British strangeness continues

Graham Lineham being arrested when getting off a flight for being mean to some trans activist types on Twitter is all over the British media, apparently.   While it's clear that he has become unhealthily obsessed with the issue (and has drifted into believing Right wing nonsense on other issues as part and parcel of being on that side of a culture war), the controversy over the arrest is well deserved.

As I posted back in 2023, it's been clear for many, many years that Britain has an almost uniquely stupid way of involving police and arrest in matters of alleged "hate crime" when they should, at most, be left to civil actions or tribunals, like in nearly all other countries.   It's hard to believe that police think this is good use of their time;  yet you never seem to read of any internal unhappiness with their role, which is a tad surprising.   (It's hard to believe that courts don't think they have better things to worry about, too.)

If this arrest finally gets the government to actually change laws and processes into something less patently heavy handed and authoritarian-light, it may be worthwhile.

Not holding my breath, though; as I don't understand how it been left the way it is for so long already... 

  

Back to the big organ

 

As you see, I was sitting up close and personal with the QPAC concert hall's pipe organ on Sunday, as it was the 40th anniversary of the venue and they put on a bunch of free stuff, including a 45 minute organ recital, which was pretty great.

Clearly, though, when QPAC gives away free tickets (you still had to "book" and get your assigned seat), a lot of people who take tickets then don't bother showing up:

 It didn't fill up much more than that, despite the booking site that very morning indicating that there were only seats available in numbers up the back in the last 4 or five rows.   Even the side chorus seats, were I was sitting, was supposed to be nearly full, but there were heaps of seats left.

Anyhoo, I'll stop whining about lazy people who don't turn up, to note that the concert inspired me to re-listen to Saint-Saëns finale to his Organ Symphany, which I had seen performed at the same venue in 2019, as mentioned here.  (There's another post about the composer's personal life here. )

Listening to it again really blew me away:  it's both beautiful and thrilling.   Someone in comments following a nicely produced British performance said it's like the music you would hear on entering Heaven, and I completely get it.

This also led me down a Youtube path to a channel by an American guy called "The Ultimate Classical Music Guide" who has put out about 5,000 (!) videos up reviewing recordings of classical music (as well as other stuff - such as the most essential piece of famous composers.)     He reckons Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No 5 (known as the Egyptian concerto) is fantastic, and so I must listen to it soon too.

He (Dave Hurwitz) also recommended an old stereo recording of the Organ Symphony as the best, and listening to it on Spotify, I can see that it seems to have the bass-iest of organ sounds that you don't even notice on some other recordings.

(My gosh - Dave has been prolific.   Just searching Saint-Saëns comes up with scores of commentary videos.  And yet he only has 65,000 subscribers, which is not a huge amount by Youtube standards.)

Anyway, I figure its good to be discovering more classical stuff of interest as I get older.   Should contribute to helping stop eventual retirement from being boring!

Nosferatu noted

I watched last year's update of Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, on Netflix over the weekend.

It looks absolutely fantastic - the atmospheric cinematography, the sets, and even the elaborate wardrobe (especially of the female leads); as well a noticeably "painterly" framing of scenes that reminded me quite a bit of Barry Lyndon.   It is definitely worth watching for these features.

I guess I do have to say, though, that it continues the Eggers oeuvre of putting a huge amount of effort into atmosphere and unique creepy environments, but not so much into story resolution.

I wondered, too, with the appearance of plague rats with the arrival of the Count, whether a better story could be made by the whole story being shown to be a fever dream of someone dying of said disease, so that the vampire becomes just an imagined metaphor for it.  (I see that the movie is true to the old silent film of the same name, which I haven't seen.  Also, Dracula in Bram Stoker's book is apparently more of a generic plague metaphor.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed well enough and would recommend viewing.  Unless you're emotionally attached to pigeons.  :)

Consider the Chinese

I don't know anything about the guy who wrote this opinion piece in the Washington Post, but here is his take on why Chinese mythical stories are rather unusual to American tastes (or perhaps, to Western tastes generically.)   It's prompted by the lacklustre box office of the dubbed version of the animated Chinese movie Ne Zha 2.  Here are the key paragraphs, which seem to make valid points:

Enormous casts, with key characters introduced suddenly in the middle of stories and others dying or disappearing just as suddenly? Check. Plotlines that are so intricate they require spreadsheets to track, with villains and heroes constantly betraying one another, embracing like brothers and then betraying one another again? Check. Gods and demons switching allegiances between good and evil so rapidly that the terms “god” and “demon” lose any kind of relevance? Check, check, check.

And yes, these epics often feature the tonal whiplash of slapstick comedy and juvenile toilet humor paired with high-minded musings about the nature of morality and the purpose of humanity.....

But the biggest difference is a fundamental expectation of what a full story with a beginning, middle and end looks like. Western stories are rooted in a hero’s journey formula in which an individual protagonist is plucked out of nowhere, achieves greatness through luck or talent, defeats monstrous evil, and subsequently receives their reward of a kingdom, true love or happiness ever after. They tend to be linear, goal-oriented and focused on progress.

They focus on collectives that have fallen out of harmony — sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes because of outside threats, sometimes for no reason other than the passage of time and the turning of cosmic cycles — and that must go through a seemingly endless series of shifts and adaptations to reach a new balance. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t heroes. It does mean that there often isn’t a singular hero or one correct — and “good” — point of view.

In that way, they reflect China itself, which has more than a billion people and a history that stretches back millennia. Americans are used to thinking of their history as a continuous ascent toward greatness (occasionally interrupted, which makes necessary a “return” to that path of greatness). China is more culturally resigned to the notion that everything is temporary, good and bad are relative (and frequently switch places), and instead of “happily ever after,” humans should settle for “peaceful … for now.” 

More American "hard to believe"

*   Why the hell does anyone care about a old timey restaurant chain changing its logo????    Sure, masked employees of the government are snatching people off the street and locking up the innocent for weeks at a time, and threatening to send people to God forsaken foreign country prison, but a logo change is the crisis.

*  Elon Musk starts sucking up to Trump again, when it suits him; joining the Mad Right's neverending conspiracy theorising about Soros:

 * Elon is also real excited that his latest Starship test launch didn't blow up.   But, seriously, doesn't this photo (posted by Musk himself) show that his spaceship has a lot of work to do on its heat shield:

*  Man with brain worm history and a voice like a frog can diagnose kids' medical issues just by walking past them:

 

"A lot of people are saying..."

As gleaned from my very recent internet consumption:

*   LLMs and AI, and AGI, have all been massively overhyped.   The impetus for the sudden spread of this view seems to be the poorly received ChatGPT5, and a couple of papers saying that LLMs are not a way to get to AGI anyway.   

*   A stockmarket massive correction, if not crash, is definitely on its way.  The impetus for this one:  an irrational looking continuing rise in markets despite the nuttiness of the Trump tariffs regime and the objective reality, demonstrated daily, that the USA  is led by someone who understands nothing but is persuaded by whoever praises him most.  (Man, those cabinet meetings where the first hour or two is spent in praising Dear Leader are so bizarre, it's hard to credit.)

*  KPop Demon Hunters is really good.   (Actually, I watched it a couple of weekends ago, even before my 22 year old daughter watched it, and it is enjoyable.  It's quite funny and has a very authentic and upbeat Korean cultural vibe about it - no doubt because it was made by a bunch of American Korean people, I think.)

 

Further notes to self on having no self

I was listening to a podcast on the weekend from the Tricycle podcast channel featuring a guy talking about the key Buddhist idea of "no self".   He mentioned Hume as having a very similar take on there being no core soul - instead humans are just a constant stream of sensations - but made no comment on whether Hume was influenced by Buddhism.

Given that I have never paid much attention to Hume's philosophy, I was a bit surprised to learn that it does indeed sound as if his philosophy may have been Buddhist inspired.  But it seems there is only speculation as to how he might have heard of Buddhist ideas, as discussed in this article.  Here's the abstract:

Philosophers and Buddhist scholars have noted the affinities between
David Hume’s empiricism and the Buddhist philosophical tradition. I show
that it was possible for Hume to have had contact with Buddhist philosophical
views. The link to Buddhism comes through the Jesuit scholars at the Royal
College of La Flèche. Charles François Dolu was a Jesuit missionary who lived
at the Royal College from 1723–1740, overlapping with Hume’s stay. He had
extensive knowledge both of other religions and cultures and of scientific
ideas. Dolu had had first-hand experience with Theravada Buddhism as part
of the second French embassy to Siam in 1687–1688. In 1727, Dolu also had
talked with Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary who visited Tibet and made
an extensive study of Tibetan Buddhism from 1716–1721. It is at least possible
that Hume heard about Buddhist ideas through Dolu. 

As the article goes on to note:

...very little was known about Buddhism in the Europe of the 1730s, when Hume was writing A Treatise of Human Nature. Buddhism had died out in India, Japan was closed to the West, and European scholars in the Chinese court focused on the elite Confucian and Taoist traditions.2

The whole thing is worth reading.  It's always so interesting to note that Jesuits may have indirectly helped fuel enlightenment ideas due to the fact they were curious about everything.   

I liked this passage at the start of the article about the unclear way people can be influenced:

We know that psychologically, people can be influenced by ideas, even if they themselves forget the source of those ideas. In fact, this “source amnesia” is the rule rather than the exception. Information about sources is actually encoded in a different kind of memory, “autobiographical” or “episodic” memory, while ideas or facts themselves are stored in more robust “semantic memory.”4 We know that listeners can be influenced by ideas even when they are not advocated by the people who present them.5 Psychologically, arguing against a position, as well as arguing for it, can lead your interlocutor to encode and remember that position. And, psychologically and historically, even great philosophers
are not only influenced by other great philosophers (especially before they are great themselves!). They may pick up ideas from much more obscure figures who happen to be the people they find congenial or talk with on a regular basis—the equivalent of the guy in the next office.

And as for how Buddhist ideas are close to some of Hume's:

Three forms of this skeptical rejection are particularly relevant for early modern philosophy and for Hume. First, Buddhism rejects the idea of a metaphysically foundational God, though there may be particular gods. This is why writers like Desideri and La Loubere identified it as atheistic. Second, it rejects the idea that there is an independent substance that is the metaphysical foundation for our experience of the external world—the doctrine of “sunyata” or “emptiness.” Finally, and most radically, the tradition rejects the Cartesian idea that there is even a foundational self that is the locus of experience—the doctrine of “anatman” or “no-self.”

On the no-self position:

Within the general Buddhist tradition, Tsongkhapa argues for a particularly Humean “middle way” position. He argues that there is no foundational, ontological self, but that nevertheless the self-concept is psychologically real. “Thus there are two senses to the term ‘self’ a self conceived in terms of an intrinsic nature that exists by means of intrinsic being, and a self in the sense of the object of our simple natural thought ‘I am.’ Of these two the first is the object of negation by reasoning, while the second is not negated.” 93 Tsongkhapa’s “middle way” is reminiscent of the “turn” at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise where Hume claims that the skeptical arguments of the first part of the book need not undermine the pragmatics of everyday life (T 1.4.7; SBN 263–74) 

I should go finish listening to the podcast, because I thought he said that Hume - and someone else he referenced - allows for people being "persons", even though arguing that persons have no core self.   

Anyway, this all reminded me too of the whole lack of clarity within Buddhism of reincarnation if there is no self (something I think Western Buddhist academics who are into it for the meditation and calmness aspects like to ignore),  and also how Mahayana Buddhism is probably best understood as a reaction against the idea of Nirvana as extinction of the self.   Here was my post about that. 

All interesting, I reckon.... 

 

 

Nihilism, considered

David Brooks wrote a column last week which feels half wrong, and half right:  The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism.

He starts with what most people in comments agree is an overblown apologia for the Right wing culture wars (and their never-ending claim to victimhood, while simultaneously claiming that it's Lefties who are all about their "feelings"):

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.

In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game. 

He also makes this somewhat surprising claim:

This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites. 

I haven't had time to look it up, but I am pretty sure the social progressiveness/higher education link has been well studied?

Anyway, am I complaining too much, because I have made it clear here that I agree that aspects of the gender and sexuality culture wars have been taken too far?   I don't think so, because the HUGE point skipped over by Brooks is the poisonous nature of Right wing media and information network aligning itself with evangelical Christianity to directly demonise one side of politics as being literally evil, and replacing trust in expertise with endless conspiracy crap just because they think any policy endorsed by "elites" (who are usually liberal) is out to control and hurt them.

But the part that does ring a bit true is the rising appeal of nihilism to right wing numbskulls:

Other people, of course, don’t just cope; they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the postmodern assault.

But decades later, with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve. They are radical deconstructors. In a 2024 dialogue between Rufo and the polemicist Curtis Yarvin, published by the magazine IM-1776, Rufo acknowledged, “I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it.” This is a key difference between old-style conservatism and Trumpism.

But there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas are false and then conclude that all ideas are false. In the dialogue, Yarvin played the role of nihilist. He ridiculed Rufo for accomplishing very little and for aiming at very little with his efforts to purge this university president or that one.

“You are just pruning the forest,” Yarvin said dismissively. He countered that everything must be destroyed: In general, Yarvin is a monarchist, but in this dialogue he played a pure nihilist. One version of nihilism holds that the structures of civilization must be destroyed, even if we don’t have anything to replace them with. He argued that all of America has been a sham, that democracy and everything that has come with it are based on lies.

He goes on:

I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.”

He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.

Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. 

Brooks then reminds us that this isn't the first time nihilism has been on the rise, even though I don't think we are ever reminded of this in schooling:

Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.

It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good. 

Yeah, I didn't now that about that Heller book, and am not familiar with the problem with the inter-war period being described as an attack of nihilism before.  I should look it up.

Brooks' column then swings into the dubious again, by noting this:

One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. 

First, those figures sound very dubious.  And secondly, it's not like the most conservative Churches are helping with the dire rise of Trumpian authoritarianism in the US or some Eastern Eurpoean countries.  To the contrary, they are prone to hyping the culture wars and forgiving anything as long as they get their way with their pet obsessions (such as abortion and gay marriage).

As you might imagine, lots and lots of comments criticise the column along the lines I have indicated.  For example:

Brooks parachutes into a red area, puts together a couple of disparate groups, forms an opinion and jets away. I am a full throated, unapologetic liberal, well educated Democrat who lives in a VERY red part of Northern Michigan. What Brooks does not realize, or ignores, is how right wing media has indoctrinated rural communities for decades. I walk  into a car parts store where the radio is blaring Mark Levan or some such fool while attempting to buy a car battery. At a gas station after the 2020 election two nut jobs were commiserating over how the Dems stole the election and that they had proof! These are not isolated incidents. Sinclair, Fox, Murdoch and the Kochs, dominate the airwaves up here, laughing at the rubes  they influence and prey on, whereby they have effectively brainwashed a huge swath of the American public by turning lies into “facts”. Brooks, an educated elite himself, seems to imply that education is the problem! I know several well educated people that voted Trump and generally it centered around tax breaks, or their deep hatred of equal rights. Even education can’t always eliminate racial ignorance. The GOP is now a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of our democratic institutions, full stop. And Brooks shallow dive into socialization has way too many blind spots as regards indoctrination, which he ignores,  to take him seriously. Study Nazi Germany for a relevant comparison. 

 And:

A disappointing read in a few ways, David. First, as a contemporary of yours (ok, a few years older) who attended two of the most so-called liberal schools, I can tell a diversity of thoughts are taught and shared (see what I did using that divisive word "diversity"). Sadly, the conservatism of our past, articulated thoughtfully by George Will, William Buckley, and Bill Kristol (to name a few) is gone. Since the 90s it has been replaced by the blatant lies, hate and ignorance of Rush Limbaugh (was there ever a less deserving recipient of the Medal of Freedom? he should have buried with the Stone of Shame) and Hannity, Carlson, and Watters.   
Second, you did not articulate what the progressives have taught that has the conservatives wanting to destroy everything. Complain? Empathy? Come on. Those are great values that those young kids that you are so happy are now going to church are, sadly, likely not learning.

 There was a comment I saw earlier on that made reference to the problems all starting with the enlightenment in 1650 (or around then!), but I am having trouble finding it now.  It reminded me that I should really try to essay ideas that have been bumping around my head about the unfinished effects of a slow burn enlightenment that we are still not finished with, but there is always something else to do.    

So sad

This well written piece that was in the New York Times about parents whose daughter committed suicide, and they later got to read her "conversations" with ChatGPT in which she was discussing her feelings, was very sad to read.   

Fortunately, the chatbot's responses were not terrible, but the mother still feels it didn't "push back" as hard as a human therapist would.  

Seems to deserve more attention?

I'm surprised how little attention this has drawn:

For months, Israeli officials have spoken in increasingly strident tones about wanting Palestinians to leave Gaza en masse. Now, a potential destination being discussed is the impoverished, war-torn African nation of South Sudan, part of the broader Israeli push for wholesale emigration from the devastated enclave.

Unable so far to find countries willing to accept large numbers of Gazan refugees from the nearly two-year Israeli campaign against Hamas, Israel has held talks with South Sudan on taking them, according to officials and people briefed on the discussions.

Critics argue that forcibly and permanently removing Gazans from the enclave would amount to ethnic cleansing and a war crime. Noting some Israeli leaders’ hope to conquer Gaza and build Jewish settlements there, they have questioned whether Israel’s long-term vision is merely resettlement or expulsion.

Israeli officials have labeled their policy “voluntary migration,” framing it as a humanitarian move to allow Palestinians who wish to depart to freely do so. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was not “pushing out” Gazans, but did not say whether they would be allowed to return after the war with Hamas.

I mean, I'm as pessimistic as the next distant observer about the long term prospects for Gaza because it seems virtually ungovernable without radicalisation (and as such, hardly worth the billions and billions of dollars to rebuild).  But this mooted destination seems pretty crazy.

I did mention Indonesian islands for Palestinians in comments recently - but the problem is, where ever they move to, if the land is taken over by Right wing Israelis, it reeks too much of exactly the same type of territorial conquest we don't want Russia doing.   

Again (and I'm just engaging in a bit of Bond movie level fantasy here), the ideal solution might be for Gaza to be irradiated by a mad billionaire with a nuclear bomb so no one can inhabit it.  (And the Gazans get a nice fertile piece of land somewhere under Muslim rule to start again.)

 

On GDP per capita

Who is this woman, and why does she seem to make so much sense:

  

 

(I feel like those are impliedly sexist questions - but this video has been very popular and I have never heard of her before. Seems she's an American living in Germany now, and her channel is mainly about less than flattering takes on America in light of her European experience?)

I wonder if Putin had tears in his eyes while telling him...

 This next bit has even more " 'Sir', he said with tears in his eyes 'Sir I have to tell you ...' " energy:

 

When conservatives go mouldy

Jordan Peterson makes the news again over his peculiar health issues:

Controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is expected to take time off from “everything” after being exposed to a “particularly moldy environment,” his daughter says.

Mikhaila Peterson took to X on Wednesday afternoon to reveal the 63-year-old influencer-academic has been forced to postpone his podcasts and move his European tour after a “severe” flare-up of symptoms she said is connected with chronic inflammatory response syndrome.

The elder Peterson has openly discussed his experience with CIRS, a condition allegedly linked to mold exposure and immune system dysfunction, and claimed he was diagnosed in 2018. It is not an officially recognized medical diagnosis or considered a distinct disease by any significant public health agency.  

I read the daughter's tweet about it, where she went on about the carnivore diet even not being enough to defeat the mould!

I guess its not impossible for some people to have serious reactions to mould:  its probably next to impossible to tell which are really suffering from it, and which are psychosomatic.   

I also saw a brief bit of Jordan going off on Joe Rogan's show about climate change being a grand Leftist conspiracy to control all people who are Right and Good in the world.   It was this (pretty great!) video, which proves that Rogan is a dangerously ignorant influencer who is so dumb he can't be bothered reading an article to understand a graph it contains.  He is truly awful.  

 

As someone in comments says: 

I'm so tired of the dumbest people on earth having the most popular shows 

 

When conservatives go hippy

Another interesting NYT piece - this time about 75 year Republican Rick Perry going all in for a new hallucinogenic I hadn't even heard of before.   

As usual, I remain deeply skeptical that the positive experiences of the few who become evangelical is a sound guide to its more widespread use.  (And this one sounds particularly dangerous, not to mention unpleasant):

     Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm     reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. “Satan, get behind me,” he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.

Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.

But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, “I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.”......

But the powerful drug, which is illegal in the United States, comes with risks. Because ibogaine lengthens the time between heartbeats, a user who gets the wrong dosage, is taking other drugs, or whose heart rate is not being monitored during treatment, can go into cardiac arrest. Even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as “the opposite of a pleasant experience.”

It is because of the drug’s potency that Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and other ibogaine advocates have adopted a baby-steps approach. Rather than promote wholesale decriminalization, or even widespread availability, they are seeking public funding for the development of an ibogaine compound in the United States, with the initial aim of treating military veterans. 

Probably because it is a conservative promoting it, there are a large number of skeptical comments after it:

To have credibility with me, this  article should explain the actual mechanisms( even if not completely known), the actual treatment process (does the dose of the substance magically transform specific memories in one sitting or is there a therapeutic conversation with a real therapist , or 12 weeks of therapy or just exactly what) and how is improvement measured, validated, followed up . How long does the identified benefit last? And how is that defined and measured— hours of improved sleep, fewer arrests or car accidents , less domestic abuse phone calls or more steady employment, less drug and alcohol and other self medication abuse. Only  quoting some people who say they are better is as meaningless as if they were describing the therapeutic benefits of shopping, ice cream or racing fast cars, what about all the people who have not had a positive effect- they will never be assessed in an anecdotal narrative. Show me the facts , the mechanisms, the double blinded assessments—not just because Kirsten Syenema  says so. 

Also, funny how its often the military veterans lining up for something to cure their mental ills and PTSD.

A simpler solution might be:  stop putting your military into pointless conflicts with no real moral justification.  Maybe then the relived horror of the killing they have implemented will not happen in the first place. 

Asking for trouble

A New York Times background piece on "stablecoins" is well worth reading.

Sounds like a whole lot of trouble brewing, if you ask me:

Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.

Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.

The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.

That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.

Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.

Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.

One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.

Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said. 

Trump, of course, would understand none of this.  He just seems crypto bros throwing him money, and he's all in. 

 

Singapore and tigers

I was reminded this morning that Singapore's name allegedly comes from an apparent misidentification of a tiger as lion.   (See Wikipedia for a full explanation.)

Now, while lions were never native to Singapore or neighbouring regions, tigers certainly were.   Which led me to think "when was the last wild tiger seen in Singapore?"   I knew of the story of a tiger being shot in Raffles Hotel, but now that I check it, it wasn't a wild one, and it was in 1902.

This website tells the real story of how big a problem wild tigers were in the 19th century:

The earliest newspaper report about the existence of tigers was published on 8 September 1831 in the Singapore Chronicle. It was reported that a male Chinese national had been killed by a tiger, and that the same tiger probably had also killed a local shortly after.⁵ In 1835, colonial architect G. D. Coleman and some convict labourers were attacked while they were laying a new road through a swamp in the jungle near town, but no one was killed.⁶ In May 1839, The Singapore Free Press reported that two Chinese had been carried off by tigers near a newly built road called Rangong Road (today’s Serangoon Road).⁷ 

When the cultivation of gambier and pepper took off in Singapore in the 1840s, plantations extended beyond town and encroached on jungle areas. By the late 1840s, the number of plantations had peaked at 600.⁸ Chinese plantation coolies became easy targets for tigers. Reports of encounters with tigers increased in the 1830s and 1840s.⁹

Tiger attacks grew so intense that, by the middle of the 19th century, tigers were rumoured to claim one life every day.¹⁰ Governor of the Straits Settlements William Butterworth, upon being questioned in the House of Commons about the tiger problem, stated that the figure was probably 200 deaths a year due to tiger killings – which was nonetheless alarming in a population of 50,000 people.¹¹ In 1859, one village near Bukit Timah was abandoned due to overwhelming tiger attacks.¹²

It was believed that tigers in Singapore killed 300 humans in 1857, but only seven deaths were reported to the police. The actual figure could be higher as many tiger attacks were unreported. Plantation bosses often did not report the deaths as they did not want to scare away potential workers.¹³ During the 1860s, more than 350 lives were lost because of tigers.¹⁴  

They would swim across from peninsula, apparently.  I wonder how big a problem they were over there (the Malay peninsula).   Presumably, pretty big!

Anyway, the government set a bounty on hunting tigers, and their numbers diminished.

The last one was apparently in 1930.  Here's how the Straits Times reported it: 

 

Well, they got a beer named after them.  So not completely forgotten...

We need better tech billionaires (part 2) - and a point I haven't seen made elsewhere

Apart from the egregious open corruption that was Tim Cook's suck up visit at the White House, one thing I noted from the video:

 

 

was that I reckon there is no way the "24 carat" gold base is solid gold - it does not have the weight in Cook's hands that a lump of gold that size should, I reckon.   (Even the weight of the box with it inside looks light.)

In theory, as I understand it, you can gold plate in 24 carat, but it's soft and not often done because of that.   But I reckon Cook wanted to give the impression Trump was getting a lump of gold, when he wasn't.  Which would be a little amusing to know, if I am right...

NDP 2025

Singapore's National Day Parade was (as acknowledged by most Singaporeans on Reddit too) really good this year.  As I said to my son who (rather dutifully, but I appreciate it) watched the whole thing with me, Brisbane ought to just subcontract the Olympics opening ceremony to Singaporean creatives - they do these stadium style shows fantastically well.   

I wonder if I can convince anyone reading to watch the whole 3 hours!    

 

 OK, well if you don't want to watch the military parade and flyovers , the entertainment show starts at 1 hour 53 min.

But you should watch the military bits, because it shows how absolutely pathetic Trump's little Army anniversary march was!   

And if you don't have the time to watch this, I was even impressed with the "pre parade" segment - singing, dancing, some jokes, and cameo appearance by their Prime Minister.   

 

All so good...

Pure, unadultered, gaslighting

 I also saw Scott Bessant - the person who people thought might talk sense to Trump, given his past background, but who immediately turned into a pro tariff lackey, no matter how nonsensical their calculation - being interviewed and trying as hard as possible to avoid saying that tariffs are paid by Americans.   (He finally said it, in a way that he probably thought some MAGA types wouldn't understand was an admission.   What a disgraceful performance.)

What? Google is still working on Blogger?

Much to my surprise, I see that Blogger has greeted me this morning with a new beta feature, which will add links to terms in a post that it thinks might be useful for readers who want to dig deeper, so to speak.

Given that people have been saying for years that they would not be surprised if Google suddenly said it was going to stop supporting this free blogging platform, it's surprising to see they are actually still making changes to it.

How useful this one is, though, remains to be seen!   I'll hit the button and see what it does with this post.  Any links will be put in by some AI in a dessert somewhere, presumably! 

Oh, it seems to not want to insert any links now.  It did before, but I deleted the text and now it's not reappearing.   Odd.   

 

Nationalism as done in Singapore

If I wasn't so busy at work lately, and the plane seats were a bit more certain, I would have headed off to Singapore to be there on its 60th anniversary National Day this Saturday.   

Instead, I will just watch the National Day Parade live on CNA via Youtube - and I would encourage anyone with a curiosity about the way nationalism and social unity can be "done right" to do the same.   I mean, I am generally leery of patriotism; but in the case of Singapore, it had to make a big effort from the start to ensure the multicultural society would work, and tying it to a patriotic appeal to take pride in making a poor tiny country rich, secure and safe has really worked.  

So, the National Day Parade (which I have watched in previous years) has elements of pure self soothing propaganda, about which I sometimes have a bit of a cringe laugh because it can be so unsubtle.  But mostly, I find myself deeply impressed, and quite often somewhat touched, by the intensity of the effort towards promoting unity, especially in the slickly produced songs and dance, which can feature a multicultural cast of scores of people, if not hundreds.  Perhaps you have to watch to understand.  Technically, my almost sentimental admiration for the country can't be because I was a Singaporean in a past live - I was here before it existed! 

The day ends with a very "you will be patriotic!" kind of thing:

SINGAPORE - The public warning system will sound at 8.19pm on Aug 9, as a signal for Singaporeans to recite the pledge and sing the National Anthem, wherever they may be on National Day.

The “all clear” signal will sound for 10 seconds, said the Singapore Civil Defence Force on Aug 6.

This marks the Majulah Moment at the end of the National Day Parade,which will take place at the Padang and Marina Bay 

Again, I find that a little bit funny, and a little bit impressive.

Such a shame I won't make it... 

 

     

News site decide events from 200 odd years ago are the headline

It was at the very top of The Guardians website this morning, but has since moved down the page.  It's still given a very large space, though:

When you read the main article, about a company started in 1824, it's not even coming up with anything new - it notes stories about atrocities that have appeared in a newspaper in 1922, about events about a hundred years before that!  

It ends with these examples of grievance mongering:

James Fitzgerald, a legal consultant for the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said companies had an obligation to confront the “evils of the past”.

“Just creeping along as though nothing happened is moral cowardice, particularly when it’s an enterprise that’s making money off dispossession,” he said.

“The more a company’s wealth is built on that sort of dispossession, I would have thought, the greater its obligation to take account of that as a decent corporate citizen in 2025.”....

The AACo spokesperson said the company had built “trusted relationships” with many traditional custodians across the properties managed. “We recognise their culture and deep connection to Country and work with them to ensure we engage respectfully,” they said....

Fitzgerald said the 1992 Mabo verdict, which recognised Indigenous peoples’ rights to their land, raised complex questions for Australian companies that had built their wealth on land taken from and cleared of Aboriginal people.

“If you keep pulling at the thread long enough, it implicates the entire basis of our sovereign state and economy,” he said. “We are all the beneficiaries of these actions in one way or another, whether as real property owners, shareholders or super fund members.”

 So, let's see - the company hasn't hidden anything, is respectful of the current "cultural custodians", and there are some academics and lawyer types making a living out of keeping the grievance alive...

As I have complained recently, such intense concentration on victim status in aboriginal advocacy is not a good way to move forward - and it irks me that The Guardian spends so much time promoting it.    

     

Hiroshima anniversary

It's fascinating, and makes me feel somewhat emotional, to read the first hand accounts of what it was like being on the Enola Gay when it bombed Hiroshima, 80 years ago.     The Washington Post provides a good service by publishing this.

Jobs figures explained

I'm sure I have mentioned this before, but the short explainer videos that the Wall Street Journal puts out now, often as a corrective to Trump and MAGA views, are actually pretty good (and non-partisan).   The latest one is about how it is an utter nonsense to blame the head of the bureau for jobs numbers that Trump didn't like: 

Something else to think about

 An interesting idea here:  check if there is any correlation between pre-space age "transients" caught on astronomical sky survey plates from Palomar observatory (in the period from 1949 to 1957), and nuclear tests and/or UFO sightings.

Seems there is, although I don't understand the statistical significance bits of the paper.   (Really, it would be good if researchers always explained that aspect in a clearer way for those of us who never studied statistics.) 

An article summarising the paper is here. 

I note that the transients are star like points of light; not streaks like satellites in low Earth orbit would make. 

I also note that other research thinks the transients are just faults in the emulsion.   But a secret government  organisation that doesn't want us to know the truth would tell us that, wouldn't they...!

It seems that the people who wrote the current paper have been out to prove something is odd about the transients for quite a while.    Mick West is very skeptical.   

I am too.   I have a dim memory from a UFO book - probably one of Hynek's - about a 50's or 60's sighting which started as apparently two star like satellites moving together, but then doing a very un-satelitte thing of starting to spin around each other.    I've always been curious if there were more sightings like that which went unrecorded...

More "about Gaza"

From the New York Times:

Hamas has consistently rejected Israel’s terms for ending the war throughout the negotiations. On Saturday, the group said in a statement that it would not disarm unless a Palestinian state was established, despite a call from Arab states last week for the group to do so.

The Israeli government opposes Palestinian statehood. On Sunday, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, visited the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which Jews revere as the Temple Mount, long a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Arab leaders denounced Mr. Ben-Gvir’s ascent to the site — during which he openly prayed — as a provocation.

“It’s important to convey from this place that we should immediately conquer Gaza, exercise our sovereignty there, and eliminate every last Hamas member,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said from the site, in a video shared by his office.

Doesn't the Hamas position on disarmament show that (well intentioned) Western nations calling for a recognition of the Palestinian state at this time are not helping?   While I understand the impulse to think that it helps show Israel does not have endorsement to do what it wants, it's hard to see the optics from Hamas's view as being other than "at last, the tide is turning in our favour, and we must hold out longer."