The catastrophic Johnson

Well, I did enjoy this Nick Cohen column on Boris Johnson, who reached a "new deal" Brexit by doing a complete turnaround on key one point within a fortnight.  He paints a picture of him in the following context:

In his classic study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon analysed British generals who had led their men to pointless deaths from Crimea to Arnhem. How familiar his diagnosis feels. Dixon identified “overweening ambition dedicated to one goal – self-advancement” as a persistent fault; and that sounds familiar. Catastrophic men equated “war with sport”, he continued, and one thinks of Theresa May’s warning in 2016 that “politics isn’t a game.”

She surely had Johnson in mind. For him, it is a game and winning is all. Last year, he told the Democratic Unionist party that a border in the Irish Sea “would be damaging to the fabric of the union”. He jutted out what passes for his jaw and with a Churchillian boom thundered: “I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

Last week, he signed up to “such an arrangement” because betraying his allies wins him the game of politics. Dixon noticed “an underestimation, sometimes bordering on the arrogant, of the enemy”. And one thinks of Dominic Cummings, so lost in his deluded machismo that he told EU countries that they “will go to the bottom of the queue” if they dared challenge the mighty Britain. A mere fortnight later, Johnson capitulated to Brussels so thoroughly the EU will no longer has to worry about the Irish border and can adopt the toughest of stances when and if trade negotiations begin.

No one should be surprised. It is an essential part of the catastrophic character that catastrophists do not learn from their mistakes or realise they are making them.

On the small matters as well as the large, political incompetents mirror military incompetents. Generals who display “a love of bull, smartness, precision and strict preservation of the military pecking order” are prone to lead regiments to disaster, Dixon wrote. Remember Jacob Rees-Mogg’s semi-literate instruction to his civil servants that they must address untitled men as “esq” when the practice is archaic. Or his insistence that they never use “hopefully” in his presence: even though the adverb has stood in for “I hope” for centuries and no serious linguist has the smallest problem with it.

There seems to be a feeling about that, despite this current (apparent) delay, Parliament will sooner or later pass this deal, in large part because they are utterly sick of having to deal with it as a problem.  We'll see.

Some interesting comments on economics here

From The Guardian:

World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King

Past crashes spawned new thinking and reform but nothing has changed since 2008 banking meltdown, says former Bank of England boss

Kidneys for sale

Today on CNA, I learned about poor Filipinos selling their kidneys through social media (the report fingers Facebook, which says it's against their rules, but they don't know what's going on til someone tells them.)



Interestingly, it seems the story has sparked some racism comments on Youtube:

Is that sarcasm at perceived Singaporean racism?  Or actual racism?

And what about this comment?:

One other thing about watching CNA - I know that Singapore doesn't work like your normal, messy democracies, but when you see government ministers talking on CNA, my goodness they seem so, so reasonable and smart and sensible compared to 90% of the politicians in most Western nations.

Saturday jacarandas

A nice line of blooming jacaranda trees at St Lucia:

Not even scientifically accurate

I meant to give a Muntz-ian "ha ha" when I noticed this story a week or so ago, but forgot.

Turns out Interstellar, which I consider awful, is not so scientifically accurate after all.

Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole? 

Short answer: almost certainly not.

And I don't even like horses

7.30's story last night on the thoroughbred racehorse business and it's pretence that it really takes care to avoid having failed, even relatively young, horses ground up into greyhound mince, was a gruesome expose of a sham industry that was really hard to watch.

The treatment of the horses at the abattoir at Caboolture was awful, and the attitude of the men who worked there woeful.   If any man has to make a living that way, I have no respect for them unless they have some at least some empathy for the animal.   There was zero on display last night.

But the whole show reinforced my prejudices against the whole racing enterprise - the alleged sport of kings that has expanded on the back of (mostly) saps with a gambling problem, as well as those who occasionally like to play dress ups and get conspicuously drunk while ignoring the inherent cruelty of breeding far too many horses and disposing of them as soon as they are too expensive to care for.

 

Apartment design considered.

I've realised something about typical apartment design in Australia, and what I dislike about it.

I really don't like the way so many have the entry door opening directly into the big, open kitchen/living room space.   It's too intrusive and direct an entry into a space which should have more privacy when viewed from the front door.   Moreover, it removes the idea of a transition space from the outside to the inside that feels important and natural in Japanese living spaces, and actually makes practical sense too.

So, I reckon no apartment entry door should open with a clear line of sight right into the living area.  I like the idea of having to turn a corner after entering an apartment to be able to see the (hopefully) impressive living area.   Even if it's not a solid wall that the door opens towards, a screening of some type should be used.   This might mean that an entry door light just inside is often needed, but that should be no big deal.

The other thing I dislike about apartment design in Australia is the way that bedrooms will so often open directly into the main living area.   There is a need for hallways to separate bedroom entries from living areas. 

I also think we don't use different floor levels enough to provide a sense of separation between different areas.   Or beds that fold up into walls.  Why can't we have those in Australia?  

As you were.

Update:  examples -

This is OK:

This is good:

This is fine:

This is everything I dislike in an apartment layout:

If you like wasabi flavour punching you in the mouth and nasal passages...

...you'll like these Doritos, which are really surprisingly strong on the flavour front:

I like it, but you can only eat so many at one sitting.

Extreme weather and climate, noted

Below is the start of a good thread on Twitter about climate change and extreme weather.

He goes on further down to talk about floods and drought, and the inherent complexity in judging overall trends in them, as well the matter of increasing hurricane strength (also quite complicated on a global scale.)

Very balanced, and it should be remembered, we are only at 1 degree average global change.  Double or triple that, and where do you think we'll be?

Also, do I need to bother pointing out that this week's floods in Japan came after record rainfall intensity?   

Nature reviews capitalism

A somewhat interesting review of three books on economics:

In Defense of Open Society George Soros PublicAffairs (2019)
Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World Branko Milanovic Belknap (2019)
Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand The New Press (2019)

is at Nature.com.

Update:  dear readers, I know that Graeme (see comments below) holds deeply to both economic anti-Semitism (for which there is a pretty good article at Wikipedia) and whatever one might call his "Jews are ruthless covert killers playing the West and Islamists for schmucks" anti-Semitism.    I usually delete his comments which are clearly in the later category, but sometimes leave those in the former category since they don't, at least, involve allegations of murder.   But I am well aware that two aspects feed off each other, and am sorely tempted to try to start deleting any and all references to Jewish matters by him.  It's a tiresome job.   Can more visitors in comments please just start telling him he is an idiot about Jews, again?   The silence he gets (and the sometimes support of Jason on economics) is, I fear, giving him a false sense that this is a "safe" place where readers maybe don't think he is a completely offensive nutjob about Jews.   

Thank you.

News from the North

North Korea, that is.

France24 informs us:

Aides to Kim Jong Un are convinced the North Korean leader plans "a great operation", state media said on Wednesday in a report that included lavish descriptions and images of the leader riding a white horse up North Korea’s most sacred mountain.

That sounds a worry.  Here's the photo they released:

I dunno, Kim's face doesn't look to me like he's exactly enjoying the experience.  Nor is the horse, in all likelihood, give the (sort of) Regal Tubbiness on his back.

Still, I can just imagine Trump seeing this image and being jealous that he doesn't have a stead on which to at least try to look like a noble warrior king. 

Various

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit busy this week.   Here's some stuff I've noticed but not given individual posts to:

*  turns out that nutty Trump economics adviser Peter Navarro has done a Trump, so to speak: invented an imaginary friend (actually himself) to give support to his positions.  Some of his co-authors did not know.   How embarrassing.

*  I've not been able to see Ad Astra, but oddly, I have had two diametrically opposed opinions of the film from two different couples.  My chances of liking it seem to be getting lower, though.

*  Who is this Bruce Mountain who argues the Snowy 2 project is a dud project?   Sorry, but I am a little suspicious of someone I haven't heard of before coming out as an expert and then dissing a renewable project that other experts seem to think is worthwhile.

*  Saudi Arabia has paid Instagram "influencers" to go there and say how marvellous the place is (in preparation of opening the country up to tourism.)  This reminds me of an old rule of thumb (actually, I must add it to my Rules for Life):  do not holiday in any country where looking the wrong way at someone can get you arrested for witchcraft (or possibly, homosexuality).

*  STDs still on the rise in America.  Most sadly:

Among newborns, syphilis cases increased 40 percent to more than 1,300 cases.

Also, look where those cases mainly come from:

The 40 percent increase in congenital syphilis cases continues a dangerous trend seen in recent years. Although most states reported at least one case of congenital syphilis, five states – Texas, California, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana – accounted for 70 percent of cases in the U.S.

That seems an odd mix, no?

Seems to me that the USA is strangely bad at not getting on top of that particular problem.

Now they complain about the violence...

I get that it's at least poor taste for wingnut Trumpers to use the Kingsman ultra violent church scene to show Trump killing "fake news";  but I think that people who find this clip offensive for its violence should have been calling it out for such in the original movie.

But no, the largely liberal leaning world of movie criticism pretty much was silent about it.

I see someone on the internet agrees.  

About the monocle

An interesting history of the monocle is to be found at The Atlantic.

 Count me as somewhat amused to read the sentence about its populariser:

The monocle followed. It was fixed in the eye socket and held in place hands-free, wedged behind the loose skin around the eye thanks to the orbicularis oculi, the muscle that closes the eyelid. Its advent is usually associated with Philipp von Stosch, an 18th-century German baron, who in his time was better known for writing the definitive work on carved gemstones and living an active, open life as a homosexual. Notwithstanding, popularizing the monocle became his lasting legacy. By the end of the century, it was in use all over German-speaking countries. It jumped to London around the turn of the 19th century, where it took hold among the aristocracy.

Glad they haven't developed a taste for humans surfing/swimming

I never used to be all that aware that orcas were near our relatively warm coastal beaches (my image of them is always of a colder water species) but here they are not far off Ballina:

Whale watchers off the coast of Ballina in northern New South Wales have held a front-row seat to the gruesome spectacle of a juvenile humpback whale being devoured by a pod of killer whales, also known as orcas.

This is, shall we say, of limited utility...

Performance art as protest is a real "thing" with Extinction Rebellion, isn't it? 

Look, I guess it's better than people setting themselves on fire, which is perhaps the most useless protest method ever devised.   (And besides, it would only be adding to CO2.)

But I feel fairly certain that performance art conveys an air of "we're here to have fun with our like minded friends" which is not very effective in terms of political influence.

She's not convinced

Sabine Hossenfelder gave a good review of Sean Carroll's recent book promoting the Many Worlds theory, but she explains her issues with it at a recent post The Trouble With Many Worlds.

About flesh eating ulcers

That's surprising:  apparently, at least one type of flesh eating ulcer caught from some weird ground bacteria are actually more common in Victoria than tropical North Queensland:

But doctors are concerned because, in the past two years, three cases of the usually geographically confined disease have emerged in the Atherton Tablelands, south of its usual catchment area in far-north Queensland. While the disease is much rarer in Queensland than Victoria, with an average of two cases per year, there are occasional spikes, such as in 2011 when 60 cases were recorded. Victoria saw a record 340 cases of the disease in 2018 and is approaching a similar number for 2019. Internationally renowned Buruli ulcer expert Prof Paul Johnson said that despite the comparatively low number of Queensland cases, the movement of the disease outside of its normal range was a concern.

And the possible bacteria spreading culprit in Victoria:

 Johnson believes it is most likely the bacteria that causes the ulcer, Mycobacterium ulcerans, is being spread in Victoria by mosquitoes and possums. In Victoria, 40% of cases are found in visitors to the Mornington and Bellarine peninsulas. The incubation period is about five months, so people often visit the beachside areas in the summer months but only present with the disease in the colder months after returning to their home areas, where doctors may not be familiar with the disease and therefore may not immediately diagnose it.

So you in that State, you get the tropical sounding disease but without the benefit of warm weather.  Huh.

Back to my vaping scepticism

An article at The Guardian notes this (White is director of Quit Victoria):

 White disagrees, and says the products should be taken off the shelves altogether, for not just medical but consumer safety reasons. She said there had been cases of the devices exploding, causing deaths. She also cited the death of a toddler in Melbourne after he consumed his mother’s e-nicotine liquid. Consumer safety standards were sorely lacking, she said.

“I can’t buy a bicycle helmet or toys from shops that don’t meet consumer safety standards, but I can go and buy a device for heating up liquids and inhale from that device for hours on end,” she said. “We have taken other products off the shelves that have less issues with them than e-cigarettes.”

She acknowledged her position had resulted in backlash from pro-vaping lobbyists in Australia, many of whom are supported by the tobacco companies that have bought a stake in the e-cigarette market.

“There are people who so passionately believe in e-cigarettes that they’re evangelical about it,” White says. “There is a divide across public health and tobacco control on this which is no doubt being fed by vested interests, and no-one is backing down.”

But also, The Lancet has weighed in:

On Saturday, the international medical journal the Lancet published an editorial in the wake of the US deaths, and said the positioning of e-cigarettes as a quit-aid had been “vastly overstated”.

“Data also suggest that smokers switch to e-cigarettes, then remain dependent long term,” the editorial said. “No solid evidence base underpins the marketing claims that e-cigarettes are healthier than cigarettes or that they can support quitting, but lax regulation has allowed e-cigarette manufacturers to pervert the success of antismoking public health messages and position e-cigarettes as healthy.”

OK, let's extract some that Lancet editorial directly:

Manufacturers of e-cigarettes, and some public health advocates, have supported their use as a smoking cessation tool and a safer alternative to cigarettes. However, the evidence for both of these claims is weak. No e-cigarettes have been tested or launched as smoking cessation products; all are sold directly to the consumer as tobacco, not medicinal, products. Three randomised trials of third-generation products show low rates of abstinence at 6 months. Data also suggest that smokers switch to e-cigarettes, then remain dependent long term. The very high nicotine levels delivered by some e-cigarettes could make them more difficult to quit than cigarettes. Very few data on long-term health effects are available to support the safety claims. The positioning of e-cigarettes as a viable cessation aid is vastly overstated, especially since the current first line treatment (nicotine replacement therapy under medical supervision) has a strong evidence base demonstrating safety and efficacy.

Claims that e-cigarettes are useful harm-reduction tools are further undermined by their high uptake among young people. Cigarette smoking among US adolescents had declined substantially in the past 20 years, but there has been a huge rise in adolescents using e-cigarettes, with rates of use at around 25% among 18-year-olds and 20% among 16-year-olds. The availability of flavoured e-liquids is cited by nearly a third of users as a major reason to start vaping, especially among younger adults. Concerns have been raised around the marketing of e-cigarettes to young adults and new users. Advertising featuring young, attractive models, sponsorship of sports events and parties, product placement, and direct payments to social media influencers are strikingly similar techniques to those used previously by the cigarette industry. In many cases, e-cigarette marketers have commandeered the public health message around smoking to promote a healthy and glamorous alternative. In response, the US Food and Drug Administration wrote to Juul Labs, criticising illegal marketing that claimed that their e-cigarettes were less harmful than cigarettes....

No solid evidence base underpins the marketing claims that e-cigarettes are healthier than cigarettes or that they can support quitting, but lax regulation has allowed e-cigarette manufacturers to pervert the success of antismoking public health messages and position e-cigarettes as healthy. The renormalisation of smoking in the form of e-cigarettes, not only among smokers, but also among young people and never smokers, risks population-wide nicotine use and dependence on a massive scale. Surely it is time to align the public health approach to e-cigarettes with that of cigarettes.

A good Catholic movie

We watched the 2014 Bill Murray movie St Vincent on Netflix last night.

I hadn't paid much attention to the reviews when it came out, except that I had the feeling most were only lukewarm. 

But I really enjoyed it.  

Agreed, there's nothing groundbreaking about it, and it does carry the strong whiff of early Wes Anderson (not a bad thing, mind you); but it's pretty rare to get this type of good natured film that is funny, sometimes touching, and carries a pleasing moral message about understanding other people.   Now that I think of it, it also has the feel of some John Hughes movies too, and nearly everyone had a soft spot for them, no?

Most surprisingly, the message is very genuinely Catholic in a positive way.  So much so that I suspected that the screenplay may be quite old, and written well before the current period of terrible PR for the church.  But I've checked, and it was written by the director Theodore Melfi in 2011, so I'm wrong.   He went on to direct and co-write the very successful (and also "feelgood") Hidden Figures in 2016.  I should pay more attention to his work, perhaps.

Anyway, it was the most pleasing Netflix film I have seen for some time.  Yay.

Another case of "as I suspected"..

From my limited contact with social workers, I had always suspected this was true, but never really had seen it confirmed:

Such stories are common – many social work students have traumatic histories that have led them to pursue that particular career choice.  ....

Social work students have a much higher incidence of various forms of childhood trauma than students of other disciplines. A 1993 US study found 22% of social work students reported childhood sexual abuse compared to 2% of business students.

The article argues that it is a problem that some people with convictions cannot go on to be social workers:

... studies have found lived experiences to be helpful in a range of social work fields. These include addiction-treatment programs, mental health, domestic and family violence, and working with sex workers.

But the link used to justify that claim is to one study of a pretty esoteric social work study:

A peer-led mobile outreach program and increased utilization of detoxification and residential drug treatment among female sex workers who use drugs in a Canadian setting.

 I remain to be convinced that too many social workers coming from a background of, say, childhood physical or emotional abuse, is actually a good idea.   The problems I can see with it is that their personal experience could bias their decisions in cases too close to their own, and the psychological harm  from abuse can take (it would seem) decades to get over, with some people never quite recovering.

It's good that people want to help see that others don't go through what they have, and it's not as if past trauma should disqualify from getting into this work.  But I don't think it obviously helps the profession if too many are there with that sort of background.

Such a peacenik

As noted everywhere:

The Trump administration will send nearly 2,000 troops and advanced military equipment to Saudi Arabia to deter threats from Iran — a move that will increase America’s presence in the Middle East, even as President Donald Trump falsely boasts about ending wars in the region.

The announcement, made by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley on Friday, continues the administration’s campaign both to increase pressure on Tehran and deepen ties with Riyadh. The US has sent an additional 14,000 military members to the Middle East since May, which the 1,800 authorized Friday will add to.

And more:

Trump is saying these things to justify his decision on Sunday to move American troops in Syria — a decision that’s drawn bipartisan pushback. It’d be one thing if he were bringing all 1,000 US troops in the country home, but he’s not. Instead, he’s moving just 50 US service members out of northern Syria to get out of the way of a just-started Turkish invasion.

That’s not all. A late September report from US Air Forces Central Command showed that the US launched the most airstrikes in Afghanistan over a single month in roughly a decade. American troops have ramped up airstrikes in Libya targeting ISIS fighters there. And the US continues its shadow war in Somalia to fend off terrorist groups there.

Where to find the only people in Australia who can detect sincerity in Donald Trump

Brilliant political analyst Tom from somewhere in Victoria lights up a durry and turns down the permanent race call on the radio so as to swoon over Trump in a live net broadcast:

When one other says he/she doesn't agree, old Tom flies the condescension flag:

The other thing that I find hilarious is how suddenly, after Trump makes a decision, most of the wingnuts at Catallaxy suddenly become experts on Turk/Kurd history so that they can nod sagely that their culture war leader has obviously made a wise decision. 

Update:   I see Sinclair has handed posting keys over to CL, who thinks that Trump's talk about how the families of the dead brought back to Dover AFB seem fine at first but then "scream" when they see the coffin "may be his finest".   In reality, it came across like a weird and exaggerated description by an emotional cripple incapable of normal empathy himself.   (It was a "sir" story, which is always a tell with Trump.)   Oh, and let's not forget his telephone calls to relatives have not always gone down well.  Maybe that's why he sticks to letters now.

It's back to the old puzzle for me - has the internet-led culture war culminating in Trump made idiots of people, or were they just always idiots waiting to be revealed by their inability to recognise a dumb, completely unethical, wannabe autocrat?

Electricity in Africa

I see Jason's having a gut reaction again, this time to a twitter headlined article in The Economist:

Electricity does not change poor lives as much as was thought

Getting a power connection to the poorest of the poor may be the wrong priority for a cash-strapped government

The article makes a case, citing studies in Africa mainly, but all Right wingers can do is get indignant that a magazine powered by electricity is dissing Africans getting electricity.  That's outrageous!

How about addressing the actual arguments and studies the article cites, conservatives?

Surely this is far from normal

The twitterverse is abuzz about what this could mean:

Attorney General William Barr “met privately Wednesday evening with one of President Trump’s frequent confidants, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul whose holdings include Fox News, which has recently become more critical of the president,” the New York Times reports.

“The meeting was held at Mr. Murdoch’s home in New York.”

The most immediate and valid reaction should surely be:  why is Barr making himself look like the President's personal lawyer and messenger boy?   We know Rudy has been a bumbling disaster, but this just looks so far from what an AG should be doing it's ridiculous.

On the other hand - is it a case of Rupert wanting to tell Trump he's withdrawing Fox support?  As I speculated earlier this week, the Turkey decision seems a valid pretext conservatives could use to withdraw support, especially if images of civilian deaths start pouring in. 

The French way

For a nation pretty relaxed about things like nudity and extramarital affairs, it seems the French have remained quite conservative compared to other countries regarding how kids are made. 

In this article at France 24:  Inside France's black market for sperm (some headline, hey?) we learn that -

On September 24, French lawmakers begin debating a government-proposed bill to extend the right to medically assisted procreation (MAP) to all women, a highly sensitive subject in France. Under current rules, single women and lesbian couples are barred from access to fertility treatment. This discrimination has fostered the rise of a thriving underground market for sperm that carries enormous legal and sanitary risks.

The article details how single or lesbian women have been, um, sourcing sperm via the underground online market, and the men who offer their services are sometimes not in it for altruistic reasons:

The donor, who says he belongs to the first category, claims to have fathered dozens of babies and now moderates a 1,100-member closed Facebook group that connects single and lesbian women with donors in France. He says he has seen a clear increase in both the number of donors and the number of women seeking donors on the Facebook group lately. But he has also noted a rise in inappropriate proposals, especially when it comes to donors seeking free sex, or a financial reward for their services.

“Some ask to be paid €30, €500 or even €1,000 for their ‘donations’,” he says, adding that he has to exclude at least 10 people from the group each month because of such demands.

Seriously, how brash do you have to be to offer to donate sperm to a lesbian, but only via sex?

But it is not an unusual thing in France, apparently, seemingly due to a strange law which perhaps encourages crazily opportunistic men to offer sex to lesbians/single women.   (Although, it also seems from what follows that there may be a genuine cultural feeling that personal delivery, so to speak, is just more natural and the way it should be.   You have to remember the French are not immune from dubious health ideas - homoeopathy is popular there.)

Can you imagine any Australian guy even bothering to try this on with an Australian lesbian?:

Once a woman has selected her donor online, there are three ways to carry out the insemination. Most opt for artificial insemination (AI), in which the donor collects his sperm in a small container and the woman uses a needleless syringe, a turkey baster or a pipette to inject the semen into her vagina. One alternative is partial insemination (PI), which involves penetration just before ejaculation. The other is natural insemination (NI) – in other words, sex.

The AI method, which entails “handling” the sperm but remains the least intrusive for the woman, is strictly forbidden in France and carries a penalty of up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine. “By handling the sperm, we’re talking three things: collecting it, retaining it and finally manipulating it with one’s hands [by way of a syringe, for example],” APGL’s Faget explains.

For the purpose of this investigation, FRANCE 24’s reporter set up a profile on a popular donor app. Within 48 hours she had received more than 50 “likes” and invitations to start a conversation with potential donors. Most of them advocated natural insemination as their preferred method, with many even conditioning their donation to its use. Offering his reasons, “Joe”, 28, wrote: “I just believe this is how it should be done, it’s more effective too.”

“Jack”, 35, said he would only be prepared to donate through NI and that it would be done “over a timespan of seven to nine days in a row (to make sure you get pregnant), as both bodies are physical and [generate the] chemicals that are needed for a successful fertilisation: It’s a dance for two to make three ☺.” He also said that he was “very interested in helping out lesbian couples and getting them both pregnant in the same cycle”.

“Bebeaide” (or Babyhelp in English), 42, who claims to have impregnated at least five women in the Paris region, initially told FRANCE 24’s reporter that he did not mind donating via the less intimate AI technique, but later told her that it would be a shame to not at least attempt partial insemination because it “maximises the chances” of getting pregnant. “It would just entail sexual intercourse at ‘the moment of’, no strings attached, no foreplay. Your partner can participate in the act,” he proposed.

According to Doctor Chalas, there is some truth to the claim that sexual intercourse works better, however disturbing the propositions. “The conception rate from sexual intercourse is around 25 percent, and 21 percent from a medically assisted intrauterine insemination with frozen donor sperm – so those two methods are comparable,” she says. “But an artificial insemination carried out at home is a lot less efficient, with a conception rate of around 10 percent.”

One other thing I learn form the article - in parts of Europe, some men can make a significant supplement to their income via donation to sperm banks:

 One reason for the dearth of sperm donors is the absence of remuneration. While donors in Denmark can be paid more than €500 per month for their semen, all donations must be free in France – a principle doctors and politicians are both attached too. Another factor is the lengthy vetting process donors have to go through, including interviews with psychologists and biologists, along with fertility and chromosome tests, and screening for possible STDs. Only the candidates who clear all tests and fit within the 18-45 age bracket are accepted.

Anyway, it looks like French law will change and things will be more like it is in other countries.   But there will probably still be French men prepared to selflessly put themselves through several rounds of sex to aid women who want to get pregnant.

 

Yeah, this is a little surprising

Good, though:

Extinction Rebellion (Melbourne), if you're listening...

Stop bothering people trying to get to work or, more importantly, hospital or court (where appointments really matter), and target something that has played and continues to play a disgusting role in climate change denial/inaction:

The IPA, of course:

As for climate scientists in semi-supporting ER:  they know that the official position of the group in terms of targets are completely unachievable, but they feel that anything that seems to help political action in the right direction is at least not worth attacking.   See some comments here on Twitter:

The pathetic Lindsay

Update:  Allahpundit at Hot Air talking about Graham:

It’s amazing how able he is to compartmentalize his disgust at Trump’s Syria policy with his zeal in defending Trump on impeachment, frankly. They’re two distinct matters, granted, but politicians use leverage they have over one matter to exact concessions on unrelated matters all the time. Pundits keep warning that Trump is playing with fire by antagonizing Senate Republicans on Syria at the very moment that they’re about to take his fate in their hands on impeachment, but is he really playing with fire? Graham is heartbroken about abandoning the Kurds and yet here he is on Fox trying to blow up the impeachment effort on the president’s behalf before it even reaches the Senate. With ass-kissing like this, why should Trump feel pressure to throw the Senate GOP a bone on foreign policy?

Weirdo aliens return?

Gee.  Odd, possible alien related, cow mutilations are back in the news, at least at NPR:

Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan Jenkins has been working the cattle cases and has gotten dozens of calls from all over offering tips and suggestions.

"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."

Some history:

Back in the 1980s, one of Terry Anderson's mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. Standing at his ranch near Pendleton, Ore., Anderson points to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain.

He remembers his cow lying dead, her udder removed with something razor sharp.

"And not one drop of blood anywhere," Anderson says.

He has never gotten over it.

"It's just left a really strange feeling with me since that day. You can't explain it," Anderson says. "And, you know, no one else has been able to explain it."

I would be a lot more convinced if there were good, clear photos of the "precision" cutting that could only have been done with a sharp instrument.

A fast food observation

Oh my.  The Filet-O-Fish has shrunk to something like a toddler sized snack.  It's tiny.  

Is McD losing more market share lately.  It deserves to...

Has Fox found a way to abandon Trump?

Remember I said that Fox News had created a cult, and didn't know how to end it?

I wonder if the Trump Turkey/Kurd decision is seen by Lachlan as giving them a way to dump him?

More important than the breakfast twits, however, will be the way the evening Trump worship sessions handle this.

An unfortunate realisation in another late movie review

This time - American History X.

Bleak films about racist neo-Nazis are not generally my cup of tea, so I hadn't bothered catching up with this one until now.

It was better than I expected, perhaps because I hadn't realised that it was actually a redemption story, and so had the spark of old fashioned optimism about it.   It's not perfect, and I had not realised (or had forgotten if I had read it before) that the director had disowned the film when it came out - a very serious case of "creative differences" between him and the studio, obviously.   A lot of the acting was very good, but that black teacher hero was a bit over the top in solemn earnestness.

By far the most surprising thing was the unpleasant realisation about how much of the speech the neo-Nazi Norton makes to his buddies (before they trash a Korean run supermarket) could have come straight out of a Donald Trump campaign rally:



Distressingly,  it seems that the person who posted that to Youtube did so because of approval of the sentiment in the speech, and lots of comments agree with him.    Which goes to show the healthy state of the American mindset under Trump.  [Sarcasm, of course.]

Fungi and your pancreas

I said in comments that I would make a post about an article at Nature, explaining that fungi around your pancreas may not be a good thing:

The communities of microorganisms that occupy specific regions of the body are often altered in cancer¹, and these microbiomes — particularly their bacterial components — are a current focus of cancer research. One example is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), for which changes in the bacterial community occupying the pancreas have been documented². This lethal disease often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages, and the prognosis is usually very poor³. Writing in Nature, Aykut et al.⁴ reveal that the fungal component of the pancreatic microbiome (known as the mycobiome) is also altered in PDA. In fact, an abundance of a specific fungal genus actually promotes the disease.

I didn't even realise that fungi made up a significant part of our normal mycobiome, but apparently they do:

The mycobiome is a historically under-recognized player in human health and disease, but its role in both is essential. Harmless organisms called commensals, including fungi, inhabit mucosal surfaces such as the linings of the gut, nose and mouth, and can activate inflammatory processes as part of the immune system’s response to injury or infection. In some cases, changes in the biodiversity of fungal communities are linked to aggravated inflammatory-disease outcomes. For example, intestinal overgrowth of Candida albicans — a fungus that causes oral thrush in babies — has been associated with severe forms of intestinal ulcers⁵ and with mould-induced asthma⁶. Moreover, it is becoming apparent that there is a relationship between the gut mycobiome and human cancers, including colorectal and oesophageal cancer⁷. 

President Flexo

Is it possible that I might be the first person to make this comparison?   I have my doubts, but Googling doesn't bring anything up that I can see.

This recent tweet of Trump:

along with his "stable genius" claim, which Trump cultists would presumably assure us are just his sense of humour, reminds me that Trump is very much like the robot character Flexo from Futurama.  You might recall that he is the robot Bender's evil twin, who constantly claims to be joking after making offensive comments:

 "Well I don't feel as bad as you look! [Laughs] Nah, I'm just messing with you, kid. You're alright. That's some face you got, though. I think they got a cream for that. [Laughs again] Nah, you're great."

I see that many other people think Trump is a lot like an aged Zapp Brannigan - and of course I can see that too.  Trump combines the worst characteristics of both.

And of course, Rupert Murdoch is Professor Farnsworth - never a better match. 

Is it wrong...

...to hope he gets just a little tear gassed?

Although, truth be told, he is such a self promoting publicity tart he's probably figuring that it would be good for his career and will be hoping for it himself.

Has he ever been on Sunrise?  He would probably kill to get a regular slot on that.

Update:   I was rather busy with domestic duties on the weekend, but now I see that the post has caused considerable consternation at Catallaxy yesterday.

Sinclair linked to it in his open thread (with his usual lack of accuracy with English - see his comment in the thread) only to find that one person in particular at Catallaxy pretty much agreed with me, and went further in her criticisms of Wilson.   SD started demanding an apology (on behalf of Tim?) and the end result seems to be either a banning (or self banning) of the commenter.  Many others want her back.

The funny thing is, this departed commenter had made one of the most offensive comments about Greta Thunberg recently, which, to his credit, Sinclair edited when he noticed it.   (To the discredit of everyone else at the blog, no one else had called her out for it.)

So, I inadvertently helped one of the more obnoxious commenters disappear from there.  Cool!

And by the way, it's pretty funny that Sinclair tried to make a big deal out of this, when he went all in defending his good mate's fantasies about Muslims blowing up an ABC panel.    

 

Wandering the streets, again

Not sure how old this Anglican church building would be, but pretty old by Brisbane standards, I bet:

Wingnut fantasy world watch

Look, all I can say that it's lucky this bloke didn't live during any witch hunt era, because his belief in his powers of interpretation of facial expressions (and even the shape of a jaw, which is freaking hilarious when you wonder what he would make of Mitch McConnell) shows exactly the same level of nutty, misplaced overconfidence in I-can-read-their-face-and-know-exactly-what-is-really-going-on-in-that-mind that would have led to more than a few women being torched:

Or is it just part of a creative writing exercise he's doing? It has that strange structure about it...

I've upset him before in a post in which I (quite respectfully, actually) noted his confession of depression, and expressed surprise at how many angry wingnuts at Catallaxy had come out to support him with their own tales of past issues with depression. 

But really, I am not sure he's out of an unhealthy mindset if he genuinely believes such rubbish.

How to be a berserker

Wired has a recent article that starts:

The legendary Viking warriors known as berserkers were renowned for their ferocity in battle, purportedly fighting in a trancelike state of blind rage (berserkergang), howling like wild animals, biting their shields, and often unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the heat of battle. But historians know very little about the berserkers apart from scattered Old Norse myths and epic sagas. One intriguing hypothesis as to the source of their behavior is that the berserkers ingested a specific kind of mushroom with psychoactive properties. Now an ethnobotanist is challenging that hypothesis, suggesting in a recent paper in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that henbane is a more likely candidate.

Henbane is a flowering weed that grows in Scandinavia, that had been used for some time:

It's been around since ancient Greece and has been used in various cultures throughout history as a narcotic, painkiller, cure for insomnia, and anesthetic. It's a common treatment for motion sickness and can produce short-term memory loss. It can knock out someone for 24 hours, and in rare cases henbane can lead to respiratory failure. It's also been investigated as a possible truth serum. Henbane even found its way into early European beers, gradually being replaced with hops after the passage of the Bavarian Purity Law in 1516.

Those characteristics don't sound rage inducing, but who knows:

Fatur argues that while both the mushrooms and henbane could account for increases in strength, altered consciousness, delirium, jerking and twitching, and red face commonly associated with the berserkers, aggressive rage is not common with the mushroom. Fatur cites several cases involving angry behavior associated with plants related to henbane, containing the same alkaloids.

All rather speculative. 

Speaking of vikings, I am close to booking a ticket for next year's Ring cycle in Brisbane.   My "best" choice, for the cheap tickets left, is either to be sitting on the top balcony in the back row;  the top row down the side and near the front but with some form of view restriction; or in the stalls right near the stage with a restricted view that means I may not see all the words on the surtitle.  

I can't work out if it will be better to be near the front and being fully immersed in the music, but not knowing what they are singing; or up in the stratospheric second balcony and being able to see everything, at least if I use opera glasses.  

Either way, perhaps if I take henbane before the performance, it will be particularly memorable.

   
 

It's the vibe

I don't talk about Scott Morrison much lately, because he strikes me as a shallow flim flam man of no substance or significant ideas who is not worth talking about.   The only positive thing I can say about him is that he has been annoying me a tad less than Tony Abbott, who was more "in your face" with ridiculous culture war decisions - Bronwyn Bishop as speaker, a knighthood to Prince Philip, for God's sake, as well as his rhetorical nastiness to Julia Gillard.  It's going to take some effort by Morrison to make himself a more ignoble PM than Abbott.

But, he may be working himself up to it, if he's going to continue the "mini-Trump" lines:

 
I think Trump's speech to the UN was just obviously retrograde and a mish-mash of wrong and muddled thoughts (as if nations retreating into what their "patriots" think is right is anything other than an invitation for selfish and unethical behaviour towards other nations - and their own citizens - to thrive), and perhaps the only reason it didn't get more critique along those lines is because the world knows it was delivered by an absurd figure.   Sure, the UN has lots of faults - but Trump's prescription is more likely to exacerbate than fix them.

If you want to see an impressive example of the polar opposite of Trump and his speech (that is, a strong defence of nations all pulling together for mutual benefit delivered by a smart and sophisticated sounding politician) have a look at the speech given by Singaporean PM Lee Hsien Loong:



So why does Morrison make a mini Trump (and mini Brexit) speech now?   There is no obvious reason that I can detect.   I don't think Morrison is the sort of man to dwell on these sort of issues much, so is there some figure in the background trying to tell him how to sound like a deep thinker? 

Or is he just an opportunistic twit who has decided to jump on at least part of the "vibe" of the most retrograde parts of Conservative thought going around at the moment? 

It would be good to know.

Republican conspiracy belief considered

Peter Beinart has a good piece in The Atlantic looking at the somewhat puzzling question as to why the American Right, despite holding the Presidency and a lot of power elsewhere, are still believing so many conspiracies.   How much can I extract?:

...over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. Stephen Miller, Breitbart, and Fox News have all called the whistle-blower an agent of the “deep state”—a phrase, popularized by Alex Jones, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once likened this notion to believing in the tooth fairy.)

On its face, this descent into self-delusion isn’t surprising. In the Trump era, Republican conspiracy theorizing has grown omnipresent. Trump himself has suggested that Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Clintons may bear responsibility for the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and wind turbines cause cancer. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Trump supporters said Barack Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.”

But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.

That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.

In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you.  ...

Beinart goes on to explain that if a party is in control, its members generally start believing less in conspiracies.  But it hasn't worked that way with Republicans, and the question is why.

The best explanation is that even though a white male Christian Republican holds the presidency, many white Christian Republican men still feel persecuted by those in power. Trump and other top Republicans fan this belief constantly.

Beinart goes on to argue that the white male Christian loss of power is largely fantasy, but:

...white male income has stagnated in recent decades, the country has grown more racially and religiously diverse, and gender norms have changed. And this has helped Republicans convince their supporters that they are America’s real victims. Republicans, according to polling this year by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to say that men face a lot of discrimination than they are to say women face a lot of discrimination. They’re more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination than to say blacks or Hispanics do. And they’re more likely to say evangelical Christians experience discrimination than Muslims do.

This itself reflects a detachment from reality. And it has made many Republicans susceptible to the conspiratorial thinking that, in the past, was reserved for groups that really were on society’s margins. 

 All very interesting and all very plausible.  Makes no mention of how the internet has (inadvertently) ramped up the ability of conspiracy belief to spread and be maintained.   That is a huge part of the story.

The worst aspect, though, is that the key global problem of climate change has had action from America (and Australia) stymied because of (parts of) the Right's persistent conspiracy belief about it in the face of well grounded scientific evidence.   

Interesting

The Guardian reports:

Another major insurer, Axis Capital, has shunned the Adani Carmichael coal project and withdrawn a bid to underwrite the construction of the mine’s rail line.

The withdrawal, first reported by Reuters, follows announcements from 15 of the world’s leading insurers which say they either won’t support the Carmichael mine, or won’t insure thermal coal projects.

It also presents a clear opportunity to activist groups seeking to stop the construction of Carmichael. Those efforts have targeted companies – on their front pavement and in the boardroom – who might provide logistical or financial support to Adani...

John Quiggin, a professor of economics at the University of Queensland, has said the Carmichael project “can’t proceed” without insurance.

So activists may not have to superglue themselves to the track, after all?  Or read up on rail line demolition for amateurs.   (I'm scared to Google the topic myself, just in case some it sets off some cyber alert in ASIO.)

Sounds about right

From The Onion:

From the article:

“It’s really not that complicated: Eat a sensible amount of plain, ordinary food each day, and then we won’t have to do all these confusing studies and you won’t have to worry anymore,” said Blair Amundsen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who explained that Americans continually eat such large quantities of bad food—drinking 24-ounce mocha lattes in the morning, ordering pizza for lunch, making hot dogs for dinner—that it’s almost impossible to determine which bad things are hurting them the most. “We wouldn’t have to churn out all this goddamn research on red meat if you didn’t eat it three meals a day, okay? So maybe just try something normal like a sandwich—not the huge kind with so much meat you have to cut it into pieces before you can fit it into your mouth, but a regular, standard-sized sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and stuff on it. And don’t try to correct your weird, bad eating habits with a diet of nothing but salad for a month, because that’s weird and bad too. Please stop whatever you’re doing now and, for like a week, just eat normal. We’re every bit as exhausted as you are with all this food study shit.”

Yeah, I have to say, some of those American deli sandwiches, with like 4 cm of sliced meats in them, are just over the top.   Seinfeld was eating one of them in a recent episode, even though I doubt from his slim figure that it's not a regular part of his diet.

American candidates

So, it would seem Bernie's health rules him out, and the Democratic candidate for President will be Biden or Warren.

I really don't follow American politics in the same level of detail that other people do, so I haven't paid much attention to Warren.  But Biden does seem too old and past it, and while Warren herself is 70, she looks younger and pretty fit.  She seems a lot younger than Trump, even though he is only 3 years older.    

Lots of people I trust on twitter say she's good at explaining stuff, and Zuckerberg has it in for her, so she probably should be the next President.   She is said to have Wall Street in a panic because she wants a wealth tax (but only kicks in at $50 million)  Surely Democrats can stand up to the rich who think that will be a disaster?

Americans can be a bit weird in their view of tax though.  They fantasise about upward mobility so much that they can imagine how annoyed they would be if facing a wealth tax, even if they're personally forever stuck on a barely living wage and have so few assets that urgent health care could send them bankrupt. 

I know the feeling

Before the internet broke my attention span I read books compulsively. Now, it takes willpower

More reason to impeach him

It's one (dangerous) thing for wingnuts to talk about Democrats trying to stage a coup;  a much, much worse thing when their cult leader makes the same claim.

Some well deserved mocking

On the story about Trump and his ideas as to how to bolster the border:

And this:

So much for that (already long debunked) theory

A report on a new planetary carbon audit that came up with these key findings:

• CO₂ out-gassed to the atmosphere and oceans today from volcanoes and other magmatically active regions is estimated at 280 to 360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) per year, including that released into the oceans from mid-ocean ridges
• Humanity's annual carbon emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and forests, etc., are 40 to 100 times greater than all volcanic emissions

Telling each other conspiracy theories has killed the Right

Jonathan Chait explains how The Federalist started a false and conspiracy laden claim about the whistleblower rules changing, which was taken up with enthusiasm by Trump and his cult followers, but the Intelligence Inspector General has denied it completely.  Does the Federalist retract?  No, it  claims some element of vindication to gloss over the fact they were completely wrong and have mislead and dumbed down the Trump base, again.

And how about this for a complete disgrace - a key Trump adviser using language bound to fire up the lurid conspiracy of the dangerous armed wingnut Trump base:

Of course he does

Hey, just dropped into Mark Latham's twitter feed, to see that now he's devoting time to defending Trump, including re-tweeing Trump's "you can't impeach me, I'm too great at being President" tweets:

How pathetic.

Latham, with his obsession with testosterone fuelled Right wing takes on matters, truly belongs with the losers at Catallaxy.  Maybe he is already commenting there?