The problem continues

First, let me predict that, with the large number of White House resignations yesterday, there is a lot more disclosure to come about Trump and his family's personal desire to see yesterday's historic  insurrection happen and succeed.

Secondly, here is some Twitter commentary worth preserving:

Yes, the theme of responsibility from within the GOP is the key distressing thing  here.  They (or at least half of them)  are still endorsing the RW alternative reality universe even after seeing the consequences in front of their gas masked faces.

But the larger scale issue is that they are willing and gullible pawns of the RW media alternative reality universe, which learnt nothing from yesterday:

Yes: the long term problem is the information alternative reality and hyperbolic political scare universe (in which formerly centrist positions are denounced as socialist suicide) originating in RW media that has brainwashed such a large part of the American voting population, including (it would seem) at least half of Republican politicians.

If moderate Republicans don't push back, the problem continues.

Not good

Well, I guess they figure no one from the US is going to be on the phone to them complaining (for the next couple of days, anyway).

 

I like the sarcasm

 

While we are waiting for events in Washington to play out...

....I offer a diversion:   Google suggested I watch this bit of real estate porn (not normally my scene, but I follow The All Knowing One's recommendations quite often.)   It's a pretty new apartment in a very skinny and tall building in New York:

You know the biggest thing that kept crossing my mind while watching it?   Those full length glass windows look so dirty.   The top of the building is still under construction, oddly, so maybe they haven't got their glass cleaning system going yet; but if I moved into a $28 million (USD) apartment and I was looking through scummy glass windows/walls all the time, I would be annoyed.

Anyway, I still don't care for the idea of being high in the sky and only full length glass walls keeping me from the elements (and falling 43 floors to my death).   The next time a sonic boom creating meteor passes over New York, I will feel vindicated.   

In a pickle

In December, I bought some red radishes at Mulgowie, and decided to pickle them (the first time in my life I had pickled anything, as it happens.)

There are many ways suggested on the internet, all involving various amounts and types of vinegar and sugar.  I went with this recipe, and I thought it worked pretty well.  I like eating them on sandwiches for the crunch, moisture and flavour they add.

 Oddly enough, no one else in the family thinks they are nice.   Now I have gone past the recommended "eat within two weeks", but I suspect any unhealthy growth in them is going to be pretty obvious.  (They are also in the fridge.)   But lots of sites say "eat within 1-2 weeks after opening".   I don't know - seems a tad overly cautious to me.

Nice summary of the American Right

From Peter Wehner writing in The Atlantic:

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe. I’m guessing that many of them haven’t read Nietzsche, but they have embraced his philosophy of perspectivism, which in its crudest form posits that there is no objective truth, no authoritative or independent criteria for determining what is true or false. In this view, we all get to make up our own facts and create our own narratives. Everything is conditioned on what your perspective is. This is exactly the sort of slippery epistemic nihilism for which conservatives have, for more than a generation, reproached the academic left—except the left comes by it more honestly.

The single most worrisome political fact in America right now is that a significant portion of the Republican Party lives in a fantasy world, a place where facts and truth don’t hold sway, where “owning the libs” is an end in itself, and where seceding from reality is a symbol of tribal loyalty, rather than a sign of mental illness. This is leading the party, and America itself, to places we’ve never been before, including the spectacle of a defeated president and his supporters engaging in a sustained effort to steal an election.

The tactics of Hawley and his many partisan confreres, if they aren’t checked and challenged, will put at risk what the scholar Stephen L. Carter calls “the entire project of Enlightenment democracy.” This doesn’t seem to bother Hawley and many in his party. But what he should know—and, one hopes, does know, somewhere in the recesses of his heart—is that he has moved very far away from conservatism.

 

The sun returns

The previous forecast for days of rain seems to have been a bit out:

Another old movie review no one asked for

So, I finally got around to watching Cabaret on DVD last night.  I was 12 when it came out so it held no particular interest at the time. But of course Liza Minelli kept singing the title song for the next 20 years and then Andrew Bolt started misusing Tomorrow Belongs to Me to bolster his alleged martyrdom, so I had a fair idea of what it was about.

But I have to say I was seriously underwhelmed. 

On the upside, Liza was pretty good as a ditzy, likeable and dislikable in equal parts, character.  You can tell it was a genuine star turn.

But as for the downside: gee, it's an intensely early 70's kind of movie, isn't it?  The period seemed unduly interested in "bad/promiscuous girl/prostitute with a kind heart" stories, if you ask me, as well as ones about open relationships/threesomes (all a part of coming to grips with the sexual revolution I guess) and this story falls into that category.  But it feels thematically very dated now.

Apart from the mystery of whoever told Michael York he could act, the main problem is that I was expecting more drama in the story.  I thought that maybe someone would die or disappear at the hands of the early Nazis; that York would turn out to be a spy; or there would some sort of redemption or improvement of Liza's character.  But no.  There's also a side story of two Jewish characters that has little in the way of drama and doesn't seem to serve much point.

I also wonder about whether the movie overdoes the somewhat grotesque appearance of cabaret of the era.  I mean, the female performers apart from Liza all looked too old, too plump, and with such garish make up that  it made it hard to understand the sex appeal of the shows, even to an older male audience.

I am sure there must be heaps of photography books devoted to the topic, so I will go looking and report back one day.  I don't expect it looked like the quasi techno rave re-imagining that Babylon Berlin gave nightclubs of the time, but I wonder if the movie goes too far the other way and makes it look too dingey.

Anyway, can cross that one off the list of famous movies I feel I should have seen by now.  Wish it had been better.

More playing with the camera

That was a couple of days ago, as was this:

Unfortunately, the rest of the week is going to be like this:

This is actually the first I can recall of many Christmas - New Year beach holidays over the years which will have a majority of days wet.  So no big complaints - our luck has been pretty good.

Proving the world is round (from sea level)

My annual short but well earned break is, for a change, taking place with a fair bit of ocean view. Like this: 

It occurred to me today that, although I have stayed in ocean view apartments before, I had never tried very hard to check out the old proof of the world being round by watching closely how a tall ship disaplears from view. The problem is, of course, that you need to spot a ship going in the right direction away from the coast, and not just parallel to it. This is likely the reason I hadn't done this before

Today was my lucky day, and to prove it, I even have the shots taken through my binoculars. 

Here's the first shot (just holding the phone lens up to the binocular's eyepiece): 

Let me crop that for you: 

This was exciting: a ship heading away by about a 45 degree angle. It did go behind a tree for about 20 to 30 minutes. 

But when emerged into sight, there was a lot less to see: 

Close up crop: 

And finally, a bare white smudge, being the top of the ship: 

And thus we have the  reverse of a tall ship's mast being sighted before the rest comes into view. 

I thought this cool, even though my kids just rolled their eyes. 

Anyway.. Back to holiday stuff.. Like testing out night mode on my phone's camera:

Nice. 

Christmas 2020

I don't recall reading about the first Christmas card before, but this is it. Smithsonian magazine explains that it was privately produced for one family in England in 1843, and it does contain the surprising detail of young children apparently being given wine to drink. And to think both of mine have now reached adulthood and I never gave that a try.

Have a good Christmas, folks. 

Fancy

This video is more or less an ad for Otis elevators, but the imagery it presents of the re-vamped Empire State Building is still pretty pleasing.   (I see now that this renovation has been open for a year or so, but this is the first I have heard of it.)

Conjuncted

Lo and behold! Brisbane actually got clear-ish skies for this evening's viewing of the Jupiter and Saturn conjunction. Here it is, taken just on my phone and cropped... Your can see it's two dots.. just: 

 

Ah, no...now that it's on my laptop, the dots are bigger than I expected.  Cool.

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.