Not a great weekend

*  I have little to contribute on the riots in the US.   Although - I did notice a couple of days ago (after the first riots) saying that 3 of Fox News evening "hosts" had spent time blaming Obama for increasing racial tension in America.   Pathetic.  Also - it seems both sides are claiming nefarious infiltrators at the riots - Antifa on one side (no doubt Fox News is running with that, and I won't bother looking) and far Right agitators on the other.   Wouldn't be completely surprised if there is some element of truth in both claims.   [Oh - here's a post at Hot Air on this topic - pointing out that America's worst Attorney General in living memory is saying "it's Antifa". Of course.]

* Disturbingly, stupidity seems to be getting younger.  Still pretty white, though:

Australian anti-vaxxers label Covid-19 a 'scam' and break distancing rules at anti-5G protests

This was the photo of protest in Brisbane:

Hard to tell from that one, but the backs of heads look pretty young.

The Daily Mail got the heading more accurate:

COVID-19 is a scam, no mandatory vaccines and 5G equals communism: Inside Australia's WEIRDEST protest ever 

And they have a bunch of photos from demos around the country showing that the anti-vaxxer movement does skew young.   (Probably because people in their 50's and up remember how, as kids, our parents talked about how much they valued the success of the polio vaccination.)  Here's a photo from the Daily Mail:

I haven't read about how this was organised - I wouldn't mind betting that a Facebook page played a large role.

Update:   a couple of other things about the character of the anti-vaxxers movement.   I think it used to be pretty accurate to characterise most anti-vaxxers as people on the Green/Left side of politics, and probably also dominated by women (even if the bogus "science" supporting it came from men.)   But something seems to have happened to move a substantial number to the Right - is it just that they saw the Right was cornering the market in obsessive conspiracy belief, and the anti-vaxxers are joiners?

Also, with this move, as the photos indicate, it looks more male dominated than before.    Look at loony loon Pete Evans, who having been sacked from Channel 7, has come out more strongly than ever with anti-vax and crank medicine as well as Qanon conspiracy tweets.  

I find this rather odd - but I presume some journalist somewhere is looking into this. 

About Wodehouse

You know, I don't think I could have told you a thing about the private life of PG Wodehouse until I  read this article just now in the New Yorker.   (I have never tried his books, or even watched the TV adaptations either.   Perhaps I should read something by him, and I presume Scribd, which I have been using for a couple of months, would have some.)

Anyway, somewhat interesting.

PS:  I make a prediction that Tim T has read something by him.  Tim?

I have a problem with this so-called trolley problem problem

David Roberts, one of the best people to follow on Twitter, says he hates the trolley problem (for reasons he doesn't explain) and tweets with approval this AEON essay which criticises "thought experiments" in ethics.

Curiously, I don't think the article actually goes on to explain much about the issue the author has with the actual trolley problem.  Instead, he gives examples of other thought experiments which have, I think, some obvious problems.

And at the end of the article he says:

Overall, ethical thought experiments are, at best, fallible ways of constructing simplified models that map rather imperfectly onto the world as we experience it, and can distort as much as they illuminate. So should we give up on them as sources of ethical insight?

and answers that with (in my paraphrase) "no, we just have to be careful how we use them."

Well, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?   

A question about the executive order

I haven't seen much about Trump's attempt to scare Twitter into not fact checking him, but I don't understand this:   if Trump wants social media companies to be at risk of being sued for content as a publisher, doesn't that make it more likely that said companies should delete his tweets due to things like the defamatory rubbish about Joe Scarborough?   Otherwise they are at risk of being joined into any defamation action that the defamed may take.

And anyone honest can see that it's the American Right that is living in a bigger conspiracy fantasy world than the Left, by far, and so many of the conspiracy claims are potentially defamatory.   Any change in the law is therefore more likely to hurt the Right than the Left.

Am I wrong in my understanding of this?  I will have to wait for more on line commentary to be able to tell.

Update:   I see that, no, I wasn't wrong about this.   Someone writing at National Review (found via one S Davidson*, posting something useful for a change) writes:

Stripping Twitter and other social media of liability protections is likely to make them more inclined to censor speech, not permit it. Either these companies will have to pass a “neutrality” test imposed by the government, or they’ll simply take down as much controversial content as possible. 

I mean, isn't this obvious??  Yet you have "must make my boss happy no matter the logic" AG Barr standing next to Trump pretending giving effect to the Order would have the opposite effect.

I also recommend reading Allahpundit's lengthy and hot take down of the executive order.  He really hates Trump, and it would seem from comments at Hot Air that 95% of its readership hates him for hating Trump:

.... this is a glimpse at an ugly authoritarian soul fantasizing openly about using government power to censor a critic. Not even a critic, as Twitter’s let him run wild on their platform for a decade. All they did to piss him off was append a note to two of his tweets that slightly complicated his scheme to scapegoat voting-by-mail for his possible defeat in November. Two days later we have the president ranting in the Oval Office next to the Attorney General about closing down a prominent media company that’s used by millions to communicate.  

The post notes that there are some within the White House strongly opposed to Trump's and Barr's little revenge fantasy.   Chances are, nothing concrete will come of it.  But making futile executive orders makes you look weak and impotent, no matter how much cultists will think the order is still the best thing since poisonous kool-aid. 

Update:  yeah, here's Jennifier Rubin at the WAPO arguing that it would be good for Twitter to not have legal protection for content published:

Well, the argument goes, how would Twitter decide which of Trump’s tweets to block or which user to banish? Let’s not overthink this. Let Twitter operate by the same rules as traditional media. No more protection from lawsuits. Let Twitter figure out which tweets it wants to be legally responsible for and which will leave it open to legal attack.

* his link was useful, his take on the matter pretty stupid.  He thinks Twitter made a big mistake by provoking Trump.   How does he figure that when he's quoting a guy saying that the whole idea behind the Order would backfire on Trump - not to mention my last point in this post that an ineffectual Order that doesn't go anywhere makes Trump look weak.

This is going to go over well

Trump, even by his own appallingly low standards, seems to gone into a tailspin in the last couple of weeks, so much so that even Andrew Bolt and a few of the old commenters at Catallaxy are calling him out over the Joe Scarborough murder tweets.   (Catallaxy remains the Australian home of the true Trump cultists, though.  I'm waiting for the Steve Kates "whataboutism" post which explains that everyone needs to forgive Trump for conspiracy based defamation because of how he is was so horribly victimised by the Russiagate media coverage.)

Anyway, with Trump saying that he'll do something about social media not treating him fairly, and then this news:

it looks like he hasn't bottomed out of the tailspin yet.

This is going to backfire massively.

Update:  human/alien hybrid Zuckerberg isn't going to risk Trump hurting his multi billion dollar business model, so he's out with the pre-emptive "suck up to the President my platform helped Russia elect" interview already:

Zuckerberg Says Twitter Is Wrong to Fact-Check Trump

Update 2:  this made me laugh:

Trailer theory confirmed

I see that the new Netflix series Space Force, for which a lot of people had high hopes due to the heavy involvement of Steve Carrell, amongst others, has received very lukewarm reviews.

This would seem to confirm what I've been saying lately about trailers for movies and series, as I had not been impressed by the one that came out for this show a few weeks ago:  if you can't make an appealing trailer out of an entire movie (or, even more so, series), it's a bad sign, given the amount of material they have to work with.  Even bad movies are usually capable of getting a decent enough trailer. 

To put this more succinctly:   a good trailer is not a guarantee of a good movie/TV show, but a dull trailer is a likely indicator of a dull or disappointing movie or show.  

The Church does things differently in Germany

I had no idea that Germany would have Catholic Churches funded this way.  From the Catholic Herald, in a story headed Record numbers leave Church in Munich archdiocese:

The Munich statistical office told CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, on May 26 that 10,744 Catholics formally withdrew from the Church in 2019. It noted that this was a fifth higher than in 2018, when 8,995 people left.

Statisticians said this was the first time that annual departures had surpassed the 10,000 mark since records began. Previously, the highest figure was 9,010, set in 1992.

In March, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bavaria’s public-service broadcaster, reported that people gave a variety of reasons for leaving, including a desire to stop paying church tax, the clerical abuse scandal and the position of women within the Church.

The Church in Germany is largely funded through a tax collected by the government. If an individual is registered as a Catholic then 8-9% of their income tax goes to the Church. The only way they can stop paying the tax is to make an official declaration renouncing their membership of the Church. They are no longer allowed to receive the sacraments or a Catholic burial.

While the number of Catholics abandoning the faith has increased steadily since the 1960s, the Church’s income has risen. In 2018, the Church’s income rose to 6.64 billion euros, while 216,078 people left the Church, according to a report by the German bishops’ conference.

I find that all rather surprising...

The amoral President

Allahpundit at Hot Air makes a couple of good points about Trump continuing to vomit up "maybe he's a murderer?  Maybe not?" conspiracy smears against Joe Scarborough. 

First, on how Twitter should deal with it (as Allahpundit thinks they must, in some fashion):

Are they sure they don’t want to try to just ride this out? He’ll tweet something even more obnoxious soon enough, likely at a less sympathetic target than the Klausutis family, and we’ll forget all about this. The nice thing about showing that you’re unfit for office every day is that your critics never have time to dwell on yesterday’s evidence. All Twitter needs him to do is provide a new shiny object that’s not quite so uncomfortable to handle. Give him a few hours.

And secondly (and more importantly), he notes how Trumps further tweets about it show what a complete amoral asshat he is:

I’ll leave you with a point I saw made on Twitter that’s jarring but also eminently true: Trump would be just fine with the idea of Scarborough having killed an aide if “Morning Joe” was still in the pro-Trump camp. The president practically admitted it in his tweets today, claiming that he’d heard the smears against Scarborough for years and never ruled them out when they were on friendly terms — but went on being friendly with him anyway. And why not? Trump’s idea of morals is purely transactional: There’s no sin he won’t happily overlook so long as you’re on his side. You could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t lose his vote of confidence in you — until you start badmouthing him. That’s what offends Trump about Scarborough, not his non-murder of a former aide.

The lawyers have got to him

That's the most likely explanation for this:

Nothing would be more delightful than to see Fox News facing a mega class action for all the parents and grandparents who died prematurely.

Of course, we must now all watch out for the Trump reaction.

A scandal that it's only now a scandal

The ABC reports:

An Australian SAS operator is under investigation for killing an Afghan man his comrades say was an unarmed and intellectually disabled civilian, the ABC can reveal.

The 2012 shooting is known as "the village idiot killing" among the special forces.

The ABC can also reveal the SAS soldier under investigation for this killing is the same man shown shooting dead a different unarmed Afghan man in video footage aired by Four Corners earlier this year.

Known as "Soldier C", he was stood down after the program and is now under investigation by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for both of the killings. 

ABC Investigations has spoken to two SAS patrol members, witnesses to the newly uncovered killing, who say the disabled man was shot in the back of the head as he was trying to "limp" away.

"Choppers have landed, this guy's ran. Fair enough. We were pretty intimidating," said one patrol member.

"He was obviously intellectually disabled. [Soldier C's] shot this f***er through the back of the head. And I remember it so clearly because his brain literally hit the ground before he did. It was just so unnecessary."

Why isn't it more of a scandal than it seems to be that it has taken 8 YEARS for investigation into a serving SAS member who his fellow SAS members considered  a murderous war criminal??

The worst takes

As you might expect, the absolutely worst takes on a viral Twitter dispute between a woman and a black man would come from Catallaxy; the only question being which of these two favourite targets (for misogyny and racism respectively) they would end up favouring. 

The most remarkable comments, to me, come from one S Davidson, whose sentiments are all against the black man for being a "busy body".  

Seeing his view on victimhood doesn't seem to extend to a black man being the subject of a white woman saying  "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life" when he 100% clearly isn't,  and then carrying out the threat in (eventually) hysterical voice, all I can say is that he should never be let anywhere near jury service, ever.   "Just too gormless" they should write against the name.  

What a threshold

Parts of India routinely get ridiculously hot.  The news today:

NEW DELHI: Heatwave conditions intensified in most of the northern states of India on Monday, with Churu in Rajasthan scorching at 47.5 degrees Celsius and the mercury breaching the 46-degree mark in parts of the national capital.

And look at the rather extraordinarily high threshold they seem to set there for calling it a heatwave:

In England, by comparison, you get the impression it's something like two days above 28 degrees.

I would still like to know what happens to the death rate in India during its heat waves.  I mean, surely it must increase substantially, but you never hear about this.  (Unlike when you have a heat wave in Europe or Russia.)

Update:  yes, there is research about this, and I think I might have even linked to this paper before.  But the numbers cited for increased deaths always sound too low to me.

Another nice sounding, almost vegan, recipe

I get so surprised when I see a vegan-ish recipe that I think would taste good, I like to record it here.  (I think the last one I noted was from the Washington Post too, and I still haven't cooked it).

Anyway, here it is - a curried chickpea salad.   It contains a lot of things I like.

Being a perpetually outraged loudmouth for a living means never having to be consistent

Moat swimming popular in Japan

A Japanese man was arrested in Tokyo on Monday after swimming across the Imperial Palace's moat to scale an outer wall, entering off-limits parts of the grounds, police said.

They said the man appeared to be in his 40s and was arrested mid-morning after emerging on palace grounds shortly before Emperor Naruhito was scheduled to conduct a rice planting ceremony elsewhere on the imperial property.

The report goes on to note the recent history of other men who have swum across the moat.    

In America, I suspect they would die in a hail of gun fire.

Don't tell your paranoid friend...

A paper that has recently appeared in Science Advances doesn't seem to yet have had the publicity in the media that I thought it might get:

Remote, brain region–specific control of choice behavior with ultrasonic waves

The abstract:

The ability to modulate neural activity in specific brain circuits remotely and systematically could revolutionize studies of brain function and treatments of brain disorders. Sound waves of high frequencies (ultrasound) have shown promise in this respect, combining the ability to modulate neuronal activity with sharp spatial focus. Here, we show that the approach can have potent effects on choice behavior. Brief, low-intensity ultrasound pulses delivered noninvasively into specific brain regions of macaque monkeys influenced their decisions regarding which target to choose. The effects were substantial, leading to around a 2:1 bias in choices compared to the default balanced proportion. The effect presence and polarity was controlled by the specific target region. These results represent a critical step towards the ability to influence choice behavior noninvasively, enabling systematic investigations and treatments of brain circuits underlying disorders of choice.

Brit Hume is a lost cause

I think he used to have a reputation as one of Fox News's moderates.  Now he's just a Trump defending moron:

Sinclair Davidson's moderation skills on display again

Sure, Clementine Ford is an annoying version of a feminist who thinks she can joke about men not dying fast enough while (presumably) being upset about men (like Alan Jones) making violence suggestive language about women. 

Personally, I have long thought she is best ignored, but it's fair enough that people complain about her getting grants to continue doing whatever she does. 

So, of course, the quality of Catallaxy comments about her is going to be great (that's sarcasm), and include argument over whether she is attractive or not.  Because that matters in a debate about what she said.  This comment struck me as particularly unpleasant, though:

Why has no journalist in the country ever challenged this academic for what he allows and doesn't allow at a blog he can moderate? 

Miranda Devine - expert on black America

What lulz.  Miranda Devine turns up in the New York Post, saying that Biden has lost blacks because of his "you ain't black" statement last week:

“Ain’t black” is Biden’s “deplorables” moment. Yet his supporters seem oblivious to the lethal blow it has delivered to his prospects, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t comprehend the catastrophe of her “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

Biden confirmed what Candace Owens’ “Blexit” movement is all about, the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted and traps them in a victim narrative.

Candace Owens!  The last time I clicked on something by her, a couple of weeks ago (via Twitter) she was arguing that people shouldn't get so hung up (pardon the pun) on the history of American lynchings.  There were "only" 3,500 blacks lynched over the entire American history, so yeah, it was bad, but let's not get carried away about its significance.  (I paraphrase ever so slightly.)

A sad story about the movie business

Of course, this would have happened thousands of time before, but it's still sad reading about how a guy who, at the age of 62, finally sold a script for a movie, but had the idea taken over by someone famous, who then made dubious claims about the lack of influence of the original work.

The quasi villain is Richard Curtis, who I personally would have liked to see retire from creative writing 30 years ago.  (I think that allows for his TV work, but kills off all of his movies - especially Love Actually.)

A close examination of COVID-19 spread

Interesting story at Science, about how a South African hospital was able to do a very careful trace of how COVID-19 spread through it:

On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time.

Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from ward to ward and between patients, doctors, and nurses, based on floor maps of the hospital, analyses of staff and patient movements, and viral genomes. Their 37-page analysis, posted on the university’s website on 22 May, is the most extensive study of any hospital outbreak of COVID-19 so far. It suggests all of the cases originated from a single introduction, and that patients rarely infected other patients. Instead, the virus was mostly carried around the hospital by staff and on the surfaces of medical equipment.....

The report, which reads like a detective novel, tracks the virus’s spread through five hospital wards, including neurology, surgery, and intensive care units (ICUs), as well as to a nearby nursing home and dialysis center. Remarkably, no staff infections seem to have taken place in the hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, arguably the riskiest area of the hospital. That may be because patients are less infectious by the time they are admitted to intensive care, or because staff there are more diligent about preventing infection, the authors note.

The first patient, who sought help for coronavirus symptoms, only spent a few hours at the hospital, but likely transmitted the virus to an elderly patient admitted the same day for a stroke. The pair were in the hospital’s emergency department at the same time; the first patient was kept separate in a triage area, but that room was reached through the main resuscitation bay, where the stroke patient occupied a bed. (The emergency department was closed in April and opened again this month with an altered layout to improve infection control.) The two were also seen by the same medical officer.

The stroke patient, who developed a fever on 13 March, probably infected the first staff case, a nurse caring for her who developed symptoms on 17 March. A further four patients may have caught the virus from the stroke patient, including a 46-year-old woman admitted for severe asthma who had a bed opposite hers. Both she and the stroke patient died.

But on the whole, patients infected few other patients directly. Instead staff members spread the disease from patient to patient and from department to department—perhaps sometimes without becoming infected themselves. “We think in the main it’s likely to have been from [staff] hands and shared patient care items like thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes,” says Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform and one of the study leaders. He and the other authors found no evidence that aerosol transmission contributed to the outbreak.

 There is more at the link above.

COVID-19 problems in India

I can't embed this, but there's a short video report on CNA about how the Right wing in India is using COVID-19 to spread ill will towards Muslims.   (Apparently, social media is being used to spread claims such as one that Muslims are spitting on food they sell so as to ensure the spread of the virus.) 

Once again, as example of the way social media can be a dangerous menace.

Word salad of the day

Stan Grant got to write a real word salady piece for The Conversation about the Uluru statement (regarding aboriginal representation in parliament or otherwise), and I am pleased to see that lots of comments are along the lines of this first one:

The problem I, and I believe many Australians have, with articles like this is that it is a word salad of vague concepts and ideas with precisely zero clear policy change proposals. As a normal working bloke who didn’t go to Uni I can honestly say I have no idea what a single part of this article means in the real world.

A voice to parliament? To say what? If you read this article out in parliament you’d put everyone to sleep.

Stan Grant is ponderous in a very Paul Kelly fashion.  So many words to so little effect.

Quick movie review - Jojo Rabbit

Watched it on Saturday.

It often made me laugh, but I can see why it had a limited box office take.  The tone changes are way, way too abrupt. There is one way I thought the film could go some way to redeem that - but it is sort of a spoiler so I will put it below in small print.*

Other than that, the film often looked a lot like a Wes Anderson one, and I see lots of critics noticed that in their reviews.  (I actually read little about this film before seeing it.)   That's not a bad thing, it's just an observation.

I think Taiki Waititi is very talented, and obviously likes to mix up humour with a bit of pathos or sentimentality (even What We Do in the Shadows had romance in it.)    But the broader the satire, the harder it is to pull that off satisfactorily, and a lot of this is pretty broad satire.  So the sudden switches to bleak seriousness are pretty disorientating.

Overall, nice try, well made and well acted.   But not a complete success.

PS:  I think the film shows how we often undervalue the great job that can be done by child actors.  The lead kid in this was really good, in a challenging role.  Yet we never seem to see kids seriously considered for acting awards.  I wonder why...


*  I thought it would have been a nice touch if the father had turned up at the end.  No such luck.

Fear of not social distancing

As I am sure others may have noticed, I get the impression that, at least as far as supermarkets are concerned, a lot of shoppers are no longer taking social distancing all that seriously.

I am finding that I now get the feeling, when people push past close to me with no obvious concern, that I am passing through the invisible cloud of their exhaled breath, containing God knows what.   The whole of a busy supermarket now feels like it could be an invisible viral soup.

Of course, what I should be doing is wearing a facemask to help counter this feeling of helplessness in the face of my fellow careless humans.  But I took a punt and didn't put one on today, and regretted it.

I wonder how many other people have developed this mild form of germophobia...

    

Obviously, yes

The Guardian, dealing with the important stories of the moment:

The Empire Strikes Back at 40: did the Star Wars saga peak too early?

The article notes what many seem to forget:  the movie did not open with uniformly great reviews.  But this helped boost the pleasure when I saw it, as it was one of those movies which I went into with no great expectations, and was delighted at how great it was.   (That also made The Return of the Jedi, which I seem to recall getting better reviews than it deserved, suffer a great deal in comparison.)

Friday porn

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If you think the Tara Read allegation has legs...

...I suggest you watch last night's Planet America, in which they uncover evidence that she (or someone acting for her) went back and amended an on line statement to make it foreshadow more details coming, when in fact it originally referred only to sexual harassment, not sexual assault.

This and the recent Politico story about how many people she has dealt who think she has a loose association with the truth, convince me that she is an oddball who has upped a story of leaving Biden's office for harassment (which the other office workers say was not the reason for her departure) into one of serious sexual assault.  

Planet America continues to be extremely good - very informed, and very balanced.  I would fault them for too much balance in favour of Trump and Republicans, actually;  but they are still well worth watching.

Putin's not having a good pandemic

Politico has an article that notes:

For most of the spring, the official line from state media was that Russia had nothing to worry about. The coronavirus was happening somewhere else, in Europe and Asia and the United States, but not here in Russia. The country had reacted promptly to potential danger, closing the border with China on January 30, then screening incoming passengers and finally halting all incoming air traffic to keep the invading viral army out. Hospitals were refitted, doctors retrained, and protective gear and equipment sent to every hospital in the country. No problem, said the Kremlin: We’ve got this.

That’s no longer believable. As of Monday, May 18, Russia was in second place after the United States in number of infections — 290,678. And those are just the official statistics. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said he believes about 2 percent of the population of Moscow is infected — that is, about 250,000 people. The death rate remains low, with only 2,722 deaths so far, although there are doubts about that number too: Recent media reports have shown how Russian methodology for assigning cause of death has lowered the Covid morbidity numbers, perhaps by more than 50 percent. (This was disputed by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova.) I don’t know anyone who thinks the statistics are accurate, if only because people were dying from Covid in Russia before anyone was testing for it.

This was supposed to be a triumphant spring for Putin. Under his stewardship, the country had amassed a huge reserve fund, had confidently started a price war with Saudi Arabia over oil and was arranging a spectacular international event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was planned to be a lavish celebration, where hundreds of foreign leaders and dignitaries, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and possibly Donald Trump would stand on the viewing platform above Lenin’s mausoleum and watch a military parade. Millions would march in “Immortal Regiment” parades, honoring relatives who fought in the war; the day would end with banquets, grand concerts and the best fireworks display of the decade. 

Putin had also carefully laid the groundwork for a series of political and constitutional moves that would allow him, effectively, to remain in power for the foreseeable future, maybe even for life. In March, the Russian Parliament approved an amendment to the constitution that would limit presidential terms but would also reset Putin’s presidential terms to zero, paving the way for him to stay head of state until 2036, the year he will turn 84. All that remained to seal the deal was a general vote on the constitutional amendments, which was supposed to be held in April.

 And in the Washington Post:

Stories of Russia’s powerful state capacity have long been central to Putin’s image as a strong leader. Since he first became president in 2000, Putin has promised to provide decisive individual leadership, not constrained by parliament, media, oligarchs or civil society, and to rebuild the Russian state, which had crumbled in the 1990s. At the beginning of his reign, Putin implicitly asked Russian citizens to accept a social pact. He would rebuild the state and grow the economy if Russians would agree to forgo their democratic institutions and human rights and allow him greater power. Putin also promised to return Russia to the international stage as a “great power.” The image of Putin as a strong leader and Russia as a strong state — both at home and abroad — has played a key role in Putin’s mystique. Putin is a “statist.” There is even a precise word in the Russian language for this ideological orientation: gosudarstvennik.

And that’s why Russia’s recent travails with containing the coronavirus threaten Putin and his autocracy. Globally, Russia now is second only to the United States in the number of citizens infected, and many suspect underreporting, especially regarding mortality rates, in official statistics.

The reality is that Putin has failed to build an efficient state in the service of Russian people over the past 20 years. He has put tremendous resources into modernizing Russia’s nuclear weapons, intelligence capabilities, conventional and police forces, and Olympic facilities, but invested far less into roads, schools or hospitals, especially outside of Moscow. Covid-19 is now exposing these lapses in state-building.

Putin also personally has not stepped forward during this crisis. He has been absent for days at a time, deferring to governors to make their own decisions. He has seemed disengaged and sometimes even uninterested in leading his government’s response to the pandemic. Moreover, Russia’s minister of culture and minister of housing have both tested positive, while Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin have even been hospitalized. That doesn’t look like strength.

Unusual drug effects

I have likely posted before about the drug DMT*, and how odd I find it that the very common effect of it is for users to have a "visit" from a entity perceived variously as an alien, spirit, god, angel, or something.   This means its users are inclined to believe more in the supernatural.  Vice has an article about a recent study:

A study has found that most people who regularly use the psychedelic drug DMT develop beliefs in a higher power such as God, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University.

An online survey of more than 2,500 people undertaken by researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine revealed that after taking DMT—nicknamed “the spirit molecule” for its ability to create deeply spiritual experiences—58 percent of respondents said tripping on DMT had triggered a belief in divine beings and powerful supernatural entities.

The study, published in the new issue of Journal of Psychopharmacology, aimed to better understand the weird experiences people have on DMT—called “entity encounter experiences”—and how they impacted their outlook. The survey was shared globally on websites such as VICE and is the largest questionnaire looking at DMT entity encounters to date. The results were published by some of the pioneers in modern psychedelic research: Alan K. Davis, Roland Griffiths, and Matthew Johnson, who run Hopkins’ new Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Respondents to the study, who had taken DMT on average 14 times, described bumping into an array of what they could best describe as aliens, spirits, angels, demons, gnomes and fairies. Most of these creatures, said respondents, were sentient and benevolent, with many described as “sacred.” Less than 15 percent reported “judgmental or malicious” creatures.

Now this may sound as if you have a good chance of enjoying the experience, but I'm not sure I would want to hear one of the messages noted here:

Almost 70 percent of people said they received some kind of message, task or insight from the entities they rubbed elbows with. Some were given predictions about the future or told the day they would die. Some were shown a way out of addiction. Others were told “love is the answer to everything" or “we are all connected, all one.” Some were even told they are God.

I don't want some bogus angel or alien worrying me about the date of my death.

The other thing I found surprising about this is how short the DMT trip is how chronologically short they can be:

Whatever, or whoever, people are meeting in the DMT zone, these life changing appointments, described by psychedelic ethnobotanist Terence McKenna as “machine elves from hyperspace”, are very short in real time. While a smoked DMT experience can feel like many lifetimes, curiously, the effects leave as quickly as they come, peaking in just a few minutes and evaporating in less than half an hour. For comparison, an LSD trip can last 12 hours or more.

All pretty interesting, even for someone like me who has never had an inclination to try anything more than alcohol.


*  Yes, I have, in 2011. 

Not feeling good about India

In an online article about Buddhism and free will (which I do not entirely "grok", and quite possibly never will!), I found this passage interesting:

Hindu scripture describes the saints as veritable supermen. For example, the Taittiriya Upanishad tells us that the yogi "attains . . . independent sovereignty,” and enjoys a bliss that is a billion times grea­ter than that of the highest gods (1.6; 2.8.).  In the Mait­ri Upanishad the ascetic surpasses Brahman, the Godhead, and "will go [yet further], he [will surpass] the gods in the realm of divinity. . . ." (4.4) In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad yogis gain in­credible pow­ers: they “shall roll up space as if it were a piece of leather" (6.20); and a yogi in the Taittiriya Upanishad boasts that "I am the first-born of the world-order, earlier than the gods, in the navel of immortality. . . . I have over­come the whole world" (3.5).  Such a view has been called “spiritual Titanism,” an extreme form of humanism in which humans take on divine attributes and prerogatives.5

 
            In the Pali texts the Buddha rejects these incredible claims of the Hindu and Jain yogis.  He was particularly critical of their claims to omniscience. 

Well, yes.  Almost certainly a good idea to reject anyone's claim, be they yogi or not, to omniscience.

This leads me to something I have been thinking about lately - I'm still slowly making my way through the Indian Netflix series Sacred Games, and the second series in particular is making a case for considering Indian mythology to be much, well, weirder than I had previously thought.   The show also seems to spending a lot of time on deriding the country's cult of the guru. 

Was the author of the book a cynic who thought religion in Indian and the Middle East (Muslim  terrorism features too) causes more harm than good, because the TV series is giving me that vibe?

Watching Foreign Correspondent last night also did nothing to improve my image of the nation, showing how so many of the poor "migrant workers" from within the country had been completely caught off guard by the sudden, COVID-19 closures:

Tens of millions of migrant workers, who'd moved to the cities to find work, lost their jobs, their wage and their shelter overnight. To find food and shelter, hundreds of thousands hit the road to head back to their villages.

In a bid to stop the exodus of people and the virus to the countryside, governments cancelled trains and buses, and closed state borders. Many kept walking anyway, often trekking hundreds of kilometres to get home.

While the government has tried to help those in need by providing food and financial aid, not everyone has benefitted.

I think that last sentence is an understatment, if ever there was one.

Not getting it

So Spotify is getting Joe Rogan all to themselves.   I've tried listening to Rogan a couple of times, I think, but I don't see the reason for his popularity.

Mind you, I am not a fan of podcasts generally speaking.  But I still don't see why people would listen to this one in particular.

He can't wait to be old and locked away for his own safety

And hasn't Warren Mundine become an extreme Right wing pinhead?  

Starting to feel this way

He is very likeable

Haven't we reached the point where "balance" is dangerous and nonsense?

Am I the only one who has developed the feeling that a sufficiently large section of the Right has turned so far against the interests of common humanity  that media owners of the Left/centrist variety are wrong to attempt anything like "balance" by incorporating opinion by anyone who supports Trump and/or denies climate change?

Look at the Washington Post, for example.  It's editorial opinion is:

The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate'

yet it still makes room (to the outrage of every single reader, it seems) for the conservative, always Trump defending dimwit Hugh Hewitt to write:

I don’t know why they won’t confront the mountain of evidence of abuse of power. Much of Trump Derangement Syndrome (the disease that afflicts the left and the media and causes them to see evil in all that Trump does) manifests itself in “attributing motive” to opponents. It’s a cheap debating trick. They should know better, but I don’t know if they do or don’t.

But I know McCarthyism when I see it. To define anyone who uses Obamagate as either a racist or conspiracy theorist is outside the norms of acceptable American political dialogue. McCarthyism of the Left will not work outside of progressive cloisters. Obamagate is here to stay because the abuse of power is already obvious and cannot be erased.

We know Fox News has a trivial amount of "balance" in the form of Chris Wallace and (say) Neil Cavuto, and it enrages Trump to see even that, when 98% of the network's output has the same bias levels of North Korean state media.

You could say that WAPO making room for Hewitt or (equally dumb)  Marc Thiessen is the same thing - a mere token effort at being able to say they provide balance.

But it's absurd, isn't it?   There are certain topics which the media, almost at a uniform international level, agrees just do not warrant exposure in serious, mainstream outlets because to do so gives them a shine of credibility they just do not deserve - the anti vaxxer movement, for example, or Holocaust denial.    Surely the utter obvious narcissistic inanity and inability to listen to credible experts of Trump puts supporting him in the same category.  Not to mention his recent re-Tweeting some blood thirsty conspiracists of QAnon, who literally would get a thrill if it was announced that a 1,000 liberals (up to and including Trump's opponent at the last election) had been executed overnight for (imagined) child sex abuse.   

And why do people with clearly opposite opinions want to be part of the pretence of supplying "balance."    How bad does it have to get for someone like Chris Wallace to say "this is serious, I just can't stand to be in the same company as the extreme sycophants who dominate this network"?

Why can't we just say that people who want sense and decency and non-denial of science consider the Trump supporting Right has gone nuts and does not deserve a voice in sensible, mainstream media?   They can all congregate around their Fox News and Breitbart and other nonsense outlets that will pander to their dangerous lack of judgement, and those networks can kick out their token efforts at balance too.

I think things have just become too serious to continue pretending that balance is warranted.  

Internal hair

A report at Gulf News:

Cairo: A medical team at a Saudi hospital had removed 2 kilograms of hair from a woman’s stomach, ending years of pain, media reported Monday.

The woman in her 20s had long suffered from excruciating pain, the cause of which was not clear until recently.

She underwent a massive clinical examination at the King Abdul Aziz Hospital in the western Saudi city of Taif that eventually specified the source of her pain, spokesman for the city’s health department Abdul Hadi Al Rabae told Okaz newspaper.

A strange object was seen recoiling inside the abdomen and forming a strangling wall of the intestines, the official added.

“The medical team decided on an urgent intervention to reach the strange object, which was found out to be a formation of interlocked hair weighing two kgs. The mass was forming around the wall of the intestines inside the abdominal cavity and was increasingly growing in a medical rarity,” the official.

I presume it was "growing" because she was eating more hair.

This condition, called trichophagia, was discussed in detail in this article at The Conversation.

I didn't know this:

Both trichophagia and pica have been found to occur in people with iron deficiency. In some case reports of Rapunzel syndrome, hair pulling and hair eating stopped after the person was treated for iron deficiency or coeliac disease.

So, eating red meat helps some women (it's mainly found in women) avoid eating their hair.  Sorry, cows.

[And yes, I know, there are other ways to get a boost of iron in your diet.]

Just what you want in a President

Haven't noticed many people on Twitter or elsewhere saying that the timing of the start of Trump's apparent self medication with hydroxychloroquine matches up pretty closely with the Mothers Day tweetstorm that everyone recognized as extreme, even for him.  

Here's Vox writing about the drug in March:

The potential adverse side effects of hydroxychloroquine are well-documented. The drug, which is a less toxic version of chloroquine, can carry adverse psychiatric side effects that can occur even after just a single dose, though it’s more common after high doses. Those manifest differently among patients, ranging from anxiety, insomnia, and nightmares to paranoia, hallucinations, personality changes, and suicidal ideation.

In combatting malaria, doctors have accepted these potential side effects in cases where patients would otherwise die.

“The risk of psychosis is of little relevance if one is dead, the thinking goes,” Remington Nevin, an epidemiologist who specializes in drug safety, tweeted.

Some think he may be lying about taking it, but it seems to me reasonable to think his tweeting might be a sign he did indeed start on it.

In normal times, the fact that the President is taking, voluntarily and unnecessarily, a drug with potential serious effects on his mood and thinking would be something the press and his party would worry about.   But, I guess, as he was already such a fragile narcissist nut, it makes detecting the drug's effect more difficult.

The music of the spheres

Spotted this odd sounding summary of a paper at Nature:

I hope the music sounds at least a bit like John William's alien music language in Close Encounters.

So much for the "unmasking" attempt at scandal

So many (nearly all?) conspiracies owe their existence and longevity to the lack of experience in, or specialised knowledge of, a field of expertise or practice by members of the public, which is exploited by the person first creating it.

Don't know how structural steel beams perform under X degrees of heat for X amount of minutes?   Well, of course that's an area ripe for conspiratorial exploitation.

The Clinton email issue with using a private account  - as I have said before, people who have worked in Defence at nearly any but the lowest levels should all know that it is easy for an email to end up with a dubious (and unnecessarily high) security classification;  the average gullible member of the public, though, hasn't a clue and thinks if any "secret" email had been misdirected or hacked it was inevitably going to be some kind of espionage disaster. 

The latest example, if this information from a WAPO column about the pathetic attempt of Trump to make "unmasking" of Flynn a scandal against Obama and Biden is true, it would be a great example of exploitation of ignorance:

Finally, the fact that a senior official’s name appeared on the list doesn’t necessarily mean that the official actually made the request. In many cases, unmasking requests are made by a senior official’s daily intelligence briefer so they could be prepared to answer any questions the official might raise. The intelligence community nonetheless records that as a request by the senior official.

Do it

From NPR:

Republicans say they're moving ahead with plans to gather tens of thousands of people at their presidential nominating convention in North Carolina this summer — even as Democrats weigh their options for convening during the coronavirus pandemic.

What I think would be funny, kind of, is if Trump himself was fearful of turning up in person  in front of a crowded auditorium, but instead only appeared on the big screen, all as Big Brother does in 1984.  

The organisers are saying that they know there will have to be some changes due to COVID-19, including possibly attendees wearing masks.  But how many would reject that request?   

Sounds a bit of a possible PR nightmare, really.

Quick movie review - The Lighthouse

I think that, provided you go into it knowing that it has a reputation as an out there, weirdo film, it's enjoyable enough.   It looks really good, and is very atmospheric; and I can fully understand how the actors found it a difficult shoot.   (They are both really good, though.)

But it's hard to say how much one can really value a movie which has the audience rushing online afterwards to work out whether it is possible to make any sense of it.     (I haven't tried very hard.  My son told me that it's supposed to be very Freudian, and I read something about the influence of Greek myth.   Something about some painting explains one brief and particularly weird image, apparently.)

I would say the film is a bit of a cheat, though, in that the fairly early disclosure of the odd behaviour of the old dude indicates that there is likely to be an explanation coming (no matter how weird) of what he's doing up there with the light.  But there isn't.   All the sexual obsession stuff, be it of heterosexual or homoerotic nature, involving a mermaid (and, seemingly, a touch of tentacle porn) is, as far as I can tell, left without any explanation at all.   And really, there is a key sequence - perhaps the climatic one - where I think the film pushes so hard on the feeling that it ought to be making some kind of intuitive or subconscious sense, but isn't at all, that it diminishes what went before it. 

I haven't ever watched Mulholland Drive, which I think is supposed to be David Lynch's most dream like film*, but I have a vague recollection that he says he just grabs ideas from a process of meditative free association.   Eggers seems to do a far more calculated form of weirdness, where (if you care to investigate) you can see where some ideas come from.   But I wish he would do something a bit more conventional.   (I did enjoy this more than The Witch, though.)


*  perhaps I should say, except for Eraserhead, which I think is just like an outright nightmare version of fears of a young guy getting his girlfriend pregnant   

Chicken, butter, cider, apples, cream. What could go wrong?

Nothing.

I don't why I had not found this recipe before, since the name sounds pretty familiar, but I tried this version of chicken Normandy on Saturday night, and it worked very well.   It's pretty straight forward too - pretty much a one pan dish, although you take stuff out and put it back in, which means extra bowls.

I don't think I would change anything about the recipe, except that I would note that I used a "low sugar" cider, and cut up a whole chicken into 8 parts (drumstick, thigh, and the other part cut into two) so that there are smaller pieces, if you want people to pick and chose how much of the chicken to eat.  I would not buy just drumsticks to do this, as it would be hard getting them to sit far enough about the cider/onion sauce while in the oven.  A whole chicken, and the right sized pieces in the right sized pan, means you can be sure a lot of the chicken is above the liquid and develops the crisp skin that makes it nicer.

But the sauce - delicious, even if someone (like my daughter) is weirdly fussy about eating fruits with meat.   She just avoided the apples (I used Pink Lady) and had the sauce.  Steamed potatoes and sautéed brussels sprouts were the vegetables, if you were wondering.

All about the disturbing world of QAnon

An excellent long read at The Atlantic about QAnon makes the case for it being a new religion in the process of creation.   I thought that maybe exaggeration, but I actually haven't read that much analysis of it as a movement before, and perhaps didn't realise the intense religiosity of many of its followers, and the similarity to other religious movements which were not killed off by the failure of predictions. 

It also makes the point I keep noting about the unforeseen harm the internet would create:

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

The article makes it clear how one of the perverse ways the QAnon movement works is that it encourages people to "do their own research", which gives devotees the thrill of participating in building up the framework of a public conspiracy belief system.   And the feeling (that at least some followers have) that it "must" be true because God would not let them get deceived in this way is clear:

In Toledo, I asked Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered immediately: “I think it’s Trump.” I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said. But she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn’t about Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now, she said, “I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling me, ‘Enough’s enough.’ But I don’t feel that. I pray about it. I’ve said, ‘Father, should I be wasting my time on this?’ … And I don’t feel that feeling of I should stop.”

And once you buy into this way of thinking, everything can be made to fit into it:

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

 And another example:

 Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

 If only my conspiracy obsessed mastermind commenter could recognize how he has fallen into the same trap.   But they get too invested to ever come back out.  

What is freaking disturbing is when you have a President encouraging this dangerous movement that is, at heart, against the basic principles that you need people to adhere to have a sound government.   (It's also full of thirst for bloody revenge for purely imagined crimes - making it like a malignant version of Christianity that can no longer wait for God to do the accounting.)

If the Republicans, and the mainstream media, had any sense, they would be daily expressing dismay that Trump is not fit for office unless he disowns the QAnon movement.

I'm getting a Buddhist headache

Inspired by my last post, referencing animal suffering, I googled the question "what does Buddhist say about animal suffering?" which led to this lengthy post at the ABC Religion and Ethics website:  Buddhism and moral status of animals. 

It has given me the urge to make a few comments about this religion:

*  it annoys me how I don't enough even know how to pronounce many of the words for the different branches of the religion and some of the concepts, as this makes it harder for my tiny brain to remember after anything other than the shortest reading break what many of the different terms mean.   

*  I know it is indisputable that Christianity has undergone a massive amount of splintering over interpretation of it foundational scriptures and theology, but I think Buddhism, with the added complication of undergoing a large amount of syncretism as it moved into different regions, is even worse. 

*  Moral reasoning within the Christian faith - or any faith really - is simplified somewhat by having the concept of an ongoing entity (a discrete human soul, or resurrected body) that is going to be around to carry the consequences of its actions.   The arguments within Buddhism over moral action are undoubtedly more complicated by the "no self" idea.  Take these paragraphs  from the above article, for example:

Most agree, however, that the Buddha denies that there is an essential self that persists through time and that underlies all our changing physical and psychological properties. This idea might lend support to the following argument: Egoistic self-interest presupposes that there is a self whose interests should be privileged over others with respect to moral consideration. This presupposition is mistaken; there is no self that could be privileged in this way. Psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. If suffering should be removed, given some interest, then all sufferings should be removed, given some interest. Killing and harming animals causes them to suffer. Animals have an interest not to suffer. So, we should not kill or harm animals.

Versions of the no-self equality argument can be found throughout the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. A famous version appears in Chapter 8 of Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra. It is susceptible to objection, however. One might, for instance, challenge the premise that psychological states exist but no selves who own those states. Paul Williams argues that it does not make sense to speak of free-floating concerns, cares and sufferings without a subject undergoing those states. This is a subtle issue. The premise is making a metaphysical claim ― there is no ontological entity, self, that stands in an ownership relation to psychological events. This is different to the phenomenological claim that psychological events, ordinarily and constitutively, involve the subjective experiencing of their own content. Both claims as well as their consistency are accepted by leading proponents of Yogācāra and Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Madhyamaka Buddhism.

 It has the lot - long, unfamiliar words which won't stick in my memory easily; metaphysics which are complicated and not intuitive;  conflict between different schools of thought. 

As I say, it gives me a bit of a headache, really...