A pointless early death (times 10 million)

NPR reports, about the pig meat industry in the USA [my bold]: 

Millions Of Pigs Will Be Euthanized As Pandemic Cripples Meatpacking Plants 

Jason Lusk, the head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University, estimates that there is currently a 40 percent reduction in meat processing capacity, which will lead to 200,000 pigs per day being left on their farms.

"That's a million extra pigs that would have gone to market, but instead are staying on the farm, from just one week," Lusk said.

Hogs ready for slaughter cannot be easily held on farms because of their fast rate of growth. Pigs that are held much longer than six months after birth grow too large for processing, and meat processing plants typically won't accept hogs larger than 300 pounds.

"Nationwide, as an industry, we're thinking right now, given what we know, somewhere between five and ten million" hogs for euthanization, said Leman, a farmer from Eureka, Ill., and a board member of the Illinois Pork Producers Association.

Before the Coronavirus crisis, pork production was a finely-tuned, just-in-time supply chain. During normal times, this led to efficiency and the reduction of the cost to produce pork. Now, it is a significant burden to hog farmers who will have nowhere to sell their ready-for-market pigs.

I guess from an individual pig's point of view, it matters little whether they are being killed to be eaten, or be buried in a pit, all at the young age of 6 months.  (Apparently, left alone, they will live 15 to 20 years.)

But from a broader point of view, where a humane person's preference is that, by and large, it's good to let semi-sentient creatures live out their life if they are doing me (or other semi-sentient creatures) no substantial harm,  this completely ruins the justification for having helped create more of them in the first place.   (The justification being that we are all part of a natural order in which living creatures find good sustenance from eating other living creatures, and hence we are entitled to humanely raise and kill some, and not be wasteful about it either.)

I eat meat, but I do feel worse about farming and slaughter as I get older.   

An excellent summary of the journalistic problem on reporting on Trump

Greg Sargent's column at WAPO re-visiting the problem with the mainstream media's political reporting on Trump and Republicans is really good:

The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.

News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.

But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again....

....news accounts are reporting on this [the Republicans trying to make the "unmasking" issue into a scandal] in purportedly objective ways that subtly place an editorial thumb on the scale in favor of those attacks.

For instance, the Associated Press ran this headline: “Flynn case boosts Trump’s bid to undo Russia probe narrative.” Axios told us:

Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.

CNN informed us that this is “the latest salvo to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation and accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing.”

But here’s the problem: These formulations do not constitute a neutral transmission of information, even though they are supposed to come across that way.

The new information actually does not “boost” Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation or “discredit” it. And if there is “no evidence of wrongdoing,” then it cannot legitimately be “turned into an election issue.”

There’s no way to neutrally assert that new info “boosts” an attack or constitutes a “salvo” or is “becoming an issue.” The information is being used in a fashion that is either legitimate or not, based on the known facts. Such pronouncements in a from-on-high tone of journalistic objectivity lend the dishonest weaponizing of new info an aura of credibility.

Referring back to how this happened with Hillary Clinton:

When critics say Clinton was unfairly placed on an equivalent plane to Trump in this regard, journalists defensively point out that Democrats must be scrutinized, too. But this misses the objection, which centers not on a demand for light scrutiny of Democrats, but on a criticism of presentation and proportionality, and the ways in which getting that lopsidedly wrong misinforms in a larger and more intangible sense.

In today's bit of Buddhist trivia

I found this in a International Committee of the Red Cross paper, about how Buddhists cope with COVID-19 (my bold):

Very early in the history of Buddhism, short verses were recommended by the Buddha to provide protection from certain afflictions, and these formal paritta (pirit in Sri Lanka) recitations of sacred texts are still regarded as having the power to heal, protect and ward off danger.

All-night paritta recitations by monks are deemed particularly effective, and the Sri Lankan Mahavamsa contains the earliest historical reference to this practice, describing how Upatissa I of Anuradhapura instructed monks to recite the Ratana Sutta through the night when Sri Lanka was afflicted by plague and disease.  This practice continues in Theravada Buddhist contexts, and during the Covid-19 crisis senior Buddhist monks in Myanmar also performed mid-air recitations of parittas on a special aircraft flying above the country to ward off the outbreak.

Now, I'm not at all against the principle of praying per se, but this apparent idea that flying above the country while praying sets up something like a protective force field against disease seems a slightly funny (and slightly delightful) amalgam of science and the supernatural to me.  All a bit Dr Strange, perhaps. 

Another Catallaxy situation

Steve Kates has been on another bender of Trump worship at Catallaxy recently, re-printing large numbers of comments from The Australian in support of his orange demigod after Troy Bramston dared write a highly critical piece.    

"So, what else is new?" you may ask.

Today, Kates goes into full blown wingnut conspiracy in a post in which he explains that the COVID-19 lockdowns are only about the e-vil Left trying to defeat Trump in the Presidential election.   Nonsensically, he also notes that a  lot of deaths have happened in nursing homes in strongly Democrat States, due to deliberate policies of allowing (or requiring) the residents to return to them after hospital admissions for COVID 19 treatment. The intention was, according to Kates, to increase deaths in those States.

Killing off frail nursing home residents in an already solidly Democrat State might seem, to someone not caught up in a bubble world of wingnut conspiracy, a strange way for those Democrat leaders to try influence voters in their favour.

Or as someone in comments says:

I don't understand the terms on which Sinclair gives posting rights to his blog, but it would seem to be on some sort of permanent basis regardless of the quality of content and the paranoia of the poster.  

Free speech for his nutty mates does mean, at least, that he continues to have his own reputation tarred by his own blog.  That's the good part.

Facilitating the import of the American paranoid/conspiracy style on politics in Australia - that's the bad part.    

Made me laugh

Some people seem to have an active dislike for the humour attempts of the Borowitz Report at the New Yorker.  But sometimes, it really hits the spot:

Rand Paul Says Secret to Social Distancing Is Making Everyone Despise You

Update:  I also like this headline from The Onion -

The contradictions of not-so-gay Poland

A few weeks ago, Foreign Correspondent had an interesting story on Poland, which has a real culture warring Right wing government (in cahoots with particularly Right wing leadership in the Catholic Church), and one of the biggest targets of both is homosexuality.   It was a balanced take, though, and included a town mayor who was openly gay and said that he managed to get on with his life with no problems.   However, you still have several districts which make declarations that they are "LGBT free" zones, and stuff like this:

Poland is preparing to vote on a new law that would criminalise sex education and denounce those who teach it as paedophiles and LGBT+ activists.

so it's hardly a happy place for many gay folk, that mayor notwithstanding.

It's with that background that I was surprised to read in this article, on the mixed way formerly Communist Europe used to legally deal with homosexual activity, that Poland has long been, at least in a technical, criminalisation sense, liberal on the matter [my bold]:

 Poland presented the strongest divergence from the Soviet model. Same-sex acts continued to be formally criminalized in the country after the First World War, when the penal codes of the former occupants (Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary) remained in power. They mostly criminalized male same-sex acts, though the Austrian code included broader provisions against so-called ‘same-sex fornication’ and was indeed also used against women. The new Polish penal code of 1932, however, decriminalized consensual same-sex acts, and they have not been recriminalized since. This new law simply reflected the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which had been used as a model for the 1808 law of the Duchy of Warsaw, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807 from the Polish lands ceded by Prussia. It was also influenced by the prominent Polish sociologists of that time, Antoni Mikulski and Leon Wachholz, who promoted the interpretation of homosexuality as innate. Interestingly, many Western countries – usually perceived as more progressive than Central and Eastern European countries – were lagging behind Poland with respect to the legal status of homosexuality. Denmark, for example, decriminalized same-sex acts in 1933, Sweden in 1944, England in 1967, Canada in 1969, West Germany in 1969, Austria in 1971, Finland in 1971, Norway in 1972, Ireland in 1993 and the United States, often considered as the prototype of the West, fully decriminalized homosexuality only in 2003, more than seventy years after Poland did so.

I would not have guessed that the country would have been under the influence of sociologists at that time.

So there's quite the disjunct between criminal law and culture acceptance in that country.  I suppose you could say the same of Asian countries such as Japan, where Wikipedia tells me:

Same-sex sexual activity was criminalised only briefly in Japan's history between 1872 and 1880, after which a localised version of the Napoleonic Penal Code was adopted with an equal age of consent.^[2]

yet it is only recently that gay people have started to be open about it on the media, and to their families.

Anyway, back to Poland:  the Foreign Correspondent story also noted that there had been a very large scale scandal of Catholic clerical child abuse revealed there not so long ago, very similar to the story elsewhere.  (Offending priests moved instead of prosecuted, etc.)   Again, it is hard to see how this will not erode the Church's authority on its teaching on sexuality.   Not sure how the right wing government got elected, though...

Can some journalist point this out to Trump?

One of Trump's back up plans for finding an excuse for [possibly, hopefully, and I think likely] losing the November election is to blame it on Democrats providing for voting by mail:

Yet in California, the Republicans just won back a seat (traditionally theirs anyway, so no one is in a great panic about it) in which it seems likely that perhaps 50% of the votes were by mail:

In 2018, in California as a whole, 43 percent of the votes ultimately cast were not in the morning-after tabulations, and the proportion of mail ballots in this special election (for which all registered voters were sent a mail ballot due to an executive order from Governor Gavin Newsom) could be even higher.

He shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.   Even though he is a moron and there is no way to get him to make sense.

A bit late to the historical Korean zombie party

I like my zombies in small doses, and hence have no interest is something as protracted as The Walking Dead (ten series, seriously?), but I did start watching with my son the 2 series (but short - 6 episodes each) of Kingdom, in which zombies run amuck in ye olde Korea.

It's pretty entertaining, and a significant part of the fun is the odd (to Western eyes) costuming - particularly the hats.  The royal guards' two feathered ones look particularly flamboyant:

As I suspected, the hats have attracted some internet posts about whether they are accurate or not, and it would seem the answer is pretty much "yes".

Cool.

What a disgraceful moron

Isn't it remarkable that Republicans and conservatives support a President who defames a vocal critic by promoting a groundless, nutty conspiracy theory that he's a murderer?   Where's the common decency on the Right gone?  

The modern world

Brisbane's autumn skies are often clear and really good for early evening satellite spotting.

As I left work a couple of nights ago, I looked up to see what I could see with the good view I had to the west, and saw what looked like a pretty bright satellite moving in such a way that I thought there was a good chance it was the International Space station.   I turned on my phone and said "OK Google, ISS sightings for Brisbane Australia", and in a flash, information from a NASA website showed it was indeed the space station.

This is the undeniably cool side of near instantaneous information from the internet.

I am not sure that it makes up for the creation of a self supporting community of idiocy that the internet also enables.  It should, but gee at times I have my doubts.

I was mistaken

At first I thought this might have been Tony Abbott confessing as to what Peta Credlin had forced him to do:

but I was mistaken.

What a suck up

Command of English?   Yeah, "thrown out to sea in a chaff bag" was positively Shakespearean.  As was "nigger in the woodpile".  Such eloquence, the likes of which way never hear again.

I've always thought Adam a dill, but his validation of my judgment lately is so thorough it's still surprising me.

Update:  I know that there is also the odd "Leftist" journo who is making comment about what a "brilliant" broadcaster he is, in terms of effectiveness with his audience, even if you don't agree with his views.   But this is a very stupidly narrow way of judging a broadcaster career performance.   Even without criticising the political content (the anti carbon tax support, for example) what about the (I think) 11 defamation cases he faced?   Isn't a "brilliant" broadcaster one who is careful enough to avoid such a large number of financial losses for his employer?

Wonder drug continues to be no wonder

Results of an observational study published yesterday in JAMA:

In this study, during rapidly expanding hospitalization for COVID-19, 70% of patients received hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin. Patients who received hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin were more likely (relative to patients receiving neither drug) to be male, have preexisting medical conditions, and have impaired respiratory or liver function at presentation. There were no significant differences in in-hospital mortality between patients who received hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin and patients who received neither drug.

The lack of observed benefit of hydroxychloroquine associated with in-hospital mortality, following adjustment for preexisting disease and severity of illness on admission, is consistent with recently reported data from other observational studies.^17,23,24

Some good media news

Alan Jones, veteran Sydney radio host, announces he will retire on health grounds 

I find it a considerable puzzle how he has any substantial following at all.  Even if you ignore the content, I find his style to be so obviously pompous (how long has he been slipping opera into the end of his show?) and arrogant (an over-inflated self regard for his role as political kingmaker),  I don't understand his appeal at all.  

The biggest problem with the internet...

....is that it has put conspiracy minded idiots in instantaneous contact with other idiots, setting up a community and cycle of mutually reinforcing idiocy, all with the ability to be politically exploited. 

Today's example:  Obamagate is still trending on Twitter, with the main concern of many of the posts being that despite the number of mindless tweets on the topic, it's some sort of serious conspiracy that Twitter is repressing the hashtag from being number one on "Trending"!

And all it took is one Fox News "story" that is pure speculation (my bold):

"Sources are telling Watters' World that Attorney General Bill Barr was just given a trove of smoking gun documents that could point directly at former President Barack Obama, revealing his powerful connection to 'Spygate' and the Russia hoax," Watters said on Saturday.

Of course, Trump, an idiot, then just had to tweet "Obamagate", and his cult followers, not to mention the sad sack Qanon followers who find meaning in fantasising about how their Annointed One will (finally!) unleash an attack on the Deep State that has corrupted all that is good and right in the world, resulting in mass arrest and executions of liberal criminals, jump on board and find more evidence of conspiracy because their hashtag is not No 1.

The US is in so much trouble, because this idiocy is exploited and encouraged by the large slab of idiots in the Republican party.

The two best things I have read on the Michael Flynn scandal

David Graham in The Atlantic: he even thinks that the FBI notes about the tactics to use in interviewing Flynn are a worry, but still notes that the outcome is ridiculous:

But as it happened, the notes didn’t have to convince Sullivan, because the Department of Justice withdrew the charges before the judge had to reach a conclusion. (Sullivan could still reject the DOJ’s motion. The long-running prosecutor on the case abruptly withdrew from it today, a likely sign of disagreement, and The New York Times reports that the motion stunned prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office.) Flynn’s defenders argued that the FBI was out to get him, and if the FBI is out to get you, it will find a way. But there’s a corollary: If Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department wants to let you off, it will find a way too.

The whole process is stunning: Flynn was accused of committing several crimes, admitted to one to try to get himself off easy, agreed to cooperate, reneged on the deal, and is now free, having escaped punishment for both the crime to which he confessed and those on which he avoided prosecution.

Yet Flynn’s escape is not merely an isolated outrage. It is also a test case for loyalty to Trump. Since Flynn flipped on Trump, and then flopped back, his fate offers a lesson for others who might find themselves in a bind and tempted to turn on Trump, who continues to engage in the sort of behavior that got him impeached.

And today, at Axios:

Mary McCord, former acting assistant attorney general for national security, claimed in a New York Times op-ed Sunday that the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn "twisted" her words to suggest that the FBI's 2017 interview of Flynn was illegitimate.

Why it matters: The Justice Department's filing relies in part on McCord's July 2017 interview with the FBI to argue that the FBI had no valid counterintelligence reason to interview Flynn, and that the former national security adviser's apparent lies were therefore immaterial....

The bottom line: "In short, the report of my interview does not anywhere suggest that the FBI’s interview of Mr. Flynn was unconstitutional, unlawful or not “tethered” to any legitimate counterintelligence purpose," McCord concludes.

 There has been the suggestion that Sullivan could, before deciding on the motion, ask for some sort of further explanation or investigation as to how the decision to withdraw was made.   It would seem that McCord's piece gives him plenty of reason to believe that the withdrawal of the charges is corrupt, but I don't know how he can get around a corrupt Attorney General...

Update:  a tweet on point -

Update2:   Another good article at The Atlantic: What Judge Sullivan Should Do

The distraction machine

And sure enough, Obamagate is trending on Twitter, and the Wingnut Right and Qanon idiots are beside themselves.

Update:  one thing I have noticed about Qanon on Twitter:  it seems to have unusually large support from women.   Not sure if all accounts are genuine, but this strikes me as odd.  Has anyone looked into this issue? 

Shipwreck story humour

Boy, that Tongan teenagers shipwreck story has gone viral.  It has given us this funny stream of tweets, too:

By the way:  I'm not doubting the story, but all photos I see of the survivors make them look way older than the ages they were when they were shipwrecked (13 to 16, and were on the island for "more than a year".)

About that Biden allegation...

This article at Vox about Tara Reade's allegations, from a reporter who had lengthy discussions with the complainant, is the single best thing I have read about the matter.

It convinces me that her complaint is highly dubious, given that her story has changed very significantly, and she has left raising the "worst" version against him until now, and not at the early stages of his career elevation.  I often don't care for Bill Maher's views, but his take on this matter seems right to me.

I know it's tricky, but Democrats and Democrat sympathisers with any brains should not let the mainstream media keep making this into another "Hilary's emails" situation - where they elevate an ill founded allegation to a significance it does not deserve, all to the benefit of the Wingnut Right.

A shipwreck tale.

It seems lots of people are sharing this article (actually, a book extract) in The Guardian about a 1960's case of 6 shipwrecked Tongan teenage boys in the Pacific who did not go all "Lord of the Rings".  

I note that the story rights were given to Channel 7 in Australia at the time of the rescue, but I don't remember it from my childhood.  (Although I would only have been 6 at the time.) 

Anyway, it's a nice, positive story.