Localised drug problems

I find it interesting how localised certain illicit drug problems can be.   I've posted about this before.  I think it's odd how, say, meth can be the problem drug in outback Australia, but hardly used at all in rural Britain.  Not entirely sure how that happens - some combination of cost and marketing decisions by the suppliers I suppose.  But there seems to be a bit of social contagion about it too. 

Anyway, the illicit problem drug of choice, so to speak, in New Zealand is apparently synthetic cannabis, and it does sound quite dangerous:

Daniel says synthetics have become the drug of choice because they are cheap and easy to buy. He believes the death rate is far higher than official figures.

Despite the risks to users, New Zealand is struggling to contain a synthetic cannabis epidemic, with children as young as 11 using the drug and entire neighbourhoods collapsing under the strain of addiction.

The government has been urged to confront the crisis after 45 people died from using the drug in the past year, making it the nation’s most deadly narcotic. In September dozens were hospitalised after a bad batch circulated in Christchurch, claiming two lives.

The grip of the drug re-emerged after a Radio NZ investigation found the entire suburb of Maraenui in Napier had been “swallowed” up by synthetics, with not a single person unaffected. 

I am told by a New Zealand born friend that cannabis itself was readily available when he was a young man there, which surprised me a bit, as I would have guessed that the climate there wasn't really ideal for its outdoor cultivation.

I wonder if there is any push there for legalisation of the natural product as being a better alternative than the black market of the synthetic.

But honestly, I still find it hard to believe that there is much benefit to adding more drugs into the mix of existing legal ones, particularly in poorer areas where drug use seems tied up with boredom and lack of economic opportunity.

A completely normal White House

It's kinda incredible that a story like this is not really attracting all that much attention.  But that's what happens when you put in a narcissistic lying idiot in the Oval Office:

The New York Times, citing half a dozen sources, reported that an altercation in February between White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Corey Lewandowski turned physical, requiring the Secret Service to intervene in the episode outside the Oval Office.

According to Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers, the near-brawl happened after a joint meeting between the men and President Trump. After a shouting match, Kelly grabbed Lewandowski by his collar and tried to push him against a wall. Lewandowski did not get physical, and the two men agreed to move on after Secret Service agents appeared on the scene.

Another teeth grinding piece at The Conversation

At the risk of upsetting one of my rare regular readers - this article at The Conversation "Why 
rapid on-set gender dysphoria is bad science"  shows what a ridiculously partisan and untrustworthy field this is.

As I said in my earlier post, it is patently clear that those with intense "pro transgender" take on the matter feel they must immediately attack and try to shut down anyone who dares suggest that there might be more to look at than just what a transgender child/person says about themselves. 

It is a ridiculous attack on the paper surveying parents which made it plain it was aware of its limitations, and acted more as a call for further research.

But no no no, we can't have that, can we?

If you enjoy grinding your teeth over cultural appropriation handwringing...

...you should try reading this article at The Conversation.

But make sure you read comments too.  There really is quite a pushback against this confected  grievance industry.

Or..they could try wearing a shirt?

An article at Medicalxpress notes that some Indian researchers have come up with a topical gel which "can be used by farmers to prevent nerve damage due to chemical crop spraying."

The article is accompanied by a video starting with this image:

Maybe I am too easily amused, but apart from the silly Bollywood macho vibe, my other thought is  "Hey, put a shirt on for your own protection, and stop waving about that poisonous chemical!"

Perhaps teenagers should read this...

Fewer Sex Partners Means a Happier Marriage
People who have had sex with fewer people seem to be more satisfied after they tie the knot. Is there hope for promiscuous romantics?

Actually, the article notes lots of cautions about how this research survey was done, but still, this graph is interesting:

Here's one paragraph from the article:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies (and an Atlantic contributor). In an earlier analysis, Wolfinger found that women with zero or one previous sex partners before marriage were also least likely to divorce, while those with 10 or more were most likely. These divorce-proof brides are an exclusive crew: By the 2010s, he writes, just 5 percent of new brides were virgins. And just 6 percent of their marriages dissolved within five years, compared with 20 percent for most people.

How to stop this level of paranoia?

I know that old pessimists have always been with us:  I remember a neighbour when I was a kid once  chatting to my father about how everything was dire and the world (and country) were getting worse and worse.  Mind you, this might have been in about the late 60's, when there was a considerable amount of bad news on the TV: Vietnam, the sexual revolution and doubts about capitalism's ability to thrive without environmental disaster were all key themes.  Not to mention what was going on in China and Russia and the possibility of nuclear war. 

But as a kid I was inherently optimistic (I suppose techno optimist, given my interest in science in the space program), and so it seemed to me that the neighbour was a sad case.  And, to his credit, my father thought so too.   "He's always thought everything was bad and getting worse. Some people are just like that." was his observation once the neighbour had gone back into his house.  (Well, I think that's a pretty close recollection.)  

Today, the problem of pessimism is exacerbated by online communities where the paranoid and conspiracy minded find it easier than ever to form a mutual support network.   You might think that this is harmless in some ways - keeping a small community of sad sacks in their own little world - but  the problem is, it surely works to deepen their paranoia and pessimism, and probably to bring others into the fold as well. 

Take this recent, fairly typical comment from (what I assume is) some older bloke in Queensland:

This comment comes in a Steve Kates thread about how "socialism kills".   The American "hard Right" started this "any policy involving any government intervention in anything is socialism" nonsense, and Steve Kates, a political idiot, sucks it all up and passes it on the blog of the (marginally) more sensible Sinclair Davidson.  

Then, in a post in which Keryn Phelps' Labor-like environment/refugee policy positions are listed he notes "These people are your enemy."   What uncivil and paranoid talk for an Australian.  

Basically, in their mind, centrism has become "socialism" - and all part of an evil plot involving culture, schools and political plotting many decades in the making. 

It's hard to say how influential or widespread such thinking really is - I mean, I can't even tell how much it is hurting the Liberals internally, given that so many at Catallaxy say they are abandoning the Party for the likes of Australian Conservatives, and will not vote for the Coalition in the next election.  (Or so they say - of course I don't believe that all that many will follow through, and in any event, their preferences will still go to the Coalition candidate.)  

But to the extent that there are "hard Right" members who really do want the Party to reject climate change action, privatise the ABC, and go all the way with whatever Trump thinks, it surely is hurting it internally.

The paranoia needs to stop and be wound back - but how?

I think a real problem is that no one within the Liberals is prepared to call it out.  They still linger on in the hope a "broad church" approach can work, when it is very clear it cannot.  

Malcolm Turnbull, you are now free to speak your mind - save your party by talking out about this.

Who really is interested in this?

I find it hard to imagine who, apart from the odd political journalist and historian, is going to be bother buying Kevin Rudd's revenge book.   

Still, I suppose you can say that about 95% of books by Australian politicians current or past.

I make one observation:  there seems there was a lot of crying going on when Kevin was in politics...

Update:  there's an extract from the book here.   Of course, extremely self-serving, with word for word recollection of conversation which make him sound like Mr Calm and Reasonable, against his observations of the "cold" viciousness of Julia Gillard. 

Look, maybe he didn't realise at the time that the "real reason" for the move came out of his behaviour as a nightmare of a boss.  But he's had time to learn the truth since then, when so many came out with details of his poor behaviour outside of media eyes. 

Just split - there is no other solution

I'm glad the Liberals didn't manage to get over the line in Wentworth (or so it seems.) 

The wingnutty Right seems to be reacting in a combination of "it's all Turnbull's fault - you couldn't trust him and he never really was a Liberal - believed in climate change - come on, as if"  and "you can't trust the voters of Wentworth - they're all doctors wives and believe in gay marriage and climate change - come on, as if."   To them, the party is doomed unless it swings firmly to the Right, blows up the Paris Accord and gets right behind burning more coal, right now.   (Oh, and stopping high levels of immigration, their second tier obsession.)   

This just goes to show the Liberal Party is completely internally compromised while ever the "hard Right"  or "wingnut Right" or whatever you want to call it tries to be accommodated by the centrists in the Party.

Mind you, even if Sharma had won, it would not have helped.   The centrists would have felt bolstered by that, leading to more resentment from the Right, which would have still run with the message "but you can't trust the voters of Wentworth". 

The Nationals are probably equally compromised - even though I don't keep that close a track on who is who there.   But you know there is trouble when you've got the National Farmer's Federation dropping scepticism about climate change, but Barnaby Joyce openly making it known that he'd be back in as Deputy PM in a flash if only the party would let him in.  He just doesn't take environmentalism of any kind seriously.

I've said it before but I'll say it again:   climate change and energy policies are really important issues.  When a substantial fraction of your Party does not even believe in the reality of a problem - there is no accommodating them by a tightrope act that cannot keep either side happy, because effective policies cannot keep both sides happy in that situation.  

The "hard Right" simply disbelieves science.   You can't accommodate that, policy wise.

This is worse than past examples of Labor factionalism.   At least their fights have been over how to react to an acknowledged issue, either from a firm Left perspective or a more compromising centrist one.   But they weren't fighting over whether there was actually an issue to address!   By contrast, this is the key  problem with the Coalition on climate change - dealing with a solid rump denying there is even an issue.

A proper leader of the Party needs to call for a split so as to resolve the otherwise unresolveable on a key issue for the future of the country.   Perhaps 20% to 30% of members, and a similar number of MPs, need to be told to leave and join the Australian Conservatives, or create the Tony Abbott Party,  or whatever.  They know they'll get the support of Murdoch and Sky News - why not go for it?    But they cannot expect to make their participation in the Liberals or Nationals work.  

Maybe Malcolm can call for that from outside of Parliament?   Can't see who else is going to do it, at least until the Party is soundly booted out of government.

White madness, and Doug Mawson, revisted

Back in 2011 I wrote about the Mawson Antarctic expedition, since I had just read about it in a biography of one of the lesser known participants, Herbert Dyce Murphy.  (Now that I re-read that post - which is one of my favourites because the author dropped into comments, I see that missed naming her book - Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer.  Sorry, Heather.)

It's probably more a case of my having forgotten, but I don't recall from that book much description of the mental breakdown of another member of the expedition - Sidney Jefferyes.  He was one of the six who had to stay in the hut for another year after missing the boat.  

His story is briefly told in ABC News today, and here are some highlights:   

There appeared to be no indication of Jeffryes' mental health problems until July 1913 when he got into several fights with his colleague Cecil Madigan, he stopped washing himself, and began collecting bottles of his own urine.

The expedition's medical officer wrote that Jeffryes was hallucinating and suffering from "delusive insanity".

Tensions grew further when another crew member found that Jeffryes had been telling Macquarie Island, via morse code, that he was the only sane member left on the expedition.

Mawson intervened, stating "Censor all messages Jeffryes insane" via morse, and removed him from most active duties.

In a letter declaring his sanity to his sister, Jeffryes wrote: "I am to be done to death by a jury of six murderers who are trying to prove me insane originating possibly from the jealousy of the six of them".

When the Aurora finally returned and took the men to Adelaide in early 1914, the ship's Second Officer Percy Gray wrote that "poor old Jeffryes, the wireless man, is beginning to go dotty again".

"The fellows were at the braces, they all rushed from one to the other and Jeffryes, whose cabin is on deck, thought they were coming to put him in his coffin, and leapt out of his bunk and barricaded the door."

"Poor chap, I am very sorry for him."

 Despite this, he was allowed to get on a train by himself, apparently to travel back to his home town of Toowoomba, and instead was later found wandering the Victorian countryside (naked, says one article - but another refers to having money in his pocket).   It seems he spent the rest of his life in insane asylums, at least one of which was possibly colder in winter than the hut in Antarctica.

What a sad life!

Anyway, I see that Mawson, when asked about Jeffryes making his way home unaccompanied, claimed that he thought he had recovered fully during the ocean voyage back, and the doctor who had shared his cabin thought so too.  Yet, you have that ship's officer in the above quote saying the opposite.   Perhaps this goes towards supporting the "Mawson was actually a jerk" theory which, as I noted in my 2011 post, seemed to be something of a relatively novel theme in Heather Rossiter's book.  (And got further backing in a, ahem, somewhat controversial revisionist biography in 2013 which speculated that he may have eaten one of his co-expeditioners to stay alive!)   

Blair gets around

Occasionally, very very occasionally, I learn something new from scanning through the website for Australian wingnut conservatives.  This, for example:

.
Tim Blair is that closely aligned to the climate change denial/culture warrior faction of the Liberals (the part that needs to be purged from the Coalition for it to re-gain credibility) that he goes to things like this?

I thought he might be more cynical of politics generally than to do that.

Secondly:  that Riccardo Bosi is an absolute conservative culture war nutcase. 

Android mystery

My Motorola phone had been showing me that I had used up about 14.3Gb of internal memory (out of 16 Gb) and I was wondering if I should delete some apps, since videos and pics were already on the SD card (which was also starting to fill up.)

Then this morning the phone said a new system update was ready - I think up to an Android Oreo version.  So I let it do it - about a 1Gb download and half an hour later:   my phone now says internal memory is only 11.2Gb!

How did it save 3Gb??

Anyway, I see now that you can configure your storage (on some phones, including mine) to let it format an SD card and treat it as if it were part of the internal memory.   So you don't have to fiddle about with moving apps to the card if you want to say space on internal memory.

Only problem is - it seems it formats the SD card first, and then you are really stuck with the same SD card forever, because of the way the phone is treating it for memory.   So if you get a new phone, you can't just whip out the card and put it in the new one.   Or so it would seem - still reading about it.

Not prepared

I guess hospitals are able to cope with vegetarian patients; strict vegan are surely more of a problem, but vegan and gluten free seems to have thrown one Australian hospital into a spin.  Feels a little bit mean to snigger, but snigger I did:

American Conservatives are the pits

Yes, I had noticed some of this talk on conservative websites before WAPO reported it:

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom. 

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights. 

It's hard to credit just how deeply shameful the talk and behaviour of American (and Australian) Trump supporting conservatives has become.

A potato observation

Is it just me, or do other people also find unwashed potatoes, when peeled and cooked of course, have better flavour than washed ones that have been peeled and cooked? 

Can someone give Jake Gyllenhaal a hug?

In an effort to find a relatively short Netflix movie to watch last Saturday, I settled on Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

I mean, I've always been pretty sympathetic to him as an actor, and this movie featured a mysterious doppelgänger, and those stories are usually sort of fun, aren't they?   Well, not always, as it turned out.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this movie had been renowned for its weird ending.  And weird beginning.   And several weird bits on the way to the ending.

Look, I recently spent a fair few words praising A Cure for Wellness for the intriguing possible number of interpretations that could be put on it; and it seems to me that quite a few reviewers more or less praised Enemy in the same way.

But for me - nah, this one crossed the line.  Trying too hard to be a movie that people will talk about by being obscure and arch.   And ridiculous.

There is one interpretation of what's going on that pretty much makes sense, up to a point.  But let's just say:  the spider ruins it all.   Don't get it - don't care.

The movie taught me two things:   someone in Hollywood really needs to tell Jake to start making movies in which he can be a nice, happy character and face a normal story arc.    It's OK to play a normal person, Jake. 

Secondly - I didn't realise til it was finished that it was directed by Denis Villeneuve, a director whose main films I have all seen, and commented upon here.   Careful readers may recall that I always find that they have a promising set up, and visually look good, but they always have story problems which cause my interest to dwindle away until by the end I am unsatisfied.

I have given him more than a fair chance to make a movie that has impressed me from beginning to end.   He has failed every time.

I do not like him as a director.  

Hedonism, again

The Guardian has an opinion piece by a gay activist (and, I would presume, popper user) complaining that the Therapeutic Goods Administration proposal to re-categorise amyl nitrite as a serious drug (potentially able to be treated criminally in the same way as heroin) is discrimination against gay and bi men.  (!) 

It would seem that the drug, which already (so I read:  not speaking from any personal knowledge here) is only sold for fake purposes under the counter at sex shops ("video head cleaner" used to be one of them, but then the VCR died out) is primarily used by gay men who find it useful to relax a certain sphincter during certain forms of sexual activity, as well as giving them a temporary high.  (And a flushed face, possible fainting, nausea and a variety of other potential and more serious side effects.)

I don't really understand drug categorisation and whether this article is exaggerating the potential for criminal action against someone in possession.   The TGA report linked to in the article certainly indicates there are hospitalisations in Australia (perhaps 20 a year in a recent decade) arising from its use - although its easy to find many sex advice health websites that appear to make light of the potential health risks.  (Have you seen what other things they make light of in terms of safe sex?  Instead of "why in God's name anyone would actually want to do such an obviously unnatural and bizarre stretching of an orifice is beyond us.  Honestly - do yourself a favour and just get more within the range of normal, hey?")

This is one of those topics where I wish there was a widespread revival of the Golden mean, and in my application of it the common sense suggestion would be "if you need a potentially dangerous drug to enjoy the sex, you need to try a different form of sex".    And/or "if you are finding your average ordinary orgasm is not enjoyable enough without being aided by the addition of a drug - you are being too hedonistic.  Perhaps try having fewer so that you enjoy the ones you have more?"

As for the TGA proposal - I would have thought a heavier crackdown on its sale and distribution would be what is deserved.  I don't really understand why it has been so commonly available so easily for so long.

Krugman correct

I think Krugman is perfectly entitled to claim vindication for his repeated warnings about what the Republicans would do.   (Well, he is not alone in such warnings, and he was sometimes repetitious in making them, but really, it is pretty breathtaking bad faith on the part of the GOP.)  I'll be bad and extract more of his column that I probably should:

When the Trump tax cut was on the verge of being enacted, I called it “the biggest tax scam in history,” and made a prediction: deficits would soar, and when they did, Republicans would once again pretend to care about debt and demand cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Sure enough, the deficit is soaring. And this week Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, after declaring the surge in red ink “very disturbing,” called for, you guessed it, cuts in “Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” He also suggested that Republicans might repeal the Affordable Care Act — taking away health care from tens of millions — if they do well in the midterm elections.

Any political analyst who didn’t see this coming should find a different profession. After all, “starve the beast” — cut taxes on the rich, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse to hack away at the safety net — has been G.O.P. strategy for decades.

Oh, and anyone asking why Republicans believed claims that the tax cut would pay for itself is being naïve. Whatever they may have said, they never actually believed that the tax cut would be deficit-neutral; they pushed for a tax cut because it was what wealthy donors wanted, and because their posturing as deficit hawks was always fraudulent. They didn’t really buy into economic nonsense; it would be more accurate to say that economic nonsense bought them.

.....

OK:   this part is new to me, and is important information when considering Laffer-ist claims that the total revenue did not drop after the tax cuts is some sort of semi-vindication:

What are they lying about? For starters, about the causes of a sharply higher deficit, which they claim is the result of higher spending, not lost revenue. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, even tried to claim that the deficit is up because of the costs of hurricane relief.

The flimsy justification for such claims is that in dollar terms, federal revenue over the past year is slightly up from the previous year, while spending is about 3 percent higher.

But that’s a junk argument, and everyone knows it. Both revenue and spending normally grow every year thanks to inflation, population growth and other factors. Revenue during Barack Obama’s second term grew more than 7 percent a year. The sources of the deficit surge are measured by how much we’ve deviated from that normal growth, and the answer is that it’s all about the tax cut.

Dishonesty about the sources of the deficit is, however, more or less a standard Republican tactic. What’s new is the double talk that pervades G.O.P. positioning on the budget and, to be fair, just about every major policy issue.

Physics and Philosophy for a Phriday

*   I quite like Philip Ball's explanation of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics in his article at Quanta.   He makes some points I do not recall having read before, such as this one (about the nature of the "splitting"):

For starters, about this business of bifurcating worlds. How does a split actually happen?

That is now seen to hinge on the issue of how a microscopic quantum event gives rise to macroscopic, classical behavior through a process called “decoherence,” in which the wavelike states of a quantum system become uncoordinated and scrambled by their interactions with their environment. Parallel quantum worlds have split once they have decohered, for by definition decohered wave functions can have no direct, causal influence on one another. For this reason, the theory of decoherence developed in the 1970s and ’80s helped to revitalize the MWI by supplying a clear rationale for what previously seemed a rather vague contingency.

In this view, splitting is not an abrupt event. It evolves through decoherence and is only complete when decoherence has removed all possibility of interference between universes. While it’s popular to regard the appearance of distinct worlds as akin to the bifurcation of futures in Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a better analogy might therefore be something like the gradual separation of shaken salad dressing into layers of oil and vinegar. It’s then meaningless to ask how many worlds there are — as the philosopher of physics David Wallace aptly puts it, the question is rather like asking, “How many experiences did you have yesterday?” You can identify some of them, but you can’t enumerate them.

Interesting.

I must say, however, that I feel a little less convinced by the article as it goes on with his explanation of his problems with the theory.   There's a heavy concentration on it attacking the concept of self;  but in these days where Buddhist ideas of there being no core self anyway have gained quite a bit of intellectual traction, it feels a little odd to be going after a theory on that basis.   (Not that I am a fan of the Buddhist idea - I think it's a worry for quite a few reasons.)

*  Now for philosophy:  if you want a dose of the most headache inducing philosophical question - the matter of free will, its existence, and whether a belief in its absence makes a nonsense of making moral judgement about human behaviour, you could do much worse than read this back and forth between Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso at Aeon.   In fact, I have not read all of it carefully yet - but at first glance, Daniel Dennett is making quite a lot of sense.

Great links, hey?  

Not quite Minority Report, but still sounds potentially open to abuse

Nature has an article that is upbeat about the potential for using AI to predict armed conflict, so as to enable early intervention:

Governments and the international community often have little warning of impending crises. Likely trouble spots can be flagged a few days or sometimes weeks in advance using algorithms that forecast risks, similar to those used for predicting policing needs and extreme weather. For conflict risk prediction, these codes estimate the likelihood of violence by extrapolating from statistical data4and analysing text in news reports to detect tensions and military developments (see go.nature.com/2oczqep). Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to boost the power of these approaches.
Several examples are under way. These include Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System, the Alan Turing Institute’s project on global urban analytics for resilient defence (run by W.G. and A.W.) and the US government’s Political Instability Task Force.

Trump and Science

Yet again, it's a case of not being sure whether to laugh or cry:  that Trumpian claim that he has "a natural instinct for science".   I think it's time to rename the Dunning-Kruger effect the "Trump syndrome".  More people would immediately recognise what it means. 

As for his natural science instinct:  how could you doubt it when one of his science-y highlights is how he has explained out loud for years about how CFC's cannot escape his sealed apartment:

Trump has made claims about hairspray and the ozone layer at least three times. Back in 2011 in Sydney, he implied the “eight-inch concrete floors” and “eight-inch concrete walls” of Trump Tower would prevent hairspray from “destroying the ozone that’s 400 miles up in the air.” In December 2015, at a campaign rally in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, Trump also said he doesn’t “think anything gets out” of his “sealed” apartment when he uses hairspray.

It's not just the child-like stupidity of imagining that gases never escape an apartment - it's the ridiculous sense of entitlement that it's a major regret that hairspray is not just like it used to be. 

Anyway, someone at Esquire does not mince words:

Trump has a predator's instinct for how people work and for identifying their weaknesses. He knows what motivates them and what plays on TV and how the media ecosystem functions. He especially knows how to keep the spotlight where it ought to be: on Donald Trump.

But in terms of intellectual capacity—the ability to reason at a high level, the volume of knowledge he's accumulated about complex phenomena, his familiarity with how humanity gathers information about the world—he is a complete and utter moron. He's a simpleton. He has absolutely no concept of how science works, which is why he feels comfortable telling the AP that he has "a natural instinct for science." Even if he did, which he doesn't, that would have exactly zero bearing on whether climate change is real. To the scientific community, the President of the United States just saying things has the same value as any other 72-year-old man yelling at them on a street corner: none.

In which he again complains about gunshots in entertainment

I just have to re-visit my complaint about how gunshot wounds are being portrayed on entertainment now.

I've been enjoying Fargo (second season) a lot, and it's not like I am going to stop watching it, but:  there was a very high body count from a sort of shootout situation in Episode 4, and the way the blood spray was special effected in on many shots made me feel more certain than ever - I reckon the special effects people are over doing it, and I strongly suspect it's certainly due to the influence of video games and their exaggerated depiction of how much blood sprays out of any gun wound.   

And look, I'm sure that some things like a close, high calibre gunshot to the head is going to be an awful mess, but it just seems that in too many shows, any shot to any part of the body is now creating big blood sprays that don't look all that real to me.  

I'm not going to ghoul around the internet trying to find close up videos of someone taking bullets, but I am curious as to whether I am right...

Dear Voters of Wentworth...

please, do not vote Liberal.   Help put this hopelessly inept government out of its misery:

And I should add:   dear Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie:   look, honestly, the Australian public will give you a pat on the back for curtailing a further 6 months of terrible government.  Please do it:

This man lectures at RMIT

The only way Steve Kates could climb further up Peak Cult Trump would be if he starts speculating on a transgender options, so that he can please the Master by giving his all, if you know what I mean.   Here he is, talking the Trump 60 Minutes interview:

The Interviewer thought she had his number, that she would take him apart. But she is dealing with the absolutely best, most articulate president possibly in history. A masterclass, as is every public presentation he gives.

Isn't his wife worried?   Not to mention his students.

How's that Laffer-ism going?

The "best" spin the diehard Laffer lovers can put on this is that the tax cuts have not (so far) caused a revenue drop:   but at a time when the economy is supposedly booming, should not revenues be up (and used to reduce budget deficit?)    Instead, why not ensure you will make revenue growth flat, and try increasing spending at the same time, hey Republican fiscal worriers?  Look, even the WSJ agrees with me (and pay attention to the two last lines in particular):

WASHINGTON--The federal deficit widened last year amid higher government spending—including rising interest costs on the debt and increased funding for the military—and flat revenues following last year’s tax cut.

The government ran a $779 billion deficit in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Treasury Department said Monday. That is the largest annual deficit in six years and 17% higher than the $666 billion deficit in fiscal 2017. As a share of gross domestic product, the deficit totaled 3.9%, up from 3.5% a year earlier and the third consecutive increase.

The deficit would have been even higher if not for shifts in the timing of certain payments, Treasury said.

Government receipts held steady at $3.3 trillion, despite strong economic growth and a robust labor market. The low unemployment rate, which hit 3.7% in September, coupled with rising wages would typically drive government tax revenue higher.

But individual withheld income taxes rose just 1% in fiscal 2018, and corporate tax receipts declined 31%—both reflecting changes implemented as part of the sweeping tax overhaul enacted in December.

Trump administration officials had argued last year the new tax law would generate enough economic growth to offset the costs of a tax cut. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went further, at times saying the changes would actually help reduce the deficit. Monday’s report showed that, so far, that is not happening.

What an insult to policy common sense.

About that civil war

There's a really interesting perspective piece in the Washington Post about the stupid civil war talk in the US at the moment, putting it in historical context of the atmosphere before the last civil war.

Basically, he argues that both sides before the C19th war took a somewhat religiously apocryphal interest in having a war to cleanse the nation.   The atmosphere in the US now is not the same -  most people can see how a war will downgrade the nation, not improve it.   (Save for the far Right, I assume - who fantasise that their authoritarian rule is just what the culture war that will kill the nation needs.)  Here are some extracts:

Apocalyptic visions captivated Americans' imaginations in the years before the Civil War. Southern Baptist Samuel Baldwin predicted in 1854 that Armageddon would ruin the Mississippi Valley, topple monarchies and Catholicism across the globe and introduce the second coming of Jesus Christ. The prophet calculated that these events would occur between 1861 and 1865 — a vision that won popular support when war broke out in 1861.

When Baldwin prophesied that Christ would return during his lifetime, he expressed a popular Protestant belief of the era, not a fringe faith. A wide array of Americans — evangelicals, reformers, utopians, boosters of manifest destiny and champions of scientific progress — believed that their actions could hasten the millennium, Christ’s thousand-year reign on Earth.

Many believers assumed that fire and blood would cleanse the world of sin and corruption before this divine presence. On April 11, 1861, the eve of the Civil War, Arthur Carpenter, an Indiana shoemaker, thought “a war of 5 or 10 years would be a great thing,” because “it would purge our nation.” Even after he volunteered and saw combat, Carpenter dreamed of biblical bloodletting. “When I die, I want it to occur in the largest battle that was ever fought, since the creation of the world,” he told his parents.

John Brown embodied Civil War Americans' faith that violence would reform America and usher Christ’s return. Brown believed that God had chosen him to end American slavery. After years of praying for the institution’s demise and guiding runaways to freedom, Brown turned to violence in Kansas and Virginia. Before his attack on Harpers Ferry, Va., Brown and his followers adopted a provisional constitution of the United States that would redesign the federal government after bloodshed washed away America’s sin. When his attack failed and he faced the gallows as a convicted traitor, Brown predicted a biblical reckoning for America, promising his jailers that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

White Southerners shared this 19th-century conviction that bold violence remade the world. Ardent secessionist and slaveholder Edmund Ruffin watched Brown die and called for disunion and war before other abolitionists followed his example. In 1860, he published “Anticipations of the Future,” a book that forecast Abraham Lincoln’s election, Southern secession and Confederate victory. Instead of waiting for an overt threat from the federal government, Ruffin urged slave owners to strike the first blow, take Fort Sumter, declare independence and convince the enemy that the price of reunion required too much Yankee blood and treasure. When the Civil War began at Fort Sumter, as he had predicted, Ruffin was there to fire the first shot.

 As to why it's different now:

The Civil War came at a moment when Americans felt control over an open, limitless future that God destined for them. Northern and Southern radicals embraced that optimism, confident that they could harness the war to achieve their ends. Enslaved millions considered America’s violent abolition an answer to their prayers. The heady optimists of the Civil War in the North and South raced toward Armageddon.

In contrast, our modern crisis is shaped by Americans feeling blindsided by unseen forces and questioning their power to direct the future according to plan. The firebrands of today who hope to stoke the passions of a divided nation encounter a society that is less confident about its future. Antebellum Americans looked forward to warfare as a catalyst for civilization, progress and salvation. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans doubt that warfare follows predictable, controllable paths and recognize how major conflicts create more problems than they solve.

 Good reading.

A self absorbed President has consequences

Yes, I agree with the gist of Nick Bryant's article, noting that it's hard to avoid the feeling that authoritarian leadership around the world has taken the hint that a self-absorbed, dumb, US President with a crush on "strong men" gives them lots of room to do authoritarian things and not worry that anything serious is going to be done about it:

The forced disappearance of the Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, who it turns out is being held by the Chinese authorities.

Mounting evidence underscoring the Kremlin's involvement in the chemical poisonings in Salisbury.

The seemingly gruesome case of Jamal Khashoggi, the missing journalist who Turkish authorities suspect was killed and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad inside the kingdom's Istanbul consulate.

All point to a world of disorder: of a slide towards unruliness; of a new era of strongman authoritarianism and a waning of international law.

Traditionally the United States has viewed itself as the upholder of norms, an exemplar of moral leadership, the policeman of global bad behaviour - an idealised notion it has not always lived up to.

But this week has driven home not just how much Donald Trump has been reluctant to perform that role. It also speaks of how his doctrine of patriotism is at risk of being interpreted by other nations as a doctrine of anything goes.

In the red, white and blue of America First do other countries see a green light to act with impunity?

The thing is, even if they know that the US will huff and puff at a diplomatic level, they know that within 24 hours, Trump will say or do something so stupid and/or vain that the public both in the US and across the globe will be distracted.   (The pointless media event of Trump meeting Kanye is the latest example.  Then he'll probably be off to another mini Nuremberg within 48 hours, to make himself feel loved.)

Update:  more on Trump's shrug shoulders attitude to Saudi Arabia and internation death squads.  

Update 2:  Allahpundit at Hot Air makes the point that the US has for a very long time put up with, um, bad behaviour from the Saudis out of economic self interest.  True, but I think it still makes a difference as to whether a President says it openly, or not.   It's a dirty secret a President just shouldn't be saying out loud.

The Good Emperor

Oh, I didn't realise this (the bit about never visiting the shrine) about Japanese Emperor Akihito:

The chief priest at Japan's controversial Yasukuni Shrine is to resign after making remarks highly critical of Emperor Akihito.

In comments leaked to a magazine, Kunio Kohori said he believed Emperor Akihito was trying to destroy the shrine by not visiting it.

The shrine in Tokyo honours Japan's 2.5 million war dead but also enshrines convicted criminals of World War Two.

It remains a high source of tension with neighbours, particularly China.

Emperor Akihito, who will abdicate next year, has never visited the shrine.

He has instead sought reconciliation with Japan's wartime enemies.

He has expressed regret over Japan's military actions in both China and the Korean peninsula, and has also visited several Pacific battlefields to honour the dead, actions that have brought him into conflict with right-wing groups at home.

Video violence and empathy

It was back in March that I last had a whinge about unnecessary blood letting and violence in video games.   In that post, I complained about how a couple of studies were claimed to show no connection between games and real life violence, but when you looked at the details, it was pretty ludicrous to conclude they were particularly useful studies at all.

Now I see that I had missed another study that came out at the end of last year, claiming to show that frequent violent video game players have lower empathy response.

Well, that's more aligned with my biases!

Anyway, the study was very technical in nature, and used EEGs and tests regarding looking at faces, etc.  All very technical.  As usual, with all of this sort of testing, it is best to treat it with a high degree of caution, but the test set up does sound a little less obtuse than that in the studies I complained about.   The abstract follows: 

Research on the effects of media violence exposure has shown robust associations among violent media exposure, increased aggressive behavior, and decreased empathy. Preliminary research indicates that frequent players of violent video games may have differences in emotional and cognitive processes compared to infrequent or nonplayers, yet research examining the amount and content of game play and the relation of these factors with affective and cognitive outcomes is limited. The present study measured neural correlates of response inhibition in the context of implicit attention to emotion, and how these factors are related to empathic responding in frequent and infrequent players of video games with graphically violent content. Participants completed a self-report measure of empathy as well as an affective stop-signal task that measured implicit attention to emotion and response inhibition during electroencephalography. Frequent players had lower levels of empathy as well as a reduction in brain activity as indicated by P100 and N200/P300 event related potentials. Reduced P100 amplitude evoked by happy facial expressions was observed in frequent players compared to infrequent players, and this effect was moderated by empathy, such that low levels of empathy further reduced P100 amplitudes for happy facial expressions for frequent players compared to infrequent players. Compared to infrequent players, frequent players had reduced N200/P300 amplitude during response inhibition, indicating less neural resources were recruited to inhibit behavior. Results from the present study illustrate that chronic exposure to violent video games modulates empathy and related neural correlates associated with affect and cognition.

Godless Episode 3

I'm still finding it is well acted and looks terrific, but I have too issues with episode 3:

*  too horsey;

* this show is starting to trigger my "why does Hollywood add so many splattery bullet-to-the-head shots in entertainment now?" complaint.   In fact, they are putting a lot of blood sprays in many shooting scenes - I really suspect that this is caused by contamination from video gaming aesthetics.  I have no way of checking this, but I very much doubt that in the 19th century, there was much to be seen by way of blood spray from your average bullet wound, at least to the body.  But because people are used to seeing huge blood sprays from any bullet wound in video games, they are inserting it in all shows now.

Rare paralysis

Seems to be an unusual spike in a rare kid's paralysis in Minnesota.   A connection with a viral infection (mild of itself) seems likely, but it's interesting how long it can take to work out what causes what, medically.

More about food safety in the 19th century

My recent post about ridiculously dangerous milk was all due to reviews of Deborah Blum's book The Poison Squad, and from an NPR interview about it, I extract this:

You tell stories of kids dying from eating candy that was contaminated with lead. Given that this was causing real suffering in consumers, what kinds of arguments were people making for leaving this unregulated?

It's baffling, because you are in this period where food makers are knowingly using very bad things. I gave the example of arsenic, which was a green food dye also used to make the shellac that glosses up chocolate. But lead was used to color candies, and red lead was used in cheese. If people wanted to make a beautiful, orange cheddar cheese, they just dumped a little red lead in it. This is not people who didn't know it was bad, but there were things that made it permissible. There were no labels, and so there was no public pressure. It was just a pre-regulatory Wild West of food that permitted bad actors to do what they will, and so they did. It saved them a lot of money. You get this capitalistic feedback loop of people who were trying to make a living – and wanting to make more of a living. The consumer was both the guinea pig and the victim.

To no one's surprise, if you feed people formaldehyde, or arsenic or lead, they will get sick. And when you demonstrate that, why does it still remain so difficult to outlaw these substances in food? 

The food industry had been organizing itself to fight regulation. Wiley had been advocating and working with congressmen to get some kind of basic consumer protection. And these experiments caught national attention — they were front-page news, there were songs about them — and everyone was realizing that there is a lot of bad stuff in their food. There was an immediate pushback. Suddenly, congressmen are on the side of food business or getting offered more money. The food industry organizes to create a Food Manufacturers Association. They were phenomenally effective. They did a great job trying to damage Wiley's reputation publicly and deny what he was finding, and bullied and threatened congressmen to kill regulation every time it came up.

If Catallaxy was still a blog where you could usefully argue about libertarianism as a political philosophy, I would be commenting there about this.

But now it's just full of ratbags, and it's even hard to goad Jason to comment here...

Now that Nordhaus wins a Nobel, people are remembering Pindyck

ATTP has a post up in which he wonders out loud about an issue I've long complained about in relation to climate change impacts:

However, I do think there are reasons to be cautious about some of these economic analyses. Let me provide a caveat up front. I’m not an expert at this, so am happy to be corrected if I get something wrong, and am partly writing this in the hope that I might learn something more.

For starters, these analyses are typically linear. This essentially means that they can say nothing about the possibility of some kind of large shock. Some of these analyses actually suggest the possibility of quite small global economic impacts even for extremely large changes in climate (see links below), which would seem to suggest that there is some point at which these calculations break down.

Also, as I understand it, most of these analyses do not consider how climate change might impact economic growth itself (see this Carbon Brief Explainer about IAMs). If the global economy grows at 3% per year, then it will be about 10 times bigger in 2100 than it is today. A large economic impact in 2100, might then seem small by comparison to the global economy at that time. Equivalently, if you discount these future economic costs to today, they can also seem quite small. Is it reasonable to assume that global economic growth will be largely unaffected by climate change?

My own view, which I’m happy to be convinced is wrong, is that these kind of analyses are fine if you want to understand things like what would happen if we did something (like impose a carbon tax). They’re probably also fine if you’re interested in how the economy will response to relatively small climate and ecological perturbations, or will respond over the next few decades. Where I think we should be more cautious is when the climate/ecological perturbations are large, or when considering very long, multi-decade timescales.

 And someone in comments reminds him that Pindyck has been saying this for some years now.

I remain quietly confident that in the next decade or so, the general view will be "come on, why did we ever thing the economic modelling of climate change was realistic?" 

Well, his briefings do have to be given as stick figure illustrations...

I'm sure his very big brain will come to the right conclusions...

An amusing tweet

In reaction to this story:  

Gay students and teachers could be rejected by religious schools under changes to anti-discrimination laws being recommended by a federal review into religious freedom, according to a media report.
The former attorney general Philip Ruddock, who chaired the review, said the right of schools to turn away gay students and teachers should be enshrined in the Sex Discrimination Act.

this tweet:

A minor point about the Kavanaugh fight

One thing very clear about the Right's reaction to Christine Ford's testimony was that her voice drove them nuts - I've read scores of comments that her voice was too "little girl" to be real - it was all an act, and/or proof that she's mentally disturbed or an emotional wreck.  One of the other.

(Oh, and how ludicrous are the wingnut "body language" videos that have become a thing in the last couple of years, with their ridiculous appeal to expertise in uncovering the secret meaning of the body language of figures the Right  want to imagine destroyed.   It's just pathetic, but they really believe an area of "science" that was never more than flim flam from hucksters.  The one on Ford was particularly welcomed with open arms.)

Anyway, I thought - if there is any truth at all that her vocals at the hearing was an act, there would be surely be someone, somewhere who has sat in a lecture or talk of hers and recorded it, and could prove that she sounds completely different in "real life".   What's the bet that there were Wingnuts desperate to turn up such material to attack her credibility.

But where are we now:  oh, that's right - no sign of any other voice recording has surfaced anywhere.  Despite her being an academic who (I presume) has had lecturing as part of her job for much of her career? 

I think it extremely safe to assume that no evidence will ever arise - because it never existed, and it was a case of wingnut's imagination run wild - again.

The near perfect quote on Trumpian propaganda

Somehow I had missed previously reading about Hannah Arendt's comments on the use of propaganda in the rise of totalitarianism.  But I saw quote extracted on Twitter, and it's absolutely perfect to describe how Trumpian lying is working with his "base":

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

However, these days, it's not even clear that they will ever believe it was even a lie.  

I got the quote from an Open Culture post which explains:

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements"

And, not that the term was around at the time she was writing it, but there is a deep irony in how those on the Right who decried post-modernism for its "truth is a mere social construct" attitude are now the side who have most comprehensively swallowed that kool aid without even realising it.     

Comedy noted

I quite like Conan O'Brien:  certainly he deserves some sort of award for weirdest looking dude to ever have a successful late night talk show.  His comedy writers seem to specialise in coming up with some pretty silly and eccentric stuff, and I particularly enjoyed a couple of sketches recently on Youtube:



Andy Richter is often very funny in his own right:



Did I note here before that I was surprised to read that Conan spoke in 2015 about getting treatment for depression and anxiety?

Well, now I see, in what must be yet another indication that getting into comedy and having psychological problems seems to go hand in hand to an extraordinary degree, Andy Richter spoke about lifelong issues with depression last year.  

Anyway, I see that Conan is changing his show to a half hour format next year.   I hope that helps him de-stress a bit.     

Things an over-active imagination can see happening

*  Brett Kavanaugh getting sacked after getting absurdly drunk at a Supreme Court welcome function, and being found in a dimly lit corner of the room trying to put "the hard word" on Ruth Ginsburg.

* That Winx horse's career coming to an end by it literally exploding just before it passes the post for what would be its 50th win.  

* Trump's hair catching fire, purely by the power of his own lies, during one of his Nurembergs.  

The civil war only one side wants

Hey, there's a very impressive tweet thread by one David Neiwert, who has studied the American  "coming civil war" rhetoric that's been ramped up by Wingnuts for the last decade or two.

Now, they have Trump, conspiracy nutter, who is lending them moral support by talking like this:

Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law - not the rule of the mob.

Yeah, sure, says the guy who laughs whenever his mini Nuremberg rallies break into "lock her up" chants. 

As far as I can recall the Republicans have precisely one act of politically inspired nutter shooting to get excited about - the baseball shooting in June 2017.   (Even so, which side of politics is the one that would want to toughen gun restrictions on nutters such as that guy?  Which side is devoted to supporting paranoid wingnuts in being armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry?)    The rest of it is handwringing over noisy protests outside of restaurants, or in front of Congress or the Supreme Court.

Republicans have conveniently become drama queens over the state of civil unrest spurned by their own politics:  race riots in the 1960's could end up with scores of deaths, and massive amounts of destruction.  Even in 1977, I see that the New York City blackout resulted in this:

In all, 1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting. A total of 1,037 fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires. In the largest mass arrest in city history, 3,776 people were arrested

The state of civil unrest in the US is relatively mild, and it is part of the tribalist authoritarian nuttiness of the Right that they continually are trying to convince themselves that mainstream Democrats are dangerous socialists who will DESTROY the economy, the nation, etc.

It's absurd, and actually dangerous when their most ardent believers are weaponised.  

Update:   A typical example of absurd "reasonable Republican" commentary from Hugh Hewitt in WAPO, alleging that the real problem is incivility:

 Trump is as wearying today as Andrew Jackson must have been in 1829 to the people of both parties who are used to different rules sets. I am one of them. Thus my criticisms of the president are many and detailed. But my fear of the wild-eyed left is far greater than my discomfort with his bull-in-china shop politics.

The left, we saw this week and last, contrasts unfavorably with the president’s hyperbole and occasional cruelty. It is now a snarling, enraged collective scream. To give it power would be to risk fraying even further the common bonds of citizenship.

The fundamental problem for Democrats and the rest of the world:   you're trying to fight idiots.   

The comments following that will be white hot, I bet.

Mice can work it out

There's something charming about a study looking into how mice couples communicate after one of them has been "unfaithful":

The quality of conversations between California mice couples after one partner has been unfaithful can help predict which mouse pairs will successfully produce a litter of mouse pups and which males are good fathers, according to a new study on the evolution of monogamy.

More unimportant pop culture notes

*  All Australian males over the age of 40 have a crush on Julia Zemero, don't they?  (Homer excepted, if I remember correctly.)   Hence I found myself watching the singing competition show All Together Now, which features a panel of "music industry figures" judging the contestants.  (The only big name on which is Ronan Keating, who I admit is a likeable TV presence.)

But as for the rest of the judges - who knew the Australian music business is (if you were to judge it by this show) completely dominated by gay/camp personalities?    It reminded me of the unknown D grade celebrities Britain manages to scrape up from somewhere for shows like "I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here".   In fact, I see this show is a format import from Britain, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I don't know:  the set is pretty, and the judges are 3/4 ridiculous, and Julia is still funny sometimes.  I might watch it again.

*  My daughter likes a lot of Justin Bieber songs, but thinks he's nuts.  Yes, I like to point out:  he is a living example of having excessive money, especially while young, causing more problems than it solves.  (A point I like to make often to justify my own less than desired income.)  She said the other day that maybe he's a "good boy" again, since he went back to his church.   Seems not to be true. 

*  I liked this short interview with Hard Quiz host Tom Gleeson.  He is funny, and I am happy to understand how they warn guests about his style.

A minor observation

As I wrote below, I was watching that Batman v Superman movie on Friday and noted Holly Hunter was in it.  I saw her in something else recently, but I forget what it was.

I've always liked her, but in these last two appearances, I thought she had a somewhat (I don't know) slurry? issue with her speech which I had never noticed before.  It reminded me very much of what I noticed in Carrie Fisher in the last two Star Wars movies.   It made me think that perhaps it's what an ill fitting partial denture can make a person sound like.  Yet surely they wouldn't have dentures but would go with implants if a tooth needed replacing.

I haven't noticed anyone else saying this about either of these actors, but I find it obvious in both of them (although more pronounced in Fisher).

Am I alone in this? 

When milk was positively dangerous

The Atlantic had a brief extract from a book that has just come out, about food contamination in the 19th century:

We tend to think of our 19th-century forefathers thriving on farm-fresh produce and pasture-raised livestock, happily unaffected by the deceptive food-manufacturing practices of today. In this we are wrong. Milk offers a stunning case in point. By mid-century, the standard, profit-maximizing recipe was a pint of lukewarm water for every quart of milk—after the cream had been skimmed off. To whiten the bluish liquid, dairymen added plaster of paris and chalk, or a dollop of molasses for a creamy gold. To replace the skimmed-off layer of cream, they might add a final flourish of pureed calf brains.

Mmmm..calves brains.

More on this somewhat nauseating topic of just how bad commercial milk was in those days can be found in a much lengthier article in the Smithsonian magazine.  Oddly, calves brains were probably the least of a consumer's reason to worry.  But first, the brains:

But there were other factors besides risky strains of bacteria that made 19th century milk untrustworthy. The worst of these were the many tricks that dairymen used to increase their profits. Far too often, not only in Indiana but nationwide, dairy producers thinned milk with water (sometimes containing a little gelatin), and recolored the resulting bluish-gray liquid with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust.

They also faked the look of rich cream by using a yellowish layer of pureed calf brains. As a historian of the Indiana health department wrote: “People could not be induced to eat brain sandwiches in [a] sufficient amount to use all the brains, and so a new market was devised.”

“Surprisingly enough,’’ he added, “it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee.”

Gosh.

 

Anyway, the worse thing was the use of formaldehyde:

Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.

Indianapolis at the time offered a near-perfect case study in all the dangers of milk in America, one that was unfortunately linked to hundreds of deaths and highlighted not only Hurty’s point about sanitation but the often lethal risks of food and drink before federal safety regulations came into place in 1906.

In late 1900, Hurty’s health department published such a blistering analysis of locally produced milk that The Indianapolis News titled its resulting article “Worms and Moss in Milk.” The finding came from an analysis of a pint bottle handed over by a family alarmed by signs that their milk was “wriggling.” It turned out to be worms, which investigators found had been introduced when a local dairyman thinned the milk with ‘’stagnant water.”....

[a few paras about the horrible bacteriological state of milk at that time go here] 

The heating of a liquid to 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes to kill pathogenic bacteria was first reported by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur in the 1850s. But although the process would later be named pasteurization in his honor, Pasteur’s focus was actually on wine. It was more than 20 years later that the German chemist Franz von Soxhlet would propose the same treatment for milk. In 1899, the Harvard microbiologist Theobald Smith — known for his discovery of Salmonella — also argued for this, after showing that pasteurization could kill some of the most stubborn pathogens in milk, such as the bovine tubercle bacillus.

But pasteurization would not become standard procedure in the United States until the 1930s, and even American doctors resisted the idea. The year before Smith announced his discovery, the American Pediatric Society erroneously warned that feeding babies heated milk could lead them to develop scurvy.

Such attitudes encouraged the dairy industry to deal with milk’s bacterial problems simply by dumping formaldehyde into the mix. And although Hurty would later become a passionate advocate of pasteurization, at first he endorsed the idea of chemical preservatives.

In 1896, desperately concerned about diseases linked to pathogens in milk, he even endorsed formaldehyde as a good preservative. The recommended dose of two drops of formalin (a mix of 40 percent formaldehyde and 60 percent water) could preserve a pint of milk for several days. It was a tiny amount, Hurty said, and he thought it might make the product safer.

But the amounts were often far from tiny. Thanks to Hurty, Indiana passed the Pure Food Law in 1899 but the state provided no money for enforcement or testing. So dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product “fresh” for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as Iceline or Preservaline. (The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days.) And as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and more toxic.

In the summer of 1900, The Indianapolis News reported on the deaths of three infants in the city’s orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative, and in 1901, Hurty himself referenced the deaths of more than 400 children due to a combination of formaldehyde, dirt, and bacteria in milk.
Following that outbreak, the state began prosecuting dairymen for using formaldehyde and, at least briefly, reduced the practice. But it wasn’t until Harvey Wiley and his allies helped secure the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 that the compound was at last banned from the food supply.

It really was a different world back then.

And once again, you have to ask - how the hell do libertarians have the hide to argue that their philosophy works, in practice?

Two unnecessary movie reviews

What's that?  Drunk, rich fratboy became a judge at the Supreme Court after all?   I have brief comments to make about that, but later.

Meantime, perhaps I can't review it fairly, but I did try watching Superman V Batman Batman v Superman (sorry, I care so little about it I got the name around wrong) on free-to-air TV on Friday.

As I tried explaining to my son (who likes Christopher Nolan's Batmen and talks about wanting to see the Joker movie), I can't get engaged with any incarnation of Batman.   There's just a wall of superhero scenario credibility that I can't break through for this character - I find Superman and Wonderwoman more believable despite the silliness of the former's physics and the latter's mythological status.   Apart from not caring for dark angst as a key feature of a superhero character, I reckon Batman's problems in large part revolve around the super-villains:  Lex Luther or even Green Goblin are more credible than a Gotham City full of Batman level ridiculous costumed superheroes.

That said, even starting on the basis that I would not enjoy it, Ben Affleck's Batman seemed particularly bad:  body too chunky, personality too charmless, and the deep, rasping voice in costume particularly over the top.  

Looking at director's Zack Snyder's body of (directorial) work, I can safely say he has a sensibility that in no way appeals to me: dour; in DC world - determined to treat Superman as a God/Jesus stand in; and even cinematography that grates.

Anyway, I fell asleep just as the titular fight scene was set up, and I kept half waking for what seemed an eternity of loud noise and CGI fire and explosions.  My son got bored before it started too, and went off to have a shower.  I woke to see funeral scenes for Superman.  I don't think I missed anything that would change my mind that it was a dud movie:  which is pretty much my reaction to anything featuring Batman.

The second more positive review:

Solo - the first serious commercial flop of the Star Wars universe.

I thought it was OK story and acting wise, but there was clear room for improvement (with emphasis on the word "clear", as you will shortly understand).

It would seem everyone suspects the first directors were likely sacked for not treating the material reverentially enough.  But really, I think it could have benefited from more laughs.   It wasn't without humour, and I liked one big joke near the end in particular, but I still think a few more big laughs would have lightened it up more.

And speaking of light - what was going on with so much murky cinematography?   I know that home LCD TVs can have an issue with low light scenes at the best of times, but I see now that people who saw it at the cinema were posting about how they found it distractingly dim too.  Someone wrote an article about how digital projection in cinemas was not being checked enough, and that's why it looked so dark in so many cinemas.

So, it's not just me - lots of people hated the lighting, and I would guess that it alone accounted for a lot of poor word of mouth.  Who is this cinematographer Bradford Young?  Oh, he's a black, young-ish guy, and he doesn't seem to have done anything else I have seen except Arrival. I wasn't overly impressed with the looks of that movie either - but he clearly seems to like working with fog and mist.

Honestly, they shouldn't have sacked the directors - they should have sacked Young.

Having said that, in CGI terms, when they were bright enough, I thought a lot of the film looked pretty terrific.  But good CGI in certain sequences is not enough to bring in a crowd these days.   (It pretty much used to be - when they first started to be deployed in the late seventies.)

So, more or less worth seeing, and I'm sort of sorry that it seems to have killed the potential for a sequel in the Han Solo story.

The Guardian asks the hard, important question...

Why is the gay leather scene dying? 

(By the way, I've barely skimmed the article, which seems to go into considerable detail about "the scene" in London.)