Commentary of note on Venezuela

The New York Times had a very critical editorial out very quickly.  

Here's a gift link to it.

In this topsy turvy world, a long tweet Marjorie Taylor Green put out (although I feel certain she would not have written it herself) basically repeated all of the points made by the NYT!  

The best contribution of the Washington Post was an article explaining the history behind the claim that Venezuela had "stolen" American oil, land and assets.  As you might expect, there is a mountain of nuance to note about that claim.  Or to put it another way:  it's a gross exaggeration and self serving take on what happened.  Here's the gift link.

Over at CNA, I thought this part of their article "Was the US capture of Venezula's President lawful" was exactly on point:

Experts in international law said the Trump administration had muddled the legal issues by claiming the operation was both a targeted law enforcement mission and the potential prelude to long-term control of Venezuela by the US.

"You cannot say this was a law enforcement operation and then turn ‍around and say now we need to run the country," said Jeremy Paul, a professor at Northeastern University specialising in constitutional law. 

"It just doesn't make any sense." 

Meanwhile, it's been a bit weird watching the European leaders hold back from criticising Trump.   I know no one wants to praise Maduro, but I still don't see the point of holding back on criticism of Trumpian tactics, which have including killing a 100 or so people on boats on the high seas as a form of extra judicial execution.

Anyway, one of the odd things that I haven't seen anyone say yet is that if a group of Muslims managed to somehow kidnap Netanyahu for a trial at the ICJ, Trump's action could well be cited as a precedent.   

 

GPS jamming explained

Well, this is a topic that doesn't get much attention, and sounds like a real worry for civilian aviation in particular:  the ease and frequency of blocking GPS, as explained at the Washington Post.

Huge if true

I see that X continues to be the home for every type of conspiracy and "secret knowledge" nutters you can imagine:

Happy "low expectations for 2026" (and a look back)

Perhaps that's the right way to start the year?   Just trust that if the world doesn't have a nuclear exchange in 2026, it'll be a "good" year?   

I mean, there is the possibility that good things could happen this year:  Republican "centrists" (yeah, I know) being sufficiently chastised by Democrat wins in mid term elections to actually start opposing Trump and his worst minions?   China might have its leadership replaced by someone not so devoted to forcing re-unification with Taiwan?   Putin might fall off the perch - although I have no idea whether there is any potential successor who is likely to be more moderate.  (Well, same can be said about China.)    

Look, the new Steven Spielberg film might be his best in a long time?   (The trailer worries me a bit - it features Catholic nuns a few times, and few American movies seems to depict them realistically.   And it does  seem to be rather X Files-ish looking.  On the other hand, we never have had a decent film that runs with the Jacques Vallee take about how the UFO phenomena is  much more closely tied to paranormal mysteries than to alien visitation, and my impression is that this is what the movie is about.   Or birds and deer not being real, perhaps?)

Anyway, you all know I like "big picture" takes on history that help put things in an interesting new  perspective.   There's a good one in the New York Times today by an American historian who considers the situation in the US during the so-called Gilded Age (at the latter part of the 19th century) and now.  He brings up lots of points that I would not consider common knowledge, and analyses change in the country in more of a "zeitgeist-y" way that seems fairly novel, and above a simple Left/Right political view.  

Go read it all, but here is a taste:

In the last decades of the 1800s, horses left millions of pounds of manure on Manhattan’s streets every day. Life expectancy sank to its lowest levels in U.S. history, and politics reached new heights of violence.

By the early 1900s, Americans were living longer than ever. Elections grew so peaceful that some worried about “apathy in political circles.” And gardeners in a cleaned-up New York were complaining that “well-rotted manure is becoming quite scarce.”

Something changed between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gilded Age ended. Wouldn’t it be useful today — trapped deep in what many call a second Gilded Age — to understand the forces that produced and then restrained a similar era in our past?....

If you track political polarization, income inequality, social distrust and many other metrics over the past 150 years, you get a U-shaped curve, charting the ways our nation went from a chaotic splintering in the 19th century to a rigid new order in the 20th to our disrupted present. It looks like a great national seesawing, as we toggled between eras of release and eras of restraint....

This section has some facts I was not familiar with: 

In one Wisconsin county, 89 percent of the teenage males present in 1860 were gone by 1870, and 90 percent of those present in 1870 were gone 10 years later. They clumped in new places. Chicago had 200 residents in 1832 and one million by 1890. Newcomers flooded in. From 1850 to 1914, one-quarter of Europe’s work force emigrated to the Americas.

At its best, these disruptions meant new prosperity and new freedoms. From 1860 to 1890, national wealth quintupled, and political turnout peaked. Gilded Age society often felt bold and innovative, blossoming with utopian visions, spiffy technologies and inventive cocktails.  

But it came with a heartbreaking recklessness. America laid more railroad track than anywhere else in the world, but corporations rarely bothered to ensure safety on their lines. Nearly 200,000 people died in train accidents from 1885 to 1900 alone.

In politics, power changed hands in the most corrupt, most violent elections in our history. In 40 years Americans witnessed the assassinations of three presidents and multiple governors, members of Congress, mayors and election officials, plus ethnic riots and racial terrorism from Manhattan to Memphis and beyond.

The very meaning of authority changed. Gilded Age leaders seized power, then wielded it to the hilt. Unlike traditional aristocrats, raised as caretakers of what they’d inherited, the new tycoons created and destroyed “without restraints of culture,” as Demarest Lloyd put it. America’s forgettable presidents were an exception, but the party bosses who ran things behind the scenes followed similar rules, employing dirty tricks and open crimes. 

His basic argument in the rest of the piece is the decision to exercise "restraint" (or "limits") in the 20th century.   He paints this as a movement that doesn't fit into a simple Left/Right viewpoint, and to a degree, argues it was cultural:

People began to talk about a new style: American cool. Employers, parenting experts and fashion columnists instructed Americans to control their emotions, in contrast to the Victorian love of bold passions. Instead of baroque sentences packed with complex clauses and grandiloquent vocabulary, people began to speak in a shorter, terser style. Literature, art and fashion shifted to a clean, stripped-down, modern aesthetic. 

Anyway, it's an interesting take, I think.   

  

 

A quote for the new year

This is from the end of one of those no specific author, philosophically inclined, YouTube channel video about Blaise Pascal, and I certainly hope it's not AI generated!:

"History is a constant re-invention of hope and meaning in all forms - mythological, technological, philosophical.  We keep questioning, answering, building, destroying. Questioning, answering, building, destroying.  We can't help ourselves from helping ourselves."

 Sounds about right?

A much needed column (and post)

All reasonable people are upset about the recent, current state of the world, but I see that Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times has taken on the brave taste of trying to partially remedy that in his column  In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up.   (It's a gift link - go read the whole thing.)

Here's how he opens:

This is the season when I customarily argue that the year just ending has been the best in human history.

So I dutifully sat at my laptop and tried to write something along the lines of: Sure, democracy is eroding, politics are toxic, wars are raging, America is losing allies, the planet is burning, and young people will never afford homes. But other than that …

I’ve done these “best year ever” columns annually, irritating Eeyores. But now I just can’t. The year 2025 was a setback for humanity — and unfortunately, the United States is a reason for the retreat. 

He nonetheless goes on to point out the ways in which, despite the dire setbacks of 2025, there are reasons to be hopeful of more progress in certain areas.  Some examples:

A starting point is to gain perspective and acknowledge that in the arc of human history, we’re still in good shape. While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000.

It also seems likely that the positive trajectories will resume after slippage in 2025 and 2026. The Gates Foundation forecasts that while the trend of declining child deaths will be slowed, deaths will at least drop in the coming years. Similarly, the share of children stunted by malnutrition will most likely be lower in 2030 than it is now, the foundation suggests, but perhaps not as low as if aid funding had been sustained.

Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 percent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school — and those educated women transform families, economies and societies. 

 And further down:

Another area that inspires me with its progress is clean energy. Climate change is still an enormous challenge, but energy economics have turned upside down and now offer a path forward — if we are willing to take it. My old college buddy Bill McKibben, who perhaps has done more than anyone else to raise alarms about climate change and who often as a result sounded rather bleak, is now surprisingly upbeat.

In his terrific new book, “Here Comes the Sun,” about the revolution of solar energy, Bill acknowledges all the challenges, but adds, “We’re also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history — something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity.”

It took 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in 1954 to install the first terawatt of solar power on the planet, in 2022. It took two years to get the second.

This is because solar is increasingly cheap and simple — balcony solar systems are common in parts of Europe — and because batteries are making immense strides. Remember the line in “The Graduate” about the bright future to be found in “one word,” “plastics”? Today that one word might be “batteries.” 

This reminds me, I never linked to this recent article in Science magazine, which you should be able to read for free: 

Turning point
Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline—a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy

The topic is clear from the title, and it gives the tiniest bit of reason for optimism.  But the challenge is still enormous, as shown on this illustration in the article:

 

This is a test

So, I starting using the new Lenovo tablet, and yeah, it's impressive.  The matte screen looks good, and the colours and screen resolution are great for a cheapo device.  I haven't tried reading on it much yet, but that will come.

One of blogging apps doesn't want to work on it, though. So I'm trying the Blogger app itself, which I think many people hate.

Let's add a screenshot..

Yes, this seems...less than ideal.  

Oh.  It published ok.  But there was no adjusting the image size within the app.  

From the garden...

It's hard to believe that the universe will ever see greater, unwarranted, grovelling endorsement of narcissism than that which surrounds Trump

New battleships: President Trump announced on Monday that the Navy would build two new “Trump Class” battleships, with the eventual goal of acquiring 25. The announcement by Mr. Trump was the latest example of the president rebranding an aspect of the federal government in his image. The Navy secretary, John Phelan, called the vessels “just one piece of the president’s golden fleet that we’re going to build.” 

(From the Washington Post.)

 (From the New York Times.)

Let's rush towards Christmas (and 70) with more depressing news!

I was only vaguely aware of estimates of dementia according to age, but this Nature article puts some more certainty to it:

Nearly one in ten people over the age of 70 have Alzheimer’s disease dementia, shows a first-of-its-kind study that paired blood-based markers and clinical assessments to study the disease in Norway¹.

That prevalence is in line with previous estimates for some other white populations². But there were also unexpected differences, including higher disease rates than anticipated in individuals older than 85...

The study, published today in Nature, shows that blood-based tools can improve epidemiological estimates of neurodegenerative disease.

But exactly how to use these tests remains controversial, warns Jason Karlawish, a geriatrician and co-director of the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Blood-based markers can be helpful for physicians treating people with dementia and for answering research questions, but they aren’t ready to be rolled out widely as health screening tools.

“It is the kind of test that, in the wrong hands, could cause a lot of harm,” says Karlawish, who was not involved in the study.

 Of course, things get worse the older you get:

Around 10% of participants over the age of 70 had dementia and AD pathology, showing both cognitive impairment and high pTau217, they report. Another 10% had mild cognitive impairments and high pTau217. And 10% had high pTau217 but no signs of cognitive impairment, which the authors refer to as preclinical AD.

These findings are broadly in line with expectations, but there were surprises, too.

Some 25% of people aged 85–89 had dementia and AD pathology, up from previous estimates of around 7% for men and 13% for women in this age group in Western Europeans3. And the incidence of preclinical AD in younger individuals was 8% in those aged 70–74, down from a previous estimate of around 22%.

Anders Gustavsson, a member of the team that compiled the earlier estimates, welcomes the latest data. “I’m not surprised that this study gets somewhat different numbers,” says Gustavsson, who is an adviser to the health-economics consultancy Quantify Research in Stockholm.

The discrepancies probably reflect selection bias, says study co-author Anita Lenora Sunde, a physician and dementia researcher at Stavanger University Hospital in Norway. Previous estimates were made by recruiting participants for brain scans, and people with dementia might not have wanted to or been able to participate. 

The article eventually gets cut off at a paywall, just as it notes that the study indicates (as many others seem to) that higher education may have a protective effect.   Good!

 

 

Mostly a problem from the Right

Axios has this good article about a recurring problem, and I will be naughty and post it here in full:

 

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.

• Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.

Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.

• The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.

Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.

• But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.
• Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."

But the frenzy only accelerated from there.

• Popular right-wing figures and large anonymous accounts cast Kharbouch's identity — Palestinian, openly queer and outspoken on Gaza — as inherently suspicious.
• Some accounts even cited amateur "gait analysis" of Kharbouch at a pro-Palestinian protest as supposed evidence that he was the shooter, alleging he was a product of campus extremism.

"The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare," Kharbouch said in a statement. "I woke up Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed toward me online."

• "Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech," he added, before noting that his harassment is "nothing" compared to the plight of Palestinians.
• Kharbouch's lawyers said his web pages were taken down as a "precaution" after "far-right influencers posted hateful vitriol" seeking to connect him to the shooting.

Between the lines: Online sleuths have a long history of misfires, most infamously during the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. But what has changed is the speed of misinformation, and the influence of those spreading it.

• Shaun Maguire, a prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist, claimed Kharbouch was "very likely" the shooter and falsely suggested that the slain MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was Jewish and pro-Israel.
• Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with outsized influence in the Trump administration, continued to claim the shooter was a "Muslim who shouted 'Allahu Akbar'" — even after authorities identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

• Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.

The other side: Not all crowdsourced attention after the Brown shooting was harmful.

• Authorities interviewed the author of a Reddit post that flagged a suspicious man and vehicle on Brown's campus, and garnered information that ultimately "blew this case right open," according to Neronha.

The big picture: In this era of hyper-partisanship, weakened content moderation and incentivized engagement, the Brown episode fits a familiar and troubling pattern.

• Earlier this month, the conservative website The Blaze retracted a story that falsely identifed a former law enforcement officer as the Jan. 6 pipe bomber — based on "gait analysis."
• In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, social platforms were flooded with misinformation — including AI-generated deepfakes — before authorities clarified who was responsible.
• For months, podcaster Candace Owens has promoted unsubstantiated allegations that Turning Point USA staff helped cover up Charlie Kirk's assassination, igniting a MAGA civil war.

The bottom line: Armchair sleuths thrive in the chaos after mass violence, amplified by platforms that reward speed and outrage. But it's innocent people who are left to absorb the fallout when the claims collapse.

As it says, the worst thing about this is how it is nearly always "consequence free" for those whose guesses turn out to be wrong.   

Windows regrets

Amongst the many things that have been annoying me greatly in the last few months (I can't wait for 2025 to end) has been the switch to Windows 11.  I put it off for as long as possible, and I guess I am glad I did at least that.

The persistent problem:  when I take the work laptop home and connect it to my home network (something I used to do regularly under Windows 10 with no issues at all), it connects to the internet, but will not see all websites.  It has a particular dislike for some big media ones - the New York Times and Washington Post (but, oddly enough, I can get to The Guardian) - and it has also affected banking websites.  I just get an instant message that it can't find the website.   It always lets me get to this blog, which allows me to complain, at least!  Emails are OK.

The thing is, on one occasion this happened, the laptop was able to do a diagnostic which fixed it.  I thought that was the end of it.   I recall getting a message saying what the fix involved, but I have forgotten what it said.  I also remember something about "this diagnostic tool is being moved/will no longer be available" or something like that.

And then, the problem returned the next time I bought the laptop home.  (I don't bring it home every night.)  I have tried running diagnostics again, but it just says I am connected to the internet, the network all looks OK.   It makes some other suggestions, which all seem useless.

Searching the internet for what causes it brings up many, rather complicated, issues to check.   It seems it is not one of the commonest issues.

Maybe I should try searching Reddit. 

Anyway, it is very annoying to have an issue which Windows once knew how to fix, and then has forgotten.

When is the replacement for 11 coming? 

 

Nice of it to put some effort in to wear Christmas colours...

Why do people excuse Trumpian inventions?

Of course, so many words have been written already on Trump's intensely narcissistic and offensive comment on Rob Reiner's death.   There were few who tried to support it, but in the local scene I saw that old JC at New Catallaxy, who I think occasionally might come here, refused to condemn it because Reiner had promoted the "Russia conspiracy" and been mean to Trump, so Trump could be mean in response (even in death.)

Even ignoring the fact that JC is part of the intense stupidity that has engulfed MAGA world that refuses to believe the reports of bipartisan committees on the involvement of Russia in support of Trump, what I don't get is this:  how can anyone possibly excuse the fact that Trump went on a narcissistic fantasy WITH ZERO EVIDENCE that Reiner was murdered because of his "Trump Derangement Syndrome".   I mean, it's an absolute invention (and an extremely unlikely one at that, given that the drug addled son was the suspect from the very start) that truly indicates a fabulist imagination so chronic that in many settings, you could see it cited as evidence for dementia and incapacity to make sound decisions.   

I mean, how are doctors going to reliably diagnose this man with dementia when he has invented bullshit, if not for his entire life, at least for the last couple of decades, and people just shrug and say "that's just Donald"?  

Given the attacks on Biden being tired and sometimes rambling, it just continues to be ridiculous that the media follows the MAGA line of "that's just Trump" when it comes to his continual lies and fabulist rhetoric.    

Complete science vandals

Against political point scoring

More on protein for us (almost) oldies

 In a Washington Post article:What a scientist who studies protein and healthy aging eats in a day:

The National Academy of Medicine says the amount of protein the average adult needs on a daily basis is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, or the equivalent of 0.36 grams per pound of body weight. That’s about 54 grams of protein for a 150-pound person — or roughly the amount of protein in a 4-ounce chicken breast and one cup of Greek yogurt. Some health influencers point out that this amount — known as the recommended dietary allowance, or RDA — is the bare minimum you need to avoid being malnourished and argue that you should be eating as much as one gram of protein per pound of body weight each day.

Phillips says the truth lies somewhere in the middle. He says that for optimal health, the average adult should aim to eat around 0.54 to 0.73 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. Eating this amount — along with regular bouts of strength training — can help you build and maintain lean muscle as you age and stave off conditions such as sarcopenia.  

Well, that's annoying how they jump between grams per kilogram and grams per pound!   If you are going metric for one, why not for both?   

Perplexity tells me it converts to 1.19g to 1.61g per kilogram.   

My previous post on this topic settled on 1.2g per kilogram, so this still sounds right... 

Random interesting video

This guy presents his videos very well, but only has 21K subscribers.  Looking at his channel, it seems he had occasional higher numbers on his videos, but the Almighty Algorithm must really hate him or something, because his usual views are in the mere hundreds.  It's hard to see why he keeps doing it!

But anyway, I thought this video about human monogamy was interesting:

 

A great time...for doomscrolling

What with Rob Reiner being murdered, Trump making it about himself (and still having his defenders in the process), the attempt to blame all criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank as being unfair anti-Semitism and lack of control of protest - this is a really good December for unhappy doomscrolling.

Maybe 2026 will be better... 

   

Bondi shooting

Now, I did say here in August that I didn't see the point in countries saying they recognised a Palestinian state when it was still (and remains today) hopelessly unclear how one was to be governed, and worried that it gave Hamas some sense of encouragement. 

That said, what a stupid Right wing tosser freakout we are seeing in blaming Australia's recognition of the state (in September - I don't think I have ever commented on it) for the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.

On Twitter X, your guaranteed source for commentary by Right wing tossers from all over the world, the freakout was happening before anyone even knew definitely what was happening.  The ABC was blamed for not mentioning fast enough that there was a Hanukkah festival happening; Channel 9 ruffled feathers by having a Muslim reporter on the scene.

Campbell Newman - now a libertarian party figure after ruining Brisbane's King George Square as Lord Mayor, and going on to be the least popular Premier we have ever seen - was reliably hyperventilating, as was clown head Rowan Dean whose outrage (that the Albanese government caused it) was enough to launch his permed head into orbit.

And now the Opposition Leader we are all waiting to be deposed - Susan Ley - is politicising it before the dead are buried:

‘Clear lack of leadership’ over antisemitism, Sussan Ley says

The opposition leader says there has been a “failure” to protect Jewish Australians.

She says there is “palpable anger” in the community and a sense of “bewilderment”.

Antisemitism in Australia has been left to fester … We have seen a clear failure to keep Jewish Australians safe. We have seen a clear lack of leadership in keeping Jewish Australians safe. We have a government that sees antisemitism as a problem to be managed, not evil that needs to be eradicated ...

 We’ve seen synagogues fire-bombed, orchestrated by foreign terrorist states. Every single day for the last two years the lives of Jewish Australians have been made harder by this rising tide of antisemitism.

Ley says she’s spoken to antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal this morning, who has been urging the government to respond to her report. 

 Here's my prediction:   unless there turns out to be some specific intelligence warning given to the government of plans for this attack, this will not have the political blowback the Liberals (and even nuttier Right) think it will.   That's because all normal people will see it as a revenge attack, likely by individuals acting alone, for the extent of the attack on Gaza in reaction to the wildly stupid terrorist attack on Israel.  And of course, it wasn't warranted, and statements of sympathy to Australian Jews are entirely appropriate.   

But only the stupidest of the stupid would say that the Albanese government encouraged it.    

Spielberg UFO freakout

One of the more amusing things on Twitter/X at the moment is the way all of the wildly gullible and very, very serious UFO believers are freaking out over the posters that have just made an appearance promoting next year's Spielberg movie (which is a return to science fiction and UFOs in particular).

Does it mean his movie will be part of the super secret government plan to soften the public for the disclosure of the reality of UFOs, or what they are about, or whatever?   (Or is it just, you know, an entertainment? I know which take I believe.)

And in a way, I would say that it has rehabilitated Spielberg in the mind of the Right, which previously had been holding him in some disdain for being a Hollywood Lefty.  But now, given that the recent wave of wild UFO claims has obviously come from the conspiracy world that is the natural mindset of gullible MAGA, it would seem some of them are hoping Spielberg is a good'un will help their cause, after all.

The poster itself (given that the plot of the movie seems a well kept secret) is a pretty great one for creating conversation:   

 I especially like that it is a bluejay  cardinal silouhette featuring prominently:  what role, exactly, are birds going to have in this movie? I don't normally associate them with knowledge of interplanetary visitors.  

Another six months to find out...