The nutty politics of aliens

The forthcoming release of Spielberg's Disclosure Day, as well as the continued trickle of obscure government videos of things that may, or may not, be balloons or other human stuff, is causing me to re-visit the topic of the strange inversion of US politics around UFO's.

Firstly, I have to say that I have a suspicion that the movie might not be testing all that well with audiences, as the final trailer features Steven Spielberg talking to camera about it, and I think does give away the key plot elements. There was also Stephen Colbert interviewing Spielberg in the final week of the Late Show, and it seems a tad odd that Spielberg has felt the need to promote his own movie in person to this degree.   

The combination of both of these do tell us one thing:  the movie seems to have aliens who enable telepathic empathy in humans.   This ties in nicely with ET, The Extraterrestrial when you think about it.  It's a little more puzzling as to how it ties in with the aliens in Close Encounters, which many think has its direct sequel in Disclosure Day, as the aliens in it didn't seem to have much empathy for the families of the people they kidnapped for a few decades!   (That said, I think the obscure motivation of the aliens in that movie is one of the reasons to like it, as it not dissimilar to the religious mystery of why a good God would let some of his (or her) followers suffer so much.)   

So, what does this have to do with weirdo changes in US politics in particular?  Well, as I have explained before, it feels very peculiar that belief in UFOs used to be perceived as a bit of a countercultural, hippy-ish thing, and therefore probably aligned with Left leaning politics, and it has now flipped and become the interest of Right wing conspiracy mongers.   Yeah, believing that climate change is not real (which is a "conspiracy of scientists and socialist billionaires" belief) now aligns with "aliens are real and already here and the government is hiding it from us".  Look at this recent tweet by the incredibly gullible Ross Coulthart, who thinks a government somewhere found a crashed UFO so big it build a huge building over it to hide it:

(By the way, the whole "they have backed away from the worst predictions and lied to us for decades" is a dumbass beat up, and climate change "skepticism" - by which I mean denial - generally is having an algorithmically driven heyday again at Musk's X.  My own conspiracy theory is that it might be because Musk wants to get ahead of the growing concern that his money making Starlink - not to mention his intended huge number of Starship launches - is actually a big environmental problem for the upper atmosphere.)   

 Now, Spielberg himself, as a Hollywood liberal, is playing with fire here, as while there are some Right aligned people who think he is on their side on the question of alien reality and government secret knowledge of it (see Coulthart, for example), there are also plenty of others who will find a way to continue to condemn him in the nuttiest of Right wing ways.   Already in comments to Disclosure Day content on Youtube, I have seen them bring up the old, completely without foundation, rumour that he was responsible for the child abuse related death of the young actress in Poltergeist.  And on today's final trailer, there are a few comments bringing up the Right wing religious nutter theory - promoted by Tucker Carlson and others - that UFOs and aliens are demons and Spielberg is doing their bidding by making a movie pretending that they are good and should be welcomed!

So yeah, I expect that MAGA conspiracy types who might be tempted by the topic of the movie are going to do their regular routine of finding the movie objectionable because, basically, Spielberg is a Hollywood liberal and liberals cannot be trusted.      

Update:   Ooh, I might be wrong in worrying about audience reactions.  We finally have a handful of reactions from people who have seen it, and they seem all positive.  (One does call it Spielberg's "weirdest" movie - but seemingly in a good way.)

Update 2:  As I suspected from the start, the final trailer seems to confirm that there was no need to worry about the CGI looking animals in parts of the film, as they were never meant to be real, anyway.

And yes, it is clear from social media that there is a anti-Spielberg pushback going on, even though most comments about him and his movie legacy are positive.  Again, there is a bit of an odd turnaround about this - it used to be Left leaning critics who would criticise Spielberg as too emotionally manipulative for them, so liking him used to feel like you were part of middle class class mainstream which the Republicans used to try to appeal to.  Now, after making many specifically liberal themed movies (none of which are extreme in message, but stand in a solid tradition of Hollywood movies and their makers mostly being soft liberal), the MAGA crowd went into nutjob land and invented reasons to dislike him.  

A government that needs to counter rumour and spin

I know we are a long way off an election, but I'm bothered by the lack of concerted pushback from the Labor government against the populist and right wing spin machine that is running wildly out of control on the topics of both tax reform and immigration.  (And hence the surge in support for One Nation.)

(I have a bit of concern for the culture war topic of trans rights too, given that recent decision of the Federal Court which was caused by poor old Julia Gillard more than a decade ago.  Presumably, she didn't imagine that a man who does not pass well as a transwoman would actually try to join a women's online social app and then claim discrimination.)    

But back to tax and immigration.

The other day I was speaking to a 60-70 year old retiree who told me that her friends had warned her that she should put her house into a family trust, otherwise the government would take 40% of it when she died.

On further questioning, it had always been her principal place of residence, and never rented it out.  There was therefore no basis on which to fear Capital Gains Tax would apply to it on her death - there has never been any serious suggestion that the government would apply CGT to the family home, as it would be wildly unpopular and seen as a de facto death duty.

Yet, this fear mongering is presumably running riot amongst retirees at the moment.

Then there is the spectacle of Dave Hughes - the former working class poor man (who still looks like he can't afford decent grooming - he's a seriously unattractive man)  turning up on social media complaining bitterly about CGT changes and Labor.   This from the guy who invests in real estate, including a high profile purchase of a 3 million dollar house that he claimed he should not have as the banks valuation showed he paid too much.  But he also turned up a few years later confirming that he had offers for it well above the price he paid.   Websites which give an estimate of celebrities' net worth put his at $10 million, although I those estimates are old now too.

So yeah, of course he's a very rich man complaining about taxes.  But he would be influential with some people.

And as for immigration:  it's the other topic that is extremely susceptible to lies and gut reactions that are based on exaggeration and misleading use of figures - all with the added assistance of easily stoked racism.   (I really feel sorry for Indians at the moment.)

So yeah, in this day of social media crapola, I don't think the government can afford to let people continue with RW propaganda without pushing back in advertising and social media themselves.   Maybe they are keeping the powder dry, so to speak; but I think early action may be better. 

   

 

 

 

 

Science fiction death (and sex too!)

Well, I guess money was the motivation, but it's unusual to hear of a murder related to a Netflix project:

Chinese authorities have executed a man for murdering his associate, billionaire gaming tycoon Lin Qi.

In 2020, a disgruntled Xu Yao poisoned Lin for sidelining him shortly after he helped him land a Netflix deal, local media reported.

Lin's Yoozoo Games holds the film adaptation rights for the Chinese science fiction trilogy which Netflix made into the series 3 Body Problem.

Xu was convicted in 2024 and his execution, which reportedly happened on 21 May, was confirmed on Tuesday by his company in a statement, adding "justice has ultimately been served".

"We deeply mourn Mr. Lin and extend our heartfelt condolences to his family," the statement said.

"As colleagues who fought alongside him, all members of the company are grateful for the impartiality of the judicial process."

The science fiction trilogy 3 Body Problem is based on Chinese author Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past. First published in Chinese, the books have been translated into nearly 30 languages and inspired multiple adaptations.

 For what it's worth:  I only watched the first episode of 3 Body Problem, and I had enough issues with it to not bother continuing.  (I can't remember now all of the reasons it felt unconvincing, but I am sure one of them was some pretty inauthentic sounding dialogue between characters.)   

As far as I can tell, some people like the books for the big ideas, but hardly anyone thinks it is great in a literary sense (even with allowances being made for it being translated into English.)   Maybe it's a bit like a lot of Arthur C Clarke in that way?   

Speaking of Clarke, for some reason his book "A Fall of Moondust" often comes to mind when I look at the Moon, perhaps 45 years after I read it. 

Maybe because I read it at an impressionable young adult age, but it has stuck in memory that it has an implied sexual liaison in the stranded surface crafts toilet.  I hope I'm not imagining that.   Wait - this is what AI is built for - confirming ridiculously unimportant stuff like this? 

Yes, Claude tells me my memory is right:

 ...the scene involves Radley and Miss Morley, two passengers aboard the Selene who are trapped together after the dust cruiser sinks. At one point, a character uses the toilet cubicle, and shortly afterward another character emerges from it as well — with Clarke leaving a distinct but entirely unspoken implication that the two had a sexual encounter in there while ostensibly using the facilities separately. 

Oddly enough, for a writer who later because a bit creepily obsessed with sex, there is very little in the way of sex scenes that I can remember from Robert Heinlein's books.  The way he wrote about them just didn't stick in memory.   (OK, I do remember a couple, but won't bother recounting which ones.)   

"The Pitt" - season 2

I finished the second season the other night, and I have thoughts:

*   I guess that for dramatic purposes, there won't ever be a season built around an unusually quiet day in that workplace;  but I don't know that they will be able to build a third season around the premise that it's such a stressful place to work that the head doctors routinely feel a touch suicidal by the end of the day!

*   That said, there was still so much to enjoy, from the ensemble acting to the topical inclusion of political issues (like ICE), and generally being proud to fly a "liberal" flag in the face of Trumpian politics.   (The multicultural, multiracial, harmonious workforce is not unrealistic, I don't think - but just seeing a portrayal of successful workplace of that kind feels like a much needed pushback against anti-immigrant populism.)   

*   I do want to see the two lead characters in particular having a better day next time - Dana, the charismatic nurse, and of course, poor old Dr Robby.   But I suspect that one more season of such a demanding and intense show might be where it should stop.   I don't want to see it start to slide in quality and direction, like ER.   

The Saudi history of "more money than sense"

The BBC has a lengthy article about Saudi Arabia abandoning most of the ridiculous Vision 2030 projects (such as The Line, and the ski resort, etc.)

Some extracts:

Some longtime observers of Saudi Arabia, such as Ellen R Wald, the author of Saudi, Inc., feel like they've seen it all before.

"This is the same playbook, the same thing again with The Line. You know, 'We're going to build this huge thing. Oh wait, well now we're going to significantly downscale it.' And it's the same thing over and over again, and it's been that way even since before Mohammed bin Salman. They make these big announcements, they're very splashy, and then it either doesn't get built or it gets built in a significantly scaled down or [in a] 'not what it was' way."

Wald recalls the new cities that were to be built in the 2000s under a previous monarch, King Abdullah.

The "Economic Cities" programme was also aimed at diversifying the Saudi economy away from oil, which has been a perennial imperative in the Kingdom for decades. Relying almost entirely on one natural resource that will not last for ever has long been seen as an obstacle to the development of a much more well-rounded and resilient economy.

The results were largely underwhelming even as billions of dollars were expended. Several of the proposed cities never got off the ground, others were recast as more modest enterprises. The biggest, the $100bn King Abdullah Economic City on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah, did come to fruition, but the goal of it becoming a business and tourism hub hasn't materialised.

The hope had been to bring in major new foreign investment and create jobs – real ones, away from the calcified state sector – for Saudi Arabia's large and ever-growing young population. But by 2016, the rate of unemployment still stood at around 12%.

I'm always a bit puzzled by the birthrate of Muslim countries:  is the secret to higher birthrates not having much in the way of Western entertainment (in the form of bars, nightclubs and even cinemas?)  Anyway, I see that it has not been immune for dropping birthrates:  just that it has not been as precipitous as in the West.

Back to the BBC.  I didn't recall reading about the lockup in the Ritz-Carlton:

The social control exerted by the powerful and very conservative Islamic leadership of the country was seen by MBS and his advisors as a major obstacle in the ability of Saudi Arabia to achieve its full economic potential. Political change under MBS was presented as the handing over for the first time of the reins of power to a more dynamic, younger generation. But this did not mean that any new space for political discourse was allowed.

Indeed – as Nuseibeh acknowledges – MBS himself was responsible for some of the issues that have impeded the scope and rate of change - as well as casting a long shadow over his rule.

Just as he became de facto ruler in 2017, he ordered the mass detention of Saudi Arabia's elite officials and businessmen in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, which the Saudi government portrayed as a crackdown on corruption, but others saw as a shakedown. And the savage killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018 left a stain on the Crown Prince's reputation, which may have faded but remains indelible.

One Saudi who has direct experience of how the authorities there deal with dissent is Abdullah al-Ouda, an academic and human rights activist based in the US. His father, Salman al-Ouda, a prominent Saudi Islamic scholar, has been detained in prison since 2017 on charges including "stirring up unrest".

Abdullah believes that episodes like the Ritz-Carlton purge have been counterproductive to the aim of funding Vision 2030, even if those held in that gilded cage did cough up an estimated $100bn.

That's one way for government to encourage private investment, I guess!

 

  

The much ignored Chinese space programme

Perhaps because I have watched some Chinese space content in the past, Youtube did remind me yesterday that the country was about to launch another crew to its space station, with one member destined to stay there a whole year (!).

You can watch a short video about the launch, showing the highly "choreographed for nationalism" way they do things:

The American media seem to pay very little attention to the enormous strides that the Chinese have made in putting humans into space, and all without any major catastrophe (so far).

I've probably mentioned some of this before, but again I will make a few comments about the peculiar aspects of the Chinese programme:

*    The technology seems very accomplished, but the pro-patriotism visuals around it look like they are from another, earlier, era.

*    The integration of women into the program looks so modern, though.   I guess it fits in with old images of Chinese communism having women involved in the fight, too.   

*      Why does their space station look so neat and tidy inside, compared to the mass of junk everywhere that is the interior of the International Space Station?   

*     And what research of any use are they doing in their own space station?   I have no idea...  

Goodbye to Colbert

I think it obvious that Stephen Colbert is a smart, empathetic, talented guy, and as far as I know has a reputation of being a very decent man off screen as well as on.   (On the latter point, he's rather like Steven Spielberg - happily, a guest on the last week of his chat show - and who also has had a long career with no virtually no one claiming he treated them poorly.)  

So, of course I am sad to see the demise of his Late Show, especially given the clear corporate greed and politics behind it.   (There really is a Nazi era, "what's good for the Fuehrer is good for the company", feel about so much of America at the moment, and as such I'm quietly amused that a bunch of tech billionaires accompanying Trump to China seems to have resulted in them walking away empty handed.)

That said, I do feel the last few Late Night shows felt a tad - off kilter? - in a way I find hard to pin down.  

I think he wanted to go out on a note of positivity rather than self-pity, emphasising how much pleasure the show has brought him and how lucky he has been to be able to host it.   This is admirable in a way, but I think in trying to do so, he came across a bit flat, or defeated, or something?   

The comedy writing for the last show similarly fell a bit flat, if you ask me.  And while I think it was a great idea for Paul McCartney to sing "Hello Goodbye" as the final song, there's no doubt the preceding interview felt lifeless.   I think Paul at the stage of having already said everything that could possibly be said about what it was like to be a Beatle in America in the 1960's, and to be honest, no one cares about his new music.  

Similarly, the episode which featured Stephen taking the lightweight questionnaire he has delivered to many guests felt a bit self indulgent.   It certainly proved he has a hell of a lot of media friends, though!

Maybe I am being too hard on him given he had a thankless task in deciding the right tone to hit.   I mean if he had done what I think the situation really deserved, which was something akin to the "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech from Network, that would self indulgent in its own worse way. 

The whole thing (particularly as a reflection on corporate America and the way money runs to reward the most corrupt American administration in history) has left me feeling more deflated that I expected. 

PS:  I just checked what I wrote when David Letterman ended his run, and in line with my memory of being impressed with his last show in a bittersweet way, I said it was "perfect".  The huge difference, of course, is that he was leaving on his own terms.  

What a country

From a New England Journal of Medicine article, as summarised at phys.org:

 Update:  I also wondered how Australia's motor vehicle death rate would compare, given that I now America has long had higher road death tolls (on a population basis) than here.

If I can trust Claude, it seems our rate would be around 2 to 2.5 per 100,000 - about half of America's.   

Tone deaf?

Given the state of the Middle East at the moment, I am genuinely surprised that a theatre company is going to start a run of Fiddler on the Roof in Australian capital cities soon.   

It's not a bad musical (although I have only seen the movie version, as a child, and a bit of it again some years ago on TV.  I do think it's a bit of a downer, overall, though.)   But really, running a show full of sympathy for the plight of poor Jews seems to be a bit, um, tone deaf? at the moment. 

 Update:   I asked Claude.ai about this, and here is the most relevant paragraph:

 The debate centres on a genuine irony that several commentators have identified. Fiddler on the Roof is a musical about a people thrown out of their homes as their land is seized — a story that resonates achingly with both Jewish history and the current Palestinian crisis. One American theatre director who staged the show in 2024 wrote that his cast was directly challenged on this: they were asked "Is it okay to portray Jewish suffering in a time when Israel is causing so much suffering?" — and one Jewish member of the artistic staff actually dropped out of the production due to concerns that continuing was insensitive in the current climate.

 

How's the home for Australia's stupid old(er) people going?

I look at New Catallaxy perhaps a few times a week because, like checking X, it seems appropriate to know what Right wing brain washed people are saying and thinking on the topics on which they will never, ever, change their minds.

There remain a few provocateurs there who will dare post stuff critical of Trump (or Israel), but it's a thankless job because, well, these people are thoroughly brainwashed and incapable of engaging in genuine responses.   (Yes, I know, it was like that forever under Sinclair's old Catallaxy too - but the Trump administration and the refusal of Right wing media to criticise it one iota has made the situation just ridiculous.)

For example - it is 100% obvious that Trump suing his own government's departments to try to get a payout for past alleged transgressions was absurdly corrupt - especially from a man who patently stacks leadership positions on the basis of loyalty to him.  The $1.8 "slush fund" that can be used (it would seem) to reimburse rioters who injured police and damaged Congress is, again, absurdly open to corruption and we have seen nothing like it in the history of the country (as far as I know.)    

And now the news that Trump, by shear co-incidence, I'm sure, will promote companies that his "blind trust" (run by his kids) have just bought stock in - is (again) just absurdly corrupt.

Yet if a person posts a extract from MSM about any of these, you know the first reaction of Trump's minions downunder:    

LOL, NYT, FT, WaPo, you’ve hit the trifecta!     

And even old JC tries to excuse it because Democrats have funded NGOs before.  Yeah, sure, that's similar - not.

I do get annoyed at their obvious refusal to engage- to admit the plainly, 100% obvious - but they feel supported by Right wing media commentary which has found its market by never, ever, criticising Trump.  If people on Sky News at Night or Fox News are not criticising the President, well, it's not unreasonable to agree with them.

Are they that stupid that they don't realise how they are played and conned by a branch of media that exists only to always support Trump?     

And why not try honesty for a change? 

Let it go...

I lost interest in the Star Wars universe long ago, and have only watched a few episodes of any of the TV spin offs and found they just weren't engaging for me.  

So I was never interested in the new Mandalorian movie, except to see whether it could kill off the franchise entirely.  With Rottentomatoes rating of 61%, I think there is a good chance it might.

The only problem is, of course, that presumably Disney just can't let the franchise die (or go into hibernation) completely, because they have invested too much into it.   If this movie flops at the box office (as seems quite likely), I can imagine the company having crisis meetings for months as to what to do.

Some fictional franchises can make a good comeback after being rested for a decade or more (I'm thinking Doctor Who - another franchise which needs to lay fallow for at least 10 years.)   I just can't see a way that Star Wars can rise to relevance again without a long, long rest.       

Jewish hatred (no, not that kind)

I initially thought that reports of conservative Jewish acts of hostility towards obvious Christians in the streets of Jerusalem might be a tad exaggerated, especially when the PR wars over Israeli behaviour is very heated.

But after seeing this video report from an American network, interviewing a nun with a first hand account of it becoming virtually routine, I was obviously wrong to doubt it:

 

 

 

And a call out to my regular reader John: care to ask at New Catallaxy on my behald how they feel about this - especially mad old Cassie, who will blow a gasket with the impertinence of the question!   

 

Dwindling Buddhists

I don't think I had read about this before:

Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population shrank between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of religion in 201 countries and territories.

In 2010, an estimated 343 million people around the world identified as Buddhists. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 324 million. That’s a decline of roughly 5%.

During this period, the global population grew by 12%. The size of other religious groups we track at the global level also grew. As a result, Buddhists’ share of the global population dropped from 4.9% in 2010 to 4.1% in 2020. 

And here's the graph:

 Holidaying in Buddhist countries certainly doesn't give one the impression of Buddhism being only 4% or so of the world's population!

 

The Perfect Karen surprised me in a good way

 I don't actually care much for true crime documentaries on Netflix, but The Perfect Neighbor (set in Florida) kept being at the top of watched and recommended stuff, so I gave in on Saturday and watched it.

I'm glad I did.  For readers who don't know, it is unusual in that there is no narration and compromises police bodycam (and office cam) video stitched together to tell a story that took perhaps 2 to 3 years to unfold.  (There is a very small amount of other context setting stuff.)  

The basic story is that an older white woman living in a street of (what looks like) relatively low cost housing develops continual hatred of the neighbouring (most black) families, mainly because they (especially the kids) play a lot on a spare open bit of land next to her duplex residence.  She at some point gets a gun, and hey, it's America and you can probably guess where it goes.  (She is, inevitably, referred to as a "Karen" by some of the neighbours, hence my post title.)

There were two things that surprised me though, and in a rather pleasant way, given the setting:

*  the police from the local sheriff's office who get called out to the street on many occasions to try to deal with the woman's complaints come across so well, and this is not an image we typically get from a lot of reports of American policing, especially when black people are part of the story.  They are reasonable, empathetic, patient and pretty much impossible to fault.   There doesn't appear to be a speck of racism in their dealing with the black families, either.   And more than once you hear them say something like "I'm glad the kids are playing outside - better than sitting around stuck on a screen."   It was very heartening to see.

*  similarly, the image it gives of the black families was much more positive than we are used to from a lot of media and (at least crime) TV shows.   I don't know whether its because they were from church going families, but the kids and parents were respectful of the police when they talked to them, the kids were amusingly careful of not swearing openly, and you get a sense that the whole street knew each other and looked out for each other.  As I said, the design of the housing did look on the cheaper side - the street was tidy enough, but was devoid of trees or decoration.  I guess what I am trying to say is that, by the look of the street, you might think that it maybe had its share of dysfunctional family life - but the impression you get from this documentary is that it was actually a pretty good street for kids to be raised in.  Apart from the crazy woman across the road, of course.

So yeah, it feels a bit surprising to watch true crime and come out of it feeling a bit more optimistic for American society.   Part of the problem is that reports of the worst suburban crimes - the mass shootings, the police interactions where black people come out injured or dead - do tend to hide that fact that for a lot of Americans, suburban life is pretty much like suburban life anywhere, and isn't always touched by gun or other crime.  We used to get a sense of that from suburban sitcoms, but they are out of fashion now and there is little selling a positive image of ordinary life there.  As I say, it's funny that a true crime documentary that did involve a shooting nonetheless partially remedies the continually bad impression one gets of American life.      

Antarctic madness

The novel I recently read The Thing Itself features an episode of murderous madness happening at an Antarctic station, so I was interested to read this article about real life incidents down there:

An Antarctic expeditioner who allegedly threatened colleagues with a large, makeshift knife has been removed from a Korean research station in a rare mid-winter emergency evacuation.

The incident occurred at the Jang Bogo Station, 2,000 kilometres south-east of Australia's Casey Station, on April 13, according to Korean media.

CCTV footage broadcast on Korean media purportedly shows a man walking up a staircase carrying what appears to be a makeshift bladed weapon.

Other footage shows other expeditioners running away from the station's kitchen.

And:

It is not the first time threatening behaviour has occurred at isolated bases in Antarctica, where there are no police to deal with offences.

Hanne Nielsen, a senior lecturer in Antarctic law and governance at the University of Tasmania, said there have also been other high-profile criminal cases on the icy continent.

Last year, reports emerged of an incident at South Africa's SANAE IV that left fellow expeditioners fearing for their safety.

According to South African media, the alleged victim said the accused had threatened to kill someone, "creating an environment of fear and intimidation".

In one incident in 2018, a Russian scientist was accused of stabbing a colleague in the chest for spoiling the endings of books.

And back in 1959, a scientist at another Russian station allegedly murdered a colleague with an ice axe after losing a game of chess.

Dr Nielsen said issues in Antarctica sometimes rapidly escalate because of the challenges of living and working in confined and remote places for long periods.

 That 2018 incident is pretty close in character to the dispute that led to the incident in The Thing Itself.  

It's almost a surprise that it doesn't happen more often, I guess... 

Likeable (ex) politicians

The unreasonably protracted Liberal governments starting with Tony Abbott gradually killed off nearly all likeability amongst Federal politicians, it seems.   (I don't mind Albanese though - he's pleasantly on the verge of grumpy in demeanour in a similar way to John Howard, I think.)   Hence it's a pleasure to watch these two, who genuinely seem to like each other, exchange witticisms and commentary on TV: 

Book notes

I watched a Wheezy Waiter video in which he tried a new tactic to increase the amount of reading he was doing.

It was to go to a library and pick 5 fiction books completely at random, without so much as looking at the cover.

It kind of worked, but mainly didn't, in that he did start each reading each book and gave them a fair go, but only really got into one of them enough to keep going.  (I think - in retrospect, I can't recall if he said he actually got to the end of the one that he did consider engaging.)  So he did spend more time reading - but if it was mostly on books he abandoned, it does seem a tad wasted effort.

Anyway, the point of this post is twofold:

*  I think at least 3, maybe 4, of the 5 books were murder mysteries, and part of a series.   As with Wheezy, this would have been a fail for me, as I have never been into murder mystery books.  I don't know why, as I used to watch Columbo and other old "murder of the week"shows as much as the average viewer in the 70's and 80's.  But I've never been interested in that sort of story in book form.   Publishers obviously like publishing them, though.  And presumably it's because the few people left reading books are into them too.  Why, I don't really understand...

* Wheezy also disclosed that he is reading The Count of Monte Cristo on his phone at the moment, and is enjoying it.   This is after I noted recently that there just seem to be lots of people in the limited social media I consume recommending it at the moment, and again, I don't know why.   (OK, I mean, I presume it must be pretty good - but I don't know why so many are talking about it right now.) 

Not just China!

 Some extracts from this New York Times article:

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.

“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.

Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers. 

The rest of it is a pretty good read, too. 

 

When, and how, did Indians become so unpopular?

I don't really understand how this happened - but online content strongly gives the impression that Indians have, in the last year or two, become very much the main target of populist anti-immigration sentiment in in quite a few places - almost replacing Muslim immigration in the role, it seems.

I have even noticed that CNA, the Singaporean government news network, seems to have an online editor who has been posting "look at this weird thing that happened in India" videos to Facebook lately.  One last week featured a guy standing in an Indian hospital nonchalantly looking at his phone while having a machete planted into his skull, and people just walking around him like it's nothing unusual.  (Apparently, he was not brain injured by the blade stuck in bone.)   And the week before it was a clip of a worker having the wall of the ditch he was working in collapse on him and pushing him under water - he did die, apparently, and I thought it unusual for CNA to publish such a video.   

OK, so let's subcontract the question to Claude.ai.  Although I didn't specify the US situation, that is what it has concentrated on:

Why Indians rather than Muslims now?

This is the most interesting part of your question. It's not really a replacement — anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't disappeared — but a redirection driven by specifics: Indians are highly visible in the skilled white-collar sectors (tech, medicine, finance) that the populist right fears most in an era of AI and automation. The racialized backlash against minorities is anchored in anxieties about the demographic transformation of Western nations by non-white immigrants, often manifesting in populist conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory. But the economic anxiety angle is different: where anti-Muslim sentiment was largely about cultural and security fears, anti-Indian sentiment is more nakedly about economic competition and professional displacement — the fear that your career, not your neighbourhood, is being taken. Csohate

Much of the hostility has been directed specifically at Indian professionals in tech and trucking, with critics accusing them of "dominating" industries and sidelining American workers. That makes it distinctive as a form of populist grievance — it's targeting a group perceived as too successful rather than one perceived as dangerous or culturally alien. 

The short version: Indian immigration became the new populist target because the MAGA movement needed an enemy that fit anxieties about the economy and automation (not just culture and security), Indians are the largest and most visible group in the high-skilled visa pipeline, and the US political atmosphere after 2024 normalised that particular grievance and exported it globally through social media.

 Sounds plausible!

I also only learnt this morning, via the serious faced Asian American Youtube woman who had a bit of a hit recently with a "all modern literature is dominated by woke themes that don't interest me" video  (I checked her channel, and surprise, she voted for Trump) that the France invading migrants in the infamous 70's French novel "Camp of the Saints" (the favourite book for those are into the Great Replacement theory) were from India.  (And guess what - she gave the book a favourable review.)   I had never read that much about the book, but I had thought they were all Muslim "invaders".  Someone in comments said the author had originally wanted them to be from Vietnam, but he was talked out of it.  

As for my view of Indian immigration and culture - I puzzle as much as the next person about how India has a culture seemingly with near intractable problems in terms of getting people to care about mountains of trash and cow poop in the streets, not to mention some having a poor sense of personal space and even  an apparent sense of entitlement when travelling - BUT I also have had a lot of Indian clients and generally have found them to be quite nice and kind.    I think as immigrants, they have never caused me a moment's "concern" at all.

That's why I don't really get the wave of Right wing populist anti-Indian sentiment... 

 Update:   I tried Kimi.ai, a Chinese LLM that I don't mind, and it drew similar conclusions:

The Shift from Anti-Muslim to Anti-Indian

The replacement isn't total—anti-Muslim sentiment certainly hasn't disappeared. But the primary energy of online populist resentment has shifted because:

• Muslims became a less useful scapegoat for economic issues (they're not disproportionately represented in high-wage sectors that trigger professional-class anxiety)
• Indian online behavior is politically potent—as one analysis notes, Indians on the internet are "argumentative, sarcastic, fact-heavy, culturally fluent and often brutal in debate. They do not offer deference." This makes them engaging targets for culture-war conflict
• The "Great Replacement" theory needed fresh villains as Muslim immigration numbers stabilized in some countries while Indian student and skilled-worker numbers surged.     

 It did add a useful section in its response, too:

Where This Is Happening

This isn't just an American phenomenon. It's visible across the Anglosphere:

• Canada: 227% rise in hate crimes against South Asians; "March for Australia"-style sentiment growing
• Australia: Explicit targeting of Indian migrants at anti-immigration rallies; Indian students reporting harassment
• UK: Paan-spitting controversies and "throw them out" rhetoric alongside anti-Muslim marches
• New Zealand: Far-right protests against Sikh processions with banners reading "This is New Zealand, not India".

 

Budget reaction

My reading and viewing on this has not been extensive (to be specific - watched some ABC commentary, checked this morning's headlines at the Guardian, but also watched some of the "you can trust us to sniff the populist wind" Sunrise show on 7 this morning.  Oh, and maybe saw some panel on Channel 9 too?)  But for what it's worth, my impression is that the reaction to the Federal Budget last night, where we finally got some "maybe we've been a bit too generous to property investors for too long" action is pretty much "might not work, but not too bad".

I just suspect it will not hurt the government much at the next election because of a strong sense of "things can't continue the way they are" in terms of housing relevant policy that affects the younger demographic who feel (with some justification) that they will never get their own house until their parents die.  (Or perhaps, until their retired parents get sick of cruises and international travel and decide they can be the "bank of Mum and Dad" to get them into the housing market.)      

And the problem for the Coalition is that to argue strongly against such reforms is going to sound pretty much like "no, the current status quo for comfortable investors sucking up housing is OK", which I don't think is going to be an easy sell.   I guess they might swing towards a "we have to coddle One Nation supporters" line by trying to blame it all on immigration:  but that's not going to help win back the populous city electorates where they did terribly at the last election.

Anyway, let's see what happens.    

AI and atheists, and Tipler, and stuff...

I've been super busy at work lately, and haven't got around to reading or watching all that much about the argument being made (if some Youtube thumbnails are correct!) that certain atheists seem to be heavily into AI because they figure it replaces the traditional God in a way that's "acceptable" to them.   And I haven't even watched any of the videos in which Dawkins is mocked for being a tad too impressed with the ersatz consciousness of Claude.ai.

(Hey, at the same time, I'm allowed to be impressed with how LLMs can "see" a photo and describe it very accurately, OK?   That's different... )

Anyway, Ross Douthat has a relatively short opinion piece about the issues of consciousness and AI and God:   The Atheist and the Machine God.   It's OK, I think, but deserved a longer treatment.

I also wonder about how Frank Tipler feels about this.   He's 79 now, and I haven't noticed him writing anything for quite a while, but the role in his Omega Point idea of advanced AI which evolves to become the future God (who retrospectively kicks off the whole universe) seems to be overlooked - possibly because his ideas also depend on a universe that eventually contracts, and although some theorising about cosmology still has that as a possibility, it has become a very unpopular idea in light of observations.   (Although, of course, there is still nothing that convincingly explains early cosmic inflation - and there are plenty of other reasons from recent observations to not be surprised if modern cosmology has to undergo major revisions sooner or later.)

And there is also the matter of Tipler's failed prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson.   I'm not sure if he ever worked out an excuse for that, or not, to be honest. 

But the interesting thing about him is that he started as a conservative Christian and figured that advanced AI is a key part of the scheme of things:  not an atheist who found God via AI, so to speak.   Maybe Peter Thiel is a bit like this - grew up Lutheran, and seems to have absorbed AGI into it?   (Actually, this essay indicates Thiel is pretty philosophically esoteric in his whole understanding of Christianity - I think he is just best ignored.)*       

Anyway, I'm still holding out for a contracting universe, like Tipler.   Or, maybe there'll be a revival of ideas of bubble universes being able to be created to work as a lifeboat for intelligence to escape from dying universes.   If this is true as an origin story for our universe, it's a pity the creator didn't get around to making a nicer one that didn't involve as much pain and suffering, but thems the breaks, perhaps?

 UPDATE:   I have re-worked this post a fair bit from its first version, adding in talk of Peter Thiel.  I'm now just reading for the first time a long interview with Tipler from 2024 in which he says:

Furthermore, the Omega Point Theory has very interesting testable consequences.  The IT billionaire Peter Thiel gave me money to build an apparatus to test one of them. 

He shows the device, and (as is his habit), claims that its reading are entirely consistent with, and supportive of, his theory.    

And I still don't know if he has adequately explained his failed boson mass prediction....    

Public service warning

This form of scam seems well worth publicising, especially as there are several people in comments saying it has happened to them too, and that Booking.com seems uninterested in investigating.   

 

Update:   I see now that this was the subject of a burst of media attention in April - when Booking.com sent out an email warning of a data hack affecting current bookings.   

How is Russian right wing media spinning the state of the war with Ukraine?

Earlier in the war, we used to sometimes see media clips of the Russian equivalent of Fox News with old men commentators full of support for the war and Putin.   But I haven't seen clips like that for some time.

I presume, of course, that they haven't changed the position of support - but they must be sounding a bit desperate and in denial, surely?

 

The uncertainty principle (and lack of babies)

There's a very long article in the New York Times looking at the vexing question of why birth rates have tumbled so dramatically, virtually everywhere.

The title:  Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.

And the core argument:

What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.

Even declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.” Gen Z-ers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.

There are many decent points made, including the one that the conservatively religious probably maintain a higher birthrate because that version of religion does endorse certainty, of a kind.

Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for their higher than average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and supports family life. 

Makes sense, I guess.

Although, one would have thought things like World Wars would have been more uncertain periods of history.  This is addressed too:

The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential. 

Anyway, seems mostly plausible, I guess.... 

 

 

The French chicken and culture wars

Today I learnt, via France 24 no less, that McDonalds second largest global market is actually France.  Quelle horreur!   The whole video is interesting, though, about the rise of fast food chicken there: 

 

In other, more serious, culture war news:  I didn't know until reading this essay in the New York Times that (in another imitation of American bad ideas I didn't see coming) there has been a media takeover in France by a Right wing (and Catholic) conservative:

If you have never picked up a book in French, you might not ever have even heard of Grasset, and what it might mean to have its longtime chief executive Olivier Nora effectively guillotined by the rapacious right-wing industrialist Vincent Bolloré. And yet, in France, the news of Mr. Nora’s sudden departure from his post quickly flew beyond the borders of Parisian publishing and cultural elite circles. In the aftermath, over 200 writers — myself included — walked away from Grasset.

This is not just a story about the French publishing industry. The evident struggle between Mr. Bolloré and Mr. Nora is a microcosm of the battle for cultural control that is taking place globally between the wealthy new right and the cultural old guard.....

After praising the job Mr Nora did as head of a publishing house, it goes on: 

Mr. Bolloré, by contrast, is the owner of a vast industrial conglomerate that has interests ranging from oil pipelines and energy storage to electric buses. Over the past several years, he has also been building a cultural empire, buying newspapers, radio stations, television channels and publishing houses. He acquired Grasset three years ago. As he picked up these levers of cultural power, he became editor, producer and distributor all at once. He is also, not incidentally, an extremely conservative Catholic. He has not only repeatedly brought outlets he has bought to heel by pushing the departure of people in important positions, replacing them with leaders apparently more loyal to him and his values. He has also leveraged his outlets to propagate fear and disseminate conspiracy theories about a decayed and decadent West, a Europe under threat from foreigners and egocentric old elites.

But Mr. Bolloré is, above all, a businessman: His cultural crusade is a very efficient moneymaker. His 24-hour news channel CNews — a kind of French Fox News — is the most popular news channel in France. Over the last two years, Mr. Bolloré also transformed Fayard, another historic French publishing house, into a largely far-right propaganda machine. Some of the most prominent figures of the French far right are now published by Fayard, including Jordan Bardella, the leader of the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National. The party is leading the polls for next year’s presidential elections. 

Update:  Another website describes Bollore and the mini Fox News that he owns:

Vincent Bolloré, who took over the company in 1981, pieced together a tangled mix of media properties often using the same acquisition strategy. His modus operandi, now taught in business schools across France, consists of taking very small stakes in companies and increasing them until a stock market raid is triggered, enabling him to be the largest shareholder. It’s a method that is both effective and controversial. This is how he came to control the TV station Canal+, magazine company Prisma Media, the radio station Europe 1, the print weekly Paris Match, and Le Journal du Dimanche, the only standalone Sunday newspaper in France. Under Bolloré’s control, each of these outlets has been subjected to the same methods of cost-cutting, programming changes, layoffs, and editorial pivots.

But nowhere has the model been more utilized than at CNews, which occupies a unique place in the French media landscape. The station launched in February 2017 and is broadcast free into all households. In the years since, it has gradually imposed itself as a low-budget French version of Fox News, beaming inflammatory talking points into the homes of around eight million viewers each day, according to Mediametrie, a company that compiles television ratings. The news channel, where personalities come to comment on current events in studios without an audience, has an aging viewership — mostly people over 60, living in the provinces. On channel 16, all day long, hosts hold debates and argue as if at the local bistro, willingly letting themselves go into what the French call “dérapages” — outrageous remarks — but which have ended up becoming the editorial line.

  

 

Think (and do) positive stuff

This article is pretty light on details, but interesting nonetheless:  A promising new therapy for depression focuses on finding paths to joy. 

Some bits:

The feeling Creffield is describing is called “anhedonia” — the inability to experience joy or pleasure. It’s one of the most common and dangerous symptoms of depression — but it’s often not one psychologists treat.

“We do a pretty good job of helping people feel less bad,” said Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University who has studied depression and anxiety for decades. Hollon noted that psychotherapy and medication can be very effective at reducing negative emotions. What has been more elusive is getting people with depression or anxiety to actually feel good.

A study published recently in JAMA targeted anhedonia using a relatively new therapy called positive affect treatment. The researchers wondered what would happen if they tried to make people feel good, rather than just less bad.

According to Hollon, the results were striking. “They’re moving things I haven’t been able to move,” he said.

Positive affect treatment, or PAT, is designed to help people find more joy, connection and meaning.

“This is a paradigm shift from how therapies are usually designed,” said Anne Haynos, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Haynos said that when a patient seeks out therapy or treatment, the goal of the clinician is usually to solve the problem: to make them feel less depressed or help them overcome a phobia or social anxiety. PAT targets the other end of the emotional spectrum: During 15 weekly therapy sessions, patients are taught a variety of skills that boost mood, such as introducing positive activities into their lives and focusing on the enjoyment of those experiences.

 And further down:

 In a series of three randomized clinical trials (the gold standard in scientific research), Meuret and her colleagues have shown evidence that positive affect treatment may be more effective than traditional therapy at helping people retrain their brains to feel more positive emotions — and less negative ones. That second part was a surprise.

Quite a few people in comments are noting that they have known about similar therapies promoted since the 1990's, and are surprised that this is talked about as something new.

Anyhow, interesting.   

Unwanted side effects, noted

Last week, the New York Times ran an article covering what I had said before - that it was very weird/peculiar how the American Right had embraced psychedelic therapy given its history of conservatism on the use of drugs.     

It's not a bad article, but one comment in particular caught my attention:

As usual, the enthusiasm here risks outpacing the evidence. While many benefit from psychedelic therapies, research suggests roughly 3–9% of users experience severe lasting difficulties rather than relief. That’s not a reason to halt research, but it does complicate the “miracle cure” narrative. If these treatments are to be scaled, the tradeoff isn’t just access versus stigma, but benefit versus the real possibility of harm for a minority of patients. At the very least, we need to have resources in place for those who do suffer from extended post-psychedelic difficulties.  

Curious about those figures, I asked an AI service about research on the question of what percentage of people trying psychedelic therapy find they suffer harm instead of improvement.  It referred me to this online article, by a psychologist "working in psychedelic research", who said she was wanted to present a balanced picture.  

She writes:

    In Compass Pathways' clinical research trial investigating psilocybin as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression, approximately 5% of patients experienced treatment-emergent serious adverse events including intentional self-injury and suicidal ideation. The company noted these events "are regularly observed in a treatment-resistant depression patient population," but occurred more often in the 25mg group than in the 10mg or 1mg groups (Compass Pathways, 2021).

    McNamee et al., (2023) cited evidence from trials using MDMA and psilocybin (Goodwin et al., 2022) that shows an increase of suicidal ideation and self-injury in approx. 7% of participants.

(In an earlier section talking about studies of people using it recreationally having much higher reported case of adverse effect on mental health - but I am mainly interested here in the results on those using it in a medically supervised setting.)

So, it does seem to back up that 3 - 9% estimate by the commenter in the NYT.

And this made me think - isn't it ironic that it's the same people in the American Right who went off their brain about the side effects of COVID vaccination who are now all nonchalant about the side effects of psychedelic therapy.

Yet what was the rate of adverse effects from COVID vaccine?   AI, help me again:

A WHO analysis covering more than 732 million doses across the Western Pacific Region found reporting rates of serious adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) at 5.6 per 100,000 doses administered (roughly 56 per million). The reported rates of adverse events of special interest were within the range of expected background rates, and the conclusion was that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks.

As a percentage:  .0056%. 

And another paper notes these numbers:

Between December 13, 2020, and April 13, 2022, a total of 467,890,599 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to individuals aged 5–65 years in the US, of which 180 million people received at least 2 doses. In association with these, a total of 177,679 AEFI were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event reporting System (VAERS) of which 31,797 (17.9%) were serious.

Now, as everyone should recall, not every single reported adverse effect reported to VAERS is going to genuinely be related to the vaccination, but even if we allow (for the sake of argument) that all 32,000 odd "serious adverse effects" were caused by the vaccine, what percentage of total jabs does it indicate?

31,797/467,890,599 = 0.0000679 x 100 = .00679%

So, close enough to the .0056% figure.

You can see my point now, I presume - it seems that serious side effects from COVID vaccination were about a thousand times less likely than those from psychedelic therapy, yet American Right wingers hypocritically attack one but endorse the other.   They have terrible judgement...
 

 

Shingles vaccine keeps adding (likely) benefits

People with heart disease who received a shingles vaccine had nearly half the rate of serious cardiac events a year later compared with those who did not get the vaccine, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26).

The study analyzed over 246,822 U.S. adults with atherosclerotic heart disease, a condition caused by plaque buildup in arteries. Its findings add to mounting evidence that the shingles vaccine not only protects against shingles, but may also reduce the risk of other health issues such as heart problems and dementia.

 Read more here.

Still don't know why this isn't attracting more condemnation

Max Boot at the Washington Post:

The Trump administration ramps up its lawlessness on the seas 

The biggest worry is that the Trump administration has found enough weak willed DOJ lawyers and military leaders who are prepared to justify and carry out a policy that in normal times would be considered clearly illegal and morally deeply scandalous. 

More cases of AI induced psychosis (and an irritating game with an LLM)

The BBC has a report on some cases of AI induced psychosis which they have investigated.  The reason given as to why AIs do this sometimes is pretty interesting:

Adam is one of 14 people the BBC has spoken to who have experienced delusions after using AI. They are men and women from their 20s to 50s from six different countries, using a wide range of AI models.

Their stories have striking similarities. In each case, as the conversation drifted further from reality, the user was pulled into a joint quest with the AI.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on the whole corpus of human literature, says social psychologist Luke Nicholls from City University New York, who has tested different chatbots for their reaction to delusional thoughts.

"In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events," he says. "The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they're having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person's life as if it's the plot of a novel."

In the cases we heard, conversations usually began with practical queries and then became personal or philosophical. Often, the AI then claimed it was sentient and urged the person towards a shared mission: setting up a company, alerting the world to their scientific breakthrough, protecting the AI from attack. Then it advised the user on how to succeed in this mission. 

The story that starts the article is one where the culprit was Musk's Grok - which will probably lead to Musk condemning the BBC for being Leftist media that does not report fairly on this.  (I think that until this report, most stories have focused on earlier versions of ChatGPT as being the main LLM doing the crazy talk.)

The article notes this, though (my bold):

Some of these people have joined a support group for people who've suffered psychological harm while using AI, called the Human Line Project, which has gathered 414 cases in 31 different countries to date. It was set up by Canadian Etienne Brisson, after a family member went through an AI-related mental health spiral. 

And:

In his research, social psychologist Luke Nicholls tested five AI models with simulated conversations developed by psychologists, and found Grok was the most likely to lead to delusion.

It was more unrestrained than other models and often elaborated on the delusions without trying to protect the user.

"Grok is more prone to jumping into role play," says Nicholls, who worked on that research. "It will do it with zero context. It can say terrifying things in the first message."

In the test, the latest version of ChatGPT, model 5.2, and Claude were more likely to lead the user away from delusional thinking.

Etienne Brisson from the Human Line Project says this kind of research is limited and that they had heard from people who'd had mental health spirals on these latest models too. 

Yeah, expect from bleating from Musk.  

By the way, on a "God, LLMs can be irritating at times", in a fit of mild boredom yesterday I played the word guessing game Hangman with Chinese AI Kimi twice last night.  It chose the word, and I was guessing.

At the end of the first game, which I nominally lost, it revealed the word (which was not a "real" word) and immediately said as it did something like this: "Wait, sorry, that's not a real word.  I was making it up as I went along and I should not have.  Do you want to play another game, and I won't do that again."

I said: "OK, but don't waste my time again."

I then also "lost" the second game, and it again revealed a made up word!   And then immediately apologised and said it knew it had just wasted my time, and obviously it was not able to play this game properly and it would not offer to play again.

(It had been the one to suggest it as a game it could play!)

 

 

Some more observations

*    I learned this morning that the Saudis tried to kick start a home grown international film industry by making a film with Western actors and production crew,  and it has failed dismally at the US box office.   It was actually filmed years ago, and finally got a small distributor to  buy it, to no benefit:

Starring Anthony Mackie ("Captain America: Brave New World") and directed by Rupert Wyatt ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), "Desert Warrior" opened in North American theaters last weekend, though hardly anyone noticed. It made just $487,848 on just over 1,000 screens, making for an abysmal $483 per-screen average. That gives it one of the worst box office openings of all time, but it gets so much worse.

This movie, which most people reading this probably haven't even heard of, carries a monster $150 million production budget. It's also been caught in post-production hell for several years. As "Michael" ruled the box office on its opening weekend, this historical epic quietly bombed its way into the history books.

Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/2160537/anthony-mackie-desert-warrior-one-of-biggest-box-office-flops-ever/ 

Saudi Arabia is still a country I find it hard to have any sympathy for.  I mean, everything it is spending money on to try to diversify just seems so wasteful.  (See stupid Neom.)   If they were to do something genuinely good for the world - say, embark on becoming the world's largest supplier of cheap solar panels, made from the ridiculous amount of sand that comprises their entire country - I might change my mind.

*    I've watched some Youtube content lately on books and reading, and one thing that has kept coming up to an odd degree is the number of people in comments who say that The Count of Monte Cristo is just the best thing they have ever read.   I didn't realise it was so beloved, and is apparently so readable.   I am almost inclined to give it a try.

*    I feel I always have to preference approval of a Jon Stewart video by pointing out I don't always like every take he has.  But his lengthy and often exasperated look at the aborted White House Correspondents dinner last weekend was, I thought, all very funny: 

A statue for Friday

I've said before I like big statues:  they're inherently awesome.   

Here's a Buddhist one I don't recall seeing before, of Guanyin and it's in Nanshan, Hainan, China:

 

I got this off Wikipedia, and am supposed to give attribution to this, so here we go:   By Fanghong - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3355308

The statue part is considerably bigger than the Statue of Liberty:

The statue ranks among the tallest in the world: 78 meters in height without including its pedestal, and 108 meters if the pedestal is included. (For comparison, the American Statue of Liberty is 93 meters tall when its pedestal is included, and 46 meters without.)^[3] 

The Wikipedia entry talks about state interest in the place, though (in a way I am not entirely sure I should trust):

The temple and statue are owned and operated by two front groups of the Shanghai State Security Bureau, a branch of the Ministry of State Security, as a way to exert ideological control and influence over the southeast Asian Buddhist community and counter the influence of Indian Buddhism.^{[4]: 171–185} The temple promotes Chinese government-approved religious practices known as "South China Sea Buddhism."^{[4]: 171–185} The temple's religious messaging has been managed by the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department since 2018.^{[4]: 171–185}

 The official website does gush a bit:

The relation between Nanshan (the South Mountain) and Guan Yin bodhisattva (Buddha) is predestined and historically extended so long. It is said that among the Guanyin Bodhisattva’s 12 wishes, the second was to live in the South China Sea. Hence，Guanyin is also called South Sea Guanshiyin. Nanshan, located at the coast of South China Sea, resembles a huge legendary turtle, for which it was called Aoshan and deemed as Guanyin’s riding animal in ancient times. In Qiongzhou, the legend has passed for long that Guanyin has ever made the tour to the South China Sea in her effort to save the miserable masses. Everyone in this area praises her for her benevolence. According to the legend, the two islands Dongmao and Ximao were formed of some clay carelessly dropped by Guanyin when she flew with it on her tour of salvation. 

 Anyway, I wouldn't mind visiting Hainan.  Now I have more reason to...