Up, through the at-mos-phere, up, where the air is clear...

Gawd, you would have felt sick to the stomach if you saw this live, but it all has a happy ending:

Tweets noted

Actually, I am less pessimistic than the last tweeter, but I could be proved wrong....

A useful summary

My only quibble - 5 decades seems a tad longer than I thought:

Particularly apt illustration for how the Bird brain, such that it is, works

Poor reviews

My impression from Twitter is that not only did all liberals think that the Trump speech was flat and way too long, but so did the frequent Trump apologist Brit Hume on Fox.   I assume that it really was flat, then.  (I saw bits and pieces, and it is no surprise to me that it is getting this sort of comment.)

Yet look at the headline on the Washington Post on line headline:

which gives the impression that it was an energetic speech.

I am very much on side with those media critics who are getting ropeable again that the mainstream press is not doing more caning of Trump for his abuse of his position, but are "two sides-ing" the parties again.

What have they got to lose by calling out a wannabe dictator as a wannabe dictator?  He already tells his followers they are the "enemy of the people" - itself an extraordinary undemocratic and dangerous attitude that should never have been normalised by resigned acceptance of its repetition.

To be clear:  the Washington Post routinely carries pages of strong Trump criticism, including of this speech.   But it shouldn't be giving a false impression in its main headline choice.  

Unsubtle symbolism

So, not only did a President use the White House and the Presidential seal for a party political convention, he also got to use a huge amount of (I assume) public land to launch a 4th July worthy fireworks display around the most obviously phallic monument in America.   

(Look, I don't normally think of the Washington Monument as phallic, but in the context of a narcissistic, trash talking, thinks-he's-real-masculine-but-probably-needs-Viagra President, I don't think this is an unwarranted take on the symbolism.)  

Update:  Heh -

Encouraging violence for political purposes

Good article at WAPO about how it is 100% clear that Republicans have no incentive to hope that community violence calms down rapidly, as it suits them politically:

At the Republican convention, one speaker after another claimed America’s cities have descended into chaos, which is not the fault of the current president but shows how much worse things will get under Biden, who is a supposed captive of radical forces unleashed inside the Democratic Party.

Some on the right are so convinced this will be effective that they haven’t shied away from cozying up to vigilante violence. Speaking about 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a Trump supporter who traveled to Kenosha with his AR-15 and has been charged with killing two protesters, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

That’s extraordinary, not only for its seemingly understanding tone toward the alleged vigilante murder of protesters but also in its depiction of a country in total civil collapse.  And while the Trump campaign distanced itself from the killings, this points to an extraordinary level of confidence (or feigned confidence) on the right in the power of all this imagery to help Trump.

Apparently, Biden has been making the point about the cynicism of this, but not enough are hearing it:

For instance, on MSNBC Thursday, Biden responded directly to Vice President Pence’s claim at the convention that “the hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” Biden said: “The problem we have right now is, we’re in Donald Trump’s America.” Biden added that Trump is “rooting for more violence, not less.”

The “Donald Trump’s America” formulation makes the simple point that Trump is the problem. Trump promises only more violence and searing divisions because he thinks those things are good for him and he doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

But he has to push harder as being the one capable of bringing calmer times:

Biden has repeatedly condemned the violence, of course, despite all the lies to the contrary. And the Biden bet is that he’s intuitively understood as a creature of the center, giving him more leeway to speak frankly to the country about how systemic racism and police brutality unleash rage and grief that is understandable and calls for serious reform — and that voters are sophisticated enough to hear this.

Central to that bet, though, is the idea that Trump is widely seen as a uniformly destructive, instigating, malevolent force. This provides an opening for Biden and Harris to argue that their offer of balance — taking the protesters’ grievances seriously while condemning violence — holds out the promise of peace, where Trump only offers more chaos and devastation. And Conway just helped Democrats build that case.

 

Presenting live from the White Palace, King Trump, watched on by Prince Don, Prince Eric and Princess Ivanka

Update:

Come on, Biden

I've been saying this for a while, but with the latest escalation in violence related to a police shooting, why isn't Biden doing a speech for national TV calling for calm and addressing specifically how the situation should be addressed.

A federal government cannot solve all of the problems, but he can make sensible proposals and call for national unity to de-escalate the situation.     All Trump and his supporters are doing is telling people there is no significant problem with policing and race, and encouraging more rednecks to join in.   Biden ought to be able to make political gain as being the one who can help calm the nation.

Military event noted

I've read some tweets about Melania Trump's robotic, look at the audience as little as possible, speech in the newly de-flowered and de-tree'd Rose Garden, and still haven't seen anyone saying how her dress looked a lot to me like a version of a khaki military coat.  Surely someone else has noticed:

I would say it suited the whole Our Glorious Leader is Endorsed by the Military vibe of the proceedings, which many are noting is inappropriate if not actually illegal.

Steve Kates would be drolling in his porridge in excitement, though, I bet.

A broken blog

Huh.  If I am not mistaken, Sinclair Davidson's Ship for Old (and occasionally middle aged) Fools (Catallaxy) is broken.  It hasn't worked completely right for many weeks, actually.  

In any event, it's become pretty much unreadable since COVID struck - full of rage against Dan Andrews, continual denial of the seriousness of the disease, the most grovelling Trump admiration, and even internal fighting over whether some of the most hysterical commenters have really gone too hysterical this time.   Not to mention one younger nut who posts about his personal involvement in the "resistance" to the Victorian lockdown, but sounds half the time like he's on cocaine.   Didn't some anti lockdown protesters get arrested yesterday?  With any luck, he will be among them.

Sinclair doesn't make many appearances anymore so I don't get much fun from attacking his dubious takes.   The site now looks more like it's "CL and Friends", and the circle of commenters is narrower and more boring than ever.  I don't even read the posts by the other cranky, anonymous posters - they all sound like grey haired male retirees with too much time on their hands.  

So, the entertainment value is way down.

Donald will be annoyed

Viewing numbers for the American political conventions shouldn't matter much either way, except when you can take pleasure in knowing that the Narcissist in Chief will be telling his minions he doesn't want to see headlines like this again:

Democrats beat Republicans in first-night convention TV audience

Travel wishes

I have decided that Portugal seems well worth visiting.  I saw some ponderous young Vlogger on Youtube call it the most underrated country he has been to, but also Richard Ayoade's visit to Porto on Travel Man sparked my interest.

I also want to go to Norway, but that's a more long standing wish.  I should look up travel vloggers' trips through there on Youtube, too.

On calories

You know, it seems to me that Twisties (cheese flavour) have a lot more calories in them than the weight would suggest.  

Maybe it's in the cheese powder? 

Which has made me realise - how do they make cheese powder?   Here's an article in the New Yorker (of all places) about that.   It includes this bit of history:

While Marco Polo reportedly encountered a type of powdered milk in thirteenth-century Mongolia, and the first patent for commercial spray-drying was awarded to Samuel Percy in 1872, the first industrial spray-dried dairy products weren’t manufactured until shortly after Kraft’s development of processed cheese in the nineteen-twenties, according to “Food Powders: Physical Properties, Processing, and Functionality.”

Huh.

 

Uncle Roger power move

The most recent "Uncle Roger" bits on Youtube aren't really going anywhere much, but I'm still watching.  This amused me on Twitter, though, from some random person talking Chinese uncles:

Even unhappier than I knew

I see that it was waaaay back in 2011 that I posted about an interview in which the normally happy looking comedian Alan Davies explained that he had in fact been in psychotherapy for years as a result of an unhappy childhood, with the main problem being that his Mum died when he was 6, and his controlling father kept him from saying "goodbye", and the funeral, or even the grave. 

Now, it turns out, he says he was sexually assaulted by his Dad, who is still alive but with dementia.

I'm a bit surprised by this, because I have watched on TV some of a stand up show he was doing (as usual, I didn't like it much), and he did reference some boys at his boarding school and their enthusiasm for, um, demonstrative masturbation.  I find this a little hard to imagine in an Australian context, but yes, this is in England, where "boarding school" and "sexually inappropriate behaviour" go together in what seems to be a peculiarly national tradition.  So it's a bit  odd to me that he would be getting laughs out of that when sexually abused at home.   Not saying it didn't happen, just surprised.


But anyway, once again I ask:  what percentage of comedians actually come from a happy family background, no great disasters in personal relationships, and no addiction or bouts of depression?  Seems like it must like 2 or 3% of them.   (Jerry Seinfeld being the stellar example of "nope, everything's been pretty good for me, really.")

PS:  while I am having a day of just saying what I do and don't like - have I mentioned before that I can't stand English comedian Jimmy Carr, who turns up on SBS ads for his unfunny panel show all the time?   Don't find him funny, or likeable, at all.  


*  not referencing a technique.

Speaking of movies I didn't care for...

I don't think I have mentioned, sometime over the last year or so, having watched the American re-make of the Japanese ghost/curse story The Ring.   It was just OK-ish, my son and I thought; but we both found The Grudge (the English remake, but still set in Japan) much scarier.

Anyway, I saw on Google Play that the original Japanese Ring, or Ringu, was available, and thinking that the trailer looked sufficiently creepy, we decided to watch it.  

It was, shall we say, underwhelming.  At first, it was close to the American re-make, but then it veered off somewhat.   But it's really surprising watching a movie regarded (according to reviews) as being "the most disturbing since The Exorcist" and not being very scared at all. The creepy factor in some movies seems to really diminish quickly over time.

As it happens, I have never watched all of The Exorcist, but from bits I have seen, quite some time ago now, I have warned my son that it almost certainly looks more silly now than disturbing.  

Anyway, back to Japanese ghosts:  Netflix has recently put up a series from Japan (Ju-On Origns) which is the backstory to The Grudge movie.  Looks like the same house.   Oddly, though, it is only 30 minutes an episode, which is barely enough to get a good scare going.   We watched the first episode last night, and I thought it was worth continuing with.  Yet it has had some very bad reviews, and some good ones.  It was pretty dark in the first episode:  it apparently gets much worse.

I guess I will stick with it, for now...

An unpopular opinion

I don't care a bit for Shawshank Redemption.  Must be the Stephen King origin.

This movie routinely comes up in people's list of favourite, or feel good, or inspiring movies.

I can't remember when I watched it (it wasn't at the cinema), but it left nearly no imprint at all on my memory except for thinking at the time "why do so many people think this is so good?"

Just wanted to put that out there, for no particular reason.

Why is Sunrise so Right wing now?

I don't pay all that much attention to Sunrise, although I do usually see/hear about 20 mins of it between 6.30 and 7am.

What I want to know is this:  why has the show gone so thoroughly populist Rght wing?   The guest commentators I have seen a lot of in the last few months are social-conservative-failure-in-his-own-life Barnaby Joyce, now-hates-every-single-person-in-the-Labor-Party and Pauline-Hanson-sycophant Mark Latham, ex rampaging Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, and from the purported Left, but wants to be part of the Right, Joel Fitzgibbon.

Sure, they dumped Pauline Hanson herself but Latham is there anyway.

This is the show that popularised Kevin Rudd to the Prime Ministership (another bad political call on their part, I reckon.)   Now we have Samantha Armytage (well, actually, I see that she is taking time off due to illness, apparently) who seems to me to very snidely Right wing populist in most of her quips. 

The internal dynamics between producers and hosts on that show would be good to know.

Never did trust Sailer

The deep state, QAnon administration

What an appalling administration:

Senior health officials in the Trump administration were taken aback last Monday when the president's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused them of being part of the "Deep State" during a meeting that was supposed to be about COVID-19 and the Strategic National Stockpile.

Why it matters: Five days after Navarro's private comments toward the FDA, the president echoed Navarro's sentiments with a pair of Saturday morning tweets and tagged Stephen Hahn, the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

• "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics," the president tweeted. "Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"
• Trump then attacked the FDA for revoking its emergency use authorization "of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treating COVID-19 amid growing evidence that the drugs are 'unlikely to be effective' in treating the coronavirus."

Yet more reason to visit Singapore

The most surprising thing I saw on CNA on the weekend:  in Singapore, a man has a shop that sells ants for hobbyists:



"Just Ants" is the name of the shop. 

I used to enjoy brief stints of ant keeping as a child, but never knew how to get a queen.  If only I was a child in Singapore, now.

So, not a bad week for the Democrats...

Seems most mainstream commentary gives Biden's acceptance speech the thumbs up;  there were notable other highlights (none of which I have got around to watching yet);  we are going to get to see if Steve Bannon's visage deteriorates even further when he is in prison with no access to skincare  products.   (Or do we learn the secret of his homeless bum looks is that he has always used whatever the American equivalent of a bar of Solvol might be for his morning facewash?) 

All in all, not a bad week for the Democrats and the hope of putting the country back on some sort of more even keel.

Mind you, the real scandal should be that there is still, probably, support for Trump in the 40 something percent range.

And the scandal about that should be that no one is talking seriously about how to undo the Right wing media information bubble that has led  the Right to gas-lit itself into such idiocy that they would defend an outright authoritarian, corrupt, intensely dumb President because he's their authoritarian, corrupt, intensely dumb man who (they think) "owns the libs".  

The US is going to have to do something about that if they want to have hopes of pulling back from a the artificial and poisonous reality maybe a full third is fully living in, with another 15% or so half way in.

It is utterly, utterly ludicrous that Right wing culture war spivs are trying the "no, you're the ones dividing us" line in light of the appalling content of the Trump campaign, the likes of which the press - and any serious pundit - should never have helped "normalise" by not calling it out at the time.

How is Murdoch playing this one?

So, Fox News is running interviews now in which the latest White House spokes-liar is throwing out the quasi-deniability line for Trump re QAnon, while running on the split screen the actual beliefs of QAnon:

Is this an attempt by Fox News to message to Trump that, no, it would be best if he did actually disavow QAnon?   Or an attempt to gain more Trump base following for QAnon - because, let's face it, brainwashing the disenchanted-with-life-white-elderly is the raison d'etre for the network, and why stop at things like "Russiagate is a hoax"?

What will pathetic Trump Cultists like puzzled dog face Tucker Carlson and smarmlord Sean Hanitty do about this tricky problem?   Keep pushing that of course their ticket to riches doesn't know what QAnon is about, despite other parts of the network running stories like the above?

Time will tell.

 

New age category needed

I have a numerically significant birthday looming, and as I was saying to my daughter recently, I'm not happy with current age categories.

I think we can all agree that adolescence virtually extends to 25 now;  youth probably covers up to almost 35, maybe 40?   "Middle aged" is probably firmly set as 40 (or 45?) to 60.

But here's my key complaint:  what do you use for (say) 60 to 75?

"Old" probably starts at 75; maybe 80.   But there seems a serious gap in naming categories between 60 to 75.

"Seniors" benefits start being talked about from 55.   But the problem is, it extends from there to 115.  

I don't know - you would think those so keen on identity politics would spend more time on this issue.  :)

Imre being stupid

Lots of notice being given to Trump's refusal to criticise QAnon, which we all know he will not do any time soon because they fantasise him as a hero of epic proportions.  

Disappointing to see the relatively sensible Imre take this Trump forgiving attitude on the matter:

First:   Trump always denies knowledge of wrongdoing when he wants to avoid disavowing someone who deserves it.  Of course he knows about QAnon.   He's re-tweeted them several times - if he doesn't know how ridiculous and dangerous their conspiracy mongering is, that is a disgrace in itself.

Secondly:   how utterly ridiculous to criticise a journalist for inviting a President to disavow support for an extreme and dangerous and stupid conspiracy.  

Thirdly:  no, it is never acceptable to say a violence fantasising conspiracy "has its heart in the right place", which is what Trump was trying to convey.    Yes, if you don't condemn such a thing, you are helping validate them.

If Imre can't condemn Trump for his weasel worded endorsement that he will later claim was not an endorsement (probably the next time some nut goes on a QAnon bender with his gun), he wants his head read.

More on hearing voices, locally

As noted in my previous post, this week's Insight re-ignited my interest in how cultural factors might influence the experience of hearing (and dealing with) voices in the head, a common feature of schziophrenia.

I seem to have missed, or forgotten, the reporting around this study in 2014:  an anthropologist who found that it seemed relatively common for people from Indian and Ghana to find the voices "playful" or entertaining; whereas all of the Americans found them nasty and unpleasant.

Here's part of the report in Stanford news (my bold on the bits about India):

For the research, Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed 60 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia – 20 each in San Mateo, California; Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India. Overall, there were 31 women and 29 men with an average age of 34. They were asked how many voices they heard, how often, what they thought caused the auditory hallucinations, and what their voices were like.

"We then asked the participants whether they knew who was speaking, whether they had conversations with the voices, and what the voices said. We asked people what they found most distressing about the voices, whether they had any positive experiences of voices and whether the voice spoke about sex or God," she said.

The findings revealed that hearing voices was broadly similar across all three cultures, according to Luhrmann. Many of those interviewed reported both good and bad voices, and conversations with those voices, as well as whispering and hissing that they could not quite place physically. Some spoke of hearing from God while others said they felt like their voices were an "assault" upon them.

The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and evidence of a sick condition.
The Americans experienced voices as bombardment and as symptoms of a brain disease caused by genes or trauma.

One participant described the voices as "like torturing people, to take their eye out with a fork, or cut someone's head and drink their blood, really nasty stuff." Other Americans (five of them) even spoke of their voices as a call to battle or war – "'the warfare of everyone just yelling.'"

Moreover, the Americans mostly did not report that they knew who spoke to them and they seemed to have 
less personal relationships with their voices, according to Luhrmann.

Among the Indians in Chennai, more than half (11) heard voices of kin or family members commanding them to do tasks. "They talk as if elder people advising younger people," one subject said. That contrasts to the Americans, only two of whom heard family members. Also, the Indians heard fewer threatening voices than the Americans – several heard the voices as playful, as manifesting spirits or magic, and even as entertaining. Finally, not as many of them described the voices in terms of a medical or psychiatric problem, as all of the Americans did.

In Accra, Ghana, where the culture accepts that disembodied spirits can talk, few subjects described voices in brain disease terms. When people talked about their voices, 10 of them called the experience predominantly positive; 16 of them reported hearing God audibly. "'Mostly, the voices are good,'" one participant remarked. 

While this doesn't seem all that many subjects, it's still fascinating. Interestingly, though, the anthropologist didn't seem to think that it was religiosity per se which made the difference.  (Although by that, does she mean how intensely religious they are in practice and interest?  Because as noted above, they seem to be religious in the sense of just accepting a supernatural spirit world):

Why the difference? Luhrmann offered an explanation: Europeans and Americans tend to see themselves as individuals motivated by a sense of self identity, whereas outside the West, people imagine the mind and self interwoven with others and defined through relationships.

"Actual people do not always follow social norms," the scholars noted. "Nonetheless, the more independent emphasis of what we typically call the 'West' and the more interdependent emphasis of other societies has been demonstrated ethnographically and experimentally in many places."

As a result, hearing voices in a specific context may differ significantly for the person involved, they wrote. In America, the voices were an intrusion and a threat to one's private world – the voices could not be controlled.

However, in India and Africa, the subjects were not as troubled by the voices – they seemed on one level to make sense in a more relational world. Still, differences existed between the participants in India and Africa; the former's voice-hearing experience emphasized playfulness and sex, whereas the latter more often involved the voice of God.

The religiosity or urban nature of the culture did not seem to be a factor in how the voices were viewed, Luhrmann said.

"Instead, the difference seems to be that the Chennai (India) and Accra (Ghana) participants were more comfortable interpreting their voices as relationships and not as the sign of a violated mind," the researchers wrote.

The research, Luhrmann observed, suggests that the "harsh, violent voices so common in the West may not be an inevitable feature of schizophrenia." Cultural shaping of schizophrenia behavior may be even more profound than previously thought.

The findings may be clinically significant, according to the researchers. Prior research showed that specific therapies may alter what patients hear their voices say. One new approach claims it is possible to improve individuals' relationships with their voices by teaching them to name their voices and to build relationships with them, and that doing so diminishes their caustic qualities. "More benign voices may contribute to more benign course and outcome," they wrote.

The Atlantic had a story about this too, ending with a story of the success (for some people) of not ignoring the voice, but developing a kind of relationship with it:

In an article for the American Scholar, Luhrmann describes one such patient, a 20-year-0ld Dutch man named Hans, whose inner voices were urging him to study Buddhism for hours each day. He cut a deal with his demons, telling them he'd say Buddhist prayers for one hour per day, no more, no less. And it worked—the voices subsided and he was able to taper his dose of psychosis medications.
At one support group for schizophrenic patients, Hans said a new, "nice" voice he had been hearing recently threatened to get mean.

"This new voice seemed like it might get nasty," Luhrmann writes. "The group had told [Hans] that he needed to talk to it. They said that he should say, 'We have to live with each other and we have to make the best of it, and we can do it only if we respect each other.' He did that, and this new voice became nice."

Call me too cautious, perhaps, but I have spoken to both my young adult children about the show, and the key message that if ever they do start hearing voices, don't try to keep it a secret and deal with it alone, but tell others what is happening and seek some assistance.

 

Voices heard

I strongly recommend last night's Insight episode on SBS, which featured a variety of people who suffered from hearing voices in their head, explaining how it started, how they got help, and whether they are now over the problem.   A psychiatrist and psychologist were also there (the latter having made a special study of the field.)

It was terribly interesting, the variety of their experiences.   One clear message that came out of it is that they all took quite some time to admit to anyone else what was happening, and the psychologist and psychiatrist both made the point that it is far better to tell someone and get help earlier, as that makes it likelier that treatment will be a success.

Another aspect of interest was the Indian woman who made reference to "cultural practices" in her family's homeland being helpful to deal with the problem.  She alluded to the belief in the "spiritual world" but didn't elaborate.   Taking an educated guess, I assume that Indians may have less reluctance to seek support from family and friends because they share a belief that the cause probably is an external and "real" spirit attack, not something purely internal which carries a stigma of weakness (and therefore shame) in the West.   (I am sure I have read years ago that mental health outcomes are surprisingly good, on average, in India* due I think to cultural factors, and I must look up whether it is for the sort of reason I am speculating about.)


*  Yes - here it is - a post from 2007.   The link to the journal no longer works, though.   I may be able to track it down, and I want to read more on the topic anyway.  Will likely update soon...

Russia tapes may well exist

In Slate reporting on the Senate Intelligence Committee report we read this:

What the report says: Discounting the infamous pee tape allegation made in the Steele Dossier, the committee said it investigated and was unable to corroborate “three general sets of allegations” around “compromising information” Russians were said to have been collecting about Donald Trump. The report goes into some fascinating details about claims surrounding Russian kompromat efforts and about Trump’s previous trips to Russia without providing much in the way of hard evidence. It notes that Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen exchanged texts with a Georgian friend and associate days before the election about efforts to stop “tapes from Russia” after a “person in Moscow was bragging had tapes from Russian trip.”

What we already knew: Cohen’s text exchange with his Georgian friend was actually a footnote from the Mueller report and it didn’t lead anywhere. Also notably, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that it was “aware of a realistic and well-sourced, but fake, video of someone who looks like Trump portraying him in a situation consistent with the uncorroborated allegations” of a pee tape from the Steele Dossier. If you read Ashley Feinberg’s reporting in Slate last year, though, you would have already been aware of this as well.

Yes, I read that Slate report at the time about the faked "pee tape" - it was quite surprising, the degree of care with which the tape was made; as is the matter of how little attention mainstream media seemed to give it.

In other tweets, I have seen mention of evidence that some hotel worker claiming he overheard conversation about Trump being compromised by a woman he saw during one Moscow trip.

It would not be at all surprising if there was some tape or other taken in Russia with kompromat possibilities.

Always suspected he was over-rated

Of course, people in the thread following this argue for more nuance, but it's interesting...

Not for the claustrophobic

Oh look:  that Smarter Every Day guy has another video up about his visit to a nuclear submarine, and this time he gets to explain how torpedoes get shot out of the tube, which he proceeds to crawl down (while the sub is underwater, no less).  Better him than me:

How Republicans and Trump cultists argue that black is white

Paul Waldman's column in the Washington Post details the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, and explains the absurdity of Republicans still saying "no collusion":

So here’s what we’re left with. The person running the Trump campaign had a close associate who is a Russian intelligence officer, with whom he was sharing confidential campaign information as Russia mounted its effort to help Trump get elected.

As part of that effort, Russia broke into Democratic systems, then passed damaging information to WikiLeaks for carefully timed release. The president’s longtime friend had a line into the “leak” part of Russia’s hack-and-leak, through which he learned the subject and timing of upcoming leaks and kept Trump personally informed.

If that’s not “collusion,” what is?

Republicans will reject this verdict. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the acting chair of the committee, insisted that “the Committee found absolutely no evidence” that Trump or his campaign “colluded with the Russian government.”  

But he was using a torturously narrow definition of “collusion” to exonerate Trump.

That definition says that only a carefully planned, coordinated and executed criminal conspiracy counts as “collusion,” and anything short of that does not. But as we now know — through copious evidence collected by the special counsel’s team, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and journalists — the Trump campaign eagerly accepted the help provided by Moscow.

The campaign’s efforts were slapdash and chaotic. But to whatever degree this didn’t rise to an even more serious level, it doesn’t appear to have been for lack of trying.

Yet to this day, the position of Trump, his attorney general, the conservative media and most of the GOP is that the entire Russia investigation was a hoax, a scam, a ruse. When the FBI learned that the Kremlin was trying to sabotage our election, they want us to believe, the bureau should not have bothered to investigate.

 Update:  or, as Kasparov tweets:

End Times

Further to recent post about religious eschatology, I see that Nature has a review of a book by an astrophysicist discussing the possible ways the universe could end:   Big Crunch, Heat Death, Big Rip, or perhaps the most disconcerting one because it could presumably happen at any time, vacuum decay.  

The review notes this:

The latest measurements point to a Heat Death, but a Big Crunch or Big Rip are within their uncertainties.

Yeah, I thought that was still the case, but seems to be underappreciated in pop science writing - a reversal into a Big Crunch, which at least has that satisfying feeling of a dramatic climax (as well as possibly satisfying Hindu and Buddhist belief in a cyclic universe, not to mention a possible Tiplerian Omega Point), is not yet completely written off.   

As for vacuum decay:

The final doomsday scenario that Mack describes is extremely unlikely: vacuum decay. A tiny bubble of ‘true vacuum’ could form, owing to instability in the field associated with the Higgs boson. That might happen if, say, a black hole evaporates in just the wrong way. Such a bubble would expand at the speed of light, destroying everything, until it cancels the universe. Vacuum decay might already have begun in some distant place. We won’t see it coming.

The possibility of vacuum decay happening as a result of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider was one reason to fret about the wisdom of operating it, as I used to note in posts which are still on the blog.   Fortunately, it would seem that the universe is not constructed in such a way that the LHC could cause much damage.

Yup

Beirut blew up because a Russian "businessman" ran out of money

Interesting to read this explanation of how Beirut came to be holding onto a ridiculously dangerous cargo due to a failure of a Russian "businessman".

 A bit more about him in The Independent:

The figure of Igor Grechushkin features prominently in the first two links of that hapless chain. A rough-and-tumble businessman from Khabarovsk in the far east of Russia, Grechushkin was on Thursday confirmed as the Rhosus’s owner by Russian state media.

Greatest country

Contextless misuse of statistics noted

We all know Trump and the GOP is going to go full throttle on claiming that there is a "tremendous" jobs recovery from the rapid loss caused by GOP confusion and politicisation of the COVID response, but it's also becoming a Right wing meme that the police are going pro-Trump again because they are being killed on the job at a higher rate.

So we get this misleading headline at ABC news (the American one):

Police officers killed surge 28% this year and some point to civil unrest and those looking to exploit it 

Shoop became the 32nd U.S. law enforcement officer shot to death this year on July 13, marking a 28% jump in felonious officer deaths over the same period in 2019, according to data from the FBI. 

But a Twitter thread about it turns up this graph:

Speaking of the South...

On the weekend, I also finished watching Tiger King, including the "after show" interviews with some of the key figures.

Probably hard to add anything new to what people have already said about it, but there is this - it was hard to tell whether Joe's flamboyant style of gayness ever hurt his business in a conservative state.  Was it a a case of American conservatives making toleration exceptions for showbiz gay - like Liberace, or Siegfreid and Roy, perhaps?  I thought it a bit funny that the young-ish campaign manager guy (who says in the after show that he also is gay) blamed Oklahoman hatred of gays for Joe's poor electoral performance in the governor race - seemingly discounting the "nutjob" factor a bit too much, I reckon.   (The campaign manager seems to be still mentally scarred by the experience - but he had extremely questionable judgement in getting involved in the first place.)

The after show was also good for seeing the "cleaned up" version of John Finlay - the heavily tattooed husband who appeared shirtless and meth-mouthed in every interview.   Oddly, he seemed to claim he had no problem with appearing shirtless - I would have guessed it was the documentary directors trying to make him look as bad as possible.   I also thought the story the (rather odd) producer guy told in the after show was very telling - about how Joe took in a woman's old horse and promised to give it a good remaining life, only to immediately go and shoot it and feed it to the tigers when she left.

I hope the success of the show does not lead to documentary makers seeking out ever greater collections of bizarre characters to follow, though. 

Funny movie noted

Until this last weekend, I had never caught up with Will Ferrell's 2006 movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and I have to say that I found it very funny.   It seemed to me to strike something of a sweet spot in terms of its comedic silliness and quasi realism; and while it no doubt did mock some aspects of the South, it didn't paint it as a Redneck nightmare zone.   No doubt the co-operation of the NASCAR organisation helped make sure it was (kind of) respectful.

I do worry a bit about Will Ferrell, though:  seems to me that he peaked in the decade 2000 - 2010.  (I see that Elf, which I think most people would probably regard as his best movie, was in 2003).  His movie choices in the last decade, however, seems to have included many more duds than hits.

Eschatology considered

I did another speed reading quick hit on the University of Queensland library yesterday (I've explained before why I do this), and the book of choice was this:

Eschatology - what a great word.  And such an important subject in religion, particularly Christianity.

But the chapter I sped through was on Buddhist eschatology, and it was interesting in its own way.

I guess I hadn't realised that it (naturally, coming from that place) had picked up the Indian idea of  cyclical creation and destruction.   I hadn't thought much about Hinduism and its obsession with that topic until recently watching both Sacred Games on Netflix (the second series became very messy, a bit ridiculous, and hard to follow, with an unsatisfactory ending) as well as this cartoon summary of key Hindu belief on Youtube:



So getting back to Buddhism:  there was a lot of interesting stuff in the chapter on its eschatology, but I was not able to copy it and the book does not seem to be on Scribd, so it is hard to remember it all.

Ideas that I hadn't realised before:  that it's long been a Buddhist belief that Buddhism would eventually no longer exist (one of the few religions with a prediction of its own extinction, I would bet);  that there can only be one Buddha in a world (universe - I think), hence you have to wait for the next cycle of destruction and creation to get another.   Maitreya is the Buddha to come - and as one page I did take a photo of says:

A vast span of time was expected to pass between the death of Sakyamuni Buddha and the coming of Maitreya, who would not appear until just after the next cycle of progress reaches its peak.  Once again, scholastic writers have attempted to calculate the time involved, with the most common being a figure of 5.6 billion years.

 A long time between drinks, so to speak.  

I'm not sure whether any branch of Buddhism, in light of modern understanding of the universe, thinks that it's not only one Buddha per entire universe.   Any scope for the equivalent of multiple incarnations of Christ on other, alien inhabited planets, I wonder?   (An idea which CS Lewis was sympathetic to.)   I'm not sure that Buddhists have ever given much thought to aliens.

The chapter did mention how the Indian sourced religions have taken some heart from modern cosmological theories of the universe cycling between Big Bang and Big Crunch - "see, we sensed that thousands of years ago!" they can say.   (And really, the 5.6 billion years figure is at least on the right scale of talking about cosmological time.)   But then, as with Christianity, the latest idea of a universe continually expanding into eternal darkness doesn't help much.

There was other interesting stuff - one Buddhist text with the Buddha sounding like a very sexist fellow with very low regard for women stepping out of their place (although as with so much Buddhist source material, how close it is to the words of the actual Buddha is anyone's guess.)

Anyway, all interesting stuff.  I see the book is available for around $80.   It is Father's Day soon...

Update:  I suppose I should state the obvious - the chapter I read was not very long, and tried to give a "big picture" view of eschatology in Buddhist belief, and I may have got some of the details wrong and be contradicted by those who know more about the many complicated variations on Buddhist belief within its branches.

I think the Wikipedia entry on it and eschatology is not very good - it seems to be bits and pieces without trying to give an overview in context.   However, the entry on Maitreya is better, and I didn't realise that there had been so many claimants to the title (including stupid old con man L Ron Hubbard):

The following list is just a small selection of those people who claimed or claim to be the incarnation of Maitreya. Many have either used the Maitreya incarnation claim to form a new Buddhist sect or have used the name of Maitreya to form a new religious movement or cult.

• In 613 the monk Xiang Haiming claimed himself Maitreya and adopted an imperial title.^[24]
• In 690 Wu Zetian, empress regnant of the Wu Zhou interregnum (690–705), proclaimed herself an incarnation of the future Buddha Maitreya, and made Luoyang the "holy capital." In 693 she temporarily replaced the compulsory Dao De Jing in the curriculum with her own Rules for Officials.^[25]
• Gung Ye, a Korean warlord and king of the short-lived state of Taebong during the 10th century, claimed himself as the living incarnation of Maitreya and ordered his subjects to worship him. His claim was widely rejected by most Buddhist monks and later he was dethroned and killed by his own servants.
• Lu Zhongyi (1849-1925), the 17th patriarch of Yiguandao, claimed to be an incarnation of Maitreya.
• L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the belief systems Dianetics and Scientology, suggested he was "Metteya" (Maitreya) in the 1955 poem Hymn of Asia. Numerous editors and followers of Hubbard claim that in the book's preface, specific physical characteristics said to be outlined—in unnamed Sanskrit sources—as properties of the coming Maitreya were properties with which Hubbard's appearance supposedly aligned.

So, just as Christianity has had its problems with wannabe leaders claiming to be a new version of (or related to) Christ, so has Buddhism.  Not sure any of them caused as much trouble as Hong Xiuquan, though - 10 million deaths by the self proclaimed brother of Christ!

Pretty much how I feel

Yes, it annoys me that journalists who work outside of the Murdoch workplace still treat their politically moderate mates who work inside of Murdoch as if there is nothing disgraceful about the fact they still work there.

It's gone on for too long.  The absolute tipping point for me was, I reckon, this cartoon that appeared with a Bolt column a couple of years ago:

Did any Murdoch journalist resign over that cartoon more suited (as I said in my post) to something like the Bulletin circa 1920?   Not that I heard. 

Journalists:  I don't care if your mate still manages to fit in some moderate commentary in the Murdoch press.  It should be socially unacceptable for anyone to accept a dollar by working for an outright racist, anti-democratic outfit (which is what the Murdoch American network is in its enabling of Trump and his cronies.)

Their friendship should be shunned.
  

The nutty American way of democracy, again

Is it just Australia, or do lots of other countries look at the American system of allowing individual states and parties to completely and maliciously stuff up fairness and national uniformity in voting in their Federal elections and think "this is absolutely nuts"?

I mean, we now have a President who votes by mail, encourages the elderly residents of one state that he needs to win that it's OK for them to vote by mail, while also admitting that he will not support funding the Postal service because he doesn't want them to be able to cope with mail in voting.  And the fat faced corrupt Attorney General was saying the other week that it was "obvious" that mail in voting would allow for fraud.

This is tinpot dictatorship in a nominal democracy territory.   

The anti-establishment Left may be causing local trouble on the streets of (some) American cities, but the American establishment Right is far more determined to do the most harm to democracy as a whole.   

Seen better days

The famous Arecibo radio telescope has had a spot of bother:

Science writes:

The iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was damaged early on 10 August when a snapped steel cable smashed into one of its antennas and tore a 30-meter gash in its 307-meter-wide dish. Observations have been halted for at least 2 weeks while investigations are carried out

Build your own dangerous laser

Are the laws about getting your hands on dangerously powerful lasers looser in America than here?  Or does being a "backyard scientist" means you can order them from China and not attract attention?
Anyway, this is interesting and entertaining:

Florida man

Just wow:

 You would think the litigiousness of America would stop really stupid workplace decisions like this, but apparently not.

The thin line between rot and fermentation

 There's a somewhat hair-raising article on CNA with the title:

Adventures in DIY fermentation: From onion-chilli paste to grasshopper garum

 and it ends on this note which keeps me away from home experiments: 

This fermenting business needs an intrepid spirit and a sense of humour. As the Noma team put it: “There is a thin line between rot and fermentation.”

Consider this recipe for example:

“In the typical southern Tunisian home,” she wrote, “the cook will slice around seventy pounds of fresh onions, toss them with salt and turmeric, pack them in earthen jugs, and leave them for three months to become soft and wet.”

Wolfert’s version of hrous was simplified and shortened for convenience. But the long Tunisian path proved irresistible to me. When I finally popped open the lid on the onion jar, stashed in a cupboard, the ripe pong was admittedly something best kept away from anyone you might be hoping to feed. But the finished paste was sensational.

But the most horrifying idea is this:

There is nothing more highly prized at Noma than the grasshopper garum. This long, sophisticated, chocolatey potion is so versatile and so good they had to stop it popping up in too many of their dishes.

Noma suggests using live grasshoppers as well as wax worm larvae, little cream-coloured wrigglers that definitely look better as moths. Sourcing initially looked simple but, in the required quantities, it turned out to be a Google-defying mission (one example from my search history: “Are pet shop grasshoppers safe for human consumption?”).

I didn’t relish seeing the little critters jumping around in my food processor either. My squeamish compromise was cricket flour, a high-protein powder, which I am told makes a mean chocolate brownie and is catching on fast among insect eaters. 

I won’t go into the details of my encounter with 300 grams of wax worms, but let me just say that, when working in bulk, the sawdust is hard to separate from the larvae.

 So, the basic point is - if fermented foods are going to smell bad anyway, how does one tell if it's a "don't eat this, it'll make you sick" sort of bad smell, instead of "it's fine, it's meant to smell like that" kind of bad odour.

 Reader Tim, who seems unduly interested in fermentation, but I assume has not gone so far as putting live grasshoppers in his blender,  may care to explain...

A short opinion

That choice of Kamala Harris for Biden's VP seems pretty good to me.   Helps deal with the Republican law and order panic campaign; she seems smart, basically likeable, and ticks the "should appeal to people of colour and immigrants" box as well.     

Still a hockey stick

First, this tweet:

 

I read some tweets by Stephen McIntyre criticising this study due to some alleged massive mistake on (I think) Antarctic proxy temperatures.    However, when I go back to his twitter feed now, it seems he has become massively obsessed with proving a scandalous and earth shattering injustice was caused to Trump and his team regarding the Russia interference investigation.  Honestly, he has 60 tweet threads on the topic, and comes back to it again and again.  He seems, in short, a complete Right wing nut now. I can't even find the climate related tweets I read only (I think) last week, they are so swamped with political, conspiracy like, guff.

And, I should point out, as with his previous criticisms of Mann and the hockey stick, the key point should be "what difference does it make?  Do your own reconstruction the way you think it should be done and let us know what it looks like."  But as far as I know, he never does. 

 

COVID efficiency

Yesterday, an important co-worker in the office wanted her GP to give her antibiotics for what was almost certainly a sinus infection that had started with an earache and moved into post-nasal drip affecting her throat.  She rang him for a telephone consultation.  He insisted on her getting a COVID 19 test, and self isolating at home until the result was in.  He emailed the form to her at work.

She went and had the test at about 11 am yesterday.  This morning she got the result emailed to her - negative, as expected.   She is back at work at 9 this morning.

The GP had said the tests were only taking about 24 hours in Brisbane now, although at the pathology place they said 2 to 3 days, but they would mark this one "urgent".  Came back in way less than 24 hours.

Pretty impressive.

Anyway, I am still in a ridiculously busy patch at work.

Also - the continual flurry of pathetic and unhelpful commentary on COVID 19 from the Right is pretty depressing. Who would have thought the harm to democracy and good government that would come from political commentary being monetarised in the way it has been (and primarily from the Right).  

A noodley day

Today, I eat 600 calories.

Yesterday, though, I made some very nice blueberry pancakes for breakfast (with ice cream and maple syrup); a big plate of char kway teow for lunch from a cafe at Sunnybank, where lots of Asian eating abounds; and my wife made Hiroshima style okonomiyaki for dinner (which has noodles in a layered fry up which is, I have decided, nicer than the more flour batter based Tokyo style.   It is a fiddly thing to cook, though.)

Back to char kway teow:  it was a disappointment when in Singapore (and Malaysia) 19 months ago that this dish did not seem as ubiquitous as I hoped it would be.   Mind you, we only spent time in Malacca in Malaysia, so maybe it is slightly regional in popularity?   Anyway, I have always liked it a lot as a fried noodle dish, and it is not always easy to find a cafe in Brisbane that does it justice.  Yesterday's was pretty good.

Dr Sleep confirms it...

...I really, really don't care for Stephen King.

The sequel to The Shining has turned up on Netflix, and I can see why it was a box office flop.

I have read that the book of The Shining had much more of what I think could be called magical realism, and it was Kubrick who turned it into a more ambiguous and realistic psychological study, well capable of different interpretations.  And King didn't like it. 

So I presume this sequel follows his book closely, as the magical realism abounds.   No ambiguity here - the ghosts from The Overlook have followed Danny all of his life, and ancient quasi gypsies tour the world looking for kiddies with psychic power to suck it, or their souls, out of them.  Danny finds himself in contact with one such potential victim and decides to help her.

I think it's an idea that could work, and for much of the first hour (which is about as long as the first act takes to unfold - it's a very leisurely told story) it kept reminding me of Ray Bradbury - in particular Something Wicked This Way Comes, which happens to be my favourite novel of his.   While the movie never bored me, it was more a case that I kept expecting it to develop into something with genuine suspense, dread or scares:  but they simply never come. 

I think it became clear that was from a writer devoid of good ideas when many of the supernatural villains were taken out in a very typically American way [I say so as not to be accused of too much as spoiler].   This is probably about 3/4 of the way in, and the movie from there just kept getting less and less convincing.

I also had a problem with the lead villain actress - it's hard to put my finger on it, but there was just something sort of smug about her performance and physicality that carried no menace at all.

So yeah, not a great movie, and I blame Stephen King totally for a bad story.

  

A tragic case

So Trump pronounced it "Thighland", and ridiculous Dinesh leaves millions jaw-dropped by tweeting about it:

Amongst many funny comments following:

Update:  this was the complete Die-nesh (that's how you pronounce it, no?) discussion:

More amusing tweets follow:

It's a control freak's paradise

I mean, who doesn't want to micro manage their own city state?:

I hope they have done something about lycra wearing cyclists.  Or perhaps it's completely unnecessary, given the climate?

Update:  one problem that Singapore seems surprisingly incapable of adequately fixing is the amount of dengue fever - which is running at some sort of recent record high at the moment:

SINGAPORE -- Singapore has been hit by an outbreak of dengue fever on pace to shatter records, adding to the burden on its health care infrastructure already taxed by growing coronavirus cases.

The country reported more than 20,000 dengue cases this year as of late July -- close to the full-year high of 22,170 in 2013. Infections are rising at the fastest-ever weekly pace.

The disease is widespread in Southeast Asia, and there is no effective vaccine or treatment. Some of the initial symptoms, including fever and body aches are similar to those of COVID-19, making them difficult to distinguish. And both diseases often cause no noticeable symptoms in patients, yet can be fatal in severe cases.

I have seen on CNA and elsewhere that the country is trying out the bio control line of releasing treated mosquitoes which breed with females who then have infertile eggs (which has been trialled in North Queensland too, I think), but it seems it's still under assessment and improvement, and it's hard to breed enough mosquitoes to make it effective.

 

Big loss

Disney is bleeding money:

For months it’s been clear that Disney, the country’s most prominent entertainment company, was facing a financial disaster unlike any in its history.

On Tuesday, it became evident just how deep the carnage has gone.

The company revealed that as a result of the coronavirus pandemic it took in just $11.8 billion in revenue and $1 billion in operating income in the three-month period that ended in June, the height of lockdowns in the country. The numbers are a significant drop from the same period a year ago, when it generated $20.25 billion in revenue and $4 billion in operating income, among the worst slides of the modern era.

In more "what's Graeme thinking?" news

Long time readers will hardly be surprised to know that Graeme is complaining from inside the  moderated comments cage I built just for him that I haven't posted about the Beirut explosion disaster, because (of course!) it was actually an atomic strike by some nefarious Jews.   He's calling it "the Jewish nuclear attack on Lebanese Christians".

I think we can safely assume that if he stubs his toe on the furniture in the dark on the way to the toilet at night, he immediately starts wondering about the surname of  the last tradesman in the apartment because he was probably a Jew who moved the drawers just enough to cause the accident and is now gloating about it at the Synagogue.

[Waves to Graeme inside the moderated comments cage.  You nut.]

Update:  I'm sure that, according to Graeme, this will be e-vil psy-ops:

I may, or may not, let you know what he says while shaking the cage.