Some thoughts on COVID-19

*   COVID-19:  I have said very little about it, because I guessed there was a good chance that it would be SARS-like in its limited expansion.  Now that this seems a wrong guess, how dangerous is it compared to other famous pandemics?:

Fourteen percent of confirmed cases have been “severe,” involving serious pneumonia and shortness of breath. Another 5 percent of patients confirmed to have the disease developed respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multi-organ failure—what the agency calls “critical cases” potentially resulting in death. Roughly 2.3 percent of confirmed cases did result in death.  ....

The latest data from China stem from an analysis of nearly 45,000 confirmed cases, and on the whole suggest that the people most likely to develop severe forms of COVID-19 are those with pre-existing illnesses and the elderly.

While less than 1 percent of people who were otherwise healthy died from the disease, the fatality rate for people with cardiovascular disease was 10.5 percent. That figure was 7.3 percent for diabetes patients and around 6 percent for those with chronic respiratory disease, hypertension, or cancer.

While overall, 2.3 percent of known cases proved fatal—which many experts say is likely an overestimate of the mortality rate, given that many mild cases might go undiagnosed—patients 80 years or older were most at risk, with 14.8 percent of them dying. Deaths occurred in every age group except in children under the age of nine, and, generally speaking, “we see relatively few cases among children,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week.

This pattern of increasing severity with age differs from that of some other viral outbreaks, notably the 1918 flu pandemic, for which mortality was high in young children and in people between 20 and 40 years of age. However, it’s broadly consistent with records of the SARS and MERS coronavirus outbreaks, notes Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “If you’re over fifty or sixty and you have some other health issues and if you’re unlucky enough to be exposed to this virus, it could be very bad,” she says.

OK, I don't want to risk getting it, but still, this doesn't sound like it carries the same sort of demographic and economic issues as the Spanish flu.

* I feel very sorry for Japan and its Olympic organisers, and every person working for a business that has made specific plans assuming the event proceeds.

* Of course, the oddball nation of South Korea would have a specific issue related to its propensity for cultish, nutty religions:

Health authorities are also focusing resources on the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, founded in 1984 by charismatic pastor Lee Man-hee, whose followers, estimated at up to 240,000 worldwide, believe he is the messiah. Shincheonji is Korean for "new heaven and earth." Its critics say it's a cult.

Authorities are not sure how the disease was first transmitted to the group, but investigators have been looking into it. More than 9,000 Shincheonji members have been put under quarantine, and the government plans to test all of them for the virus.

Critics say the disease may have spread within the church quickly because of the way that it worships. "Shincheonji followers hold services sitting on the floor, without any chairs," packed together "like bean sprouts," says Shin Hyun-uk, director of the Guri Cult Counseling Center, an organization in Gyeonggi province that works to extract members from the church. Shin was a member of the Shincheonji group for 20 years, managing the church's Bible study instructors, until 2006.

"A bigger problem is that they shout out 'amen' after every sentence the pastor utters, pretty much every few seconds. And they do that at the top of their lungs," sending respiratory droplets flying everywhere, he adds. These droplets are believed to transmit the coronavirus.

He says that group members proselytize in secret, without revealing their identity. This is because many Koreans are wary of the group and its reputation. As a result, this makes it difficult for people who may have been targeted to know whether they've been in contact with a member of the sect. "Because Shincheonji members cannot reveal themselves, they make it impossible for others to be cautious and self-quarantine themselves."

What was I saying about Queensland police?

I don't generally like commenting on media reporting of criminal actions, including sentencing decisions, as the report will virtually be guaranteed of not painting a complete picture of all factors and all material put to the court.  But even so, this seems a very surprising situation:

A Queensland man has admitted to splashing petrol on his former partner and threatening to burn their house down, in a court case successfully prosecuted by the victim because the state’s police refused to bring domestic violence charges.

In 2017 police told the victim, Dani*, that there was a prima facie case against her former partner for threatening violence, but because there was “a low level of public interest” they would not bring a charge.

Dani then took the rare step of hiring a barrister and prosecuting the criminal case herself.

Her barrister, Clem van der Weegen, said the private prosecution and guilty plea should “deeply embarrass” the Queensland police.

At a hearing last year, a Queensland magistrate’s court was told that officers had refused to cooperate with the case and had declined to make written witness statements. They eventually supplied statements after Dani’s legal team complained directly to the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll.....

 The man had previously pleaded guilty to a property offence – wilful damage – that occurred on the same night, but was not charged in relation to his domestic violence.

At Dani’s urging, police conducted a “factual review” of the incident in 2017.

The officer who conducted the review recommended no domestic violence charges against her former partner....

So, the police thought, and still seem to be arguing, that because the guy was charged with property damage, they didn't have to worry about charging him with an assault type offence for getting petrol on her and threatening to set it alight?   Was he just saying the splash on her was an accident, and he wasn't going to light it until she got out of the house?  

As I said a few posts back, you have to wonder about the Queensland police...

Stoic sex and marriage, considered

As I warned last week, I wanted to write about the strange world of ancient Greek sexual ethics, and that of the Stoics in particular.  Why?   Because I would have assumed that Stoic attitude would be to suck it up and be indifferent as to whether you are having an active sex life or not.   And in fact it seems that later Stoics, particularly of the Roman variety, were pretty conservative on the topic.  But to my surprise, the original Stoics were about as "stoic" when it came to sex as Austin Powers.

So, let's start extracting from the book "The Making of Fornication:  Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity" by Kathy L Gaca.  (I'm not sure why so much of it is available via Google Books, but there is a lot):



OK.  That "sex as a means of training in reason and ethics" is a worry, but we'll get to that.  First of all, they thought eros was all about "the making of friends".  This sounds pretty laid back, and kind of modern:

Already, you can see, things are taking a turn for the weirdly ancient Greek worse when they agree with the practice of mentors getting it on with their students:

....yeah, so we have heard of this before, but at least Zeno didn't think it should be all older men wanting a "friendly" rub up against adolescent boys.  No, girls should expect to be talked into educational sex with their wiser ones too:

Am I the only person to find such a faux high-minded attitude aligning sex with virtue inadvertently funny?  Did parents mock their son if he wanted to change careers to become a professional "wise man" because they knew the job came with far more sex than being something more useful, such as local potter or baker?  "No Mum, I think it's really important, the development of virtue in our city."  "Yeah, sure, son"

Anyway, how did they think the adults should ideally act between themselves?  Here we get into the 1960's "free love" bit:

 

As is common in these radical revisions of how the world of sex and reproduction should be, the kids are to be raised communally too (and, by the sounds of it, not having a clue as to who their true parents may be):

Stupid Greek hippies!   And reminiscent of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's free love ideas, too. 

Things get even worse when they argued that the importance of communality meant that incest prohibitions were silly:

OK, so I presumably have convinced everyone that early Stoicism was one of the early cases of highfalutin' philosophising getting in the way of common sense and biology.  But how did they get to think this way?

Well, remember I recently mocked the way tantric sex was a silly Indian/Asian fetishisation of the (alleged) enormous mystical power of semen?   The early Stoics were probably ahead of them:

I'll skip a bit, til we get to this key part, which apparently shows how a philosophy can make a disproportionately big deal out of a bit of, well, Temple porn:

I've read somewhere (maybe I will turn it up again for a link) that this mural or painting (in a temple to Hera at Argos, I think) puzzled most Greeks because their mythology didn't have a story of Zeus and Hera, um, interacting that way.    As such, it's meaning, and whether or not Chrysippus was even being serious in reading so much into it, was much debated at the time:

Chrysippus’ interpretation of the sexual union of Zeus and Hera belongs to

one of the most infamous pieces of ancient allegoresis. The extravagance of this

interpretation has even prompted some scholars to question the seriousness of

Chrysippus’ hermeneutical attempts. Thus, for example, A.A. Long in his semi-

nal paper has expressed some doubts as to whether Chrysippus’ was earnest in his

allegorical interpretation of the Samos (or Argos) mural.  Such an assessment, nev-

ertheless, does not sit well the testimonies that present Chrysippus’ interpretation

as a serious, albeit scandalizing, allegorical suggestion. Origen, who provides us

with the most important testimony here, insists that Chrysippus “misinterprets”

(παρερμηνεύει) the painting, but he clearly regards it as a serious hermeneutical

attempt. In a similar vein, Clemens Romanus3and Theophilus Antiochenus4con-

sider Chrysippus to be in earnest, even if they abominate the view he advocates.

I find it very odd, and amusing, that so much deep philosophical discussion could arise out of questioning the meaning of a piece of art.  Presumably, the guy who created it wasn't around to explain what he meant, so early Stoics just put their own spin on it.  

Anyway, I suppose I should add in that early Stoics weren't the only ones with extreme ideas on marriage - Plato in The Republic had the "guardians" of his ideal state actually run as a eugenic farm:

Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce, might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed.

To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must consider every child born between seven and ten months after their copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups is forbidden.

A great idea (I say sarcastically) that finally got to more-or-less be tried out by the Nazis:

In 1935, Himmler began a propaganda campaign inviting any unwed mother who fit the racial profile to give birth inside a Lebensborn home.

It was an ambitious pledge, as it sought to turn a centuries-old attitude about unwed mothers on its head. No longer was having a child out of wedlock a source of shame — instead, the Nazi regime would celebrate the birth of any Aryan child, regardless of its parents’ marital status....

Yet even the government’s open-arms approach to unwed mothers wasn’t enough to dramatically change the numbers. So Himmler took the Lebensborn program one step further.

He began arranging secret meetings in which “suitable” women could meet S.S. soldiers and, if both parties were amenable, create more babies for the Nazi party — with no offer of marriage on the table.

 Anyway, back to the Stoics.  As I said at the beginning, the later Roman Stoic philosophers, who are more influential now anyway under the current revival of interest in Stoicism, were right regular romantic conservatives compared to Zeno.   Here's Hierocles:

 “The whole of our race is naturally adapted to society … cities could not exist without a household; but the household of an unmarried man is truly imperfect … a life accompanied by wedlock is to be precedaneously chosen by the wise man; but a single life is not to be chosen, except particular circumstances require it … Nature herself, prior to the wise man incites us to this, who also exhorts the wise man to marry. For she not only made us gregarious, but likewise adapted to copulation, and proposed the procreation of children and stability of life, as the one and common work of wedlock … In the first place, indeed, because it produces a truly divine fruit, the procreation of children, since they will be assistants to us in all our actions … I also think that a married life is beautiful. For what other thing can be such an ornament to a family, as is the association of husband and wife? … For there is not anything so troublesome which will not be easily borne by a husband and wife when they are concordant, and are willing to endure it in common … but when we marry those whom we ought not, and, together with this, are ourselves entirely ignorant of life, and unprepared to take a wife in such a way as a free and ingenuous woman ought to be taken, then it happens that this association with her becomes difficult and intolerable.” (Fragment V, On Wedlock)

That's quite nice, and has quite the ring of common sense compared to proto-hippy Zeno.

And here is advice from Epictetus that lots of Christian parents would be very comfortable with:

 “As for sex, abstain as far as possible before marriage, and if you do go in for it, do nothing that is socially unacceptable. But don’t interfere with other people on account of their sex lives or criticize them, and don’t broadcast your own abstinence.”

 As the person who posted that quote writes: 

Basically, try to be responsible and mind your own business. Not a bad way to live.

There’s no reason to be a pleasure-hating moralist (that is its own passion, anyway). There’s not much to admire in the stories we hear from Greece and Rome about slaves and prostitution and pederasty either. Worse still are the hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

Epictetus’s formula is almost a perfect Aristotelian Mean: Don’t abstain and don’t overdo. Leave other people to their own choices. Keep your own choices private. And don’t think you’re better than anyone else—because you’re not.

 So, maybe the lesson of the whole post is this:  ignore most Greek philosophising on sex and marriage, and don't base theology on porn.

Movie review - 1917

Finally caught with it yesterday, and yes, it's a great film.  

Like Parasite, there is not much you can say about it without risking spoiling a little the pleasure that others may take from it on first viewing.   Let's just say that in both films, when unexpected things happen, they can come with quite a surprise/shock.  

I do think it was snubbed at the Oscars in terms of the number of awards it got - and while I would agree that there was more to contemplate after viewing Parasite (it was thematically more complex), I wasn't moved by that movie in the same way I was in parts of 1917.

So personally, I would have liked to see Parasite get best international film and screenplay, but 1917 best director and best film.   Sam Mendes is extremely talented.

One further comment:  I wonder how the film went over in Germany.  Did Sam once buy a really bad German car, or something?  He co-wrote the screenplay, and it contains nothing in the way of a sympathetic or humanising portrait of the German fighters, as you find in some World War One films.  (It is an easy war in which to show the common soldiers on both sides as victims of their bloody minded political and/or military leaders. But this film has none of that.)  That doesn't detract from the film - I just thought it a little unusual and interesting to note.

The most pleasing vegetable (and a Saturday night recipe)

I have shared this with my kids, who thought it an unusual confession.  Now for the world:

I find cooking sliced leeks in butter on the stovetop a fantastically pleasing experience. It's the combination of the bright and cheerful green/white colour with the gentle smell of onion that doesn't overpower the kitchen the way onions can.  I can't think of any other vegetable which gives the same aesthetic pleasure in its combination of sight and smell.

I know - doing garlic (especially with some chilli flakes) in a pan with olive oil can be pretty intensely pleasing too, from an olfactory point of view.  I even love the smell of virgin olive oil heating up by itself.  But you don't get any substantial aesthetic pleasure from the colour.  (Yes, I know, some olive oils have a nice colour - but it's not the same cheerful palate as leeks.)

Anyway, now that that's out of the way, I was very pleased with the result of more-or-less following this recipe last night:

Seared salmon with mashed potato and leeks

The ingredient list I modified a little, so I will write my version that worked well:

*  Enough potato for a generous serving of mash for four
*  One large leek (you want to get at least a cup when its sliced)
*  Butter (and a bit of olive oil)
*  Corn, fresh, sliced off the cob (I used one big cob's worth for 3 people last night - yes, I had left over potato - but I would say you probably want a cup and a bit for 4)
*  small amount of garlic (minced out of a jar is ok)
*   baby rocket (a couple of cups)
*  skin on salmon pieces

The great thing about mashed potato is the way they reheat so well in the microwave.   I did this yesterday - did the mash after lunch, went to a movie, came home and the rest of the cooking was very quick.


So:   make your mashed potatoes the way you like, but while the potatoes are cooking, cook the sliced leeks in a couple of tablespoons of butter (perhaps more, because I use a substantial amount of butter in mashed potato anyway.)   Mix the leeks into the mash and there you have it - mashed potato with a sweeter, more intense flavour than the blander variety.  Just plain mash with salmon is a bit dull, I think.

Cook the salmon fillets with some butter and a little olive oil.   Take them out,   perhaps drain off some of the butter/oil, put in the corn kernels and garlic, with a little bit more butter if you want, and they soften with a few minutes.  While waiting, mash on plate, salmon on top.  Throw rocket in with the corn, just to wilt them (only takes a minute), add a bit of salt, and onto the salmon and mash.

I still served a lemon wedge with the salmon.   I think its often a bit tricky finding the right side vegetables with pan fried salmon, as you want some moisture somewhere, and I can't be bothered doing a sauce.  This worked well.

You can thank me later.
 

The New Zealand problem

I see courtesy of Sinclair Davidson that there is some kind of ban filter working to prevent getting onto this blog in New Zealand.  At least on the network he was using.  The reason it's listed is apparently for "hate and racism"!

I would love to know whether it is because of things I quote from Catallaxy.

(By the way, Sinclair, I am pretty sure that after I had a go at you for not filtering "chinks" on your block list for comments, you started to do so.  Can I claim credit for controlling your blog from here?  I'll send other recommendations as I see fit.)  

Or is because I don't always delete Graeme Bird's anti-Semitic ramblings in comments fast enough.

Sinclair ought to at least tell us if Catallaxy suffered the same fate.  If people could get to that site from NZ, but not to mine, there would be something seriously wrong!

The predictably appalling Arndt

I was going to write a post about how the odd looking Queensland detective heading the Clarke murder investigation could not possibly stay in charge after making his utterly gormless comment which carried the extremely strong suggestion that, who knows?, maybe the mother could be the one who should be blamed for making her husband so distraught that it led to him killing her and their kids.

The statement was completely and utterly unjustifiable - one that only the stupid, usually divorced, misogynists of Catallaxy could endorse -  and I was pleased to see the guy step down voluntarily.   I don't want to be mean, as they sometimes have an awful job which I would not want to do myself; but this guy's inability to avoid saying there are "two sides" to such a enormously malevolent act seems to confirm that you don't have to be very sharp to be a police officer at any level, in Queensland in particular (although other States' forces give us a run for the money at times, too.)   

Anyway, I thought it was all over, but then Bettina "Not a Psychologist, I just like being introduced that way" Arndt fulfilled my prediction that she would come out and say something stupidly offensive:

And she was saying this after the media was reporting the guy had a DVO against him already at the time he killed his family!

Even worse, she doubles down after the guy voluntarily stood aside:

And worse still - she apparently claims in a grubby newsletter that someone who was "close to the family" rang her to spill the beans on "the background to Baxter's actions" - which she hopes will come out in a coroner's hearing. 

How despicable is this?   Leading her "men are the real victims here - even when they kill" loser followers in a un-sourced whisper campaign that, yeah, the dead mother was a real bitch??

I was looking at her website the other day, and one of the things that annoyed me was that, sometimes, there has been a tiny kernel of a worthwhile argument in some of her attitudes, but she blows her credibility so completely out of the water by her unhinged culture war against feminism attitude that she is now the last person to listen to any sex or relationship topic. 

She needs to retire from the public discourse.  That severe head tilt she shows on her social media profile pic  (something Tim Blair would mock if she were a Lefty figure) must be giving her a headache by now.

A good take on the "reocons"

From the Niskanen Centre, a rather good explanation of the people surrounding Trump: "Meet the Reocons".  The subheading:

On the American right, a growing group of intellectuals are using acute cultural fears to secure an illiberal future. It’s reactionary politics at its most explosive and unpredictable.

Another book to be written about how Trump created a departmental shambles

One of the more interesting things to read about the Roger Stone sentencing is this article at the Washington Post, explaining that the prosecutor appeared not to really be endorsing the revised sentencing submissions, and wouldn't confirm who had written them!

It really sounds like a Justice Department in complete internal disarray, all due (of course) to Trump and his enabler Barr.

While on the topic of Trump, I was trying to find live streaming of the Democrat debate on Youtube yesterday lunchtime, and there was none to be found.  (I think it was still on while I was looking, but maybe I was a little late.)   Instead, I ended up watching a little live streaming of Trump at a rally, and once again I find his cult status completely puzzling.

The 10 minutes I watched were mostly bragging about how his election night went, and how TV pundits couldn't believe it when he started to win.   It was a story he has presumably told scores of times before, and people behind him did not look all that engaged.  Finally, he moved onto "Democrats are the parties of high crime and late abortion, ripping the babies from the mother's womb", and the audience got a little animated again.  And he threw in some clearly dubious bragging about medical advances.   It seems, incidentally, that Trump cultists are really pleased that if they get a deadly illness, they can try some pre-approved drug.  The fact that the vast majority of new drugs never get approved (only 14% make it, apparently) would surely indicate that very few of them going to have a benefit from the drug, let alone be saved by it.   (Not all new drugs would be actual life saving ones in any event.)

My point is - it is extremely difficult to understand why his followers think it is worth going to his rallies.  He speeches are rambling, clearly vain, off the cuff efforts by someone who would be given a poor rating as a high school orator let alone as an adult, and the audience itself does not look highly engaged during the more repetitive sections.   He doesn't attempt theatrical drama and practised emotional high points, like Hitler.  Yet people still, presumably, get some emotional lift from being there.

Although I have never been to a cricket match in my life, I think it might be like the odd way you sometimes see a cricket crowd start to amuse themselves during tedious play, with Mexican waves, etc.   What they came to watch is not all that great at the moment anyway, but they all know they all like the same thing when it is great.  

And I am still inclined to believe that they are clinging together because they know they are on the losing side of long term social and economic change.   

Japanese architects still trying to kill people

This takes me back:   a decade ago I was mocking the way Japanese architect designed houses seemed to disproportionately feature stupid, unsafe stairways.  A reminder:

I’ve mentioned here before the fondness modern Japanese architects seem to have for precipitous stairways without rails, balcony levels with low walls, and generally anything that any sensible client would recognize as a death trap for them or their house guests.
Well, I think this distinctive set of apartments in Tokyo probably takes the cake.  Why bother waiting for the resident to slip off the edge of rail-less stairs when you can actually build large holes in the floor!
As I said in a comment at Dezeen, the next logical step is hidden, spring loaded trap doors in the floor, to keep clients on their toes.

Well, they are still at it, if this post at Dezeen is anything to go by:

A series of triangular and rectangular platforms create numerous floor levels inside this house in Osaka, Japan.

Designed by Tato Architects, House in Takatsuki is a three-storey building containing 16 different floor levels.

Imagine negotiating this.  I keep getting images of cartoon/slapstick characters falling down various ledges from top to bottom:

I particularly like the touch of the sharp cornered metal step in the last photo.  Perfectly suited to slicing open a calf.

It's really just nuts.

In Trump news

*  I see that some on Twitter are pointing out that the media should perhaps show some scepticism about the self-seving nature of the "I have considered resigning over the Trump tweets" story from Barr.   I think they are right:  it does have a air of "how can I ensure that I stay here, helping my dumb-ass boss whose heart is in the right place, while maintaining a semblance of independence to be recorded in the history books."  

*  Seems that Trump has decided to try to neuter the intelligence services by installing a complete flunky as their acting head (which apparently means the Senate can do nothing about it, even if they wanted to.)   What's that sound in Russia?  Putin popping champagne, no doubt.  

Someone else on Twitter, though, says that this will have a chance of backfiring, as Grenell''s direct, partisan interference is likely to result in lots of leaking against him.   But will that concern Trump cultists?  Probably not.

All the best people

I knew that if I wanted to see the worst possible take on a horrific domestic violence murder suicide by an estranged husband*, I could wait for Bettina Arndt to comment, or go to the open thread at Catallaxy.

News reports are saying that no  Family Court proceedings re the children were underway yet, so perhaps Arndt is finding it hard to come up with a "bias against men in the Family Court leads to despair" aspect yet.   But that doesn't stop a regular at Catallaxy:

push anyone hard enough and they will snap. the article mentioned that she had withdrawn the children from him, probably on advice of lawyers. its a standard trick before a family report, make the kids not use to being around dad. the family report will note awkwardness, the judge will use that to decide custody. my ex did it to me. she has probably been provoking him for months, again on the advice of lawyers so that bad reactions can be documented. ex did that to me as well and it went on for a whole year. by the end of it I was ready to kill someone. the first would have been her lawyers, but in the end I kept it together, just.

the system is easy to rort and is heavily biased against men.

this woman now has to live the rest of her life, physically and mentally scarred knowing she could have avoided it all.

the left has weaponised women’s hypergamous behaviour. might sound heartless but I have zero sympathy for her.

He wrote that before he knew the wife/mother had died in hospital too, obviously.  Also before he knew anything at all about the reasons the mother left home and was, apparently, not letting the kids stay with him.  

While the thread is not exactly full of endorsement of his take on the matter, several take the opportunity to chime in on his subsequent comment that Rose Batty (son killed by father) is an appalling person for campaigning against domestic violence.

I've said before that there are lot of psychologically damaged, bitter-after-all-these-years divorced blokes on the site:  and it when it comes to domestic violence, their takes are the worst in the nation.

Update:    you might want to sit down while you read this one (from a different, regular Catallaxy commenter):

He was challenged, by one of the women so stupid as to want to appear in that community, to which he responded:

 

 *  mind you, only recently estranged.  It looks like it is barely a couple of months since the wife left the matrimonial home with the kids.   

Producers only have themselves to blame

I announced last year that I was well and truly "over" My Kitchen Rules.   I'm sort of happy to see that I am not alone - this year the show has gone into a ratings downwards spiral so bad that it looks like it won't recover.

Noticing that they have apparently changed the format a little this year, I'll fess up to having had a look at it for perhaps 20 minutes last week.   It is no wonder the ratings are tanking.  At least in previous years, if there was a contestant who was really annoying, you knew they weren't going to be back the following year.   So what do I find this year - the guy last year assigned the role of "bitchy, apparently gay, dude" is back, along with quite a few others from last years' contestants.   And as for audiences being over it being played as a personal conflict drama, I tuned in just at the right time to find a room in which there was some confrontation going on about whether that episode's cooks were being "honest" or not about their past experience with cooking for a living, with tears and upset from one of the accused.  I assume Pete and Manu had gone outside for a breath of fresh air (something the audience was wishing they could have as well) because they were no where to be seen in trying to calm down the room.   (Not that I have any doubts that the producers were involved in making this happen.)

People are over the faked up inter-contestant conflict aspects of the show, I reckon; even though that was always part of the format, it was clear the producers thought that ramping it up would attract more viewers.  I think it has backfired spectacularly.  A little bit of "who are going to play this year's 'baddies'?" could be fun - but push it too far and it just starts looking manipulative, too transparent and as bad as most other reality TV.

England, flooding and Conservatives

So, large parts of England are under water again.

Attributing any particular flood to climate change is a tricky thing, given the range of factors that help contribute to flooding generally.   (Look, even an opinion piece at The Guardian complains that a lot of current flooding is causing by poor infrastructure decisions.)   But the more floods that appear the more it's fair to assume that the attribution studies will confirm the connection with increased flooding generally.    

Fortunately, for England, their brand of conservatism is not tied to culture war denial of climate change:

The warnings came as George Eustice, the new environment secretary, admitted that the “nature of climate change” means the government cannot protect every household from extreme weather, such as recent storms which have brought flooding to parts of the UK.

“We’ll never be able to protect every single household just because of the nature of climate change and the fact that these weather events are becoming more extreme,” Mr Eustice told Sky News.

Why did Australian conservatism decide to follow the line of American conservative denialism, instead of the European path?   Probably the IPA I would say - and at heart, the American and Australian conservative path was likely formed by mining interest funding to "think tanks".  I would assume that limited mining (at least on land) in England means they have never been targeted in the same way.   

Fornication soon

For those disappointed that there is no new post yet - all 3 of you - things are busy at work and personally.

But I am working on a post about how early Stoics were not very "stoic" at all about sex, and how odd it seems that a pornographic painting of Zeus and Hera played a role in justifying their views.

This is what happens when you have an hour to kill at St Lucia, as I did last Saturday, and you go to the University library and notice a book on the shelf entitled: The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity.

More to come...

Update:  it just occurred to me that story of the sexual grooming of a young student by an old sports coach of St Kevin's College which featured on last night's 4 Corners (and it was a very sordid case) was the sort of stuff which [some] Greek philosophers would have thought was actually appropriate; almost noble.   Ancient Greece was a very different place, and one that it's hard to get your head around.

Update 2:  OK, my update should be qualified, as I reminded myself about the massive contradictions in ancient Greek writings about how homosexuality was viewed - including those around the nature of the teacher/mentor and student relationships.  I am sure I read this article many years ago, and linked to it in a post.  

A simple question

With all the fuss about Huawei and the 5G network, is it possible for Western governments with concerns to just keep using 4G network and make all government related work use phones which are only 4G capable?  And recommend all businesses with security concerns, or just Joe Public, to do the same if they want to?

I mean, I've never really understood what the appeal of 5G is meant to be.  Isn't 4G plenty good enough for nearly all use these days?  5G capable phones are just becoming available (as is the network itself, which needs a heap more antennas across a city) but is there any real demand for 5G phones?

So why would it be such a big deal to keep using the 4G network and 4G only phones?

Probably there is a technical reason, but I would like to know....
  

Uncut trash

I had to abandon watching Uncut Gems, the movie slavered over by nearly all critics in one of those cases where their enthusiasm looks more like a group dynamic than anything the mere audience can understand, after 30 (maybe 40?) minutes.

Three things about the film were rendering it unwatchable:

1.    has there ever been a movie with a worse sound mix?   It had to be intentional, and I presume designed to make situations seem more stressful; but to me it's a complete artist failure, and doesn't feel like real life at all.   If you have seen it, you would surely have to know what I mean - the way dialogue is surrounded by a soup of other noise (mostly, other people voices).  Here's how I think real life works:  even if you are in a room where everyone is talking but you are concentrating on one speaker, you either have to both shout to be heard over the din, or you are able to mentally focus on the one voice and don't notice so much the other murmur.  And in film, unless you have characters shouting at other over noise, that is why you can reduce the other ambient noise to a level (and a kind of blur) where the audience doesn't find it distracting.   This movie ignores that completely.

I don't know how they did the sound in this film - maybe they did just put mikes all over the place and let the extras talk and not bother mixing it at all.    But it really, really, drove me nuts, because my mind refused to accept that this is how sound in film should work.

2.   Has there ever been such a praised film with such a God-awful, weirdly anachronistic musical soundtrack?   It reminded me a bit of John Carpenter's cheap-as electronic soundtracks.  But he was working in the 80's - this film is set in 2012.   I have no idea why they thought this was appropriate, and it kept intruding too.

3.   As I have always said, it doesn't matter what the swear word de jour is, and I don't care if it reflects how certain people in New York speak - its intense overuse in a screenplay renders dialogue into a tedium of listening to what is effectively just a verbal tic.   (Don't teenagers who get into the trap of using "like" once or twice n every single sentence start driving you nuts?  Why am I supposed to find one verbal tic irritating, but not another?)    I see that it's in the top ten movies for "f count" - looking at the list there is only one other I have seen (Casino - and I remember feeling it was OK-ish but not particularly great).   


Of course, movies about seedy characters and a quasi criminal underworld are not generally my thing, and I have repeated asked what does someone like Scorsese want to forever keep returning to it.  (He has, by the way, an executive producer credit on this film.)     But even so, I just couldn't stay with the film, which didn't seem to setting up a "first act" that held any dramatic interest anyway.

I have looked at reviews for any negative ones.  At least Dana Stevens in Slate seemed to be nearly as bothered by the sound mix as me:

...most conversations in Howard’s world are operatic screaming matches, conducted over the competing noise of overlapping background dialogue, the incessant buzzing of the locked bulletproof glass door that leads into the shop, and an ambient—perhaps too ambient, as in omnipresent—electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, who composes under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. 

And her conclusion:

...I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground. 

Very glad I gave up on it when I did!

And finally, there is pretty good reason to suspect that the critical reception is not being met with the same response from audiences:  Variety asks Uncut Gems’: The Startling Indie Smash That Audiences…Don’t Like?

The appalling Fox News

This is transparently setting up an excuse for Trump to pardon Stone.

I would support any Democrat candidate who had a policy "Fox News to be made illegal as a threat to democracy".

Update:  conservative Australian pundits commentary:  "Democrats just don't understand how on the nose they are with the broader public because of their embrace of identity politics. They're going to lose.  Ha ha ha ha."

Gold speculation

Noticed this on Twitter:

Now, I may have a mere "man in the [relatively well educated] street" knowledge of economics, but I thought one of the things that modern economists were virtually all certain about is that returning to a gold standard would be a foolish idea.  (I mean, I don't think even Steve Kates - the most highly self- regarding Trump cultist economist on the planet - even advocates for it?)   

Yet the WSJ has a London editor who argues that economists are fearful that this Judy Shelton is right on this?

OK, I see from a Marketwatch article that her ideas about gold and money are more complicated - and actually (if I understand it correctly) kind of globalist-friendly.   Which means Trump probably doesn't understand her ideas at all.   And no one seems to think her ideas are at all practical.  She has also done a huge flip flop on low interest rates.

I always feel I should understand economics more on a theoretical level:  but when you see a field with the supposed life long experts on the subject holding such divergent views, it more-or-less dis-incentivises me from spending too much time on the subject.  

Muslim Valentine's Day panic

Indonesia is a strange place - most are normal folk, I'm sure, but they have to live with more assertive Muslims who have an extreme view of relationship development:

A nationwide movement known as “Indonesia Tanpa Pacaran” (Indonesia Without Dating) is also calling for February 14 to be nationally recognised as an anti-dating holiday. The group, which has over 1 million followers on Instagram, advocates the idea that dating goes against Islamic teachings, and is an unnecessary step before marriage.

At a rally on February 9, supporters of the movement carried signs reading, "We support February 14 as Indonesia Without Dating Day," and "Erase dating from Indonesia."

Earlier in the same article, we read about one area's heads of Eduction ordering schools not to celebrate Valentine's Day:

In a letter circulated throughout schools in Bandung, Indonesia’s second-largest city, Hikmat Ginanjar, head of the Department of Education, issued a formal ban on any form of Valentine’s Day celebration.

“[Valentine’s Day] has no place in our culture. It’s incompatible with our religious values. We have sent out letters reminding primary and secondary students of this fact,” Cucu Saputra, Secretary of Bandung’s Department of Education, told local media.

Missing an opportunity to use Valentine’s Day to instead provide students with ample sex education, Saputra mentioned that the youth often celebrate the holiday by hosting alcohol-fueled sex parties. He then declared that Valentine’s Day need not be celebrated in Indonesia, because love should be celebrated every day.

Saputra also delegated the task of enforcing the Valentine’s Day ban to individual schools, leaving much open to interpretation.

An interesting development

Barr: Trump's Roger Stone tweets "make it impossible for me to do my job" 

Someone so important to Trump telling him to stop tweeting because it's improper and deeply embarrassing?   What will be the Trump response??

The only "good" thing about Trump's tweeting is that it makes his corrupt intentions plain for the world to see.   But he is so dumb, or self involved, he just doesn't realise how harmful it is to his credibility. 

Corruption in plain sight update:

Conservative pundits reaction:

"Ha ha ha - look at those Democrats in disarray about who to choose as their candidate."   

Update 2:   don't misread my posting about this to mean that I think Barr has just discovered "principles" and a backbone.  I'm on side with those who think this is more likely cynical signalling to Trump that he is making it hard for Barr to do his bidding:

In brain related news...

*  Being born blind protects people from getting schizophrenia.   Didn't know this, even though scientists have for quite a while:

Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They've analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case.

As time goes on, larger data sets have emerged: In 2018, a study led by a researcher named Vera Morgan at the University of Western Australia looked at nearly half a million children born between 1980 and 2001 and strengthened this negative association. Pollak, a psychiatrist and researcher at King's College London, remembered checking in the mental health facility where he works after learning about it; he too was unable to find a single patient with congenital blindness who had schizophrenia. 

*  The readiness potential in the brain, the thing which led Libet to suggest its measurement proves there is no free will, is actually closely connected to breathing:

Scientists at EPFL in Switzerland have shown that you are more likely to initiate a voluntary decision as you exhale. Published in today's issue of Nature Communications, these findings propose a new angle on an almost 60-year-old neuroscientific debate about free will and the involvement of the human brain.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it maybe means something....

*   Microdoses of lithium may prove to be protective for Alzheimer's disease:

There remains a controversy in scientific circles today regarding the value of lithium therapy in treating Alzheimer's disease. Much of this stems from the fact that because the information gathered to date has been obtained using a multitude of differential approaches, conditions, formulations, timing and dosages of treatment, results are difficult to compare. In addition, continued treatments with high dosage of lithium render a number of serious adverse effects making this approach impracticable for long term treatments especially in the elderly.

In a new study, however, a team of researchers at McGill University led by Dr. Claudio Cuello of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, has shown that, when given in a formulation that facilitates passage to the brain, lithium in doses up to 400 times lower than what is currently being prescribed for mood disorders is capable of both halting signs of advanced Alzheimer's pathology such as amyloid plaques and of recovering lost cognitive abilities. The findings are published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease....

"Microdoses of lithium at concentrations hundreds of times lower than applied in the clinic for mood disorders were administered at early amyloid pathology stages in the Alzheimer's-like transgenic rat. These results were remarkably positive and were published in 2017 in Translational Psychiatry and they stimulated us to continue working with this approach on a more advanced pathology," notes Dr. Cuello.

Encouraged by these earlier results, the researchers set out to apply the same lithium formulation at later stages of the disease to their transgenic rat modelling neuropathological aspects of Alzheimer's disease. This study found that beneficial outcomes in diminishing pathology and improving cognition can also be achieved at more advanced stages, akin to late preclinical stages of the disease, when amyloid plaques are already present in the brain and when cognition starts to decline.

Update:  I had a feeling lithium as a possible preventative for dementia had a mention before at this blog.  It was back in 2014, referencing a NYT article that was very interesting.

I like it when I re-read old posts and still find them fascinating.

The current wet weather

Well, less than a month ago I did some amateur speculation based on looking at sea surface temperatures, and wondered if we were about to get some heavy rain once the monsoon kicked in.

Seems my speculation might have been right - there has been widespread rain, but most is associated with storm-like systems, resulting in very high intensity falls but uneven distribution.

The weather bureau has been pointing out that because of this uneven distribution, it is exactly "drought breaking" rainfall, and I wondered Toowoomba's dam levels to see how they are doing:

Yeah, there's a long way to go to get to full dams up that way.

I was also surprised to see how poorly those dams have done in the last 4 or so years:

Psychological problems noted

*   Did you read Christopher Eccleston's interview in The Guardian about his bout of serious mental health issues?:

His book focuses heavily on his previously undisclosed struggle with anorexia and a mental breakdown so intense that the Priory psychiatrist Justin Haslam described it as one of the worst cases of clinical depression he had ever seen.

That may have been prompted by a divorce, but it's surprising to read that he's had issues with his body image for a long time:

His doctors told him that there was a severe imbalance in his brain chemistry and he was put on high doses of medication. The trigger might have been the split from his wife, and the guilt around not seeing his children, but Eccleston’s problems had been brewing for years. Since childhood, he had suffered from body image problems. He wanted to be androgynous – “Still do, because I feel like a prop forward” – but he knew his mum and dad wouldn’t have tolerated their kid dabbling in eye liner on the streets of working-class Salford, where he grew up.

“I could do all the male stuff – I was captain of the sports team and I’d get very physical on the field,” he says, “but I also had this interest in femininity. When I did my first play at Eccles college, Lock Up Your Daughters, I wore mascara and I was like: ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ I was expressing on the outside what I felt on the inside.”

He was never confused about his sexuality, although he says he has always appreciated male beauty. His relationship with his male friends had always been especially intimate, too: “It’s a terrible word, but there were suspicions,” he says, “because of how we were together.”

I don't mean to sound rude, but he seems to be disturbed enough to have become a comedian instead of an actor.   (It also would not be a complete surprise if he later decides he is transgender.)

*  How bad is it for Lefties to giggle at Jordan Peterson's personal woes?   Some will obviously go too far; but really, as if Right wing people don't do the same when it turns out a Left wing figure is shown to have personal problems of the kind they have warned others to avoid.   And besides, the schadenfreude should probably be more directed to those on the Right who thought he was genuinely a worthwhile guru, when the evidence has long been there that he (and his daughter) have some crank health ideas that should have served as a warning as to his general reliability for life advice.  

I always thought he was a waffle merchant not worth paying attention to.  More people are likely to share that view now.

I liked this tweet on the topic:

Even Hot Air has a problem with this...

Allahpundit writes on the Stone prosecution matter:

The right thing to do. No one can stop Trump from handing out corrupt pardons to his sleazy cronies but a prosecutor can and should refuse to revisit what he believes is the proper sentencing recommendation just because it gave the president the sads. People should keep resigning until Bill Barr himself has to go into court and inform the judge personally that he’s been notified by a tweet that the original sentence was too harsh.

The rest of his commentary is pretty interesting too.  (He basically doesn't believe the DOJ explanation as to why they intervened, unless they produce the evidence.)

As I have said before:  I can't believe the quality of conservative commentary in Australia that will just say with amusement "Ha, Trump again owning the Democrats, who can't even organise a candidate vote.  And the US economy.   He's going to win."   They are fundamentally non-serious jokers too blinded by tribal political point scoring to acknowledge obvious corruption and authoritarianism.   

Psychoanalysing conservatives and liberals

The Washington Post has an interview with the author of a book:

“Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” is all about how conservatives and liberals not only are drawn to different kinds of media, but tend to have different kinds of psychological makeup.

Here's what she says:

Waldman: What are the key differences in psychological profiles that correlate with whether you’re a liberal or a conservative?

Young: The traits that we’re talking about relate to how individuals engage with threats in their world, meaning how much are you monitoring your environment for threats and how much are you cognizant of your own mortality?

So that's where this trait “need for cognition” comes into play: that you enjoy thinking. The other one at the center of this is a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. If you don't perceive your world to be scary and dangerous, you are not going to be as motivated to process things efficiently because you're not always worried about your survival. And you would not be uncomfortable with situations or texts that are ambiguous.

Need for cognition is something that we find is significantly lower amongst social and cultural conservatives. They are more likely to seek order, predictability and routine in their lives. This also translates into how they think about ambiguous texts.

And it’s quite intuitive that people who are drawn to abstract art, wild jazz music and stories in literature that are absurd or that don’t resolve — like the plot doesn’t tie up in the end — the kinds of people who are drawn to those things and who enjoy those things are higher in tolerance for ambiguity and they’re higher in need for cognition. They also tend to be liberal.

Waldman: So Fox News or conservative talk radio isn’t just about being angry, it’s also about threats.

Young: It’s about identifying people, institutions, parties and policies that pose a threat. It’s also about the aesthetic package of that genre, which is didactic and clear. You are never confused about where Sean Hannity stands on an issue. You’re never like, “Oh, that was rather layered. What could he actually mean?”

Waldman: “Getting” the joke is also important to people who like satire. Explain what that’s about.

Young: The kind of satire that really exemplifies this processing is irony, because irony is saying the opposite of what you intend. This is what humor scholars call incongruity, because there are two competing elements, and it’s the audience who makes sense of them and brings them together.

This is something that is really taxing cognitively. Not only are some people not good at it, some people just don’t enjoy it. It’s like riddle solving, where you as the audience are adding something to be able to then understand it.

I have mixed feelings about this:   I think it seems to describe the psychological state of conservatives now - especially American conservatives; but it seems to me it was not always as pronounced as this. I tend to be more interested in the question - how did conservatives go so nuts?

Early emotional scars, and future sexual behaviour

Over at AEON there's an autobiographical essay by an English woman prompted by her strong reaction when a new friend says he is in a polyamorous relationship (she reacts strongly against the idea because she had a father who cheated on her mother on an apparently massive scale):  

My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car.

After he finally left his wife and 2 children, he made a return with a surprising proposal:

He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people.

On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said.

 But the main reason I thought it worth posting about the  essay is this part of it:  

‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow.

In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein.

From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right.

I have always thought that boarding school from a young age would be emotionally harmful, but I have never felt sure whether I was just projecting from what I am sure would have been my own poor reaction if ever it had been proposed that I had to leave home for schooling.  I wonder if it has been more broadly studied, or if that book is the only one on the topic?
 

Most controversial comment about Parasite

Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones wrote:

First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.

This sounds, of course, like he's saying that he prefers dubbing to subtitles.

And that is a controversial opinion, with this Tweet, which (shall we say) succinctly expressing disbelief that a writer (let alone one from a liberal publication) could say that, now having 9,000 retweets and 46,000 likes.

Even my teenage kids agree that dubbing is awful (in live action movies at least - it passes adequately in animation) and they always turn on subtitles for foreign content on Netflix, even if I am not watching it with them.

Kevin Drum needs re-education camp, or something...

Rule of Federal law optional in Trump's America

As someone down further in the thread says, with intended sarcasm I assume:

Revenge of the pangolin?

Pangolins only came to my attention back in 2014, although there has since been a David Attenborough narrated documentary which publicised their plight as victims of Chinese traditional medicine.

If the current coronovirus problem leads to Chinese not eating any, or as many, endangered wild animals for imaginary health benefits, that will at least be something good to come of it.  See this:

Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?