Looking for connections

Science magazine is running a series of reports on suicide, which includes this map for suicide rates in 2017:

On the website version, you can hover over the country and get the exact figure, with Australia showing as 11, the USA as 14, Russia 25, and Greenland at the top of the chart at 51.  (And that's before they heard Trump wanted to buy them.)

What strikes me most is how Muslim countries are all very low.  For example, Pakistan is at 4.44, Bangladesh at 6, but neighbouring India is 15.59.   Saudi Arabia is a startling low 2.9; Indonesia 3.1.

The other consistently low rate countries are those which are very Catholic, particularly those with their own local ethno-Catholicism, like Mexico and the Philippines, as well the European strongholds in Italy and Spain. (France is not so good:  at 12.4 it is close to our rate.)  Mexico surprises me:  for a country so notoriously dangerous for murder, at 5.9, the violence in the form of suicide is about half of ours.

I guess I should note that Buddhist countries are very much a mixed bag - Japan is as high as the US, but other, smaller Buddhist countries are low.  China is quite good at 7.2, too. Not sure what accounts for that.

I have posted before about the pretty well established connection between Protestantism and higher suicide rates, but I don't think I had realised before how being Muslim, or at least, living in a highly Muslim society,  seems to be even more "protective" from suicide than being Catholic.
 

Catholic schism in Italy, too

For once, a useful link from that ugly blog.

An article in Foreign Policy noting that Italian politics is caught up in the Great Schism in Catholicism:

It is a tale of two Catholic churches. One is focused on social justice, welcoming migrants, helping the poor, protecting the environment, defending the virtues of the European Union,  and building bridges rather than walls.  It proudly sports a cosmopolitan identity and talks about diversity and inclusion. It firmly opposes leaders like Salvini and U.S. President Donald Trump, whose ideology is one “that always ends badly—it leads to war,” as Pope Francis said in a recent interview with the daily La Stampa, adding that he’s concerned “because we hear speeches that resemble those of Hitler in 1934.” The poster child of this Catholic Church is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist whose initiatives have been blessed by the pope.

The other Catholic Church stresses the importance of tradition and defending the so-called Judeo-Christian West from mass immigration, pledges to protect the traditional family, and fights permissive laws on abortion and LGBT rights. It is skeptical of a bureaucratic, highly secularized EU and believes that Christianity thrives in a world organized around nation-states as opposed to supranational organizations. This faction fears that the current Vatican leadership may eventually turn the church into a progressive NGO.

In this highly polarized ecosystem, both sides claim to represent the true faith. And both sides are struggling to find a political home. Italy’s government crisis reveals a deeper tectonic shift in the Catholic world that has left many devout voters with no political home. In Italy, 74 percent of the population identifies as Catholic, but only 27 percent of those are actively practicing. In the recent election for the European Parliament, more than half of practicing Catholics didn’t vote.

Go watch it

I finished watching Happy Jail on Netflix last night. 

I've already recommended it, but I'm back to say that it is just extraordinarily good as documentary, and I am not sure why it hasn't attracted more media attention.   (My son liked it too, so it's not just my eccentric taste.)

PS:  I think it obvious why so many documentary/local reportage shows look so good these days - everything from Backroads, to Foreign Correspondent, to Happy Jail -  is the invention of the cheap drone with camera.   Beautiful aerial shots are just ubiquitous in these shows now, and we all know why.   But I don't care how many times they are used, really:  getting a God's eye view over settings I just find pleasing every time.   Maybe it subconsciously feels like it is satisfying those "cool! I can fly" dreams?    

What ugliness

When I see a Bunnings ad featuring an ethnically diverse woman, I think "that's good...another sign of successful integration into a typical aspect of the Australian way of life.  Especially good that it's a Muslim woman.  Good on you Bunnings for your diversity in hiring, too."  

But when a poisonous soul who comments at Sinclair's club for ugly conservatism sees the ad, this is what she thinks:

For the millionth time, I honestly don't understand how Sinclair Davidson can feel satisfaction running a blog that lets people display themselves in all their ugliness. 

Saturday photo

Everyone likes the ornate design of this building, surely?  I like to imagine it has a hunchback living secretly in the roof space and spires, or the dark, creepy basement I am told exists too.  

The "I'm only being reasonable - and stop oppressing me" Right has a long, disreputable history

David Roberts tweeted praise for this article in the Washington Post, and it is really good.

The writer, Eve Fairbanks, points out that a great deal of recent conservative rhetoric which claims to the status of "only being reasonable" in reaction to an unreasonable and censoring Left reads exactly as did the pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery commentary before and during the Civil War.  For example:

They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”

They loved hyperbole. Events were “the most extraordinary spectacles” that had “ever challenged the notice of the civilized world,” “too alarming” and threatened “to destroy all that is valuable and beautiful in the institutions of our country.” All over, they saw slippery slopes: Objecting to the extension of slavery into new territories, Lincoln’s longtime position, would lead inexorably to miscegenation.

The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.

Now, I think it is probably fair to note that realising this doesn't detract from some ideas of the Left being legitimately bad arguments that ignore the facts of nature - the most obvious modern ones surround the extremes of identity politics,  like the suggestion that sportswomen should not claim unfairness when transexual men start winning all events.   (I'm also sympathetic to the line that a certain basic form of capitalism - whereby people like to organise around, and profit from, things they can do well - is a natural tendency of human society, which explains why far Left attempts to suppress it completely are always doomed to fail.)

But it does tell us to be extremely cautions of the Right wing claims of persecution and to being tied to reason, when they are falling to act on dangers promoted by figures on their own side. 

The absolute worst thing about it is the way the conservative Right has decided  to give, at most, only occasional lip service to objection to the dangerous, authoritarian sympathising stupidity of Trump and his administration, and the global dire dangers of climate change, preferring instead to shrug their shoulders and concentrate on a culture war with the Left as if it was more important.

They only had to read Catallaxy to know this

From an article in The New Republic The Misogyny of Climate Deniers:

In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.

 The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.

The deep irony is that the other ideology that bulldozed over nature in the interests of economic growth is the communism that the wingnut Right spend the rest of their limited brain cells panicking about as secretly taking over the world under the guise of "cultural Marxism" and "socialism". 

Foreign Correspondent noted

Been meaning to say:  gee, this current season of ABC's Foreign Correspondent has been good. 

Fake meat in America; Taiwan and its worrying future with China; child surrogacy gone wrong in the Ukraine; and a look at Barcelona and the continuing vexed issue of Catalonian independence.

All well made, informative and engaging shows.

The enemies of the ABC need to exiled to some Survivor Island, and they can make documentaries of themselves getting sunburnt and stupider by the day by making reality TV.    

Stand up comedy is pretty weird

I rarely care for stand up comedy of any variety, but I will still read reviews of it to see what stuff that I wouldn't like is out there.

I note that Dave Chappelle has a Netflix special out which is getting praise from Tim Blair and some people at Catallaxy, and complaints from the likes of The Guardian and Slate.  The criticism from the Left - especially the one at Slate - sounds far, far more compelling a guide to my reaction, should I watch it.   Mind you, The Guardian's review is very similar, really.

There is something a bit weird about stand up, isn't there?, in the way audiences reaction precedes, and is independent from, thought.   Take this, for example, from The Guardian:

Chappelle speaks out against Michael Jackson’s accusers, stating in no uncertain terms that “I do not believe these motherf.......s” to whistles and cheers of approval from the audience. An assortment of his hotter takes plays like an exoneration wishlist: Kevin Hart’s a good guy, Louis CK never did anything wrong, and even if the King of Pop did prey on innocent children, “I mean, it’s Michael Jackson.”

I mean, really?   Surely it is only due to an expectation that the guy on stage is funny that people would find that crack about Jackson's accusers a laugh-out-loud thing?   It's not even a joke, as such.

Have psychologists studied this much?  

Feeling sorry for the Queen

I bet the Queen is hating the position she is in at the moment.

I see that Axios suggests the possible outcomes of tosspot Johnson's seeking of Brexit advantage by limiting Parliament are:

What's next? Parliament will return from recess to sit for a short session next week, during which lawmakers are expected to take steps to block a no-deal Brexit in the limited time they have.

• Option 1 is a legislative fix forcing the government to seek another extension from the EU, but there are no binding Brexit bills currently on the agenda.
• Option 2 is a vote of no-confidence, which would give MPs a window of 14 days to form a caretaker unity government with the express purpose of blocking no-deal.
• Option 3 is a general election, assuming anti-no-deal lawmakers can't gather enough support to form a government. But Downing Street officials have already said that Johnson would likely hold any snap election after Brexit has been completed on Oct. 31.

But if no-confidence passes, who gets to tell the Queen what to do?   Does Johnson tell her to just call an election, and one after 31 October?   Does a caretaker unity government enter after him and say "no, we are governing and we will just pass this Act delaying Brexit and then go to an election"?   Does Scotland knock at her door and say "we'll be leaving the kingdom, thanks very much.  And Balmoral is going to become an upmarket spa and holiday resort." 

I don't quite understand... 

Update:  The BBC provides some much needed explanation of the technicalities here.  I understand the options a bit better now.

Rain needed

Brisbane, and everywhere west of Brisbane, is very, very dry at the moment.  There is hope for a little rain today, but it sounds like barely enough to green the lawns.  When you drive down Milton Road from the city, and look up at Mt Cootha, there are patches of brown trees extending up the mountainside.  I am not sure if they are dying, but I don't recall ever seeing this before, and it doesn't feel very re-assuring.

Interestingly, I see that most water supply dams close to the coast are at relatively healthy levels.  Quite a few are virtually full, although Brisbane's Wivenhoe is down to 52.8%.   Somerset Dam, however, which feeds directly into it, is at 74.5%.  I

You don't have to go too much further inland, though, to see some dams effectively empty - which tends not to be a good thing in agricultural areas (he says with understatement.)

As in Queensland, I think virtually everywhere away from the coast in New South Wales has been on extended drought for a long time.  I know someone with family in Walgett.  Photos show it as a dustbowl.  Someone else I know who has relatives at Tamworth says trees are dying everywhere there.

I hope this isn't the start of another really prolonged, widespread drought like the one in the 2000's. 

More fasting research

At phys.org, a report on a dieting method that sounds a little hard to stick to:

In recent years there has been a surge in studies looking at the biologic effects of different kinds of fasting diets in both animal models and humans. These diets include continuous calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and alternate-day fasting (ADF). Now the largest study of its kind to look at the effects of strict ADF in healthy people has shown a number of health benefits. The participants alternated 36 hours of zero-calorie intake with 12 hours of unlimited eating. The findings are reported August 27 in the journal Cell Metabolism. ...

"We found that on average, during the 12 hours when they could eat normally, the participants in the ADF group compensated for some of the calories lost from the fasting, but not all," says Harald Sourij, a professor at the Medical University of Graz. "Overall, they reached a mean calorie restriction of about 35% and lost an average of 3.5 kg [7.7 lb] during four weeks of ADF."

The article goes on to note the health benefit changes recorded in the study, and it does point this other simple advantage:

"The elegant thing about strict ADF is that it doesn't require participants to count their meals and calories: they just don't eat anything for one day."

Yeah, I must admit, I have found during bursts of 5:2 dieting that I start to spend too long in the supermarket reading calorie information on things I can try for a variation on how to get my 600 cal in a day.

I am due to start dieting again.  Not sure if will try this method.  3.5kg for four weeks of intermittent sounds a bit less that I might have expected, especially as it always seems to me that the first couple of kilos drop fast, but it gets slower as you go along.

Ngo-ing, Ngo-ing, Gone

So, Andy Ngo has left Quillette abruptly (or not, see next sentence) after evidence comes out of his lack of reporting when he sees right wing activists planning a confrontation at a bar.  Claire Lehmann says it's all a co-incidence (she says he actually had already left before this story came out) and he has gone onto "bigger projects".    (Sounds suspiciously like one of those standard cover statements when you don't want to go into detail - along the lines of "resigned to spend more time with his family".)

What's the bet that he might be getting a more permanent role with Fox News?  He'll fit right in.

Kids being different

There's a more-or-less reasonable piece up at The Atlantic about the issue of kids who grow up to identify as gay/bi/queer, which makes a point that I don't recall reading much about before:

Numerous studies have shown that children who eventually come out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—scientists call them pre-homosexual, or pre-GLB kids—demonstrate more childhood gender nonconformity in their speech, body language, and choice of activity than their pre-straight contemporaries do. These reports have also produced evidence of a “dosage effect”: The more gender nonconformity someone shows in childhood, the more likely they will identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual as an adult.

“The link between childhood gender conformity/nonconformity and adult sexual orientation is one of the strongest relationships between a childhood trait and an adult ‘phenotype’ that’s been demonstrated in all of psychology,” Richard Lippa, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton, told me via email. While the link is not foolproof––not all tomboys will be lesbians; not all boys in dresses will be gay––Lippa says it is “quite strong.” (The scientific calculus for transgender people, he says, is “more complex.”)

Kids—especially pre-GLB kids—need room to explore their own identities. Yet because society presumes queerness to be inherently sexual, adults think that a preteen who plays up his gender nonconformity could not possibly be doing so voluntarily. Critics instead see adults in and aligned with the LGBTQ community as sexualizing children by exposing them to what a National Review writer calls a “deeply and perversely erotic subculture.” Conservative media have accused Wendy Napoles of endangering her son. After news reports indicated that Desmond’s performances had caught a convicted pedophile’s eye (as if it’s a young boy’s fault that pedophiles exist), some people called child protective services on her. But the people who have deemed drag too risqué for preteens have yet to support alternative ways in which queer kids like Desmond can publicly express themselves without fear.

I am not surprised at what the studies say - it fits in anecdotally with what a lot of parents and gay adults have said about recognizing they were "different" from a young age - but I didn't really know it had been studied much.

I think those paragraphs I quote help illustrate why sexuality/gender is a pretty confusing issue to understand for a lot of us:  it's not just a matter of which gender people might sexually respond to - it also brings up whole puzzle of why some gay/queer folk might be very gender conforming in most respects other than their sex life, and others aren't.   In particular, I find it hard to understand the drag queen thing - a combination of something like a transexual who is happy to stay in their male body, but likes to act not just female, but as a particular version of the opposite gender - the dramatic diva.  Not sure I will ever get my head around that.   And because I think a lot of adults have trouble understanding it in adult form, it feels strange seeing a pre-pubescent boy acting out that way too.

So sure, I don't want kids who feel different to suffer unduly if they don't want to follow "traditional" gender behaviour; but on the other hand, don't particularly feel that it is a good idea to encourage kids to do what feel likes attention seeking behaviour. 

I might write more later... 

Feeling Germanic

Careful readers - or at least Tim T - will recall that I was off to see a performance of (amongst other pieces) Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony on Saturday night.

What a blast that piece of music is - a 50 minute, single movement musical rendering of a hike through the Alps, with an afternoon thunderstorm and all.   The normal Youth Orchestra (playing at QPAC) was boosted by extra brass, the huge organ in the concert hall (which I had never heard played before), not one but two harps, and extra percussion stuff (cowbells, sheet of metal, rolling barrel thing for making wind sound) all crammed in onto a completely packed stage.  Not only that - at the end, a bunch of extra brass players came on stage to take a bow - I didn't know where they had been, but my daughter explained later that they had played off stage to create a certain effect (!).   It was, quite likely, the biggest assembled orchestra I have seen, in fact.    

So, there was certainly no lack of volume: it blasts away at times with something approaching rock band volume, which made for quite a different experience from the normally restrained volumes of most classical pieces at that venue.

Interestingly, though, I read in the program that the piece when first performed was not overly enthusiastically received, with some saying it was too "cinematic".   I get the impression that the less-than-completely-enthusiastic reception to certain works of famous composers is not an uncommon thing in classical music history - I assume Tim knows about that more reliably than me.   Anyway, more explanation about the symphony is set out in this neat piece at The Conversation, if anyone is interested.

So, after feeling entertained by this Germanic power classic, I was reminded that Wagner's Ring Cycle is coming to Brisbane next year, and I have found out that C reserve seats up in the balcony stratosphere are $380 for the entire cycle. 

Now, I have never been to an opera in my life, and it would be kind of ridiculous to start my experience of them with (as the QPAC website explains)  a 15 hour epic performed over 4 nights.   But hey, it's the very ridiculousness of the idea that is perversely tempting me to do it.  And when you divide the cost into the hourly rate,  it's quite the opera bargain!  (At least for the cheap seats - the premium ones are $2,200.   I trust that a glass of champagne before and during intervals might be included in that.)

I heard someone from (I think) Opera Australia spruiking it when it was announced, and he was saying that it sounds like a heavy experience, but it really isn't - he claimed that he has had so many people say to him at the end that they could happily go back and watch it all over again.  He called it a "life changing experience", which seems a bit of an opening to making a Hitler-ian joke about it making people want to invade neighbouring countries, but I am sure that is not what he meant.

Anyway, I have my doubts I will do it, but I am (at least a bit) tempted.

Update:   I should have guessed - there are lots of amusing takes on the net about what it is like to go through the Cycle.    I think ClassicFM's The 18 Stages of watching Wagner's Ring Cycle is pretty funny.   More encouraging, and still witty, is How Crazy Do You Have to Be to Sit Through 15 Hours of Opera.   On a more serious note, but still with the occasional funny line:

The director Achim Freyer once informed me that sleeping during Wagner simply means listening on a different level.

is this piece at the Washington Post.

Stranger Things 3 noted

Just finished Stranger Things 3.

I'm feeling a tad "over" the show.   If I recall correctly, my initial reaction to the first episodes of the first series was that it felt odd to have a show that was so transparent in the deliberate imitation of scenes from movies of the era.   Eventually, I was won over by the pretty charming characters, and the general good humour of the show.

The second series was continued harmless fun, I thought; but with the third series, the too obvious lifts from 1980's movies (and not just in passing:  the Terminator character was so important to the whole season) started to bother me again.   I was feeling too distracted by noticing which better movies they are copying.

The whole premise (and details) of this season was also pushing it too far into the ridiculous:  a secret underground Russian base is one thing, but the depth and extent of their lair was pretty silly.   And really - I know 1980's hair was bad, but honestly, the helmet hair of two of the guys really seems to be taking it to extremes that I do not recall.

That said, because I think the main characters are well acted, and still pretty charming, I would still watch the 4th series.  But if El gets her powers back, when will she start first putting a tissue up her nose to deal with the inevitable nosebleed?  

Something to keep in mind

Treatable disease often mistaken for Alzheimer's

Not sure I would want to visit the US right now...

Washington: A Jamaican national was detained for nearly three months in the United States after bringing in bottles of honey from the Caribbean island that customs agents mistakenly believed to be liquid methamphetamine.

Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs and immigration bureaucracy.

Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.

Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.

According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.

Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive: they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was wrong.

The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.

Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with the US immigration service.

His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.

The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

Here's a link to the story at Gulf News.

Excessive recipe excessively funny

The recipe video at this tweet has just about the funniest comments thread that I can ever recall on Twitter.  

I liked the hamburger with pickles clip in the comments thread too...

Channel News Asia, for good and not quite so good

As I have explained before, I really like watching the weekly highlights from Channel News Asia, in part for its stories about the rest of Asia, but also because of the upbeat, optimistic tone of stories about Singapore.

I'm not cynical about how, it being government owned, it's not as if the positive spin is coming from a completely independent viewpoint.  For example, I like the way it continually runs stories that encourages the multicultural tolerance that the nation island depends on.  In propaganda terms, I've realised it's like the polar opposite of Fox News:  a news and current affairs service devoted to national unity and optimism - the type of channel a benevolent dictator might desire - rather than the cynical, money grubbing operation of an ageing husk of a media billionaire designed to enrich him further by sowing division and rabid partisanship.

That said, I was a little taken about by a recent story which seemed to display a much more cynical line.   While I have seen sympathetic stories about migrant workers there before, this one about a Bangladeshi guy who got some fame for a book of poetry, and then (pretty much) let it go to his head, seems to be designed to carry the message "migrant workers - you are here to do hard labour, and don't forget it".

(Mind you, the guy does come across as having a somewhat overinflated view of his artist talents.  I have my doubts that he would have known the spin the CNA story would take, though, when he was co-operating with them.  And the comments that follow the video on Youtube show that I am not the only one who thought this video was unusually mean-spirited and seemed like a warning to migrant workers.)

The only other thing I don't like about CNA is that I can't embed their Youtube videos.

Update:  I was wrong - I can embed their videos, just my old computer at home (Vista powered) won't let me.  Here's the story I was talking about:

A devil of a Sunday

An interesting story at the Catholic Herald, about the head Jesuit upsetting Catholic exorcists:

An international organization of Catholic exorcists said Thursday that the existence of Satan as a real and personal being is a truth of Christin doctrine.

“The real existence of the devil, as a personal subject who thinks and acts and has made the choice of rebellion against God, is a truth of faith that has always been part of Christian doctrine,” the International Association of Exorcists said in an August 22 press release.

The organization’s release came in response to recent remarks on the devil from Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, which the organization called “grave and confusing.”

The exorcists said they released their statement to provide “doctrinal clarification.”

Sosa made headlines earlier this week when he told Italian magazine Tempi that “the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”

The devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Sosa said.

Citing a long history of Church teaching on the nature of Satan, including several citations from Pope Francis and his recent predecessors, the exorcists’ organization said that Catholics are bound to believe that Satan is a real and personal being, a fallen angel.

The beginning of the end?

Allahpundit's take on Trump's "hereby order" tweets (and continuing trade war, as well as his attacks on his own appiontees) seems pretty accurate to me.  For example:

Like a Twitter pal said, imagine throwing a fit because Denmark refused to sell Greenland to you and touting the fact that an ally said Israelis love you like you’re the second coming and having those things *not* be your most alarming statements of the week....

He’s never going to accept that the Fed is independent from partisan politics by design, but he could at least restrain his scapegoating of Powell by not comparing him unfavorably to communist China’s supremo, a guy who operates actual concentration camps. Trump’s willingness to speak warmly about the world’s worst bad guys while excoriating domestic politicians in the most acidic ways has lost most of its power to shock after his bromances with Putin and Kim Jong Un, but not all of it.

But wait. He was saving the Big Crazy for his response to China’s new retaliatory tariffs on American imports

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered.” Every day brings new material for a game of “What if Obama said it?” but purporting to order U.S. companies not to do business with China is championship-round stuff. I wonder which White House advisor got stuck explaining to him that he doesn’t actually have the power to do that. Just like I wonder when we’re going to start hearing about sanctions on China, which would be like dropping an atomic bomb on the economy....

This past week is going to get its own chapter in all of the self-serving post-Trump “I never really liked him” memoirs written by his cronies eager to rehabilitate their image once he’s gone. 

Look, the Trump cultists are never going to abandon him - you can see that on Twitter and comments rubbishing Allahpundit's take - but there is surely a substantial number of GOP congress people who can be pushed past their support of convenience for him into actually starting to talk about a replacement less obviously profoundly ignorant and flighty (I'm being very restrained with my descriptions) with someone like Pence, perhaps?

About conspiracy theories

The TLS looks at the rise of modern conspiracy theory belief:

Much of the work of modernity involved escaping the conspiracy of history itself, in which people are damned and doomed from the start. What they strove to become, instead, were people with a future; persons, bearers of rights, of sovereignty, with control over their destinies; citizens in secular nation states. They also understood themselves as objects and organisms, subject to natural laws. Nineteenth-century intellectuals offered all manner of secular explanations for misfortune in the realm of the physical and biological sciences, from the modelling of the weather to the germ theory of disease, and in the realm of the emerging social sciences, from economics to eugenics. This change coincided with rising rates of literacy and the growth of public schooling: the democratization of knowledge. By 1881, when Guiteau shot Garfield, rules of evidence – ideas about the relationship between facts and arguments, ideas once confined to courts of law and chemical laboratories – had spilled out to the new profession of journalism and the new popular genre of detective fiction. Suddenly, everyone had a theory, about almost everything. The misery of humanity became a crime everyone could solve.

The most popular scapegoat, it turns out, is other people. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a period during which emerging nation states sorted the world’s peoples into “nationalities”, most conspiracy theories in the US and Western Europe involved threats to the nation by people who weren’t so easily sorted. The most notorious of these theories concerned an alleged international conspiracy of Jews, people with ties across national borders. “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe”, claimed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in Russia in 1903, was distributed throughout the US by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and assigned as a textbook in German schools from 1933. Much the same claim appeared in The Jewish Peril, a pamphlet issued by the British government in 1920 and written, in part, by Nesta Webster, who tied the Jewish conspiracy to the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth century.

Arguably, there is just this one conspiracy theory, an endlessly recycled version of antisemitism, as the political scientist Thomas Milan Konda suggests in Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How delusions have overrun America. The Jewish conspiracy theory served as the template for nearly all that followed, from anti-communist and anti-homosexual panics and purges to race-based nationalism and xenophobia of every stripe, down to Islamophobia, the demonization of refugees, and the detention of immigrants. In the 1930s, the American fascist and disciple of Nesta Webster, Elizabeth Dilling – the founder of the Patriotic Research Bureau and author of the Red Network (which branded even the YMCA a communist front) – delighted audiences with her fake Yiddish accent, at a time when critics of FDR denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”. By way of a mysterious “hidden hand”, the theory alleges, Illuminati or Jews or Bolsheviks or communists or gay people, or whoever, secretly run most national governments and aspire to world domination. “There are 200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country”, the housewife and America Firster Agnes Waters announced in 1942. “If they are admitted they will rape every woman that is left unprotected.”

 I have comments moderation on, and its wildly unlikely that any of Graeme's ones will get through.

Everyone liked Tim, except...

Tim Fischer was a genuinely likeable politician, as all the kind words from everyone following his death show.

I was amused to read at Catallaxy how the only regular left wing participant there, the Vietnamese war conscript veteran often referred to as "Numbers", noted how veterans suffered more blood cancer than  the rest of their population cohort, only to have others in thread pooh-pooh the suggestion.  Then on TV I saw that Tim himself said he had been told by a specialist that exposure to war time chemicals had probably stuffed up his immune system.   So much for the collective smarts of Catallaxy.

And I also was reminded, by clown rodeo leader Sinclair Davidson himself, that he considered Fischer an anti-Semite, no doubt for his criticisms of Israel's treatment of Palestine, and his general friendliness with Arab countries in the region.  

Just add that to the list of SD's views which are so eccentric that mainstream commentators just go "uhuh" and move on.  It probably doesn't top his all time "seriously?" comment re Adam Goodes:

But is it racist? Many individuals are having a go at me on twitter for questioning whether calling an Indigenous man an “ape” is actually racist and not just rude. For many people it seems self-evident that is is racist. But nobody can say how or why. The “best” story I’ve heard is that Social Darwinism ranks “people of colour” below animals.

but comes pretty close.

Green finance success?

I take it from this report that the Gillard established Clean Energy Finance Corporation might be sold into private hands means that it has been a success:

Private investment funds are circling Australia's Clean Energy Finance Corporation hoping for a sale of the $10 billion government-owned organisation, as its head flags a major shift in how taxpayer funds are used to support the booming industry.

In an interview that will spark debate over whether the fund should be privatised like its counterpart in Britain, CEFC chief executive Ian Learmonth said he would shift his focus to strengthening the grid's reliability because banks had become more comfortable financing large-scale wind and solar projects....

The CEFC was established under the Gillard government in 2012 to spur investment in the sector while it introduced a carbon pricing scheme. Touting Australia's clean-energy credentials to Pacific leaders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week called it "the world's most successful green bank"....

Mr Learmonth said as the utility solar and wind-power renewables market had matured, more private capital had flowed in. The CEFC earned $350 million last year from maturing loans, which have been written on a commercial basis allowing for a transfer to private entities if required.

I bet that Liberals were not predicting a success when it was established.  

Composer more modern than I knew

Last night I learned (because my daughter was doing an assignment on him) that Richard Strauss (not Johann) lived from 1864 to 1949;  I didn't realise he was a 20th century figure.   

And this weekend, I get to listen to his An Alpine Symphony, a "tone poem" which my daughter actually likes.   (She plays a lot of different composers in her youth orchestra, but seems to not care much for a lot of the pieces selected.  She has a particular dislike of Mozart, for some reason.)

I also didn't realise that the 2001: A Space Odyssey piece from Also sprach Zarathustra was just the opening fanfare to a piece that goes 30 minutes.

There is much I do not know...

Twin beds more common than I knew?

Someone in England has written "A Cultural History of Twin Beds", which indicates that they were not that uncommon in the earlier part of the 20th century.   Here are the highlights:

Her key findings reveal that twin beds:

• Were initially adopted as a health precaution in the late nineteenth century to stop couples passing on germs through exhaled breath.
• Were seen, by the 1920s, as a desirable, modern and fashionable choice, particularly among the middle classes.
• Featured as integral elements of the architectural and design visions of avant-garde Modernists such as Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens and Wells Coates.
• Were (in the early decades of the 20th century) indicative of forward-thinking married couples, balancing nocturnal 'togetherness' with a continuing commitment to separateness and autonomy.
• Never entirely replaced double beds in the households of middle-class couples but, by the 1930s and 1940s, were sufficiently commonplace to be unremarkable.
• Enjoyed a century-long moment of prominence in British society and, as such, are invaluable indicators of social customs and cultural values relating to health, modernity and marriage.

The backlash against twin beds as indicative of a distant or failing marriage partnership intensified in the 1950s and by the late 1960s few married couples saw them as a desirable choice for the bedroom.

Innovation in Malaysia

Noted at CNA:

One Condoms has introduced the limited-edition “super sensitive” rendang-flavoured condoms to commemorate Malaysia’s upcoming independence day on Aug 31.

This is the fourth release in the company’s quirky Malaysian series, which began in 2016 and includes flavours such as nasi lemak, teh tarik and durians.

According to the Malay Mail, the condoms will only be available on the market for a limited period. The site quoted a statement released by One Condoms manufacturer Karex that the idea behind the local flavours is to break the stigma and get people comfortable to talk about sex.

“The end game is simple — pleasurable sex in a safe holistic way which is the ultimate objective of our iconic Malaysian series, now proudly in our fourth year.”

I perceive certain practical issues with the whole flavoured condom thing - especially if it is on the spicy side.   But the readers can contemplate that without my assistance.

Yeah, sure

Once again, there is no conservative hyperbole too far for Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy blog - which seems to escape attention for things like action under the Racial Discrimination Act, defamation or (I wonder?) contempt of court only because people think ratbags are not worth pursuing.   Real clever strategy, Sinclair [sarcasm]:  let the entire blog be a joke so that conservatives can say anything offensive and you can shrug your shoulders.

The latest example, by a "guest post/rant" by the Pell obsessed uber-conservative Catholic CL, in a lengthy diatribe against an ABC journalist, is this comment about the need for the High Court to fix the Pell conviction:

If ever there was a case in need of High Court correction, this is it. The future of the Commonwealth depends on it.

Um, yeah.  I'd like to hear how. 

And this:

....a second jury of dupable vigilantes eager to convict the self-same but, by then, notorious George Pell and an appeals court which this morning raised preposterous hearsay to the level of DNA and CCTV.

Hearsay?   I don't think this scintillating dissector of judicial wrongs even knows the first thing about the legal terminology.

Isn't it also simply offensive to describe the jury - any jury - that way?

Mind you, this is the same character who has been outright claiming for months since Pell's conviction that the accuser is an outright liar and fabricator.    While I have no problem with people doubting that a conviction is reasonable, common decency alone would suggest that someone who  have no direct experience of hearing a witness (or knowledge of a jury) should not start publicly attacking their character and motivation simply because the outcome was not what they thought it should be. 

In the bigger picture, I also note that Sinclair and his nutty crew spend much of their time rubbishing the low ratings and national importance of the ABC in order to argue for its defunding, but when it comes to Pell, the story switches to writing as if every juror has obviously been watching and reading the ABC's spin on the matter.

But put on the "I just run a clown show in my spare time" defence, Sinclair, and it'll be OK. 

 

Religious, cow related, lynchings in India

I've posted on the topic before, but this article at NPR seems a good summary of the situation in India, with Hindu nationalism, and its belief in sacred status of cows, leading to lynchings against (mainly) Muslims.  Some highlights:

Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won power in India five years ago, lynchings of the country's minorities have surged. In February, Human Rights Watch reported at least 44 such murders between May 2015 and December 2018. Hundreds more people have been injured in religiously motivated attacks.

Most of the victims are Muslims, members of the country's largest religious minority. They comprise about 15% of India's 1.3 billion people. Other victims include lower-caste Hindus and Christians.

Most of the attackers are devout Hindu men, known as "cow vigilantes," who take it upon themselves to enforce beef bans. Some of them claim ties to the BJP. Last year, a BJP minister met with a group of men convicted of a lynching and draped them in flower garlands.

....

Article 15 of India's constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion. Human rights groups are lobbying for the creation of a specific hate crimes law, but none exists in India yet.

....

Before he died, Khan was able to describe his attackers to police. Six men were arrested. Charges against them were dropped, then reinstated, and the case remained in limbo for two years — until last week, when a court acquitted all of them, citing lack of evidence.

Instead, Khan was charged posthumously with cow smuggling. Police say he didn't have a permit to transport cows across state lines. Khan's two sons, who were with him that day, await trial — and if convicted, face the possibility of up to five years in prison.

"It's like they are trying to erase us — erase all of my people," Jaibuna says in the muddy courtyard of their family farm.

....

Some Indian analysts say the situation in India is comparable to the post-Civil War period in the United States, when many white people looked on as black people were lynched.

"The similarities with the American lynchings of the late 19th century are striking," says Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil, a business professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay who has studied corporate India's lack of response to hate crimes.

"Most of the upper-middle class that populate[s] the corporate classes, they're also upper-caste Hindus," Poruthiyil explains. "Even if they don't agree with the lynching itself, they might be OK with the idea of stopping cow slaughter. It's a slippery slope."

As a child in Mumbai, Ayyub survived Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992 and 1993, which killed several hundred people. But she says what's happening now feels worse, because it's not a "spur of the moment" outpouring of anger. There are very specific targets.

"Now lynchings are organized on social media," Ayyub says. "People send messages to each other, saying, 'Hey, this household has beef in their fridge, let's go attack them."

More about high rise building insurance

I noted earlier this week that people (including me) were generally unaware that the compulsory insurance against structural defects that is taken out by builders constructing houses did not apply to strata structures over 3 levels high.  

I see some history of this is in an article at the ABC, which also indicates that high rise apartments are very profitable for developers (at least, if they can sell them all):

Prior to 2002, this insurance was a mandatory feature of all domestic building contracts.
HIH Insurance Limited, a major provider of Home Warranty Insurance, was placed into administration in March 2001 and left the insurance market.

In 2002, in response to a failure from other insurers to fill the gap left by HIH, State Governments agreed to exempt builders from providing this type of insurance in buildings above three stories.

For high-rise builders, who don't need to qualify for this insurance and also had the incentive of rising land prices, speculative apartment developments started to look like attractive investments as they didn't need to qualify for this kind of insurance.

Take the now infamous Opal Tower.

Publicly available documents put the cost of this development at around $215 million. If all 392 apartments were sold at their advertised price of between $800,000 and $2.5 million each, the developers have potential to make a profit on this project of around $165 million dollars, or a 77 per cent return on their investment.

Or take the Prima Pearl skyscraper in Melbourne.

The builder was paid $230 million, to build 680 "designer" apartments. Labour and materials worth $338,000 was used per home and each sold for an average cost of $1,000,000.

Quite the tidy profit for its developer. Shame about the creaking.

He really, really wanted to buy Greenland.

It is truly a presidency impossible to parody.

President Trump responded to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen‘s message to the United States that Greenland is not for sale by tweeting Tuesday evening that he's postponing their scheduled meeting. A White House spokesman later clarified that the president's entire trip to Denmark had been canceled, per AP.

Economic genius and cult member Steve Kates was fully on board.  Of course.

The Pell decision

Sinclair Davidson's Sheltered Home for Obnoxious Old Conservatives is, of course, going off about the Victorian Appeal Court upholding George Pell's conviction by a 2 to 1 majority.  

I would have thought that anyone, on the Left or the Right, would be wise* to be cautious about this whole affair.   It seems clear that the witness must have been pretty convincing in his evidence; but also everyone knows juries have made mistakes and (obviously) different lawyers and judges can disagree about whether there is a clear enough mistake to overturn the decision. 

In short, the judicial system is imperfect, but it is what it is and there is no way of being absolutely certain here as to whether its findings accord perfectly with what really happened.  

If, by some extraordinary circumstance, it later became perfectly clear that the convictions were wrong (I think the only likelihood of that would be a confession of the victim that he invented it), it's not going to be the biggest injustice in the nation's history.   Pell will serve about the same time in jail as Lindy Chamberlain, and I think the lack of evidence and outright carelessness of the investigation and expert witnesses and prosecution collectively in that case would still stand as a worse case of injustice.  


*  That excludes the dumb, culture war blinded people of Catallaxy, naturally.

Bigger than the Pell verdict

It actually is, on Twitter, at the moment:

Many of the despairing thread comments and memes cursing Sony are funny.  I like this one, which I have seen before:

But I see on other threads that some are saying that Disney was being too greedy in the cut it wanted.  Also, that they still might reach a deal yet.

Worrying times indeed.   :)

Get Happy

Another Netflix recommendation - and this one is new and really good.

Happy Jail - a short documentary series about the jail on Cebu, in the Philippines, which became famous for the dancing prisoners a decade or so ago.

The jail - which is actually a remand jail, apparently, but people (of both sexes, and quite a few gays) can be there for many years at a time - still thrives on dancing, and is bizarrely now run by an ex-convict who is friends with the new local governor.  (He didn't start the dancing stuff - that was by a previous prison boss who spends much time rubbishing the new regime.)

It doesn't dwell on the dancing per se - although, given that they practice virtually continuously, there are lots of shots of that.   What makes is so fascinating is the way the whole place runs:  the facilities are appallingly crowded and ramshackle, and the prison is to an extraordinary extent sort of self managed.  I doubt there will ever be another documentary where the prisoners seem so happy to be being filmed.

It's extremely well made, and at half an hour per episode, doesn't wear out its welcome.

It continually makes me feel how oddball the Philippines is - fervently religious, full of terrible poverty, in-fighting, corruption, drugs; and people who really like to sing and dance through it all.  It manages to make the place look both attractive and repulsive at the same time.

Highly recommended.

In which I get to talk about syphilis again

It's been a while since I've re-visited the topic of syphilis (recent visitors can see how fascinating I find the topic by searching the blog in the sidebar), but a book review in Nature gives me an excuse to marvel at its historic devastation again.   The book is How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness.   Sounds fun.  

Here are some extracts from the review, looking more at the syphilis side:

In the nineteenth century, neurosyphilis was one of the most ubiquitous and fatal forms of degenerative mental illness known to psychiatry. Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude. That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis. At the time, as many as one-third of patients in mental hospitals had symptoms that could now be clearly traced back to syphilis (A. M. Brandt Science 239, 375–380; 1988).

(I had remarked in an earlier post that it seems surprising that it took so long for medicine to confirm syphilis led to madness.)  Back to the general effects on psychiatry after this:

...the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists. They embarked on a quest, still largely unfulfilled, to find biological foundations for other mental disorders, especially grave conditions such as schizophrenia. Only later would it become clear, as the authors point out, that neurosyphilis is “an unsuitable model for anything clearly unrelated to infection or inflammation in the frontal and temporal lobe regions”....

The age of Freud was also the age of syphilis. Freud, and psychoanalysis more generally, focused on suppressed sexual fantasies and traumas because, for patients then, the shameful and terrifying spectre of syphilis hung over every sexual encounter like “the sword of Damocles” ....

The history of neurosyphilis bequeathed a tendency to indulge in excessive reductionism. That of hysteria encouraged a tendency to indulge in excessive psychologism. And both psychiatry and neurology were left the poorer. As the authors argue, the majority of patients seen by practitioners in both fields are afflicted with what they call “in-between states” — forms of distress informed by both biology and biography. The book is in this sense a plea for neurology and psychiatry to repair ruptures, join forces and do justice to the experiences of their patients.

Just a joke? [insert nervous laugh]

Fake Chinese police cars spotted in Perth and Adelaide amid pro-Hong Kong rallies

Authorities are investigating after fake Chinese police cars were spotted in Adelaide and Perth amid pro-Hong Kong demonstrations across Australia, but the owner of one of the cars has told police it was a "joke".

Some joke...

Construction problems in Australia

That was a pretty great Four Corners last night on the abrupt realisation in Australia that our apartment construction industry was in a huge mess.   Some takeaways:

*  How do libertarians and their "always de-regulate and privatise compliance checks" attitude live with themselves?   It seems pretty clear that a large part of the problem, if not the single largest part, is the looser regime that State governments allowed for certification, going back about 20 or more years ago.

* Of course, greedy developers play their part too.  What about this tweet after the show, which has a ring of truth about it:

* There was also the surprise of the guy from an engineer's association saying that, apart from in Queensland (yay), technically, anyone in the other States can call themselves an engineer.   I had heard someone saying this before, and recently mentioned it to someone who owns a family company that builds houses and the occasional apartment or townhouse block.  He thought that didn't sound right, but it apparently is.

* I was also speaking to a solicitor recently, who has been around a long time, and he wasn't aware that the compulsory insurance run by the Queensland Building and Construction Commission for house builders (and which gives cover for 6 1/2 years for structural faults) does not apply to buildings over 3 levels high.   Apparently, this is the case pretty much everywhere in Australia, but it seems a safe bet that for decades, people buying off the plan units have not been aware that they are much, much more certain insurance position if they build a house, or buy a new townhouse with only two levels, than if they buy even a 5th floor apartment.

* The show did indicate that some changes Queensland has made (to the QBCC inspection regime) are better than what exists in other States.  Again, yay for Queensland I suppose.

*  Going back to regulation - some Asian woman said something along the lines of "we thought Australia did regulation well, so we thought apartment buying was safe".   Yeah, well - shows what happens when you go too far into self regulation.   Libertarians and their desire to let the market sought it out (you know, dodgy builders will get a bad rep and that will solve the problem) has probably stuffed up the Australian market for off the plan for some years now.   Also - see Boeing and self certification in the USA.

*  The other big issue, not covered in the program, is the matter of insurers getting cold feet about cover for engineers and certifiers, not to mention builders themselves.  I am pretty sure that part of the issue for poor apartment owners can be fights between different insurers as to which is really responsible - I mean, the body corporate itself will have insurance for things like fire and storm damage, but if you have a big water ingress problem from the first storm after it is built, that insurer is likely going to be looking at blaming design, construction or certification, which brings in up to three other insurers to fight amongst themselves as to who was really at fault.   That is, assuming the builder has any insurance at all - as the show indicated, some will just organise their corporate finances such that they can easily close down the company that built it if it looks at risk of a multi million dollar claim.

* I am aware of one high rise apartment block in inner city Brisbane years ago that had some design fault or other, which meant that body corporate levies for something like a normal sized 2 bedroom unit there went up to around $10-$11,000 per annum.  (I think to fund the legal action against the builder/designer.)  As that sort of litigation can take years, it meant people who wanted out couldn't easily sell the apartment with those levies. 

* Why has this mainly been an issue for residential apartments?  I don't recall hearing of an office block with the same level of problems.  I guess residential apartments have a lot more plumbing and fiddly bits, but still.  It would seem something about the apartment building business is particularly rotten.

Vaping mystery

I would have thought that the pro-vaping lobby would have some misgivings about their position until doctors work out what is causing serious lung disease amongst vapers in the USA.

But I have noticed no sign of that in Australia.   I see that Terry Barnes, former Liberal health adviser, is still running a pro-vaping line in the interests of reducing smoking rates. 

I know he can claim some academic support - but I think it very likely that within a few years, it will be seen to have been misplaced. 

I am surprised that people cannot apply some common sense to this issue, and judge that it is unlikely to be a healthy thing to coat your lungs regularly with the liquid needed to deliver nicotine.  Less unhealthy than smoking?  Presumably so, but the key thing should be how much it helps smokers quit - and the research on that is still early.   Even if it helps more smokers quit, it would need to be a substantially higher number than other nicotine replacement methods in order to justify the health risks associated with vaping.  As to how much higher - that is just a judgement call, and for me, it is one the vaping industry is unlikely to pass, especially taking into account how many young users it attracts. It is not as if the industry wants only ex-smokers as users, after all.

Heinlein believed

...in an afterlife, so it would seem from a 1968 letter that Michael Prescott has posted.

I am not sure I am all that surprised - I would say he always showed interest in other dimensions (a bit like in the Flatland scenario), and alternative universes, and perhaps his afterlife interests were connected with that.   (In other words, a belief that if we understood science better we could work out where "Heaven" is.)

Portland is still there

Today I had read this very anti Ngo article at Jacobin: Portland's Andy Ngo is the Most Dangerous Grifter in America, then had a look at his twitter feed during the anticipated confrontation between out of town Right wing provocateurs and local Antifa, many of whom are unsavoury looking characters in their own way.

And yeah, I have to say, it is clear Ngo isn't a real journalist.  He was tweeting short clips (taken by others - I assume he did not turn up this time, which is no doubt a good idea in his own self interest), without context, and giving the uniformly worst possible interpretation against Antifa in all cases.  He's as much as a journalist as, say, John Pilger was when doing his completely one-sided takes.  In other words, just a biased commentator with a camera. 

Anyway, it seems there wasn't as much drama at Portland as people feared, even though there were arrests.  I did see on Twitter that one of the Right wing organisers of their intervention said it was a success because it got Trump's attention on Twitter.

Yeah, right.  A real sincere exercise in free speech.

Portland is still there, and Andy Ngo is still doing his part to encourage wingnuts into thinking the US is going to collapse because of Liberals, rather than because it has a narcissistic, dumb, wannabe authoritarian President with an enabling Party behind him.

Update:  the Daily Kos version of events during the day.  Because you would have no idea what was happening if you relied on Andy Ngo.

Fluffy donut

Am sitting beside this at the moment:

She had a bath this morning...

Milk under attack

On a busy Brisbane street this morning, the anti dairy folk are out:

This is a busy street, just outside the Ekka.   Which, I now realise, is almost certainly why they are here.  

I haven't been into the Ekka this year, or last year.  I wonder if the vegans have much of a presence yet?  Given the increase in vegan products I've been noticing in supermarkets (Coles brand smoke flavoured tofu, for example), there must be some vegan promotion in there.   

Now I'm imagining late night fights there between big-hatted cow cockies and tofu stall holders.

I must go next year and find out...

Limited truth in advertising

Just saw this flyer:

Checking Wikipedia, I find that this now comprises just one original member..the drummer.   Rather like Ringo going on tour and calling himself The Beatles, no?

Saturday photo

Colmslie Beach Reserve, Brisbane:

Finger workout

This one's for reader Tim, who is interested in all things German, I think:

German finger wrestling pulls a crowd in Bavaria

Competitors, who are matched in weight and age, sit opposite each other and pull on a small leather loop using just one finger.  The winner is the one who pulls his opponent across the table. As in other forms of wrestling, those taking part must put in lots of training. Squeezing tennis balls and lifting heavy weights with just one finger are both part of the routine. To emerge triumphant, technique and physical strength are important, as is a high pain threshold.

Fingerhakeln is traditional in Bavaria and in Austria. Its origins are unclear but it is believed to have started as a way of settling arguments.

I thought at first, if only Hitler had been prepared to settle disputes with a good fingerhakeln session.  But then I thought of poor old Roosevelt being flung across the table, and America going all Man in the High Castle.

Churchill, on the other hand, might have kept Britain safe that way.

The articles has lots of photos of men in traditional get up, pulling fingers.

Does it make cream too?

More on that company that wants to get fake milk made using milk protein from GM yeast:

After working at MassBiologics less than a year, Pandya quit in 2014 to found Perfect Day with another vegan biologist, Perumal Gandhi, also now 27. Their Berkeley, California, company has developed a technology to insert a DNA sequence into microflora like yeast that produces casein and whey proteins that are identical to those found in cow’s milk. Rather than create its own line of grocery store items, Perfect Day, which has raised $40 million from investors, is selling its proteins to large food manufacturers to turn into mayonnaise, protein bars, baby formula and cookies.

I don't really understand - do those proteins make cream?  Because milk only tastes good because of the cream.  (If you're going to drink skim milk, you may as well go with unsweetened almond milk.)   And the article does not involve any actual taste test of a milk product made this whey way.  (Ha ha).  

Anyway, I am curious as to whether this can be a success.   Isn't raising yeast in gigantic bio-reactors pretty efficient,  and economical?      

Good grief

WSJ reports:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer’s imagination, according to people familiar with the discussions, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea.

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it was a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination that will never come to fruition. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

Maybe Peter Thiel told him it was a good idea?   He's nutty enough to think it might make a good future Libertarian Land.  I have no idea why Trump himself would come up with the thought...

Yay for science thwarting vegans

Have I mentioned before that I'm pretty dismayed how veganism has seemingly completely trumped vegetarianism in the alt. normal diet marketplace of ideas?    I mean, really:  the idea of giving up cheese, or eggs, is a huge ask for many people, me included.   And besides, I would be pretty sure that it is much, much easier to get a load of essential vitamins from your food if you include dairy, eggs, and the occasional not-very-sentient source of protein.   (Say, prawns and oysters - I am never going to worry too much about upsetting their farmed friends by taking them out of the sea.)  

But I can see why vegans argue about not wanting to support the egg industry, which involves killing huge numbers of day old rooster chicks.   (Why they wouldn't eat ones from their own backyard, though - that seems way too purist to me.)

So I am happy to read about the big effort to find a way to deal with the problem, by not even allowing the rooster eggs to hatch:

Modern laying hens have been bred to produce huge numbers of eggs, but their brothers are useless. They don't put on weight fast enough to be raised for meat. So hatchery workers—specialized "sexers"—sort day-old chicks by hand, squeezing open their anal vents for a sign of their sex. Females are sold to farms. Males—roughly 7 billion per year worldwide, according to industry estimates—are fed into a shredder or gassed.

Sorting males from females before chicks hatch at 21 days wouldn't just avoid the massacre. Hatcheries would no longer need to employ sexers, they wouldn't waste space and energy incubating male eggs, and they could sell those eggs as a raw material for animal feed producers, the cosmetics industry, or vaccine manufacturers. The United Egg Producers, a U.S. cooperative, says it wants to be cull-free by 2020, and the German government has said it will outlaw the practice. "Everyone wants the same thing, and the right piece of technology could solve this right now," says Timothy Kurt, scientific program director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) in Washington, D.C.

Look at how hi-tech one method of achieving this is:

One contender is the technology behind the respeggt eggs, which sorts them based on sex hormones. Funding from governments and industry has prompted an abundance of other ideas—from laser spectroscopy to MRI scans to genetic engineering. And next month, FFAR will announce seed funding for six finalists—selected from 21 entries from 10 countries—for an Egg-Tech Prize competing for up to $6 million for a workable method.

Almuth Einspanier, a veterinary endocrinologist at Leipzig University in Germany, and her colleagues laid the groundwork for the respeggt brand. They found that by day 9 of development, female embryos produce a hormone called estrone sulfate that can be detected reliably in fluid that builds up in the egg—"essentially the embryo's pee," Einspanier says. The German grocery chain Rewe and HatchTech, a Dutch hatchery equipment supplier, founded Seleggt, a spin-off based in Cologne, Germany, to market the technique. The company built a robot that fires a laser to open a hole in the shell much smaller than a pinhead. It sucks out a minuscule drop of the fluid and adds it to a solution that turns blue in the presence of the female hormone. Female eggs go to the incubator and male eggs are sent off to be frozen and processed into powder for animal feed.

Next thing we need work on - how to make milk other than from an udder.  What happened to this artificial cow's milk that is made from GM yeast?   Deserves another post, probably.