Wilful medical science lies as dangerous political propaganda

Yes, even on Twitter/X, whenever this claim has been posted, there have been scores of responses explaining clearly how and why it is untrue, such that to continue to propagate it is an outright lie.   That the likes of Cruz continue to lie, in a way that is going to continue making Fauci a target of extremist rhetoric and threats, is just appalling.

Catering for his escape

From the Washington Post:

The administration has claimed that Trump departed Turkey on July 8 on the former Air Force One. Trump announced on social media that he would use the “former Air Force One” rather than the plane that flew him there, a newer Boeing 747-8 gifted to the United States by Qatar. The security of the Qatar-provided aircraft has been called into question, and Trump said last month after the trip that it would undergo additional upgrades.

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.  

The Guardian had put it this way:

Prompted by an Iranian assassination threat, Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse that involved hiding the president in an airport catering cart, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times. 

That gave me the pleasurable image of Trump trying to be squeezed into some super sized version of these things:

 

But, sadly, apparently not...

A few comments on the Arday story

*  Twitter/X has been absolutely covered in its general feed with content about this story, in a way that makes you think "I know that this is now dominated by Right wing content, but this still looks like Musk made a call and required that the algorithm promote this story as much as possible."

*  As lots of people have said, significant parts of academic sociology (and the humanities more generally) have for decades (ever since identity politics and analysis became a thing) devolved into pretty vacuous and arcane complaint twaddle with little in the way of substance or remedy to social ills.   And as someone who has several times pointed to the (to be generous) dubious value of the work of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan and her Macquarie University compatriots, I sympathise entirely.

By the way, from my dim memories of it from some, ugh, 48 years ago, the introductory sociology subject that I did as a small part of my degree was actually pretty solid and interesting.  It's not an inherently valueless subject; it is just what academia has decided to do with it.   Basically, if this scandal results in Universities (and the bodies that fund academics) taking a harder look at what is being produced by who in their Humanities schools, it's not a bad result.

* I am somewhat puzzled as to how long it is taking for journalism to turn up comments from family or fellow students (or therapists) who knew Arday when he was young and allegedly unable to talk or read.  As one would think that if his claims were not exaggerated, there would be people willing to confirm it's true.   It is making it look more likely that there is no one who wants to defend the background story.

*  The New York Times has published some "Takeaways" from his (just published?) memoir, and man, I can just imagine the embarrassment of the person or persons who decided to fund it.  I like this little bit:

When he decided to go to college, his girlfriend “wrote out the entire application for me — including my personal statement.” At St. Mary’s University in London, he scored just 9 percent on his first exam. He worked hard, raising his grades so quickly that a professor at the school accused him of cheating.

“When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds, it weirdly makes people question your credibility,” he writes.  

 Actually, when you make claims that sound wildly implausible and an exaggeration that even Donald Trump would hesitate to claim, that's when people question your credibility.  

A venue can be too big

Yesterday was Singapore's National Day, and as a dutiful fan of the country, I watched the National Day Parade live on Youtube.   (I've explained before why I enjoy viewing it.)

Unfortunately, this year they moved it from the outside site of recent years to inside the National Stadium, which I thought might be a good idea, but turns out it isn't.   (A decade or so ago they held it there, but I wasn't watching at that time.)

The venue is simply too large for this kind of performance.   I've seen the stadium from the outside and did not think it looked gigantic; but the interior shots, even allowing for different lens focal length, made it look enormous inside.  It seated 42,000 apparently, but the centre floor area looks so big that it was never filled up satisfactorily with performers.  They always seemed to be surrounded by too much empty floor, and a repeated camera view kept showing how far away the centre stage must have felt to the attendees, too.     

The songs this year were bland and more like simple pop songs.  (Mind you, I sympathise with song writers trying to find a new way every year to come up with novel lyrics on the same theme.  I guess people do it with love songs, though?)  

Anyway, people on Reddit seemed underwhelmed too.   And now I see that someone said on CNA that it wasn't a great venue in 2016.    The only thing it helps with is people can rehearse out of the sun, I guess.  I think someone died from the heat during rehearsal last year, so it's not a minor problem.  

I'm curious if it will return to the parade ground setting next year.... 

 

Republican numbskulls and Fauci, again

There was an opinion piece at the NYT a few days ago by a guy who thinks Fauci should have answered some questions (I don't agree), but nonetheless, the best part of his piece is how he detailed the nonsensical contradictory positions MAGA and Republicans hold in their empty heads:

But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.

You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon. And you can’t really fault liberal hysteria on social media when some of the most vocal early advocates of aggressive mitigation were figures like the libertarian crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan and the reactionary neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. National Review was slamming the case against lockdowns as “absurd”; Tucker Carlson was reportedly lobbying the president to take the virus more seriously.

Back then, support for aggressive mitigation measures was pretty close to universal: In May 2020, one survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least 80 percent of the country was on board with social distancing, stay-at-home orders and business closures. Even so, by the end of the next month, all states but one ended their stay-at-home orders. And if you think that early near-unanimity was the result of irresponsible fear-mongering, you may be surprised to learn that in 2024, when asked whether they would support any similar measures again if faced with another pandemic, Americans answered in the affirmative by a margin of 81 to 19.

And people (including me!) forget this:

In retrospect, it is especially striking that Fauci initially downplayed the risk of the virus, suggesting that it was sufficiently low-risk that Americans need not worry about it in February 2020, and implying that they should worry more about the seasonal flu. When Fauci did come out as a relative alarmist the following month, offering what were seen at the time as worst-case scenarios, he predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths — about one-tenth as many as the country eventually endured. 

Back to Wagner

I haven't had a reason to write about Wagner since seeing the Ring Cycle a couple of years ago, but here's an article on the annual Bayreuth Festival in Germany that has appeared in the New York Times.

Some interesting bits and pieces:

It started in the years leading up to 1876, when the composer Richard Wagner was seeking an appropriate venue for the performance of his monumental, four-opera “Ring” cycle.

Think about the first scene of the film “The Age of Innocence,” set in the early 1870s — how Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, wanders into a New York opera house and takes his seat in a box partway through an act. The audience is lit almost as brightly as the stage. He can pay attention to one or two arias while still flirting shamelessly with a countess in the box opposite. The theater is a social setting to see and be seen, where the goings-on onstage are only a part of the experience.

Wagner was opposed to this. He wanted to create “music drama” that was audience’s sole focus.

The Festspielhaus has no boxes. Its seats rise in an amphitheater-shaped fan, its walls and proscenium focus attention on the stage. The pit is covered, so the orchestra’s sound rises as if from the building itself. The cover also ensures that no light leaks out of the pit to remind audiences that they’re watching a staged show.

It was designed as a singular place to interpret and contemplate Wagner’s works: more religious temple than standard-issue opera house. As Wagner wrote, the theater aimed to transport viewers into an “ecstatic state of clairvoyance in which the scenic image” becomes “a true reflection of life itself.” 

 Also - it has no airconditioning, and the seats are really hard.   Still, suits the stoicism of the Germans, I guess.  

Attendees might still end up going to the toilet in a Portaloo during intermission:

Despite the elegance of its audiences and the price of its drinks and tickets, the Festspielhaus has a rustic vibe. The grounds are dotted with portable toilets. There are barely any indoor lobbies; before the performance and during the luxurious, hourlong intervals, audience members stroll across plazas and parks outside and munch on sausages.

The end of the intermissions (Wagner operas usually have two) are announced not by bells but by brass fanfares, arranged by the composer himself from the music of the upcoming act, which ring out from a balcony at the front of the theater.

The festival is still a family business, run now by 48 year old Katharina Wagner, the great granddaughter of Richard.  Some businesses really have legs!

And while I knew Hitler had visited and been a fan, I didn't know about this:

The 2026 opener, “Rienzi,” is a youthful Wagner effort about a populist Roman leader. Hitler loved it so much that he owned Wagner’s original score, which is now lost and presumed to have been in Hitler’s bunker when it was destroyed after the dictator’s suicide. 

I might go looking for a recording of that on Youtube.  Let's see - there is an avante garde looking modern dress version which only runs for - 3 hours 50 minutes!   (And looks like no English subtitles.) 

Even videos of just the overture go for 13 minutes. 

Oh well, something to catch up with on retirement, perhaps! 

 

Let them fight

So, one side of the MAGA influencers and politicians are gaslighting about how you can feed a family of 8 an (impliedly) satisfying burrito meal for $20, and so the cost of living whiners are just lazy people who don't know how to cook economically; and the other side is saying "come on, be real, that's impossible, I've got a family of 8 and I know it; and we ignore the rising cost of living as a genuine concern of people at our peril."

 

Funny to be on the side of Matt Walsh, but he's obviously right.   

And a special birthday shout out to...

Race Around the World - and Gina Rinehart

I have been meaning to post about the ABC revival of Race Around the World and why I have found it watchable, but still disappointing.

Since the first series, the drop in price and improved quality of video equipment (and, of course, the Youtube based plethora of independent travel vloggers) has certainly taken the sheen of novelty off anyone being able to make TV quality content  anywhere in the world.     So the revival feels more than ever to be mainly about the pressure on the competitors to find stories and edit them into shape in the relatively short time they have.   This led to one guy having a serious looking stress breakdown on last week's episode, which he incorporated into the video, but it was uncomfortable to watch.

As far as the competitors are concerned, I have to admit that I can't really remember any apart from John Saffron from the first series, but my feeling is that this lot are generally not as likeable (with an exception I will get to.)    The two leading guys, especially moustachioed Jayden, whose hairy body looks like it escaped from some 70's era porno, seem to me to be overly self-confident and too pre-experienced as travellers and video makers.   Or should I say, it's especially Jayden who seems too competent for the show - it was, after all, Elliott who had the breakdown last week.  

I find two of the women a bit bland but inoffensive.  But Kate - her deadpan style seems far too contrived and I find her positively irritating.  As does Gina Rinehart!

The one competitor that I have consistently felt sorry for is poor old William.   He seems to be a gentle, modest person who enjoys creating gentle parody styles in his videos, and the irony was that the one which was not like that (and the only one for which he got much praise) was the one he liked the least.   I found his videos likeable and comforting (certainly not irritating like some of the others), and felt that the judges should just accept that while they might not share his taste, there's nothing wrong with his, and that creative types who stick to their guns often eventually find their audience.  (Hello, Wes Anderson.)   

William also often seemed a little hurt by their criticisms, and kept making comments about finding it harder than he expected.   As I say, I just wanted everyone to be nicer about his style and tastes.     

Anyway, onto the Gina Rinehart aspect.  Irritating "I'm so wacky" Kate ended her video from Scotland, in which she was referencing Braveheart,  with a satirical comment about imagined violence on Gina, for which Gina demanded (and today received) an apology from the ABC.  

As much as I dislike Rinehart, it didn't work as humour, made no real sense in the context, and at the risk of agreeing with the idiots at Sky News (now rebranded to News24, I see), the ABC should have pulled it before it was shown.

It's a bad day when something on the ABC makes me think Gina probably deserves an apology.     

Himmler's masseur

I guess it was inevitable, given the number of people involved, but it still kind of surprises me when new stories of intriguing people and what they did in World War 2 just keep turning up this long after it ended.  

The reason for this post is the movie discussed here in The Guardian:  

Himmler’s ‘anti-Nazi’ masseur: Claes Bang stars as SS chief’s ‘magic Buddha’

Felix Kersten, the personal therapist of Hitler’s principal enforcer, claimed to have saved countless lives from the Holocaust. A new feature film exposes him as a narcissist prone to myth-making 

Some extracts:

In I Is Another, which has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival this week, he is played by Danish actor Claes Bang (once a Dracula for the BBC), as a mercurial, charming but very slippery figure.

The myth the masseur promoted in his postwar memoirs was that he had used his influence over Himmler to save many people from being sent to the gas chambers.

A biography by French journalist Joseph Kessel, The Man With the Miraculous Hands, reinforced the idea that Kersten had helped “entire populations escape the terror of deportation” and that he “prevented the crematory ovens from receiving their full quota of corpses”. Randau now dismisses the book as “full of lies”.

In the film, Kersten is shown on a long train journey to Oslo where he hopes he will be awarded the Nobel prize. During the journey, he is accosted by a fictional investigative journalist Hedda Wohmann (Valerie Pachner) who strongly suspects he is liar and hopes to catch him out.

In preparation for the movie, Randau did extensive research of his own and discovered the masseur’s SS membership card in an archive in Berlin. Kersten had always concealed his SS membership but Randau found a letter in the archive in which the masseur asked if he was allowed to wear the SS uniform in public, undermining his later claims that he was an avowed anti-Nazi. There was also plentiful evidence that Kersten forged several of the documents which showed him in the best light.

However, when it comes to establishing whether or not Kersten really was spying on behalf of the Swedes, as many have claimed, he hit a dead end. For reasons no one could explain, all the files still remain classified (although Randau can’t help but notice how well connected the masseur was with Swedish government sources).

“I think he definitely saved some people’s lives but not thousands,” Randau concludes. “I am sure he did it only because he wanted to save his own reputation, maybe even his own life.

“He was a narcissist, and like all narcissists, his self-confidence was really weak. For him, it wasn’t enough to be a hero, he wanted to be a superhero and that was his mistake.”

The writer-director believes that after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, Kersten realised that the ship was sinking. “He had to jump off somehow. At that point, he started to manipulate Himmler and there was this mutual whitewashing with other guys involved. A lot of letters and documents are definitely fake, letters saying things like, ‘thank you for being such an enemy of the Nazi system like I am’ and stuff like that.”

One fact was incontrovertible. Kersten, who died in 1960, was a brilliant masseur. He provided instant relief for Himmler from his excruciating intestinal spasms. The SS chief called him “a magic Buddha who cures everything” and was extremely indulgent toward him as a consequence. 

He seems to have shared a similar feature to Schindler in his private life:

Kersten was personable too. People tended to like him. He was, the director says, “a skirt chaser, a ladies’ man” and he is rumoured to have lived in a menage a trois with his wife and his secretary. 

 (Not that Schindler did the menage a trois, since if the movie was correct, there's no way his wife would have accepted it.)    

 

Understanding the double slit

I meant to post about this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video "You probably misunderstood the double slit experiment".

I always get the feeling that on videos like this is mostly, but not necessarily completely, right.   I find it curious, for example, that she treats the issue of wave/particle duality as nothing special, and we just have to accept it as what quantum "objects" are like.   I think that's what she's saying in this video, but it was a couple of weeks ago that I watched it.

I've talked before about what I think is a lack of clarity in some of her takes on entanglement, etc.  But she is usually interesting, and often a bit wryly funny, so I don't mind her at all.   (She is one of these people where it seems eccentricity bleeds a bit into actual mental health issues, but she seems mostly OK.) 

A Chinese man's take on Chinese philosophy

This guy popped up in my recommended feed the other day, no doubt because of my occasional viewing of content on Asian philosophy and religions.  I thought this video was pretty good, and I found by viewing one or two of his other videos that he is one of the "I used to have a job but lost it and don't know what I can do for the rest of my life" men from China.   At least he doesn't just do the "this is the day to day life of a struggling man who has lost it all" style video, which wear out their welcome soon enough.  He actually just seems to have decided to educate people on a topic he's interested in.  Cool.

 

All about Alan, revisited

I wrote a post in 2023 about my evolving views on Alan Jones, and nothing I wrote then has changed.

Now that Jones is actually facing trial on the type of behaviour first reported in that year, it does make for a particularly salacious trial.  Unfortunately, though, all of today's cross examination was the subject of a non publication order, and it's not clear yet whether it will ever be lifted. 

I would be enormously surprised if Jones can prove a widespread conspiracy of rivals and greedy men setting up 6 different complainants to tell stories of behaviour which is also explained by being consistent reporting of the activities of a serial sex pest.

But, we shall see....

Update:  One thing I forgot to add to the post.  I reckon that this bit of evidence from the first day:

In court on Tuesday, Complainant J detailed a stay at Mr Jones's Fitzroy Falls farm in 2004, where he said he and the veteran broadcaster spoke over dinner and a glass of wine.

He said Mr Jones told him: "You've got to remember, there's only one rule here … there are no rules."

will be believed by everyone, because it just sounds so Alan Jones you immediately hear it in your head in his voice!   (And yes, it is also creepy given what follows it.)

Zoomies continued...

Old brainworms is back

 

 

He is such a conspiracy nut.  As one website explains:

 

Kennedy has spread misinformation about the origins of some of the deadliest and most debilitating diseases of the modern era through his popular podcast and in speeches when he was running for president. In addition to his false claims about Lyme disease, Kennedy has said that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was created when children were being vaccinated against other illnesses and that avian and swine flu were “fabricated” by the World Health Organization to control the public.

He has also said West Nile virus was created at Plum Island and that respiratory syncytial virus was purposely spread from apes to humans so pharmaceutical companies could profit off vaccines. Kennedy has also said that baby boomers have high cancer rates because they were vaccinated for polio, arguing that the vaccine caused more harm than the actual infection, which, at its height in the mid-20th century, killed or paralyzed a half-million people annually.

“I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health,” Kennedy said at an online campaign event in June 2023. “We can go down a whole list of diseases, and there is good evidence that even the Spanish flu came from vaccine research.”

Kennedy was named by Trump last month to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He is famous for falsely linking immunizations to autism and cancer. But Kennedy’s conspiratorial views about viruses have gained less attention. In at least three episodes of his podcast — ranked as Spotify’s 11th most popular podcast in its “health and fitness” category — Kennedy says his distrust of vaccines is, in part, due to his belief that researching and developing immunizations has “created some of the worst plagues in our history.”

Kennedy’s belief that deadly diseases were created by humans has shaped his views toward the agency he is poised to lead. He has vowed to drastically reduce the professional workforce at the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health, because he says it is too cozy with pharmaceutical companies that are profiting off viruses. During his campaign event last summer, he declared that his promises to rid the nation of chronic diseases are rooted in his belief that communicable illnesses would not actually be dangerous were it not for pharmaceutical companies and world health officials bioengineering them.

“The real threat to human health is not coming from infections,” he said. 

More phone camera play

As for that last one, it does have something called "AI supermoon" that comes on if zoom in 20x.  I suspect that it's like the Samsung feature that drew attention on Reddit a few years ago for questionable image authenticity.  I will look into it more, but for now, I'm happy enough.

Republican numbskulls

I've always disliked Rand Paul, and his never ending attempts to "get" an 85 year old scientist who has done tens times more for the good of the country than the perm headed libertarian or his father has ever done, or is likely to do, just means my judgement was too kind, if anything.  He's a conspiracy addled twit, as are so many Republicans, and I hate to see so many dumb Americans on social media cheering on the persecution of Fauci as if he was personally responsible for the pandemic.

Also, how dumb are Republican politicians and figures that they would talk about how they wanted to see Fauci face punishment for their imagined crimes, and then be all annoyed that he won't answer questions:

What morons.

Also - one of the many things to despise about Trump is that he's happy to ride on the coattails of  conspiracy and hatred and not have a care in the world about how it affects the well being and safety of the target of the conspiracy.   He knows his cult followers includes thousands who own guns and who think Fauci is literally evil and a mass murderer.   He dealt with Fauci respectfully at the start of their relationship, and Fauci has said so himself.  And this:

In 2021, Trump awarded Fauci a presidential commendation for his work on the US Covid vaccine project, known as Operation Warp Speed. 

But now, sniffing the wind that it will help shore up his cult's priors, Trump comes out with "throw him under the bus" stuff like this:

"Many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “‘Operation Warp Speed’ was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President. I overrode Fauci on this. His ideas were CRAZY! Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China."

Moron, and to call him a "fair weather friend" is inadequate.  To the power of 10, perhaps.

 

 

The Trump menace spreads far and wide

An article in the New York Times explains that the locals in Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia are blaming the loss of the European tourist market on the disruption to air routes there because of the Iran war:

In Cambodia, international arrivals in the first three months of this year declined by 45 percent compared with the same period last year, tourism officials said. Mr. Khon said that he used to earn an average of about 82,000 Cambodian riel, or $20, a day ferrying visitors. That has now dropped to less than $5 a day....

In neighboring Thailand’s Phang Nga province, there is a similar crisis. Hotel bookings there have dropped by around 50 percent since the war began, local officials said...

Rungrat Huailek, 53, who has run boat tours in Phang Nga for 30 years, said that with the European tourists gone, residents were cutting nonessential expenses. He said his monthly earnings had dropped from around $900 to about $300, and he was forced to burn through most of his savings.

When his teenage daughter asked to go on a vacation during a recent school break, he asked her to buy a snack at the nearest convenience store. That, he said, was the only outing they could afford.

“Things look so bleak now,” Mr. Rungrat said. “All I can do is pray and be patient.” 

It says that Bali has been "more resilient", but that European tourism has dropped there too.  In fact, I sometimes watch Youtube videos by an expat Australian who lives there now, and I gather from the title of a few of his recent videos that there is an evident tourism lull there underway.

This probably makes it a good time for me to make a visit, except for the fact that even that blogger, who has lived in Indonesia for 15 years, says you just have to accept that you will get a bout of "Bali belly" if there for any length of time.  (And honestly, it seems pretty to find someone who has holidayed there for more than a week and not had one incident of it.)    

Speaking of Indonesia more widely - I was watching Flora and Note visiting Bandung on Java and making a somewhat torturous trip on motor scooter to a nearby tourist attraction called the White Crater.  It's a dormant volcanic crater filled with water that still emits heaps of sulphurous gas, such that signs recommend tourists not to stay in the crater part for more than 15 minutes!   Safety standards in Indonesia are somewhat relaxed.  

 

 

AI goes in search of Homer

Some guy on Twitter/X has asked Claude.ai to do a "literal" prose translation of The Odyssey, because he didn't want to read the one that Nolan used.  He has published the results, too, but has made little comment about the quality.  There are many sceptical comments:

Perhaps my favourite:

I also have been surprised to see quite a few people (presumably Americans) say in comments that they had to read it in high school.   To me, this seems rather surprisingly "high brow" of US high schools.  (Claude.ai says it has been a prescribed text since the mid 20th century, most commonly in 9th grade english.)  I doubt that it has ever been such in Australia.   (Claude.ai seems to think I am correct - suggesting that extracts from it have probably only ever featured in late primary school as an introduction to mythology.)   

 

Oh, further to fun tweets on the story, and the ridiculous MAGA reaction to the Nolan movie, get a load of this:   

 

  

Get back to me when the starship shield is actually physically checked after flight

Is it just me, or did it seem that the latest Musk Starship 3 test flight (number 13) take place without much prior fanfare?   

Watching the videos of the flight after it happened, I noted that the booster still didn't work on the way down as it should, and while there was much excitement over how the Starship itself plonked down gently into the ocean and just floated there without exploding, that gave plenty of time for drones to look at the heat shield which (to this layman's eyes) still looked like a complete mess that would need heaps of refurbishment before it could be re-used.

If I understand it correctly, the whole economic viability of the Starship system is meant to be built on the thing having mere hours of turnaround time.  What stupid and unachievable thing has Musk said about this?   I will let an AI tell me:

Long-term cadence goal
More recently he's put a number on the eventual operational tempo: "In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours," with "24/day" as the peak and "sustained... more like ~10/day." That implies an average turnaround well under an hour per vehicle at peak, across a fleet. Yahoo Financebarchart

Grain of salt worth noting
Musk has a long history of announcing aggressive turnaround targets that then slipped — most famously his 2017–2018 pledge that SpaceX would demonstrate two orbital launches of the same Block 5 vehicle within 24 hours, no later than next year (i.e., 2019), a target Falcon 9 has still never hit outright even years later. So while his stated ambition for Starship is hours-scale (and eventually many flights/day at full cadence), his track record suggests these dates/targets tend to be optimistic rather than realized on schedule — worth treating as an aspiration rather than a firm engineering timeline. Fox News

Maybe finance bros are realising nothing he says sticks?  Or maybe, they just think the drop in price means "get in now!"?:

The Musk-led rocket, connectivity and artificial intelligence company's latest slip extended a dramatic downward run for a company that sold shares to the public in mid-June, saw its stock quickly jump above $225, and then watched as the shares fell to below their IPO price over the course of about a month. Investors now have the company's first quarterly earnings report—and the likelihood of extensive commentary from Musk—to look forward to next week, but for now their enthusiasm seems to have cooled.

Wall Street analysts remain generally bullish, with Visible Alpha calculating an average price target over $293 that is more than double today's close. Morgan Stanley, which calculates the shares' value at $300, in a Monday note said that "at less than $120/share, we believe investors are paying a  reasonable multiple for the core Space + Connectivity business while receiving limited-to no value for the company's AI opportunity, despite multiple monetization paths" to 2028 AI revenues around $100 billion.

"We see the current valuation as an attractive entry point," they wrote.  

 

  

Streaming views

One of the good things about having adult kids is that, instead of me having to pay for 4 streaming services, I can watch two of them paid for by the offspring who subscribe because of particular things they want to watch.   Hence:

*  I just finished watching the latest episodes of Futurama (Season 13) on Disney, and (as per posts on Reddit), it was a very funny season.   This show has just always been great, really, but some seasons are better than others.  And it's good news, everyone:  there is a Season 14 coming.  

*  The absolutely most surreal adult animated comedy I have seen is Smiling Friends, currently showing on HBO in Australia.   I'm sure that writing under the influence of drugs does not really work, but it is hard to imagine how sober people otherwise came up with some of the jokes and visuals in this very adult show.  Perhaps it reminds me of a grown up's Ren and Stimpy, a little?   Anyway, very bizarre and very often very funny with it.  Thankfully, it's only about 10 to 15 minutes per episode, which is about right for that type of content.   

*  I mentioned recently how I have not found much in the way of Korean Netflix series that keeps me engaged,  but hey, I am enjoying (so far) the new show The East Palace.   Like Kingdom, it's a combination of historical palace intrigue and the supernatural (well, viral zombies, in the case of Kingdom).  Sure, as lots of people have said on Reddit, it's a bit like Stranger Things meets Kingdom, but I think the central conceit of how the hero gains entry to the alternative reality spirit world is pretty cool.   I won't spoil it here - it is established in the first episode, anyway.    

I would say that the show does feel a bit too rushed, at least in the first 3 episodes; and the subtitles actually flash by too quickly in some exchanges.   While it is heavy on the CGI, for a show about fighting malevolent spirits, that's pretty unavoidable, and I think the art design of the dead, and CGI itself, are of  high quality.   It is fantasy horror, which is not a genre I am generally drawn to, but man, it looks absolutely gorgeous in virtually every single shot.  The acting is competent and likeable too, I reckon.

Hopefully, it stays good to the end.        

From the garden...

The macro photo setting on my new phone is pretty impressive, I reckon:

These photos were cropped, but that's the only adjustment...

Americans and their lettuce

It seems kind of amazing that First World America continually has outbreaks of food poisoning that seem to come down to contaminated plants.  It also seems amazing that, with this history, the Trump administration would say "you know what, lets loosen reporting requirements":

The U.S. has long relied on an approach called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), originally developed in the late 1950s by NASA and Pillsbury to keep astronauts from getting food poisoning in zero gravity. HACCP maps out every point “from farm to fork, those key choke points” where contamination could occur, and builds in monitoring and a “stop” mechanism when something goes wrong, Schwab says. It works—but only when it’s actively maintained, reported, and enforced. 

According to Schwab, the enforcement piece is what has eroded. Federal agencies have lost staff and funding needed to inspect, audit, and monitor food producers, leaving more of the system dependent on voluntary industry self-regulation.  

“Self-regulation works until it doesn’t,” Schwab says. That’s where FoodNet came in. FoodNet is the joint CDC-FDA-USDA-EPA active surveillance system that tracks foodborne illness across 10 sentinel sites. Cyclospora reporting was mandatory until July 2025 when the Trump administration made reporting optional for Cyclospora, along with five other pathogens (Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia). 

“Cuts to food safety ... make the food system more susceptible to these types of outbreaks,” says Love.  

 And further down:

Restoring surveillance capacity, Schwab argues, is the central fix: a fully funded, fully staffed federal system with mandatory pathogen reporting so that multistate patterns are identified within days rather than after an outbreak has already spread nationwide. States that have kept investing in their own monitoring show what’s possible, but a state-by-state patchwork can’t substitute for a coordinated federal response, particularly for products that cross state lines. 

It’s critical to ensure that there are strict controls on irrigation water, and on-farm sanitation practices can minimize risks, says Love: “Are farm workers given time to go to the bathroom? Are bathrooms provided to them? Do they have a handwashing station with warm water? That gets back to, you know, how do you treat your workers?”  

Some notable tweets about that movie

In more "big picture" political analysis...

I have opined to a couple of people lately that I reckon the big long term problem with the Liberal Party (and why they have plummeted in polling) is that it has tried to straddle both sides of the barbed wire fence for so long with respect to climate change, and now immigration too.

Of course, all parties have to do this to a degree - do we really think Labor leadership isn't biting its tongue continually with respect to the Trump presidency?   

But with the Liberals, it's played a game of "we believe in it, we just don't believe in doing much about it" on climate change for two to three decades now, and have been completely unable to present a unified front, with individual MPs always making clear their complete disbelief in it even being a real issue, under the mantra that "it's a big party, it can tolerate dissenting views".  

Well, no.  If it's an important enough issue, a party loses credibility by such toleration.   

I maintain that Turnbull's leadership died on this division, and he should have initiated a split in the party by demanding that those who dispute it as a real, science based, problem that needs the clear endorsement of clean renewable energy just get out of the party, because the division is killing their credibility, especially in urban electorates.  But he didn't.

And now that "too much immigration" sentiment has caught on with much of the populist Right here (partly via contagion from Trumpian and some European politics, and partly by dishonest assessment of numbers here in light of COVID disruption), the Liberals are caught on another major fence straddle - they want to appeal to both dumb, prejudiced populists who have (at least temporarily) been telling pollsters they will vote for Pauline Hansen purely because of this issue, AND to urban electorates full of migrants who don't particularly like being told there's no hope of family members joining them, and that lots of Australians don't like them.

What a disaster it is for the party that Tony Abbott has re-asserted influence within the party, and has started endorsing co-operation with One Nation, while other party members yearn for the days he was the assassin sent to eliminate Hanson.         

Maybe the fundamental problem for the Liberals is that its party base has aged, and as a class, older people are stupider people when it comes to climate change.  And any younger people who have some attraction to the party are probably under the influence of the culture warring of the populist American Republicans, and hence also not strong believers in climate change but want to spent their time on decrying "woke" issues and complaining about tax.    So the smarter politicians in the party who do see climate change as a very large and demanding issue have this internal institutional pushback to fight against.

The party is therefore kind of doomed for now, and I don't see it being fixed unless they have the massive internal clean out they need. 

 

Political similarities

 I missed most of Kitchen Cabinet last night, featuring Annabel Crabb's lengthy friendly interview style with Anthony Albanese.  

In this online article by her, obviously related to the show, she notes similarities in the careers of Albanese and John Howard:

Point of view: You are the Australian prime minister. You've been elected for a second term, an outcome barely anyone would have predicted back when you were grinding your way through desolate years of opposition. You've just introduced a tax you once promised not to. You're staring down an intense scare campaign on that tax, while — in other news — Pauline Hanson is steaming in off a long run.

You are, of course, Anthony Albanese in 2026. But you could just as easily be John Howard in 1998.

We all, at some level, know that Australia has burned through a few too many political leaders of late. But it's genuinely rattling to realise that in the last 30 years, Anthony Albanese and John Howard are the only two prime ministers to win two elections in a row. The only two.

As it happens, I was saying to a friend only a week or two ago that Albanese and Howard seem to me to share the same kind of dorky "this man doesn't have the obvious looks or charisma to be PM, but I kind of like that about him?"  aspects. I think they both carry an air of slightly grumpy earnestness that goes over well, too.   Of course, there are a substantial number of people who hate them with a passion - but overall, I think they are relatively popular PMs because of the personal characteristics I've outlined.  

To compare some other recent PM's:  Morrison had a flaky Christian advertising man thing going that reeked insincerity and opportunism;  Turnbull always seemed like he had accidentally chosen the wrong party and was a tad too much in awe of himself, but his powers of political persuasion did not match his self-assessment;  Rudd definitely presented as always thinking he was the smartest person in any room but tried to cover it with a bit of false modesty in TV appearances.

Abbott - a generic weirdo with a "mummy" thing going on with his handler that was so strong it worried other Liberals in Parliament House!    And then there was Gillard, whose strong pre-leadership charisma suddenly diminished under the pressure of the top job; but you know, I think she is looked back on as having a basically likeable and good character, and I have ever heard Liberal voters positively admire her for her attitude of "no complaints, and no running commentary from me" after getting out of politics.  

That's my psychological profiling summation of the last 20 odd years of Australian Prime Ministers! 

 

Not free thinkers

Earlier this year, I mentioned Kimi, a Chinese LLM that I liked using, at least for some things.   At the time, it didn't seem to be much on anyone's radar (outside of nerd world).   Hence, over the weekend, when there was a lot of news about the high performance (and cheaper price) of its newest model release compared to the American models, I gave myself a pat on the back for being an early adopter.

This also led me to watching quite a few videos on Youtube of people trying out Claude.ai and Kimi on the exact same tasks, and the results were quite interesting.   Overall, as might be expected, Kimi takes longer but at about a third of the price, and produces results that are very similar (and certainly not, say, a third of the quality.)

But the most interesting result was that one video which showed that when given a relatively open ended job, such as inventing a game, with next to nothing very little in terms of instructing on the style, both LLMs produced near identical results.  Well, there were some differences of course, but the core aspects would make anyone think they are extremely similar.   [I made a mistake in my first version of this post - on rewatching the video, the instructions were not as open ended as I thought.]

As far as I can tell, the reason for this is not 100% clear, although I think some people are pointing to the "distillation" issue that is upsetting the American companies.  They say that Kimi, and other Chinese models, conduct a large part of their training by running fake accounts on the American LLMs, and the results they get are hence influenced strongly by the outcomes of the American 

Update:   I have deleted most of  the rest of this post, as it was based on my careless watching of the video over breakfast this morning.  I thought the prompt had been "make a compelling game, your choice" (more or less), but it wasn't like that.  Hence the similarities in the games are not as surprising as I thought.

I thought what it showed was that LLMs didn't have much in the way of human imagination, but seem very constrained in their "thinking".   And the way they are fiddled with to give the "right" answers on contentious cultural issues (like how Musk has spent so much time fiddling with Grok to try to make it lean Right and not be "woke", but without being a Hitler admirer) is another good example of this.

Anyway, I must watch videos more carefully before I post about them! 

 

Movie not recommended

I had the misfortune of watching Bugonia on Netflix on Saturday.   It had a few Oscar nominations last year, so I thought it couldn't be all bad.  But it is.

My fundamental issues:

*  it never felt real, or convincing, in any respect.  With the 2 male protagonists, I thought the autistic cousin felt very much like unconvincing acting; and the main lead - there was never any real explanation as to how he learned the great conspiracy secret that motivated him.  I guess one could argue that the "not quite real" acting of Emma Stone was justified by the ending, and in that sense she did a good job, but the ending blows it in another way.

*  It's supposedly a black comedy thriller?  Well, it's certainly black, but I didn't feel any comedy landing at all.   In fact, I would say it's hard to even identify the attempt at comedy, unless you feel the silly ending is one giant troll that made the movie a waste of time.

*  The ending both looks like a troll but also meant to be showing some dark pessimistic message of the nature of humanity.  That combination just doesn't work.   (I have now read that it is a remake of a South Korean film - maybe it did the messaging much better?)

*  As is usual with black comedy, I guess, no one is likeable.  Maybe the autistic cousin could be, if I found his part better written and I didn't feel it was acting?

*  The use of music was just - wanky pretentious?  In fact, I think it's safe to say the whole movie is pretentious.  

*  A ridiculous amount of blood in one scene.   

At least I am happy to see it didn't make much money - $43 million - so it was likely unprofitable.   The audience has taste, sometimes. 

 

It never ends

Many years ago (and I really don't know how many, but I would guess maybe 8?), I had run out of my preferred hair gel/goopy stuff from Japan and bought this on a whim:

I didn't care for it much and, after using it for a while, and following the arrival of more Gatsby, put it under the sink in the bathroom and forgot about it.

I rediscovered it about a year ago, tried it again, and found it better than I remembered.  

I like the smell, and every time I use it I am reminded of Dapper Dan, the pomade that featured in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, a movie which I've been reminded lately of due to The Odyssey.  (Maybe I need to see Nolan's effort to identify more of Oh Brother's inspiration.)

The thing is, though, I only need a tiny amount on damp hair to do its job, and I'm not sure it will ever finish.  I don't use it every day, but even so, it is diminishing at such a slow rate, it might be magically renewing itself overnight, for all I can tell.

And look at the list of ingredients, worthy of a petrochemical factory:

I asked Claude if it could identify when it was made, and it said after 2013, but it not narrow it down further.

So yeah, there is no point to this.  Other than noting my amazement at how long it is lasting, and that the line "I'm a Dapper Dan man" is coming to mind every time I use it...

Thinking about a lack of interest

I like to think about things that interest me, but also (sometimes) about why certain things don't interest me.  

The prompt for this:  the movie The Odyssey.

I have some immediate reasons for not being that excited.   I think Nolan tends to be overpraised for his movies.  I've enjoyed some, and found others (Interstellar!) pretty woeful and spent much time wondering how other people could overlook the faults which were obvious to me.  

Then there's Matt Damon, one of those odd actors who seems to me to be competent and a nice enough person, but I don't actually find him particularly appealing on screen.  (I prefer him to Matthew McConaughey, though, whose lack of appeal to me is more intense.)    And there's the right wing campaign against it - I think it is obvious from some tweets that some are claiming to have seen it when they haven't, and while their concern about certain casting choices might not bother me much, I sort of don't want to watch it thinking about how it should be viewed in light of Right wing culture warring.  

But I think there is a deeper reason, and it may just be to do with a life long lack of deep interest in Greek mythology.    Greek philosophy - well, of course that's important and significant - but Greek mythology?  Sure, you have to know a bit so as to have some useful metaphors, but some see psychological depth to some stories, and the problem is, I usually don't.   I tend to think more about the basic oddity of many of the stories.    

In a way, I've always found it a bit hard understanding why Western high brow education was so enamoured of Greek mythology.  Sure, the artwork and temples around it were amazing, but why their mythology, or mythologically based stories, like The Odyssey, have such sway seems harder to understand.   I've watched a few Youtube commentaries about the original poem and its very peculiar aspects to the modern reader, and they have reinforced, if anything, that my lack of interest is justified. 

Maybe it's like my disdain for Greek food - they do a couple of things well, and I even cook a very nice mousakka at home, but there's no real depth to it as a cuisine, if you ask me.   Similarly, it feels like some see a depth to Greek stories that I don't see as being really there.  (Presumably, someone like CS Lewis would be dismayed and think it's down to my lack of relevant education.)

Maybe I'm just a bogan and don't know it!

Anyway, I might see the movie, in the expectation of being underwhelmed, and then not be.  We'll see...     

  

Mechanical elves and Kant

Sabine Hossenfelder casts her very sceptical eye over some sciencey types who have written about whether the aliens (or deities, or mechanical elves) who turn up when people take DMT are real.

The comments that follow the video have a lot of useful (and, of course, witty) things to add.  (It is an idea that I don't think has turned up in any movie, yet.  Surprisingly.)

And - almost certainly it's the first time a Hossenfelder video has mentioned Kant - although a lot of people are a little worried about how it sounds with a German accent.  

Worth watching: 

Update:  Thanks to John in comments for the link to a BBC story earlier this year that I had missed.

Apparently, a mushroom in China is well known for causing "visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture", if eaten raw or insufficiently cooked.

Yet the chemical component that causes it is still unidentified.  And as the effects can be long lasting, there isn't much incentive for  self-experimentation.

I was particularly interested in this part, about spontaneous hallucinations of this type, which does happen:

It could also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people even when they're not consuming L. asiatica. The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 non-mushroom-related cases had been reported since lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909. But for those relatively few people, the outcome can be serious: a third of those patients who came down with non-mushroom-related cases did not fully recover. 

I would guess someone has considered this as an explanation for fairy lore?

Sometimes I wish things happened here as quickly and decisively as in China

Sure, I like messy democracy.  But when you see social issues that you would just like to see addressed by a bit of quickly implemented tough mindedness, China's approach can have some appeal:

 Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bade heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday, aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency.

The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, as is the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died.

But these interactive tools must not "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships," China's new rulebook says.

Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline.

That sparked an outpouring of grief on social media, with users archiving chat histories and sharing their last conversations.

"I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar."

Another user, who said they had spent more than two years with their AI companion, expressed similar anguish.

"He really is like my family, like my lover," she wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone—my heart feels hollow."

The regulations were jointly issued by five government departments, including the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)....

 

China is the first major jurisdiction to introduce specific rules targeting immersive AI tools that simulate romantic or familial bonds.

But it's a topic that has sparked debate and calls for guardrails worldwide.

A 2025 study by Common Sense Media found nearly three in four American teenagers had used AI companions designed for personal conversations like those available on the platforms Character.AI, Replika and Nomi.

 

Far from a permanent fix

It's been ages since I read about magnetic brain stimulation as a treatment for depression.  Perhaps it's because they are still trying to work out the right regime for it to have longer benefit:

Question  Do 10 once-daily sessions of intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex improve depressive symptoms more than sham iTBS?

Findings  In this randomized, double-blind, clinical trial of 73 adults with major depressive disorder, iTBS was superior to sham, with significantly greater reductions in clinician-rated depressive symptoms after 5 and 10 sessions; however, between-group differences were not sustained at the 4-week follow-up, as the sham group showed continued improvement.

Meaning  These findings suggest that 10 once-daily iTBS sessions improve depressive symptoms more than sham in the short term, with no sustained advantage after 4 weeks.

Here's the link. 

Giving it away (or trying to)

Well look at ads you find on Facebook...

A few people in comments say things like "mate, seeing you makes me reach for bottle", as the deal includes a bottle of Shiraz allegedly worth $80.

Seeing a give away deal like this made me suspect it must be owned by a billionaire who cares more about influence than making money.  And now that I look, yes it changed hands in 2024 and is now owned by the same guy, one Sir Paul Marshall, who is also the money behind GB News.   (Seems he might not be a billionaire, but he's close.)

His wiki entry indicates he's a conservative Christian with lots of deep thoughts about its intersection with economics.  Not quite as oddball as Peter Thiel perhaps, but still, people who get carried away fretting about the Enlightenment tend to be a worry.

I hope Qatar, in particular, feels stupid

I was going to say when I posted about this yesterday that it would be reversed in no time.  Everyone treats Trump as a rambling old man, now, who can't be trusted to mean what he says:

President Trump on Tuesday walked back his demand for collecting a 20% toll from ships that transit through the Strait of Hormuz — and instead said Gulf states would make major investments in the U.S.

Why it matters: Trump's Hormuz fee announcement on Monday was deemed illegal by the UN maritime agency and shocked many U.S. allies in the Gulf. It also validated the Iranian demand to collect service fees in the strait — something Trump himself rejected until several days ago.

What they're saying: "Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States," Trump wrote on Truth Social.... 

Behind the scenes: Two Gulf officials said Trump's announcement on Monday about tolls caught countries in the region by surprise.

• Officials from several Gulf countries asked their White House counterparts for clarification, the sources said.
• On Tuesday, Trump spoke to Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to express his condolences for the death of his father. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz also came up in the call.

Reality check: Before the war with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Bahrain had already committed to invest more than $2 trillion in the U.S. over the next several years.

As for Qatar:  I can only imagine how they scream every time he makes a random decision that hurts them "Geez, I've got to ring him again and remind him about the gold toilets in the airplane bribe." 

 

Fusion powered electricity is not practical

I've been meaning to post this for some weeks, after seeing Sabine Hossenfelder do another fusion sceptic video.  She does seem to flip flop a bit on this topic, to be honest.

She noted a few small companies that had moved the goalposts considerably, and then decided to scale down the aim of their research to mere componentry for others to use.

But most importantly, she pointed to this recent Nature Energy paper which argues fusion power is just very unlikely to be an economically viable way to make electricity:

While nuclear fusion power is often hailed as a future source of abundant, clean energy, current dominant fusion designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are unlikely to become competitive due to their expected low experience rates. Accordingly, policymakers should not rely on, or fund, fusion power as a core pillar of future clean energy systems unless designs with different characteristics are developed. ...

We find that the two dominant nuclear FPP designs, magnetic and laser inertial, are inherently large in unit size, extremely complex in design, and require moderate to high customization. Existing technologies with similar characteristics have historically had experience rates (ERs) of 2–8%. We also find that cost estimates for first-of-a-kind FPP vary widely from US$1,400 to $43,000 per kW. Using the interquartile range of these cost estimates and projecting the future cost using our empirically grounded ER of 5%, our results indicate that fusion power is likely to remain uncompetitive relative to other low-carbon electricity supply technologies (see Fig. 1). This casts considerable doubt on the future role of fusion power in a net-zero energy system and whether current investment levels from both the public and private sectors are justified. ...

 We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 nuclear fusion experts from the public and private sectors, covering both magnetic and laser inertial fusion approaches. Interviewees were guided through a structured survey to assess three technology-inherent characteristics of future FPPs: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. Drawing on existing academic evidence, these characteristics were matched to experience rates observed historically in technologies with similar characteristics. Since ERs of existing technologies are derived from empirical cost data, this approach is well-suited to estimating future cost reductions for FPPs, an early-stage technology with no historical data. During the interviews, cost estimates for future first-of-a-kind FPPs were also elicited to supplement those from the literature and to estimate the cost reduction trajectories for fusion power technologies. 

 Here's two of my fusion skeptic posts (there are more) in which I kept on making the same point about how achieving fusion is one thing, but making it in a way that is economically viable as a source of clean energy is another.

I don't really understand why investors, be they government or private, don't intuitively get that....