Why (some) mushrooms are "magic"

Ed Yong has an interesting article at the Atlantic, explaining a theory that some mushrooms make hallucinogens to ward off insects:

These genes seem to have originated in fungi that specialize in breaking down decaying wood or animal dung. Both materials are rich in hungry insects that compete with fungi, either by eating them directly or by going after the same nutrients. So perhaps, Slot suggests, fungi first evolved psilocybin to drug these competitors.

His idea makes sense. Psilocybin affects us humans because it fits into receptor molecules that typically respond to serotonin—a brain-signaling chemical. Those receptors are ancient ones that insects also share, so it’s likely that psilocybin interferes with their nervous system, too. “We don’t have a way to know the subjective experience of an insect,” says Slot, and it’s hard to say if they trip. But one thing is clear from past experiments: Psilocybin reduces insect appetites.

Powerline in fantasyland

I visited Powerline to see if they have started to turn on Trump yet (no, of course not, although I would say it is more muted than before), but I note that John Hinderaker tries to defend Trump on Afghanistan by - you got it - blaming it all on Obama:

Barack Obama’s administration was a horrific failure in just about every way, but he has had the press running interference for him for eight years and counting. His lies and broken promises about Afghanistan are a sobering reminder of what a poor job he did as president. So far, Donald Trump has been a vast improvement.

This is where the American Right is stuck - in a ridiculous belief that, against all economic and other evidence, the Obama administration was a disaster.    They have no credibility til they stop believing that.

More on the Brexit reality sinking in

Have a read of Martin Kettle in The Guardian.

Nuts for Trump

I had noticed this guy in the background at the Arizona rally.  Here's his story:

Strange story of a 'Blacks for Trump' guy standing behind President at Phoenix rally

The weird Dershowitz show

At last, some background on why Alan Dershowitz has been putting himself out there in support of many Trump views.  

It has been weird, and I could have just put it down to my general theory that most people above a certain age come to have, shall we say, unreliable views.   (Don't worry, I've got at least another 20 years of blogging before you can start to hold this against me.)

The Trump decline

Trump is getting a lot of negative commentary after the Arizona rally, and the Washington Post says that even those attending got bored with his self indulgent (and never ending) complaints that everything is the media's fault.

Yes, it seems the Charlottesville reaction is a true turning point for Trump, and one from which it is hard to see how he will recover, given the "it's everyone else's fault" cycle that he's stuck in.

Wives on offer

The issue of marriage as part of cultures is a hot topic at the moment, given the same sex marriage "plebiscite," and it has led to me reading about oddities of some other cultures' practices within marriage of which I was unaware.

I couldn't recall ever having heard anything about marriage in Inuit culture, but I found via Google that the popular topic there is the matter of wife swapping/trading. 

There's a .pdf paper from 1971 (when Inuit were still eskimo) on the topic here  - and it makes for interesting reading, not only for the wife swapping parts, but also the picture it paints of how dangerous it was for an eskimo/Inuit man to meet a stranger in the middle of nowhere.  (Unless the other guy was recognized pretty quickly, it was usually a matter of run away, or kill or be killed, apparently.)   Doesn't sound very "noble savage" at all.

More discussion about it can be found at this 1961 paper.

Both make the point that the half siblings produced by these arrangements felt a special bond - quite a bit different from the "mixed family" issues we see in the West.

For those who can't be bothered following the links, I'll post a brief wiki explanation here:

Among the Inuit, a very specialized and socially-circumscribed form of wife-sharing was practiced. When hunters were away, they would often stumble into the tribal lands of other tribes, and be subject to death for the offense. But, when they could show a "relationship" by virtue of a man, father or grandfather who had sex with their wife, mother or other female relatives, the wandering hunter was then regarded as family. The Inuit had specific terminology and language describing the complex relationships that emerged from this practice of wife sharing. A man called another man "aipak," or "other me," if the man had sex with his wife. Thus, in their conception, this other man having sex with one's wife was just "another me."^[36]

None of these studies discuss what the wives actually thought of the arrangement - the implication seems to be that they didn't mind the variety -  but surely they must have been resentful at some of their husband's loser mates visiting and claiming rights.

As for gay marriage, or even recognition of homosexuality, it seems that some modern Inuit thinks it's very un-traditional and against their culture.   I guess the counter to that, for the same sex marriage advocate, is that perhaps a culture that flourished by socially endorsed wife swapping shouldn't really be complaining too much about what others think is acceptable within marriage...

Holding their heart in their hands - literally

What an extraordinary thing: 

An initiative reunites transplant recipients with their former organs for education and therapy.

Vietnam War revisionism revised

Yes, I had noticed how those at Catallaxy who think The Left-Liberals in Politics Have Been And Always Will Be The Source of All Evil and Failure in Society are fully on board with the idea that the Vietnam War was just a failure of American will, not American military power, and if it weren't for those goddamn liberal newspapers publicising leaks about how the Generals weren't always telling the truth about things, it could have all been wound up with great success by 1970.

I've always thought that this sounded like a rubbish argument, and this column today in the New York Times by a historian explains that it's always been a minority view amongst his peers, and he gives some explanation as to why.

The big question is how similar Afghanistan is to the Vietnam situation.

In some sense, I would have thought it's pretty similar - both the North Vietnamese communist leadership and the Taliban are ideologues of the most entrenched kind. 

On the other hand, I think (from what little I know) that the Afghanistan government being propped up is not a corrupt or unworthy government in the way the South Vietnamese one was. 

But back to a similarity:  the locals in Taliban controlled areas are (I think) often sympathetic to the Taliban.  What's the point of winning those dirt poor territories if they are going to resent their "liberation" anyway?

As I was pondering all of this while shaving this morning, a thought did occur to me - surely one big difference is the military supply lines that the North Vietnamese had was not going to stop.  But where does the Taliban get its weaponry from?   Is it just that they don't really need that much to cause mayhem, and a little goes a long, long way?

As for the Jason Soon question raised yesterday - why support Afghanistan at all - the issue of the Taliban/IS taking over most of the country and having nuclear armed Pakistan next door does sound a reason to worry about giving up on it entirely.

Civil war and sex

What with all this talk about the American Civil War, and gay relationships in Australia, I thought it only appropriate that I Google the combination of both and see what turns up.

I think this post Sex and the Civil War is pretty good, relying (heavily, perhaps) on the main book on the topic that comes up.

Anyhow, lots of talk about prostitution and the war, but on the gay side there isn't much to note.

I did like this cross dressing story that would seem improbable in a movie:

Occasionally ordinary soldiers would share their tents with their wives. In the Confederacy, Keith Blalock signed up with “Sam” Blalock, a good-looking sixteen year old boy, actually his wife Melinda. Melinda fought three engagements before she was wounded and found out by the regimental surgeon. Upon discharge from the Confederate army, they continued to soldier on together as Union partisans.

But back to homosexuality, this paragraph is interesting, especially the Jefferson proposal which just goes to show how tough you can still be and call it leniency when the original punishment is death:

Homosexuality was not much of an issue. There are not many recorded, probably because sodomy was regarded as an unspeakable crime. Though some reenactors a few years back “reenacted” a firing squad for two soldiers dressed in pink uniforms for “conduct unbecoming”, in fact there is no record of any soldier on either side being executed for the offense of homosexuality, or for that matter being disciplined for the offense. However, a handful of sailors were thrown out of the navy. Military law did not specifically outlaw sodomy until 1921. But we should not infer from this that homosexuality was previously accepted along the lines of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Keep in mind that at the time of the Revolution sodomy was punishable by death in all thirteen colonies. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed a more lenient penal code under which homosexuals would be castrated and lesbians would have their noses pieced with half-inch holes; Jefferson’s proposal was rejected and sodomy remained a capital crime until 1831.

 I don't know how the homoeroticism of Walt Whitman fits into that take on matters, though...

Update:  just went to check - sodomy in Britain only had the death penalty removed in 1861, although the last two executed for it were in 1835.   Their story - executed for activity for which the only evidence was a witness who watched through a keyhole - makes for an interesting Wikipedia entry. Oddly enough, various websites inform me that death was still the punishment for it in Victoria up to 1949 (!).  I did note here in a previous post, though, that the last Australian execution for it was in 1863 in Tasmania.   Took them a hell of a long time to remove the punishment from the books in Victoria, then.

Which way is the wind blowing today, Mr President?

Axios has a post listing the many tweets over the years in which Trump has called for America to get out of Afghanistan completely.

Everyone's expecting that he will shortly announce more troops going in.   Nearly everyone is also expecting that Bannon will blast the decision from Breitbart as a Trump capitulation to the Generals.   I also think that most people would be very surprised to see an extra 5,000 or so troops making a long term difference.   Short term, yes, maybe; long term - no.

To be honest, I don't know enough about the situation in Afghanistan to know what is the best thing to do.  But then, I didn't spend years criticising Obama either for his decisions about dealing with the complex issue.  

Brexit fantasies

I see that Simon Wren-Lewis is very annoyed at the quality of journalist debate about Brexit in the UK.  Interesting.  

American Civil War revisionism

At this time of renewed discussion about what the American Civil War was all about, and the point of statutes to Confederate figures, it's worth reading this 2001 lengthy review of 3 books on the topic, which the New York Review of Books was kind enough to include on their email.  (I have a suspicion I have read it before, but I'm not sure.)

Also, I was quite surprised to read of the "notorious white county" in Georgia in Slate, and how recently there the racism remained on display:

I was raised in Forsyth County, Georgia, one of the most notorious “white counties” in America, and a place where mob violence was the law of the land for nearly a century. After a young woman was murdered there in the fall of 1912, whites lynched a local black man, then waged a months-long campaign of terror that drove out every last black neighbor. For decades after, residents attacked any nonwhite who dared to step over the county line and kept Forsyth all-white throughout my childhood in the 1970s. In 1987, when a group of locals, including my family, marched to protest the ongoing segregation, we were met by an army of white supremacists who vowed to “Keep Forsyth White” and paraded through the streets of my hometown with nooses slung over their shoulders.

As I said here last week, those on the Right who like to pretend that racial issues in the US were all done and dusted because of civil rights reform in the 1960's are rather silly...

More Lewis

I enjoyed reading Shaun Micallef's account of meeting and interviewing Jerry Lewis on a couple of his trips to Australia.

Also, when I mentioned how Lewis had been ill for a very long time, I didn't realise he had a bad heart too since the 1960's, until I read his Wikipedia page.  He was like a walking tribute to modern medicine...

Adding extra centimetres

From Phys.org: 

Japan on Saturday launched the third satellite in its effort to build a homegrown geolocation system aimed at improving the accuracy of car navigation systems and smartphone maps to mere centimetres.

Here's the thing...

Here's my simplified take on Bannon.   Vox writes:

Bannon’s project centered on opposition to what he derisively called “globalism”: the idea of tearing down borders and linking countries through trade, immigration, and international institutions like NATO and the United Nations. He believed that Brexit and Trump’s rise in particular showed the way for a global uprising of so-called “nationalists” or “populists” against the status quo.

“We believe — strongly — that there is a global tea party movement,” Bannon said in a 2014 speech. “The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos.”

But here's the thing:  globalisation has worked well, particularly in terms of stopping the wars in Europe (and, I suppose, the Pacific too if you count the rise of Japan as a proto-globalisation success), as well dramatically raising global wealth, mainly via China's engagement with trade and capitalism.   It has come at an adjustment cost to middle America and parts of Europe in particular, but then again other recent policy issues unrelated to globalisation of trade (poor regulation of banking, nutty policies in Greece, tax reform that benefits the rich, and technological change generally) have played a significant role in the decline of the fortunes of the middle class too, particularly in the last decade.

What's more, with the obvious looming economic and humanitarian problem of global warming, a globalist approach to address that is the only one that makes sense.  

This is why the Bannon project was eccentric and fundamentally misguided, even leaving aside the distasteful, if not dangerous, ethnonationalist aspect. Globalisation does present problems for the West, but given its successes, it's no wonder that the rest of the world, and "big picture" institutions like the Catholic Church - save for its most conservative element, which is engaged in its own war against what might be called the globalisation of ideas - were not on side with the Bannon response.   Throwing the baby out with the bathwater never made sense, and indeed, the same thing can be said about Brexit.  

What's more, an increase in nationalist, isolationist sentiment is hardly the cure for a threat from radicalised Islam:  isn't it sort of obvious that the isolation of countries that already have large Islamic influence would be more likely to increase the Islamic nationalist sentiment in those countries too?   (Sure, full engagement, such as with the likes of Saudi Arabia also has its own problems, but the West seems doomed to play a very complicated dance while it waits for Islam to sort out its centuries old internal civil war on the global stage.) 

The way backwards

From NPR:

When children in Turkey head back to school this fall, something will be missing from their textbooks: any mention of evolution.

The Turkish government is phasing in what it calls a values-based curriculum. Critics accuse Turkey's president of pushing a more conservative, religious ideology — at the expense of young people's education....

Erdogan does not support implementing sharia law. But he has repeatedly been elected by religious voters who felt their beliefs were neglected during decades of enforced secularism.

In a barber shop in the Istanbul neighborhood where Erdogan grew up, a bearded man in a traditional Muslim cap chats with the barber as he gets a shave. He explains how he kept his daughter out of school when Turkey didn't allow girls to wear headscarves in classrooms. The ban was lifted in middle schools and high schools in 2014.

"In school, they taught us humans evolved from monkeys. But that's not true," says Suat Keceli. "I support our government taking it out of biology textbooks. I think it's Satan's work."

In revising these textbooks, the government sought input from a small cadre of religious academics, including the president of Turkey's Uskudar University, a private institution that will host an academic conference on creationism this fall.

"Most Turks don't believe in evolution because it implies that God doesn't exist, and we're all here on earth just by chance! That's confusing," says the university's president, Nevzat Tarhan. "Turkey is a modern democracy, but we should not be afraid to embrace our Islamic culture as well."

Jerry Lewis

He had famously suffered health problems for so long it sort of surprised me he reached the age of 91, but in any case I note Jerry Lewis's death with appreciation for the laughs he provided over the years.

I'm not sure that he was all that likeable in person - he certainly gave the impression of having a pretty high opinion of himself - but perhaps some of the more controversial things he said over the last 10 or 20 years were the result of cranky old age.   But at his peak, count me amongst those who did find him very funny.   It did please me when my kids enjoyed watching some of his movies with me on DVD when they were younger.  Perhaps I should watch Artists and Models again soon.

Nietzsche and the alt.right

Vox has an article with the following heading and subheading:

The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too.

 The alt-right is obsessed with the 19th-century German philosopher. They don’t understand him.

It's of interest, but it doesn't really dissuade me from my view that there is likely ittle for me to gain from reading Nietzsche.   I'm happy to go along with his quasi-redemption in the second half of the 20th century as more misunderstood than malicious, but as even this writer says at the end:

Nietzsche was a lot of things — iconoclast, recluse, misanthrope — but he wasn’t a racist or a fascist. He would have shunned the white identity politics of the Nazis and the alt-right. That he’s been hijacked by racists and fascists is partly his fault, though. His writings are riddled with contradictions and puzzles. And his fixation on the future of humankind is easily confused with a kind of social Darwinism. 

But in the end, people find in Nietzsche’s work what they went into it already believing.

Which reads to me like a big warning sign - if it's that much work working out what he really meant, isn't that a sign of a failed philosopher?   What's more, if he was so unclear that he was able to be  adopted by fascists (and, as this writer admits, it's not hard to see how they took parts of his writings as supportive)  there doesn't seem much to me worth admiring about his efforts.

I think I might have said something similar here before.   But nothing seems to have changed.

That's Right - let's harass Brandis for his sincerity

Sinclair Davidson deserves a red hot call from Brandis, if not the PM, personally if he allows this comment by ABC bombing fantasising Quadrant fool Roger Franklin (it is an open secret that he comments at Catallaxy as "areff") to remain on the blog.

Whatever one may think of Brandis' reaction to Hanson's stunt yesterday, there was no doubting its sincerity, and it's really disgusting that Australian wingnuts should be promoting telephone harassment of his office over it.

Update:  there's now a link back to here from SD, indicating he doesn't give a toss - an attitude which doesn't displease entirely, since I assume it helps keep him and his desired policies well outside of any  circle of serious political influence within the entire Coalition.   He'd rather be nuttily obsessed with s18C and run a routinely offensive Australian alt.right supporter's forum than be taken seriously.  Winning.