True crime issues

From an NPR review of a book about an apparently over-looked serial killer in New York in the early 1990's, this paragraph about "true crime" writing (and TV - it's really getting too prominent on Netflix, if you ask me) sounds about right:

Last Call is journalist Elon Green's first book, but he is not new to the genre of true crime, nor is he a stranger to the problems that lie within it, most notably the genre's enduring, pernicious whiteness, and how it has trained us to believe that white women are most often the victims of murder (this is not true; the most commonly murdered demographic are men, by other men). The genre has also trained us into believing that serial killers are masterminds, evil geniuses, rather than opportunists who get lucky — or that they treat murder like some kind of art (a la Hannibal). In other words, the killers often become the focus, the object of fascination.

This is not true in Last Call, which puts the victims first, and which, when it does reveal the discovery of the killer, doesn't attempt to make him seem like an anti-hero.

Another bit from further down, which I hadn't heard of before:

There's a stink to the judge's decision that's reminiscent of the attitude police had when one of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims, drugged, naked, and bleeding, escaped into the street only to be politely returned to Dahmer's clutches by police officers who chalked up the incident as a "domestic squabble between homosexuals" (the victim, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was 14; Dahmer was 31).

Wow.

By the way, there is a little bit more description of the murders - committed by a gay man who found his victims in New York's gay bar scene in the early 1990's - in this review of the book at The Guardian.

Zapping desire

I haven't read anything about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for cognitive improvement for a while.  Oddly, this seems a subject that has never attracted much mainstream media attention, for whatever reason.

But I see in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (thank you Sci Hub), that there is another purpose for which TMS has recently been tried - to see if it can dampen sexual arousal in those who suffer from hypersexuality.  Although this was just a "proof of concept" study, the authors seems encouraged that it did work on dampening sexual arousal.   

The study was pretty basic, though.  And if I read the graphs properly, it wasn't like it killed all arousal after a 15 minute treatment.  But it did seem to have a effect on those who received the real TMS over those who received the sham version.

Interestingly - the study seemed to confirm that stimulation to only the right side had an effect.  The area of the brain is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC to its friends:

Meta-analytic neuroimaging findings provide robust evidence for bilateral involvement of the DLPFC in neural processing ofvisual sexual stimuli.10  Our study complements this correlative evidence by showing a causal brain-behavior relationship between the right (but not left) DLPFC and sexual arousal. More specifically, it demonstrates that increasing the activity of the ight DLPFC by high-frequency rTMS leads to a decrease in sexual arousal. Thus, this relationship suggests a specific role of the right DLPFC in regulating, that is, inhibiting, sexual arousal.Moreover, our results affirm previous conclusions, drawn from fMRI, that the right DLPFC is involved in self-regulation of sexual arousal due to its increased activity during attempted inhibition of sexual arousal,  that seems to be specific to the sexual domain.

So, it seems that stimulating the part of the brain that is involved in resisting sex stimulation aids inhibition of arousal.

The paper also mentions that it had been thought that deep brain stimulation of the hypothalamus might work.  But (apart from requiring surgery), it might have an unwanted side effect (my bold):

Based on case reports of stereotaxic interventions in paraphilic patients in the 1970s, the ventromedial hypothalamus was recently hypothesized to represent a promising target for deep brain stimulation.  Although the side effects of deep brain stimulation in general might be lesser than systemic side effects of antiandrogenic drug therapies,it is undeniable that side effects of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques might even be comparatively negligible. Considering not only the involvement in sexual arousal but also its crucial role for encoding sexual preference,33neurostimulation of the hypothalamus might lead to unwanted side effects regarding sexual orientation, for example altered sexual partner preference as observed in male ferrets with lesions of the preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus. In contrast, our non-invasive approach of cortical stimulation may provide a more specific, better tolerated,and safer method that is easy to apply

Well, that's an invitation to Google the topic of "stereotaxic interventions" (I think just means surgical work on lesions) on the hypothalamus and its effect on human sexual behaviour.   From the 2006 paper Neurological Control of Human Sexual Behaviour: Insights from Lesion Studies:

In the 1970s, certain psychosurgical techniques were developed to target sexual behaviour. These were based on experimental work in animals that demonstrated that destruction of the hypothalamic ventromedial nuclei led to the conversion of feline post‐amygdalectomy hypersexuality to hyposexuality.¹³ Roeder and colleagues¹⁴ subsequently developed a stereotaxic method of treating “sexual deviations” in humans. Stereotaxic lesions of the ventral medial hypothalamic nucleus were performed in 10 patients with “sexual deviation” ranging from paedophilic homosexuality to intractable exhibitionism. The results showed that sex drive was diminished or abolished in all cases.¹⁴

Some more specific examples of how brain abnormality has led to problematic sexual behaviour: 

Poeck and Pilleri¹⁵ described a female patient who displayed periodic hypersexual and aggressive behaviour after encephalitis of unknown aetiology. Neuropathological examination revealed extensive lesions to limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, thalamic nuclei and the fornix. Ortego and colleagues¹⁶ described a woman with neuropathologically confirmed multiple sclerosis who developed hypersexuality and multiple paraphilias, including paedophilia, zoophilia and incest over the 2 months prior to her death. She had extensive lesions of limbic structures, including the hypothalamus, basal frontal, septal and temporal regions. Frohman and colleagues¹⁷ described a male patient with altered sexual behaviour characterised by an obsessive and insatiable desire to touch women's breasts. Neuroimaging showed enhancing lesions on the right side of the hypothalamus and mesencephalon.  

The article goes on to give lots of other examples of problems within other parts of the brain that can led to hypersexuality.   

It's all a little disturbing to read such cases, due to the damage they may cause to "faith" in self control and free will.   I would hope it's more an example of "extreme cases making for bad law", so to speak:  you really don't want people who don't have brain lesions to think they can follow impulses because they're just a meat robot with no control.      

On the up side, maybe someone is working on Woody Allen's orgasmatron via TMS?  Ha.  (Actually, the only thing I see about using TMS to increase libido has been about women.)

 

Twitter humour

 

Consider the colon

There's a rather interesting article at Scientific American:

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

and I thought this paragraph, taking a sort of comparative overview of our digestive systems, was pretty interesting:

Our guts are remarkably similar to those of chimpanzees and orangutans--gorillas are a bit special--which are, in turn, not so very different from those of most monkeys. If you were to sketch and then consider the guts of different monkeys, apes and humans you would stop before you were finished, unable to remember which ones you had drawn and which ones you had not. There is variation. In the leaf-eating black and white colobus monkeys (among which my wife and I once lived in Boabeng-Fiema, Ghana) the stomach is modified into a giant fermentation flask, as if the colobus were kin to a cow. In leaf-eating howler monkeys the large intestine has become enlarged to take on a similarly disproportionate role, albeit later on in digestion. But in most species things are not so complex. An unelaborated stomach breaks down protein, a simple small intestine absorbs sugars and a large (but not huge) large intestine ferments whatever plant material is left over. Our guts do not seem to be specialized hominid guts; they are, instead, relatively generalized monkey/ape guts. Our guts are distinguished primarily (aside from our slightly enlarged appendix) by what they are missing rather than what they uniquely possess. Our large intestines are shorter than those of living apes relative to the overall size of our gut (more like 25 percent of the whole, compared to 46 percent of the whole in chimps). This shortness appears to make us less able to obtain nutrients from the cellulose in plant material than are other primates though the data are far from clear-cut. The variation in the size and details of our large intestines relative to those of apes or gorillas have not been very well considered. In a 1925 study the size of colons was found to vary from one country to the next with the average Russian apparently having a colon five feet longer than the average Turk. Presumably the differences among regions in colon length are genetically based. It also seems likely that the true human colonic diversity has not yet been characterized (the above study considered only Europe). Because of the differences in our colons (and ultimately the number of bacteria in them) we must also vary in how effectively we turn cellulose and other hard to break down plant material into fatty acids. One measure of the inefficiency of our colons is our farting, which we all know varies person to person. Each stinking fart is filled with a measure of our variety.³ Aside then from the modest size of our colon, our guts are strikingly, elegantly, obviously, ordinary.  

 

At last, a Dr Seuss excuse

I'm not making this up:  for some years, I have occasionally wondered if I could find an excuse to insert a joke reference in a post to an unpopular Dr Seuss title "My Testicles Need Spectacles" - and I could never think of one.

The time has now arrived.  I will soon start looking for Seuss like illustrations that can be adapted for the cover art...

Singapore and floating solar

I've been complaining for a year or two that floating solar cells are an obviously good idea, but no one listens.

But look, my favourite effectively one Party state with very competent technocratic inclined leadership is building quite a bit of it.

Space-starved Singapore builds floating solar farms in climate fight

Neat.

Although floating solar cells at sea must be fraught with difficulties in most parts of the world due to the problem of waves, I would assume that the permanently pretty calm conditions around Singapore must make it pretty ideal for this system.  Only if there weren't so many ships wanting to be there, too.

More American nonsense

 

Trial by media the only option Scott Morrison and Christian Porter left open

I find this exasperatingly stupid.

The only reason we now have people like Andrew Bolt and even his ideological enemy Phillip Adams attacking or questioning the credibility of a rape claim made by a deceased women (Adams tweeted concern about Crikey reporting that it may be a case influenced by recovered memory therapy - or theory?) is because Morrison and Porter tried to tough it out by pretending that a Police non investigation is the same as an actual investigation.   

So now we have the unedifying spectacle of Bolt publishing an example of what was in the material the women's friends sent to politicians, and attacking Labor for saying it was a "credible" claim, and tonight we will have Four Corners presumably with a few people the deceased knew saying that she seemed credible in her recall to them.

It could all have been avoided by Porter stepping down while a discrete, independent inquiry was held.  Seems to me it could have been finalised within 4 to 6 months, tops;  and the media would have stopped talking about it.

PS:   if there is stuff in the dossier that makes it look like an independent investigation would find insufficient grounds for acting on the complaint in any manner - how stupid does Morrison (and Porter) look for taking the apparent tactical decision ("can't blame me for not acting if I didn't read the material") of saying they had not read the details before deciding no investigation is warranted?

 

Monday observations

*  A minor but very useful change made to my Android settings - using the power button to hang up on a call.  I have found hanging up an issue if, during a call, I have gone looking for something else on the phone - like a contact number I wanted to pass on.  I then have had the fiddly task of finding the "phone" screen again amongst other open apps, and it's a bit of a pain.   

But seeing I usually hold the phone in my left hand, I have a finger close to the power button all the time, and using it to hang up is much simpler.

You can thank me later. 

*  A Democrat/Biden victory on COVID support is a pretty big deal.   But in conspiracy land:

*  I have been meaning to link to Jonathan Chait's interesting column from a week or two ago:

The Republicans’ Long War to Roll Back the New Deal Is Finally Over

It starts with this:

The Democratic Party is on the verge of passing an economic-rescue bill twice the size of the one they enacted under Barack Obama. And yet the Republican opposition, which could block any bill by turning just one senator, has invested shockingly little energy in its opposition. While no Republicans seem likely to vote in favor, they have responded with resignation, rather than the paroxysms of outrage they mustered against previous Democratic administrations (and over far more limited measures).

Biden’s relief bill is extremely popular, yes — but this is a result of the GOP’s muted opposition as much as it is a cause. Meanwhile, Republican leaders are assenting to a restoration of earmarks, a budgetary practice they had once flamboyantly banned as a symbol of big government excess.

Many observers in both parties anticipated that the switch to a Democratic president would drive the GOP back to the libertarian purity that it has habitually clung to in opposition. But more than a month in, barely a sign of it can be found. The absence of a renewed anti-government impulse suggests a profound historic change may be afoot: The Republican Party is finally abandoning its crusade to roll back the New Deal.

But go read the rest.

 

A good summary

So, a different law professor (Ben Saul in Sydney - never heard of him before) has put up in a twitter thread the position with having an independent inquiry into Porter.  I agree with it completely:

 My legal views on Christian Porter: 1) it is normal that the same conduct of a person may be subject to different legal processes for different purposes - criminal, civil, employment, disciplinary, human rights, ombudsperson, coronial etc

2) The standards of proof may differ between processes for different purposes. Non-criminal processes may not depend on the existence of any criminal process, let alone a conviction on evidence beyond reasonable doubt, or the views of police

3) The govt is not legally required to establish an ad hoc inquiry into the matter. It is a political question of what our democracy expects of the character and fitness of any politician, particularly a cabinet minister and first law officer

4) and whether we trust the Prime Minister alone to judge it when he has a clear partisan political conflict of interest, the matter is so serious, and larger issues of violence against women are of such public concern

5) It is well accepted that the content of due process varies according to context. An inquiry for determining the fitness of the Attorney-General could readily meet necessary due process standards if appropriately structured  

6) It is irrelevant that Porter thinks all he could do in an inquiry is deny the allegations. It is his choice not to respond more fully. The purpose of an inquiry is to allow the complainant’s evidence to be independently tested so far as possible...

7) including by considering any views Porter may wish to put after he is fully informed of the evidence; to forensically test his version of events; and to consider other evidence or witnesses. An inquiry would ensure, not undermine, due process in these circumstances (end)  (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1367382998727847940)

I noticed Phil Coorey wrote a column bemoaning "no one will ever know the truth", and indicating that this means there is no point in having an independent inquiry.   This is a completely ill conceived criticism, and it sure as hell hasn't stopped governments calling enquiries into historical matters of much less consequence than a criminal sexual assault by the first law officer of the nation.  ("Ms Gillard,  did you or did you not pay for that kitchen renovation?")

No one knows the details of the evidence this woman, and/or her friends, have compiled.   The woman's family would like an enquiry now.

Sure, there is every chance that the enquiry will conclude that the events of the night concerned are so uncertain that Porter should be given the benefit of the doubt (even applying a civil law "balance of probabilities" test) - but you don't know that for sure until you have the enquiry.

The social media rumour mill which Coorey is complaining about actually makes it more important to have an enquiry.   

If Porter had any sense, he would see that the best chance of getting past this would be to step aside and co-operate with an independent enquiry.   

But he has been a terrible Attorney General all round, so why should he stop now?

Update:   and more along these lines:

We're dealing with dishonest idiots here

Matthew Ygelesias is making some good points lately (not that I always agree with him):

 

Don't tell Carlson, but the Chinese are coming after his precious bodily fluids

I noticed this a few days ago:

and then read this today (my bold):

In a new paper published by Nature Communications, The Lundquist Institute (TLI) Investigator Wei Yan, MD, Ph.D., and his research colleagues spell out an innovative strategy that has led to the discovery of a natural compound as a safe, effective and reversible male contraceptive agent in pre-clinical animal models. Despite tremendous efforts over the past decades, the progress in developing non-hormonal male contraceptives has been very limited.  

The compound is triptonide, which can be either purified from a Chinese herb called Tripterygium Wilfordii Hook F, or produced through chemical synthesis. Single daily oral doses of triptonide induce altered sperm having minimal or no forward motility with close to 100% penetrance and consequently male infertility in 3-4 and 5-6 weeks. Once the treatment is stopped, the males become fertile again in ~4-6 weeks, and can produce healthy offspring. No discernable toxic effects were detected in either short- or long-term triptonide treatment.

So, don't put it past the conspiracy addled brains of the Right to come up with a story that the Chinese have putting triptonide in the water supply of the West in a long term plan to out populate it.

More seriously - it would be pretty incredible if a natural compound found in a herb really did prove to be a super effective and safe male contraceptive.

It's an odd country

Having a read of a story about a transgender (man to woman) person in Korea who was kicked out the military (and now has killed herself), I see this:

South Korea is far less tolerant of the LGBTQ community than its East Asian neighbours.

Being LGBT is often seen as a disability or a mental illness, or by powerful conservative churches as a sin, and there are no anti-discrimination laws in the country.

In Ms Byun's case, anti-LGBT campaigners had attempted to identify her online. They also held demonstrations urging the military to dismiss her after news about the case emerged and have called for further demonstrations.

Which all strikes me as odd, given the extremely obvious and deliberate androgynous styling of K Pop males, especially BTS.  

Meanwhile, in America

Not to mention the Dr Seuss kerfuffle - a decision made by the owners of the books, and under no particular "cancel culture" pressure.

Private high school boys sticking together?

I see Chris Uhlmann is still running with "Porter's been cleared and this is a disgraceful witch hunt" line (which is ludicrous, seeing the police never even properly started an investigation); and some are complaining that Andrew Probyn from the ABC sounded unusually sympathetic to Porter at the end of his press conference.  

Probyn went to Scotch College (all boy's school);  Uhlmann to a Marist Brothers college in Canberra.   Porter himself to an Anglican boys school.

Gives me an uncomfortable feeling that journalist sympathy is only possible if you've also gone to an all boys' high school, with their dubious reputation for seeing all girls as potential sexual conquests.  (An attitude I noticed had developed in guys I knew who went to Catholic boy's education after a mixed sex primary school.)

Update:  Peter van Onselen -

Went to - The Scots College, Sydney.  All boys.

(Also, lots of people pointing out he has openly said he's a friend of Porter.)

On TV this morning, every talking head said that you can't just leave it at this, there has to be a form of independent enquiry.   

And when you think about it, with all the uncertainty as to how the dossier sent to the police was compiled (it is apparently not even certain it was all done by the complainant), open questions about when she started telling friends about it, etc, it is possible that Porter could come out of an enquiry looking better "cleared" than merely by his own denial.   

He is being politically self serving by claiming it is so unfair because he can't prove that something didn't happen. 

Professor black and white

James Allen, the Right wing law professor that who I have long thought a twit, writes about Christian Porter:

And if you agree with me about this [the criminal standard of proof being beyond reasonable doubt, and the accused having the right to cross examine their accuser]  – to repeat myself, many do not – then you will see immediately (as I said) that on the facts of these allegations no legal system with any commitment to fair procedures would ever consider Christian Porter as anything other than wholly innocent.  End of story.  That’s how it should be.  Let me be unequivocally clear about that. 

What he does not want to mention, although being a lawyer he would be completely aware of it, is the civil law standard of proof of "balance of probabilities".    Hence, you have situations where a person is acquitted of a crime, but can still be found civilly liable to pay compensation.   Hello, OJ Simpson.

Questions of appropriateness of positions held in a government should not be decided on simple "did he commit a crime or not according to criminal burden of proof" - especially in a case where no complete police investigation is possible due to the death of the complainant.  

Quite disingenuous, just as Porter's "but no one told me any of the details" claims today.

Porter denial

Bernard Keane makes the point which I agree is the weirdest thing about how Morrison and Porter have chosen to deal with the historical rape allegation:

What has emerged from Christian Porter’s media conference this afternoon — where he vehemently and repeatedly denied the allegations made against him in relation to a sexual assault in 1988 — is a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of multiple parties about some of the gravest claims that can be made against any individual, let alone one occupying the position of chief law officer of the Commonwealth.

First is Porter’s own lack of curiosity about allegations he claims he was aware were circulating about last November — that he had “offended against” (his words) a woman in the past. Porter did not seek to obtain details of the allegations or see the documents involved. And, when asked by the prime minister last Wednesday about the allegations, Porter merely denied them, and did not ask to see the documents involved.

And as part of his insistence that he is the victim of a trial by media (and especially the ABC), Porter says no one has put the allegations to him — a claim that may yet be fiercely contested by others.

It has no bearing on the veracity of the claims made against Porter which, to repeat, he rejects completely. But it is peculiar behaviour for the first law officer of the Commonwealth to be so completely uninterested in claims that would be politically destructive, even to the point of not being sufficiently moved to ask the prime minister to hand a copy to him when asked about them.

But it enabled Porter to insist this afternoon that he had no idea about the claims made against them and to profess outrage that he had been subjected to such a “whispering campaign”.

Then there is Scott Morrison’s own lack of curiosity. The prime minister says he was “fully briefed” on the claims made against Porter but did not bother to read the relevant documents. Nor did he show Porter the documents — an incurious prime minister and an incurious attorney-general.

I cannot see how this attitude can play out well - it makes it look like a case of men protecting men on the part of Morrison in particular:   "I don't even have to read the full details of this matter - if Christian denies it, that's good enough for me."   

I can see no credible way out of this other than to have some form of enquiry - unless Porter just resigns "for health reasons".   While it certainly not impossible that the complaint was an imagined event from a person who suffered mental health issues, you can't have the freaking Attorney General the subject of such an allegation from a person he did socialise with and take the attitude "well, she's died before a police investigation could be started, so (whew) no need to look further into it."    

 

A random post

It's a little surprising, isn't it, that scientists are still working on ways to quickly generate genuinely random numbers.   Here's the start of an article at Science:

Human-made physical random number generators (RNGs) can be traced back 5000 years or more. Early examples such as knucklebones, two-sided throwsticks, or dice have been found in the Middle East, India, and China. RNGs were used for fortune telling and games of chance, with the oldest known board games of similar age as those of the number generators. Today, RNGs are vital for services and state-of-the-art technologies such as cryptographically secured communication, blockchain technologies, and quantum key distribution. Moreover, RNGs are needed in machine learning and scientific applications such as Monte Carlo numerical methods. On page 948 of this issue, Kim et al. (1) demonstrate an ultrafast RNG based on a broad-area laser with a multispot beam that is analogous to generating random numbers by using many dice at once.

Random numbers are often generated by using a software algorithm running on a computer, called “pseudo”-random because the sequence eventually repeats. Moreover, relations among the numbers can exist that reveal that the numbers are not uniformly random. Hence, true RNGs (TRNGs) are of great interest, providing random numbers based on physical measurements that involve some noisy or stochastic process. All TRNGs have some nonidealities, such as generating zeroes more frequently than ones for a binary-output device, which must be mitigated by carefully engineering the device and postprocessing the data to improve the randomness quality.

Some applications require generating random numbers at very high rates, such as encrypting data in cloud-computing data centers, high-speed communication networks, or massive simulations. Photonic devices are a natural fit for these applications because of their potential for high-speed operation, compact size for chip-scale devices, and low power consumption.

Recently, Marangon et al. (3) developed a TRNG that is based on interfering two different lasers on a beam splitter and detecting the resulting powers that emanate from its two output ports. The randomness comes about from quantum fluctuations in a laser due to a process known as spontaneous emission of photons.

I wonder if fortune telling is improved by using the very best form of random number generator - one involving quantum effects, for example.

 

We had a storm

A very tall gum tree fell over in the park near my house.  Honestly, the local birds sounded sad after it.

How long before an attempted repair to this hopeless attempt at political management?

Scott Morrison, and the entire Morrison government, just seem incredibly hopeless at dealing with serious rape and sexual assault claims which have the potential to be politically damaging.   It's like we are watching incompetence in management circa 1980:   I mean, seriously - my job in the second half of the 1980's saw some examples of workplace freak out over how to handle sexual misbehaviour, and I reckon the people I saw responding way back then had more of a clue than this government:

The Prime Minister received an anonymous letter last week penned by friends of a woman who told police she was raped in 1988 by a man who is now a minister in Mr Morrison’s cabinet. The woman has since taken her own life.

Mr Morrison told reporters on Monday he had spoken to the minister in question and he “absolutely” denied the allegations.

Mr Morrison said he had discussed the correspondence with the AFP commissioner, as well as Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary and deputy secretary.

“I had a discussion with the individual, as I said, who absolutely rejects these allegations,” Mr Morrison said.

“And so after having … spoken to the commissioner and to the secretary and deputy secretary at this stage, there are no matters that require attention.”

When asked if he believed the minister’s denial, Mr Morrison said it was a “matter for the police”.

“I’m not the commissioner of police,” he said.

“Allegations of criminal conduct should be dealt with by competent and authorised agencies.”

When asked whether he had read the evidence submitted with the letter, Mr Morrison said he was “aware of the contents”.

“I’ve been briefed on the contents of them. And it was appropriate, as the commissioner himself advised the parliament to refer any allegations to the properly authorities,” the PM said.

“That is the way in our country under the rule of law things like this are dealt with. It is important to ensure that we uphold that. That is the way our society operates.

“Now, these are very distressing issues that have been raised, as there are other issues that have been raised in relation to other members in other cases.

“But the proper place for that to be dealt is by the authorities, which are the police.

“That’s how our country operates. That systems protects all Australians.”

There is no conceivable way a sensible boss would think he could deal with it like this.

I reckon within a week we'll have an inquiry set up, and the cabinet minister standing aside.

It's bleeding obvious you can't tough this one out.

Update:  Chris Uhlmann, an idiot, thinks it would be outrageously unfair for the cabinet member to face any inquiry, because it would "reverse the onus of proof".    Pathetic.

Nostradamus never foresaw this one

Namely, international diplomatic friction over one country wanting to take anal swabs of other nations' citizens:

TOKYO: Tokyo has requested Beijing to stop taking anal swab tests for COVID-19 on Japanese citizens as the procedure causes psychological pain, a government spokesman said on Monday (Mar 1).

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said the government has not received a response that Beijing would change the testing procedure, so Japan would continue to ask China to alter the way of testing....

China's foreign ministry denied last month that US diplomats in the country had been required to take anal swab tests for COVID-19, following media reports that some had complained about the procedure.

 

Weekend stuff

*  Like 95% of young women, my daughter thinks Apple is the only company to consider for phones and laptops, and so I found myself with her in the Brisbane Apple store on Saturday.   

Is it just me, or does the whole Apple store vibe strike other people as way too much like visiting a creepy Scientology outlet?   The uniform; the young, way-too-enthusiastic-for-just-doing-retail attitude; (dare I say) the invitation to part with more money than what more modest religions invite. 

I bet I am not the first to make the comparison, but it really struck me on Saturday.

*  Barramundi:   against my better judgement, tried cooking with it again on Saturday night.   It is a mushy, unpleasantly coloured, wildly over-rated fish, and I don't know why they bother farming it.

*  Watched The Green Book on Saturday.   It's enjoyable enough, and I think the two lead actors are both very good (Viggo Mortensen is ridiculously versatile), but I have criticisms.

I felt the screenplay gave very inadequate basis for understanding how Don Shirley (who I knew nothing about) came to be the way he was.  I mean, we already understand how an American Italian who grew up in the Bronx is the way he is; it's much rarer to find an upper class Black guy in the 1960's who disdains most of Black culture, so isn't that worth some detailed explanation?   

I also thought that it was a bit dramatically flat - I expected some greater racial insult to be the dramatic peak of the film than the refusal of service at the venue's restaurant.   And there was the YMCA incident which I felt was sort of inexplicably glossed over by Viggo's character:  it just seemed a bit implausible to me that an American Italian like that would (more or less) just shrug it off, and later share a hotel room with the guy.    

But it is, of course, well intentioned and handsomely made, so I wouldn't want to put off anyone from seeing it.   

But it you want to be concerned again about the liberties Hollywood routinely takes on true life stories, you can read this Time article which gives an explanation as to why some people who knew Shirley complain about the film, and others think it OK.    (They are many similar article around on other sites.)

COVID's odd effect in Japan

This article at the BBC notes that COVID in Japan seems to have caused an increase in suicide, but only amongst women, which is odd:

Professor Michiko Ueda is one of Japan's leading experts on suicide. She tells me how shocking it has been to witness the sharp reverse in the last few months.

"This pattern of female suicides is very, very unusual," she tells me.

"I have never seen this much [of an] increase in my career as a researcher on this topic. The thing about the coronavirus pandemic is the industries hit most are industries staffed by women, such as tourism and retail and the food industries."

Japan has seen a large rise in single women living alone, many of them choosing that over marriage which entails quite traditional gender roles still. Prof Ueda says young women are also far more likely to be in so-called precarious employment.

On a cheerier note, I hadn't realised that suicide rates had been improving as much as they have over the last 12 years:

In a country notoriously reserved about people talking about their mental health, the article does not explain what is behind this.   
  

An accurate forecast

It surprises me, watching my favourite vloggers, how much time they sometimes say it takes them to edit their videos.  But I also wonder, do so many of them have to follow that jumpy style of editting that is so common.  Less edits would cut down edit time. [To be clear - I know this Tik Tok works  because of the editing, and the Tik Tok format is often based on quick edits.   I am talking more about the way so many vloggers use the constant little edits on longer Youtube videos  when it's just a talk to camera.  Sure, some are cutting out mistakes, but I am sure it is used just as a stylistic device too.] 

I'm also getting a depressing B Ark vision of the future of humanity where in 200 years a tiny outpost of people survive in the Arctic circle, trying to grow crops and editing videos about it.  (And some intellectual will discover that ubiquitous masturbation is about to lead to extinction.)

 

[Having said that, I did like that guy's Tik Tok.  I don't have the app, but I think you can watch it via the Tweet here.]

Yeah, that'll work

In China:

So far, 2021 has been cruel to unhappy Chinese couples. The first blow came on Jan. 1, when a new law went into effect mandating a 30-day cooling-off period for those seeking a divorce. Then, in February, couples that were still seeking to split up found themselves struggling to find online appointments. In parts of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the calendar was backed up for weeks. In Guangzhou, appointments were so scarce that scalpers sold them.

China’s government isn’t apologizing. For years, it took a hands-off approach to marriage and divorce. But steep recent declines in the country’s birth rate are changing minds at the top. A government that once sought to discourage childbearing is now resurrecting traditional and often sexist notions of family and gender to promote it.

The article explains the history of government intervention there into marriage laws.  The concern with the birthrate has led to government badgering of women:

...the end of the one-child policy in 2016 had no meaningful impact on the country’s birth rate. In 2019, the number of births fell 4%, to 10.6 million, China’s lowest level since 1961.

That has left the government eager to find scapegoats as it abandons decades of anti-natalism for an increasingly coercive pro-natalism. Last week, the National Health Commission outlined the factors that, in its view, are impacting fertility in China’s economically depressed northeast region: “economic burdens, infant and child care, and female career development.” The commission is no outlier. About a decade ago, Chinese media began referring to working, unmarried women over the age of 27 by the derogatory term “leftover women,” expressing an anti-feminist (and pro-natalist) attitude that has persisted ever since.

I wonder how popular abortion is now in that country?   I mean, we know it was used to help enforce the one child policy, but now that they want more kids, wouldn't they just consider it making it harder to obtain?

Reports say that they are being, shall we say, unsubtle about its use for the Uighurs:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

 It's pretty incredible, their attitude to controlling society.

The continuing uncertainty over Planet 9

I didn't think it would be so hard to work our whether there really is Planet Nine - but it obviously is. 

Planet Nine is dead; long live Planet Nine? For some years, scientists have debated the existence of an unseen planet at least five times the mass of Earth in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Now, the hypothesis has been dealt a blow by a new analysis of distant, icy objects, which questions the evidence that they are under the gravitational pull of a huge planet.

The findings do not rule out the possibility of a ninth planet orbiting the Sun, and astronomers say more data will be needed to put the debate to rest.

 I would like it to turn out to be a captured black hole, actually.   That would allow for some good science fiction ideas.

A fairly complicated story about some possible new physics

It's not the simplest explanation, but it's worth reading:  How the Universe Remembers Information.

(I think they really should put "Possibly" at the end of that title.)

Still counting

I see via Twitter that Gallup has a new figure out for its survey results on American sexual identification, and the headline story is the (so to speak) rise of the bi:

More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.

Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

The other big thing is the increase in bi identification being mainly in the young, and mainly with women:

Women are more likely to identify as bisexual -- 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

I'm not sure that there is really anything too surprising about this - it's been pretty clear for some time that there it's been increasingly "cool" amongst the youth to identify as being something other than boring old straight, and we already knew young women were ahead of the curve in claiming sexual/gender diversity.  Identity politics itself has been on the up and up.  

But there are some interesting things said about the results on Twitter.  For example, I had never thought of this before, but I read a tweet (that I can't find again right now) that argued that the large number of deaths from AIDS in the 80's and 90's can partly account for why substantially fewer older men identify as gay.

The most dubious result in the survey is probably the transgender identification amongst the younger group, especially "Gen Z":

I'm with the middle comment:  it's a result that really raises questions about how young people are thinking about these categories when they answer the survey.   

Anyway, it all reminded me of a post I wrote in 2013 about estimates at that time of the number of men  who could likely be called gay or bisexual.    (See the comments too.)  At that time, I guesstimated that, if you looked at CDC survey evidence of men who said they had sexual experiences with men, you could probably get to 4 to 5% who could be identified as gay or bisexual, in America at least.*

The Gallup results would now back that up:

 Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.

So, I think my guesstimate still looks good.

 

 

* The figure increases to 20% if you are talking about England.**

** A joke.  Although I am still pretty sure it's the gayest country on the planet.  

   

Cancelled Will is not letting it get him down

I really respect Will Wilkinson.   Arguably, he was the recent victim of one of the stupidest examples of "cancel culture" being mis-used by a boss against a quality, (now) pretty much mainstream liberal writer, but Wilkinson did not moan about it at all, and just went on to set up his own corner of the internet to pump out his great writing.

A recent example:  On the Defensive Prickliness of Anti-Woke Patriotism.  

It's about this:

Why is it so bothersome to admit that there are shameful chapters of cruel injustice in our nation’s history? Why is it so hard to simply accept that the historical record and publicly available comparative evidence suggests that the United States of America is pretty great in a lot of ways and really awful in a lot of ways?

He ends with this explanations of how conservatives "cope" with the dissonance that there is a lot to criticise in the history of the country, while it is also pretty great in many ways:

The easiest way to cope with the story that credible American historians tend to tell is to outsource your expertise identification needs to conservative commentators (they’re expert experts!) who say that you shouldn’t trust them — who say that these out-of-touch woke egghead elites sneering down on all of us from their ivory towers are intentionally spreading misinformation because they hate America, want to tear down what makes it great, and replace it with something bad, foreign and dystopian, like …. I dunno, functional democratic institutions or an adequate social insurance state?

However, dismissing inconvenient truths by impugning the messenger doesn’t fully meet the challenge of keeping on the sunny side. It remains that America has a lot of profound problems that simply cannot be denied. So the next step is to blame all our undeniable problems on the evil and incompetence of your cultural/political rivals while pretending that the places where most Americans live don’t really count as part of the country. This leaves conservatives in a position where they can say that America is unambiguously great … except for all the ways in which the left and “elites” have turned it into a tyrannizing garbage fire.  

This is how you end up with the truly baffling Calvinball of conservative national assessment. America is the greatest country in the history of the world! It is also “not great,” “crippled,” and the victim of “carnage” roughly in proportion to the extent that Republicans don’t control things. A meaty majority of the American population dwells in large metro areas, which are all run by Democrats. These places are thus unmitigated disasters. You might think that an ambiguous “part good, part bad” mixed judgment of America’s merits would be logically inescapable once you’ve committed yourself to the idea that half the country lives in one or another crumbling, corrupt, crowded, crime-infested hellhole. Indeed, it is logically inescapable.

But this isn’t logic; this is a coping mechanism. That’s why the problems that beset America’s cities, whether real or imagined, don’t exactly count against America because they count first against Democrats and Democrats aren’t really American. Or maybe it’s that multicultural Democratic-majority cities don’t count as part of “real” America, so the horrendous problems they are imagined to have can’t drag down America’s greatness score. Either way. 

At the end of all these intellectual and emotional gymnastics is relief. Really, there’s nothing to not be proud of. Because if American history makes you feel bad, it’s a lie. If the places where most Americans live are terrible it doesn’t count because those aren’t real American places that count. If there’s anything about our country that is seriously and undeniably bad, it’s because disloyal fake Americans are preventing us from being the greatest country on Earth by scandalously denying that we are.

I find that analysis completely convincing.

More connected but less...connected

So it seems Noah Smith just noticed an article from 2018 in The Atlantic that noted that young Americans were having less sex than before:

 which led to a couple of Tweets by a guy explaining it:

That sounds (a little depressingly) plausible.  Someone else throws this in:

This all sounds bad from an evolutionary perspective!

A disappointing summer

I suspected as much.  As this article notes, Queensland was (more or less) promised a wet summer due to La Nina, but apart from parts of the far North, it's been pretty dry.

This have been very noticeable around Brisbane, where it seems to me to be quite a few years now since we had a lot of summer rainfall.  Storms have brought just enough intermittent rain to keeps the grass green-ish, but we really haven't had the days of deep, drenching rain that used to be a regular feature of our summers.

It's still possible we may get a very wet autumn, I guess.  I certainly hope we are not heading into a protracted period of low rainfall again, though.   

Illiberal Left noted

Further to my post yesterday, I agree with this sentiment:

I also found via Twitter today this Jonathan Chait article about some of the silliness about "cancelling" people for using words when they are clearly just being quoted, rather than endorsed:  Describing a slur is not the same as using it.

It seems pretty surprising that such a thing needs to be explained in detail, but that's where some of the worst of "cancel culture" has taken us.  

 

A repeat problem

I watched Four Corners last night on management problems in Kakadu National Park.  

Jointly managed by traditional owners and Canberra based (I think) Parks Australia, apparently there has been a lot of argument from the locals that the latter is not listening to them enough.  One example they gave, and a major one for the tourism operators, was the closing down of a walkway to get to the top of a formerly very popular waterfall.   Apparently, traditional owners claimed it came too close to a sacred site, and they had warned Parks Australia.

The show, I have to say, as a piece of journalism, was completely unbalanced.  They did point out that a trio of Parks Australia managers had resigned, but there was no attempt at all to have any of them, or anyone else from Parks Australia, to respond to various claims of the local traditional owners.

You see, I find it hard to believe that Parks Australia would have built the stairway against clear and specific protest from the traditional owners about impact on a sacred site.  I strongly suspect there is more to it than that - unclear input from traditional owners; a expansion of a sacred site from what they had previously considered sacred; or a simple miscommunication.   

The problem seems to be a repeat one - that it is really hard working with aboriginal representative bodies, and I very much doubt that the problem is all (as aboriginal activists claim) on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.

There seems a very good chance that traditional owner expectations as to their opinion always winning on every management issue is going to lead to their own economic loss due to permanently reduced tourism.   One aboriginal community member last night was saying that in fact they shouldn't be putting all their economic eggs into tourism anyway - but he was completely and utterly non specific as to what other enterprises anyone had in mind:  

JOHN CHRISTOPHERSEN, SENIOR COMMUNITY MEMBER: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation are looking at developing tourism in Jabiru, there are a whole range of different options that Jabiru could become used for, rather than tourism. I would not be putting all my eggs in the tourism basket, I can tell you that. A lot more effort needs to be put into the health of our people. The education of our people, employment of our people. There is potential for economic growth in establishing enterprises for our people in the Park. But you have to see beyond the blinkers. Look outside the box, mate. What might be a potential. Tourism is not the be all and end all.     

I always worry that I am sounding too Right wing unsympathetic on aboriginal issues - but it's just that anyone my age has seen decades of claims that if only politicians and non indigenous Australians would listen more to what traditional owners want and need it will all improve.

But it doesn't.  Or not much, anyway.

Maybe I am getting old, but I don't understand this...

 What's it mean to be tribally Right wing but not very Right ideologically?   

I mean, particularly in the American context - to be tribally Right at the moment means you are more than likely living in an evidence free conspiracy world where only election fraud won the election for Biden, Trump remains the saviour of the common man, and Democrats want to destroy civil society.  Not to mention disbelief in climate change, wearing masks for COVID, and not wanting to take a vaccine that would return the world to something more normal.

Who wants to be any part of how wrong that tribalism has gone?

And if you go to Britain - the populist Right led to Brexit, and who really thinks that is still looking a good idea?

I keep saying, but apparently cannot convince Jason Soon - the excesses of the Left in illiberal views on identity politics is pretty minor stuff compared to the crapfest the tribal Right has delivered.

Waving the bloody shirt

There's a very interesting thread by David Neiwert on Twitter about the Right's use of rhetorical tactics that originated post (American) civil war. Here's a link to the Threadreader version, because it's long.

 

 

Barbarian history examined

So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle.  It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland.  (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.)  It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all.  I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)

Anyway:  I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews.  I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out.  (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are  particularly well documented.)   

I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not.   I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans.   But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.   

Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff.   If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.

To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected.   Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.

I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest,  but Spencer explains all of that as well.  His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.

I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy.  Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.

So, well done, everyone.   

And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year.  (It was COVID delayed last year.)

McConnell and others have more work to do if they want the cult to fade

I think that the "establishment" Republicans - those with brains enough to know that it's bad for the party to continue to under the sway of Trump and   his family - has been hoping that one-off denunciations and then just not talking about him anymore might work.   And I guess it might, eventually, if Trump starts getting entangled in too many legal actions.

But polling is indicating that the cult isn't fading fast enough, despite 6 January:

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump's support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided.

"We feel like Republicans don't fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day," Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. "But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don't ever push back."

Half of those polled say the GOP should become "more loyal to Trump," even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone last Monday through Friday. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

 

 

Mars as a "insurance policy"

I am somewhat sympathetic to this:
 

As I have said before, I think it is better to establish the Moon as a nearby lifeboat - store a lot of information, including genetic, up there in the event that a large chunk of the Earth is ruined.

Chinese crankery

As spotted on Twitter:

Mink again

I noted in November that COVID 19 was causing mink culls in Denmark, where raising mink is a big industry.  (I would have thought Scandinavians were nicer than that!)

I see via Washington Post that the industry is also significant in (of all places) Wisconsin;  and mink farmers there are getting vaccinated ahead of the likes of flight attendants, teachers and others.

As with Denmark, there is Youtube PR material by mink farmers emphasising how humane they are, all while showing that the animals seem to live their entire lives in cages that seem pretty damn small to me, given the size of the animal:

 

Wouldn't we think a cat, an animal about the same size, and perhaps of similar mammalian intelligence,  is not being treated humanely if raised for its entire live in a cage like that?    And wouldn't a shed full of cats so raised cause a lot of concern?   But mink get a pass for confinement, it seems.   

There is no doubt, it would seem, that they are well fed (in order to preserve the quality of the fur); but it's a pretty dull life, no?  

Weird design, even for a university

Have a look at this "semi-outdoor" plaza space in Japan, which has a very sci fi movie setting feeling about it:

 

I can't really tell if I like it, or not.  It has a slightly claustrophobic feeling about it from some angles.  

Can anyone wander in there? I also reckon that while it looks all new and pristine now, it's going to get messy pretty soon, with leaves and stuff from outside, unless they have a way of cleaning that enormous looking space.  Maybe it looks bigger than what it is?  

More thoughts:  sort of gives a "human as an ant inside a nest" perspective, doesn't it?   Also - would be something of a worry being there during an earthquake.  I suppose you might be OK if you stand still under one of the holes?

You can read about the architects arty ideas about what he was trying to achieve, here.