As much as it pains me to say, but...

...Andrew Bolt appears to be more right than wrong in his opinion on the issue of denying the US election outcome:

 

He must know that this is Rupert Murdoch's opinion too;  but if he is reading the Right wing social media (including Catallaxy, which he surely follows closely), he would have to know that the Conservative base is far from agreeing with both of them.  (And, amusingly, they are apparently swearing off  Fox News and cancelling subscriptions to The Australian because they are not adequately endorsing the Trumpian denial of reality.)    

Bolt & Rupert deserve no great credit for seemingly acknowledging reality on this one issue, when they have spent a couple of decades priming the Conservative base to live in a world of denial of expert evidence, and to prefer a self serving information cocoon that leads them to think they are the smart insiders who can see what's really going on.  You know I'm talking climate change...

Sex and politics

Once again we're in the murky media ethical question of when it is newsworthy that a married politician is having an affair.   

I find it hard to get upset with the ABC running a story on it where the only figures examined were current Liberal/National Party heavyweights - they're the ones in power, it's obviously more significant than what might be going in the Opposition in the same period.   Go back 45 years and it was a Labor government's turn with Jim Cairns; 22 years ago it was that party's turn again with Gareth Evans. 

Overall, I think 4 Corners did good justification for the relevance of the reporting:  especially for the deep foolishness of Christian Porter, who I have never paid any attention to before.   How stupid to be carrying on with a woman in a public bar frequented by journalists and political staff from all sides.

Malcolm Turnbull sounded pretty reasonable to me in his explanation of why he found the behaviour so galling and inappropriate.   Sure, there is an element of revenge in talking about it now:  but he is right on the principles.  

I used to think that you could generalise that there was a difference between the Left and Right in the nature of their sex scandals, with Labor politicians being more promiscuous (hello, Bob Hawke), while Conservatives had fewer orgasms but in seedier circumstances (using prostitutes, into S&M, soliciting anonymous interactions in toilets, etc).   But perhaps that was too influenced by the impression given by British sex scandals.   Anyway, after last night's reporting, I should probably revise those presumptions.  

Just in case you were wondering ...

Graeme Bird is busy burbling away in comments in moderation that Trump won the election "in a landslide", but "the oligarchy", which has Rupert Murdoch on side - because they lent him money, or something - is busy trying to usurp the will of the people by installing Biden.  He allows that it might work, but we won't know for a few months.  

As I do not believe in being an open forum for the repetition of absurd conspiracy claims, even via the little read comments of my blog,  very few of Graeme's comments are going to be allowed through for quite a while.  (For which he will call me a Jewish c..., again, no doubt.)

  

Quite a burn, this item on the front page of the Washington Post website

 

Oh sure: nothing the US does ever affects Australia

I never trusted Adam Creighton's opinions, but his credibility this year has really been in a nosedive:

As people in tweets following this have pointed out, Trumps effect on:

a.    tariffs and relationship with China;

b.    climate change; and

c.    a general retreat from multilateral co-operation in other areas 

is meant to have no effect on Australians at all?   When China has just last week been sabre rattling on stopping or winding back a huge range of imports?
 

Movie reviewed: His House

Who knew you could make a horror/witchcraft/ghost movie an effective political one?  I kept feeling I wanted Peter Dutton to watch it.

I'm talking about the new, and apparently popular, Netflix film His House.  It's pretty good - well acted, well directed, and very sympathetic to the plight of African refugees in (in this case) England.   I think it is most effectively disturbing in the last third, when you get to see what that main characters went through.

I do think that the malevolent supernatural forces (if they exist at all) are left with ill defined motivation, though.  Why it would want the husband and wife to react that way is unclear.   (This is hard to talk about without talking complete spoilers.)   But overall, a pretty very fine effort.

A Colbert clip that has nothing to do with US politics

This is from last week, I think, and it made me laugh a lot:

 

Call out conspiracy belief on the Right

As much as I thought Biden's speech on the weekend was pretty great for what was needed at the time, I do hope he, at some point, makes this clear:   the Right in America needs to stop living in the world of conspiracy belief.   Denying climate change was their entry drug;  Qanon is the ridiculous end.   But things like believing a widespread organised system of election fraud is plausible is still, at heart, a belief in a conspiracy, and they to stop being so gullible.

People need to be told when they are being ridiculous. 

Watching Rupert

So, it seems clear Rupert wants Trump out: 

And: 

But what will Carlson and Hannity say in light of this? Not to mention the even worse opinion "stars" of the network. Judge what's-her-name? Will she comply? 

 

Update:

 

Speaking of legacy -

 

 

An extraordinarily fine victory speech

Typing this as I watch Biden  finish his victory speech and it's energetic and pitch perfect; really, it's just perfect in every sense. It's extraordinarily refreshing after the pathetic and dark rhetoric of Trump. 

This will get very postive reviews, I reckon; and it will deflate those in the Right wing media who will know they have to recalibrate how to attack him. 

A good day

At last.. waking up to the good news on the Biden win. 

Some stuff I've noticed on Twitter (the first from yesterday):

The problem is, though, the length of time it will take for the poisonous conspiracy belief system of the American Right to give up hope of changing the outcome.The Murdoch family could play an enormous role in this... But will they? 

I liked this parody of that nutjob's paintings: 

And meanwhile, over at Catallaxy, it's all: 

Yes, cokehead Tailgunner still thinks it all a Qanon play that will be revealed as a trap... Any...moment.... now. 

Actually, he has lots of support.. Their willingness to be gullible  consumers of  lies and deflection from bad faith propagandists for 20 years on climate change means they have no ability to tell when they are being played anymore.

On that serious problem, Ezra Klein's column at Vox is pretty pessimistic.. He is talking about Trump's discrediting the result: 

This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

As I say, I reckon Fox News has disproportionate power here... But what would it take for Murdoch to tell them they have to stop degitimitising democracy?Some militia shooting up Democrats?

Stupid people like those at Catallaxy think that Trump will start his own rival media network which will crush Fox, if Fox does not maintain the pro-Trump rage. This theory is based on the idea that Trump knows how to pick people with competence, and that Fox "stars"are willing to jump ship to a purely one person cult based enterprise. It won't happen, or if it does, it will fail like most of Trump's vanity projects. 

Anyway, for now, things are looking up. 

Cult members at work

For goodness sake.  The Christian participation in the Trump Cult has tarnished the reputation of the religion irreparably:

The longest week

How many other Australians have been reading Twitter in bed up to midnight, and going to sleep thinking "with any luck, when I wake up in the morning, the Biden win will be confirmed" only to be disappointed at 5.45am?

Seems to me the numbers are moving in the right direction still.

I was surprised to see Andrew Bolt, of all people, saying that Trump shouldn't be promoting voter fraud claims that are not well founded because it's harmful for democracy.   My message to Andrew:   TELL THAT TO YOUR OTHER SKY NEWS HOSTS AND THEN GET ON THE PHONE TO RUPERT MURDOCH AND TELL HIM HE'S LETTING FOX NEWS RUIN DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.   Yeah, I know:  as if.  And by today Andrew will be back to spewing something in support of Trump anyway - he does these occasional swings into momentary centrist positions before coming back to his Pauline Hanson friendly attitudes.

As I have complained before - anyone with any decency should not be playing the game of "I'm an independent thinker and working for the Murdoch media empire to provide much needed balance to the extreme right wing bias that is 90% of the rest of the commentary here".    No.  You're working for or with a company that runs a propaganda network working in the cynical interests of a money and power hungry billionaire family that is using you as a fig leaf cover to say they really provide diverse opinion.    The media empire that is the single biggest cause of the "epistemic crisis" in American (and to an extent, Australian) Right wing politics.    No one decent should do anything other than leave them and rubbish the corporate line endlessly - like the amusing Twitter feed of Tony Koch.

Anyway, back to count watch....

Rupert Murdoch and democracy

Interestingly, Vanity Fair claimed (although I really don't put much faith in this) that "a source" told them that Trump rang Rupert Murdoch directly to angrily complain when Fox News put Arizona down as a Biden win yesterday, but Rupert declined to do a Packer and ring the network to tell them to change it.

But Fox News' evening opinion line up - surely the most influential part of the network - is apparently running hard on the "unfair election/fraudulent vote counts" claims.   

I put Murdoch into the category of rich men who consider Trump a useful idiot - but doesn't he care at all about democracy?   He would know that spreading purely partisan rumour and conspiracy about election counts is bad for respect for democracy.   

Is it really worth the money and the feeling of power, Rupert?   

Update:  look at this, for example -

 and

More amusement

 Update:  how embarrassing for Joe (Hockey) -

Prediction: there will be too much analysis

Of course I haven't given up on an eventual Biden win, but the one thing I am not looking forward to is the months and months of over-analysis of why Trump (win or lose) did much better than expected.

Can't we just circumvent it all with a these observations:

a.    Trump and Republicans are the party of the rich*, and the dumb**.  Combine those two proportions of the population, and you get into "could always win" numbers.

b.    The US will not return to reasonable politics while ever the Murdoch family doesn't want it to.   We can only hope that things might improve when Rupert dies; but the population will be kept dumbed down while ever the "in it for the money" Right wing propaganda media continues to have influence.  

c.    Social media also has its role in dumbing down and polarising the population as well - but they do get at least some credit (unlike Murdoch) for their role in moderating how much misinformation and rumour were spread in the lead up to this election.   

 

*  OK, have to make allowances for some categories of the rich being more liberal than others.  But as a general rule...

**   OK, I still worry about using that as a general description of people who otherwise function normally except in their politics.   Perhaps it's more - been so propagandised into an inability to tell truth from fiction it plays like they are dumb.   

Update:   I understand people being upset that so many Americans, knowing Trumps personality and performance, still voted for him.  But it's worth remembering that voluntary voting has an effect on the total numbers who did so:

Around 239.2 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2020, according to the U.S. Elections Project. NBC News’ projected 159.8 million ballots cast in 2020 would constitute about a 66.8% voter turnout rate among eligible citizens — the highest since 1900.

Actually, I'm not sure about that number of ballots figure - the total votes counted on the election outcome pages show about 139 million votes - but other sites agree that the proportion of eligible voters figures of about 66% seems right.

So, if about 48.5% of the vote ends up going to Trump (it's closer to 49% at the moment), that's 32.4% of the eligible voters.  As I have often said before, a significant number of those likely consider him a useful idiot (he's good for their tax rate, Right wing media business, or investment in defence industries, etc).   So who knows, but maybe 20% of the voting population are true members of the Trump cult - and helped made that way by the self interested Right wing propaganda industry and cynical culture warring which has become the strategy of the Republicans for two to three decades. 

I mean, that's still bad.   Maybe just not quite as bad as it first seems.

Made me laugh

 And more:

Talking big figures (while we wait for the US election's big figures)

I've been browsing arXiv again, and turned up this recent paper The Information Catastrophe:

Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10 to power 50. After 250 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 TW, or the total planetary power consumption today, and 500 years from now the digital content will account for more than half of the Earths mass, according to the mass energy information equivalence principle. Besides the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, our estimates here point to another singularity event for our planet, called the Information Catastrophe. 

Um, not entirely sure what to make of this.  All sounds a bit silly, really.  Here is the conclusion:

In conclusion, we established that the incredible growth of digital information production would reach a singularity point when there are more digital bits created than atoms on the planet. At the same time, the digital information production alone will consume most of the planetary power capacity, leading to ethical and environmental concerns already recognized by Floridi, who introduced the concept of “infosphere” and considered challenges posed by our digital information society [27]. These issues are valid regardless of the future developments in data storage technologies. In terms of digital data, the mass-energy-information equivalence principle formulated in 2019 has not been yet verified experimentally, but assuming this is correct, then in not a very distant future, most of the planet’s mass will be made up of bits of information. Applying the law of conservation in conjunction with the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, it means that the mass of the planet is unchanged over time. However, our technological progress inverts radically the distribution of the Earth’s matter from predominantly ordinary matter, to the fifth form of digital information matter. One could say that we are literally changing the planet bit by bit. In this context, assuming the planetary power limitations are solved, we could envisage a future World mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code.

 

Horses again

With this happening yesterday in the Melbourne Death Race 2020:

 ...I am reminded of my very reasonable proposal of last year for racing to change into robot horse racing, with these transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

Actually, I was thinking:  it's going to take a while to get to battery powered horses with jockeys on their back to be able to run, quickly, the sort of distance that will satisfy punters.    Ideally, as a further transitional provision, I would now add:

*   Jockeys allowed to carry robot horses on their backs over the rest of the race.

Of course, should they break their legs doing so, some real horses could probably be trained to shoot guns, couldn't they?   Even if just a tranquilliser, the imagery would be terrific.

Islamic State really hates education

News from Kabul:

At least 22 people have been killed by gunmen who stormed Kabul University before engaging security forces in an hours-long battle on Monday.

A spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry said the attack was eventually stopped when three gunmen were killed.

A regional Islamic State group claimed responsibility in a statement....

The Taliban denied involvement and condemned the attack shortly after it began on Monday. Hours later the Islamic State group issued a message on the Telegram app saying it had targeted "the graduation of judges and investigators working for the apostate Afghan government".

And last week (and going back further):

A massive suicide bombing on October 24 outside the Kawsar-e Danish educational center in west Kabul was the latest attack cruelly targeting the Hazara Shia minority. The explosion took place in a crowded, narrow street outside the center, killing 30 people and injuring more than 70, mostly children and young adults between 15 and 26 years old who were attending classes.

Since 2017, the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood, home to a predominantly Hazara community, has seen numerous attacks on civilians. A bombing at the Imam Zaman mosque in October 2017 killed 39; an attack on a school in August 2018 killed more than 34 students; and twin bombings at a wrestling club in September 2018 killed 20, including journalists and first responders who arrived after the first explosion. In May, gunmen murdered 15 women in the maternity wing of the Dasht-e Barchi hospital, many of whom were in labor or had just given birth.

The Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan branch of the Islamic State (ISIS), claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack.  The armed group has claimed responsibility for many such bombings and has long singled out Afghanistan’s Hazara Shia community for attack.

Nothing says "let's set things back a 1,000 years" like attacking schools and universities.  And so cowardly when targeting kids and older students.

I don't get the ideology - they want high tech when it comes to weaponry and (probably) modern communication that allows for co-ordination of attacks.   But for nothing else.  So stupid.

 

The "let's praise the narcissist and see if that works" strategy clearly didn't work

Hey, wasn't this the same person who earlier this year thought Trump was really on top of the details and believed science?  Yes, yes it was:

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” Birx said. “I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

She deserves to feel stupid.

Yes, amusing

(A reminder: I did start, but didn't stick with, The Man in the High Castle.  Too bleak, and alternative history is generally not my thing.)

Cult watch continues

Just when you thought he couldn't get any nuttier, Steve Kates at Catallaxy gives Trump credit for catching COVID:

Trump has done everything possible, including catching the disease and then recovering from it, to demonstrate his bona fides in regard to the pandemic.

That has more than a touch of messianic imagining about it - He came and risked His life for us so that He could show us the pathway out of adversity.   

Hard to believe he has lost friendships over his cult membership, isn't it?  

[American] cooking discussed

First:  for future reference - I followed this American recipe for Mongolian beef stir fry on the weekend, and it worked out pretty good.   Just did it in the big, non stick skillet on the wok burner (not the wok), and the larger area of heated surface from the skillet did make it easier to sear both the beef and vegetables.  Woks on home stovetop gas wok burners only get hot in the tiny centre, and even then not really searingly hot like the jet burner powered woks at restaurants.  I'm going with the skillet from this point on.

Second:  that recipe came from an American site where I noticed a recipe for "home made sloppy joes".  I was never 100% sure what was in them, but now that I know, it's a really unappealing way to eat mince:

And once again I say - what is it with American cooking and onion and garlic powder.  It's like they invented the stuff (maybe they did?), but you would be hard pressed to find an American meat dish that does not use one or the other, or both.  They're obsessed with it.

Third:  OK, I am being mean to American cooking, because I did start recently watching Adam Ragusea, who I see has a million subscribers on Youtube.  I like the style of his videos - the concentrating on the food and the cooking, not his face; his rapid commentary; his sense of humour.  And when he's not showing how to cook something, but does a video about the history of some food or condiment, he's pretty interesting too.  I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know about vinegar by watching this one recently:

 

I see from the net that he doesn't have a professional background in food at all.  (He used to teach journalism and is also a musician.) I guess that makes him a little like our own Adam Liaw.

As with a lot of  home made Youtube content, I reckon it mostly depends on having a likeable personality come through in the videos.   I don't mind watching, for example, the former travel vloggers who have been doing a "watch us renovate our crappy RV home over the next 8 months" series.  They're just a likeable couple.  

She's officially now "positively annoying"

I'm talking Patricia Karvelas, who was never at risk of losing her presumably high paying job as a well known ABC broadcaster, but whined endlessly during the Melbourne lockdown about how hard it was not being able to send her kids to school. Anyway, here are recent tweets that I find annoying (these and her endless stupid studio dancing tweets): 

A fair assessment

On the topic of the Queensland election:  I think everyone expected Labor to win, so it was no surprise.  Queensland politics never seem to attract politicians who I find particularly impressive, which makes it harder for me to have an interest in following its intrigues closely.   

That said, the LNP current leader Deb Frecklington I find has a quite unappealing media presence and manner.   I was surprised she didn't just resign at the concession speech on Saturday.   Probably because the LNP has had particularly talentless and charmless politicians at the State level for such a long time now.

I was actually quite rude to some LNP "how to vote" poll booth people on Saturday.   Only because they looked university student age.  They gave me a cheery greeting, and I responded by asking what was wrong with them, that they were too young to be in such a stupid party.  They took it quite well, actually - I think one of them said "I don't really have a come back for that" (and no one else was within hearing distance, it wasn't like I was trying to make a scene.)  I have never done this before, but really, Young Liberals are just hard to put up with.

Update:  Oh, so she has resigned today.  Why not say on Saturday that she'll consider her future and make a decision in a few days' time?

Good luck, I say sarcastically...

I've mentioned this always coked-up sounding MAGA tradie from Melbourne who now comments all the time at Catallaxy:

There is much excitement generally at that blog as they grasp at all and any last minute figures that they think proves Trump is about to have not just a slim victory, but a glorious, vanquishing-his-enemies-forever type of victory.   

If Trump loses, and I expect he will, Catallaxy will be an interesting place to watch.   Steve Kates, at the very least, will require sedation for a month.

Monday quantum physics

I have been watching Youtube videos on quantum physics recently, and thought that these two were very good, from the point of view of explaining how the ideas evolved.  As the guy who made them says:

More in-depth than most presentations for laypersons, but without the mathematical rigour needed by a specialist in the field.

These are 5 years old now, and unfortunately, he seems to have stopped at two.  Although I haven't watched his other videos, it would seem he got into some huge fight with both creationists and post-modernists and stopped making videos.

Anyway, so I don't lose track of them in future:

 

and

Insulting commentary from both sides of the fence

No doubt France has a serious issue with Muslim extremism - as does Britain with the random terror attacks that have gone on there over the last few years.  It is an awful problem.

However, given that the latest attack happened inside of a Catholic church, this has sent the Catholic cranks of Catallaxy over the top:

Given that the Muslim population of France is apparently 5,670,000 or so, I wonder if CL thinks all of them should be rounded up and sent on a decade's long flotilla of ships over the Med to, where exactly?, just some random bit of desert where they can be quietly dumped?   Or only the "recalcitrant" Muslims - which I assume you can assess by asking them all to fill in a survey question "Are you for or against the beheading those who insult the Prophet?"   

Anyway, CL does actually do something useful later on the blog - he points to a Twitter commentary on the matter by ageing Mahathir Mohamad, in which he brings up the low standards of the West by noting that many women there wear g-strings and people go nude on some beaches.   That is, shall we say, unhelpful.   (I particularly dislike how his criticism which reads "The killing is not an act that as a Muslim I would approve" which leaves open the suggestion that he thinks other Muslims with sterner opinions than him might not be unreasonable in approving it.*)

Time for him to ride off into the sunset, I think.

*  Oh, I see know that he did also say that Muslims have "the right" to kill millions of French based on how many Muslims the French have killed in history, but I think that tweet has been deleted.   That's even worse, I suppose, but it is more along the lines of one of those rhetorical flourishes (equivalent to the CL one) where you know he would say if pressed  "I wasn't meaning that it should be done - of course that would be terrible in reality")

All the more reason not to like sport

I was surprised by this:  

I would have guessed more Democrat donations from the NBA.   And is baseball more Democrat because it has its biggest  fans in liberal, North East states?

Anyway, I'll take it as another piece of evidence in justification of my general rule of thumb that sport is basically all bad and a waste of time and money, except for when it leads to 24 hour bar openings. 

But Mum, I don't want to control monkey brains with light

 

I underestimated the stupidity of Trump supporters/cultists

I was opining earlier in the year that the problem for Trump would be the inability to hold campaign rallies due to COVID-19.  Little did I realise that not only the intense narcissism of Trump would mean that he would insist on them, but his dumb cult followers would attend, even in the freezing cold:

At least seven people were hospitalized and 30 had to receive medical attention during and after a Tuesday evening campaign rally with President Trump in Omaha, Nebraska.

You would have to suspect that campaign induced spread of COVID is going to be a significant factor in reduced Republican turn out.

Update:  just been amusing myself on a meme generator page -

 

That rare thing: stand up I like

You all know I am generally not a big fan of stand up comedy.   But no one probably recalls that I thought the (deliberately?) amateurish show Aaron Chen Tonight, which turned up on some obscure ABC secondary channel slot a couple of years ago, was likeable.

Well, superstardom seems to be escaping Mr Chen, but Youtube has thrown up at me some more recent short clips of his stand up (probably because I watch Uncle Roger videos), and I do find his whole comedy persona pretty funny:

Much worrying speculation

Maybe you've seen on Twitter this nightmarish scenario:   Trump loses, but not by enough of a margin to immediately concede, and in fact announces a bunch of lawfare to try to knock out enough votes to let him cling on.

At this time, perhaps midway through a couple of months of chronic uncertainty as to who the real winner is, China decides to make a move on Taiwan, confident that America doesn't know who speaks for them anyway (and while redneck militia take pot shots in the streets against Democrat protesters who think Trump must step down.)   

It has a worrying sort of plausibility about it, no?

The BBC wrote:

Is China preparing to invade Taiwan? It's a question being discussed with feverish intensity on many China forums right now. And what should be one of the top geopolitical concerns for the incoming US president.

The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

In response some newspapers ran headlines suggesting an invasion is imminent.

It almost certainly isn't. But there are good reasons for the urgency with which China experts are now discussing the future of Taiwan.

I don't know:  the main reason for doubting the scenario is that it would seem China would be buying itself a region full of bitter and unhappy citizens - more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.

 

 

Girls are weird

Sorry for the Bart Simpson-like analysis in the heading, but this does seem really odd to me:

Girls who do not live with both parents from birth to age two may be at higher risk of starting puberty at a younger age than girls living with both parents, research published in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests. The authors suggest that their findings support the hypothesis that stress in early life may influence puberty onset. The risk of early puberty onset could potentially be mitigated by interventions aiming to improve child wellbeing, according to the authors.  

A team of researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, U.S., found that girls who did not live with both parents from birth to age two were 38% more likely to begin their period before the age of 12 compared with girls who lived with both parents. Girls who did not live with both parents between the ages of two and six were 18% more likely than girls whose parents lived together to begin their period before the age of 12.

I am surprised that stress at such a young age can have such a specific biological effect 9 or 10 years later.

My quick assessment of Rogan as not worth paying attention to seems vindicated

 

Yes. Increase the court.

This woman is showing no good sense on anything:

 

Another worry

At the Washington Post:

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 coronavirus cases in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, even though the flight was only 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”...

Masks were utilized by nine of those 13 infected passengers, with one child not wearing a mask and three passengers’ mask use “unknown,” the report noted.

A full return to something like "normal" international air travel is likely some way off.

 

The writing process

I thought this interesting, because I have a story I would like to write (would prefer it as a screenplay, to be honest) but while I can imagine certain scenes very well, haven't got the overall thing to work in my mind yet:

 

If you want some really worrying reading today...

...try this abstract from a new paper in Nature Geoscience:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity above 5 °C plausible due to state-dependent cloud feedback

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of Earth is defined as the global mean surface air temperature increase that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For decades, global climate models have predicted it as between approximately 2 and 4.5 °C. However, a large subset of models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project predict values exceeding 5 °C. The difference has been attributed to the radiative effects of clouds, which are better captured in these models, but the underlying physical mechanism and thus how realistic such high climate sensitivities are remain unclear. Here we analyse Community Earth System Model simulations and find that, as the climate warms, the progressive reduction of ice content in clouds relative to liquid leads to increased reflectivity and a negative feedback that restrains climate warming, in particular over the Southern Ocean. However, once the clouds are predominantly liquid, this negative feedback vanishes. Thereafter, other positive cloud feedback mechanisms dominate, leading to a transition to a high-sensitivity climate state. Although the exact timing and magnitude of the transition may be model dependent, our findings suggest that the state dependence of the cloud-phase feedbacks is a crucial factor in the evolution of Earth’s climate sensitivity with warming.

What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.

Very deadpan, and funny

This one's for Jason, who hasn't made an appearance in comments for a long time.  From The Onion:

 

So, how's the debate going?

Which means his cult members will think he's doing fantastic, because he's confirming their "insider who thinks he/she knows what's really going on" status.  The rest of the country, though... 

Update:

Again, his cult members, who are all about punishing those who don't align with their politics, will see no problem.

Hugh Hewitt: Give me my tin-pot dictatorship and give it to me NOW!

What a laugh:

 Get this next bit:

It's too much for even the White House to take seriously?   

As always with Hewitt's columns at WAPO, the comments are about 99% mocking him.   This one is moderate in tone, but sums it up correctly, for anyone who isn't part of the Trump cult:

Just a minor detail

So I just had a look at the New York Post to see what is behind the pants wetting excitement on the low information Right about Tony Bobulinski.

Seems to be all about an email in which Hunter Biden makes (what Tony says is a) cryptic reference to Joe Biden getting a cut in a deal with a Chinese firm in 2017.

I had to read way down the article to get to this:

What is not clear yet is whether Joe Biden had secret stakes in any of Hunter’s other deals. As for this one, while the date on the May 2017 email would be nearly four months after Biden left the White House, it’s not known when discussions among the partners and with the Chinese first began. Certainly they started before the email.

And while such deals would be legal for Joe Biden when he left government service, the facts take on extra significance during a campaign where China policy is a frequent topic — and a big dispute between Trump and Biden.

So, when the Right sees sudden disclosure of a Trump company in China making money, it's all just shrug shoulders, legitimate business deals.   And they have no interest whatever in the fact that no one understands Trump's  true financial position because Trump has stonewalled on providing the information for at least 5 years.

But when its Joe Bodin, it's a matter of national security that he (possibly) had a cut in a deal in China.   

Right. 

Just a random thought...

....it's been rattling around my mind for a while that whiny, whiny Trump is like an unfunny version of Rodney Dangerfield.  He "don't get no respect", and no  laughs either.  I think his deliberately stupid dancing at rallies has re-kindled the thought.

Someone else somewhere would probably have made the comparison a while ago, but I personally haven't seen it.   Oh look, someone did a "deepfake" video last year that has Trump's face on Dangerfield's head.  Doesn't look all that different, though.

Yeah, thanks again, unfettered social media

In Berlin, there's been some vandalism of items in a museum, and while it seems they are not 100% certain, the media thinks there is probably a connection to this:

....the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit and public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, which broke the news together, were the first to draw a link between the vandalism and conspiracy theorists.

One of the conspiracy theorists who's gathered a large following of coronavirus deniers, Attila Hildmann, has claimed a number of times on his Telegram channel that the Pergamon Museum is the center of a 'global Satanism scene' which, his followers allege, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been using for 'human sacrifices,' noting that she lives opposite the Museum.

 

A most unusual election

A few observations:

*  Isn't it weird that while Republicans and their Right wing media have been on a blitz to emphasise Hunter Biden's drug problems, they haven't been able to stop the president's own son from making appearances in which he looks either coked up or mentally unwell?:

Yes, that’s a real clip of Donald Trump Jr. lying in bed with his head in such a position that his neck is completely obscured, nursing what appears to be a serious sunburn, and claiming that Instagram has been purposely hiding his posts from his legions of followers. “Hey guys, hope you’re doing well,” the president’s eldest son says, again, from his bed. “Just watching my algorithms getting crushed. I guess I did something to piss off the Instagram gods, so hopefully you’re seeing this stuff anyway. We’ll do what we can. Talk to you soon.”

From the outside, it’s extremely difficult to understand why Donny boy posted this clip, the only logical explanation being that he thinks he looks good.

*  Have we ever had an election before in which the issue of men masturbating has featured so prominently?

*  Just today, we have Republicans claiming that fake emails threatening Democrats to vote Trump are actually intended to hurt Trump.   Because they are too obviously fake?  Or they think they come from Iran, and of course they would not want to help Trump?   But John Ratcliffe is a completely unreliable pro-Trump appointee:

On Monday, Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to bolster an unconfirmed news report by The New York Post related to the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in the Ukraine. Mr. Ratcliffe suggested on Fox Business that the Obama-Biden administration had committed (unnamed) criminal abuses of power and that voters should take these supposed actions into account in the upcoming election.

Such personal political commentary for a sitting intelligence leader is virtually unprecedented. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, tweeted that Mr. Ratcliffe’s actions were “reprehensible” and worthy of a “tin-pot dictatorship.”

 Can he believed about the nation behind the emails?

Why is the intern hours problem so slow to be properly addressed??

So, last night I was at a high school awards night, and the guest speaker was a graduate from 2008 who now works as a doctor in the Queensland hospital system.

She explained that she initially studied for a science degree, but after a couple of years swapped to medicine.   This means she would have been an intern only about, what?, 5 years ago?

While she is very happy in her job now, she did say that the intern years were the worst - 70 hour weeks I think she said, and so stressed and tired she would cry when she got home.  And get this:  if she raised her exhaustion at work, the response from senior doctors was the old "well, that's what we had to go through, so suck it up."

That way of thinking has been driving me nuts for decades!   I saw it in an unrelated profession in my 20's, and it has offended me ever since.  (That's a story for another day.)

It's consistent with a Four Corners story on this problem in 2015 (and in fact, she would have been an intern around then.)

But 5 years later, what sign is there that the problem is being actually addressed?

Here's a report from last year:

Almost half of Queensland's junior doctors working in the public system are concerned they are so exhausted that they will make a clinical error, the state's peak doctors association has warned.

The Australian Medical Association Queensland's latest Resident Hospital Health Check report surveyed almost 900 of the state's junior doctors, of which 46 per cent reported concern about their long working hours burning them out.

The figure is unchanged from the year before....

Dr Abdeen said junior doctors worked long hours, with some going on call for 120 hours in a row.

"You're working day shifts, you're on call all night, getting called multiple times per day, and then going back to work the next day, of course you're going to be fatigued," Dr Abdeen said.

"All of these factors lead to a person who is going to be burnt out and ultimately prone to mistakes."

Dr Abdeen said he himself had just recently covered two other doctors on a single shift, forcing him to do the work of three doctors and treat all of their patients.

Here's a report from earlier this year:

The Black Dog Institute and UNSW Sydney have published Australian-first research examining the relationship between average working hours and the mental health of junior doctors.
 
And the results are stark.
 
A quarter of all junior doctors work unsafe hours, which researchers found doubles their risk of developing mental health issues and suicidal ideation.
 
Associate Professor Samuel Harvey, study co-author and Chief Psychiatrist at the Black Dog Institute said working long hours has been an accepted part of the culture of medical training for decades, but ongoing research is changing perceptions.

‘We’re now starting to understand the human cost behind these excessive workloads,’ he said.
 
‘Pressure on junior doctors to “earn their stripes” by taking on long work hours has always been common, but what we now know is that this can have profound mental health impacts, with concerning implications for both the individual doctors and our broader health system.’
 
A cohort of almost 43,000 randomly selected junior doctors in Australia were invited to participate in Beyond Blue’s National Mental Health Survey, with 12,252 providing data to form the research – the largest and most up-to-date national figures available on doctors’ mental health outcomes.
 
Junior doctors who worked over 55 hours a week were more than twice as likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation, compared to those working 40–44 hours per week.  
 
The same results applied regardless of age, gender, level of training, location, marital status or whether the doctor was trained overseas or locally, confirming a link between long working hours and poorer mental health among junior doctors.

So it's pretty clear that the problem is still not being adequately addressed.

I presume it's a combination of inadequate hospital funding, variable intern numbers, and A PERSISTENTLY STUPID ATTITUDE OF [SOME] SENIOR DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS.

Because honestly, if it wasn't for the latter, you should have doctors at every election telling people to vote for governments that will do their utmost to address the problem.

 

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: