COVID's odd effect in Japan

This article at the BBC notes that COVID in Japan seems to have caused an increase in suicide, but only amongst women, which is odd:

Professor Michiko Ueda is one of Japan's leading experts on suicide. She tells me how shocking it has been to witness the sharp reverse in the last few months.

"This pattern of female suicides is very, very unusual," she tells me.

"I have never seen this much [of an] increase in my career as a researcher on this topic. The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is the industries hit most are industries staffed by women, such as tourism and retail and the food industries."

Japan has seen a large rise in single women living alone, many of them choosing that over marriage which entails quite traditional gender roles still. Prof Ueda says young women are also far more likely to be in so-called precarious employment.

On a cheerier note, I hadn't realised that suicide rates had been improving as much as they have over the last 12 years:

In a country notoriously reserved about people talking about their mental health, the article does not explain what is behind this.   
  

An accurate forecast

It surprises me, watching my favourite vloggers, how much time they sometimes say it takes them to edit their videos.  But I also wonder, do so many of them have to follow that jumpy style of editting that is so common.  Less edits would cut down edit time. [To be clear - I know this Tik Tok works  because of the editing, and the Tik Tok format is often based on quick edits.   I am talking more about the way so many vloggers use the constant little edits on longer Youtube videos  when it's just a talk to camera.  Sure, some are cutting out mistakes, but I am sure it is used just as a stylistic device too.] 

I'm also getting a depressing B Ark vision of the future of humanity where in 200 years a tiny outpost of people survive in the Arctic circle, trying to grow crops and editing videos about it.  (And some intellectual will discover that ubiquitous masturbation is about to lead to extinction.)

 

[Having said that, I did like that guy's Tik Tok.  I don't have the app, but I think you can watch it via the Tweet here.]

Yeah, that'll work

In China:

So far, 2021 has been cruel to unhappy Chinese couples. The first blow came on Jan. 1, when a new law went into effect mandating a 30-day cooling-off period for those seeking a divorce. Then, in February, couples that were still seeking to split up found themselves struggling to find online appointments. In parts of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the calendar was backed up for weeks. In Guangzhou, appointments were so scarce that scalpers sold them.

China’s government isn’t apologizing. For years, it took a hands-off approach to marriage and divorce. But steep recent declines in the country’s birth rate are changing minds at the top. A government that once sought to discourage childbearing is now resurrecting traditional and often sexist notions of family and gender to promote it.

The article explains the history of government intervention there into marriage laws.  The concern with the birthrate has led to government badgering of women:

...the end of the one-child policy in 2016 had no meaningful impact on the country’s birth rate. In 2019, the number of births fell 4%, to 10.6 million, China’s lowest level since 1961.

That has left the government eager to find scapegoats as it abandons decades of anti-natalism for an increasingly coercive pro-natalism. Last week, the National Health Commission outlined the factors that, in its view, are impacting fertility in China’s economically depressed northeast region: “economic burdens, infant and child care, and female career development.” The commission is no outlier. About a decade ago, Chinese media began referring to working, unmarried women over the age of 27 by the derogatory term “leftover women,” expressing an anti-feminist (and pro-natalist) attitude that has persisted ever since.

I wonder how popular abortion is now in that country?   I mean, we know it was used to help enforce the one child policy, but now that they want more kids, wouldn't they just consider it making it harder to obtain?

Reports say that they are being, shall we say, unsubtle about its use for the Uighurs:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

 It's pretty incredible, their attitude to controlling society.

The continuing uncertainty over Planet 9

I didn't think it would be so hard to work our whether there really is Planet Nine - but it obviously is. 

Planet Nine is dead; long live Planet Nine? For some years, scientists have debated the existence of an unseen planet at least five times the mass of Earth in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Now, the hypothesis has been dealt a blow by a new analysis of distant, icy objects, which questions the evidence that they are under the gravitational pull of a huge planet.

The findings do not rule out the possibility of a ninth planet orbiting the Sun, and astronomers say more data will be needed to put the debate to rest.

 I would like it to turn out to be a captured black hole, actually.   That would allow for some good science fiction ideas.

A fairly complicated story about some possible new physics

It's not the simplest explanation, but it's worth reading:  How the Universe Remembers Information.

(I think they really should put "Possibly" at the end of that title.)

Still counting

I see via Twitter that Gallup has a new figure out for its survey results on American sexual identification, and the headline story is the (so to speak) rise of the bi:

More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.

Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

The other big thing is the increase in bi identification being mainly in the young, and mainly with women:

Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

I'm not sure that there is really anything too surprising about this - it's been pretty clear for some time that there it's been increasingly "cool" amongst the youth to identify as being something other than boring old straight, and we already knew young women were ahead of the curve in claiming sexual/gender diversity.  Identity politics itself has been on the up and up.  

But there are some interesting things said about the results on Twitter.  For example, I had never thought of this before, but I read a tweet (that I can't find again right now) that argued that the large number of deaths from AIDS in the 80's and 90's can partly account for why substantially fewer older men identify as gay.

The most dubious result in the survey is probably the transgender identification amongst the younger group, especially "Gen Z":

I'm with the middle comment:  it's a result that really raises questions about how young people are thinking about these categories when they answer the survey.   

Anyway, it all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2013 about estimates at that time of the number of men  who could likely be called gay or bisexual.    (See the comments too.)  At that time, I guesstimated that, if you looked at CDC survey evidence of men who said they had sexual experiences with men, you could probably get to 4 to 5% who could be identified as gay or bisexual, in America at least.*

The Gallup results would now back that up:

 Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

So, I think my guesstimate still looks good.

 

 

* The figure increases to 20% if you are talking about England.**

** A joke.  Although I am still pretty sure it's the gayest country on the planet.  

   

Cancelled Will is not letting it get him down

I really respect Will Wilkinson.   Arguably, he was the recent victim of one of the stupidest examples of "cancel culture" being mis-used by a boss against a quality, (now) pretty much mainstream liberal writer, but Wilkinson did not moan about it at all, and just went on to set up his own corner of the internet to pump out his great writing.

A recent example:  On the Defensive Prickliness of Anti-Woke Patriotism.  

It's about this:

Why is it so bothersome to admit that there are shameful chapters of cruel injustice in our nation’s history? Why is it so hard to simply accept that the historical record and publicly available comparative evidence suggests that the United States of America is pretty great in a lot of ways and really awful in a lot of ways?

He ends with this explanations of how conservatives "cope" with the dissonance that there is a lot to criticise in the history of the country, while it is also pretty great in many ways:

The easiest way to cope with the story that credible American historians tend to tell is to outsource your expertise identification needs to conservative commentators (they’re expert experts!) who say that you shouldn’t trust them — who say that these out-of-touch woke egghead elites sneering down on all of us from their ivory towers are intentionally spreading misinformation because they hate America, want to tear down what makes it great, and replace it with something bad, foreign and dystopian, like …. I dunno, functional democratic institutions or an adequate social insurance state?

However, dismissing inconvenient truths by impugning the messenger doesn’t fully meet the challenge of keeping on the sunny side. It remains that America has a lot of profound problems that simply cannot be denied. So the next step is to blame all our undeniable problems on the evil and incompetence of your cultural/political rivals while pretending that the places where most Americans live don’t really count as part of the country. This leaves conservatives in a position where they can say that America is unambiguously great … except for all the ways in which the left and “elites” have turned it into a tyrannizing garbage fire.  

This is how you end up with the truly baffling Calvinball of conservative national assessment. America is the greatest country in the history of the world! It is also “not great,” “crippled,” and the victim of “carnage” roughly in proportion to the extent that Republicans don’t control things. A meaty majority of the American population dwells in large metro areas, which are all run by Democrats. These places are thus unmitigated disasters. You might think that an ambiguous “part good, part bad” mixed judgment of America’s merits would be logically inescapable once you’ve committed yourself to the idea that half the country lives in one or another crumbling, corrupt, crowded, crime-infested hellhole. Indeed, it is logically inescapable.

But this isn’t logic; this is a coping mechanism. That’s why the problems that beset America’s cities, whether real or imagined, don’t exactly count against America because they count first against Democrats and Democrats aren’t really American. Or maybe it’s that multicultural Democratic-majority cities don’t count as part of “real” America, so the horrendous problems they are imagined to have can’t drag down America’s greatness score. Either way. 

At the end of all these intellectual and emotional gymnastics is relief. Really, there’s nothing to not be proud of. Because if American history makes you feel bad, it’s a lie. If the places where most Americans live are terrible it doesn’t count because those aren’t real American places that count. If there’s anything about our country that is seriously and undeniably bad, it’s because disloyal fake Americans are preventing us from being the greatest country on Earth by scandalously denying that we are.

I find that analysis completely convincing.

More connected but less...connected

So it seems Noah Smith just noticed an article from 2018 in The Atlantic that noted that young Americans were having less sex than before:

 which led to a couple of Tweets by a guy explaining it:

That sounds (a little depressingly) plausible.  Someone else throws this in:

This all sounds bad from an evolutionary perspective!

A disappointing summer

I suspected as much.  As this article notes, Queensland was (more or less) promised a wet summer due to La Nina, but apart from parts of the far North, it's been pretty dry.

This have been very noticeable around Brisbane, where it seems to me to be quite a few years now since we had a lot of summer rainfall.  Storms have brought just enough intermittent rain to keeps the grass green-ish, but we really haven't had the days of deep, drenching rain that used to be a regular feature of our summers.

It's still possible we may get a very wet autumn, I guess.  I certainly hope we are not heading into a protracted period of low rainfall again, though.   

Illiberal Left noted

Further to my post yesterday, I agree with this sentiment:

I also found via Twitter today this Jonathan Chait article about some of the silliness about "cancelling" people for using words when they are clearly just being quoted, rather than endorsed:  Describing a slur is not the same as using it.

It seems pretty surprising that such a thing needs to be explained in detail, but that's where some of the worst of "cancel culture" has taken us.  

 

A repeat problem

I watched Four Corners last night on management problems in Kakadu National Park.  

Jointly managed by traditional owners and Canberra based (I think) Parks Australia, apparently there has been a lot of argument from the locals that the latter is not listening to them enough.  One example they gave, and a major one for the tourism operators, was the closing down of a walkway to get to the top of a formerly very popular waterfall.   Apparently, traditional owners claimed it came too close to a sacred site, and they had warned Parks Australia.

The show, I have to say, as a piece of journalism, was completely unbalanced.  They did point out that a trio of Parks Australia managers had resigned, but there was no attempt at all to have any of them, or anyone else from Parks Australia, to respond to various claims of the local traditional owners.

You see, I find it hard to believe that Parks Australia would have built the stairway against clear and specific protest from the traditional owners about impact on a sacred site.  I strongly suspect there is more to it than that - unclear input from traditional owners; a expansion of a sacred site from what they had previously considered sacred; or a simple miscommunication.   

The problem seems to be a repeat one - that it is really hard working with aboriginal representative bodies, and I very much doubt that the problem is all (as aboriginal activists claim) on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.

There seems a very good chance that traditional owner expectations as to their opinion always winning on every management issue is going to lead to their own economic loss due to permanently reduced tourism.   One aboriginal community member last night was saying that in fact they shouldn't be putting all their economic eggs into tourism anyway - but he was completely and utterly non specific as to what other enterprises anyone had in mind:  

JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation are looking at developing tourism in Jabiru, there are a whole range of different options that Jabiru could become used for, rather than tourism. I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people. The education of our people, employment of our people. There is potential for economic growth in establishing enterprises for our people in the Park. But you have to see beyond the blinkers. Look outside the box, mate. What might be a potential. Tourism is not the be all and end all.     

I always worry that I am sounding too Right wing unsympathetic on aboriginal issues - but it's just that anyone my age has seen decades of claims that if only politicians and non indigenous Australians would listen more to what traditional owners want and need it will all improve.

But it doesn't.  Or not much, anyway.

Maybe I am getting old, but I don't understand this...

 What's it mean to be tribally Right wing but not very Right ideologically?   

I mean, particularly in the American context - to be tribally Right at the moment means you are more than likely living in an evidence free conspiracy world where only election fraud won the election for Biden, Trump remains the saviour of the common man, and Democrats want to destroy civil society.  Not to mention disbelief in climate change, wearing masks for COVID, and not wanting to take a vaccine that would return the world to something more normal.

Who wants to be any part of how wrong that tribalism has gone?

And if you go to Britain - the populist Right led to Brexit, and who really thinks that is still looking a good idea?

I keep saying, but apparently cannot convince Jason Soon - the excesses of the Left in illiberal views on identity politics is pretty minor stuff compared to the crapfest the tribal Right has delivered.

Waving the bloody shirt

There's a very interesting thread by David Neiwert on Twitter about the Right's use of rhetorical tactics that originated post (American) civil war. Here's a link to the Threadreader version, because it's long.

 

 

Barbarian history examined

So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle.  It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland.  (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.)  It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all.  I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)

Anyway:  I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews.  I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out.  (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are  particularly well documented.)   

I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not.   I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans.   But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.   

Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff.   If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.

To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected.   Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.

I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest,  but Spencer explains all of that as well.  His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.

I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy.  Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.

So, well done, everyone.   

And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year.  (It was COVID delayed last year.)

McConnell and others have more work to do if they want the cult to fade

I think that the "establishment" Republicans - those with brains enough to know that it's bad for the party to continue to under the sway of Trump and   his family - has been hoping that one-off denunciations and then just not talking about him anymore might work.   And I guess it might, eventually, if Trump starts getting entangled in too many legal actions.

But polling is indicating that the cult isn't fading fast enough, despite 6 January:

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

 

 

Mars as a "insurance policy"

I am somewhat sympathetic to this:
 

As I have said before, I think it is better to establish the Moon as a nearby lifeboat - store a lot of information, including genetic, up there in the event that a large chunk of the Earth is ruined.

Chinese crankery

As spotted on Twitter:

Mink again

I noted in November that COVID 19 was causing mink culls in Denmark, where raising mink is a big industry.  (I would have thought Scandinavians were nicer than that!)

I see via Washington Post that the industry is also significant in (of all places) Wisconsin;  and mink farmers there are getting vaccinated ahead of the likes of flight attendants, teachers and others.

As with Denmark, there is Youtube PR material by mink farmers emphasising how humane they are, all while showing that the animals seem to live their entire lives in cages that seem pretty damn small to me, given the size of the animal:

 

Wouldn't we think a cat, an animal about the same size, and perhaps of similar mammalian intelligence,  is not being treated humanely if raised for its entire live in a cage like that?    And wouldn't a shed full of cats so raised cause a lot of concern?   But mink get a pass for confinement, it seems.   

There is no doubt, it would seem, that they are well fed (in order to preserve the quality of the fur); but it's a pretty dull life, no?  

Weird design, even for a university

Have a look at this "semi-outdoor" plaza space in Japan, which has a very sci fi movie setting feeling about it:

 

I can't really tell if I like it, or not.  It has a slightly claustrophobic feeling about it from some angles.  

Can anyone wander in there? I also reckon that while it looks all new and pristine now, it's going to get messy pretty soon, with leaves and stuff from outside, unless they have a way of cleaning that enormous looking space.  Maybe it looks bigger than what it is?  

More thoughts:  sort of gives a "human as an ant inside a nest" perspective, doesn't it?   Also - would be something of a worry being there during an earthquake.  I suppose you might be OK if you stand still under one of the holes?

You can read about the architects arty ideas about what he was trying to achieve, here.

Turbines on ice

Texas seems to be over the worst of the power outages.  I have been wondering how many will have died from the cold:  the Washington Post count currently has it at 47, but you would have to suspect there are many more yet to be found in homes, or amongst the homeless.

But one cool thing the event has alerted everyone to is that wind turbines can be made to be very rugged indeed, including the ones in Antarctica, of all places.

I admired the Jupiter 2 looks of this Belgian Antarctic outpost in a post many years ago, but I don't think that I knew then that it relies a lot on wind turbine power as well as solar panels:

Reading about this base, on its website here, I see that there is lot more to it than the UFO looking bit; but it also seems to only be a summer station and is not manned over winter.

Anyway, they some nice videos, but using Vimeo instead of Youtube.  I presume I can still embed them:

There's also a short one showing what it looks like during a blizzard: 

 

 

Bracing weather!

 I see that Australia's Mawson base had two, more conventional looking, wind turbines installed in 2003 (much longer ago than I would have guessed.)  One of them died in 2017 (fell over, actually), but the other is still going strong, apparently.  Here's a photo:

 

It's a very messy looking base, as I am sure I have commented before.  Still, gets the job done, I suppose.

Oh look - there's the wreck of a Russian transport aircraft near it:

Here's the story:

This week we ventured out to visit the remains of a Russian aircraft on the plateau. The plane is (was?) a Lisunov Li-2T, the Russian built DC-3, and a close cousin of the Basler aircraft which still service the Antarctic programs of many countries today. In 1968 this aircraft and crew dropped in to visit Mawson for Christmas, no doubt with a bottle of their finest de-icing fluid to share. A strong wind gust during take-off caused damage to a wing and propeller, stranding the hapless crew. A Mawson blizzard further damaged the plane, flipping it upside down and sealing its fate. In the following 52 years it has slowly been carried by the plateau towards the coast, about 30 metres each year. Reaching it now requires travelling through crevassed terrain, and the use of glacier travel technique, the party roped together for safety. Two groups made the trip this week, each being trained in glacier travel equipment and rescue skills before they departed.

The plane lies twisted and buried by the snow and slow creeping ice. One landing ski protrudes into the air, the empty cockpit dials poke above the snow surface, a hinged door reveals a fuselage full of snow. The horizontal stabilizer now points skywards making a great backdrop for a photo.

Anyway, these are tough turbines, that's for sure.

I get spam

I occasionally get spam comments - and don't let them through of course.

This one, though, was the first of its kind, and noteworthy:

Lahore is the most making city with solid economy and bunches of amusement working environments. Getting the authentic high class Lahore Escorts Services will be dynamically excellent in the coming days since all the call youths are communicating that they are high class Call Girls in Lahore in a way. Experienced customers will locate the real and premium Pakistan Call Girls in Lahore and the new customers will get unassuming associations for higher rates.

There was a link in there to the escort service, which I have removed.

Perhaps I am easily amused, but the idea of spamming random blogs just in case they might interest someone who happens to be heading to Pakistan and who wants a sex escort while there strikes me as some sort of high point of optimism in marketing. 

The wrath of the trans soon to descend on The Economist

Has The Economist been running a transgender skeptic line before now?   This short article suggests so, and I expect transgender activists, who seem to be the most rabid activists around, will be very upset with it:

Little is known about the effect of puberty blockers - That has not stopped clinics prescribing them enthusiastically

...despite their popularity, the effects of puberty blockers remain unclear. Because they are not licensed for gender medicine, drug firms have done no trials. Record-keeping in many clinics is poor. A 2018 review by researchers at the University of Melbourne described the evidence for their use as “low-quality”. In December British judges likewise flagged the lack of a “firm evidence base” when ruling that children were unlikely to be able to give meaningful consent to taking them. Britain’s National Health Service recently withdrew a claim, still made elsewhere, that their effects are “fully reversible”.

The studies that do exist are at once weak and worrying. The day after the court ruling, GIDS published a study that found children were happy to receive the drugs. But there was little other evidence of benefit—not even a reduction in gender dysphoria. Two older studies of Dutch patients given puberty blockers in the 1990s found that gender dysphoria eased afterwards. But without a control group, it is impossible to tell how patients would have felt had they not taken the drugs.

The article starts with this surpising evidence of the rapid rise of transgenderism as a social concern:

America had one paediatric gender clinic in 2007. It now has at least 50. The sole paediatric gender clinic for England and Wales, known by its acronym, GIDS, has seen referrals rise 30-fold in a decade. A similar pattern is evident across the rich world.

It doesn't even mention the disproportionate rise in teenage girls deciding they are transgender.

Just one more thing to worry about

So, it would appear from this research, that the environmental effect of Earth's magnetic field flipping (which last happened 42,000 years ago) on the planet is not particularly well understood:

One temporary flip of the poles, known as the Laschamps excursion, happened 42,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,000 years. Previous work found little evidence that the event had a profound impact on the planet, possibly because the focus had not been on the period during which the poles were actually shifting, researchers say.

Now scientists say the flip, together with a period of low solar activity, could have been behind a vast array of climatic and environmental phenomena with dramatic ramifications. “It probably would have seemed like the end of days,” said Prof Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales and co-author of the study....

Writing in the journal Science, Turney and his colleagues describe how they carried out radiocarbon analyses of the rings of ancient kauri trees preserved in northern New Zealand wetlands, some of which were more than 42,000 years old.

This allowed them to track over time the rise in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere produced by increasing levels of high energy cosmic radiation reaching the Earth during the Laschamps excursion. As a result they were able to date the atmospheric changes in more detail than offered by previous records, such as mineral deposits.

They then examined numerous records and materials from all over the world, including from lake and ice cores, and found that a host of major environmental changes occurred at the same time as the carbon-14 levels peaked.

So, what did happen in this period?: 

“We see this massive growth of the ice sheet over North America … we see tropical rain belts in the west Pacific shifting dramatically at that point, and then also wind belts in the southern ocean and a drying out in Australia,” said Turney.

The researchers also used a model to examine how the chemistry of the atmosphere might change if the Earth’s magnetic field was lost and there was a prolonged period of low solar activity, which would have further reduced Earth’s protection against cosmic radiation. Ice core records suggest such dips in solar activity, known as the “grand solar minima”, coincided with the Laschamps excursion.

The results reveal that the atmospheric changes could have resulted in huge shifts in the climate, electrical storms and widespread colourful aurora.

Some stuff in the report is pretty speculative:

...the team suggest they could also be linked to the emergence of red ochre handprints, the suggestion being that humans may have used the pigment as a sunscreen against the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth as a result of the depletion of ozone.

They also suggest the rise in the use of caves by our ancestors around this time, as well as the rise in cave art, might be down to the fact that underground spaces offered shelter from the harsh conditions. The situation may also have boosted competition, potentially contributing to the end of the Neanderthals, Turney said.

Of course, the worry is how well our civilisation could cope:

The Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years, and the researchers say another flip could be on the cards. Such a situation could have a dramatic effect, not least by devastating electricity grids and satellite networks.

All a worry...

 

It must be economics Friday

I don't usually post about economics on a Friday - I tend to try to find more esoteric stories to note.

But this article in South China Morning Post caught my eye.  Young Chinese are worried about their economy, too.  It starts:

As vlogger Ning Nanshan stares down the camera and launches into a lecture about China’s push for technological self-reliance, a flood of “bullet comments” begins floating across the screen.

“Go our own way and corner the rest of the world!” says one of the comments on

Bilibili

, a popular video-sharing site that allows viewers to post messages in real time.

“Our motherland’s five-year plan is so awesome!” says another as it flies across the monitor.

While most of Ning’s videos trumpet China’s advancements in manufacturing, he occasionally touches on more middle class concerns, like runaway house prices. There too, the bullet comments come thick and fast – although with a very different tone.

“It is impossible for house prices to fall, there is no solution to my despair,” says one user.

“Working hard is not the answer, it will not work,” reads another comment.

With few other outlets to express opinions, social media platforms like Bilibili have become important online gathering places for young Chinese. And while they can be home to dizzying displays of nationalism, they also provide brief windows into what some political analysts say is the “serious divergence” between China’s booming economy and the personal prospects of ordinary people.

Further down:

China was the only major economy to post positive growth last year, following a quick recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Its gross domestic product (GDP) topped 100 trillion yuan (US$15.4 trillion) for the first time in 2020 – about 17 per cent of the world economy –

narrowing the gap with the United States

to only $6.2 trillion, from $7.1 trillion in 2019.

For China’s leaders, the GDP figure was a “milestone” that showed the nation’s economic and technological strength. Analysts have estimated the nation will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028, five years earlier than previously forecast.

But the impressive headline figure fails to tell the whole story. Young Chinese in particular are taking to online platforms like Bilibili or Weibo to voice despair over skyrocketing house prices, widening inequality, and the increasing price of everyday goods.

More to my surprise, there are some comments by an "independent scholar" in Beijing which appear to be brave, very brave:

Wu Qiang, a political observer and an independent scholar based in Beijing, said the optimism about China’s economy on social media was mostly “Communist Party propaganda”, with many other topics out of bounds due to the nation’s vast online censorship system.

“The nationalism on Chinese media is a nihilistic statism, which is to conceal inequality through empty slogans without giving real equality and political rights to the people. This is reflected in the suffering people feel in their lives,” he said.

He said China’s strong growth under state capitalism was a “paradox” for many young people, who lacked comprehensive labour rights and work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

China’s relatively low household incomes and the small share of employment in the services sector also hint at the divergence between the nation’s booming economy and the life satisfaction of the average worker.

GDP per capita in China was around US$10,200 in 2019, compared to US$63,200 in the United States, according to the most recent World Bank data.

In 2019, China’s private consumption accounted for about 39 per cent of GDP, which was about 30 percentage points lower than the US and Europe, according to data from CEIC. It was also about 20 percentage points lower than developing countries such as India and Brazil.

Long story short - the dramatic rise in GDP is not improving the lives of the people as much as might be expected.

If I was Wu, I would be a bit nervous about knocks on the door and invitations to come speak to local party officials, in the next few weeks.

 

 

Not a conservative

Good article at The Atlantic, pointing out that Rush Limbaugh did not advance conservatism:

As a proponent of conservatism in America, Limbaugh was a failure who in his later years abandoned the project of advancing a positive agenda, culminating in his alignment with the vulgar style and populist anti-leftism of Donald Trump. Character no longer mattered. Budget deficits no longer mattered. Free trade no longer mattered. Nepotism no longer mattered. Lavishing praise on foreign dictators no longer mattered.

All that mattered was owning the libs in the culture war, in part to avenge a deeply felt sense of aggrievement. Limbaugh and Trump were alike in attaining great wealth and political influence while still talking and seeming to feel as though society was stacked against guys like them....

....the proposition that Limbaugh helped conservatism thrive or grow is unsubstantiated. National Review and Barry Goldwater reinvigorated conservatism in postwar America. The high-water mark of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was over before Limbaugh was a force in American politics.

Over the ensuing decades, as Limbaugh grew in fame and gained as much influence in the Republican Party as anyone, the conservative movement suffered from political and intellectual decline. “In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar,” a writer at The American Conservative once complained. “Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.” The seesaw of partisan politics gave conservatives occasional victories, such as the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the 2010 Tea Party wave, but once in office the GOP tended to squander those victories quickly and never accomplished much conservative change. The government kept getting bigger. The country kept getting more socially liberal. The right delighted in the fact that the left was never able to create its own Rush Limbaugh, despite various attempts. But perhaps that supposed failing has helped progressives make gains.

Read the whole thing.

 

Economists and what they don't know

I have being muttering here for perhaps a couple of years now that it seems that there is some sort of unacknowledged crisis in macro economics in which economists (probably on both sides of politics, even though Laffer-ish Right wing economists have been wronger for longer) aren't really admitting to not understanding some fundamental things that are pretty damn important.      

See these two stories which back up my theory.  From Axios:

The world's debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 356% in 2020, a new report from the Institute of International Finance finds, up 35 percentage points from where it stood in 2019, as countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.

Why it matters: The increase brings numerous countries, including the U.S., to extreme debt levels, well beyond what economists have called untenable in the past.

• Nonfinancial private sector debt alone now makes up 165% of the entire world's economic output.

What they're saying: "The upswing was well beyond the rise seen during the 2008 global financial crisis," IIF economists said in the report.

• "Back in 2008 and 2009, the increase in global debt ratio was limited to 10 percentage points and 15 percentage points, respectively."

By the numbers: Global debt increased to $281 trillion last year, with total private and public sector debt rising by $24 trillion in the 61 countries IIF follows.....

Why the debt matters: While worries about significantly pushing up inflation and borrowing costs have not come to pass, slow growth and diminishing returns have, and the world's already high debt levels look to be inhibiting economic growth and threaten to hold back a full recovery from the pandemic in the long run.

• Further, almost all of the debt issued in 2020 was to deal with present circumstances rather than to invest in forward-looking projects or growth, making future investments in such projects more difficult and potentially more costly.

Where it stands: The CBO projected U.S. GDP growth over the next 10 years will be largely below 2% (with the notable exclusion of 2021), and that annual budget deficits will increase.

• The federal debt is set to exceed the size of the economy this year for only the second time since the end of World War II and grow to 107% of GDP by 2031.
• That projection was made without including President Biden's proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

And this reminded me of Noah Smith's recent take on the question of economists and debt:

No one knows how much the government can borrow

Some extracts: 

Remember that some people thought that government borrowing and spending during the Great Recession, facilitated by quantitative easing (Fed bond-buying) to keep interest rates low, was going to lead to substantial inflation. But it didn’t.

Would it have led to inflation if the government borrowing and spending had been 10x what it was? 100x? 10000000000000000000000x? Where’s the cutoff?

We don’t know. David Andolfatto, writing at the St. Louis Fed blog, lays it out:

There is presumably a limit to how much the market is willing or able to absorb in the way of Treasury securities, for a given price level (or inflation rate) and a given structure of interest rates. However, no one really knows how high the debt-to-GDP ratio can get. We can only know once we get there…There is no way of knowing beforehand just how large the national debt can get before inflation becomes a concern.

So when the government borrows more and more from the Fed and spends the money, it’s like our country is walking down an infinite corridor towards an invisible pit. We know the pit is out there somewhere in front of us, but we just have no idea how far we have to walk before we fall in.

Noah then notes that there is far too inadequate research on the issue.  He lists some papers which might give some indication, but his conclusion is this:

Just because the U.S. hasn’t had inflation for a long time doesn’t mean borrowing constraints aren’t a pressing, even urgent research question. There are so many pieces of the puzzle that need investigating. Do deficits matter in the absolute sense, or does it just matter how much is financed by the central bank? Is the start of central bank financing of deficits what kicks off the inflation, or something else? Does it matter what government spends the money on? Are policy regime changes of the kind Sargent talks about actually detectable in the data? And if so, what do they look like? Why hasn’t Japan, with its debt of 240% of GDP, had even the tiniest glimmer of inflation?

And so on.

We need the top minds working on this now, not waiting until after disaster strikes and then analyzing it after the fact!

His take on the matter sounds very plausible to me.

A Seoul problem

Just one of the unusual things you learn by watching Channel News Asia:   housing costs in Seoul have been climbing dramatically in recent years:

 

If you can't be bothered watching the video, the description of the story: 

Home prices in Seoul have risen more than 50% in the last four years. President Moon Jae-in has been under fire for failing to cool the housing market, despite introducing dozens of measures including tax hikes and loan limits. His latest plan to increase the supply of affordable housing has also not been well received. In South Korea, public rental housing refers to small-sized apartments purchased by the local government to be rented out to low-income groups at below market prices. 

The video, which features some people saying that they doubt that those who live in public housing can "fit in" in the local area indicates that the sort of social problems depicted in Parasite are pretty real.

 

About Texas energy

This article in New York Magazine No the Green New Deal did not cause the Texas power outage strikes me as one of the most balanced and comprehensive discussions of the issues.  

It does end with this fair enough point, for example:

Progressives need clear answers about how a green transition can make America’s electric grids more robust against the coming storms. The Week’s Ryan Cooper, drawing on the insights of climate wonk Dave Roberts, sketches out what such an answer might look like. Specifically, Cooper argues that America can achieve electricity resilience by exploiting its vast size and climate diversity through a nationally integrated power grid.

Update:   Oh - 

(Bloomberg) -- Federal regulators warned Texas that its power plants couldn’t be counted on to reliably churn out electricity in bitterly cold conditions a decade ago, when the last deep freeze plunged 4 million people into the dark.

They recommended that utilities use more insulation, heat pipes and take other steps to winterize plants -- strategies commonly observed in cooler climates but not in normally balmy Texas.

“Where did those recommendations go, and how were they implemented?” said Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, an association of clean energy businesses. “Those are going to be some pretty key questions.”

As investigators probe the current power crisis in Texas, which has left millions of people without power or a promise of when it will be restored, questions are sure to be raised about how the state responded to the urgings from the 2011 analysis, issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets reliability standards.

All the news

*    I don't use Facebook, and suspect the world would be a better place if no one else did, too.

So it worries me not one bit that the company run by an alien (no other way to explain that haircut) has stopped Australian news feeds (or links?). 

Anything that makes Facebook less popular is fine by me. 

*   This sexual assault in Parliament is a very weird story (the circumstances around the entry into Parliament House, the aftermath, the way the politicians first tried to handle it) that reflects badly on how the Morrison government handles internal scandal.   And if this is true, it only gets worse:

*  Why does Scott Morrison retain a quite high approval rating?   And why does he have that, but his party doesn't lead in voting intention?   (I think some polls still show a slight lead?)  I think Morrison has been able to avoid scrutiny due to COVID keeping more eyes on State premiums than him, but gee I find him unimpressive.   I disliked Tony Abbott more, because he was more "in your face", and put up a pretence of being a political deep thinker, and he was a disgrace in his treatment of Gillard when he was Opposition leader.   But Morrison is so....superficial.  

* Rush Limbaugh has died.   No tears from me, and no criticism of anyone who attacks him before the body is cold, either.   (Many are pointing out that he more-or-less pioneered the "all liberals are evil and only want to hurt and crush you" fear based political narrative amongst conservatives which has poisoned politics in American and a slab of the Australian Right.  Quite despicable.) 

Top notch propaganda

I recently subscribed to CGTN (China Global Television Network) on Youtube, and so have been watching some of their huge output of pro-China content.   (Given there seems a 50/50-ish chance that the country will dominate the globe within the next 40 years, I recommend everyone subscribe and hit the "like" button a lot on the assumption that it is being recorded on a government computer somewhere in Beijing and will give you a good "social credit" rating when they become our local overlords.  Or even if you  plan on taking a holiday in China and get arrested for having the wrong bookmark on your phone browser, it probably wouldn't hurt.)

Seriously, I do think it is worth watching because it's startling to see a such a slick, completely unsubtle,  government run pro-China PR project to win global hearts and minds and attack all criticisms.   It's just not something we are used to seeing outside of a war setting, really.  

And it is surprising how they use Caucasian people to do some of the work too.  They are even sometimes resorting to sarcastic mockery rather than just ranting.   See this one about the BBC, with whom they are feuding since England banned them from TV broadcasting:

 

They also have a lot of content designed to humanise the Chinese people.  Like this one:

Uncle Hanzi? 

I think I find this interesting partly because it seems rarely explained in the West how propagandistic the Chinese government is with their own people.  I guess this channel gives us an idea, at least.

The rise of intense, uncritical nationalism within any country is always a worry, and it seems odd that we in the West are not being told much about that aspect of Chinese life.   I think I read a brief comment somewhere recently that modern Chinese nationalism is all based on a narrative of finally getting back at the West for its terrible and humiliating treatment handed out in the Opium Wars.   I wonder if that's right - it sounds kind of plausible, but I have never seen anyone explaining the content of Chinese schools' history books.

I do know that Chinese nationalism makes for some very unwatchable Chinese movies.  (And, I have to confess - as well as apologise in advance to my future overlords - that I do find spoken Chinese one of the most grating languages to the ear in foreign cinema.)   

Anyway, it's all fascinating and a bit of a worry.   I do still side with the idea that engagement is better than attempting isolation. 

 

Does Trump take the "credit" for this?

From the BBC:

China is now the EU's biggest trading partner, overtaking the US in 2020.

China bucked a wider trend, as trade with most of Europe's major partners dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trade between China and the EU was worth $709bn (€586bn, £511bn) last year, compared with $671bn worth of imports and exports from the US.

Although China's economy cratered in the first quarter due to the pandemic, its economic recovery later in the year fuelled demand for EU goods.

 

Wait, what?

 

Yet Bannon has swung back to being a Trump supporter??

A perfectly normal White House.

Update:  from the report in The Guardian on the same story - just how nutty is Bannon though?

Rosen said Bannon had “great frustrations with Trump”, who had been “throwing him under the bus”, particularly over an interview Bannon gave to Time magazine.

Bannon, he said, regularly cited a New York Times column by David Brooks, in October 2017, which said some Republicans visiting the White House suspected Trump might have Alzheimer’s disease – but gave him a standing ovation anyway.

“Bannon kept saying this, and he wanted to do something about it,” Rosen said. “Now, the secret was that Bannon crazily thought that he could be president.”

Asked to what extent Bannon’s claims represented “legitimate news versus Bannon just kind of trying to get attention”, Rosen said: “That’s exactly the trick in trying to deal with Steve, because a lot of it is to draw attention to himself.”

This is why politics is not working properly in the USA

 Part 2::

 

Some days, you do just wish that the government ran power stations and electricity grids

The sudden winter black out problem in Texas is leading many American journalists to make comments like this:

 which I think is pretty applicable to my feelings about understanding Australia's electricity grid/power generation issues too.

Back when I were a lad, I think it was all under direct government control, and if you had too many blackouts, you knew who to blame.  

It's rare to see any summary as to when and how that all started to change.   In the 1980's, was it?  

The whole electricity market thing with spot prices, etc, just always seems too complicated to understand fully, given that it is tied up with grid issues too.

Anyway, back to Texas.

The true story seems to simply be that that State never expected wind to generate much power for an event like this, but the back up from natural gas in particular just hasn't been there.   

I have read many times that Texas didn't bother with buying winterised wind turbines, like other, colder, states do;  but it remains unclear as to what difference that would have made to this particular crisis anyway.

As for my wish that electricity was just a public utility like it used to be:  I do qualify that by noting that it always seems to me that we had a hell of a lot more blackouts in the suburbs of Brisbane when I was a child than we get now.  They do seem really rare to me over the last 20 or 30 years.  So maybe the more complicated system does something right.

Ex-cellent

Trump (tries to) hit back at McConnell (my bold):

Trump unleashed a torrent of insults at McConnell, who just a few days ago voted to acquit Trump but also said the former president bore responsibility for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a lengthy statement, Trump eviscerates McConnell, claiming the Kentucky Republican “begged” Trump for his support in his 2020 reelection bid and threatening to back primary challengers to lawmakers who aren’t aligned with Trump.

“Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership,” Trump warns.

Safe bet that Trump didn't write that string of words himself.

Oh, apparently this is even admitted further down:

The statement on McConnell was edited by a “bunch” of people and the entire process took several days, according to the adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

 More:

The former president says he “regrets” giving McConnell his endorsement last year and claims the veteran politician would have lost had it not been for Trump. McConnell won another term by nearly 20 percentage points over Democrat Amy McGrath.

Trump then blames McConnell for Republicans losing two Senate seats in Georgia, where Trump continued to perpetuate unfounded claims that the presidential election was rigged.

“He doesn’t have what it takes, never did, and never will,” Trump says in the statement, hinting at his role going forward.

“This is a big moment for our country," Trump says, in closing, "and we cannot let it pass by using third rate ‘leaders’ to dictate our future!”

 Yeah, there are bits in there that are Trump's own words.

Go on, Donald:  make a third party.  Split the GOP vote.  Please?

Not a good sign for a Trump return

News of a poll post the impeachment:

Over half of Americans (58%) say that Trump should have been convicted, which tracks with the 56% who said the same last week before the 57-43 Senate vote to acquit left Trump free to possibly run for office again. Last year, after Trump was acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial, Americans were evenly split on the outcome, with 49% approving of the Senate's judgment and 47% disapproving, according to a Monmouth University poll....

The seven Republicans, who make up 14% of the GOP conference in the Senate, mirrors the 14% of Republicans nationwide who believe Trump should have been convicted and barred from holding future office in the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel.

I had to check again - how popular was the idea of Bill Clinton's impeachment back in the day.   It was never very popular at all, as noted in this Gallup article written about Trump's first impeachment:

Americans' support for the Senate convicting Clinton in 1999 was much lower than current support for convicting Donald Trump. Gallup's Jan. 22-24, 1999, survey (one of a number we conducted while Clinton was on trial) found 33% of Americans in favor of Clinton being found guilty and removed from office, while 64% were against. Our latest survey on Trump shows 46% in favor of his conviction.

In the 1999 survey, Clinton's job approval rating was 69%, much higher than Trump's current 44% approval. So, the lower support for Clinton's conviction went hand in glove with his approval rating: 64% were against conviction compared with his 69% approval rating, and 33% were in favor of conviction juxtaposed against a 29% disapproval rating.

Thus, as is the case now for Trump, Americans' views on Clinton's impeachment largely reflected their overall assessment of the job he was doing more generally. Clinton had a high job approval rating and a concomitantly low "convict" rating; Trump's approval is lower and his "convict" rating higher.

No meat Saturday

Had these for lunch:

They were good.  Made in Malaysia.   

 

Made this for dinner:

That's my latest attempt to make a vegetarian/vegan burger patty that sticks together well.  It worked better in that regard, but I still was not completely happy with its texture.  

 

For my future reference, this time I sort of followed the Youtube recipe that appears at the previous post I linked above, but with some variation:

 

1 can black beans

1 can lentils

1/2 can of chick peas

1/2 cup or so of grated raw beetroot

1/4 cup of rolled oats

1/4 cup of nutritional yeast (that stuff's not cheap, by the way)

Some re-hydrated dried shitake mushrooms (probably barely 1/4 cup by the time I squeezed the liquid out - next time I would add much more)

2 tablespoons of coconut oil 

2 teaspoons of tapioca starch (for binding effect - I think it worked, but could still go with more next time)

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

salt (I forget - I think 1/2 teaspoon)

pepper (I ran out - was intended to be 1/2 teaspoon) 

 

Of course, the ingredients were blitzed (with a hand blender this time) to a rough consistency - you don't want a smooth paste, of course.

Next time, I propose dropping the lentils, perhaps just going with a full can of beans and chick peas, more shitake mushrooms, a bit more tapioca starch, and add some crushed walnuts at the end for more texture.  I am perhaps inclined to put in a bit less smoked paprika and add some other herb too, but I am not sure what.

Speaking of Carlson

I agree wholeheartedly with Max Boot's recent column: 

In office, Trump was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy. Now it may be Tucker Carlson.

The Right and UFOs

Hey, here's a enjoyable article at Slate:

What UFOs and Joe McCarthy Have to Do With the Assault on the Capitol

which covers some stuff I hadn't read about before - the Right Wing interest in UFOs and their representation in 1950's science fiction, and then moving forward into Right Wing interest today in paranormal stuff and (in particular) Tucker Carlson's interest in running UFO content too.

This is a bit of a worry, given my own interest in UFOs - although I don't really follow the topic closely now.  I was more on board when it was a liberal interest:  I mean, Close Encounters of the Third Kind paints the aliens as merely misunderstood and somewhat child-like.   (As was ET a few years later.)

I guess there were plenty of Right wing style aliens to be feared in the late 70's, early 80's too (I suppose Alien could readily have been seen as a communist analogue if it had been made in the 1950's).   But interest in UFOs in the 60's and 70's was more a liberal, alternative lifestyle, alternative religion sort of thing.   Perhaps it was in the 1990's (with X Files and the whole alien's are into anal probe or changing our DNA stuff) that it started taking on the more paranoid Right wing character.