Thursday, June 30, 2022

Big power project apparently can work

When I first heard about it, I thought that this project sounded fanciful, because I didn't imagine the power transmission over that long a distance (and via undersea cable) would be efficient enough.  But it would seem I was wrong:

SINGAPORE: The company behind a megaproject to deliver up to 15 per cent of Singapore’s energy requirements via a 4,200km undersea cable from northern Australia aims to start construction in 2024.

The project took a step closer to being realised last week, after being deemed investment-ready by Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body that advises the country’s government on key projects of national significance.

This potentially opens the US$20.7 billion intercontinental cable operation - called the Australia-Asia PowerLink - to investment that could include public funds.

Before construction can begin, all financing documents will need to be signed and prior conditions for the availability of financing will have to be fulfilled.

Sun Cable wants to build the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in the world in Australia’s Northern Territory and send clean power to the regional city of Darwin as well as Singapore.

Singapore is currently a gas burning nation, so it must be feeling the pinch at the moment:

It comes as Singapore looks to expand its renewable energy options and moves to import power as a solution to lowering its carbon emissions footprint - it currently generates about 95 per cent of its energy from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.
Anyway, the undersea cable is HVDC, which is maybe the only way it could work?:

“We need that ability to transmit electricity on an intercontinental basis to get from where that resource is abundant to where those large loads are and where they're growing fast. And that's what the evolution of high-voltage direct current submarine cable technology allows,” he added.

This article talks about HVDC undersea cables.  Seems there are only relatively short ones around, so I hope the challenges of 4,000 km of such cable are not too much to overcome.  

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Message to Monty

Monty, Monty, Monty.

I see you tried to engage dover beach with your "defending institutions" argument.   

It has gotten you no where, of course, because all he is interested in is institutions defending (or rather, forcing on the citizens as a whole) his conservative Catholic values on abortion, marriage, etc.  

Here's the thing:  people like him who can watch the violent riot and death calls at the Capitol, and all of the evidence from the Congressional hearing, and still think Trump was the one unfairly treated, are just plainly too stupid to bother arguing with.   They are willfully blind and are more sympathetic to Christian flavoured fascism than anything else, because it gets them the laws they want forced on everyone.    

They love you dropping in because it gives them a thrill that you think they are worth engaging with. 

They aren't.  

The only thing I think you should ever say to them is just "you are too stupid to argue with."

To Trumpist idiots, this makes him sound like a hero in an action movie

I noticed on Twitter some people saying that Trump lunging from his seat to try to stop the driver of his vehicle taking him to the White House instead of the Capitol would not be possible, because of a screen between the back and the driver.

The Washington Post is onto that already, and it appears this is not going to work as a defence.   

The most depressing and stupid thing to realise from that article, however, is that Trump getting physical with his staff probably appeals to a significant section of his nutjob base, as to them it makes him sound like an action hero who nearly thwarted his kidnapping:

On that message board, some conceded that her testimony actually showed another way in which Trump had faced unfair treatment. One poster said the story showed that “the Deep State coup plotters” of the Secret Service had “effectively kidnapped the President of the United States of America against his wishes” as part of a “C.I.AMilitary Industrial Complex coup d'etat.”

Some there argued she should be “locked up for lying under oath,” while another poster there suggested her wild testimony was just Washington as usual.

“Even if she’s telling the truth,” the anonymous patriots.win poster said, “where’s the f---ing problem?”

Allahpundit points out, by the way, that it would be unlikely the committee would let Hutchinson give this evidence if it didn't know it was going to be backed up by one of the first hand witnesses.    

The other bit of evidence, not being given enough attention, I think, is that not only did Hutchinson talk about the aftermath of one plate throwing incident, she said he did something similar several times.

Update:  Allahpundit is now going on about how damaging it will look if the secret service isn't backing her up, as some leaks are now suggesting.   Meh.   It was never going to be evidence at a Trump trial, anyway.  


An entertaining dream

Before I start forgetting the details completely, I seemed to have a long, but basically enjoyable, dream last night which went something like this.

I was a younger version of myself, returning at night to the house I grew up in (I think my parents were still alive) only to find that the suburban block it was on was the subject of some sort of military action.  I ran away, but eventually decided to give myself in, finding that the new rulers (of uncertain origin) were putting local residents in trains for re-location elsewhere.  I was worried about how this felt like the Holocaust, but the trains were quite OK.   

We were then on a cruise ship, again quite OK standard, and being shipped to Germany.

The thing was, no one knew exactly who the aggressors were, in what appeared to be a global wide conflict of some type.

Scott Morrison appeared in one scene, and I asked him, in public, that when he was PM he must have had some idea where this threat may come from, so couldn't he tell us who the aggressors likely were?  He said "nope", he had no idea at all, there was no warning of this conflict.

Sinclair Davidson (!) then featured amongst a group of others in front of which I declared I had worked it out:  the orders for this were probably coming from the sentient global AI that the internet had become.   I mean, people were just following orders given via emails on screens - the global AI could easily be producing those.   

I did spend a bit of time asking what the best term for our new AI overlord was, as I thought some science fiction writer had come up with one, but I couldn't remember it.  No one else could either.

The relocations, by the way, were more about balancing where the best places for humans to live for efficient use of resources - there was no evil intent about it as such.

And that's about it...

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

What a country

A story from the Washington Post, and what an appalling one:

A man fatally shot an employee and injured another at an Atlanta Subway restaurant over the weekend because he had “too much mayo on his sandwich,” police said Monday morning.

The shooter fired a handgun at two workers, a 26-year-old woman who died of her wounds and a 24-year-old woman who was in critical condition, Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. told reporters. The injured woman’s 5-year-old child was in the restaurant at the time.

As the top comment says, in the context of the Supreme Court last week deciding people carrying handguns was cool:

This is precisely the consequence of last Thursday's dreadful SCOTUS decision - apparently their "appetizer" for all the dreadful decisions they had lined up for us - and of all the hypocrisy for a right wing that supposedly believes in states' rights and didn't allow New York to protect its citizens from exactly this kind of impulsive fatal violence ... These 'carry' laws are all an unmitigated outrage and yet instead its the protective laws that SCOTUS goes after. The founding fathers would be appalled. This is not remotely what the 2nd amendment was ever intended to allow. And the pretzel illogic that is used by every single Justice appointed by a GOP President on the current court is the most transparent bunk covering their actual Trojan horse cabal to overthrow American democracy, not just from the inside but from the ultimate tribunal of the inside. Two Bushes and a Trump managed to find and plant the most anti-democracy, anti-sanity Justices imagineable for this systematic dismantling of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the majority of us at least.

 

The problem with multiverse movies (or perhaps I should say, stories)

Just a quick note, based on having watched a Youtube video that explained that the Marvel cinematic "Universe" (now really a cable TV plus cinema universe - not to everyone's satisfaction) is doubtlessly heading towards a series of stories (already in comic book form) in which the multiverse plays a key role:

The storyline involves the destruction of the Marvel Universe and various other alternate universes (including those seen in the Ultimate Marvel and Marvel 2099 imprints, the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, the Marvel 1602 universe, and the "House of M" storyline), with each universe's respective Earth combining with each other into Battleworld, a planet that exhibits the aspects of the various universes. The planet itself is divided in many territories that are mostly self-contained and where a "pocket universe" composed of a specific storyline or universe reside and evolve. Various versions of individual Marvel characters can be present multiple times on the Battleworld. For example, there is a Tony Stark present in many of the territories where the Kingdom of Manhattan has both the Earth-1610 and the Earth-616 versions, and many versions of Thor serve as a peace-keeping force. The stories depicted in the miniseries about each domain's characters' powers and personal histories vastly differ from the ones portrayed in the main Marvel universe(s).  

Now, I'm already not the biggest fan of superhero movies, and my enjoyment is very dependent on them not taking themselves too seriously.   (The next Thor movie looks to be a continuation of the rather comedic last one, so I'll still see it if it has good reviews.)

But even so, isn't it obvious that the problem with multiverse storylines is that when anything is possible, it quickly starts to become boring?    There are too many options.   You might get away with dealing with the multiverse in one movie, or maybe two, but if you keep on going, how can you really keep it dramatically (or creatively?) interesting.  

And is it possible that audiences are already starting to sense that, despite the box office success of the last Dr Strange movie?

 




Monday, June 27, 2022

Great calls

Someone on Twitter noted these today:


 

More from the Douthat column:

....the scenarios that have been spun out in reputable publications — where Trump induces Republican state legislatures to overrule the clear outcome in their states or militia violence intimidates the Supreme Court into vacating a Biden victory — bear no relationship to the Trump presidency we’ve actually experienced. Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like “plotting” implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.

 What a specious argument it was...

James Blunt is very amusing


 

Asia and motorbikes (soon to be electric, hopefully)

The BBC asks Will electric motorbike sales take off across Asia, and gives some interesting figures:

Asia accounts for more than half of all global motorbike sales, and in some countries it is unusual for a family to not own one.

Take Thailand, the nation with the highest per person use of motorcycles. There 87% of households own at least one motorbike. These are typically the scooter variety, whereby the rider sits with his or her feet directly in front.

Thailand is closely followed by Vietnam (86%), Indonesia (85%), and Malaysia (83%) for households with motorbikes. The figures then drop to 60% and 47% respectively, in giant markets China and India, but that still dwarfs the UK's 7%.

The vast majority of Asia's motorbikes currently run on petrol, but transport experts say that a big switch to electric versions is now gathering pace.

I like this innovation:

While the big Japanese motorbike manufacturers like Yamaha and Honda are now making electric models, the Asian market has been led by newer companies.

Taiwan's Gogoro is one such firm. In addition to a range of electric motorbikes, it has come up with a solution to the problem of a rider having to stand around while their bikes charge.

Instead of charging points, Gogoro's users in Taiwan simply need to drive to one of more than 2,200 battery stations, and swap their batteries for free. The outdoor stations run 24-hours a day, and are said to be able to withstand the typhoons and searing heat of Taiwanese summers.

Gogoro is now planning to make this battery-swapping hardware and technology available to partner companies across Asia. These include Hero in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and DCJ and Yadea in China. Gogoro is also working on a partnership with Yamaha.

Horace Luke, Gogoro's chief executive, says the company is trying to become the "Android" of the electric motorbike world, providing the invisible scaffolding for other brands He likens it to the mobile phone system which encourages innovation by giving device makers more freedom to customise phones. In this spirit, Gogoro also intends to share its battery-management software, which helps to extend the life of the batteries.

Cool.


About that Roe decision

One of the most interesting articles about it was this one in the New York Times (it's a gift link so you'll be able to read it) about Justice Alito's life long determination to see it overruled.  

His statements at confirmation fitted the usual deceptive pattern that all conservative judges follow:

Later that year [1985], Mr. Alito applied for another position in the Justice Department, proudly citing his role in devising a strategy for those cases. “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Years later, when those documents were disclosed during his Supreme Court confirmation, he assured senators that while that statement reflected his views in 1985, he would approach abortion cases with an open mind as a justice, with due respect for precedent and with no ideological agenda.

“When someone becomes a judge,” he said, “you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”

Amongst other things of note I only learnt since the decision - about 50% of American abortions are via medication now.   How States expect to stop the inter State movement of the few pills that are needed remains to be seen.   But there will probably be States that seek to punish a woman for taking them, despite (I think) most (or all?) States saying they will criminalise abortion providers, not the women seeking an abortion.   Anyway, I still suspect that this method (not around at the time of Roe) is going to reduce the effect of this court decision in preventing access to abortion.

Also - there has been talk around how how American abortion rights were (under Roe) more liberal than those in many European countries.   (Noah Smith was going on about it.)   As many people were pointing out to him, and others, this can be very deceptive, as anyone who has experience of Australian laws would know.   Women might have the right to an abortion for any reason up to a certain time, but if they retain the right after that to have an abortion for their health, and this is broadly interpreted to include their mental health, then you can have de facto liberal access anyway.   

And I am pretty sure that it was long established that, within Australian states, having access to abortion as of right, and having it only by claiming it will hurt your mental health, resulted in virtually the same rate of abortion in each jurisdiction.   

Pro-lifers like to go on about the apparent depravity of having a right to abortion up to birth, without recognising the difficulty of getting doctors to actually agree to a late procedure.   As someone I saw on Twitter said, with rare exception, very late term abortions are about wanted pregnancies in which a serious medical problem with the baby has been discovered very late.   

Update Allahpundit notes this:

Once red states ban abortion entirely, forcing local pregnant women to find providers out of state, demand will quickly overwhelm supply and create long waits that will lead to women getting abortions later in their pregnancies. A 15-week national ban would prevent those abortions — but as I say, that won’t pass until 2025 at the soonest. In the short term, the perverse outcome of today’s decision is likely to mean more abortions getting pushed off into the second and even third trimesters, when babies are viable.

That is from a post about Republicans now talking about a Federal 15 week limit on abortion.  He starts:

In December I predicted that the traditional conservative rationale for overturning Roe, that the 50 states rather than the Court are the proper venue for regulating abortion, would expire five minutes after the Dobbs decision dropped. At which point it would shift instantly to “national restrictions!”

I was wrong. It took about two hours after the ruling for that decades-old federalist credo to be dumped in a ditch by House Republicans.

Here’s something I rarely say about these chuckleheads, though. The idea of a national 15-week ban is … good politics.

I think?

He's the only conservative commenter who does nuance well.

Friday, June 24, 2022

This is nuts, too!

Never seen this before:


 A video about the place:

This is kinda nuts

On the up side, I guess, it's a benefit to other Western countries that we  get to see the effects of slack regulation in the US and hence avoid problems before they can happen here.

 I mean, this is just kinda nuts, isn't it:

Although recreational cannabis is illegal in the United States for those under 21, it has become more accessible as many states have legalized it. But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

Marijuana is not as dangerous as a drug like fentanyl, but it can have potentially harmful effects — especially for young people, whose brains are still developing. In addition to uncontrollable vomiting and addiction, adolescents who frequently use high doses of cannabis may also experience psychosis that could possibly lead to a lifelong psychiatric disorder, an increased likelihood of developing depression and suicidal ideation, changes in brain anatomy and connectivity and poor memory.

But despite these dangers, the potency of the products currently on the market is largely unregulated.

In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By 2017, it was 17 percent. And now cannabis manufacturers are extracting THC to make oils; edibles; wax; sugar-size crystals; and glass-like products called shatter that advertise high THC levels in some cases exceeding 95 percent.

Meanwhile, the average level of CBD — the nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant tied to relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation — has been on the decline in cannabis plants. Studies suggest that lower levels of CBD can potentially make cannabis more addictive.

THC concentrates “are as close to the cannabis plant as strawberries are to frosted strawberry pop tarts,” Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, wrote in a report on the health risks of highly concentrated cannabis.

Although cannabis is legal for recreational use in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 37 states and D.C., only Vermont and Connecticut have imposed caps on THC concentration. Both ban concentrates above 60 percent, with the exception of pre-filled cartridges, and do not permit cannabis plant material to exceed 30 percent THC. But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels are somehow safer.

I have been saying for a while:  if you're going to legalise cannabis based products, why wouldn't you set regulations about the apparently protective part of it - the CBD levels?   

And really, why would you let such a plethora of cannabis containing products exist in the first place - like candies and cookies, with their obvious potential risk of being eaten by little kids?

 

 

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Break out the pre-nup

How did she manage to stay with him for this long, if this is true:

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, a former top model, are reportedly set to divorce....

Before the wedding, a friend of the couple told the Guardian: “They are very sweet together, in a little couple bubble. They act like a married couple already, talking over each other, holding hands.

“She puts her feet up on his legs, they disagree on things like any married couple. She hates Trump, he understands Trump, it’s been like that from the beginning.”

 

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

French speakers like big animated things

Not sure if I had seen the giant Minotaur of Toulouse before, but it's pretty impressive (and reminds me a lot of something that could be in a Miyazaki film - especially Howl's Moving Castle.)

 

 It also reminded me of some giant puppets from somewhere - turns out it was probably Montreal: 

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Drag panic

Even though I doubt I will ever fully understand the appeal of watching drag artists, I agree with Yglesias that we are in the midst of a full blown conservative panic:


Their most prominent target is, of course, the "drag queen story hour" events that are aimed at children.

The history of that movement is relatively short, and set out in this Wikipedia article.  (It started in San Francisco - no surprise there.)

The events that are held in libraries are no doubt attended by children with parents who are already highly motivated to expose to children to "diversity" - and the relatively small number of families involved should be of no great concern to anyone.   

On the other hand, I do think it a bit odd that schools should partake of these shows (as they have in New York).   

But where ever these events are held, I have strong doubts that any but a relatively small proportion of the children in attendance would find them especially entertaining or of particular interest.   In fact, an article in the Wall Street Journal "What I saw at Drag Queen Story Hour" made this point way back in 2019:

The adults present loved Drag Queen Story Hour. They laughed at Venus’s jokes, and they sang the children’s songs along with her, rolling their hands and shaking their fingers Hokey Pokey-style as she did. When she stuck out her tongue during a ditty about a frog, so did the mothers and fathers. It was the children who . . . didn’t react at all. They either stared transfixed at Venus, squirmed restlessly, or crawled and toddled off to find their own entertainments. After the reading a mother brought her little daughter up to meet Venus, who offered to let the girl try on one of the massive rhinestone bracelets she wore on both wrists. The mother, delighted, slipped a bracelet onto her own wrist; the little girl shrank back and turned her head away.

I couldn’t tell what was going on inside those small heads, of course. Perhaps they were shy, or bored. Perhaps some of them were too young. Or perhaps Venus and her 6-inch eyelashes terrified them. Heavy stage makeup can look flattering under stage lights, but in ordinary indoor daylight the effect can be more Medusa than goddess of love. Spike heels and glitter viewed up close might seem scary to a small child whose mother’s fashion inspirations are New Balance and Lululemon.

Still, drag is a time-honored form of comic entertainment, from the Greek stage to RuPaul. Perhaps if the drag queens toned it down and positioned themselves less as “queer role models” and more as comedians in the Milton Berle tradition, they’d be less off-putting. Also if they ditched the propagandistic reading lists: How many kids really want to hear one more tiresome lesson about “individuality,” much less same-sex marriage?

The last paragraph makes a valid enough point - it's not that I can't find some drag funny if part of a comedy act; it's just that I don't get the point of gay glamour drag, like Ru Paul, with its over the top visuals that are often more a parody of feminine glamour.  (I guess some of the more ridiculous looking drag artists use it with ribald humour in shows with a primarily gay audience - so I suppose I "get" that aspect of drag show - but I still don't understand the appeal of the "serious" side of song or dance performance as a drag queen.  And I seriously doubt that most children can understand the vibe of most drag playing to them, either.) 

Anyway, while I find all gay drag rather strange and unappealing, I also know that conservative panic about it is  ridiculous in its own way.   I mean, seriously:

And in a San Francisco suburb, men invade Panda Dulce’s reading at a library’s Drag Queen Story Hour, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs.

After focusing on transgender athletes and youths, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is now targeting drag storytimes — conceived as a way to educate and entertain children by appealing to their imaginations — with interruptions and other protests reported across the country in the past two weeks, since Pride Month began.

I think drag is perhaps at a peak of cultural attention at the moment, and I can understand parents thinking it is a dubious use of school funds.   But if I am right, and most kids don't really respond that well to the shows, the movement might never gain widespread footholds in schools.   Or perhaps continue just as a thing you might see once during all of primary school - big deal.

Anyway, regardless of the degree of cultural visibility of drag, I very much doubt that it's ever going to be an evil influence over children who would otherwise not become gay.   I mean, just common sense based on our childhood feelings tells us that, doesn't it?   If a 6 year old boy gets a thrill that he doesn't quite understand from realising the "woman" is a man, it would seem a fair bet that he might not be destined for a purely straight life in future in any event.  Isn't that sort of obvious to conservatives?  Apparently not....

Update:   Ha!  Dover Beach at his New Catallaxy is still fanboying Ed Feser, the only Catholic philosopher in the world who still thinks the existence of (Catholic version) God is a lay down misere by force of logic alone, and has a completely over the top reaction to the issue:



Bad news I forgot to post about

Two recent-ish stories I overlooked posting about:

Salmon really don't like warming water (even in frigid New Zealand oceans):

New Zealand’s biggest king salmon farmer says it is shutting some of its farms after warming seas prompted mass die-offs of fish, warning that it is a “canary in the coalmine” for climate change.

New Zealand is the world’s largest producer of king, or “chinook” salmon, a highly valued breed which fetches a premium on the world market. The country’s farms account for about 85% of global supply, New Zealand King Salmon chief executive Grant Rosewarne said.

Now, increasingly warm summer seas mean the fish at some sites are dying en masse before they can reach maturity, leaving farmers dumping thousands of tonnes of dead fish into local landfills.

I see (now that I Google the topic) that increasing temperatures in Alaska have been a worry for years.  here is a story from early 2022:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Feb 25 (Reuters) - With marine heat waves helping to wipe out some of Alaska’s storied salmon runs in recent years, officials have resorted to sending emergency food shipments to affected communities while scientists warn that the industry’s days of traditional harvests may be numbered.

Salmon all but disappeared from the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) Yukon River run last year, as record-high temperatures led to the fish piling up dead in streams and rivers before they were able to spawn. A study published Feb. 15 in the journal Fisheries detailed more than 100 salmon die-offs at freshwater sites around Alaska.

Just how many rogue black holes are wandering the galaxy?  Way, way too many, by the sounds:

A rogue black hole wandering the space lanes of our Milky Way galaxy alone could be the smallest black hole yet found, according to one estimate of its mass.

Earlier this year, astronomers led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the discovery of the first known isolated stellar-mass black hole

The black hole is 5,000 light-years away and was discovered thanks to the power of its gravity to act as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light of a background star 19,000 light-years away.....

Even though stars with more than 20 solar masses account for just 0.1% of all the stars in the Milky Way, there are so many stars in the Milky Way (an estimated 100–200 billion), and the Milky Way is so old (approximately 13 billion years) that there should now be 100 million or more stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy. 

Many of these are found in binary systems, where their presence is evident from their gravitational pull on their companion star and their accretion of matter from their neighbor. One has even been found inside a star cluster, NGC 1850 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. However, many others will be wandering between the stars, going unnoticed until a chance alignment with a background star means we spot them creating a gravitational lens.

 

 

 

America is in a very, very strange place in history

As noted at Hot Air, by never-Trumper Allahpundit:

The survey of 1,541 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 10-13, found that if another presidential election were held today, more registered voters say they would cast ballots for Donald Trump (44%) than for Biden (42%) — even though the House Jan. 6 committee has spent the last week linking Trump to what it called a “seditious conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election and laying the groundwork for possible criminal prosecution…

Biden’s job approval rating has been atrophying for much of the last year, and the new survey shows that it has never been weaker. A full 56% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s performance — the highest share to date — while just 39% approve. Three weeks ago, those numbers were 53% and 42%, respectively…

How bad is it? Many more independents say Biden shouldn’t run again (76 percent) than say Trump shouldn’t (57 percent). Among Biden’s own voters in 2020, more say he shouldn’t run again than say he should, 40/37. 

While there will likely be many theories floating around about how this could possibly be correct (not Biden's unpopularity - inflation and an apparent inability to convince the rogue elements in his own Party to put Democrat policy into effect account for that - but the willingness to consider Trump as a better alternative),  I really think you have to consider the brokenness of the media landscape to be the major factor.

In any event, I am dubious about the polling of hypothetical contests - it's surely the kind of polling that is most likely to generate off the cuff gut reactions.

And besides, all serious people know it's already clear that Trump's position in history as a danger to democracy and the worst President who ever got into office via a cult following generated by the internet and the Murdoch media is secure.  Biden, on the other hand, is likely to be seen as a victim of circumstance, pretty much like Jimmy Carter.   

Nonetheless, I would prefer the polling was not like this.   It doesn't inspire confidence in the future of the country... 

Update:   further to the title of this post:

You can only explain Republican cowardice on Trump by a lust for power replacing decency and common sense, I think?  Or are there other theories out there.


Monday, June 20, 2022

The fear of brainwashing

I was driving around on Saturday and happened to catch most of Episode 3 of a Canadian podcast (being broadcast on ABC Radio Nation) called "Brainwashed".   This episode was about the CIA's program in the 50's and 60's to try to find the key to mind control, mainly by experiments with LSD and other drugs (often conducted on unwitting subjects.)

While I've read a little bit about this before, I had not realised, or had forgotten, that the origin of the fear of brainwashing came in large part from some American soldiers who refused to return to the US at the end of the Korean war.  This led to a widespread speculation in the US that the Koreans/Chinese had worked out the secret of successful brainwashing - and if they could do that to fine American soldiers, who knows what they could do?  (I see that "The Manchurian Candidate" came out in 1962, and the Korean War ended in 1953, so the screenwriters had plenty of time to come up with their brainwashing scenario.)

However, the story of the 21 who refused repatriation is a bit complicated, and even if initially "brainwashed", it didn't last for long for many of them.  Many had actually fled China before the movie even came out:

In September, however, 23 American prisoners of war also refused repatriation, sparking a nationwide debate among journalists, politicians, military officials, psychiatrists, and the soldiers themselves.

During a 90-day cooling-off period, the GIs were held in the neutral zone at Panmunjom, but only two changed their minds in response to entreaties by U.S. officials and letters from the GIs’ families.

The commonly accepted reason at the time was that they were brainwashed while held prisoner. This was effectively confirmed by 149 other POWs held by the Chinese/North Koreans who “reported that their captors had waged a systematic effort to break down their beliefs and entice them to collaborate”.

Time and Newsweek published articles looking for defects in the 21, to explain why they were able to be brainwashed. The magazines blamed reasons such as alcoholism, STDs, low IQs, and being “diseased”.

Race played an important role throughout the nationwide debate, especially since three of the 21 nonrepatriates were black. Discussion of the black nonrepatriates in the white press highlights public perceptions of Communism and civil rights in the mid-1950s.

For example, many publications noted the special effort the Chinese had made to woo black American soldiers, how they had stressed that in their Marxist nation all members of society were treated equally.

During the 90 days cooling-off period all 23 US soldiers were held on neutral territory. The 2 that left the group were court-martialed for desertion and collaboration, one was given a 20-year sentence, and the other 10. The remaining 21 were dishonorably discharged and journeyed in China.

 Once in China, the soldiers were sent to a collective farm to work. Within 1.5 years three of them ran away and sought refuge at the British Embassy in Peking. By 1958, 7 more of the soldiers had left China.

By 1966, only two remained in China. One of the 21 returned to the US in 1965 and explained his actions in 1953 as being motivated by “anger by the recall of his idol, General Douglas MacArthur, who favored the use of nuclear weapons to end the war. During his two years as a prisoner, he increasingly felt abandoned by America”.

 Anyway, it was a very interesting podcast, and I should listen to all episodes. 

The culture wars in publishing

I enjoyed reading this lengthy piece in The Guardian on the weekend, about a controversy in England over a particular book that got caught up in the PC culture wars.  It also talks about book publishing generally, and this section caught my attention:

What’s often portrayed as a generational divide, pitching “woke” young millennials against an ageing establishment, is in reality not so simple. Like the arts and academia, publishing is historically left-leaning and tends to attract the idealistic and value-driven at all ages. But it’s also dominated by recruits who can afford to do unpaid internships and move to London. The net result, this publisher argues, is an intake of privileged graduates anxious to compensate for their privilege, and growing resistance to publishing conservative voices they might disagree with. More than one industry source dates these tensions to Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump leaving many younger staff in particular keen not to fuel what they see as dangerous fires.

Last year, more than 200 employees at the US publisher Simon & Schuster signed a petition urging the firm not to publish a memoir by Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence. Similar protests followed across the industry over books by the rightwing philosopher Jordan Peterson and “alt-right” activist Milo Yiannopoulos, while in Britain some staff at JK Rowling’s publisher, Hachette, were unhappy about working on her children’s picture book, The Ickabog, in light of Rowling’s views on trans rights.

The authors of the two big gender-critical feminist books published last year in Britain, Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, have both described battling to get published in Britain, and neither got US publishing deals. Caroline Hardman, the literary agent who originally approached Stock and suggested she write the book, stresses it is not uncommon for multiple editors to reject a title before one accepts it, but confirms that several editors passed on it. “Some people were saying, ‘Nobody will buy it; there’s no interest in this topic.’ But that wasn’t what I was seeing in my life – there was this groundswell of grassroots feminism and I had become aware of the Gender Recognition Act consultation [on making it easier to self-identify as trans]. I was thinking, ‘This is a really big thing,’’’ she says. “I did have some people who were interested, but knew they would get backlash internally.”

Eventually, Joyce’s book became a bestseller for Oneworld.

Risotto noted

As this blog doubles as my resource for recipes I don't want to forget, I'll just note here that I don't think I have ever recorded proportions of stock to arborio rice for risotto.  

Following roughly this recipe on the weekend, I've decided it's 800 ml of stock for 300 g of rice (using the normal stir it in method; none of this "baked risotto" for me.)

It also took just one chorizo, and was enough for 3 pretty large servings.  (Oh, and I put in a knob of butter, and some parmesan cheese, in at the end.)

Nice.

Friday, June 17, 2022

A gruesome post

So, I'm late in getting around to watching it, but am currently going through the 3rd season of the Norwegian Viking comedy Norsemen on Netflix.

I've posted about this series before - the show is very funny in an occasionally violent Scandinavian Monty-Python-does-history kind of way.  One of the things that I find continually funny is just the way they speak their English - it's like the rhythm itself is amusing.    (Is this the way Norwegian itself sounds?  I really don't know.)

Anyway, in this season, there is a Viking wedding which features one of the violent bits (although, as usual, done in such an over the top way it's not offending me) - the sacrifice of a slave.

This has caused me to Google whether this actually happened much, and I can't for the moment see any confirmation of this.  Animal sacrifice, yes, but slave sacrifice is usually mentioned in the context of funerals, not weddings.

However, in reading about violent Norse habits, I did come across discussion of the "blood eagle" as a method of extremely gruesome execution.   I see that people who have watched Vikings, or played bloody video games, know all about this, but it was new to me.  I almost wish I didn't know:

Particularly infamous is the so-called “blood eagle”, a gory ritual these warriors are said to have performed on their most hated enemies. The ritual allegedly involved carving the victim’s back open and cutting their ribs away from their spine, before the lungs were pulled out through the resulting wounds. The final fluttering of the lungs splayed out on the outspread ribs would supposedly resemble the movement of a bird’s wings – hence the eagle in the name. 
I see that it is questioned whether it was real:

For decades, researchers have dismissed the blood eagle as a legend. No archaeological evidence of the ritual has ever been found, and the Vikings themselves kept no records, listing their achievements only in spoken poetry and sagas that were first written down centuries later. So the bloody rite has been rejected as improbable, resulting from repeated misunderstandings of complex poetry and a desire by Christian writers to paint their Nordic attackers as barbaric heathens. 

However, our new study, takes an entirely new approach on the matter. Our team, made up of medical scientists and a historian, bypassed the long-standing question of “did the blood eagle ever really happen?”, asking instead: “Could it have been done?” Our answer is a clear yes.

I can think of better things to study...

 


Would be funny to Australians if it turned out to be Hawaii

As Montana reels from floods, no one is sure where Gov. Gianforte is

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Things I don't understand about the electricity "market" in Australia

a.    How do fluctuating "spot prices" work?  I get the impression that move very quickly, but why? 

b.    If a power generating company, whether it be privately or publicly owned, says it can't make profit if the cost of gas or coal is at a certain level, over what time frame are they talking?   Businesses can wear a temporary loss if they make enough profit over the rest of the year - who determines whether these companies are being opportunistic when complaining about a temporary loss due to a temporary spike in cost to generate?

c.    There was talk about how if AMEO set a price, they would compensate companies for the loss caused.  Where does that compensation money come from?   And again, who determines what is reasonable compensation, as that surely involves the question of what a reasonable profit is (which raises the question in b.)

d.    How do the multitude of "retailers" manage to make a difference in price to customers.  I don't understand what an electricity retailer actually does, and why some should be able to offer significantly different prices to customers.

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

We're getting old

At the Washington Post, an article talking about the 40th anniversary of ET.

It does praise the movie, but I think leaves out two key aspects of its success:

a.    the operatic, deeply affecting, quality of the score.  Does anyone doubt that it contributes enormously to the emotional weight of the key scenes in the last 20 minutes of the film?

b.    although the article does say "Empathy is the film’s guiding philosophy", I would go further than that, and note that it doesn't really feature have true "bad guys" or enemies.  Sure, there are scary police/government officers who try to recover the alien in heavy handed fashion, but a key aspect of the film is that the adults want to "meet" ET too, just that they approach it with adult concerns that are not readily understood by children (the concern for biological contagion).   As with Close Encounters, the conflict is more a case of misunderstanding between groups - not deliberate ill will borne by one lot against another.   In this way, the Spielbergian universe of this era is the opposite of the scare world that the American Right was just starting to talk itself into, with fear of otherness cumulating in Trumpist nativism and demagoguery.   It's no accident that Right wing sites are always waiting to ridicule Spielberg and his movies for being a Hollywood woke liberal - he is their philosophical enemy for believing in a kinder world. 

Meatless Einstein

I seem to have missed that (some) vegans like to claim Einstein as a fellow non-meat eater.

However, as this article from the LA Times explains, he only went vegetarian for the last couple of years of his life.

He did, however, have misgivings about eating meat:

“I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” he once professed in a letter. He largely agreed with the moral motivations behind vegetarianism, but was unable to comply.

I sympathise.  

I didn't know he had life long "chronic digestive distress".  I should go back and actually read that biography sitting on my bedside table.

How Republicans will move away from Trump

I reckon Allahpundit's explanation of how a move away from Trump within Republicans will work sounds very plausible: 

To repeat a point from yesterday, Republican voters will never admit that the evidence produced at the hearings is damning and should disqualify Trump from being president again. To do so would be disloyal. They might, however, point to the hypothetical effect the evidence will have on swing voters and proclaim that Trump is hopelessly damaged goods. I suspect that’s how Ron DeSantis and other Trump rivals will spin the January 6 evidence if and when they face him in a primary. They can’t tout the evidence as proof of a character deficit but they can say that electability matters above all other things and Trump is no longer electable. The “witch hunt” destroyed him.

As a Republican, you’re not allowed to admit that you believe Trump is unfit for office but you are allowed to disguise that belief as worrying that others might find him unfit for office. Of course he’s fit for office! But … we want to play our strongest hand in 2024, don’t we?


The potential for floating solar power is bigger than I would have guessed

This is the subheading from a Nature comment piece last week:

Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed. 
There is mention of the benefits:

Placing solar arrays on reservoirs could have many advantages. The arrays are simply conventional solar panels installed on floats that are anchored through mooring lines. Proximity to water tends to keep them cool, making floating panels about 5% more efficient than land-based ones7. Arrays shield the surface from the sun and might reduce evaporation, retaining water for hydropower, drinking and irrigation8. Hydropower reservoirs already have the grid infrastructure for conveying electricity to consumers, reducing transmission costs. Pairing solar with pumped-storage hydropower could address the twin challenges of providing energy when sunlight is weak and storing it as potential energy in reservoirs when solar-power production is high9.

I've been saying this for some time....

A futuristic prototype if ever there was one

They were testing this prototype when I were but a boy (in the 1960's), but I am still a bit surprised that I don't recall ever seeing it before.   I think I would have remembered, as it's like a perfect example of what futurism in the 1960's looked like.   (Rather Thunderbirds-ish, don't you think?)

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Agreed

Have I ever mentioned before that I was never convinced that the Turing Test made much sense?  I have a vague recollection of arguing with someone about this in the 1980's:


Update:  By the way, my bit of speculation that I think is fun is that sentience in Google (or the WWW generally) might be detected when it becomes clear that it's taking steps to reproducing itself.  Say, orders for new computers or Web components are emailed to a chip manufacturer, with someone discovering they were never generated by a human.

 

I was just complaining about the complexity of energy in Australia last week...


 And read Giles Parkinson on this:

It’s one thing to feel you are being held hostage by privately owned provider of an essential product, but quite another when the stand-off may involve a publicly owned company providing a service as fundamental as electricity.

The extraordinary scenes that emerged in Queensland over the long weekend, and which quickly infected NSW, where generators threatened power shortfalls unless they got paid more money – come from an electricity system – its markets and its regulatory environment – that are completely broken.

It has turned into a state of complete farce when, in Queensland, a state dominated by publicly owned electricity generators – apparently can’t guarantee an essential service because they can’t make sufficient profits.

 Even he doesn't really explain how to fix it properly, though... 

Update:   I suspect JQ  is right - 



Anyone reasonable can see the value in the Jan 6 committee hearings

I watched some clips of the second day of the Jan 6 committee hearing, and I have to say, the manner and questioning of several prominent Republican officials by Democrat Zoe Lofgren was very calm and effective in showing up how there was never anything to the Trump fraud claims.   A summary of 4 key takeaways from the day is here.

I really find it very difficult to believe that this will not prevent Trump successfully running again.  Sure, his deluded followers are not even watching it, and the ridiculous pro-Turmp pundits cannot reverse their opinion while saving any face - but there must some effect of this process on at least enough of the party faithful to not vote for Trump again.

Oh, and here's the Axios summary.  The comments of Allahpundit at Hot Air are worthwhile too.  He points this out, too:  a terrible aspect of the Trump lies that is so badly under-emphasised:

Trump was so sold on the “smoking gun” video that he pressed Georgia officials on it during a phone call a month after it was debunked, even mentioning one of the election workers seen in the clip by name. That woman and another worker were inundated with death threats amid the conspiracy-mongering in December 2020. Their lives have been more or less destroyed since then. As for Pak, he resigned as U.S. Attorney once he found out that Trump was considering firing him for failing to find fraud.  Pak refused to substitute the reality Trump preferred, so he had to go.

Right wingers, and stupid Bill Maher, are very upset that a nutter who planned on shooting a Supreme Court judge was not given enough publicity in the media.

They never talk about the thousands of death threats both Republican officials, and innocent election workers, received all based on a lie of a deranged President. 

More:


And more:

John Hinderaker at the Powerline blog, has moved on:

What we do not need is candidates who are obsessed with righting the alleged (and to some extent imaginary) wrongs that Donald Trump suffered in 2020. I don’t blame Trump for being unhappy, but his emotional state cannot dictate the future of the Republican Party. 

And Trump delusion continues:

You can read it here.  The footnotes are very often to 2000 Mules evidence - which prominent Republican pundits have already refused to support.

Yet more update:  this very damning take on the Bill Barr role at Slate is really worth reading.

Monday, June 13, 2022

He has a point, but still has priorities wrong

Latest Bill Maher kerfuffle:

I've been complaining about this for a long, long time too:  I didn't like how the original Matrix showed a world where everyone "not with us is against us" and gave permission for hundreds of normies to be shot up by characters dressed to look cool.    I've complained in recent years about the  "shot to the head, brains sprayed out the back" has become completely normalised in entertainment, such that it contains no shock value at all.    I even quit Squid Games over the violent silliness and am very disappointed that more people did not have a problem with it.  (It's been renewed for a Season 2, I see.  How stupider can the plot get?)

That said:   obviously, the entire world has been watching the same movies and shows and has not been suffering mass shootings in the same repetitive fashion as the US.   Obviously, you can in practice take action on the negative effects of glamorised media violence by stopping the population having such easy access to guns.

It's OK to complain about fictional depiction of violence, but it's not the immediate answer to an immediate problem.


 

Rupert making his feelings better known

So both the New York Post and The Australian have editorialised against a Trump return, and criticised him over the Jan 6 insurrection.  

I'm sure I've posted before that it had been reported that Rupert Murdoch never believed the election was "stolen".   So has he figured he has made enough money from gullible Trump supporters now, and can tell them they're wrong after all?

And he must know that Trumpists will not feel isolated until Fox News evening line up abandons them. 

How is he going to bring that Frankenstein monster to heal?   (Or does he have any desire to - money, money, money, after all.)

 

I wouldn't disagree

From Vox:

The January 6 hearings showed why it’s reasonable to call Trump a fascist

Another weekend update

*  Yes, this has been a remarkably cold stretch for Brisbane - fortunately, from last night, I thought the cold was starting to get less intense.  We just rely on turning split system air con to "warm" if it's cold, and most winters we really don't use them often.   But the last - what? 4 days? - the living room one has been on most of the day.

*  Saw Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.  I rank it a solid "OK".  I don't know why, but I find the world of Dr Strange charmingly silly.  (I liked the way, for example, the guests at a wedding just stand on a high rise balcony watching while said doctor goes to deal with a giant, one eyed octo-monster from another dimension destroying a city street only a block or two from them, and don't run away in mad panic.)   Certainly, in this movie, the reminders Strange gives me of the covers to the Lobsang Rampa books, which I would see in bookshops as a child (but never read) became even clearer.    I guess without Marvel movies, there would be battalions of special effects artists out of work, and who knows what trouble they could get up to if not meaningfully occupied?

*  Oh, it might be something like this:

Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

Yeah, yeah:  this story is wildly popular.   But so it should be, seeing it's like reading a science fiction story come to life:  a company has to seriously explain to one of its engineers why he is mistaken about his having helped create a sentient AI .  Mind you, I, and probably many others, had already begun to suspect broader sentience from Google just from Youtube recommendations.  (I don't really believe this, but I would like to be able to.)    

It's reminding me a little of David Brin's Earth. (Well, the bit about an AI being created - how it came to inhabit the Earth was a bit silly.)



Friday, June 10, 2022

David Roberts wrong for once

Yeah, I trust Noah Smith's take on this a lot more than I trust the (usually) reliable David Roberts's take:

Jonathan Chait's article at New York Magazine on this is also well worth a read (clear your cookies! - or use a browser that doesn't save them.)

 

Australian Fox News drone (insert Jack Nicholson yelling "You can't handle the truth")

Hey, look at old Tom, who seems to spend his days watching either Tucker Carlson or the horse races:

Tom says:

What we are seeing play out in Washington DC as we speak is unprecedented: a choreographed witchhunt by the Democratic Party against its political enemies, broadcast live from Washington DC by all three major free-to-air US TV networks and all cable news networks, except Fox News, which has refused to co-operate.

It is astonishing because this is happening in the “land of the free” which notionally has a free press.

It is not possible in a free country that the media could collude with a political party to smear (and eventually prosecute) party enemies.

Unless this is arrested, the USA will become a fascist one-party state indistinguishable from communist China or Soviet Russia.

It's truly a Goebbelsian level of brainwashing that the Murdoch family has achieved with their committed audience (of mostly cranky old white men, whose families can barely tolerate having over for dinner anymore).

Update:  from what I can make out from Twitter comments, the hearing has produced a lot of new clips of a lot of people close to Trump (including his daughter!) saying they know the election was not stolen.  It seems to have impressed a lot of people as being much more damaging and compelling than  than they had expected.

 

Energy and politics are a terrible mix

I've felt this way for years, but it's pretty appalling that energy production and sale, and government policy that affects it, is at just the right level of complexity that it becomes incredibly easy for self serving (and sometimes ridiculous) ideas about it to spread because of the mere veneer of plausibility.    For example:


 

And look, I don't understand it at all well either - I just get by on reading a range of material and getting a sense of who is talking more sense about it.

What we need is someone who is seen as a good communicator who can explain the complexities and what is possible and reasonable.   This is part of my "it's time for specifics" arguments too - as far as the plan ahead for replacing coal and gas with alternatives.   Rather than just waiting for the way it pans out now - with intermittent, ad hoc-ish, announcements like this:

Rio Tinto has called for proposals to develop large-scale wind and solar power in Central and Southern Queensland to power its aluminium assets, help meet its climate change ambitions and further encourage renewable development and industry in the region.

The approach, which is through a formal market Request for Proposals (RFP), is intended to support the development of multiple new wind and solar power projects that can, in parallel with firming solutions, start supplying power to Rio Tinto’s Gladstone assets through the Queensland grid by 2030.

Or this:

While on the topic of future energy, John Quiggin's article on nuclear in Australia seemed clear and comprehensible.   But his political allegiances (now, basically "Green") mean he's not going to be seen as a trusted national communicator more broadly on the future of electricity generation and markets, either.   I'm not sure whether he agrees with my concern about the lack of specifics, too.  I should go over to his blog and ask him, I guess!