnbull is preferred as Liberal leader to Tony Abbott by 68-32, with Coalition voters favouring Turnbull 73-27. However, One Nation voters prefer Abbott by a massive 77-23. It appears that as Turnbull has become more centrist over the last two months, the hard right has moved towards One Nation.

In ReachTEL’s forced choice better PM question, Turnbull leads by 54-46, a two point gain for Turnbull since the May Channel 7 ReachTEL. Same sex marriage is supported by 62-26, with 59% in favour of a plebiscite to decide the issue, while 41% prefer a parliamentary vote. 64% thought penalty rates should be higher on Sunday than Saturday.

Hey, a new phone

So, I did go and buy myself the Moto G5 Plus.   $350 from Good Guys, on special. 

May I carry on about the amazing abilities of smartphones, again, and how everyone should be in awe every day they use one?

Given this phone apparently has a gyro and accelerometer sensors, I have been telling my kids that if only I could plug it into a rocket, I suspect it could navigate me to the Moon and back.  (I also have a fantasy that it will be stolen by an alien trying to repair its defective flying saucer.) 

Anyway, all looking good so far, but setting up stuff on it reminds me again about what a problem it is keeping track of multiple account passwords these days.   I've not found the best solution for this.  Sure, it's convenient setting everything up to remember passwords, but when you need to type them in again somewhere else a year later...

I do like the way Yahoo mail can be set to log in on a computer by answering a message on your phone confirming that you are trying to log in.  I now occasionally get notification this way of attempted log ins from funny parts of the world (I think it has happened 3 times in the past 6 months.)   That's sort of a worry on the one hand, but on the other, it feels good to know you've defeated an attempt from somewhere.

Advice to a reader

So, JC, you're all taken with your nicotine being delivered through an e-cigarette now, instead of your regular tobacco hit.  (I know, you didn't smoke much.)  Anyway, thought you might be interested in parts of this article from 2016, at Live Science:

But regardless of how the nicotine is delivered — whether through e-cigs or conventional cigarettes — it still has effects on the body. The drug is a cardiovascular stimulant, and can potentially worsen heart disease in people who already have severe heart conditions. However, it's not known whether nicotine alone can cause heart disease in people who don't have heart problems, said Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco researcher and professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health.

But there's some evidence that e-cigarettes can have a substantial effect on blood vessels, and may increase people's heart attack risk in that way, Glantz said....

Studies evaluating whether e-cigarettes are less harmful than cigarettes have been inconclusive, according to a review of studies published in the journal Tobacco Control in May 2014.

Moreover, the long-term health effects in people who get nicotine in a vaporized form over time are not known, Siegel said. It's also unclear whether propylene glycol, a known irritant to the respiratory tract, could result in lung problems after decades of vaping, he said.

And because e-cigarettes have been on the market for only about 10 years, there have been no long-term studies of people who have used them for 30 to 40 years. Therefore, the full extent of e-cigs' effects on heart and lung health, as well as their cancer-causing potential, over time is not known, Glantz told Live Science.

 And since that article, you might care to read this one:

Electronic cigarettes may increase the risk of heart disease, researchers at UCLA report.
The team found that two risk factors for heart disease were elevated in 16 e-cigarette users compared with 18 nonsmokers.

And this one:  

Our findings indicate that Electronic cigarette use, when adjusted for other risk factors, is associated with a 42 % increased odds of myocardial infarction. This increase in odds is consistent regardless of traditional cigarette smoking history. More studies are needed to further assess this risk.

You can thank me later...

Poor decisions - parents and courts

I've said many times here that I am not in favour of euthanasia laws, but I do get very irritated by reflexive conservative Christian attitudes to prolonging life by artificial means in cases where the doctors want to withdraw life support, and parents or relatives disagree.

Why do conservatives always assume that the parents know what is best?

The irony in the current Baby Gard case (which Trump has opportunistically weighed in on - groan), is that the US neurologist who has offered to try an experimental treatment is explicitly saying that it would be a "treatment, not a cure", and at most may achieve this:

He said the therapy, which would be tried for six months, would provide a "small chance" of a meaningful improvement in Charlie's brain function.

"[Charlie] may be able to interact. To smile. To look at objects," he said.

Charlie at the moment is (apparently) completely reliant on ventilation and a feeding tube, and is not conscious.   Given that I'm sure both ventilation and feeding tubes are distressing if you are awake, at least he is not suffering.   (True, a young, awake baby would not understand what is happening, but the physical sensation of having feeding tube and ventilation is presumably detectable by a conscious baby, and is surely not pleasant.)

It would seem that, at best, the neurologist is suggesting that he might be improved enough to gain consciousness, but if that happens while he is still reliant on a feeding tube and ventilator, that is where the true suffering would begin!

Don't the parents recognise that risk?

The mother (and her supporters) have been quoted as saying that even if this treatment doesn't work, it's worth the experiment because that is how effective treatments might be found.   I can see the "in principle" reasoning for that - but no acknowledgement that a partially successful treatment sounds likely to increase this baby's suffering before his ultimate death. And,  it very much seems that there is no real medical opinion that there will ever be a cure for mitochondrial disease, given the problem is at the cellular level.   

Look,  these cases are tragic and he is a really beautiful baby, but the fact remains that highly emotional parents, and conservative Christians who believe in miracles, may well not be capable of making the best decisions in cases like this.   There is a strong case to be made that it is the English doctors and the judges backing them who are the ones being more compassionate here.

Therapy animals

There is quite a bit of common sense on display in this article about the therapy animal fad in America.   The idea has definitely gotten a bit out of hand: 

A therapy-animal trend grips the United States. The San Francisco airport now deploys a pig to calm frazzled travelers. Universities nationwide bring dogs (and a donkey) onto campus to soothe students during finals. Llamas comfort hospital patients, pooches provide succor at disaster sites and horses are used to treat sex addiction.

And that duck on a plane? It might be an emotional-support animal prescribed by a mental health professional.

As some in the article say, it's hardly surprising to find that a lot of troubled people find some comfort with being around animals - but bumping it up into a form of therapy can get more than a little silly (as with the duck story.)   I was interested to read this:

Using animals in mental health settings is nothing new. In the 17th century, a Quaker-run retreat in England encouraged mentally ill patients to interact with animals on its grounds. Sigmund Freud often included one of his dogs in psychoanalysis sessions. Yet the subject did not become a research target until the American child psychologist Boris Levinson began writing in the 1960s about the positive effect his dog Jingles had on patients.

I was also wryly amused by the therapy bear cub gone wrong story:

But there are good reasons for rigorous research on animals and mental health. ... Crossman pointed to a 2014 incident at Washington University in St. Louis as an example of animal therapy gone wrong. A bear cub brought to campus during finals week nipped some students, causing a rabies scare that almost ended with the animal being euthanized. More generally, Serpell said, the popular idea that pets make you happier “is not a harmless distortion. … If the public believes that getting an animal is going to be good for them, many times an unsuitable person will get an unsuitable animal, and it doesn’t work out well for either.”

Guns in America and the Trump effect

It seems to me that it now has to be a case of victims being within special categories in American mass shootings before the world media pays that much attention to them.   Hence, while a nightclub shooting where 28 are injured, or a hospital rampage by a mad doctor, both get noticed, media attention moves on pretty fast.   I'm suspecting that it is partly the Trump effect - the media is so amazed at the mental 13 year old who became President**that it crowds out attention to all but the most spectacular examples of death by gun.

I also have been meaning to post about the new study that indicates that right to carry laws in the US do not make States safer.  Quite the opposite.

It's one of the great ironies that rabid guns rights advocates are also likely to be climate change denialists who believe (even if they don't put it this way) that correlation does not mean causation when it comes to increasing CO2 and rising global temperatures, yet they won't apply the same rule to decreasing crime rates and looser gun laws, where it actually deserves to be applied*.    This recent study address that particular issue.

I liked the concluding remarks in The Atlantic interview with one of the study's authors (linked above):

Ewing: Is the general takeaway that gun owners in these states are more likely to commit crimes because they are allowed to be armed all the time?

Donohue: The one thing that the paper puts most of its focus on is estimating what the net impact is. There could be some beneficial use of these guns, but overall the harm outweighs the benefit. And the harm comes in many different forms.

For example, the Philando Castile case in St. Paul, Minnesota. [After he was stopped by police,] he immediately told the officer that he was a right-to-carry holder and had a gun, which you’re advised to do. And then the officer shot at him seven times. It scares the hell out of people when they think someone has a gun. Obviously, that right-to-carry holder wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he ended up getting killed anyway.

When more people are carrying guns, things can get more heated. There are times in which the gun could be involved in a way that thwarts a crime, but for the same reason that the officer shot Castile, guns tend to escalate the situation.

The NRA offers a very simplistic view to the public in the way in which the world works, which is: There are all these bad guys out there, but now we’re going to give you a gun, and that means you’re going to be able to be the good guy who saves your life and the lives of other people.

But [with more] people carrying around guns—they’re going to be losing them, they’re going to be stolen, there are going to be more criminals with guns, and the criminals are more likely to carry guns because they know there are guns out there. For a whole array of reasons, more concealed-gun-carrying outside the home pushes up violent crime.

*  And in climate change it has been applied, in the sense that scientists have excluded other explanations. 

**  I think it's a bit silly of CNN to be saying the tweet encourages violence against reporters - but it does show the juvenile mind of Trump.

Boxing observed

I've never paid (much) attention to boxing, but having a bout on in my city which attracted a stadium audience of fifty odd thousand, a large international viewership, and a week long build up in the media, I did notice it today.  A few observations:

a.  It was, I take it, a close win; but the sport does seem to have a credibility problem if some well known figures within it are going to carry on as much about a close decision not going the way they thought it should as they did today.

b.  I won't go into the matter of concussion and blood and whether it's a sport that really should be endorsed as entertainment.   (As it happens, I don't really have a strong view.)   But I was annoyed to see on TV in the post match wrap up that our Lord Mayor (who was thrilled with the national and international publicity his city received for hosting it) had a couple of young, bare female torsos standing prominently behind him at his press conference table.  Really, isn't the quasi-gladiatorial nature of the enterprise appealing enough to the average male viewer without throwing in titillating female (un)dress too?  I thought the promoters could do a fair bit towards making it seem a sport more connected to modern mores if they avoided adding superfluous heterosexual  messaging into the mix. 

c.  One thing I don't get about boxing at this level is how those who want to be close to the action will get all dressed up for it, as if it's as sophisticated as going to a ritzy European opera house.   (Bear in mind, I have never been to an opera - I'm just trying to think of a form of entertainment most associated with dressing up for a night out.)  Sure, it may well just be a factor of the wealth required to get an expensive seat, but if you're going to a show that appeals at a visceral level, why sit at it in a suit and look on impassively, as most seem to do.   I have always wondered about this, as it strikes me as very incongruous - I have this feeling that, by rights, it should be more like how viewing Shakespeare in his day at the Globe was depicted in Shakespeare in Love - pretty rough and ready regardless of how much money you have. 

Kon-tiki revisited

I never read the book, but I'm sure it was lying around the house when I was a child, so I at least knew about it; but it does seem that the 20th century fame of the Kon-Tiki expedition has faded a lot from popular memory.  (I'm extrapolating from the fact that my teenage son didn't know about it - but I think I'm right.)

However, one serendipitous off shoot of reading reviews of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie was that I learned that the same Norwegian directors had made a pretty well regarded movie of the expedition, simply called Kon-Tiki.  And, as luck would have it, it is available on SBS on Demand, and has been for some time.

We watched it last night, and it is a genuinely well made and engaging movie.  I was not expecting it to be in English, and I was particularly impressed with the visual realism of nearly all of it - particularly with the sharks and other sea creatures lurking around much of the time. 

I see from reading the Wikipedia entry that the movie does take considerable liberties with the true, on water, events - I guess that was probably inevitable, and I would recommend not reading Wiki until after viewing the movie, so as to not spoil a key scene.  

In a way, this doesn't really worry me, as the real voyage and the theory behind it (that Polynesians had come from Peru) was never thought to be probable in the first place, and that still pretty much stands to this day despite the raft's journey.  (Although it looks like look there was a genetic mixing of South Americans with Polynesians at least in Easter Island, but when and how that happened is still unclear.)  On my "should I be annoyed with the historical inaccuracies or not" scale, I'm happy to put this one into the "no, as it encouraged me to double check on the real facts" category.

Anyway, well worth watching.

Morning Trump

This Trump, Morning Joe warfare is quite the thing, isn't it?

The Washington Post story has thousands of comments following it, mostly despairing about Trump's behaviour, of course.  Some were amusing:

Another WAPO article lists the criticism of Trump from cable tv commentators.   Worth reading.