Mud brick city

A story at the BBC says that a palace made of mud bricks in Yemen is in danger of collapse (due to poor maintenance and heavy rain.)

It's a big building, and you wouldn't guess it was mud bricks:

But even more interesting, further down in the story, is a photo of a large number of crumbling mud brick houses "in the Old City of Sanaa":

I had no idea there were such large mud brick buildings anywhere in the world.   

Another site has an interview discussing this place:

These are homes for Yemenis. I know some people had to leave because their homes were damaged. But what is life like in these buildings?

The house develops, as I said, in vertical. So you have the lower floor: storage, the kitchen and so on. And two or three rooms per floor where the family or the extended family lives. So, of course, now they have more modern services. The toilets and so on are more modern than the old ones, but still they live in the same way. 

I'm guessing there are no elevators. So if you have company over, they have to walk up nine stories if you're on the top floor.

Absolutely. And not only that, but you are at 2,200 meters high. It's one of the highest capitals in the world. So it is quite an effort, I would say.  

You're running out of breath by the time you get up to the ninth story. 

I would say so. But the inhabitants are used to that. 

I've been in mud brick structures before, some two stories high. But it's hard to imagine anything in mud brick taller than that. As an architect, what in your training prepared you to appreciate this construction? 

These are the highest buildings in mud brick in the world. The fact that they are one adjacent to the others, of course, helps with the height. But they are all individual houses with different plans and layout, built around a staircase — a stone staircase that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor. And the rooms open around this staircase. So people move all the time from one floor to another and some floors are dedicated to the kitchen, some other to women. And as you move up, you know, there are more open space and the public space for the house and the community. 

Oh well.  A fair chance that climate change might wash away this city over the next century, perhaps?

Catholics for Trump are fine with this, because it's better than Obama making a Catholic hospital provide for its staff to be able to get contraception under their health insurance

Maybe that's the longest post title ever, but the sickening state of conservative Catholicism and American politics makes it worth it.  Here's the story:

 

 

Not sure what it means

Rabbit obsessed Noah Smith has a thread on twitter about how the Middle East is now "a big mess of proxy wars", starting and ending with these:

For all of the claims that the US meddling in the Middle East was more trouble that it was worth, I am not sure that this alternative makes for a better situation for the West, or the globe generally.  

The salad is made

I finally made the chickpea salad recipe which I had seen in the Washington Post earlier this year:

(Their photo, not mine.)

It took me some months to find I had actually gathered all of the relevant ingredients and all were still OK to use.  (We don't routinely have mango chutney in the house, nor plain Greek yoghurt.  We also tend to use curry spices more than curry paste.  But I did use Japanese mayo, and we always have a large bottle of that delicious stuff in the fridge.) 

As I expected, it is very nice as a side dish, and when layered thick as a sandwich filling.    

Chickpeas are just the best legume. 

Update:  because I am sure there is a large audience out there as interested in them as I am, I found a list of "10 interesting facts about chickpeas", compiled by an Australian snack making company.  (On the Sunshine Coast, so not so far from me, too.)

Actually, most of the facts aren't that interesting, except for these two:

Ground chickpeas have been used as a coffee substitute since the 18th century and are still commonly used as a caffeine-free alternative today. Widely available, the taste is said to be delicious – why not give it a go!

[Never heard of that before.]

India is the world’s number one leader in chickpea production, with a staggering 8,832,500 metric tons reportedly produced in 2013. Interestingly, the country coming in second place was Australia! With 813,300 tons produced in the same year. “Production of chickpea by countries” UN Food & Agriculture Organisation 2014.

 And yes, more recent figures still show Australia was the second biggest producer in 2018 (figures are for 1,000 metric tons):

I cannot wait to enhance dinner conversation with my kids with this fact.   

But there's more!

I didn't realise that it's a variety of chickpea that is made into split peas, and ultimately dhal:

 

The larger variety that is canned and favoured in Mediterranean cooking are the kabuli variety.

This is setting me up for some great dinner time imparting of knowledge to my offspring!

 

Back to tiny black holes

It's been ages since I searched arXiv for black hole papers.  But I did one today and found another paper on a favourite topic - micro black holes and whether they evaporate, and are a good candidate for dark matter.  The abstract:

The nature of dark matter is still an open problem. The simplest assumption is that gravity is the only force coupled certainly to dark matter and thus the micro blackholes could be a viable candidate. We investigated the possibility of direct detection of microblack holes with masses around and upward the Planck scale (10−5g), ensuring classical gravitational treatment of these objects in the next generation of huge LAr detectors. We show that the signals (ionization and scintillations) produced in LAr enable the discrimination between micro black holes or other particles. It is expected that the trajectories of these microblack holes will appear as crossing the whole active medium, in any direction, producing uniform ionization and scintillation on all the path.

I had to look up LAr - it's liquid argon.

The introduction section of the paper gives a good summary of the questions around evaporating black holes:

An important issue is to show that black holes do not radiate in some conditions and which are their characteristics, as an argument to explain that these relics objects can survive from early Universe. We would need to detect the black holes or to have strong indirect evidence of their existence, as well as to show that they do not radiate. At present we are far from doing this.

In a classical paper, Hawking [2] suggested that unidentified tracks in the photographs taken in old bubble chamber detectors could be explained as signals of gravitationally collapsed objects (μBH). The mechanism of black hole formation is well known. As a result of fluctuations in the early Universe, a large number of gravitationally collapsed objects can be formed with characteristics determined by the gravity and quantum behaviour. For masses above the Planck mass limit of10−5g quantum behaviour is prevented.The small black holes are expected to be unstable due to Hawking radiation, but the evaporation is not well-understood at masses of order of the Planck scale. Helfer [3] has shown that none of the derivations that have been given for the prediction of radiation from black holes is convincing. It argued that all involve, at some point, speculations on the physics at scales which are not merely orders of magnitude beyond any investigated experimentally(∼103GeV), but at scales increasing beyond the Planck scale (∼1019GeV), where essentially  quantum-gravitational effects are expected to be dominant and various derivations that havebeen put forward, not all are mutually consistent. 

Given the profound nature of the issues addressed, some disagreement and controversy exists over exactly what has been achieved. Balbinot [4] demonstrated that when a blackhole becomes more and more charged, the Hawking radiation decreases and in the limit of maximum charge containment there is no radiation. Certain inflation models naturally assume the formation of a large number of small black hole [5] and the GUP may indeed prevent total evaporation of small black holes by dynamics and not by symmetry, just like the prevention of hydrogen atom from collapse by the standard uncertainty principle [6].Chavda and Chavda [7] introduced a different idea: gravitationally bound black holes will not have Hawking radiation. They examine the range10−24kg≤MBH≤10−12kg where quantum aspects must be considered. These limits of masses are controversial regarding the stability of the black holes, see for example [8].

And we can't have that, can we?

 

The very definition of precocious

NPR has a story about a 12 year old (black) American boy in college:

Caleb's mother, Claire Anderson, says it didn't take long to see that her son was ahead of the typical baby milestones. When he was just 3 weeks old, she says, he started copying her motions. She got certified in sign language so she could teach it to him.

"Because I thought though that he wanted to communicate, but he didn't have a [means] or a way to do that. Then he started picking up sign language really fast," she says. "When he was about 6 months old, he started reading. And by 9 months old he was already signing over 250 words."

Anderson says Caleb was doing fractions when he was 2. He passed the first grade when he was 3. When time came for middle school, she says, he could have skipped it altogether. "But we still decided to put Caleb into the seventh grade to build social skills and just think about the well-rounded child."

Those years were not easy for Caleb.

"They looked down on me because I was younger than them. And not only that, the curriculum was boring to me because I learn really, really fast. One day I came to my mom and she asked me, 'Are you happy here?' and I said, 'No, I'm really bored. This isn't challenging me,' " he says.

Now Caleb is in a dual program at Chattahoochee Technical College in Marietta working toward an associate degree while getting his high school credits. It gives him a chance to dream of NASA, SpaceX and flying cars.

Gee.  I wonder if there are other brilliant 6 month olds who get handed an iPad and start having their intelligence sucked out of them by the internet.

 

I like this

An advertisement for South Korean tourism caught my eye on Youtube this morning: 

 Cool.

Speaking of nuts

I called out this ex-SAS dude (Riccardo Bosi) as a nutter some years ago, when he used to comment at Catallaxy.  (Many there liked him.)   He now spends his days running pointlessly as an independent (most recently, in the upcoming Queensland elections):

ISIS metastasized

Interesting article at Washington Post arguing that recent ISIS activities in Africa show how the problem has not gone away under Trump, and that Trump's woeful inability to be credible and consistent has make an international response more difficult.

Oh my - someone agreeing with me on the excessive use of "shock value" on TV?

Someone at Wired seems to both sort of like and sort of hate The Boys - a show whose second series has been notable for a number of exploding heads, apparently.  (I saw the first episode of the first season and did not want to watch any more of it.  I explained why at the time.)

Boy oh Boys. It’s easily the best and worst of the bunch. If there’s a way to push superheroes any further than this—full-on rapey murderers whose villainy is covered up by the pharmaceutical giant that not-so-secretly made them—the culture would have to combust. It’s not even postmodern, at this point. Deadpool was postmodern. Guardians and Thor were postmodern. The Boys is some pure metamodernist BS, so committed to sharpening its edge on the whetstone of canon it forgets to cut anything with its trenchant blade.

The show wants you to talk about it, but what more is there to say? There’s a racist supe with a Nazi past who radicalizes sad male fans through memes; there’s a lesbian supe with a drug problem and a redemption arc; there’s a sexually predatious supe who’s involved in a scene with a boat and a whale that—computer-generated though the whale may be—should nonetheless have violated sundry animal rights laws. These social-justice shocks the show seems forced to administer, in an effort to make you feel more alive than you are, sinking into your couch, losing your head. When the evil-Superman Homelander, played with such disgusting magnificence by Anthony Starr that the patriotic suit and cape should be permanently retired, masturbates on the roof of a skyscraper, he is The Boys itself, naked and shameless.

This is the crisis so-called “prestige TV” finds itself in (if it was ever prestige to begin with). There’s not just an expectation of quality but of seeing something new, like a whale-murdering boat, or lightning Nazis. So shows proceed as episodically as ever, but they have to keep getting bigger, badder, uglier, realer, even if there’s no reason for it. One head explodes early in the season, so 10 must explode later on. In this, television mirrors real life. Or real life as it’s been, After Corona: a series of escalations. When you sit down to a new TV show at the end of your day, you’re not distracting yourself or escaping. You’re reinforcing the escalating, episodic tension of your everyday existence. The jolts of recognition might feel nice, but they’re not at all healthy. They’re destructive, and they’re the reason you feel deader after a binge.

It's the sort of thing I have been complaining about recently when re-watching old movies. 

Switching to vaudeville

It's not that I have been seeing much of the recent Trump rallies, but I get the distinct impression that he has, as they say, just "thrown the switch to vaudeville".   The silly dancing to music (the owners of which keep telling his campaign to stop using); the repeated "threats" to not come back to the states which don't vote for him, or even the entire country; the talk of him looking more handsome that JFK (leading, if I heard it right, to chants of "we love you".   (I see now that I Google to check that last point that it has been happening at several rallies.   What more confirmation of this being more a cult than a normal political movement could you get?)

The rambling speeches seem to be as devoid of policy detail as his last campaign - even emptier in fact.   He just lies about what he has accomplished and promises more of the same.  

I think what's going on is that he knows it's looking bad and he's just out to get the last ounce of narcissism enhancing adulation he can get by saying whatever ridiculous thing he wants.

The boasting of his looks and the positive reaction it got strikes me as particularly telling of his audience.  I don't think it's likely something the majority of his audience take all that seriously, but I think many probably do take it as an endorsement of their own way of telling themselves lies about their own appearance:  along the lines of "I'm overweight too but you know, I'm comfortable with my looks just like Donald".   It's the same thing as for their racism, misogyny and conspiracy beliefs - he gives permission for people to be the worst they can be and they "love" him for it.

On re-watching Casino

A couple of months ago I posted about re-watching Goodfellas for the first time since I saw it at the cinema, and finding it more enjoyable than I remembered.

Well, I've now done the same thing with Casino, and once again I can say that virtually nothing of what happened in the movie had stuck in my mind - I could not even get a even a snippet of memory for this one.  

And on re-watching it, I can see why.   It's a flashy movie in search of a story, really.  Unlike Goodfellas, which is all about how someone grows up and tries to make his way in the mobster life, this one starts with the characters already corrupt and sleazy, and the main thing that goes wrong is the de Niro character picking a bad wife.    Sure, Sharon Stone is really good, and there is plenty of music of the era (even more so than in Goodfellas, I suspect), but in retrospect there is so little to it, story wise.   I don't remember being particularly disappointed in it after seeing it in the cinema, so in this case, I think it is worse than how I "remembered" it.

My overall lukewarm assessment of Scorsese feels very justified by this experience.

Yes, he's seriously disgusting

A couple of tweets from this morning: 

Man stuck in the 1950's can't even get events of a few months ago right

In today's edition of "culture war conservatives have become extremely stupid":

Um - first line:  no they did not.  Carlson claimed they were going to do so; they denied it and said that in fact they told him before his show that they were not going to.   

This brainiac, who has always seemed to consider himself a historian, can't even get events of few months ago right.

Second line:  yeah, time passes, and social views change too.

Third line:  sure.  The Western world of my father involved some pretty heavy male drinking and some pretty unhappy marriages.   It must be very hard to measure net happiness in society, but we sure do live in a lot fancier homes, eat better, travel a lot more, and are more tolerant of people different from ourselves than we were 50 years ago.   I'd prefer to be living now than then, thank you very much; even if the nostalgia of a more or less happy childhood makes everyone think fondly of the past from time to time.  

Second paragraph:  people who study the threat of violence in society for a living know the main risk is from dimwitted, propagandarised and heavily armed Right wing which is wetting themselves with excitement at putting down the Deep State/communists in their midst by gunfights in the street.    But let's ignore the experts, as the Right is wont to do on a whole swathe of topics now.

 

The Hunter Biden effect

It's only been a day or so, but my guess about the effect of the New York Post's Hunter Biden's emails is that it will influence barely one voter towards Trump.   Here's a bunch of reasons why:

 *  while I would guess, given the lack of adamant denials from the Hunter Biden camp, that the emails are likely real, the question of how they got to Giuliani and the Post is just weird and, at the very best, so sleazy.   Who honestly thinks it's right that a computer repair guy who doesn't get paid $84 should not only claim it's his, but pass it onto political operatives?   Unless you have the most extreme case of criminality obvious from a cursory examination (say, obvious unhidden folders of porn or snuff videos or something like that), wouldn't you expect the repair man to not read emails and just format the hard drive and re-sell it, or give it away?    That said, it's very weird in itself that a laptop full of work emails would be forgotten about by whoever left it there.  

*  it's also quite on the cards, given apparent intelligence reports, that some of the emails being disclosed are not from the computer at all but from a Russian hack on Burisma itself.  This hack was reported in the NYT in January.    The stink of repeat Russian interference is all over this.

*  The Post's second day of reporting about it is about a bunch of emails to do with Hunter's involvement in Chinese operations.   I read the report and it didn't sound like anything obviously illegal going on.   If that is the best they've got, after only the second day, I don't think it's going anywhere.

*  Trump voters think it's a HUGE deal, but they, after all, the stupidest self gas-lite people on the planet.   They are completely unable (or too stupid) to acknowledge the hypocrisy of Trump going on about nepotism in politics and making money.    Those inclined to the Democrats already openly acknowledged that it was a bad look for Hunter to be have dealing with Burisma and presumed he was there due to political connections, so confirmation of that is not going to sway them away from Biden Snr.

*  Even if it was proved that Joe Biden had met with a Burisma executive, and had lied about it, the alternative is to vote for a character who just lies and makes stuff up as his entire political modus operandi.   Even (I would guess) half of his base knows Trumps bullshits - they just don't care that he does, for reasons we have been over many times.  A democrat suddenly voting for Trump because of this is just not going to happen. [He says, fingers crossed.]

Regional real estate porn considered

Surely I am not the only person who watches the ABC's Escape from the City partly for the perverse enjoyment of finding out at the end that, yet again, the couple that seemed so enthusiastic about moving to the area they were shown, and wildly impressed by at least one of the homes they inspected, nonetheless found a reason to not go live in there?  

It's like the makers of the show may as well send back that box of champagne that's gathering dust in the back of the production office for when a couple actually buys one of the shows' houses (or even moves into the area.)    I'm not sure it has ever happened in the history of the show.

(That said, in reference to last night's episode  - boy, houses at Mission Beach in Far North Queensland seem good value.   But what about the 1980's place you had to reach by boat on what looked like a crocodile infested river?  It was pretty hilariously inconvenient.)  

Of course Pauline Hanson approves

Why doesn't Andrew Bolt join her party and be done with:

Adam Creighton scratches Paris off his holiday list

They are getting very worried about the European second wave:

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday ordered a nighttime curfew for Paris and eight other French cities to contain the spread of Covid-19 after daily new infection rates reached record levels. 

In a televised interview, Macron said residents of those cities – which combined are home to close to a third of the French population – would not be allowed to be outdoors between 9pm (1900 GMT) and 6am (0400 GMT) from Saturday, for a duration of at least four weeks, except for essential reasons.

"We have to act. We need to put a brake on the spread of the virus," Macron said, adding the measure would stop people visiting restaurants and private homes in the late evening and night.

"We are going to have to deal with this virus until at least the summer of 2021," Macron said, saying "all scientists" were in agreement.

Here's the reason why:

Echoing the concern of British doctors, Paris regional health director Aurelian Rousseau said hospital admissions could quickly spiral out of control.

He told BFM TV: “As with tidal waves, it might seem like we have time, but actually, in the end, it’s a race.

“We’re at that point where we’re entering a race against time.”

The 1,539 French Covid patients receiving intensive care is still almost five times lower than an April 8 high of 7,148, but also four times higher than a July 31 low of 371.

And as there are normally more people hospitalised with various illnesses in the autumn than in spring, health experts fear the hospital system could be overwhelmed if nothing is done to contain the second wave.

I wonder how armchair critic and obnoxious know-it-all Adam Creighton would deal with the situation?  He seems never to acknowledge that the COVID problem is complicated, and that death rate is not the only issue.   Has he ever even  mentioned seriously the evidence of some recovered patients having on-going health problems?   

Part of the political problem (continuing from the previous quote):

With countries from Spain to Ukraine posting record increases in recent days, authorities are struggling to devise restrictions that slow the spread while not pushing the economy over the edge and sparking public unrest.

Lower death and hospitalisation rates stoked an impression that the disease has lost its bite, sparking resistance to tougher restrictions.

 

Max Boot on the Republican pseudo scandals

Max Boot's column about the failure of the "unmasking" pseudo scandal is good.  I like how it ends, too:

If Trump, Cornyn, Cruz, Paul, Nunes, Grenell and all the others who shamelessly flogged this faux scandal had a modicum of honesty or decency they would publicly recant and apologize to all of the Obama officials they reviled with no evidence. Dream on. None of the scandalmongers have admitted they were wrong. Many have simply moved on to pushing other phony scandals....

But facts don’t matter in the Hunter Biden conspiracy theories any more than in the “unmasking” story. The strategy is, as former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon once said, to “flood the zone with shit” to distract attention from Trump’s real wrongdoing. The real scandal is that Trump and his cult followers hurl so many insane accusations — and never recant or apologize. While claiming to be a victim of McCarthyism, Trump is, in fact, its foremost modern practitioner. His mentor, Joseph McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn, would be proud of him. 

Funnily enough, McCarthy is treated as an unfairly treated hero now by the conservative Right.

Two views of history

First, Daniel C Dennett writes an enthusiastic review of a book about how we became WEIRD.  Here are some parts (from the New York Times):

How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By Joseph Henrich

According to copies of copies of fragments of ancient texts, Pythagoras in about 500 B.C. exhorted his followers: Don’t eat beans! Why he issued this prohibition is anybody’s guess (Aristotle thought he knew), but it doesn’t much matter because the idea never caught on.

According to Joseph Henrich, some unknown early church fathers about a thousand years later promulgated the edict: Don’t marry your cousin! Why they did this is also unclear, but if Henrich is right — and he develops a fascinating case brimming with evidence — this prohibition changed the face of the world, by eventually creating societies and people that were WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

In the argument put forward in this engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued book, this simple rule triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, science to replace lore and law to replace custom. If you are reading this you are very probably WEIRD, and so are almost all of your friends and associates, but we are outliers on many psychological measures.

The world today has billions of inhabitants who have minds strikingly different from ours. Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed. Right? They (the non-WEIRD majority) identify more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, think more “holistically,” take responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who besmirch the group’s honor), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and think nepotism is a natural duty....

WEIRD folk are the more recent development, growing out of the innovation of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the birth of states and organized religions about 3,000 years ago, then becoming “proto-WEIRD” over the last 1,500 years (thanks to the prohibition on marrying one’s cousin), culminating in the biologically sudden arrival of science, industry and the “modern” world during the last 500 years or so. WEIRD minds evolved by natural selection, but not by genetic selection; they evolved by the natural selection of cultural practices and other culturally transmitted items. 

Sounds interesting.    Other reviews have appeared in The Atlantic and (ugh) Quillete, amongst other places.

Secondly, a short article at Philosophy Now makes the case that Kant was pretty progressive in his thoughts on history:

In 1784, three years after the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant published a curious article in a prominent intellectual newspaper titled: ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective’. Made up of nine Propositions, the article attempted to outline the necessary elements a future historian would have to consider if he or she wanted to compile a universal human history. This may not seem like such a curious idea today, as we see this type of history frequently published, with various subjects as their catalyst. For example, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) or Harari’s Sapiens (2015) are both attempts to construct a universal history from a particular point of view. But what is curious about Kant’s short article is its discussion of conflict in history, as well as nature’s role in conflicts....

In Kant’s view history tells us that conflict is not simply a set of randomly occurring mindless acts, nor is it a sign that we are heading toward an apocalyptical nightmare. Rather, there is something integral to all conflicts no matter how multifarious they are and in what context they appear.

In Proposition Four, Kant outlines a notion commonly linked to a concept of the ‘cunning of nature’ (Hegel’s later doctrine of the ‘cunning of reason’ is a clear reference to Kant). The cunning of nature involves a feature of human social interaction which Kant calls ‘unsociable sociability’, which he defines as the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency connected, however, with a constant resistance that continually threatens to break up this society.” Put simply, it is a natural human inclination to connect with other people and to be part of a larger whole; yet it is also part of our natural inclination to destroy these social bonds through isolationism and divisiveness. Kant argues that this dichotomy is the source of all human conflict, even attributing conflict between states as emanating from unsociable sociability: countries entering into conflict break sociable links, resulting in a state of war. We need only look at the Cold War for a striking example of unsociable sociability propelling states into dangerous and unresolvable deadlocks.

Yet Kant also attributes historical progress to it – which means that unsociable sociability is responsible for humanity developing toward more enlightened states. Without the antagonistic aspect of humanity, Kant thinks we wouldn’t be compelled to grow culturally or intellectually. In these senses, unsociable sociability is the driving force behind all human history.....

.....According to Kant’s Proposition Five, the point toward which human historical development tends is a perfectly just civil constitution, meaning an egalitarian or ‘cosmopolitan’ society where all are welcome, and equal. Kant attributes this utopian goal also to unsociable sociability, because we may learn from the conflicts it catapults us into. This is the crux of Kant’s article, and perhaps its most peculiar feature: unsociable sociability pushes human beings into conflict with each other, forcing them to learn how and how not to treat one another, and so develop moral laws. Moreover, according to Kant, this will all lead to a state whereby conflict is necessarily eventually abolished. Hence the cunning of nature: conflict occurs in the pursuit of a developmental end we are oblivious to by helping us learn from the mistakes made in history on both an individual and a global level. In a note from 1776, Kant already had a clear inkling of this idea, writing, “The useful aim of philosophical history consists in the preservation of good models and the display of instructive mistakes.”

I think this teaches us a key lesson about today. It is easy to lose sight of our ability to construct laws and institutions which prevent harm to others. It’s easy to look at the social and political situation, globally or in our own country, and determine that things can never improve – that we’re on course to collide with catastrophe. What Kant teaches us is that no matter how unlikely it appears, we must not lose hope that a perfectly just society is possible, and that the social antagonisms and conflicts we see are steps toward this goal. Without this hope we are rendered powerless to change anything.

I like his optimism.   And how ironic is it that to fulfil his vision, the side of politics in America that is most aligned in his stern view of morals is the one that must be defeated in order to make for a better future.

 

Always a conspiracy

Don't you like how, instead of admitting that it looks like there were conned by highly political partisan  Right wing spin on what Obama and people around him have done, people like this prefer to believe instead that it must be a Deep State betrayal of their Dear Leader if people haven't been arrested:

The Conservative Catholic brand is not coming back from the fact they so gullibly endorsed such an obvious un-Christian authoritarian fraud in Trump and his circle, all because of culture wars and abortion.
   

But she has seven children!

I agree entirely with this commentary in the Washington Post - it's pretty cringey, the emphasis the Republicans are putting on a judge's family:

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has seven kids. And don’t you dare forget it.

The opening day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court was kid-friendly. It was child-obsessed. It was a little over five hours of children as talking points and visual aids and proof of unwavering conservative values. It’s hard to recall a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee that was so focused on the well-being, the deportment and the birth story of our youngest citizens. ...

The many references to Barrett’s children were a not-so-subtle pronouncement that her prolific motherhood was especially good and admirable and a sign that she was not shirking her womanly duty while she was unleashing her ambition. Barrett had it all — on terms that were acceptable to social conservatives.

If you ask me, she's setting herself up for a fall.   If her husband isn't caught having an affair (cue the "she's so busy, she never had time for me" excuse), one of two of the kids in 10 or 15 years time will do a tell all interview about how the happy family on the TV was not so happy in private.  I've seen it happen in big, apparently happy, conservative Catholic families before. 

I also agree with this tweet:

Basically, any judge who accepts a nomination in these circumstances is automatically deeply suspect, no matter how many children.

Update:  Democrats, please go ahead and pack the court - 

Update 2:  from The Onion:

Paganism re-visited

In a conversation over some craft beer last weekend, the topic of pagan practices being pretty ugly came up briefly, specifically this practice (referring here to Vikings, but I think the death of chieftains in other societies might have led to this to):

A man couldn’t marry his concubine, thus his wife didn’t feel threatened by her. They all lived together in the same household. The most powerful men among the Vikings owned sex slaves. The life of sex slaves was hard.

When a chieftain died, his men had sex with the sex slave to express love for their deceased leader. Afterwards, they killed the poor woman and cremated her together with her master. She would serve him also in the afterlife.

"...to express love for their deceased leader"!   That seems to be putting spin on the practice, to put it mildly.

Another site notes that pre-Christian Vikings took the idea of a male dominance in sex very seriously:

Calling a man by any term which suggested he played the ‘passive’ or ‘feminine’ part in homosexual sex was considered an insult so severe that the person who had been insulted had the right to avenge it in combat. Just the insult itself might be enough to get a man outlawed.

There is no apparent equivalent derogatory term for a man who played the ‘active’ part in homosexual sex. Indeed in ‘Guðmundar saga dýra’ Guðmundar plans to rape a male captive in order to break his spirit. This reflects badly on the slave, but not on the rapist, who is merely demonstrating his manliness.

Both castration and rape of defeated foes was seen as a good way of making them more effeminate, and therefore easier to control.

In this context – where the penetrator is regarded as perfectly normal and admirable, but to be the one being penetrated is to be shamed, broken, treated as a slave and ridiculed thenceforth as unmanly – it’s hard to imagine many m/m relationships existing as between equals.

From yet another article, I don't think I have heard before about men being the specific victims of sacrificial rites led by effeminate priests:

From Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th Century Christian chronicler, comes the information that the god Freyr was served by gender-variant male priests who displayed feminized behaviour and employed bells, which were considered ‘unmanly.’ They apparently enacted a symbolic sacred marriage in order to “ensure the divine fruitfulness of the season.” A ritual which took place every nine years, and consisted of the sacrifice of nine males of every species (including humans) to Freyr, who was worshipped as an erect phallus. The Priests of Freyr also performed shape shifting rites with boar masks.The ergi priests who practiced seidr also performed tasks usually associated with women, such as weaving and childrearing. The quality of their voices was was referred to as seid laeti, possibly indicating that some of them were castrati. Seidrmen were clearly differentiated from men who might occasionally indulge in same-sex relations & take the active role.The key theme here is that in surrendering themselves to passive intercourse, the ergi became a channel for the divine.

I wonder - how did one avoid becoming part of the 9 year festival?

And I can't say I know about Freyr, so here we go:

Freyr (pronounced “FREY-ur;” Old Norse Freyr, “Lord;” sometimes anglicized as “Frey”) is a god who belongs to the Vanir tribe of deities. He’s also an honorary member of the other tribe of Norse gods, the Aesir, having arrived in their fortress, Asgard, as a hostage at the closing of the Aesir-Vanir War.

Freyr was one of the most widely and passionately venerated divinities amongst the heathen Norse and other Germanic peoples. One Old Norse poem calls him “the foremost of the gods” and “hated by none.”^[1] The reasons for this aren’t hard to understand; their well-being and prosperity depended on his benevolence, which particularly manifested itself in sexual and ecological fertility, bountiful harvests, wealth, and peace. His role in providing health and abundance was often symbolized by his fylgja, the boar Gullinborsti (“Golden-Bristled”),^[2] and by his enormous, erect phallus.^[3]

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Freyr was a frequent recipient of sacrifices at various occasions, such as the blessing of a wedding^[4] or the celebration of a harvest. During harvest festivals, the sacrifice traditionally took the form of his favored animal, the boar.^[5]

This drawing of him (thankfully modest) is a popular one at several site:

 Yet a visit from the priests of Freyr was not always a worry:

We know from medieval Icelandic sources that priestesses and/or priests of Freyr traveled throughout the country on a chariot which contained a statue of the god.^[12] The significance of such processions is described by the Roman historian Tacitus, who vividly depicts the processions connected with the early Germanic goddess Nerthus, whose name is the Proto-Germanic form of the name of Freyr’s father Njord. When the chariot reached a village or town, the people laid down their arms and “every iron object” and enjoyed a period of peace and joyful festivities, reveling in the deity’s kind presence.^[13] Such processions and celebrations appear to have been a common feature of the worship of the deities the Norse called the Vanir from at least as far back as the first century CE through the Viking Age. 

Back to the human sacrifice story, from another site:

Another Freyr-related sacrifice is the Frøsblot ("Frø-sacrifice", with Frø being another name for Freyr) as recorded by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar who lived c. 1150-1220 CE. In Uppsala, Sweden, a certain Haddingus is said to have instituted a yearly sacrifice to Freyr – the Frøsblot - as a way of atonement to the god, something seemingly linked to the great sacrifice at Uppsala that is supposed to have happened every nine years.

There may indeed have been a temple at Uppsala, as a famous account – based on hearsay but usually considered reasonably to moderately authentic – written by Adam of Bremen c. 1070 CE argues. Adam writes of a big, golden temple with statues of Thor, Odin, and Fricco (synonymous with Freyr), the latter adorned with an "immense phallus" (4). Every nine years, men, horses and dogs were allegedly sacrificed, their bodies swinging from trees in the sacred grove. The archaeological record does not support the existence of a temple, although there are other buildings among which a large hall have been found dating to between the 3rd and 10th centuries CE.

 Anyhow - I'm rather glad to have avoided the era.    

As I said on Saturday,  the most pleasing aspect of Christianity is that it's a religion that displaced the extremely widespread belief* in the need for continual animal or human blood sacrifice - God partook in the ultimate (self) sacrifice, and doesn't require fresh animal (or human) sacrifice any more.   Which is a kind of relief, in a practical sense.    

*  I was even surprised to read this in Journey to the West.  The Monkey King does this:

One day he instructed his four Stalwart Generals to arrange a feast for the six other kings. Oxen and horses were slaughtered, sacrifices were made to Heaven and Earth, and the assembled monsters danced, sang, and drank themselves blotto.

Chinese babies

Not that I want to upset our (slightly delayed) future Overlords, but Chinese sensitivity to imagined  historical slights is getting out of hand.  They're almost as whiny as transgender folk are towards JK Rowling (or, to be fair, as Donald Trump on the failure of people outside of his cult to also praise him):  

South Korean boyband BTS is facing a barrage of criticism in China after its leader made remarks about the Korean War and several big-name brands, including Samsung, have apparently distanced themselves from the K-pop group amid the uproar.

The controversy is the latest example of the political landmines lying in wait for big brands in China, the world's second-largest economy.

The leader of BTS, known by the initials RM, upset many people in China in a speech when the band received an award from a US-based organisation for their contribution to South Korea-US relations.

RM invoked a "history of pain" shared between South Korea and the United States and, referring to the 1950-53 Korean War, spoke of "sacrifices of countless men and women".

The war pitted South Korean and US forces against those from North Korea and China.

The comments touched off heated debate on social media in China.

"They should not make any money from China," one angry user said on the Weibo platform, referring to BTS.

"If you want to make money from Chinese fans you have to consider Chinese feelings."

Posts featuring Samsung's BTS special edition smartphones and earphones disappeared from Chinese e-commerce platforms Tmall and JD.com as the controversy swirled.

I noticed the band and their somewhat catchy song Dynamite featuring in a Samsung ad here.   They need to retire soon, or this level of celebrity is going to eat them up, in the way it usually does.

 

Very unfortunate

It's pretty rare to see significant construction accidents in Australia lately, it seems; and this one seems particularly embarrassing given where it happened.  (Not that, I presume, the school or its graduates necessarily had much to do with it, I suppose):

At least one person is believed to be dead and several injured after a building under construction at Curtin University collapsed after midday WA time on Tuesday.

The construction site at Curtin’s Bentley campus has been closed, and police, firefighters and ambulance officers rushed to the scene after part of the building collapsed at around 12.30pm....

The five-storey building under construction is part of Curtin’s new facility called Exchange, and features a glass courtyard as part of the new School of Design and the Built Environment. It was due for completion in 2021.

Weird Japanese tomb to be excavated?

From Japan Times:

The Imperial Household Agency is considering excavating Daisen Kofun in Osaka Prefecture, the country’s largest ancient burial mound, in a conservation project that could begin around next fall, sources close to the plan said Saturday.

The tomb mound in Sakai, dating back to around the middle of the 5th century, is under control of the agency as the mausoleum of Emperor Nintoku, while academic debate continues over who was actually buried there.

If the planned re-excavation project is carried out, it would be the first digging since an ancient burial complex comprising 49 tombs including Daisen Kofun was added to the World Heritage list in 2019, the sources said.

Archaeologists and historians hope the envisioned research on the tomb mound will shed light on its structure, many aspects of which remain a mystery.

I posted about this tomb about a year ago, as I hadn't previously realised they existed.   A reminder:

 

  

Some good context on "court packing"

I learnt stuff from this column at CNN. 

Another cult noted

I have to say, the New York Times Op-docs videos on Youtube are very good.  Very artfully made, sometimes a bit trivial but still extremely watchable.  Here's one I saw recently: 

And here's a creepy one about kids growing up in the narco zone of Mexico: 

There's a lot more that look interesting, but I haven't watched many yet.

Corn fritters for future reference

I love when it's cheap, fresh corn season, and over the last couple of years I've tried making corn fritters a couple of times, with mixed results.   I tried again last night, basically using this recipe except just using self raising flour instead of plain with baking soda.  I probably used more than that amount of coriander, too, but it still working out fine.   The amount of salt for this quantity seemed just right, too.  (Working out the right amount of salt by taste can be tricky.)

I'll copy the key parts of the recipe here: 

For the fritters:

For dinner, we ate them with some hot smoked salmon on top (although cold smoked salmon would be fine too) and some grilled asparagus too.  Nice.

Exactly. Why doesn't Chas Licciardello realise this?

I refer to cheery Chas on Planet America who keeps saying Biden is playing this wrong.  

Maybe something good for my ageing body?

Oh look, maybe body builders have stumbled onto something good.  From Science last month:

A dietary supplement bodybuilders use to bulk up may have a more sweeping health benefit: Staving off the ravages of old age. Mice given the substance—alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG)—were healthier as they aged, and females lived longer than mice not on the supplement.

Other compounds, like the antiaging drug rapamycin and the diabetes treatment metformin, have shown similar effects in mouse experiments. But AKG is naturally made by mice and by our own bodies, and it is already considered safe to consume by regulators.

“The big thing about this is that its safety profile is so good,” says University of North Dakota aging researcher Holly Brown-Borg, who was not involved with the study. “It has potential and should be explored further, for sure.”

AKG is part of the metabolic cycle that our cells use to make energy from food. In addition to its use by bodybuilders, doctors sometimes treat osteoporosis and kidney disease with the supplement.

The molecule grabbed attention as a possible antiaging treatment in 2014, when researchers reported AKG could extend life span by more than 50% in tiny Caenorhabditis elegans worms. That’s on par with a low-calorie diet, which has been shown to promote healthy aging, but is hard for most people to stick with. Other groups later showed life span improvements from AKG in fruit flies.

In the new study, Gordon Lithgow and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and colleagues turned to mammals. They gave groups of 18-month-old mice (about age 55 in human years) the equivalent of 2% of their daily chow as AKG until they died, or for up to 21 months. AKG levels in blood gradually drop with age, and the scientists’ aim was to restore levels to those seen in young animals.

Some differences jumped out within a few months: “They looked much blacker, shinier, and younger” than control mice, says Azar Asadi Shahmirzadi, a postdoc at the Buck Institute who did the experiments as a graduate student. In addition, the AKG-fed mice scored an average of more than 40% better on tests of “frailty,” as measured by 31 physiological attributes including hair color, hearing, walking gait, and grip strength. And female mice lived a median of 8% to 20% longer after AKG treatment began than control mice, the group reports today in Cell Metabolism.

The AKG-eating mice did not perform better on tests of heart function or treadmill endurance, however, and the tests did not include cognitive performance.

I see it is readily available, although in variations that are confusing.

Here's some reference to a possibly dubious claim by a certain company selling the supplement to oldies under the brand name Rejuvant.    Only $150 for a 30 day supply(!).   I might have to pass on that one.

 

 

It might be slightly exaggerated...

...but this Twitter commentary on how a Trump interview on Hannity went a short time ago is pretty amusing:

 

What he said...

 And also, what she said:

Extremely obvious sexism and misogyny

It's impossible to read the conservative reactions on Twitter and the net to Kamala Harris's debate performance without seeing screamingly obvious sexism and misogyny.

From Trump calling her a "monster", to Fox News calling her "cringeworthy", to (of course I went there) Australia's pathetic Trump base at Catallaxy saying that that her very voice was unbearable and making "jokes" about her and fellatio.

It is simply an inexplicable overreaction without factoring in white, older male sexism and misogyny - the same group in which Trump still has a majority of support, at least if they low education.   

I watched a bit of her performance on Youtube and I find her inoffensive.   I will make allowances for people letting political partisanship read things into voice and mannerism that are not really there (or not so obvious, at least, to the other side), but as I say, in this case, the conservative reaction is just over the top and the reason for it transparent.

By the way:   why are journalists buying into the whole Republican line that it's really bad if Biden and Harris don't explain clearly their intention regarding "court packing"?   As someone said on Twitter, what the Republicans are doing (or trying to do - it would be hilarious if COVID casualties prevent them from having a quorum to confirm Coney Barrett before the election) is a form of deeply unethical "court packing" anyway;  and I don't see that anyone who would be inclined to vote Democrat would really care if Biden kept his cards hidden on what his party might try to do re court numbers in future.

Update:  Ahem.

 

An unrelated thing

Seeking diversity of topics for this blog, I just had a scroll through this year's Archives of Sexual Behaviour.   As you do.   I see that someone has studied something I had noticed in about 1985 when sharing an office with a gay guy who could not, at the time, be openly gay and keep his job.   Everyone assumed, correctly, that he was gay anyway - they just didn't say it openly at the workplace.  Now, I have mentioned this story before, but it became clear to me that the "gay voice" became much more distinct when he took a call from one of his friends.  I told him, as it was not exactly in his interest for his sexuality to be too widely known in the organisation, and he honestly did not realise he was doing so.   Anyway, onto the abstract:

Listeners rely on vocal features when guessing others’ sexual orientation. What is less clear is whether speakers modulate their voice to emphasize or to conceal their sexual orientation. We hypothesized that gay individuals adapt their voices to the social context, either emphasizing or disguising their sexual orientation. In Study 1 (n = 20 speakers, n = 383 Italian listeners and n = 373 British listeners), using a simulated conversation paradigm, we found that gay speakers modulated their voices depending on the interlocutor, sounding more gay when speaking to a person with whom they have had an easy (vs. difficult or no) coming out. Although straight speakers were always clearly perceived as heterosexual, their voice perception also varied depending on the interlocutor. Study 2 (n = 14 speakers and n = 309 listeners), comparing the voices of young YouTubers before and after their public coming out, showed a voice modulation as a function of coming out. The voices of gay YouTubers sounded more gay after coming out, whereas those of age-matched straight control male speakers sounded increasingly heterosexual over time. Combining experimental and archival methods, this research suggests that gay speakers modulate their voices flexibly depending on their relation with the interlocutor and as a consequence of their public coming out.

So, evidence after all of these years that it was not just my imagination.

A VP debate

Didn't see any of it, but seems to me that Harris supporters think she won, and Pence supporters think he did.   (Actually, in the routine verbal imagery of violent dominance that the Right loves to use now - he "crushed" or "smashed" her in the debate.   I think they get a particular thrill when it's a woman they are saying it about.)   No reason to think it was other than a sort of draw then?  

Then again, probably not, because from comments around the place, it seems Pence was a bit of an interrupter and ignored the time rules on a more minor scale than Trump but in a context in which it looks like he wanted to walk over women.   Given Trump's unpopularity with women, that should have been something to avoid.  

The biggest scandal that may come out of it would be if it turns out his pink eye really was a sign of a COVID infection.   It would not be too surprising if this happens, and damaging to the Trump brand.  

I also note that, as someone reminded us on Twitter, the Lefties watching thought the fly that was attracted to Pence's head was hilarious and a great metaphor; but if it had been the other way around, there would have genuinely been Trump supporters talking on social media about how it was a sign she was a demon or in league with them.   [The tweet reminded us that Alex Jones had claimed this when a fly briefly alighted on Hilary Clinton in 2016.   The nuttiness of the Right has only increased since then.]

Some appalling social media news

Noticed this at Gulf News:

Manila: Online misinformation is leaching out from cheap mobile phones and free Facebook plans used by millions in the Philippines, convincing many to reject vaccinations for polio and other deadly diseases.

Childhood immunisation rates have plummeted in the country - from 87 per cent in 2014 to 68 per cent - resulting in a measles epidemic and the reemergence of polio last year.

A highly politicised campaign that led to the withdrawal of dengue vaccine Dengvaxia in 2017 is widely seen as one of the main drivers of the fall.

But health experts also point to an explosion of vaccination-related misinformation that has undermined confidence in all types of immunisations.

In the northern city of Tarlac, government nurse Reeza Patriarca watched with horror the impacts of Facebook posts that falsely claimed five people had died after receiving an unspecified vaccination.

The problem is the popularity of Facebook in the country, even with the poor:

Most of the Philippines' 73 million internet users have a Facebook account, according to Britain-based media consultancy We Are Social.

Many poorer Filipinos rely on Facebook's Free Basics plan to use the internet, trapping them in the social media giant's information bubble.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has defended the service, saying it gives people who could not otherwise afford it an opportunity to use the internet.

Posts about President Rodrigo Duterte flooded Facebook in 2016 and were seen as playing a key role in his election victory - and officials say the site has been a boon for anti-vaxxer groups too.

Wilda Silva, the health department's immunisation programme manager, said fake news about vaccines "travels faster and wider than correct information".

 

 

Some cultural education for you

I should know more than the average Australian about what (some) Japanese don't like about their own culture, but this list by a young Japanese guy (who I think went to college in America) has some amusing surprises in it:  

Wishing him ill

Forgot to mention on the weekend, but this Vox piece:

Is it immoral if you feel schadenfreude about Trump’s Covid-19? 

is really good.  After considering what some famous philosophers have said on the topic, it ends on this consideration:

That said, what if someone wishes for Trump to die, not out of pure punitiveness, but out of a desire for Americans to get a new president who that person believes would save many lives?

 Whether you think this is ethically acceptable depends a lot on your preexisting moral commitments. Specifically, you’ll answer differently depending on which school of ethics you gravitate toward: utilitarianism, deontology, or virtue ethics. Here’s a brief (and admittedly oversimplified) breakdown.

If you’re a utilitarian, you might argue this is a perfectly acceptable wish because something is moral if it produces good consequences — and having a president who doesn’t bungle a national pandemic response would prevent a lot of death, which is clearly a good consequence.

But if you’re a deontologist (also known as a Kantian), then you’d argue this is an unacceptable wish because something is moral if it’s fulfilling your duty to others and immoral if it’s not. Immanuel Kant famously said we have a duty always to treat human beings as ends in themselves, not means to our ends. Wishing death upon someone — even if it’s to save many more people from death — is treating that someone as a means.

A virtue ethicist would likely agree with the deontologist that wishing death on someone is unacceptable, but for a somewhat different reason: By doing so, you’re cultivating in yourself a negative trait, rather than a virtuous trait like empathy. Even if it doesn’t actually harm anybody else (wishes are different from actions, after all), it harms you as a moral being, potentially chipping away at your capacity for empathy in the long term.

The virtue ethicist would probably want to remind us that it is perfectly possible to wish for the alleviation of suffering in a human being who has tested positive for a lethal pathogen, even if we happen to deeply dislike that human being. It is possible to wish for that human being’s recovery even if we feel a simultaneous sense of superiority, of vulnerability, of desperation to see justice in our world — and even if we think the world would be better off if that person didn’t recover.

If we examine what’s under the hood of our schadenfreude and don’t like what we see, it’s worth remembering that we have this option at our disposal.

Despite my general sympathy towards Kantian and virtue ethics, I'm leaning towards utilitarianism on this one.

Just stop it, Patricia

Patricia Karvelas is quite OK as a broadcaster on the ABC, even though her evening slot means I don't hear all that much of her show.   But I have to say, her recent daily tweeting of her radio studio dancing really strikes me as gratingly undignified and more becoming of a "look at me" teenager on social media than a mature adult.   [This is today's example.]  I wish she would stop it.