Rupert's reasons

Given the rabid pro-Coalition coverage in the Murdoch press, it's interesting to remember this reported from last year:

According to reports in the ABC and The Australian Financial Review that differ in detail rather than substance, days before Turnbull was forced to walk the plank on August 31, Murdoch told fellow billionaire Kerry Stokes, the Perth-based chairman of Seven West, “Malcolm has to go.”

Stokes apparently disagreed.

"That means we get Bill Shorten and the CFMEU,” he told Murdoch in a version of the story reported by the AFR.

Not to worry, says Murdoch, according to the ABC report, "They'll only be in for three years – it won't be so bad. I did alright under Labor and the Painters and Dockers; I can make money under Shorten and the CFMEU."

I can only assume that one or more of the following factors are currently rattling around Rupert's decrepit looking head:

*  Rupert has had second thoughts about how he could make money under Shorten;

*  Rupert wants to see his "king maker" judgement vindicated at the polls;

*   Rupert really got his nose out of joint when Shorten refused to meet with him (which is something Shorten really has not received enough credit for.)

What was I saying about Poland? (Part 2, I think)

At The Guardian:

A woman has been arrested on suspicion of offending religious sentiment, after posters bearing an image of the Virgin Mary with her halo painted in the colours of the rainbow flag appeared in the city of Płock in central Poland.

The Polish interior minister, Joachim Brudziński, announced on Twitter on Monday that a person had been arrested for “carrying out a profanation of the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa”.

A Płock police spokeswoman confirmed a 51-year-old woman had been arrested over the alleged offence. The woman had been abroad, but upon her return, the police entered and searched her home, where they found several dozen images of the Virgin Mary with the rainbow-coloured halo.

The “Black Madonna of Częstochowa” is a revered Byzantine icon that resides in the monastery of Jasna Góra, a UN world heritage site and Poland’s holiest Catholic shrine.

Offending religious feeling is a crime under the Polish penal code. If convicted, the woman could face a prison sentence of up to two years.

 Update:  can someone point Andrew Bolt to this article, because I see he gets really upset with religious interference in art.  Well, sometimes, anyway:

Permafrost worry

That commentary piece that has appeared in Nature on the great uncertainties in the amount of greenhouse gas likely to come from melting permafrost is indeed a worry.    The basic message is that things are going faster in the North than anyone expected:

Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.

But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.

Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes². Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.

This type of thawing is a serious problem for communities living around the Arctic (see ‘Arctic permafrost’). Roads buckle, houses become unstable. Access to traditional foods is changing, because it is becoming dangerous to travel across the land to hunt. Families cannot reach lines of game traps that have supported them for generations.

In short, permafrost is thawing much more quickly than models have predicted, with unknown consequences for greenhouse-gas release. Researchers urgently need to learn more about it. Here we outline how. 

 There current guesstimate as to how much worse it could be than that in current models:

We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills, could release between 60 billion and 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300. This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually. Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20% of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50%. Gradual thawing affects the surface of frozen ground and slowly penetrates downwards. Sudden collapse releases more carbon per square metre because it disrupts stockpiles deep in frozen layers.

Furthermore, because abrupt thawing releases more methane than gradual thawing does, the climate impacts of the two processes will be similar⁷. So, together, the impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate could be twice that expected from current models.

The rarity of a TV show that ends well

I see via Twitter that the dying episodes of Game of Thrones are continuing to upset quite a lot of long time viewers.   So someone asked "what TV series ended for you in a satisfying way", and people are nominating things I don't agree with (the ending of MASH left me cold, but I had stopped caring much about the show long before the final season) or shows I haven't seen at all (The Shield).

And it's true, so few lengthy TV series do end in a satisfactory way.   Most people were underwhelmed with Seinfeld's final episode;  even worse, it seems The X Files make a final series which everyone simply ignored after the poor quality of the penultimate come back series.   Most sitcoms go on for about 3 seasons too long, and I stop watching them long before the end anyway.

I continue an old devotion to the Mary Tyler Moore show, and I've probably mentioned before that I did think the ending of that show was funny - new management at the TV station recognise that ratings are bad, and decide that the problem isn't the ridiculous newsreader Ted, but the rest of the newsroom which promptly gets the sack. 

I'm struggling to remember another show that I did watch to the very end, and found satisfying in the last episode.

A culinary note

I'm still in long weekend mode, ok?

The culinary note: I really like the distinctive flavour of washed rind cheeses.  They should be more popular than they seem to be. 

I'm eating one from Italy as I write.   This makes me feeler wealthier than I am, and if it got here via airplane it's probably a climate change sin, but I am trying to support the fancy deli/cafe/restaurant in King Street, which seems to have so many experienced staff I fear that Brisbane isn't sophisticated  enough for it.

The Australian sparkling wine I am having with it is quite pleasing too, and carries no guilt.

The passion post

It's the Labour Day holiday in Brisbane.  Beautiful clear blue sky and 24 degrees.  May to September is just great weather here...pity the daylight hours get short.

Anyway, a boring post about this plant:

We have a yellow passionfruit vine growing out of a not very big pot, over an arch that' only about 1.5 m wide.  It is about 2 years old and has produced fruit before, but at the moment, it has gone berserk.   I reckon there are about 35 fruit coming on this  rather small area vine which we basically ignore, apart from watering in dry weather.

I have no idea what will happen if I actually fertilize it.  Or should I just let a happy plant be?

Election on track (I think)

So I've been reading Twitter and some other commentary, and watched Insiders.

Two weeks out from the election I think the view has firmed up that Labor is not in danger of losing the election after all.  Apparently, the betting market has turned in Labor's favour again; people think the social media campaign being run by the Liberals looks desperate and run by people without a clue (the Star Wars themed tweets, for example); and Josh Frydenberg looked and sounded far from confident on Insiders today, which also brought the delightful news that Tony Abbot really is looking likely to loss his seat.  

The best thing that can come from a Labor win would be that it involves not just Abbott but other conservatives losing seats and sparking the internal confrontation that the Coalition has to have in order to rid itself of climate change denialism.  It would be a real disaster if the Liberals scraped home and avoided that fate. 

On a side note, I see from a peruse of the Catallaxy threads that an old commenter DD (Daddy Dave, I think) has turned back up after what would be years of absence.   He used to be one of few moderate Righties on the site, and nearly always maintained a polite disposition.   I think he used to occasionally look in here too, but commented that he thought it a boring and would never have a big readership because it didn't really attempt to engage with readers, or some such.  C'est la vie.

I find it to believe he will continue commenting at Catallaxy for long, given the ludicrous Down Under American Right Culture War site that it has become.  But we will see...

An unromantic lead

A review of Long Shot begins:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in cinematic comedies of the past decade or so, that just about every woman on-screen must be in want of Seth Rogen. From Knocked Up to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to Neighbors, Hollywood has continually presented the star as a romantic lead while marveling at the supposed ludicrousness of the concept, to the extent that his new vehicle is a rom-com called Long Shot. The premise? That Rogen, playing to type as an avuncular, bearded fellow who’s no stranger to sweatpants, gets entangled in a relationship with an impressive and a spectacularly beautiful politician played by Charlize Theron.

I could be mistaken, but isn't the defining aspect of a Seth Rogan film that they have quite a lot of pretty crude sexual humour?   As such, I have never seen one of his films, and would guess that he and his ilk are behind the death of decent romantic comedies we have witnessed over about the last 10 - 15 years.

Even I find this a weird approach to policing

I may give the impression that there isn't a government intervention into lessening illicit drug use that I don't like, but even I find it pretty amazingly intrusive that police in Sydney users sniffer dogs (and strip searches) for drugs on your average commuter crowd at places like Central Station.    I mean, even for someone like me who hates the drug taking aspect of music festivals and am dubious about policies that semi endorse it can see that random searches of commuters is just extraordinary.

The only thing I can say about this is - did Labor have any different policy before the last election?  If so, sorry people, but you got the police state you voted for...*



*  I see that Labor was saying that music festival pill testing should not be off the table, so they do sound as if they were reform minded.

Automation unfairly getting the blame

Here's the article at The Week I was looking for.  Found via Peter Whiteford's twitter feed:

How robots became a scapegoat for the destruction of the working class

The gigantic Murdoch problem

I agree with a lot of this article, particularly the way it criticises the genuine journalists working within Murdoch who put up with the editorial bias of their employer.   It's moved into outright cowardice, really.  Anyway,  this is it:

News Corp: Democracy’s greatest threat

What did we do before the internet?

I went looking at The Week for an article on robots taking jobs, and saw this great contribution to humanity there instead:

I put Pringles in the fridge and it changed my life

I still read it.  Might even try it.

Far too late

The SMH repeats the news from the Washington Post:

Facebook said on Friday it had permanently banned several far-right figures and organisations, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Infowars host Alex Jones, commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, for being "dangerous", a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups.

Helen's made a goose of herself, again

Only yesterday I mentioned Helen Dale in the context of climate change, noting that she had once at least called on libertarians to stop denying it.   

I had missed, though, that only last week she had a nasty sounding tweet about Greta Thunbergpril: 

She explains at the Spectator this was "fairly obviously" a joke.

Very few people took it that way.   Helen has apparently deleted Twitter from her phone, such was the blowback she was getting.   And given that Dale herself has claimed she probably has a degree of Aspergers, it is very hard to see her tweet as anything other than (at least) somewhat callous from a person who should know better.   (Jealousy at the attention Thunberg has received is another theory I've seen in the Twitter response.)

Now look - I don't hold any great interest in Greta Thunberg and have paid her very little attention.   I actually share Dale's view in her Spectator attempt at self-justification that under 18's should basically never be shoved into political leadership roles.   And Britain in particular is having an outbreak of idealistic climate protest founded on exaggerated slogans and claims.   (I am extremely rarely impressed by any form of protest, though.  Not a joiner that way.)   I just take the view of "at least their heart is in the right place" and don't resent that it might have some political consequences in a useful direction.

I still say, though, that it's hard not to see behind Dale's Tweet the typical libertarian ideological motivation to just ignore climate change - either deny it exists, or deny it's bad enough to do anything about, or deny we're capable of doing anything about it and put all the eggs in the techno basket of successful geo-engineering that would have to done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 


She belongs on a seasteading "nation" with all other libertarians.  

A diet would help

I don't know anything about the rapper/comedian/actor Adam Briggs apart from seeing him on The Weekly from time to time.  I'd put him in the category "mostly harmless".   But last night on the show, he joked, as on Twitter, that as an indigenous man he may be 32 but (in terms of much lower indigenous life expectancy), that's like 67 in "white years":

Look, the guy's from Shepparton and it seems he has lived either there or in Melbourne all his life.     As such, he has (unlike some fellow indigenous)  ready access to healthy food and all the medical services he could need.  Yet he clearly carries quite a lot of excess weight - and on his gut, which is well recognized as the worst kind of overweight to be.

He may well be the equivalent of 67 in "health" years (I am surprised he is only 32 - he could pass for much older), but it's a bit rich to even joke that it's due to just being a "Blackfulla". 

Judith not good at analogies (when it suits her)

Whenever The Australian or AFR run articles by the likes of Judith Sloan or Alan Moran on climate change economics, they should (but don't) put a large rider in bold "READERS SHOULD KNOW:  THIS ECONOMIST DOES NOT BELIEVE CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL OR NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED IN ANY MANNER AT ALL.".  Because, of course, if your analysis is springing from  that fundamental belief, there is no reason to trust its objectivity at all.

So I see today that Sloan's column in The Australian on the modelled costs of Labor's climate plan is able to be accessed.  

To be honest, much of her account of the uncertainties is pretty well aligned  with what I heard on Radio National this morning - she could have put more effort into poohing-poohing Labor's policy than she did.   Is this a sign of a crack in her noggin that is letting in light that action is going to happen and she had better start sounding like she hasn't always been a flat earth climate change denier when talking about policy responses?

But my main reason for posting about this:  she claims to be completely puzzled by Bill Shorten's "fat person eating 10 big macs" analogy.  It's not perfect, but the point is clear enough:  the fat person [Australia] can't just continue with the easy and fast fix for hunger [energy needs] by eating fast food all the time [building coal power stations], because we all know that in the long run it will hurt/kill them [climate change effects].   They  have to put the effort in to get a better diet [clean energy and reducing all emissions] even if a good meal costs more than a Big Mac [that's where the analogy starts to go off road - although if the only choice were restaurants, it might work.]

She's just being deliberately obtuse in saying she doesn't understand it.

Suicide, poison and phones

The Washington Post has an article noting the increase in girls trying suicide by poison (boys prefer guns and strangulation), but it then talks more broadly about the rise in youth suicide and the search for a plausible causes.   Some think the rise of the mobile phone is more than a coincidence:

Spiller said he and others have overlaid their findings with other data to try to identify why the rates have spiked so sharply since 2011. They studied data from the rise of opioid addiction and deaths in recent years, thinking that the sharp increase could be due to increased access to drugs or fallout from parents’ deaths or addictions. But the timing did not fit precisely — the beginnings of the opioid epidemic traces back years before the 2011 spike.

They also compared it against economic data, but much of the country’s downturn occurred in 2008 or 2009.

“Unfortunately, we can’t definitely answer the why. That’s not how the data works,” said John Ackerman, a co-author and clinical psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Ackerman and Spiller, however, suspect the sudden increase in recent years has to do with the advent of smartphones and how they have made social media much more pervasive in young people’s lives.

The iPhone 3 came out in 2008, Spiller notes, and the Android phones had come into widespread use by 2011. Adults adopted such devices first, but within a year or two, such smartphones became more common among adolescents.

For years now, across all demographic groups, the death rate from suicide has been rising broadly. Experts cannot easily explain it. There is no single factor driving the phenomenon.

Vegan health

Isn't it kind of obvious that veganism (as opposed to mere vegetarianism - especially of the variety where dairy and eggs are still eaten) isn't that great a health plan for humans when pro-vegans have to write articles about the great care that must be taken by vegan pregnant mothers to get all the nutrition they and their embryos need?

Yesterday, I saw on twitter some young women who said she was going to try eating some form of flesh again for health reasons, but she tried mussels and found them repulsive.  She also went on and on about how traumatic it had been and how the mere idea of eating flesh (even of a brainless bivalve) makes her skin crawl.   It sounded to me like some borderline form of anorexia.

I know that most people have some image of eating some forms of animal food as being repulsive - I wince at the idea of eating roasted bone marrow on My Kitchen Rules for some reason, and lamb brains are icky too -  but to have a generic revulsion for all form of animal protein, including all forms of seafood, seems pretty exceptionally broad.

Anyway, you do read of her type of health issue from time to time - did I post about the vegan Youtube woman who secretly started eating a small amount of meat again on doctor's advice?   I'm not sure how many vegans do have to give it up for health reasons, but it seems to be a not insubstantial problem...

More Shinto

Surely I can't be the only person who was surprised at the apparent simplicity of the ceremonies for the replacement of the Japanese Emperor?    But I see now that there is more Shinto stuff to come, but not til October:

As Emperor Naruhito ascended the throne on Wednesday, a key imperial succession ritual related to Shinto rekindled controversy over the separation of state and religion that is stipulated in the Constitution.

Shinto is a Japanese indigenous religion in which the emperor is venerated as a descendant of a sun goddess. In the ritual, the emperor inherited the imperial regalia, which are said to have been bestowed by the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami as proof of his ascension to the throne.

As the Kenji to Shokei no Gi rite marking the emperor’s enthronement was staged as a state occasion financed by public funds, critics pointed to the possibility that it violated the Constitution banning the government from engaging in religious activities.

Japan’s postwar Constitution stipulates no religious organization shall receive any privileges from the state or exercise any political authority.

The regalia, called Sanshu no Jingi, consist of a sacred mirror, sword and jewel. In the ritual, the jewel and a replica of the sword were passed to the new monarch together with the state and privy seals.

Besides the regalia inheritance ceremony, the government decided in April last year to publicly fund the main Shinto-linked imperial succession rituals to be held in the fall, following the precedent set for the ceremonies of Emperor Emeritus Akihito’s enthronement in 1990.

The upcoming key rituals are Sokuirei Seiden no Gi on Oct. 22 to proclaim the enthronement of the emperor and the Daijosai grand thanksgiving rite in November, in which the emperor will make offerings to ancestral deities and pray for the peace and prosperity of Japan and its people.

 Interested readers in what goes on in Shinto ceremonies for an ascending Emperor might like to read this previous post from 2017.

Seasteading enthusiasm dwindles

According to Slate, the libertarian dreams of seasteading seem to be fading.  Peter Thiel, apparently, seems less enthusiastic these days.

I kind of wish it would work, so that a few score of the most dangerous libertarians (Kochs, Thiel, Stark*, etc) - those who either deny climate change or think you just watch the world burn and then work out if you can science your way out of the extremes - could be set adrift in the Pacific Ocean and lose all influence in the rest of the world.

*  Oh wait, he's taken care of.

Not exactly the law and order country

India seems to have a very real problem with mob justice.   It sounds like a rather lawless and dangerous place (if not for visitors, then at least for residents!)   Some examples from today's perusal of the Times of India:

Some peculiar artwork decision with this sad story, too:

Bear in the mind the undue influence that WhatsApp has for spreading false rumour there too, and the number of deaths it has caused, I'm adding it to my list of "no hurry to visit" countries.

Negative interest

Aren't conservatives going on and on about the Folau matter to a ridiculous degree?   Yeah, sure: climate change is a crock of no interest but the really important thing is whether a rugby player will get booted or not.

My interest level in this is already in negative territory.   I could only be less interested if it were a racing horse up for a Code of Conduct hearing for tweeting offensive stuff about jockeys.

Product endorsement - curry chips

Maybe it's because I usually only buy them when especially hungry due to missing out on lunch, but I find that the "curry night Korma" flavoured chips by Tyrells are especially delicious:

This easily remains my preferred chip brand.  Not oily (Smiths are the worst at that) and flavours that are not too overpowering. 

Libertarians clinging to climate change denial

I see that the annual "We Hate Tax" conference, run by some libertarian mob together with some other/associated "we hate tax!" group, has the following guests (with my added commentary in brackets):

Local speakers including former Finance Minister Nick Minchin [well known climate change denying politician], Tom Switzer from the Centre for Independent Studies [dunno], John Roskam [runs Rinehart funded pro-actively climate change denying IPA] ..., LNP Senator Amanda Stoker [can't find direct climate position - but seems to love coal] , climate blogger Jo Nova [most prominent solo climate change denying blogger of Australia, also a goldbug with a husband very suspicious about the great banking families of Europe - nudge, nudge, wink, wink], and Professor Sinclair Davidson [runs persistently climate change denying Catallaxy, almost certainly a "I don't deny, I'm just not convinced" disingenuous type - he won't actually tell us anymore if he personally believes that AGW is real and worth addressing]  and Dr Chris Berg from RMIT University [the more affable face of IPA who also stays silent on climate change, and deserves derision for giving moral support to deniers even if he isn't one himself].

This reminds me: in 2014, I gave rare praise to Helen Dale for at least having stated this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis.

Sorry Helen:  they're not listening to you.   (And anyway, your willingness to work for denier - or "I'm not convinced" twit - Leyonhjelm shows you didn't really treat it as an important issue yourself.)

What Emperors do in retirement

It's hard not to be impressed with the apparent gentleness and humility of the retiring Japanese emperor and empress:

The imperial couple will move to a temporary residence in Tokyo before settling at Togu Palace in the Akasaka Estate, currently home to the incoming emperor — Crown Prince Naruhito — and his family, once renovation work is completed.

Togu Palace will be renamed Sento Imperial Palace, which translates as “the place where the retired imperial couple live.”

Their temporary residence is the Takanawa Imperial Residence in Minato Ward, formerly home to Prince and Princess Takamatsu which has been empty since the princess — aunt of Emperor Akihito — died in 2004.

The couple has fond memories of their final home, the place they brought up their children when the emperor was crown prince.

The emperor will hand off all public duties to the new emperor immediately. The couple will pray for the country and its people after they move, and spend more time with friends, listening to music and reading, according to Imperial Household Agency officials.

A keen marine biologist, the retired emperor will periodically visit the Imperial Palace to continue his research on gobies, they said.

“I am looking forward to being able to take my time to read every book that I have yet to read,” Empress Michiko said in a statement to the press last October.

Trump and oversight

An article at New Repbulic argues that Trump is ironically building the case for impeachment by being so obstructionist about Congressional oversight.  It ends as follows:

In the aggregate, however, the White House’s obstinacy suggests a deeper problem. Presidents are supposed to accept the principle that Congress can act as a meaningful check on their power. Trump does not. His resistance to scrutiny isn’t limited to Congress, of course. The president habitually complains that mainstream news outlets don’t show him the deference he thinks he deserves. “In the ‘old days’ if you were president and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” he fumed on Twitter earlier this week. Trump’s hunger for a fawning press was already bad; his authoritarian craving for the same treatment from Congress is worse.

It’s possible that this all-or-nothing approach could eventually backfire on Trump in court. It was already hard to argue that his resistance sprung from a good-faith attempt to preserve the executive branch’s powers. If anything, his categorical public refusal to cooperate with Congress only makes explicit what was already implicit. Then again, the Supreme Court still might not care. Even when faced with clear evidence of the Trump administration’s bad faith, the court’s conservative justices have chosen to pretend that nothing is amiss.

There’s a certain irony to the timing of these all-out efforts to block congressional oversight. Democrats have spent the past two years arguing that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and disinterest in the rule of law would endanger American democracy. The president doesn’t seem interested in disputing the Democrats’ portrayal of him beyond soundbites like “No obstruction!” If anything, he seems almost eager to prove them right.

David Brooks and the mountains

I've never read David Brooks much, but he seems a very gentle character for a quasi-conservative (he's fallen out with most of his former buddies over Trump - so that's a good sign.)

I saw him recently on PBS Newshour talking about his increasing interest in matters spiritual, and his book on the matter, and it sounded somewhat interesting.

This review of the book at the New Yorker gives me a lot more biographical information on him, and the book, and he is indeed an interesting guy.

I would say his current position seems to be one you could classify as close to Unitarian Universalism - someone who is interested in seeing if there be some sort of common agreement between everyone, whether of a religious faith or not, as to the sort of principles that are involved in living a good and moral life.

Psychiatry's problems, noted again

I posted about another review of this book last month, but this review from Nature contains other highlights of the failures of psychiatry that I hadn't thought about for a long time:

In January 1973, Science published an article called ‘On being sane in insane places’. The author, psychologist David Rosenhan, described how he and seven other healthy people had reported themselves to a dozen psychiatric hospitals, claiming to hear voices uttering odd words such as ‘thud’ or ‘hollow’ — a symptom never reported in the clinical literature. Each person was diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis, and admitted; once inside, they stopped the performance. They were released after an average of 19 days with diagnoses of ‘schizophrenia in remission’ (D. L. Rosenhan Science 179, 250–258; 1973).

One research and teaching hospital, hearing about the study, declared that its own staff could never be so deceived. It challenged Rosenhan to send it pseudopatients. He agreed, but never did. Nonetheless, the hospital claimed to have identified 41 of them.

Psychiatric hospitals, it seemed, could recognize neither healthy people nor those with mental illnesses. Rosenhan’s study exemplifies much of what went wrong in twentieth-century psychiatry, as biologists, psychoanalysts and sociologists struggled for supremacy. Science historian Anne Harrington takes us through the painful history of that struggle in the enthralling Mind Fixers, which focuses particularly on the United States.  

Something new I hadn't known:  it took this long to identify syphilis as eventually caused dementia?:

Certain discoveries, such as the findings in 1897 and 1913 confirming that syphilis causes late-onset psychosis, bolstered biologists’ view that mental disorders were brain-based. 

I also did not realise that psychoanalytic approaches had the sort of revival related here, even though of course I knew the 70's were the heyday of - gee, who was the guy who seemed to blame most  psychosis on families and pressure they put their kids under?*:  

As Harrington relates, the horrors of two world wars generated hundreds of thousands of cases of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, indicating a clear role for environmental triggers for some mental illnesses. By the 1970s, the Nazi eugenics atrocities had led most US psychoanalysts to disdain biological approaches even more vehemently, but their reasoning caused its own distress. They extended Freud’s view that mental disorders were rooted in early sexual fantasies to encompass all causes of early childhood anxieties. The idea that families, particularly mothers, were to blame for unexplained mental conditions such as psychoses became mainstream. By the 1950s, psychoanalysts dominated US psychiatry teaching.

Around this time, notes Harrington, social scientists emerged as the third influential force, aligning with psychoanalysts on the purported role of ‘toxic’ families in causing psychiatric disease. Yet within a decade, US psychiatrists experienced a backlash — both from patients’ families, fed up with being vilified, and from the professional ranks. What’s more, a 1962 study showed that two psychiatrists disagreed on the diagnosis of the same person 70% of the time (A. T. Beck Am. J. Psychiatry 119, 210–216; 1962).

*  RD Laing.  Haven't thought about him for a long time, too.

Dumb, populist, flakey perpetual politician who never achieves anything can't understand why she attracts dumb, populist, flakey wannabe politicians

My heart breaks for Pauline Hanson, who's decided to take on the mantle of martyr instead of looking in the mirror to understand why she attracts self-serving idiots to her party.   Like attracts like, Pauline...

Update:  Re-reading this, I think it uses harsher rhetoric than usual, but I did give her some praise yesterday, so it all balances in the end.

Yeah, thanks, Netflix

Seems fairly likely that what some people feared would happen with the release of teen suicide story "13 Reasons Why" did:

The Netflix show "13 Reasons Why" was associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the shows release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates, according to a study published today in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The findings highlight the necessity of using best practices when portraying suicide in popular entertainment and in the media. The study was conducted by researchers at several universities, hospitals, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. NIMH also funded the study.

The number of deaths by suicide recorded in April 2017 was greater than the number seen in any single month during the five-year period examined by the researchers. When researchers analyzed the data by sex, they found the increase in the suicide rate was primarily driven by significant increases in suicide in young males. While suicide rates for females increased after the show's release, the increase was not statistically significant.

"The results of this study should raise awareness that young people are particularly vulnerable to the media," said study author Lisa Horowitz, Ph.D., M.P.H., a clinical scientist in the NIMH Intramural Research Program. "All disciplines, including the media, need to take good care to be constructive and thoughtful about topics that intersect with public health crises."

I have to say, though, that I would have expected it would be a show watched by more girls than guys, so the increase in male teen suicide is a surprise.  I hope they looked for any other possible media event that might have been related.

Pauline does the right thing

Gawd, what's coming over me?   When I heard Pauline Hanson's comments on her horrible* candidate Steve Dickson's resignation for the video of him carrying on like an absolute yobbo at a strip club, I thought she put it very well.   The Guardian reports it as follows:

Speaking at an early morning media conference, an angry Hanson said the footage “cannot be ignored or condoned” and she had accepted Dickson’s offer to resign. She said she would not tolerate her children behaving that way towards women, and would not condone her candidate’s “dealing with women in this fashion” either.

“Steve’s language and behaviour was unacceptable and does not meet my expectations nor the greater public’s expectation of a person who is standing for public office,” the One Nation party leader said.

“Steve Dickson yesterday offered his resignation from all positions within the party, which I have accepted.”

It was actually better than that - she referenced being the mother of 3 boys, and that she would find their similar behaviour unacceptable.

I offer, probably for the one and only time in my life, congratulations to her for not mincing words and saying that expects men (whether politicians or not) to behave better towards women.



*  I had previously noted in two posts his appalling smarmy hypocrisy when dealing with the NRA and the Christian element in their ranks.

Poets and depression

As I don't care for poetry, I didn't know much about the late Les Murray, but heard on the radio this morning that he had suffered from depression for a long time as a younger man. Which made me think:  are my less-than-positive feelings about this art form because it seems to be the preferred artistic outlet  of angsty teens and (later) adults with depression? 

I don't know that I have really thought about this much before, but I see that the matter has been studied, particularly in relation to female poets.  From the Wikipedia entry on "The Sylvia Plath effect":

The Sylvia Plath effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman. This early finding has been dubbed "the Sylvia Plath effect", and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed...

In one study, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Another study extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness.^[1]
 
In another study performed by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, female writers were found to be more likely to suffer not only from mood disorders, but also from panic attacks, general anxiety, drug abuse, and eating disorders. The rates of multiple mental disorders were also higher among these writers. Although it was not explored in depth, abuse during childhood (physical or sexual) also loomed as a possible contributor to psychological issues in adulthood. The cumulative psychopathology scores of subjects, their reported exposure to abuse during childhood, mental difficulties in their mothers, and the combined creativity scores of their parents represented significant predictors of their illnesses. The high rates of certain emotional disorders in female writers suggested a direct relationship between creativity and psychopathology, but the relationships were not clear-cut. As the results of the predictive analysis indicated, familial and environmental factors also appeared to play a role.^[5]

I see at Quora someone asks:

Do poets get depression or do depressed people write poetry?

Anyway,  Tim, you seem a jolly enough fellow whose poetry is not a downer.  But has anyone done a study on how much published poetry could be categorised as "cheerful" as opposed to "deals with a depressing subject" or at best "melancholic"?  

Drug problem in Bangladesh

A detailed article here from the BBC about a large drug problem in Bangladesh with something called Yaba:

Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh have become hooked on yaba - a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine sold as cheap red or pink pills. The official response has been harsh, with hundreds of people killed in alleged incidents of "crossfire"....

"In the early stages of using yaba it has a lot of positive effects. Everything is enhanced with yaba," says Dr Ashique Selim, a consultant psychiatrist specialising in addiction.

"You become more sociable… You enjoy music, cigarettes and sex more. In Bangladesh there's a very unhealthy association between yaba and sex - you're awake longer, you've got more energy, you feel more confident. If you stop using yaba, there are no withdrawal symptoms, it's not like alcohol or heroin. But it's the effects of yaba that are really addictive. It's a very, very dangerous drug."

Yaba first appeared in Bangladesh in 2002 and its use, and abuse, has steadily risen since then. Manufactured illicitly in industrial quantities in Myanmar, it is smuggled into Bangladesh in the far south-east of the country, where the border partly follows the River Naf.

It was across this river that hundreds of thousands of desperate Rohingya refugees fled into Bangladesh in 2017, to escape from the Burmese military. Now nearly a million destitute refugees live in makeshift camps in the region and dealers have succeeded in turning some of them into mules - often women, who smuggle packages of pills inside their vaginas.

Experts believe the dealers see an unmissable business opportunity. At a time of rapid growth - Bangladesh has one of the world's fastest growing economies - traffickers are dumping huge quantities of yaba, and selling it cheaply to create a captive market. Anecdotally, it seems its use is becoming more prevalent among go-getters riding the economic boom.

As usual, the story behind how certain types of drugs get a hold in different countries and societies is often interesting, and a bit surprising.

Am I a bad person...

...for being somewhat amused that it seems quite a lot of people, after having devoted so many hours for so many years to Game of Thrones, found that (what I gather was) the climatic battle of the entire series was so poorly lit that they often couldn't tell what was going on?

Or perhaps I should instead feel a little sorry for them, but happy for myself that I was didn't suffer the same fate.

Update:   I have noticed comments about the too fast editing too - something that drives me nuts, but many people these days have become acclimatised to.  I can safely predict I would have hated this episode.  I mean, even though it seems this BBC reviewer overall thought it was good, he freely admits to a lot of negatives:

The direction and cutting makes events frenzied, scrappy and yes, due to the lack of lighting, difficult to follow – a clever visual articulation of how this fight would really feel. This is an admirable artistic choice in theory, but after a while it starts to translate as tiresome, incomprehensible noise. In interviews leading up to the episode, Sapochnik cited The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ Battle of Helm’s Deep as his main inspiration. But The Battle of Winterfell never quite achieves the elegance or clarity of Peter Jackson’s sequence – nor matches its remarkable balance of character and action. This is not to say that The Battle of Winterfell is bad. It is not. But based on first viewing, it is perhaps not impressive enough to live up to its own hype.

 Update 2:  continuing to sound like a Redditor, I will assert my unpopular opinion that the only decent cinematic fantasy character based battles that took place on a field were those in the first two Narnia movies.   They were well directed, not overly choppy editting, and were thrilling without obvious blood letting.   (Marvel also does it without blood, but the editing often leaves a lot to be desired.)

Unpopular opinion No 2:   the climatic battle in Avengers: Endgame was a little too reminiscent of that in Reader Player One.

Unpopular opinion No 3:   Dr Strange is the most important Marvel Universe character, and deserves at least two more movies.   (Although it seems I often do not care much for the follow up movie for a Marvel movie that I liked.)

Some sordid history

Today I learned that Tolkien's eldest son became a Catholic priest who was accused of sexually molesting boys in at least the 1950's.   Said son died in 2003, but claimed in 1994 that he had been sexually assaulted by more than one of Dad's Oxford academic friends, who would sometimes sleep over in the son's bed.  Given that they probably all stank of pipe tobacco (but then again, I bet the whole house did), this was likely an unpleasant experience for a child even without the sexual assault.   

Poor old CS Lewis gets a mention as one of Tolkien's friends, but I think he was likely too busy having an affair with his deceased mate's mother (and later, his wife to be) to be interested in molesting boys.   I sure hope so, anyway.  

Australian politics

Here's my current gut feeling:

*   I have read on Twitter some analysis showing that today's Newspoll showing TPP at 51/49 in favour of Labor (but with a worrying small swing towards the Coalition) is a specific result of a change in how they were handling Clive Palmer's dumbass support.   In other words, if they had left him grouped with "other", it would still have been 52/48.   Sounds plausible to me.

*  Perceived campaign performance is such a fickle thing, isn't it?   It's so much a question of "the vibe" over content, and looking positive and cheerful is simply enough to sway some, regardless of being an inch deep on actual policy.   This is why I think both Morrison (groan)  and Palmer (rending of shirt sound at the goldfish like memory of the Australian - especially Queensland - electorate) have had better than expected campaigns, and Shorten has been the victim of some momentary crankiness that has to be avoided at all costs in the next two weeks.

*  I don't think the Labor TV ads have been very good either.   Isn't the public a bit skeptical of statements about how much money has been taken from health, and schools, etc, unless it has happened really recently and had an obvious, direct effect on services?   I don't think the advertising agency they are using is doing a great job.

*  I think everyone expects that seat by seat plays are going to be unusually important this time,  and not in favour of the Coalition, what with so many Liberals having jumped ship before the election.  I therefore remain relatively confident of a substantial enough majority government for Labor.

* It's good to see One Nation support down, and if history is any guide, any Senate wins by Palmer will just mean we have more independents soon enough, and they didn't work out too bad last time.   But is he attracting a nuttier group of candidates this time around?   I mean, the advertising about the Chinese airstrip in WA indicates that he is, so perhaps we'll end up with nutty independents of the ex-One Nation kind.   I just hope he gets none up.

Time for the Endgame (review)

It was...OK-ish.

I don't think it deserves a lot of analysis, really.  Remembering that I wasn't invested in Avengers or Ironman  movies anyway, it was perhaps a bit of a fluke that I liked Infinity War, which set me up as keen to see its resolution.

I was somewhat underwhelmed.  While it does have humour, I seem to recall finding Infinity War funnier.  It took a while to build up momentum, and to be honest, to my mind, it was a lazy sort of script generally speaking.  For example, there are at least two key plot points (I won't say them here - it's a bit spoiler-ish too early after its release) which just happen, without any real foreshadowing or explanation as to how they could just fall in place as they do.   And (while my son disagrees), I think the whole explanation of the way this movie's version of time travel works is quite confusingly done:  I didn't expect it to be plausible, but I just wanted it to have some clearer exposition than it got.

I suppose fan boys (and girls) might argue that it's a really complicated and intricate script, the way it ties certain things together from past movies. I suppose I can see that - I assumed it was revisiting the past movies accurately in a somewhat Back to the Future 2 sort of way.  But given my lack of familiarity with the past movies, any pleasure in that went over my head.  (I have read one or two reviewers saying that it works as a stand alone movie, and I think that's a silly suggestion.)

Oh dear, I am doing more analysis than I said I would, but I'll just note that I actually thought at least one more role would be retired than what we got.   It needed more in the way of good guy deaths.  

I hope things pick up in the next Marvel outing - although I don't think the trailer for the next Spiderman movie looks all that enticing.  We shall see...

Update:   I make the point in comments that there is at least one Youtube video up noting some inconsistencies in this movie compared to previous ones.   (Although it also points out some foreshadowing from them too.)

I just wanted to note something else, too:   in my comments on Infinity War, I noted that Thanos's Malthusian justification for killing half of all life struck me as possibly appealing to the nutty Right that thinks all environmentalism is semi-religious, inaccurate panic mongering that actually hates humanity (the kind of people who think you can ignore climate change because Hitler was a vegetarian greenie, dontcha know?)

In this movie, I had the feeling that the vibe was swinging a bit too obviously in the politically correct direction, with the role of the female good guys played up pretty explicitly: not as extraordinarily blatantly as in the last Star Wars movie, but still with a distinctly "this is Disney, we respect and encourage female empowerment" vibe.

Sure, most of the heroic characters remain male, but the effort to increase the female importance seemed a touch too obvious to me.

Guess I'm hard to please, hey?
  
Update 2:   hey, Jason.   I feel somewhat vindicated in my complaint about the time travel explanation being poorly handled when I read this guy's very lengthy piece trying to justify how what a lot of people have started to argue is a lack of internal consistency is not really a "plot hole" at all.   I kind of can't be bothered following the argument as to whether he is or isn't right:   the simple length he has to go to make the argument I think justifies my take.

An attack of humourlessness at The Atlantic

Red warning lights should be flashing whenever you read someone who says "but late night comedy shows just aren't funny anymore", especially when we know that shows like Stephen Colbert's have been rating very well.

I say this after looking at a piece by one Andrew Ferguson at The Atlantic, the headline of which suggested it was going to make a very plausible argument that America is too deeply politically divided under Trump for the White House Correspondents Dinner to continue as a form of political roast.   (I would agree with that.)

But instead, the argument is really  a broad whinge that he does not find any humour in late night television comedy anymore.  He even references in passing Conan O'Brien,  who is not intensely political, has always done some very funny, often somewhat absurdist, material and who appears happier and revived in a new half hour format.   His complaint seems to be that the humour is not much in traditional "joke" punch line format anymore - it's more a case of stating the facts as they are and the audience finding it hilarious.

This seems a ridiculously tin-earred complaint to me.  Presumably, he longs for the day of the relatively non-political humour and joke structure of Bob Hope and Jimmy Carson.  The latter, in particular, always struck me as bland and not particularly funny.  If I recall correctly,  even in his heyday some found his sidekick lame: today, at least the sidekick is usually with their own talent (often the bandleader, or someone like Andy Richter who has a genuine comedy gift).  By contrast, I remember an old sarcastic complaint that Ed McMahon's only talent other than forced sounding guffaws was doing dog food advertisements.

Ferguson's take was, of course, taken up enthusiastically by Hot Air because it lets them say "see, it's not just us conservatives, our complaint for the last 5 years must be right!"

But honestly, no one in their right mind can deny that Trump is the most absurdly non-Presidential acting President we have ever seen, who lies and bullshits continually and has a barely functioning administration with extreme turnover and leaks against the boss.  Even without the Mueller investigation, he is the biggest and easiest target for political humour that has ever existed.

Trump is intrinsically absurd - that might be the explanation as to why humour about him does not need much construction as a old time-y "joke".   But I'm even skeptical of his take on that - I still think if you watch enough, there is a joke structure to their delivery that Ferguson just can't really see anymore.

I doubt that Ferguson is a conservative politically, but generally speaking, provided you aren't a conservative fretting about having lost the culture wars, the late night show humour about Trump has often been hilarious.

Whatever the explanation, there is something definitely "off" with Ferguson's sense of humour - and I expect most readers of The Atlantic will be saying the same.  

UFOs back again?

In a report which seems to take too unskeptically the comments of someone from the dubious "To the Stars Academy", the Washington Post nonetheless reports on the Navy setting up a more detailed scheme for its pilots to report UFOs (my bold):

A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue.

As first reported by POLITICO, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis since 2014. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.”

He said, “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”

I'm not sure of the source of that claim of recent numbers of unidentified aircraft - but I also note that if something seems to be moving just like an aircraft, it probably is one. 

Is it a case that the Navy is concerned about unidentified aircraft only, and this report conflates that with UFO's?

Transgender health

Nature has an article about a larger than usual European study on the on-going health and effects of transgender treatment.   It certainly supports the criticism that hormonal treatments have been readily offered without knowing the long term consequences.   Look at this, for example:

In 2017, the NIH launched a prospective study of 400 transgender adolescents. It will be the first study to examine the effects of drugs that block puberty until a teenager’s body and mind is mature enough to begin cross-sex hormone treatment.

Questions of how — and when — to allow transgender youth to transition medically and socially are among the stickiest in the field.

I hadn't heard of this surprising figure before, either:

Mental health tends to rank highly among health concerns, along with HIV. According to some studies, 25% of transgender women and 56% of African American transgender women in the United States are living with HIV, although this estimate could be high because it is based on people seeking treatment.

This is such a complicated area....

Beyond Meat going public

That's a co-incidence:  after having just tried one of their burgers and finding it pretty satisfying, Vox says that the US company is going public and has had good growth in the last few years.  Not profitably yet, but it seems everyone expects it to be:

Now, the company has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, scheduled for next week. They’ll sell shares in the company for between $19 and $21 per share, allowing them to raise $183 million for additional manufacturing facilities, research and development, and sales. If their stock sells at the high end of that, the company would be valued at $1.2 billion. They’ll be listed on NASDAQ as BYND.

Founded in 2009 by CEO Ethan Brown, the Los Angeles-based company’s products first hit supermarket shelves in 2013. Its rapid rise — food is not an easy industry to break into — reflects intense consumer demand and investor interest in meat alternatives. The company has never been profitable, and lost $29 million in 2018, but its rapidly growing revenues made it a good bet to many investors — as did its positioning on the frontier of a transformation of our food system.

Unusual economic idea

From Axios:

How depreciating money could save the global economy

Some explanation:

Central banks have unloaded trillions of dollars of stimulus in efforts to push inflation above 2% in countries from the U.S. to Japan and across the eurozone, but nothing seems to be working.

Driving the news: One radical idea that could boost spending and help resuscitate moribund economies is Silvio Gessell's proposal for depreciating money, writes Stephen Mihm, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, in an editorial for Bloomberg.

What it means: Money, if not spent, would lose its value by 5% a year. That would encourage people to spend, rather than hold onto it. Such a plan would radically boost the "velocity" of money, giving a major boost to developed economies where services account for a hefty majority of economic growth.

• "In Gesell's formulation, money became a 'hot potato' that note holders tried to use before it lost value," Mihm writes. "As far-fetched as they seem, his writings had practical implications because they pointed a way out of the impasse the world confronted in the Great Depression."

Context: The idea has been tried before. The mayor of Wörgl, Austria, used the town’s funds to put Gesell's depreciating currency into rotation and managed to stimulate a minor boom in the midst of the Great Depression.

Um, not sure how you make money depreciate by a set figure in the current system...

Incompetence results in slightly better news

Gee, the Sri Lankan government is looking pretty spectacularly inept:

Sri Lankan authorities have revised the death toll from Easter Sunday’s string of bombings down to 253 people from the previous estimate of 359.

At least the ineptitude on this means better news, of sorts.

The downfall of capitalism, by George Monbiot

While skeptical of the need to "declare capitalism dead", perpetual pessimist George Monbiot's piece in The Guardian is actually pretty well argued, and there are parts I think sound right.  Like this:

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

I guess I don't mind his previous points before this one, too:  in which he notes that it is not really useful just to argue that because capitalism worked spectacularly well in the past that it must continue in the same way in the future:

Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

But he is a bit light on where we move forward from here:

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

But yeah, on the whole, a reasonably argued take on the matter.   I think perhaps all it really amounts to is saying that capitalism as a system needs greater shaping by government intervention, but need not be abandoned in its entirety.
 

Local wildlife continues to surprise

Over the years, I've posted photos of a kangaroo in my street (twice), possums under the deck (here's one example, but there are many more), cockatoos, corellas and more unusual birds.   Of course we get more wildlife that I haven't photographed:  brush turkeys, blue tongued lizards, as well as your lorikeets, flying foxes, kookaburras, etc.   Lots of Australian wildlife, all within 18 km of the heart of the city, but it's not as if my house borders bushland, although it is within a couple of kilometres of patches of it.

Anyhow, last night the dog was doing its job of unnecessarily guarding our house by looking out the front window and barking at passing humans and their canines, when she obviously spotted something walking past closer to the house.  I couldn't see anything, but she was highly excited, and I eventually went out the front to find this:

Yes, a bundle of spikes* that is an echidna, with its head buried in the corner, I suspect in order to eat ants which are always in that area.   It was breathing and scraping, but we just let it be.  I checked half an hour later and it had moved on.

I had once seen one of these on a footpath near the bushy riverbank a couple of kilometres from me, but never really expected to see one in my street.

If only I ever spot a koala in the gum trees in the small park in front of the house (very unlikely, but the way things are going, seems I shouldn't rule it out entirely) I'll have some sort of Australian wildlife bingo game triumph that I never have expected to when I moved into this suburb.



*  now that I think of it, looks a tad like a bicycle helmet as designed for Mad Max; or one for a severe swooping magpie deterrent.

Chinese Australians and ANZAC Day

I'm starting to think it must be quite a onerous task for news services to come up with some fresh historical aspect of Australian war time service for each ANZAC Day.  But they usually do manage something of interest, and this year I choose to highlight the ABC stories on Chinese Australians who served in the World Wars.

There were at least 213 Chinese-Australians who enlisted in World War I, and potentially many more in World War II — however nobody knows exactly how many there were, due to Australia's race-based enlistment policies at the time.

"There were race requirements for entering the armed services during the World Wars," historian Meleah Hampton from the Australian War Memorial told the ABC.

The enforcement of these rules came down to how "European" a would-be soldier appeared in the eyes of the man taking down his enlistment — but Dr Hampton said their assessments became more lax as the need for soldiers grew.

"When they started getting very desperate for men, they started seeing whiter and whiter people I guess," she said.

The article supports this with a photo of someone who tried to enlist in World War 1 but was rejected:

The article notes the story of Billy Sing, of mixed Chinese Caucasian heritage, who was a crack sniper at Gallipoli and served in France too:

He does look quite the badass dude in the next photo

Moving forward to WW2, and Wellington Lee, later a deputy mayor in Melbourne, said he was rejected by the Navy (on pure racial grounds, he believes) but did get to enlist in the Air Force.  (Ahem, always the best service to be in, I say with some direct knowledge.)  Here's a photo of Lee from the article:

I see from another story from 2018 on the ABC, the Air Force again features as the service a Chinese Australian was able to join in WW2:

The White Australia policy treated her father as a "foreigner and enemy" and resulted in her mother's citizenship being revoked.

But despite that, in 1945 — at the age of just 18 — Kathleen Quan Mane enlisted as a decoder in Australia's Air Force for what would be the final year of World War II.

Ms Quan Mane and her sister Doreen, the youngest of five girls in their family, were among the first 21 Chinese-Australian servicewomen to join the war effort.

Here she is in uniform:

Cool.

Good on these people for giving service to our country even when, with its policies, you could argue it didn't really deserve their help.  

Update:   I just found via Twitter that someone writing in the South China Morning Post has an article about his great Uncle, Fred Goon, who did this:

Eight times Goon tried to sign up, and eight times he was rejected. But on his ninth try, on January 12, 1917, he succeeded. The medical officer noted the 23-year-old recruit’s dark complexion and hair, but not his Chinese heritage.

A little over a year later, Goon was gulping down German drift gas in the trenches of the Western Front, and he was hospitalised for months. He returned to the Belgian front in time to take part in the last battle of the war involving Australian troops.

The persistence of Goon, my great-uncle, may be some kind of record.

Here's his photo:

The image on the right is how he appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser when it reported news of his gassing.

Goon had a Chinese father but Irish descended mother.  This combination was not that unusual around Bendigo, oddly enough:

Goon was the son of Louey Fong Goon, a merchant from Taishan in Guangdong who joined the 19th century Australian gold rush. In Bendigo, he married Elizabeth Johnson, daughter of Irish immigrants, in 1896 – three years after she had given birth to their son, Fred.

My great-grandparents’ pairing was not unique; there were 28 marriages between Chinese men and Irish-born women in Victoria in a five-year period at the height of the gold rush, and many others involved Australian-born Irishwomen like Johnson.

But Fred was born into an Australia where racism was already endemic – anger about Chinese men marrying white women had helped trigger violent unrest, including the infamous 1861 Lambing Flat riot, in which Chinese miners were expelled from goldfields by white diggers. By 1901, the White Australia Policy was enshrined in law and would prevent most Chinese immigration for almost 50 years.

The article explains the discretionary nature of the racial criteria for enlistment:

Cheah Ah-Qune said the racism faced by ethnic Chinese would-be recruits was institutionalised, but application of the European-origin rule was up to individual recruitment medics. Some were sticklers. Others would bend the rules.

“One might say, well, you’re Sino in appearance, you have an olive complexion, but your heart is in the right place, so let’s put you in. It was discretionary … especially as the war progressed and more and more men were needed,” she said.

Some Chinese-Australians went to great lengths to enlist, said Cheah Ah-Qune, citing one recruit who travelled from Melbourne to Queensland to sign up, at least 1,700km north.

Interesting stuff.