Republican numbskulls and Fauci, again

There was an opinion piece at the NYT a few days ago by a guy who thinks Fauci should have answered some questions (I don't agree), but nonetheless, the best part of his piece is how he detailed the nonsensical contradictory positions MAGA and Republicans hold in their empty heads:

But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.

You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon. And you can’t really fault liberal hysteria on social media when some of the most vocal early advocates of aggressive mitigation were figures like the libertarian crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan and the reactionary neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. National Review was slamming the case against lockdowns as “absurd”; Tucker Carlson was reportedly lobbying the president to take the virus more seriously.

Back then, support for aggressive mitigation measures was pretty close to universal: In May 2020, one survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least 80 percent of the country was on board with social distancing, stay-at-home orders and business closures. Even so, by the end of the next month, all states but one ended their stay-at-home orders. And if you think that early near-unanimity was the result of irresponsible fear-mongering, you may be surprised to learn that in 2024, when asked whether they would support any similar measures again if faced with another pandemic, Americans answered in the affirmative by a margin of 81 to 19.

And people (including me!) forget this:

In retrospect, it is especially striking that Fauci initially downplayed the risk of the virus, suggesting that it was sufficiently low-risk that Americans need not worry about it in February 2020, and implying that they should worry more about the seasonal flu. When Fauci did come out as a relative alarmist the following month, offering what were seen at the time as worst-case scenarios, he predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths — about one-tenth as many as the country eventually endured. 

Back to Wagner

I haven't had a reason to write about Wagner since seeing the Ring Cycle a couple of years ago, but here's an article on the annual Bayreuth Festival in Germany that has appeared in the New York Times.

Some interesting bits and pieces:

It started in the years leading up to 1876, when the composer Richard Wagner was seeking an appropriate venue for the performance of his monumental, four-opera “Ring” cycle.

Think about the first scene of the film “The Age of Innocence,” set in the early 1870s — how Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, wanders into a New York opera house and takes his seat in a box partway through an act. The audience is lit almost as brightly as the stage. He can pay attention to one or two arias while still flirting shamelessly with a countess in the box opposite. The theater is a social setting to see and be seen, where the goings-on onstage are only a part of the experience.

Wagner was opposed to this. He wanted to create “music drama” that was audience’s sole focus.

The Festspielhaus has no boxes. Its seats rise in an amphitheater-shaped fan, its walls and proscenium focus attention on the stage. The pit is covered, so the orchestra’s sound rises as if from the building itself. The cover also ensures that no light leaks out of the pit to remind audiences that they’re watching a staged show.

It was designed as a singular place to interpret and contemplate Wagner’s works: more religious temple than standard-issue opera house. As Wagner wrote, the theater aimed to transport viewers into an “ecstatic state of clairvoyance in which the scenic image” becomes “a true reflection of life itself.” 

 Also - it has no airconditioning, and the seats are really hard.   Still, suits the stoicism of the Germans, I guess.  

Attendees might still end up going to the toilet in a Portaloo during intermission:

Despite the elegance of its audiences and the price of its drinks and tickets, the Festspielhaus has a rustic vibe. The grounds are dotted with portable toilets. There are barely any indoor lobbies; before the performance and during the luxurious, hourlong intervals, audience members stroll across plazas and parks outside and munch on sausages.

The end of the intermissions (Wagner operas usually have two) are announced not by bells but by brass fanfares, arranged by the composer himself from the music of the upcoming act, which ring out from a balcony at the front of the theater.

The festival is still a family business, run now by 48 year old Katharina Wagner, the great granddaughter of Richard.  Some businesses really have legs!

And while I knew Hitler had visited and been a fan, I didn't know about this:

The 2026 opener, “Rienzi,” is a youthful Wagner effort about a populist Roman leader. Hitler loved it so much that he owned Wagner’s original score, which is now lost and presumed to have been in Hitler’s bunker when it was destroyed after the dictator’s suicide. 

I might go looking for a recording of that on Youtube.  Let's see - there is an avante garde looking modern dress version which only runs for - 3 hours 50 minutes!   (And looks like no English subtitles.) 

Even videos of just the overture go for 13 minutes. 

Oh well, something to catch up with on retirement, perhaps! 

 

Let them fight

So, one side of the MAGA influencers and politicians are gaslighting about how you can feed a family of 8 an (impliedly) satisfying burrito meal for $20, and so the cost of living whiners are just lazy people who don't know how to cook economically; and the other side is saying "come on, be real, that's impossible, I've got a family of 8 and I know it; and we ignore the rising cost of living as a genuine concern of people at our peril."

 

Funny to be on the side of Matt Walsh, but he's obviously right.   

And a special birthday shout out to...

Race Around the World - and Gina Rinehart

I have been meaning to post about the ABC revival of Race Around the World and why I have found it watchable, but still disappointing.

Since the first series, the drop in price and improved quality of video equipment (and, of course, the Youtube based plethora of independent travel vloggers) has certainly taken the sheen of novelty off anyone being able to make TV quality content  anywhere in the world.     So the revival feels more than ever to be mainly about the pressure on the competitors to find stories and edit them into shape in the relatively short time they have.   This led to one guy having a serious looking stress breakdown on last week's episode, which he incorporated into the video, but it was uncomfortable to watch.

As far as the competitors are concerned, I have to admit that I can't really remember any apart from John Saffron from the first series, but my feeling is that this lot are generally not as likeable (with an exception I will get to.)    The two leading guys, especially moustachioed Jayden, whose hairy body looks like it escaped from some 70's era porno, seem to me to be overly self-confident and too pre-experienced as travellers and video makers.   Or should I say, it's especially Jayden who seems too competent for the show - it was, after all, Elliott who had the breakdown last week.  

I find two of the women a bit bland but inoffensive.  But Kate - her deadpan style seems far too contrived and I find her positively irritating.  As does Gina Rinehart!

The one competitor that I have consistently felt sorry for is poor old William.   He seems to be a gentle, modest person who enjoys creating gentle parody styles in his videos, and the irony was that the one which was not like that (and the only one for which he got much praise) was the one he liked the least.   I found his videos likeable and comforting (certainly not irritating like some of the others), and felt that the judges should just accept that while they might not share his taste, there's nothing wrong with his, and that creative types who stick to their guns often eventually find their audience.  (Hello, Wes Anderson.)   

William also often seemed a little hurt by their criticisms, and kept making comments about finding it harder than he expected.   As I say, I just wanted everyone to be nicer about his style and tastes.     

Anyway, onto the Gina Rinehart aspect.  Irritating "I'm so wacky" Kate ended her video from Scotland, in which she was referencing Braveheart,  with a satirical comment about imagined violence on Gina, for which Gina demanded (and today received) an apology from the ABC.  

As much as I dislike Rinehart, it didn't work as humour, made no real sense in the context, and at the risk of agreeing with the idiots at Sky News (now rebranded to News24, I see), the ABC should have pulled it before it was shown.

It's a bad day when something on the ABC makes me think Gina probably deserves an apology.     

Himmler's masseur

I guess it was inevitable, given the number of people involved, but it still kind of surprises me when new stories of intriguing people and what they did in World War 2 just keep turning up this long after it ended.  

The reason for this post is the movie discussed here in The Guardian:  

Himmler’s ‘anti-Nazi’ masseur: Claes Bang stars as SS chief’s ‘magic Buddha’

Felix Kersten, the personal therapist of Hitler’s principal enforcer, claimed to have saved countless lives from the Holocaust. A new feature film exposes him as a narcissist prone to myth-making 

Some extracts:

In I Is Another, which has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival this week, he is played by Danish actor Claes Bang (once a Dracula for the BBC), as a mercurial, charming but very slippery figure.

The myth the masseur promoted in his postwar memoirs was that he had used his influence over Himmler to save many people from being sent to the gas chambers.

A biography by French journalist Joseph Kessel, The Man With the Miraculous Hands, reinforced the idea that Kersten had helped “entire populations escape the terror of deportation” and that he “prevented the crematory ovens from receiving their full quota of corpses”. Randau now dismisses the book as “full of lies”.

In the film, Kersten is shown on a long train journey to Oslo where he hopes he will be awarded the Nobel prize. During the journey, he is accosted by a fictional investigative journalist Hedda Wohmann (Valerie Pachner) who strongly suspects he is liar and hopes to catch him out.

In preparation for the movie, Randau did extensive research of his own and discovered the masseur’s SS membership card in an archive in Berlin. Kersten had always concealed his SS membership but Randau found a letter in the archive in which the masseur asked if he was allowed to wear the SS uniform in public, undermining his later claims that he was an avowed anti-Nazi. There was also plentiful evidence that Kersten forged several of the documents which showed him in the best light.

However, when it comes to establishing whether or not Kersten really was spying on behalf of the Swedes, as many have claimed, he hit a dead end. For reasons no one could explain, all the files still remain classified (although Randau can’t help but notice how well connected the masseur was with Swedish government sources).

“I think he definitely saved some people’s lives but not thousands,” Randau concludes. “I am sure he did it only because he wanted to save his own reputation, maybe even his own life.

“He was a narcissist, and like all narcissists, his self-confidence was really weak. For him, it wasn’t enough to be a hero, he wanted to be a superhero and that was his mistake.”

The writer-director believes that after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, Kersten realised that the ship was sinking. “He had to jump off somehow. At that point, he started to manipulate Himmler and there was this mutual whitewashing with other guys involved. A lot of letters and documents are definitely fake, letters saying things like, ‘thank you for being such an enemy of the Nazi system like I am’ and stuff like that.”

One fact was incontrovertible. Kersten, who died in 1960, was a brilliant masseur. He provided instant relief for Himmler from his excruciating intestinal spasms. The SS chief called him “a magic Buddha who cures everything” and was extremely indulgent toward him as a consequence. 

He seems to have shared a similar feature to Schindler in his private life:

Kersten was personable too. People tended to like him. He was, the director says, “a skirt chaser, a ladies’ man” and he is rumoured to have lived in a menage a trois with his wife and his secretary. 

 (Not that Schindler did the menage a trois, since if the movie was correct, there's no way his wife would have accepted it.)    

 

Understanding the double slit

I meant to post about this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video "You probably misunderstood the double slit experiment".

I always get the feeling that on videos like this is mostly, but not necessarily completely, right.   I find it curious, for example, that she treats the issue of wave/particle duality as nothing special, and we just have to accept it as what quantum "objects" are like.   I think that's what she's saying in this video, but it was a couple of weeks ago that I watched it.

I've talked before about what I think is a lack of clarity in some of her takes on entanglement, etc.  But she is usually interesting, and often a bit wryly funny, so I don't mind her at all.   (She is one of these people where it seems eccentricity bleeds a bit into actual mental health issues, but she seems mostly OK.) 

A Chinese man's take on Chinese philosophy

This guy popped up in my recommended feed the other day, no doubt because of my occasional viewing of content on Asian philosophy and religions.  I thought this video was pretty good, and I found by viewing one or two of his other videos that he is one of the "I used to have a job but lost it and don't know what I can do for the rest of my life" men from China.   At least he doesn't just do the "this is the day to day life of a struggling man who has lost it all" style video, which wear out their welcome soon enough.  He actually just seems to have decided to educate people on a topic he's interested in.  Cool.

 

All about Alan, revisited

I wrote a post in 2023 about my evolving views on Alan Jones, and nothing I wrote then has changed.

Now that Jones is actually facing trial on the type of behaviour first reported in that year, it does make for a particularly salacious trial.  Unfortunately, though, all of today's cross examination was the subject of a non publication order, and it's not clear yet whether it will ever be lifted. 

I would be enormously surprised if Jones can prove a widespread conspiracy of rivals and greedy men setting up 6 different complainants to tell stories of behaviour which is also explained by being consistent reporting of the activities of a serial sex pest.

But, we shall see....

Update:  One thing I forgot to add to the post.  I reckon that this bit of evidence from the first day:

In court on Tuesday, Complainant J detailed a stay at Mr Jones's Fitzroy Falls farm in 2004, where he said he and the veteran broadcaster spoke over dinner and a glass of wine.

He said Mr Jones told him: "You've got to remember, there's only one rule here … there are no rules."

will be believed by everyone, because it just sounds so Alan Jones you immediately hear it in your head in his voice!   (And yes, it is also creepy given what follows it.)

Zoomies continued...

Old brainworms is back

 

 

He is such a conspiracy nut.  As one website explains:

 

Kennedy has spread misinformation about the origins of some of the deadliest and most debilitating diseases of the modern era through his popular podcast and in speeches when he was running for president. In addition to his false claims about Lyme disease, Kennedy has said that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was created when children were being vaccinated against other illnesses and that avian and swine flu were “fabricated” by the World Health Organization to control the public.

He has also said West Nile virus was created at Plum Island and that respiratory syncytial virus was purposely spread from apes to humans so pharmaceutical companies could profit off vaccines. Kennedy has also said that baby boomers have high cancer rates because they were vaccinated for polio, arguing that the vaccine caused more harm than the actual infection, which, at its height in the mid-20th century, killed or paralyzed a half-million people annually.

“I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health,” Kennedy said at an online campaign event in June 2023. “We can go down a whole list of diseases, and there is good evidence that even the Spanish flu came from vaccine research.”

Kennedy was named by Trump last month to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He is famous for falsely linking immunizations to autism and cancer. But Kennedy’s conspiratorial views about viruses have gained less attention. In at least three episodes of his podcast — ranked as Spotify’s 11th most popular podcast in its “health and fitness” category — Kennedy says his distrust of vaccines is, in part, due to his belief that researching and developing immunizations has “created some of the worst plagues in our history.”

Kennedy’s belief that deadly diseases were created by humans has shaped his views toward the agency he is poised to lead. He has vowed to drastically reduce the professional workforce at the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health, because he says it is too cozy with pharmaceutical companies that are profiting off viruses. During his campaign event last summer, he declared that his promises to rid the nation of chronic diseases are rooted in his belief that communicable illnesses would not actually be dangerous were it not for pharmaceutical companies and world health officials bioengineering them.

“The real threat to human health is not coming from infections,” he said. 

More phone camera play

As for that last one, it does have something called "AI supermoon" that comes on if zoom in 20x.  I suspect that it's like the Samsung feature that drew attention on Reddit a few years ago for questionable image authenticity.  I will look into it more, but for now, I'm happy enough.

Republican numbskulls

I've always disliked Rand Paul, and his never ending attempts to "get" an 85 year old scientist who has done tens times more for the good of the country than the perm headed libertarian or his father has ever done, or is likely to do, just means my judgement was too kind, if anything.  He's a conspiracy addled twit, as are so many Republicans, and I hate to see so many dumb Americans on social media cheering on the persecution of Fauci as if he was personally responsible for the pandemic.

Also, how dumb are Republican politicians and figures that they would talk about how they wanted to see Fauci face punishment for their imagined crimes, and then be all annoyed that he won't answer questions:

What morons.

Also - one of the many things to despise about Trump is that he's happy to ride on the coattails of  conspiracy and hatred and not have a care in the world about how it affects the well being and safety of the target of the conspiracy.   He knows his cult followers includes thousands who own guns and who think Fauci is literally evil and a mass murderer.   He dealt with Fauci respectfully at the start of their relationship, and Fauci has said so himself.  And this:

In 2021, Trump awarded Fauci a presidential commendation for his work on the US Covid vaccine project, known as Operation Warp Speed. 

But now, sniffing the wind that it will help shore up his cult's priors, Trump comes out with "throw him under the bus" stuff like this:

"Many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “‘Operation Warp Speed’ was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President. I overrode Fauci on this. His ideas were CRAZY! Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China."

Moron, and to call him a "fair weather friend" is inadequate.  To the power of 10, perhaps.

 

 

The Trump menace spreads far and wide

An article in the New York Times explains that the locals in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia are blaming the loss of the European tourist market on the disruption to air routes there because of the Iran war:

In Cambodia, international arrivals in the first three months of this year declined by 45 percent compared with the same period last year, tourism officials said. Mr. Khon said that he used to earn an average of about 82,000 Cambodian riel, or $20, a day ferrying visitors. That has now dropped to less than $5 a day....

In neighboring Thailand’s Phang Nga province, there is a similar crisis. Hotel bookings there have dropped by around 50 percent since the war began, local officials said...

Rungrat Huailek, 53, who has run boat tours in Phang Nga for 30 years, said that with the European tourists gone, residents were cutting nonessential expenses. He said his monthly earnings had dropped from around $900 to about $300, and he was forced to burn through most of his savings.

When his teenage daughter asked to go on a vacation during a recent school break, he asked her to buy a snack at the nearest convenience store. That, he said, was the only outing they could afford.

“Things look so bleak now,” Mr. Rungrat said. “All I can do is pray and be patient.” 

It says that Bali has been "more resilient", but that European tourism has dropped there too.  In fact, I sometimes watch Youtube videos by an expat Australian who lives there now, and I gather from the title of a few of his recent videos that there is an evident tourism lull there underway.

This probably makes it a good time for me to make a visit, except for the fact that even that blogger, who has lived in Indonesia for 15 years, says you just have to accept that you will get a bout of "Bali belly" if there for any length of time.  (And honestly, it seems pretty to find someone who has holidayed there for more than a week and not had one incident of it.)    

Speaking of Indonesia more widely - I was watching Flora and Note visiting Bandung on Java and making a somewhat torturous trip on motor scooter to a nearby tourist attraction called the White Crater.  It's a dormant volcanic crater filled with water that still emits heaps of sulphurous gas, such that signs recommend tourists not to stay in the crater part for more than 15 minutes!   Safety standards in Indonesia are somewhat relaxed.  

 

 

AI goes in search of Homer

Some guy on Twitter/X has asked Claude.ai to do a "literal" prose translation of The Odyssey, because he didn't want to read the one that Nolan used.  He has published the results, too, but has made little comment about the quality.  There are many sceptical comments:

Perhaps my favourite:

I also have been surprised to see quite a few people (presumably Americans) say in comments that they had to read it in high school.   To me, this seems rather surprisingly "high brow" of US high schools.  (Claude.ai says it has been a prescribed text since the mid 20th century, most commonly in 9th grade english.)  I doubt that it has ever been such in Australia.   (Claude.ai seems to think I am correct - suggesting that extracts from it have probably only ever featured in late primary school as an introduction to mythology.)   

 

Oh, further to fun tweets on the story, and the ridiculous MAGA reaction to the Nolan movie, get a load of this: