The odd Churchill family

Another link from Arts & Letters - this time to quite a long review of a biography of the woman who became the Churchills' war time cook.  The bits I liked:

Among Landemare’s regular clients in the mid-1930s were Winston and Clementine Churchill. Churchill was not at the time a minister, but he understood the political power of food. ‘He treated the dining room as a stage, and dinner as a performance.’ Happier as host than as a guest, he and Clementine gave dinners twice a week and frequent lunches. As lunch remained a less formal occasion the balance of the sexes didn’t matter. Winston and Clementine each held their own parties and she particularly enjoyed her ‘hen luncheons’.

 Although the Churchills always lived beyond their means, by the end of the 1930s Landemare’s prices had exceeded the Churchills’ reach. The outbreak of war, however, altered domestic economics once again. The demand for grand dinners declined and Landemare decided a permanent post would be desirable. The Churchills took on ‘Mrs Mar’ in February 1940, less than a month after rationing started. Clementine was ‘enchanted ... I knew she would make the best out of rations, and that everyone in the household would be happy.’ In May, Churchill became prime minister and Landemare moved into 10 Downing Street the following month. Here, at last, she becomes visible in history as a person described by others: ‘a round body’, according to one of the Churchill secretaries, ‘who could tell one in detail the intricacies of marriage and divorce among the aristocracy’. A woman who was ‘open and generous-spirited’ and ‘very calm indeed, whenever there was a mini-crisis’. She was quite often to be found sitting in the kitchen ‘half an hour or so before a big dinner ... with everything under control, reading the Sporting Life’. In October 1940 this sangfroid nearly cost her her life. Churchill ran into the kitchen during an air raid and told her to get into the shelter, but Landemare, who was making a delicate pudding, refused: ‘If I’d’ve turned it out it’d’ve been no more – it was so light you see.’ Churchill insisted, and moments later the 25-foot plate-glass window at the back of the kitchen exploded into shards. ‘Ooh the rubble, terrible,’ she recalled.‘He saved my life, I’m sure.’

Throughout the war she cooked at Downing Street, Chequers and occasionally in the tiny kitchen under the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill was an enthusiast for chain eating, which was his interpretation of the medical advice he had been given before the war. He liked soup last thing at night and insisted, even at Yalta, on operating on ‘tummy time’. He was not a glutton but, as Gray puts it, ‘he was used to good food and plenty of it.’....

The Churchills were famously terrible employers. Many a cook and kitchen maid had left in tears and one had reputedly gone mad. Mrs Mar, however, did more than stay the course. She became a trusted ally and a friend to Mary, the Churchills’ daughter. She took a practical view of Winston’s peculiarities. If, as sometimes occurred, he ‘absent-mindedly wandered around stark naked’, she told him off and he would apologise. His roast beef ‘always had to be underdone’, but since he was often late for meals this could be difficult to achieve. Landemare’s method was to ‘watch till I knew he was in, then he’d have to have his bath and then I knew to put the meat in’.

The odd Mozart family

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a short article from the US edition of the Spectator talks about the peculiar things we know about Mozart and his family from his letters.

First - execution as exciting public entertainment for the kiddies:

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

And dinner table conversation with the whole family must have been, um, fun:

That’s probably the most notorious aspect of Mozart’s letters: the filth. Quite how gamey they get varies with the translation. The classic English version — some 616 letters covering the period 1762 to 1791 — comes in three fat volumes, translated by Emily Anderson in 1938 in the best possible taste. More recent paperback selections by Robert Spaethling and Stewart Spencer are less reserved: ‘I’ll shit on your nose so it runs down your chin,’ writes the 21-year-old Wolfgang to his cousin Maria in Augsburg, and if you’ve seen Amadeus, you’ll know that there’s plenty more where that came from. (Mrs Thatcher famously disapproved of the scatology.) One advantage of Anderson’s edition (and Spencer’s 2006 translation) is that it includes letters from the rest of the Mozart family, and it’s clear that they were all at it — mother, father, daughter and son, all cheerfully potty-mouthing away. ‘Stick your tongue up your crack,’ Nannerl urges her brother.

Living in a tube on the Moon or Mars

Some interesting talk here of the size of lava tubes on the Moon and Mars, and their likely safety for a base:

The international journal Earth-Science Reviews published a paper offering an overview of lava tubes (pyroducts) on Earth, eventually providing an estimate of the (greater) size of their lunar and Martian counterparts....

"We measured the size and gathered the morphology of lunar and Martian collapse chains (collapsed lava tubes), using digital terrain models (DTMs), which we obtained through satellite stereoscopic images and laser altimetry taken by interplanetary probes," reminds Riccardo Pozzobon. "We then compared these data to topographic studies about similar collapse chains on the Earth's surface and to laser scans of the inside of lava tubes in Lanzarote and the Galapagos. These data allowed to establish a restriction to the relationship between collapse chains and subsurface cavities that are still intact."

Researchers found that Martian and lunar tubes are respectively 100 and 1,000 times wider than those on Earth, which typically have a diameter of 10 to 30 meters. Lower gravity and its effect on volcanism explain these outstanding dimensions (with total volumes exceeding 1 billion of cubic meters on the Moon).

Riccardo Pozzobon adds: "Tubes as wide as these can be longer than 40 kilometers, making the Moon an extraordinary target for subsurface exploration and potential settlement in the wide protected and stable environments of lava tubes. The latter are so big they can contain Padua's entire city center."

"What is most important is that, despite the impressive dimension of the lunar tubes, they remain well within the roof stability threshold because of a lower gravitational attraction," explains Matteo Massironi, who is professor of Structural and Planetary Geology at the Department of Geosciences of the University of Padua. "This means that the majority of lava tubes underneath the maria smooth plains are intact. The collapse chains we observed might have been caused by asteroids piercing the tube walls. This is what the collapse chains in Marius Hills seem to suggest. From the latter, we can get access to these huge underground cavities."

Francesco Sauro concludes: "Lava tubes could provide stable shields from cosmic and solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts which are often happening on the surfaces of planetary bodies. Moreover, they have great potential for providing an environment in which temperatures do not vary from day- to night-time.

Back to the Axios interview

Despite my reservations about Swan, it should go without saying that Trump's interview with him was a terrible performance highlighting all of his gargantuan inadequacies not just as a President, but as a person.

The worst look for his character was surely the response to the invitation to say something good about John Lewis, in which he made it clear that he views personal relationships in a purely transactional way. 

We already knew this, really:   all a mad dictator has to do is praise Trump to his face, and Trump will transactionally sing the praises of said dictator forever more.   But don't turn up to his inauguration, and no way will Trump say anything good about you.

How can his cult members find such a deeply cynical, "what's in it for me" attitude appealing?  

Sudden success comedian

Yeah, I saw the viral video of "Uncle Roger" watching the fried rice video and was amused.

I see that this character by Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng has a new video out, and I have to say, while it starts slow, his interactions with (real or fake, I'm not 100% sure) customers often made me laugh out loud.

I think Nigel, who seems to have been around for a while (with what appears to have been moderate success - he has toured as a support act in Britain, for example) may have a major hit on his hands with this character:

Still suspicious

This is not going to be a popular take on the matter, but nevertheless....

I watched all of the Jonathan Swan interview with Trump on Youtube last night, and I can understand the praise for an interviewer actually doing follow up questions, and looking openly sceptical and aghast at some of Trump's comments.

But you know, it still made me uncomfortable, or at least suspicious, as I kept thinking "why isn't Trump losing his cool with Swan?   Has Swan pre-endeared himself to Trump somehow such that Trump will tolerate anything he says, or any face he pulls?"

I saw on Twitter afterwards someone asking more-or-less that same question, and one person claimed that Swan is buddies with Jarod Kushner.   But I see that he did an interview with Jarod last year that lots of people think did not go well for the son-in-law.   So how true could this be?

When Swan started at Axios, I noted quite a few tweets which made me suspicious of his politics - I actually thought he should be sacked, as he was looking to me to be much like a Chris Uhlmann character - positioning himself as a moderate or objective middle man, but in fact conceding too much to the Right to really fit that picture.

I still have my suspicions about him.

I would try that (if the price is right)

I must be a bit weird,  because I usually enjoy airline food.  Perhaps it's because I find flying per se a wondrous thing, and the added bonus of being able to eat food prepared for me while simultaneously hurtling around the planet at 40,000 feet just makes the total experience even more awesome.   [The only downside, apart from the leg room issue and the occasional unpleasant co-passenger, is trying to suppress flatulence until in a place it is "safe".  Sorry.  :)]

Let's not rush to conclusions - unless it's about how a white person should never do time for killing a black person

The Right white commentators are high five-ing themselves over leaked footage showing more of George Floyd being arrested and acting as if he may well have been high at the time.  This includes the "I'll turn my opinion on a dime if I can find a way to excuse a white guy in any confrontation with a black guy" CL at Catallaxy:

Next:

The video shows Floyd was handcuffed as soon as he got out of the car (at gun point).  And, I would guess, was probably patted down for weapons, but you can't tell from the video.  [Update - yes you can, I just hadn't watched it long enough.  They checked his pockets before trying to get him to sit inside the police car, and before he was on the ground with a knee on his neck.]  

So supposedly, huge, drug affected, hand cuffed people have been well known as dangerous killers for years, according to policing expert CL.

Finally, the deep regret at ever thinking that a white police officer was acting dangerously while kneeing a black guy's neck for 9 minutes:

Basically, no person who is an active commenter at Catallaxy should ever be allowed near jury service, especially if it involves an accused of colour (or, for that matter, a Muslim.)    It's like the veneer of "not racist, just being reasonable" is about a micron deep.

What I don't understand about Tik Tok panic

Peter Navarro tries to explain:

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Monday that the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok poses a threat to privacy and national security, telling the Axios Re:Cap podcast, "Let's not downplay the threat here: the mothers of America have to worry about whether the Chinese Communist Party knows where their children are."

I dunno:  if someone from the CCP could give the mothers a call and let them know, most of them would probably think it's a useful service.

Everyone knows the average user of Tik Tok is really young;  young people don't tend to do anything that is of national security importance.    Who cares if the CCP in theory might be able to ask the company to hand over data that could tell them that Johnny is probably skipping high school (or his college class) today?  

Given the incredible depths of information that Google and Facebook collect on nearly every single adult in the West, and (one would have to suspect) the ease with which China could get some internal company spy to leak some of that information, worrying about Tik Tok just seems wildly disproportionate to me.

Stiglitz on debt

Despite my feeling that economics is having something of a crisis in understanding what is happening in the world at the moment,  I still sense that Joseph Stiglitz is credible and well worth listening to.

Here he is in The Guardian warning of a looming debt crisis, and what should be done about it:

While the Covid-19 pandemic rages, more than 100 low- and middle-income countries will still have to pay a combined $130bn in debt service this year – around half of which is owed to private creditors. With much economic activity suspended and fiscal revenues in free fall, many countries will be forced to default. Others will cobble together scarce resources to pay creditors, cutting back on much-needed health and social expenditures. Still others will resort to additional borrowing, kicking the proverbial can down the road, seemingly easier now because of the flood of liquidity from central banks around the world.

From Latin America’s lost decade in the 1980s to the more recent Greek crisis, there are plenty of painful reminders of what happens when countries cannot service their debts. A global debt crisis today will push millions of people into unemployment and fuel instability and violence around the world. Many will seek jobs abroad, potentially overwhelming border-control and immigration systems in Europe and North America. Another costly migration crisis will divert attention away from the urgent need to address climate change. Such humanitarian emergencies are becoming the new norm.

This nightmare scenario is avoidable if we act now. The origins of today’s looming debt crisis are easy to understand. Owing to quantitative easing, the public debt (mostly sovereign bonds) of low- and middle-income countries has more than tripled since the 2008 global financial crisis. Sovereign bonds are riskier than “official” debt from multilateral institutions and developed-country aid agencies because creditors can dump them on a whim, triggering a sharp currency depreciation and other far-reaching economic disruptions.

Back in June 2013, we worried that “shortsighted financial markets, working with shortsighted governments,” were “laying the groundwork for the world’s next debt crisis.” Now, the day of reckoning has come. This past March, the United Nations called for debt relief for the world’s least-developed countries. Several G20 countries and the International Monetary Fund have suspended debt service for the year, and have called upon private creditors to follow suit.

Unsurprisingly, these calls have fallen on deaf ears. The newly formed Africa Private Creditor Working Group, for example, has already rejected the idea of modest but broad-based debt relief for poor countries. As a result, much, if not most, of the benefits of debt relief from official creditors will accrue to the private creditors who are unwilling to provide any debt relief.

The upshot is that taxpayers in creditor countries will once again end up bailing out excessive risk taking and imprudent lending by private actors. The only way to avoid this is to have a comprehensive debt standstill that includes private creditors. But without strong action from the countries in which debt contracts are written, private creditors are unlikely to accept such an arrangement. These governments therefore must invoke the doctrines of necessity and force majeure to enforce comprehensive standstills on debt service.
 

No doubt I have copied more than I should, but go to the article to read about his proposed response.

Meanwhile, in unreleased comments...

....Graeme is going on and on about how upset he is that I am have stopped letting his pro-HCQ and other "how to avoid COVID-19" nostrums through anymore. 

Graeme, it's a great pity your anti-Semitism conspiracy theories prevent you participating at Catallaxy, as your wildly disproportionate certainty in your own expertise and conclusions means you are a natural "fit" for all of the armchair experts-in-everything that inhabit that awful place.

You've had more than a fair run in comments here about your solutions to COVID-19, and it's become boring and repetitious.  Even though all sensible people reading this blog should know I don't endorse your views on nearly anything, I'm calling a halt to your publication of dubious amateur hour medical advice via my comments.

Call me "unconvinced"

If I was one to use the meme, I would be saying this quote has me reaching for my revolver:

In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote. Later, she added that “there are no new ideas … only new ways of making them felt.”

Demon seed not enough to stop Andrew Bolt

Look, we know he has to bloviate for a living, but I still find it remarkable that he would write in defence of a demon seed believing doctor's opinion on COVID 19:

How can he ignore this part?:

Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.

“Hello, you don’t need a mask. There is a cure,” Immanuel said. 

Update:  I've now watched the video of his editorial - he knows she said masks don't matter; he knows she believes demon seed causes some illnesses.  He just shrugs and says on HCQ, she may be right, she may be wrong.  (Exactly the same open minded attitude he brings to climate science - Ha!)  But he's sure the motive for taking her video off social media is because she supports Trump.   Just another grand Bolt conspiracy theory, in other words. 

He cares more about defending Trump from an imagined political attack than the spread of crank disinformation that would further bolster the crank anti-mask refuseniks in America and Australia.   More interested in politics than public health.   A disgrace.

Good to see

France 24 notes:

Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the official residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday and thronged the streets of central Jerusalem, as weeks of protests against the Israeli leader appeared to be gaining steam.

The demonstration in central Jerusalem, along with smaller gatherings in Tel Aviv, near Netanyahu's beach house in central Israel and at dozens of busy intersections nationwide, was one of the largest turnouts in weeks of protests.

Throughout the summer, thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets, calling for Netanyahu to resign, protesting his handling of the country's coronavirus crisis and saying he should not remain in office while on trial for corruption charges. Though Netanyahu has tried to play down the protests, the twice-a-week gatherings show no signs of slowing.

Israeli media estimated at least 10,000 people demonstrated near the official residence in central Jerusalem. Late Saturday, thousands marched through the streets in a noisy but orderly rally. Demonstrators hoisted Israeli flags and blew loud horns as they marched. Many held posters that said “Crime Minister" and “Bibi Go Home” or accused Netanyahu of being out of touch with the public.

There should be a pushback

I have seen a couple of recent articles about the dangerous rise of Qanon within Republican circles.  There's one in The Guardian, and one in WAPO.   Both articles show that the Trump campaign is courting these nutters.

I don't understand why there isn't a stronger Democrat pushback on this.   If I were Biden, or his advisers, I would be on the front foot in the media pointing out often that this is a nutty and dangerous conspiracy that only one party is condemning.  

Adam whips himself into a frenzy

Update:   And in an article we can be safely assume Adam would not read, or at least, let influence him, Science magazine notes the vexed issue of lingering effects of infection:

“Everybody talks about a binary situation, you either get it mild and recover quickly, or you get really sick and wind up in the ICU,” says Akrami, who falls into neither category. Thousands echo her story in online COVID-19 support groups. Outpatient clinics for survivors are springing up, and some are already overburdened. Akrami has been waiting more than 4 weeks to be seen at one of them, despite a referral from her general practitioner.

The list of lingering maladies from COVID-19 is longer and more varied than most doctors could have imagined. Ongoing problems include fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain.

The likelihood of a patient developing persistent symptoms is hard to pin down because different studies track different outcomes and follow survivors for different lengths of time. One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. Data from the COVID Symptom Study, which uses an app into which millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden have tapped their symptoms, suggest 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. But with the crisis just months old, no one knows how far into the future symptoms will endure, and whether COVID-19 will prompt the onset of chronic diseases....

For Götz Martin Richter, a radiologist at the Klinikum Stuttgart in Germany, what’s especially striking is that just as the illness’ acute symptoms vary unpredictably, so, too, do those that linger. Richter thinks of two patients he has treated: a middle-aged man who experienced mild pneumonia from COVID-19, and an elderly woman already suffering from chronic leukemia and arterial disease, who almost died from the virus and had to be resuscitated. Three months later, the man with the mild case “falls asleep all day long and cannot work,” Richter says. The woman has minimal lung damage and feels fine.

 In one respect, the article reports something that's not as bad as it could be:  it seems that COVID 19 causes less lung lesions than SARS did.  Seems like the range of other effects outweigh that, though.

Trump on how to make enemies with every American high school student

Banning Tik Tok seems a pretty ludicrous idea to me;  so naturally it's appealling to the Orange One.  Nevermind:

Extraordinary heat

While the world frets (rightly) about COVID-19, terrible temperature records are being set:

Record high temperatures have been plaguing the Middle East, the mercury soaring to extreme levels during a blistering and unforgiving heat wave. Baghdad surged to its highest temperature ever recorded Tuesday.

Tuesday’s preliminary high of 125.2 degrees (51.8 Celsius) in Iraq’s capital city shatters its previous record of 123.8 degrees set on July 30, 2015, for any day of the year.

On Wednesday, Baghdad followed up with a temperature of 124 degrees, its second-highest temperature on record. On Monday, it had reached 123 degrees.

The crippling heat forced many residents indoors, and street sellers had to seek whatever shade they could find. With the state electricity grid failing, many households were relying on generators to power fridges, fans or air-conditioning units, the machines adding a guttural hum to the city’s already-noisy streets.

Yes: the failure of a power supply in heat like that is surely an invitation to death.

Surprising tech news

On re-watching Goodfellas

Last weekend, I re-watched Goodfellas on Netflix for the first time since I saw it in the cinema, waaay back in 1990.

To be honest, not much had stuck with me about it over the years.  I remembered thinking Ray Lolita was good in it, and for some reason I could recall the bit near the end when he felt the authorities finally closing in on him as he kept looking up and suspecting a helicopter was following his car.   While nominally handsome, I always felt there was something about Lolita's face or gaze which made him look like he was not being sincere, and that you were dealing with a personality mask rather than a genuinely open person.   Not sure why he always gave me that feeling, but it works a treat for a character like the one in this movie.   (I get the same vibe about Eddie McGuire, as I have mentioned before.  I need a supercomputer to analyse the faces of men I feel are inherently untrustable to tell me what it is that is causing this reaction.)

On re-watching it, I realised I had forgotten how much humour and nostalgic music was in it, given that it was about mob gangsters.   My son said it might be accused of glamorising the criminal life somewhat, which is something I am often sensitive about in watching this genre.  But when they start eating their own, I think it's hard to say that's the effect of the movie overall.  (I still argue that glamorisation of the criminal underworld is a huge problem with Tarantino, however, despite his movies' body count.)  

Speaking of violence, it shows how far normalised movie and television depictions of violence have become.  Now whole effects studios seem to be engaged in adding blood sprays from bullet shots to the head in every show under the sun on Netflix;  whereas just one graphic blood spray in 1990 was enough to get an R rating at the cinema.   I long for the days when depictions of violence had more impact because it was genuinely considered shocking to show the graphic effect of violence for entertainment purposes. 

Anyway, I certainly could understand the praise for the direction, and overall, I would say I had forgotten how good it was.