US military not doing so well...

There is an article at the New York Times about suicide in the US Air Force in general, and talking about one case the writer knew about in detail.  I was surprised by this:

Today, I accept that I can’t change the actions that led up to Neil’s suicide, but I can control actions I take in the future. The Air Force is facing an alarming increase in suicides, with 2019 seeing a rise of about 50 percent compared to last year, and I want to do whatever I can to help do something about it. For instance, I recorded a podcast for the Air Force about losing Neil, as part of a push to teach people that it is normal and healthy to talk about stressors and to seek help. I’ve also had an active hand in the messaging for the recent Resilience Tactical Pause, the Air Force initiative that requires all airmen to stand down for a day to focus on mental well-being, resiliency and suicide prevention.

I wonder why the Air Force, in particular, would be having such an increase?  I thought - maybe the base rate is actually low, and this is just a reversion to more "normal" rate?   But no - it seems that the USAF is expecting perhaps 150 suicides this year, and has about 320,000 active members.   The general rate of suicide in the US is about 13 per 100,000

So yeah, the USAF really is running at a high suicide rate.  Odd.

Still waiting for the brillance of Boris to emerge

Can't say that I have detected any obvious sign of Boris Johnson "winning" at anything yet.

His performance has generally looked embarrassing:  another living example of the Peter Principle.  (His level of competence peaked out at being Mayor of London, it seems.)

Netflix and cultural export

I recently wrote that I liked the way Netflix lets us view a lot of good quality shows from other cultures, and I see that Axios has an article saying that investing in other countries productions is a specific strategy of the company.

This is a good thing, I think.

I think I'm in...

I've been watching various Youtubes of (parts of) the Ring Cycle, and I have to say, the music from Die Walkure (even before it hits the Ride of the Valkyries) is more exciting than I realised.   

As for versions to watch, I've been pretty impressed by the (very different) Copenhagen Ring.  

I'm pretty sure I'm now going to see it in Brisbane - and the only issue is whether I buy restricted view seats close to the action, or a nosebleed seat on the second balcony.   (There are not that many seats left in any category, by the way.)  

Don't see that every day

This story about a flipped cargo ship that transports cars seems not to have attracted much attention on the Australian news:

Four crew were rescued from the propeller shaft room by a hole being cut in the hull.

They got their "morning after", then.  :)

The dire state of water in Jordan

A report in Nature about how Jordan is caught in a real water supply mess:  depleting ground water; climate change affecting rainfall patterns; population increase and the refugee problem; and desalination solution complicated and involves Israel.  

The joke continues

Oh look, Sinclair Davidson has returned to the topic of climate change and carbon taxes, under a post referencing "climate hysteria".   He ends with his longstanding line that, if done right (that is, according to his value judgement that governments must have as little tax income as possible) maybe a carbon tax could be OK:

How did such a modest and potentially beneficial adjustment to the tax code become virtually undiscussable?

Simple answer: because that is not what actually gets implemented. When the carbon tax was implemented in Australia, for example, the revenue was used to expand the welfare state – not reduce the tax burden. Worse – income tax rates to lower income individuals were increased.


Now there is an argument to having a carbon tax where that tax is considered as part of the overall tax system. Then we would have to consider the dead weight losses associated with a carbon tax and the dead weight losses associated with the taxes that it replaces. This would involve an honest debate and evaluation of the technical merits and demerits of a carbon tax.  I have zero confidence given on what we have seen to date that such a debate could or would be possible.

That last line is so disingenuous as to be a complete joke.

How can a person who runs a blog that for years and years and years has been absolutely full of "climate change is not a serious issue, if it exists at all" content complain that it's impossible to have a "proper" debate on a carbon tax?

Does he think people don't notice his hand on the tiptruck pouring bullshit into the well of public discourse while simultaneously claiming that it's impossible to reason with people who want him to stop doing that but won't taste the water?

Looking at 9/11 again

I didn't plan to, but I ended up watching the documentary 9/11: 102 Minutes that Changed America on SBS last night.   (It's available on SBS on Demand.)   I hadn't seen it before, and found it very powerful and affecting. 

If you haven't seen it, it's a documentary made up of mostly amateur footage of what was going on that day, with no voiceover, and only the occasional break away from the chronology of the events.  (It runs for the same 102 minutes from the time of the first impact to the collapse of the second tower.)   It's a strong reminder of the sense of disbelief and anxiety that it induced (at one point, someone on the street says they've heard that there was a threat that a new building would be blown up every 30 minutes.)    It showed people in the World Trade Towers perched outside of windows, but has the good taste to not show people jumping or falling, although they did have some reaction from people who saw it happening.

A few reactions I had:

*  watching it unfold, it feels pretty surprising that the death toll was not substantially higher.   Like people watching in the street, it feels like it wouldn't be surprising if 10,000 had died instead of a few thousand.

*  it's hard to credit how people can possibly believe anything about "controlled demolition" when you watch the buildings burn with great intensity in "real time" before the collapse.  

*  I know people were saying "but they didn't come from Iraq" before the Iraqi invasion, but it's hard to avoid the felling that an invasion of somewhere was going to be inevitable outcome of the event, and Iraq was just the unlucky country.   (Who wants to try to control Saudi Arabia, anyway.)


PS:   Graeme - don't bother commenting your conspiracy stuff - it won't get through.

When things feel climate change-y

I think most South East Queenslanders will be sharing the feeling that when bushfires start burning down 90 year old timber lodges in a subtropical rainforest area not known, in our lifetimes, as being prone to fire at all, this feels like climate change.

I have only ever camped at Binna Burra; most memorably during a Christmas holiday period when a teenager in Navy Cadets, and it poured rain during the couple of days we were there.  With nothing else to do, we still trudged through the rainforest, finding interesting things coming out with the water and sitting in the middle of the path, such as the large, bright blue crayfish that normally stay in the creeks up there.  Also, an enormous variety of earthworm, about a metre long and more than a centimetre wide, if memory serves correct.   Of course, the leeches were out in force, and it was almost impossible to avoid at least one or two.   Some kids, not being as careful as they should, looked like their legs had been shot up when they returned and went to the shower block, as the blood flowed profusely (with the leech bite anti-coagulant effect) from multiple bites up and down their limbs.

Fun.   Feels very sad that the old lodge has gone, as I would have liked to stay there at least once.

Update:  an article at the ABC about how the rainforest in the area does not have a history of burning.

Heh

(Truth be told, I am not as down on George W as most observers, but this call was still obviously wrong.)

Fast takes

*  This Jackie Trad so-called scandal has always seemed to me to be a storm in a teacup.   Politics in Queensland has always been stupid, and there are no signs of it letting up.

* Isn't there something off with the claim that Labor is now the dregs of the middle class who shoot themselves in the foot by being too Green when the Unions that are pro-coal represent mine workers who probably all earn well over $100,000 a year?   In other words, it's not the middle class lording it over the working class - it's a fight within the middle class.

* Anti-coal protesters, if they were serious, would be making plans to superglue themselves to certain central Queensland rail lines, rather than to Brisbane streets.   Superglue 10 people at 200 m intervals to a coal train line, and see how long it takes to remove them would be an interesting start.

* Peter Dutton is now disturbingly weird looking.  Buy a hairpiece, for God's sake.  Some guys' heads can carry off bald:  yours doesn't.

* Donald Trump and the hurricane:  this is so weird, I don't think it is any exaggeration now to say he is mentally unwell.   And to anyone who doubts that - wait until he is gone and we get the true story from people within the White House as to his behaviour.     

* Speaking of which, this piece in Slate a few days ago was good, and accurate:

Governing by Owning the Libs:  When a president’s entire motivation is to antagonize the people who didn’t vote for him.

*  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has just about topped out at making about $132 million in the US - not that big a hit, I would have thought, even allowing for another $150 million overseas.  For a (apparently) $90 million budget, it's barely making much money for the studio (if the rule of thumb that you have to make 3 times the budget to start turning a profit still applies.)   He's a director whose attraction to critics is not much reflected in actual bucks at the box office anymore.   (Interestingly, I see that Pulp Fiction made about $213 million, but on a claimed $8 million budget.)

Yet more Saturday pics

For someone suffering (what I think was) a bad episode of hayfever this week, Brisbane's weather is not helping.  It's under a dust cloud following a windy change last night: 

Well, you've probably seen worse, but we are used to pretty clear skies here.  The pool is the one on Gregory Terrace, quite liked for the modernist design of the building around it.

I went for a walk around Spring Hill, taking pics of old buildings. 

An old Masonic Temple that's been taken over by the equally mysterious Embroiderers Guild.   Or do the Masons still use the heavily curtained upstairs, I wonder.

A block of old flats (I wonder if strata titled now?) that is in good nick and I have always liked the look of.

Not sure if this is flats, but I only took the pic for the lions on top, as well as the mini flag pole, which makes it look a tad ship like.  

Next:

There are lots of these old workers cottage style houses in Spring Hill, and the latticed in porch is a common feature.  This one is rather extreme:  I get the feeling a Boo Radley character could be observing the passing children from in there, with no risk of being seen.  I always think that any lattice like this must make the house interior very dark.

I was surprised to walk down a side street to find a row of particularly old looking houses:

Maybe it was the open porches that made them look more attractive.  All seem occupied, and it reminded me a bit of some streets around Potts Point or Woolloomooloo in Sydney.

And finally, to ruin the ambiance, possibly the ugliest block of units in Brisbane:

The unit for sale, according to the sign, had "sophistication".  That's real estate talk for you.

Good one, Malaysia

Why would Mahatir be soft on this guy?  Makes little sense to me:

Zakir Naik is an Indian preacher of Islam who currently calls Malaysia home. Described by the Washington Post as a “rock star of tele-evangelism”, he is also a fugitive, having evaded law enforcement in his home country of India since July 2016, when he fled the country within hours of bombers from neighbouring Bangladesh allegedly citing ideological influence from his YouTube videos.

A proponent of austere Salafi Islam, Naik has a long history of provocative rhetoric, including claims that “every Muslim should be a terrorist” and that suicide bombings are a legitimate weapon in war. He has expressed support for the death penalty for apostasy and the belief that Muslim-majority countries shouldn’t allow other religions to build houses of worship.

His television channel, named “Peace TV”, has been banned in India, Bangladesh, and (soon after the 2019 Easter bombings) Sri Lanka. Zahran Hashim, the alleged mastermind of the Sri Lanka attacks, once posted a video for his YouTube followers asking Sri Lankan Muslims what they could do for the celebrity preacher. Naik’s so-called Islamic Research Foundation was banned in 2016 under India’s anti-terror laws for “extolling Osama Bin Laden’s views”. He was charged in absentia in May this year for money laundering, accused of acquiring US$28 million worth of criminal assets.

While many governments in Asia treat Naik with suspicion, Malaysia has given him the red-carpet treatment. Naik has been granted permanent residency status and has attracted crowds of tens of thousands on speaking tours around the Muslim-majority country.

During a sermon to a large audience in the ultraconservative state of Kelantan in early August, Naik questioned the loyalty of Malaysia’s ethnic and religious minorities. He referred to ethnic Chinese Malaysians – many of whose ancestors have lived in Malaya since the early 19th century and constitute around a quarter of the country’s population – as “guests”....

Asked about his opinion on Naik’s remarks, Mahathir claimed that the preacher faces being “killed” if returned to India. “So he is here today, but if any country wants to have him, they are welcome to do so,” the PM said....

 Many see the PM’s tacit support of Naik’s presence in Malaysia as undermining his “Pact of Hope” government’s commitment to progressive values and pluralism, upon which they were elected. It also provides a clear picture of the enduring strength of far-right political Islam and the Malay-dominated status quo – even in the renewed democracy of “new Malaysia”.
 

A dream recorded

Last night, I saw a photo of a tree full of flying foxes, which no doubt then contributed to a dream which involved one of these critters wanting to know what was written on a piece of paper I was carrying.  Yeah, it was talking to me, and flew down to the ground where it showed me a trick whereby it could hold its body in such a way that it resembled, kind of, a cat.  (It was a weird looking transformation.)  I was very surprised, but the flying fox said that they had always been able to do this.  I grabbed my phone to take photos, because I thought this had never been recorded before.  The conversation then moved onto the piece of paper, which had marks on it, but they weren't words.  It sort of petered out from there...

I think it amusing, or odd, that in such a dream it wasn't the animal talking that was the surprise, but what it could do to transform its body.   Dreams are weird...

Goose goes high

Well, I would never have thought this was possible:  

In 1953, a mountain climber reported seeing a bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) soar over the peak of Mount Everest. The nearly 9-kilometer feat—2 kilometers higher than any other animal has been known to fly—was thought physiologically impossible. Now, researchers who raised 19 of the geese—named for the black stripes on the backs of their heads—have shown the birds really do have what it takes to fly so high.

 What bothers me a bit about this is that even at a height just short of most cruising altitudes, aircraft engines could still accidentally suck in a goose...

The ongoing effects of Christianity

Tom Holland, writing in New Statesman:

Repeatedly, throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had given radicals their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as epiphenomena, was veiling the true germ of his revolt against capitalism behind jargon. The revulsion that Marx so patently felt at the miseries of artisans evicted on to the streets by their landlords to starve, of children aged before their years by toiling night and day in factories, of labourers worked to death in distant colonies so that the bourgeoisie might have sugar with their tea, made a mockery of his claims to have outgrown moral judgements. As with Marx, so with Corbyn: his interpretation of the world appears fuelled by certainties that have no obvious source in his model of economics. It rises instead from profounder depths. If it offers a liberation from Christianity, then it is one that seems eerily like a recalibration of it.

Let's see how the appeal goes

Don't think I ever commented on the Peter Ridd dismissal case.

I see that Anthony Watts and the IPA are all excited that he got a big damages award from Judge Vasta, who was the subject of an article "Could Salvatore Vasta be Australia's Worse Judge" in February this year, before the Ridd case.

Given Vasta's somewhat hyperbolic sounding words reported today...:

Outlining his final declarations and penalties, Judge Salvatore Vasta suggested the university's conduct bordered on "paranoia and hysteria fuelled by systemic vindictiveness" and Dr Ridd must have felt he was being persecuted. He found the academic's intellectual freedom had been undermined by the "myopic and unjustified actions of his lifelong employer"....

Judge Vasta ordered a payment of $1.09 million in damages and compensation for lost wages and superannuation. Another $125,000 is to be paid to Dr Ridd as a penalty to "deter both this university and any other employer from dismissing an employee for exercising basic workplace rights".

...I suspect that the IPA should not be popping the champagne until the appeal is finished.

Stupid Shapiro

Yes, Ben Shapiro is a twit.  I liked these tweet responses to his whiny Right wing complaint when a company makes a perfectly reasonable decision as to how it wants to run its business:

Some clean up

Two of the worst looking hurricane damage photos I have seen from the Bahamas (found at an Axios post):

Boris not so hot in Parliament

Before Boris Johnson got the top job, I was saying to his sympathisers here that it seemed to me that most observers long thought he was not a particularly good parliamentary performer.

Most journalists commenting on the situation now seem to agree that Corbyn has been sounding surprisingly good, and Johnson is continuing his underperformance.  

Good.

Feeling poorly

I'm never 100% sure how to tell whether a dripping nose with little else going on is hayfever or a head cold.

I'm going with hayfever this time.  

Seriously?

The Conversation occasionally throws up an article that reads close to "peak Guardian".  Like this example from a part of academia that needs to be sacked if this is all they have to think about:

Sex robots increase the potential for gender-based violence 

I've complained before:  why does this topic attract so much attention, as if every second man in future is going to have one in his cupboard?  Has Westworld been way, way too influential?

How can I take this latest article seriously when it claims:

 Over 40 per cent of men who participated in an online survey said they could imagine buying a sex robot in the next five years.

The link shows it was to a survey of 263 men, with no details of where the survey was conducted.  Viz magazine? 

And this: 

 The concern is that if human-robot relationships continue to play out in such a manner, there is a possibility that the way users view and practise consent in their human relationships could shift, with negative consequences for women.

Acts of violence towards sex robots have also been observed around the world over the past few years. These include incidents of decapitation, mutilation and molestation. For individuals who might be inclined to act in this way, the availability of a robot to violate could feed these behaviours.

And the final paragraph:

The way sex robots are currently programmed is obviously problematic. It encourages the porn-ification of women, devalues consent and does not punish violence and aggression. Providing intelligent and somewhat autonomous machines with a full set of rights is excessive, but finding ways to protect them from harm is a positive solution. This ethical approach could preclude harmful human behaviour and in turn protect us from ourselves.

 I really can't believe people make a living fretting about giving some sort of rights to masturbation devices.

Network

I've been at home today trying to get a workplace laptop to work through my home internet (it won't - or at least, not properly), and this has reminded me that the worst aspect of modern computing, which seems ridiculously immune to adequate simplification, is networking.  

With all the alleged brilliance of AI, when are we going to get to a situation where I can say to my laptop "you're at home now, there's a new wifi you need to connect to, and I need Outlook and my other software to work from here today", and it will do it?

They ought to scrap the way it works now and start again.

Fun and games in Britain

Just thinking out loud here, but if an election is called on 14 October and the pro-Brexit-at-any-cost parties win, couldn't they get Parliament going in time to get any pre-election legislation delaying Brexit revoked?  Does it really take that long to get the Queen to roll up at Parliament?   Couldn't they ask her to just read one statement:  "My government will now ensure Brexit proceeds, and do a lot of other good stuff.  See you next Parliament." 

Someone will know, somewhere...

As I suspected

Slate has an article about the "no shampoo" idea, which has a certain following in Australia, but of which I am rather sceptical.  One quote:

So zero shampoo is not the answer for me—or most people. The idea that your hair will naturally rebalance after a period of not washing is “an old wives’ tale,” noted Joshua Zeichner, the director of cosmetic and clinical research at Mount Sinai Hospital to me via email. Moreover, it’s not good for your scalp, which does need to be cleansed now and then to stay healthy. “This no-shampoo movement has been a problem,” dermatologist Rebecca Baxt told me. She’s seen an uptick of people coming in with dead skin built up on their scalps, which itches and flakes, and ironically looks kind of dry, which can further feed the no-washing cycle. From a doctor’s perspective, the scalp skin is what you’re really caring for when you wash your hair. 

I heard the comedian Dave Hughes on his radio show some time ago say that he doesn't use shampoo very often, and once he got in the shower and was surprised to find that his hair was bubbling under the shower, when he hadn't put anything on it.  Turned out his wife had told one of his kids to secretly drop some shampoo into his hair while playing with him, so that he would finally wash his hair properly. 

Since then, when I have seen him on TV, I have thought "yeah, this guy's hair does look kind of stiff and as if it needs a good wash."  I wonder how many other people who follow this idea I could detect as having not-so-nice looking hair.

David's keeping count

David Neiwert writes on Right wing violence in the USA, and someone re-tweeted this from 2018, in which he lists some prominent Right wing murders (and acknowledges two cases of Left wing motivated killing.)   It is easy to forget these incidents, even if you don't have a political motivation for doing so.

And as it says at the start: 

For some reason, folks on the right have extremely short memories when it comes to acts of right-wing political violence. This is especially the case when they are in the middle of a propaganda campaign to make "the left" look violent. A long thread with lots of pix follows.

Well, made me laugh

In America, it's time to drop the kids off to their college dorm for the first time, I gather.   I thought this was a funny first tweet in response:

Give me some good news

A lot of "downer" news at the moment, no?

Families being thrown out of Australia when there appears to be no real need to; a severe hurricane mashing up the Bahamas; mass shootings in the US with responses in Twitter including a fair swathe of "don't worry, when we get even more guns into the hands of citizens, and they get the right training, things will come good"; (as already noted) a Conservative minister muttering about how governments don't have to follow Parliament, when push comes to shove; and Hong Kong in considerable turmoil.

Cheer me up, someone...

Bad news story from Vietnam

The ABC has a story up about the problem of family breakdown, runaway boys, and their exploitation by sex tourists in Vietnam (it talks about Hanoi in particular.)

I've been wanting to holiday in Vietnam, thinking that there would not be much of the obvious problems of poverty to be seen, particularly in the big cities.   But sounds like there sort of is.

Not a worry at all

Yeah, so Australian pro-Brexit readers (I think I have three):  are you not the teensy weeniest embarrassed that you now have a Conservative Minister saying that the government may not abide by laws passed by Parliament?

I can't see that Helen Dale has tweeted about that remarkable interview, either.


And to pre-empt a response of "but giving the country Brexit is following the democratic will of the people from the referendum" - the referendum was not binding, and it was up to the government to work out how to do it.  Regardless of laws passed previously to get the ball rolling, of course Parliaments can change previous legislation.    

Sorry, but democracy and rule of law is more important that your feelz about how important Brexit is.

What are the chances...

...that I would intensely dislike that Joker film?  

It's just about the safest bet in the world, given that I don't respond to comic book universes that purport to be serious, and have never gone out of my way to view movies in the "lonely, emotionally fragile man goes berserk" genre.  (Yeah, call me a film history philistine, but I still haven't got around to seeing Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, or Falling Down.  Dark themes of that kind have never held much appeal to me - so sue me.) 

What's more, Joker, while getting some ecstatic reviews, has received some pretty solid negative ones too,  most notably from Time's Stephanie Zacharek.   Given the strange world of comic book fandom, what's the bet that she has already received some disturbing threats over the net?  (Which would be kind of ironic, I guess.)

Anyway, the negative reviews have already primed me for the reasons I would dislike it.   Yet my son, being of the age where darker themes appeal, badly wants to see it.  

Perhaps I should deliberately hate view this one, and let out many sighs and mutterings throughout to annoy him?   Don't think I will, as maybe I would get into too much trouble from others in the cinema, too.

Do not wander towards this movie

I tried watching the Chinese science fiction blockbuster (at least in China) The Wandering Earth last night.

It's spectacularly bad - like the worst Michael Bay (or Roland Emmerich)  movie times 10, with even less character development, terrible opaque-to-understanding action editing, very 2001 derivative in one plot element, underwhelming special effects, and an awful,  clunky script.  About the only slightly interesting thing was that there was a light relief character (who didn't have much to do, actually) who was meant to have one parent from China, and one from Melbourne.  I think there was sort of a suggestion that his Australian genes had dumbed him down, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I put up with its awfulness for about half the way, before speeding up to the end to see what happened.   Yeah, heroic male sacrifice featured, as might be expected.  Chinese audiences must be absolutely desperate for special effects heavy science fiction movies to have seen this one in large numbers, is all I can say.

I see that on Rottentomatoes that there are OK reviews from some American critics in the "just a bit of escapist, science fiction disaster movie fun " variety.  They are wrong.

The gigantic keyhole tombs in Japan

I've never spent much time around Osaka prefecture - is that why I hadn't actually heard of the gigantic "keyhole" tombs near it, which are explained in this BBC video?  Here's a photo:

Pretty interesting - and pretty amazing how Japan doesn't believe in any form of archaeological digging on them.  

All good stuff for a science fiction/fantasy movie, too, I would imagine.  Probably already been done in some anime already, I suspect.

Evidence is optional

I see that James Allan, the conservative blow in legal professor who writes for reliably wingnut Quadrant and Australian Spectator, has a new contribution to the former magazine:  a report on a road trip through America. 

The article is lightweight guff, ending on the note that in all Red states they passed through, conversations with people having breakfast in diners convinced him that Trump will romp it in at the 2020 election, such is the love expressed for the Orange one.   Now, anecdotal evidence is something people like to cite, but I have my suspicion that talking to "locals who eat breakfasts in Red state diners on any regular basis" is not safe sampling - it's going to be selective for the more Right wing type under any President.  I could be wrong - I've never eaten at such establishments - but you would certainly get the impression from their depiction in US media that they would swing that way.

Anyway, that's not really why I am posting about his article.  It was this claim (my bold):

What saves time, and I think I mentioned this in my recounting of the 2013 road trip, is that the US has sane and normal speeding laws.  On interstate highways, the big ones that criss-cross the nation, you can drive at least 80 miles per hour (about 130 kph) before there is the slightest chance of a speeding ticket.  And there are no speed cameras.  Either the police catch you that day, then and there, or you don’t get a ticket.

And you know what?  All that revenuers’ propaganda about Australia’s ridiculously low speed limits promoting safety is guff. Compare deaths over distance travelled and Australia is no bastion of safety. 

Because I had only posted earlier this year about how I didn't realise the American road death rate was so high, I thought this sounded suss.

So, looking up an annual report comparing OECD countries road safety, I find this table:

Um, a rate of .52 is way under .73.

If Allan's throw away line is meant to imply that America's per distance travelled death rate (with its higher speeds and looser enforcement) is not so different to Australia's (and let's be honest, that's his intention), it is flat out wrong.

As with anyone who loves Brexit, sympathises with Trump and his voters, and (I am betting) doesn't believe climate change is a serious issue, James just doesn't care about evidence.

It's the marker for the state of conservative Right wing politics now.

Looking for connections

Science magazine is running a series of reports on suicide, which includes this map for suicide rates in 2017:

On the website version, you can hover over the country and get the exact figure, with Australia showing as 11, the USA as 14, Russia 25, and Greenland at the top of the chart at 51.  (And that's before they heard Trump wanted to buy them.)

What strikes me most is how Muslim countries are all very low.  For example, Pakistan is at 4.44, Bangladesh at 6, but neighbouring India is 15.59.   Saudi Arabia is a startling low 2.9; Indonesia 3.1.

The other consistently low rate countries are those which are very Catholic, particularly those with their own local ethno-Catholicism, like Mexico and the Philippines, as well the European strongholds in Italy and Spain. (France is not so good:  at 12.4 it is close to our rate.)  Mexico surprises me:  for a country so notoriously dangerous for murder, at 5.9, the violence in the form of suicide is about half of ours.

I guess I should note that Buddhist countries are very much a mixed bag - Japan is as high as the US, but other, smaller Buddhist countries are low.  China is quite good at 7.2, too. Not sure what accounts for that.

I have posted before about the pretty well established connection between Protestantism and higher suicide rates, but I don't think I had realised before how being Muslim, or at least, living in a highly Muslim society,  seems to be even more "protective" from suicide than being Catholic.
 

Catholic schism in Italy, too

For once, a useful link from that ugly blog.

An article in Foreign Policy noting that Italian politics is caught up in the Great Schism in Catholicism:

It is a tale of two Catholic churches. One is focused on social justice, welcoming migrants, helping the poor, protecting the environment, defending the virtues of the European Union,  and building bridges rather than walls.  It proudly sports a cosmopolitan identity and talks about diversity and inclusion. It firmly opposes leaders like Salvini and U.S. President Donald Trump, whose ideology is one “that always ends badly—it leads to war,” as Pope Francis said in a recent interview with the daily La Stampa, adding that he’s concerned “because we hear speeches that resemble those of Hitler in 1934.” The poster child of this Catholic Church is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist whose initiatives have been blessed by the pope.

The other Catholic Church stresses the importance of tradition and defending the so-called Judeo-Christian West from mass immigration, pledges to protect the traditional family, and fights permissive laws on abortion and LGBT rights. It is skeptical of a bureaucratic, highly secularized EU and believes that Christianity thrives in a world organized around nation-states as opposed to supranational organizations. This faction fears that the current Vatican leadership may eventually turn the church into a progressive NGO.

In this highly polarized ecosystem, both sides claim to represent the true faith. And both sides are struggling to find a political home. Italy’s government crisis reveals a deeper tectonic shift in the Catholic world that has left many devout voters with no political home. In Italy, 74 percent of the population identifies as Catholic, but only 27 percent of those are actively practicing. In the recent election for the European Parliament, more than half of practicing Catholics didn’t vote.

Go watch it

I finished watching Happy Jail on Netflix last night. 

I've already recommended it, but I'm back to say that it is just extraordinarily good as documentary, and I am not sure why it hasn't attracted more media attention.   (My son liked it too, so it's not just my eccentric taste.)

PS:  I think it obvious why so many documentary/local reportage shows look so good these days - everything from Backroads, to Foreign Correspondent, to Happy Jail -  is the invention of the cheap drone with camera.   Beautiful aerial shots are just ubiquitous in these shows now, and we all know why.   But I don't care how many times they are used, really:  getting a God's eye view over settings I just find pleasing every time.   Maybe it subconsciously feels like it is satisfying those "cool! I can fly" dreams?    

What ugliness

When I see a Bunnings ad featuring an ethnically diverse woman, I think "that's good...another sign of successful integration into a typical aspect of the Australian way of life.  Especially good that it's a Muslim woman.  Good on you Bunnings for your diversity in hiring, too."  

But when a poisonous soul who comments at Sinclair's club for ugly conservatism sees the ad, this is what she thinks:

For the millionth time, I honestly don't understand how Sinclair Davidson can feel satisfaction running a blog that lets people display themselves in all their ugliness. 

Saturday photo

Everyone likes the ornate design of this building, surely?  I like to imagine it has a hunchback living secretly in the roof space and spires, or the dark, creepy basement I am told exists too.  

The "I'm only being reasonable - and stop oppressing me" Right has a long, disreputable history

David Roberts tweeted praise for this article in the Washington Post, and it is really good.

The writer, Eve Fairbanks, points out that a great deal of recent conservative rhetoric which claims to the status of "only being reasonable" in reaction to an unreasonable and censoring Left reads exactly as did the pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery commentary before and during the Civil War.  For example:

They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”

They loved hyperbole. Events were “the most extraordinary spectacles” that had “ever challenged the notice of the civilized world,” “too alarming” and threatened “to destroy all that is valuable and beautiful in the institutions of our country.” All over, they saw slippery slopes: Objecting to the extension of slavery into new territories, Lincoln’s longtime position, would lead inexorably to miscegenation.

The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.

Now, I think it is probably fair to note that realising this doesn't detract from some ideas of the Left being legitimately bad arguments that ignore the facts of nature - the most obvious modern ones surround the extremes of identity politics,  like the suggestion that sportswomen should not claim unfairness when transexual men start winning all events.   (I'm also sympathetic to the line that a certain basic form of capitalism - whereby people like to organise around, and profit from, things they can do well - is a natural tendency of human society, which explains why far Left attempts to suppress it completely are always doomed to fail.)

But it does tell us to be extremely cautions of the Right wing claims of persecution and to being tied to reason, when they are falling to act on dangers promoted by figures on their own side. 

The absolute worst thing about it is the way the conservative Right has decided  to give, at most, only occasional lip service to objection to the dangerous, authoritarian sympathising stupidity of Trump and his administration, and the global dire dangers of climate change, preferring instead to shrug their shoulders and concentrate on a culture war with the Left as if it was more important.

They only had to read Catallaxy to know this

From an article in The New Republic The Misogyny of Climate Deniers:

In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.

 The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.

The deep irony is that the other ideology that bulldozed over nature in the interests of economic growth is the communism that the wingnut Right spend the rest of their limited brain cells panicking about as secretly taking over the world under the guise of "cultural Marxism" and "socialism". 

Foreign Correspondent noted

Been meaning to say:  gee, this current season of ABC's Foreign Correspondent has been good. 

Fake meat in America; Taiwan and its worrying future with China; child surrogacy gone wrong in the Ukraine; and a look at Barcelona and the continuing vexed issue of Catalonian independence.

All well made, informative and engaging shows.

The enemies of the ABC need to exiled to some Survivor Island, and they can make documentaries of themselves getting sunburnt and stupider by the day by making reality TV.    

Stand up comedy is pretty weird

I rarely care for stand up comedy of any variety, but I will still read reviews of it to see what stuff that I wouldn't like is out there.

I note that Dave Chappelle has a Netflix special out which is getting praise from Tim Blair and some people at Catallaxy, and complaints from the likes of The Guardian and Slate.  The criticism from the Left - especially the one at Slate - sounds far, far more compelling a guide to my reaction, should I watch it.   Mind you, The Guardian's review is very similar, really.

There is something a bit weird about stand up, isn't there?, in the way audiences reaction precedes, and is independent from, thought.   Take this, for example, from The Guardian:

Chappelle speaks out against Michael Jackson’s accusers, stating in no uncertain terms that “I do not believe these motherf.......s” to whistles and cheers of approval from the audience. An assortment of his hotter takes plays like an exoneration wishlist: Kevin Hart’s a good guy, Louis CK never did anything wrong, and even if the King of Pop did prey on innocent children, “I mean, it’s Michael Jackson.”

I mean, really?   Surely it is only due to an expectation that the guy on stage is funny that people would find that crack about Jackson's accusers a laugh-out-loud thing?   It's not even a joke, as such.

Have psychologists studied this much?  

Feeling sorry for the Queen

I bet the Queen is hating the position she is in at the moment.

I see that Axios suggests the possible outcomes of tosspot Johnson's seeking of Brexit advantage by limiting Parliament are:

What's next? Parliament will return from recess to sit for a short session next week, during which lawmakers are expected to take steps to block a no-deal Brexit in the limited time they have.

• Option 1 is a legislative fix forcing the government to seek another extension from the EU, but there are no binding Brexit bills currently on the agenda.
• Option 2 is a vote of no-confidence, which would give MPs a window of 14 days to form a caretaker unity government with the express purpose of blocking no-deal.
• Option 3 is a general election, assuming anti-no-deal lawmakers can't gather enough support to form a government. But Downing Street officials have already said that Johnson would likely hold any snap election after Brexit has been completed on Oct. 31.

But if no-confidence passes, who gets to tell the Queen what to do?   Does Johnson tell her to just call an election, and one after 31 October?   Does a caretaker unity government enter after him and say "no, we are governing and we will just pass this Act delaying Brexit and then go to an election"?   Does Scotland knock at her door and say "we'll be leaving the kingdom, thanks very much.  And Balmoral is going to become an upmarket spa and holiday resort." 

I don't quite understand... 

Update:  The BBC provides some much needed explanation of the technicalities here.  I understand the options a bit better now.

Rain needed

Brisbane, and everywhere west of Brisbane, is very, very dry at the moment.  There is hope for a little rain today, but it sounds like barely enough to green the lawns.  When you drive down Milton Road from the city, and look up at Mt Cootha, there are patches of brown trees extending up the mountainside.  I am not sure if they are dying, but I don't recall ever seeing this before, and it doesn't feel very re-assuring.

Interestingly, I see that most water supply dams close to the coast are at relatively healthy levels.  Quite a few are virtually full, although Brisbane's Wivenhoe is down to 52.8%.   Somerset Dam, however, which feeds directly into it, is at 74.5%.  I

You don't have to go too much further inland, though, to see some dams effectively empty - which tends not to be a good thing in agricultural areas (he says with understatement.)

As in Queensland, I think virtually everywhere away from the coast in New South Wales has been on extended drought for a long time.  I know someone with family in Walgett.  Photos show it as a dustbowl.  Someone else I know who has relatives at Tamworth says trees are dying everywhere there.

I hope this isn't the start of another really prolonged, widespread drought like the one in the 2000's. 

More fasting research

At phys.org, a report on a dieting method that sounds a little hard to stick to:

In recent years there has been a surge in studies looking at the biologic effects of different kinds of fasting diets in both animal models and humans. These diets include continuous calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and alternate-day fasting (ADF). Now the largest study of its kind to look at the effects of strict ADF in healthy people has shown a number of health benefits. The participants alternated 36 hours of zero-calorie intake with 12 hours of unlimited eating. The findings are reported August 27 in the journal Cell Metabolism. ...

"We found that on average, during the 12 hours when they could eat normally, the participants in the ADF group compensated for some of the calories lost from the fasting, but not all," says Harald Sourij, a professor at the Medical University of Graz. "Overall, they reached a mean calorie restriction of about 35% and lost an average of 3.5 kg [7.7 lb] during four weeks of ADF."

The article goes on to note the health benefit changes recorded in the study, and it does point this other simple advantage:

"The elegant thing about strict ADF is that it doesn't require participants to count their meals and calories: they just don't eat anything for one day."

Yeah, I must admit, I have found during bursts of 5:2 dieting that I start to spend too long in the supermarket reading calorie information on things I can try for a variation on how to get my 600 cal in a day.

I am due to start dieting again.  Not sure if will try this method.  3.5kg for four weeks of intermittent sounds a bit less that I might have expected, especially as it always seems to me that the first couple of kilos drop fast, but it gets slower as you go along.

Ngo-ing, Ngo-ing, Gone

So, Andy Ngo has left Quillette abruptly (or not, see next sentence) after evidence comes out of his lack of reporting when he sees right wing activists planning a confrontation at a bar.  Claire Lehmann says it's all a co-incidence (she says he actually had already left before this story came out) and he has gone onto "bigger projects".    (Sounds suspiciously like one of those standard cover statements when you don't want to go into detail - along the lines of "resigned to spend more time with his family".)

What's the bet that he might be getting a more permanent role with Fox News?  He'll fit right in.

Kids being different

There's a more-or-less reasonable piece up at The Atlantic about the issue of kids who grow up to identify as gay/bi/queer, which makes a point that I don't recall reading much about before:

Numerous studies have shown that children who eventually come out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—scientists call them pre-homosexual, or pre-GLB kids—demonstrate more childhood gender nonconformity in their speech, body language, and choice of activity than their pre-straight contemporaries do. These reports have also produced evidence of a “dosage effect”: The more gender nonconformity someone shows in childhood, the more likely they will identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual as an adult.

“The link between childhood gender conformity/nonconformity and adult sexual orientation is one of the strongest relationships between a childhood trait and an adult ‘phenotype’ that’s been demonstrated in all of psychology,” Richard Lippa, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton, told me via email. While the link is not foolproof––not all tomboys will be lesbians; not all boys in dresses will be gay––Lippa says it is “quite strong.” (The scientific calculus for transgender people, he says, is “more complex.”)

Kids—especially pre-GLB kids—need room to explore their own identities. Yet because society presumes queerness to be inherently sexual, adults think that a preteen who plays up his gender nonconformity could not possibly be doing so voluntarily. Critics instead see adults in and aligned with the LGBTQ community as sexualizing children by exposing them to what a National Review writer calls a “deeply and perversely erotic subculture.” Conservative media have accused Wendy Napoles of endangering her son. After news reports indicated that Desmond’s performances had caught a convicted pedophile’s eye (as if it’s a young boy’s fault that pedophiles exist), some people called child protective services on her. But the people who have deemed drag too risqué for preteens have yet to support alternative ways in which queer kids like Desmond can publicly express themselves without fear.

I am not surprised at what the studies say - it fits in anecdotally with what a lot of parents and gay adults have said about recognizing they were "different" from a young age - but I didn't really know it had been studied much.

I think those paragraphs I quote help illustrate why sexuality/gender is a pretty confusing issue to understand for a lot of us:  it's not just a matter of which gender people might sexually respond to - it also brings up whole puzzle of why some gay/queer folk might be very gender conforming in most respects other than their sex life, and others aren't.   In particular, I find it hard to understand the drag queen thing - a combination of something like a transexual who is happy to stay in their male body, but likes to act not just female, but as a particular version of the opposite gender - the dramatic diva.  Not sure I will ever get my head around that.   And because I think a lot of adults have trouble understanding it in adult form, it feels strange seeing a pre-pubescent boy acting out that way too.

So sure, I don't want kids who feel different to suffer unduly if they don't want to follow "traditional" gender behaviour; but on the other hand, don't particularly feel that it is a good idea to encourage kids to do what feel likes attention seeking behaviour. 

I might write more later... 

Feeling Germanic

Careful readers - or at least Tim T - will recall that I was off to see a performance of (amongst other pieces) Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony on Saturday night.

What a blast that piece of music is - a 50 minute, single movement musical rendering of a hike through the Alps, with an afternoon thunderstorm and all.   The normal Youth Orchestra (playing at QPAC) was boosted by extra brass, the huge organ in the concert hall (which I had never heard played before), not one but two harps, and extra percussion stuff (cowbells, sheet of metal, rolling barrel thing for making wind sound) all crammed in onto a completely packed stage.  Not only that - at the end, a bunch of extra brass players came on stage to take a bow - I didn't know where they had been, but my daughter explained later that they had played off stage to create a certain effect (!).   It was, quite likely, the biggest assembled orchestra I have seen, in fact.    

So, there was certainly no lack of volume: it blasts away at times with something approaching rock band volume, which made for quite a different experience from the normally restrained volumes of most classical pieces at that venue.

Interestingly, though, I read in the program that the piece when first performed was not overly enthusiastically received, with some saying it was too "cinematic".   I get the impression that the less-than-completely-enthusiastic reception to certain works of famous composers is not an uncommon thing in classical music history - I assume Tim knows about that more reliably than me.   Anyway, more explanation about the symphony is set out in this neat piece at The Conversation, if anyone is interested.

So, after feeling entertained by this Germanic power classic, I was reminded that Wagner's Ring Cycle is coming to Brisbane next year, and I have found out that C reserve seats up in the balcony stratosphere are $380 for the entire cycle. 

Now, I have never been to an opera in my life, and it would be kind of ridiculous to start my experience of them with (as the QPAC website explains)  a 15 hour epic performed over 4 nights.   But hey, it's the very ridiculousness of the idea that is perversely tempting me to do it.  And when you divide the cost into the hourly rate,  it's quite the opera bargain!  (At least for the cheap seats - the premium ones are $2,200.   I trust that a glass of champagne before and during intervals might be included in that.)

I heard someone from (I think) Opera Australia spruiking it when it was announced, and he was saying that it sounds like a heavy experience, but it really isn't - he claimed that he has had so many people say to him at the end that they could happily go back and watch it all over again.  He called it a "life changing experience", which seems a bit of an opening to making a Hitler-ian joke about it making people want to invade neighbouring countries, but I am sure that is not what he meant.

Anyway, I have my doubts I will do it, but I am (at least a bit) tempted.

Update:   I should have guessed - there are lots of amusing takes on the net about what it is like to go through the Cycle.    I think ClassicFM's The 18 Stages of watching Wagner's Ring Cycle is pretty funny.   More encouraging, and still witty, is How Crazy Do You Have to Be to Sit Through 15 Hours of Opera.   On a more serious note, but still with the occasional funny line:

The director Achim Freyer once informed me that sleeping during Wagner simply means listening on a different level.

is this piece at the Washington Post.

Stranger Things 3 noted

Just finished Stranger Things 3.

I'm feeling a tad "over" the show.   If I recall correctly, my initial reaction to the first episodes of the first series was that it felt odd to have a show that was so transparent in the deliberate imitation of scenes from movies of the era.   Eventually, I was won over by the pretty charming characters, and the general good humour of the show.

The second series was continued harmless fun, I thought; but with the third series, the too obvious lifts from 1980's movies (and not just in passing:  the Terminator character was so important to the whole season) started to bother me again.   I was feeling too distracted by noticing which better movies they are copying.

The whole premise (and details) of this season was also pushing it too far into the ridiculous:  a secret underground Russian base is one thing, but the depth and extent of their lair was pretty silly.   And really - I know 1980's hair was bad, but honestly, the helmet hair of two of the guys really seems to be taking it to extremes that I do not recall.

That said, because I think the main characters are well acted, and still pretty charming, I would still watch the 4th series.  But if El gets her powers back, when will she start first putting a tissue up her nose to deal with the inevitable nosebleed?  

Something to keep in mind

Treatable disease often mistaken for Alzheimer's

Not sure I would want to visit the US right now...

Washington: A Jamaican national was detained for nearly three months in the United States after bringing in bottles of honey from the Caribbean island that customs agents mistakenly believed to be liquid methamphetamine.

Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs and immigration bureaucracy.

Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.

Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.

According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.

Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive: they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was wrong.

The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.

Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with the US immigration service.

His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.

The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

Here's a link to the story at Gulf News.

Excessive recipe excessively funny

The recipe video at this tweet has just about the funniest comments thread that I can ever recall on Twitter.  

I liked the hamburger with pickles clip in the comments thread too...

Channel News Asia, for good and not quite so good

As I have explained before, I really like watching the weekly highlights from Channel News Asia, in part for its stories about the rest of Asia, but also because of the upbeat, optimistic tone of stories about Singapore.

I'm not cynical about how, it being government owned, it's not as if the positive spin is coming from a completely independent viewpoint.  For example, I like the way it continually runs stories that encourages the multicultural tolerance that the nation island depends on.  In propaganda terms, I've realised it's like the polar opposite of Fox News:  a news and current affairs service devoted to national unity and optimism - the type of channel a benevolent dictator might desire - rather than the cynical, money grubbing operation of an ageing husk of a media billionaire designed to enrich him further by sowing division and rabid partisanship.

That said, I was a little taken about by a recent story which seemed to display a much more cynical line.   While I have seen sympathetic stories about migrant workers there before, this one about a Bangladeshi guy who got some fame for a book of poetry, and then (pretty much) let it go to his head, seems to be designed to carry the message "migrant workers - you are here to do hard labour, and don't forget it".

(Mind you, the guy does come across as having a somewhat overinflated view of his artist talents.  I have my doubts that he would have known the spin the CNA story would take, though, when he was co-operating with them.  And the comments that follow the video on Youtube show that I am not the only one who thought this video was unusually mean-spirited and seemed like a warning to migrant workers.)

The only other thing I don't like about CNA is that I can't embed their Youtube videos.

Update:  I was wrong - I can embed their videos, just my old computer at home (Vista powered) won't let me.  Here's the story I was talking about:

A devil of a Sunday

An interesting story at the Catholic Herald, about the head Jesuit upsetting Catholic exorcists:

An international organization of Catholic exorcists said Thursday that the existence of Satan as a real and personal being is a truth of Christin doctrine.

“The real existence of the devil, as a personal subject who thinks and acts and has made the choice of rebellion against God, is a truth of faith that has always been part of Christian doctrine,” the International Association of Exorcists said in an August 22 press release.

The organization’s release came in response to recent remarks on the devil from Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, which the organization called “grave and confusing.”

The exorcists said they released their statement to provide “doctrinal clarification.”

Sosa made headlines earlier this week when he told Italian magazine Tempi that “the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”

The devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Sosa said.

Citing a long history of Church teaching on the nature of Satan, including several citations from Pope Francis and his recent predecessors, the exorcists’ organization said that Catholics are bound to believe that Satan is a real and personal being, a fallen angel.