Some beautiful videos from the far North

A month or two ago, Google suggested I watch an 8 minute BBC video about Svalsbard, the island up north of Norway which used to be Spitzbergen.   Its legal status is pretty unusual, as Wikipedia explains:

Svalbard (/ˈsvɑːlbɑːr/ SVAHL-bar,^[3] Urban East Norwegian: [ˈsvɑ̂ːɫbɑr] (listen); prior to 1925 known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, (lit. Sharp Peaks; Russian: Шпицберген) is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Situated north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya. While part of the Kingdom of Norway since 1925, Svalbard is not part of geographical Norway; administratively, the archipelago is not part of any Norwegian county, but forms an unincorporated area administered by a governor appointed by the Norwegian government, and a special jurisdiction subject to the Svalbard Treaty that is outside of the Schengen Area, the Nordic Passport Union and the European Economic Area.

Apparently, this means that you do not need a visa to go work there, which,  as the video explains, means that some people go there on a whim to see if they can a living, and end up happy enough:

All Knowing Google, thus detecting I was interested in the place, took some weeks to do so, but eventually recommended the Youtube channel of Cecilia, a (I think) Swedish woman who lives there (with a boyfriend and a beautiful dog.)   

I haven't watched them all, and maybe she will soon run out of new things to show, but I have to say that the images she puts up of the place are remarkably beautiful and pretty interesting.   (Even just watching her shop in the town's one big store was interesting.)

Anyway, here she is, showing exactly what the midnight sun looks like back in April, at the start of 4 months of permanent sun!:

 

 Her videos are not exactly slick - some of the explanatory stuff goes no longer than necessary - but for an amateur just showing the world the really remarkable and unusual part of the world she lives in, I find it very pleasing.   Here she is showing us a spectacular example of the Northern Lights:

 

I recommend watching them on you big smart TV if you have one. 

One other thing that's pretty interesting about the place - it has coal mines.   I find it quite surprising that Norway found it economically viable at the start of the 20th century to mine coal in such a frigid part of the world.  It's also a big reminder about how much the Earth has changed over its geological history.

I'm not sure I personally need to visit such an isolated part of the world (even though I would love to see Norway generally.)   But an amateur vlogger can make you feel as if you're experiencing the next best thing anyway.

Guilty pleasure admitted

I quite the new Spicy Pepper Paneer pizza now in Australian Domino's.   It's vegetarian too.   In fact, I don't mind their regular Vegorama too.

I get the feeling, reading lots of liberals from America on Twitter, that it's the opposite of hip to admit liking Domino's.   But I do.

And in other completely unimportant fast food news:   needed a quick lunch yesterday and McDonalds as nearby.   I know I have posted about it before - probably this year in fact -  but when you haven't eaten anything there for 6 months or so, you can get completely surprised all over again at how their main burger diameters have shrunk so much that they look like toy food or something.    

End Times noted

Phil Plait has a fun post up noting that, provided protons do not decay, the last big thing to happen to the universe might be black dwarves (modest size star remnants) exploding a bit like supernovae.   But it will take a very, very, very long time:

When enough iron builds up, they too will collapse and explode, leaving behind a neutron star.

But pycnonuclear fusion is an agonizingly slow process. How long will that take before the sudden collapse and kablooie?

Yeah, I promised earlier that I'd explain this number. For the highest mass black dwarfs, which will collapse first, the average amount of time it takes is, well, 10^1,100 years.

That's 10 to the 1,100th power. Written out, it's a 1 followed by eleven hundred zeroes....

And that's the black dwarfs that go first. The lowest mass ones take much longer.

How much longer? I'm not terribly glad you asked. They collapse after about 10^32,000 years.

That's not a typo. It's ten to the thirty-two-thousandth power. A one with 32,000 zeroes after it.

 He also points out, though, that at time frames like that, the expansion of the universe will mean that the observable universe is actually pretty small, so that you would have to be lucky to even have one of these explosions observable. (!)

All sound rather implausible - which Plait acknowledges readily, since it seems more likely that protons do decay, this puts a much "shorter" timeframe for everything to disappear.

Anyway, I expect everyone will have moved via black holes into alternative, much younger and newer universes well before this.

 

 

Funny and true

A restaurant worth noting

I've been so busy I have not got around to praising a Brisbane restaurant.

Last Friday night, I was shouted to a fantastic meal at Moda, a tapas restaurant/bar at Paddington, Brisbane.  It was not planned ahead of time, we had just headed into Paddington hoping to get into another restaurant without a booking, but of course in this Christmas post-COVID season, a lot of places were full.

I like tapas bars as a concept, but its been a while since I have been to one where I thought every plate was great and good for the price.

Well, let's deal with the price issue first:   Moda is not cheap.   But - the quality of each and every item we had was fantastic.   (Making it simpler, if expensive, we had the $95 a head chef's selection of plates, mains, and desserts.  It was pretty much a blow out meal that you probably really only want to tackle if you have missed lunch.  Which I had.)   

What can I remember of the dishes?   A duck liver parfait that was just about the best I think I have ever had; ceviche that was also pretty spectacularly nice; an octopus salad; some pipis in a cream sort of sauce; baked figs with something or other;  a couple of croquette type things; some lamb; some beef with something (the details are starting to get fuzzy) and the desserts cake and pastry pieces.  

To drink, we had a $60 bottle of Spanish cava - which I continue to say I find to be a more reliably pleasant sparkling wine than French champagne.   And a glass of chilled French muscat at the end - it was delicious too.

Service was great, and the food came pretty fast and at pretty much the right rate (a bit surprising especially give that the place was packed inside, while we managed to have a pretty pleasantly quieter time at a table outside).

Honestly, it was the best restaurant meal I have had for years.   I wish the place well.

Oh, and now that I look at reviews for it (as I said, we just ended up there by luck, really), it's not just me who thinks it's good:

 

Heh

 

A Senate problem

Greg Sargent's column on Mitch McConnell's attempt to convince every single Senator to not object to the Democrat electors in January explains it as well as any.   (He fears that if forced to vote, the Trump base will be able to identify specifically those who have abandoned Trump, and want to punish them.)  

I would think it hilarious if dimwit curly hair Rand Paul ruins this plan.  

Yes, I certainly have mixed feelings about what China is doing at the moment

I have also been meaning to say this:   an unfortunate effect of Australia feeling lucky in its avoidance of COVID 19 (the heavy lifting for which was to a large extent done at State level) is that Scott Morrison is getting approval ratings he really does not deserve.  

And yet conservatives still support him

 

 

Yay

Just happened an hour or so ago:

 

I am guessing that Parler is going off.

Also - how stupid of Republicans in some states to be assigning what someone on Twitter called cosplay alternative electors.   

Seriously, I think the party has to split for any part of it to regain credibility.
 

That Supreme Court decision

It was good news yesterday that the Supreme Court in the US stopped the Texas/Republican anti-democracy action.   

Now that so many Republicans signed up for it (completely foolishly - since what was the point of joining in on a Trump loyalty test when it was so unlikely that the case could be successful?), and yet still the Proud Boys want to destroy the GOP, we go back to the question I have been asking - how bad is the split in the GOP going to be between Trump loyalists who want to treat him indefinitely as the next president in waiting, and those who want to put an end to his era?

I am not alone

 I felt that way after only two episodes.

John Oliver on Pringles

John Oliver can be pretty funny, and his ranting about Pringles amused me this week:

 

 

 

Like him, I have questioned the point of Pringles. I'll eat them, but I agree - a well made normal chip is much nicer.

How stupid

 As someone else tweets:

He's right, I think, and as I keep saying, I reckon it spells trouble for the Republicans in the coming years, until Trump either goes to jail, has a stroke, or otherwise loses interest in trying to control the Republicans as a vanity project.

Or - I could be completely wrong.   I mean, who can tell with the weird, weird state of American politics now?

Republicans and the civil war fever

Noticed this on Twitter:

His article at Daily Kos, written in early 2019, is a good reminder about how long the wingnut Right has fantasised about getting to use their guns in a civil war.

Busy but some thoughts

The office workload is high at the moment:  it is always is at this time of year, and it always dispels any sense of a holiday mood.  Oh well.

Anyway, some various thoughts I normally would have posted separately about:

 *  By virtue of falling asleep and waking up with the TV still on, I found myself watching on SBS last Friday a documentary about Hank Williams, of all people.   Like most Australians, I guess, I knew the name, would probably recognise a couple of songs as being him, but had absolutely no idea about his life.  I would have guessed he lived into the 1960's, but he died aged 29 in 1953, seemingly of a combination of alcohol and medically administered morphine.

So yeah:  turns out he was like he was like the early country version of Amy Winehouse:  big talent, unhappy life, drugs and alcohol their ruination.  (Not that I know much about Amy Winehouse either, but I think that's the general gist.)   Fame is good for very, very few people.

* This Texas Supreme Court last ditch effort to try to stop Biden becoming President:  it's too cute by half, surely?   Given that the litigation is only against those States where Biden won, the political motivation is just too obvious - I mean, couldn't they find a Trump voting State where some technical argument might be possible about how that State had changed its voting procedures in the last year and join them in the action to try to gain some pretence of it not being purely about trying to install Trump?   

And if the Supreme Court gave it any credibility, surely it would be opening a Pandora's Box of potential future litigation. 

I see that a lot of people have noted that the 17 States joining in are basically the States of the old South, making it like a revenge attempt for losing the Civil War.   It's also been noted that its being run by the "States rights are important" party - sure, until they vote for the wrong President.

I am no expert on American constitutional law - but it seems wildly improbable that this will go anywhere.

* Assuming that this is all done and dusted soon - the biggest story of 2021 will be how seriously the Republican party splits.  Here's a bit of speculation:  the "best" thing that could happen for the party to recover would be for some QAnon, "the election was stolen" nutter to shoot or blow up up some Democrat (or even Republican who didn't endorse Trump's fake win claims) office - this would finally give the appalling "leadership" of the Party a reason to say "Enough is enough.  The election was lost legitimately and people have to stop believing it was all a conspiracy that's going to be cured by armed rebellion."

 

The very messy state of marriage in India

At the BBC, a quite long article on the mess that is inter-faith marriage in India.  Some points:

Every year, some 1,000 interfaith couples get in touch with a Delhi-based support group and seek help.

Hindu and Muslim couples usually approach Dhanak when their families deny them permission to marry. Aged between 20-30 years, the harried men and women want the group to talk to their families or help them seek legal assistance.

Among the couples who come to Dhanak, 52% are Hindu women planning to marry Muslim men; and 42% are Muslim women planning to marry Hindu men

"Both Hindu and Muslim families in India fiercely oppose interfaith marriages," Asif Iqbal, founder of Dhanak, told me.

"They will stoop to any level to stop them. Parents even smear the reputation of their daughters to dissuade her lover's family. The so-called 'love-jihad' is another weapon to discourage such relationships."

The bogey of "love-jihad", a term radical Hindu groups coined to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage, has returned to haunt India's interfaith relationships. 

Last week, police in northern Uttar Pradesh state held a Muslim man for allegedly trying to convert a Hindu woman to Islam - he was the first to be arrested under a new anti-conversion law that targets love-jihad. At least four other states ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are planning similar laws. Party spokespeople say such laws are required to stop "deception, fraud and misrepresentation".

"When a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman, it is always portrayed as romance and love by Hindu organisations, while when the reverse happens it is depicted as coercion," says Charu Gupta, a historian at University of Delhi, who has researched the "myth of love jihad" ....

 

Monogamous, arranged, heterosexual and same-community marriages are idealised - more than 90% of all marriages in India are arranged. Interfaith marriages are rare. One study put them at just over 2%. Many believe the spectre of love jihad is resurrected from time to time by Hindu groups for political gains.

That such strident campaigns against interfaith unions have a long and chequered history in India is well-documented.

In the backdrop of rising religious tensions in the 1920s and 1930s, Hindu nationalist groups in parts of northern India launched a campaign against "kidnapping" of Hindu women by Muslim men and demanded the recovery of their Hindu wives.

There's a lot more at the website.

 

Bind my (veggie) burger, please

For the second time, I tried making "smoky" beetroot and bean based burger patties on the weekend.  (It's the use of smoked paprika that gives them that flavour.)  The recipe I followed this time is here.    

The taste is pretty nice, and it's interesting, because I am pretty sure it's a psychological association of the colour of red with meat which gives the brain the impression that a beet burger is going to be more substantial and filling than some other forms of vegan or vegetarian burger.  

But - as with a previous attempt, using a different but similar recipe, there is a problem with getting home made veggie burgers to stick together in a similar way to meat burgers.

This seems to be a well recognised problem - see this article Tricks for Making Veggie Burgers That Won't Fall Apart, for example.  The trouble is, none of those suggestions sound very convincing to me.

I am sure the problem comes from the hard to avoid fact that frying (or baking) the patty makes the semi cooked vegetables inside release steam/water, which loosens the whole thing.   I doubt egg works, as I have never found it helps much with salmon patties, which can also suffer structural integrity issues. 

It was suggested to me yesterday, in a discussion which went on for far too long in the dog park, that perhaps the answer would be xanthan gum, which I didn't realise you could use in baked products as a thickening agent.

I also wonder whether the common ingredient you see on a lot of the imitation meat products you see lately - pea protein (or pea protein isolate) - itself binds somewhat when cooked.   Now that I look around, one other veggie burger suggest wheat gluten - so maybe just adding flour or cornflower does help?   Not sure how it would affect the taste, though.  (As a side note, I also see coconut oil in a lot of fake meat products now.  I can imagine that could help in taste and mouth feel too, so maybe it's time I start just experimenting with my own additions to a veggie burger recipe.)

I suspect that reader Tim might have an idea about this.  Help me, please.

Update:  because Google knows what I want to know, I found that Youtube suggested a Canadian video which showed a chef making a vegan burger with all the usual suspects (beans, lentils, chickpeas,  mushrooms, spices) but also oats and - I think this may make the difference - tapioca starch.

That sounds plausible to me - it would avoid the possible floury taste of wheat flour or cornflower.

Someone who watched the video guessed at the quantities:

1 cup - Black Beans

1 cup - Chickpeas

1 cup - Lentils 1 cup 

Mushrooms (cooked) 1/2 cup

Rolled Oats 1/4 cup 

Beets (Shredded) 

1/4 cup - Nutritional Yeast

1 tsp - Tapioca Starch

1/4 tsp - Salt 1/4 tsp - Pepper 1/8 tsp - Chili Powder 1 tsp - Parsley 1 tsp - Rosemary  

 

I think there was more tapioca starch than that. 

Sounds worth a try...

As read on Twitter

Count me disappointed that no one seems to remember The Andromeda Strain

Well, that was a good news science story - the Japanese satellite returning to Earth (to Woomera, no less) with a chunk of asteroid rock and dust in it.  

The only thing that slightly disappoints me is that not enough people are referencing that this is pretty much how The Andromeda Strain started, and given what 2020 has thrown up at us already, who would put it past the year to try that on....

Dubious about lab grown chicken

The Guardian has a headline:

No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time 

but when you read the details, it sounds more like PR spin than anything else:

The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients. Initial availability would be limited, the company said, and the bites would be sold in a restaurant in Singapore. The product would be significantly more expensive than conventional chicken until production was scaled up, but Eat Just said it would ultimately be cheaper.

The cells used to start the process came from a cell bank and did not require the slaughter of a chicken because cells can be taken from biopsies of live animals. The nutrients supplied to the growing cells were all from plants.

The growth medium for the Singapore production line includes foetal bovine serum, which is extracted from foetal blood, but this is largely removed before consumption. A plant-based serum would be used in the next production line, the company said, but was not available when the Singapore approval process began two years ago.

What I would like to know is:

*  how many chicken cells per piece?

*  how much could they be contributing to the taste?  [Perhaps need a blind test between a bit of their chicken made with plant filler alone, compared to a piece with the chicken cells thrown in.]

*  sounds like they certainly can't be contributing to texture. 

* is using "plant medium" to grow cells really been proved as viable?

I remain deeply skeptical about the benefits (both for the individual consumer and on the bigger question of whether it will ever reduce the number of animals raised and eaten) of this whole idea.  

I would like science journalists to show more skepticism on the matter - they seem too ready to just repeat PR releases.

Amongst the reasons to avoid it

Case studies and autopsy results are confirming that, in some cases, COVID-19 can cause such severe lung damage that patients require a lung transplant to survive.  ....

"We provide explicit evidence that COVID-19 can cause permanent damage to the lung in some patients for whom lung transplantation is the only hope for survival," said study principal investigator Dr. Ankit Bharat. He's chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, in Chicago.

His team also discovered unique cells—called KRT17 epithelial cells—in the lung tissue of COVID-19 patients with irreversible damage. These cells have also been found in patients with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis, a deadly progressive lung disease.

The findings, the first of their kind on the issue, were published Nov. 30 in Science Translational Medicine. To date, eight COVID-19 patients have received double-lung transplants at Northwestern Medicine, the most performed at any health system in the world.

Pretty extraordinary (and not widely publicised, it seems.)

Not sure what this means for Umbrella Academy

So, mopey faced Ellen Page is now Elliot Page - and the BBC wastes no time in endorsing her transgender proclamation:

Elliot Page: Juno star announces he is transgender

As I have complained before, I already found her kind of annoyingly serious, and I would guess she very specifically wanted the second season of Umbrella Academy to give her character a lesbian awakening storyline.  (It was, in any event, pretty well handled; and the whole season was extremely enjoyable.) 

Apart from a suspicion that this will cause a further spike in unhappy teenage girls deciding their depression can be cured by deciding they are really men, my only other interest in the matter is what it means for the third season of Umbrella Academy.

Can the producers just replace her with a more likeable actress?   Please.

 

Yeah... Real suspicious

This man likes to give mini history lessons in many of his posts: 

Where's the rah rah Brexit support now?

By the way, there are tweets following that last one that say "only 8% lead for remain after all of this?"; and people responding with "wait until the effects actually start to be felt in the hip pocket, and in general inconvenience, next year." 

I have noticed, for a long time now actually, that there is a distinct lack of pro-Brexit content on the internet from the libertarian/conservative people who never said all that much about it, but were pro-Brexit because they could just feel it in their bones, or something, that "less rules the better". 

Look at Helen Dale, for example.  She promotes herself as some sort of reasonable, "classical liberal" Tory who supports Brexit yet seem to virtually never discuss it in detail in her Twitter feed.  Maybe she has written a column or two criticising the way it has been handled politically, but it seems low on her priority of interests, even though she lives there.

And calling Jason Soon:  where do you stand on this now?   You've had a pretty crook year as far as disillusionment with commentators who you formerly gave some credence to when they have gone completely stupidly pig headed on COVID 19.   (Hello, Adam "I never liked my gran anyway" Creighton - but I think there must be others.)   As far as I can recall, you indicated soft support for Brexit, like Dale, and thought Johnson would make a great PM.   Isn't it time to admit error, or do we have to wait to see economic and social costs over the next few years before you'll admit your support never had more than a mere intuitive basis?

Update:   also, not that I watch it, apart from the odd clip that turns up on Youtube, but I don't think even the clown wingnuts on Australia's Sky News at Night spend time trying to defend Brexit.   Lack of material to work with, I suspect.

Going To the Lake

I started watching the Russian Netflix series To the Lake, and I thought the first episode was really good.   Looks like a lot of money spent on it, with some flashy camera moves and fancy shots showing  directorial flair which I didn't really expect from a series from that part of the world.   

A few other observations:

*  angry Russian language sounds really angry.   I guess angry German does too.   Is there just something about the tone of certain languages which make them sound scarier than others when the speaker is upset?

* interesting to see wealthy characters in a Russian story, and the wealthiest played as dislikeable.  (Maybe there is a redemption arc coming up though?)  The show seems to pull no punches about corruption, crime and how quickly the place would fall apart if under disaster pressure a tad higher than that presented by COVID-19.   I doubt that Putin likes it.

* why is Googling bringing so few American reviews for it?  It has been released there, but I can't spot mainstream media outlets reviews at all.   That's odd, isn't it?

Historical pigs of London

This story came to my attention by being mentioned in a Youtube video.  I had not heard of it before.  Here is the Wiki version, from an entry about the medieval St Anthony's Hospital in London:

One source of income, traditional to certain religious foundations dedicated to Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt, was from donated free-range pigs: any pig considered by the supervisor of the London Livestock market unfit to be killed for food was reserved for the use of the Hospital as follows: a proctor of St. Anthony's placed a collar around its neck from which hung a bell. It was then released onto the City streets to scavenge, protected by the status afforded by its bell, from molestation by the population.^[2] it was a virtuous deed to feed these pigs, which quickly fattened and when ready for the table were reclaimed by the Hospital and sold or slaughtered for food.^[3] The privilege appears on occasion to have been abused, as in 1311 one of the Hospital's tenants Roger de Wynchester, was forced to promise the City authorities not to claim pigs found wandering about the City, nor to put bells on "any swine but those given in charity to the house".^[4]

Incredible bad faith

The news is already old - these losing pro-Trump cases really are being thrown out quickly now - but I just wanted to note the incredible bad faith of (some) Pennsylvania Republicans who voted for mail in ballots a year ago, conducted a primary using them, but when Trump loses in the final election, decide to challenge the constitutionality of the legislation they voted in!

This was all explained in a post by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air - which remains in my opinion the only conservative politics website worth anything.   

Here he is with an update when the PA Supreme Court threw it out. 

It just shows incredible bad faith that any Pennsylvania Republican should have tried this on. 

Balls

A post about something I found mildly amusing.   

We went to IKEA on Sunday and decided to have lunch there.   None of my family are fans of the IKEA meatball, but I saw they had a new vegetarian or vegan choice - Plant Balls.   What a name, hey?

Apparently, they always used to have "veggie balls", but this new one is part of the movement to make a plant product that resembles the meat product.   They are cheap so I had ten, with mash potato, peas, gravy and that jam that perhaps only exists due to  IKEA shops.  

I thought they weren't bad, but reminded me a little of poultry stuffing rather than meat.   (Perhaps that's unfair - I would not consider a meal of stuffing, but I would eat these again.)  The IKEA website explains:

The plant ball is proof that a less meaty future can be just as delicious, whether you’re a meat-lover or not. Made with pea protein, potatoes, onion, oats and apple, it has the taste and juicy bite of the IKEA meatball – minus the meat. Instead, the perfect meaty taste is achieved by adding umami flavours, like mushroom, tomato and roasted vegetables.

They don't have much trouble replicating the IKEA meatball in texture - one reason I don't care for them being the lack of texture, like they are made from the leftover residue of a mincing machine rather than the mince itself.  That said, they do sell an extraordinary amount:

“At IKEA, we sell 1 billion meatballs a year. Imagine if we can convert even some of those into plant balls. That’s a real tangible reduction in our climate footprint.”

But still - that name.   I don't think they put much effort into it.   I reckon they should have a competition to rename them.  

Am I right? [I am right]

Every single bit of alleged evidence of the Trump election being "rigged" comes down to someone with no direct and detailed knowledge of specific vote counting and tallying processes either seeing something*, or doing some maths, and saying "that looked real suspicious to me."  That's it.  That's where it ends.

I cannot believe how dumb and gullible so many on the Right are - as I have said many times, it's like they are not only willing dupes to any shonky, bad faith, self proclaimed expert (as they have been for a decade or so with climate change), but they have virtually self gaslight themselves into an alternative reality.

Update:  in the weird world of Australian Right wing-nuttery, curated by Sinclair Davidson because, it would seem, he likes people to be able to display themselves as ageing, gullible, conservative cranks and fools (often with unpleasant personalities to boot), we get examples like this:

 As so many are observing - Rupert spent a decade or two, for his profit, pandering to a conspiracy consuming, culture warring, gullible and ageing conservative audience that is now distraught that he is trying to edge them back to an even slightly more evidence based view of the world.   It would be sort of funny to watch, if it weren't a worry for democracy and the future of the US.

Update:   Trump and his cultists are adamant that the Biden vote (at more than 80 million) is just too incredible to believe.   Looking at this graph, putting it in historic perspective, there's nothing shocking about it at all.   

*  or, not seeing something, then inferring that fraud was being committed - like complaining they were kept 10 feet from a electorate office worker's table and thinking the reason was that they wanted to commit fraud. 

Getting creeped out now

OK, so because I watched the BTS song Dynamite, and perhaps because I actually like watching the Feel the Rhythm of Korea tourism ads (they really do make it look like a cool and nice place to visit), Youtube got me to watch the new BTS song Life Goes On last night.   They're a cultural phenomena, OK.  Do I have to keep justifying myself?

Man, the androgynous (and quasi Japanese "boys love" anime - made for girls, mind you) styling and vibe of the group is starting to creep me out.  It's giving me a sad and uncanny Michael Jackson "they don't know what they want to look like" feeling - and in fact the guy driving the car in close up in this clip specifically reminded me of Jackson for some reason.   I also thought at one point that it was going to have a boys in pyjamas having a pillow fight sequence - but it didn't quite go there.  One of them does something very peculiar to a bicycle seat, though.   I just thought the whole clip was sort of off.

As I have said before - it's not like deliberate androgyny in pop music is anything new (and for all I know, maybe one or more of them is gay) - but whoever is control of their image is making this band look like pale, plastic skinned robots with with artificially perfect hair.  It's just too much...

It's stuff like this that makes me doubt the whole "Trump will own the Republican party for years" thing

I keep saying - I reckon most prominent Republicans who defend Trump have only done so for purely opportunistic reasons.  They know he's a jerk who has no real friends (political or everyday) and that he dumps on anyone who crosses him in a heartbeat.   People like Raffensperger will not appreciate having to worry about a Trump cultist stalking him with a gun for doing his job.

So his idiot base may be loyal to him for a year or two after he's gone, but the "establishment" Republicans are going to dump on him as soon as he is out of the White House.

Again - I could be completely wrong.   But it just seems the most plausible take to me.

Revenge of the wasps (and in Brisbane, too!)

I would guess that aircraft are responsible for splatting at least a few thousand wasps a year, so is it any surprise that wasps are trying to take them down?

Interesting story at phys.org:

Over a period of 39 months, invasive keyhole wasps (Pachodynerus nasidens) at the Brisbane Airport were responsible for 93 instances of fully blocked replica pitot probes—vital instruments that measure airspeed—according to a study published November 25 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alan House of Eco Logical Australia and colleagues. As noted by the authors, the results underscore the importance of risk-mitigating strategies, such as covering pitot probes when aircraft arrive and setting up additional traps to intercept the wasps....

A total of 26 wasp-related issues were reported at the airport between November 2013 and April 2019, in conjunction with a series of serious safety incidents involving pitot probes. In its native range in South and Central America and the Caribbean, the wasp is known to construct nests using man-made cavities, such as window crevices, electrical sockets, and of course, keyholes.

Things I'm not reading about: a Republican split?

Maybe the columns about this are yet to come, but I am surprised at how few words are being written on the risk that Trump will cause a serious, quite long term, split in the Right between his dumb, conspiracy addled "base" who are leaving Fox News and going into the even more intensely partisan propaganda echo chambers of OAN and Parler, and those "establishment" Republican politicians and their supporters who have always known Trump is a useful idiot but have not been able to say so for 4 years.  

Because, it seems to me, the only way those on the "establishment" side can hope to win back the cultists is if they start spilling the beans on how hopeless they found Trump to deal with after his departure.   But given the nature of cultist logic, that runs the risk of intensifying their belief in the Deep State and the righteous cause of their glorious leader who always warned them that Washington was corrupt.  

Look, I could be completely wrong and somehow the fine line that the likes of Carlson and Fox News is trying to tread will work.   But it seems a real problem, way outweighing the intensity of the internecine arguments within the Democrats.  

The Fox way forward discussed

At the Washington Post, a detailed look at how Tucker Carlson hopes to manage accepting a Biden presidency without losing the wingnut base that would prefer to be shooting people on the street.  (If you use Twitter, you should really look at that @parlertake account to see how much violence is being hoped for amongst wingnuts.  I wonder if the FBI now has staff dedicated to examining that site/app.)

I liked this take down of the complete and utter crap Carlson claimed yesterday:

Carlson then gets to the third part of his post-election playbook.

“We shouldn't let our focus on voting machines distract us from all that happened earlier this month. The 2020 presidential election was not fair. No honest person would claim that it was fair,” Carlson insisted. “On many levels the system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another, and it was rigged in ways that were not hidden from view. We all saw it happen.”

How? Well, for one thing, Carlson says that the media allowed Biden to “refuse to explain what they would do if they were elected.”

This, as The Post’s Dave Weigel has pointed out, is ridiculous. Perhaps there wasn’t coverage of Biden’s agenda on Fox News, but it’s impossible to argue that he didn’t offer detailed proposals of what his presidency would entail. Those proposals often struggled to be heard over the volume of Trump’s chatter, but they existed.

The candidate who explicitly had no post-election proposals was Trump. There was no section on his website outlining any plans, just a delineation of his self-described accomplishments. The Republican Party broadly acknowledged that there was no use in developing a platform, reverting to a broad “whatever Trump wants” explanation.

The other part in this column I liked was the short and simple summary of the nonsense position of Republicans that investigating this election as being entirely legitimate and essential, while the "Russiagate" investigation was a fraud from the start:

To this day, Trump remains frustrated that his 2016 election was overshadowed by questions about Russia's efforts to interfere in the results and various investigations into people associated with his campaign. As he's pushed to hold off Biden's win, many of his allies have argued that muddying the waters after Election Day is fair play given the investigations Trump himself had to endure.

There are important differences, of course. One is that the investigations into Russian interference began well before the 2016 election concluded and focused on several individuals with demonstrated ties to Russia. Had Trump simply embraced the probe of interference broadly as a way to protect the vote, it wouldn’t have become the pall that it did. But, again, Trump was eager to present himself as a winner, and the idea that Russia might have influenced the outcome was therefore anathema.

The other distinction between the 2016 election probe and the one Carlson suggests is that in that case there was good reason to suspect malfeasance on the part of people associated with Trump’s campaign. One adviser traveled to Moscow in July 2016. Another was told that Russia had obtained emails that were apparently the ones eventually leaked by WikiLeaks. Another — Trump’s campaign chairman — had worked directly for pro-Russian interests and, it turns out, shared campaign data with an individual linked to Russian intelligence.

By contrast, there isn’t any evidence that anything untoward happened with electronic voting in 2020. There are plenty of allegations, certainly, though even Carlson had to admit last week that Trump’s campaign couldn’t present evidence to support those allegations. As with most elections, there were certainly errors and flaws that deserve to be probed to prevent them from happening again in the future. Perhaps those investigations will turn something up. But what Carlson proposes is obviously a fishing expedition, something that may bear political fruit but should be understood in that context.

Basically, whenever you read a person mock "Wussia, wussia, wussia" or the Mueller investigation, you know that they have dumbed themselves down with partisanship to the point they are not worth arguing with. 

 

Big dish closes permanently

Nothing much to say about this, except that it was hardly looking well maintained anyway.  It was a cool looking facility in its day, but they should never have let its use make Goldeneye the travesty of science that it was!

Legendary Arecibo telescope will close forever — scientists are reeling

 

Re-endorsing this way of eating prawns

It was earlier this year that I endorsed this:

I used it again this last weekend, and it's just so easy and so nice - if you have a family that doesn't mind peeling their own hot prawns (or eating a lot of the shell.)  

For $15 I bought 700g of whole green banana prawns (I prefer tiger, but they are not always available green in the supermarket), and in a big wok fried (in a few tablespoons of oil) some capsicum, spring onion and left over bok choy; take it out, then throw in the prawns.  Let them cook about 75% of the way through (that's the instructions on the spice pack!), and sprinkle on the spices.  Keep cooking, and add back the vegetables, and you're done.   Throw on top of a big serving plate of rice.

It couldn't be easier, because you don't peel the prawns. 

If the prawn is not super large, I eat quite a bit of shell now too.  Frying lets you do that.

I also re-invite the Seahs company to reward me for the endorsement.   Ha.  Maybe just a return ticket to Singapore to visit their factory would be enough!

Speaking of Parler

I just found out that there is a Twitter account devoted to showing us screenshots of "takes" to be found on Parler.  @parlertakes. 

Cool. 

The Parler folk are in a current meltdown about transition starting.   Lots of calls for war and violence.  

Which is consistent with what I said a couple of posts back - let them go into "non-censored" self exile:  it will hurt the credibility of anyone who wants to hang out with the dangerous, conspiracy addled nutters that will flock there.

As expected

Oddball conservative Gray Connolly on the Trump transition:

This was predicted:
 

It's over

So Trump has authorised the transition to begin.  For God's sake, he may as well let someone read the briefings, since it's clear he was just too busy playing golf and insisting his people had to come up with some face saving strategy to show he won when no court in the land will agree.

I can just imagine the whoops of joy in any agency with a briefing obligation to this doofus.   Can you imagine the challenge of being given a 20 page report full of summaries of complex international political situations, and having to work out every day how to compress it down to a single page with stick figures so that it will keep his attention?  It would be exasperating.

Meanwhile, Right wing media figures have to plot their future now.  Mark Levin, one of the more obnoxious and faux smart commentators is threatening to leave Facebook and just live on Parler.   Good - I tend to think that self exile into poorly run echo chambers will only hurt their long term credibility.  Like Catallaxy, any outsider looking in will just see how they dumb themselves down by the mutual support of ignorance and ideologically motivated incredulity as to facts and real expertise.  

Fox News will be most interesting - but I think they will just pretend they never really believed the conspiracy theories about the election that they promoted, start distancing themselves from Trump, and try to be the "respectable" face of the Right - you know, where huge deficits of Republican doing become the nations most urgent crisis, climate change is denied as a socialist plot, and other such continual hypocritical rubbish.   But will that work for the likes of Lou Dobbs and Judge Box of Whine?  Ideally, they abandon ship to OAN and encourage a permanent split on the Republican side between Always Trumpers and the rest.   Which, I think, would cause many  GOP politicians to start to spill the beans over how impossible they found it to engage meaningfully with Trump, and a raft of embarrassing stories will emerge.  Which Always Trumpers will never believe, despite the source.

If he were not such a complete embarrassment to himself, I would also be interested in what Scott Adams has to say about this outcome.  I will check later.

I would also say that if not now, by at least in January, it's the end of QAnon.   It would be most delightful if the creator of it is exposed as a 22 year old nerd who lives with his parents and thought it was a huge joke to test how gullible how many Americans can be.   But even if he (or she) is never exposed, surely the pretence of 9 D chess still being played by an out-of-office Trump to vanquish the Deep State simply can't survive a competent Biden presidency.   I think the creator of it will just let it fade away. 

That's my current guess, anyway...

Fargo runs out of steam

I have watched the first two episodes of Season 4 of Fargo, and by mid-way through the second one, I told my son it just didn't seem very good.   

I hadn't even read any reviews of it before then, but now that I check Metacritic, there are a lot of 50% or less reviews from the biggest papers saying things like "it's not terrible, but it feels disappointing and stale compared to previous seasons".

So, I feel justified.

As it happens, I still have never watched Season 1, which I think a lot of people liked.  I loved Season 2 though, but did feel Season 3 started to press the credibility too far.     

Yes, count me surprised too

I don't know why Noah tweeted about this at the moment, but some suggestions as to why it is true follows: 

In more disturbing cute furry animal news

The New York Times notes that the COVID 19 mink cull in Denmark is causing real political problems:

The slaughter of minks in Denmark to prevent the spread of a potentially dangerous new strain of the coronavirus has prompted a political crisis in the country, with the minister of agriculture forced to step down and the government in danger of collapse.

The cull has led to a political crisis in Denmark, with right-wing parties accusing the government of using the pandemic to try to end mink farming in the country. Denmark is home to some of the world’s largest mink farms, with an estimated population of more than 15 million.

The opposition is calling for Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to resign after a hurried decision to cull the animals after a mutated strain of the virus was found to have made the leap from the animals to humans....

When Ms. Frederiksen ordered the killing of all the animals in Denmark two weeks ago, the military had to step in to assist the country’s approximately 1,100 mink farmers in the slaughter.

Mogens Jensen, the minister of agriculture, condemned the rapid action taken by the government, saying it had no legal basis to kill the animals and destroy the industry.

On Thursday, a Danish newspaper, B.T., reported that Mr. Jensen and five other ministers had warned in September that culling beyond the infected areas was illegal.

The slaughter was halted midway through the effort and the focus shifted to culling minks only in the vicinity of the outbreak tied to the mutated strain of the virus.

But Mr. Jensen had already lost the support of the government and was forced to step down.

The culling of the minks has been met by a broad public backlash, with a study by Aarhus University finding support for the government falling by 20 percent.

 It's a little hard to understand whether the public political backlash is inspired by a Right wing-ish "how dare you try to kill our beloved fur industry", or a more Left wing "how dare you kill those cute animals unnecessarily."   

I mean - how much public awareness is there in Denmark of what mink farms look like?  Because, frankly, to this outsider, the permanently cage bound conditions of these animals doesn't make the practice look at all humane. 

Unsurprisingly, anti fur activists see this as an opportunity to close down the industry permanently.  And if it does, it will mean that this video effort to paint Danish mink farming in as positive a light as possible was all for nothing.   As a PR effort, it transparently is a case of "tries too hard".

The industry was probably on the way out anyway:

Wearing fur remains relatively acceptable in Denmark—enough so that hip young designers like Astrid Andersen and Saks Potts still incorporate it into their collections. But changing tastes and increased animal-welfare concerns have led many of the world’s top fashion designers—from Versace to Ralph Lauren to Vivienne Westwood to Chanel—to drop it from their collections. Many retailers as well, including department stores like Macy’s and online outlets like Farfetch, have pledged to stop selling the product. Fur farming is already banned in the U.K., and France recently announced it would ban mink fur farming by 2025. On the heels of a coronavirus outbreak in its own mink flock, the Netherlands moved up its own plan to phase out mink farming; originally planned for 2024, it must now be complete by March 2021. 

So yeah, while I don't wish illnesses on humans in order to stop farming I am uncomfortable with, I guess at least something I approve of came out of COVID. 

Potential cheaper workers for manicure shops

This otter behaviour - nibbling down her owner's fingernail, without biting her finger - is pretty unexpected and remarkable.  Not to mention close to peak animal kingdom kawaii. (OK, if the fingernail biting doesn't strike you as cute, the second part of the video of the otter seemingly feigning lack of interest in a stick surely is.)

Time for the Reverse Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution (which needs a better title)

I was thinking about this article from the Brookings Institute over the weekend:

Biden-voting counties equal 70% of America’s economy. What does this mean for the nation’s political-economic divide? 

Here's an extract:

...the stark economic rift that Brookings Metro documented after Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 victory has grown even wider. In 2016, we wrote that the 2,584 counties that Trump won generated just 36% of the country’s economic output, whereas the 472 counties Hillary Clinton carried equated to almost two-thirds of the nation’s aggregate economy.

A similar analysis for last week’s election shows these trends continuing, albeit with a different political outcome. This time, Biden’s winning base in 477 counties encompasses fully 70% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy. (Votes are still outstanding in 110 mostly low-output counties, and this piece will be updated as new data is reported.)...

So, while the election’s winner may have changed, the nation’s economic geography remains rigidly divided. Biden captured virtually all of the counties with the biggest economies in the country (depicted by the largest blue tiles in the nearby graphic), including flipping the few that Clinton did not win in 2016.

By contrast, Trump won thousands of counties in small-town and rural communities with correspondingly tiny economies (depicted by the red tiles). Biden’s counties tended to be far more diverse, educated, and white-collar professional, with their aggregate nonwhite and college-educated shares of the economy running to 35% and 36%, respectively, compared to 16% and 25% in counties that voted for Trump.

Trump's appeal to the less well educated was well documented.    And his appeal to less economically important regions seems to be shown as well.

Trump/Republican belief in conspiracy theory is not just dangerous to democracy, it's dangerous to the globe, given they treat climate change as a fraud conducted by socialist scientists.

In Australia, you see a similar dynamic - climate change denialism is biggest in National Party members, isn't it, and they come from rural electorates.

The irony in all of this is that the actual socialist revolution disaster of the Khmer Rouge was all about depopulating cities to get everyone farming.  (The Chinese attempts at farming collectivisation in the Great Leap Forward and subsequent Cultural Revolution being the inspiration, also with terrible results.)  

But now, all the bad ideas come from the rural and less educated areas and have undue influence over how us reality based, city sophisticates, need to run the place. 

I like a drive through the countryside as much as the next city slicker, but if I were trying to organise a better world now, I think there's a good case for depopulating the countryside and rural towns.    

With automation we probably need far fewer people on farms anyway. And cities are supposed to be much more efficient for energy use.   And they vote for fewer numbnuts. 

So, here's the plan:  minimum city size of 1 million.   Round up people from the smaller, non-viable towns and make them live at least 50 km from the nearest city.   Those who must stay on the land for the good of the nation (vineyard growers, for example!) must agree to send their children to university.

The countryside to be reserved for day trippers.   (OK, I'll allow weekends.)

Farming to be more automated than ever before.  (If mines, mining trains, and container shipping ports can be as automated as they now are, there's room for a lot more automation in the fields.)

We have to give up on it being a good idea for people to live in the country.  It's clearly dangerous and a breeding ground for bad ideas.  

OK, and before you say that the failed communist plans were due to city elites sitting around and having bad ideas about how they could control rural populations and activities that they didn't understand at all :   yes true - but my Revolution is about not leaving a rural population there in the first place.   And all I am saying about farming is not that we need more, or less of it, or that it needs anything radical - just that it can be done with a lot fewer people given modern technology.

Of course, those who oppose such a plan - such as the IPA - I make a special exemption for them living in the city.   In fact, they are the only ones who should be forced onto the land.   Sinclair Davidson, John Roskam and the smarmy kids waiting for Liberal pre-selection who work there would do well trying to run a sheep station near Longreach, on quasi-libertarian principles, I'm sure...

You know it makes sense. 

Now for a better name.

Update:   this post was also inspired by my sympathy to takes like this on the American election;

The chapter about schooling is over

I'm feeling a bit...um...not exactly melancholic, but a touch of sadness about time passing.  Perhaps it's a twinge of foreboding of empty nest syndrome approaching, too.

You see, my daughter finished Year 12 today.  She didn't get emotional, but it reminded me of the mixed feelings I had when I finished high school.   On the weekend she will head off to a Noosa "schoolies" stay with her friends - which is not going to help with that "she'll be leaving home soon" feeling.

I think a lot of Year 12 students this year might not be feeling as emotional as in other years, due to the considerably smaller amount of time they spent together at school due to the COVID-19 shut down. So they probably already felt the start of distancing from each other at the start of the year.  It's a theory... 

Also, my son has finally got his licence and went driving alone for the first time today.   That's another change to briefly occupy the mind with imagined disasters, before squashing them into the corner of the brain reserved for thoughts you really shouldn't spend time thinking.

Anyway, such is life.   Maybe I deserve a drink tonight.  Oh yeah, I am cooking.  I had better go... 

 

 

The conspiracy theory problem, again

This article at Vox about the terrible state of conspiracy theory belief in America is pretty good.   I'm not sure, however, that I agree with it's apparent conclusion that there is not much you can do to stop it, other than wait for people to grow out of it.

In other vegetarian news

I see that McDonalds, which has badly fallen out of favour with me and my family, is bringing in a "McPlant" burger - presumably similar to the "Rebel Whopper" which I actually quite like from Hungry Jacks.   (Speaking of HJ - I only ever go to my local one, which is pretty cheap and basic in design and seems to be run by really unhappy teenagers.   I may like one of their burgers now, but the chain still has a negative feeling about it, if you ask me.  At least McDonalds tried to make their outlets look more stylish.)   

I'm not at all sure how the fancier quality imitation meat market is going.  If my local supermarkets are anything to go by, sure, there are lots of start ups trying to sell vegetarian burgers, mince, and imitation chicken meat, but it often seems to be being sold at a discount because the expiry date is about to run out.  And there is something of a price issue - they are more expensive than real meat patties that involved raising a cow, trucking it, killing it, grinding it up, making it into patties and transporting it.   I guess economies of scale have something to do with it, but you would have thought that something resembling a meat patty made from vegetable protein should be able to be made at the same price as a real meat one.  

I don't even know that HJ Rebel Whopper is a success - it was heavily promoted at the start, and was high in prominence at the drive-thru sign, but the last time I went there, it had gone to a hard to spot corner of the signage.  This does not augur well.

I should really try more of the frozen, Asian imitation meats.  But one I really liked a few years ago - a sort of fake chicken but made from mushrooms and with a pleasingly firmer texture than you usually get from such products - I have not been able to find again, last time I looked.

Anyway, I still feel I should be making more of an effort to increase the vegetarian meals at home.  I still say I am never going to feel too guilty about eating a prawn or mussel, though.

Nut roasts noted

I don't know why - perhaps it's just my general fondness for nuts as a very filling form of vegetarian snack/food - but these recipes for "nut roasts" mostly sound pretty appealing.

Vegetarians rejoice: 10 nut roast recipes that won’t let you down