The media is very bad at context, sometimes

Even the great Planet America show last week did not seem to emphasise this enough - they showed similar graphs, ran a full length interview with a conservative from the Heritage Foundation, and just a snippet from a Cato Institute guy saying that it's not all Biden pull factors, we've seen seasonal surges before.  This is the graph:

Honestly, how much media attention is being given to the 2019 surge under Trump?  Very little, if you ask me.  There's also pretty small attention being given to the ease with which Trump's wall is being breached.

Planet America, I reckon, too often tries too hard to be "fair" to conservatives and Republicans, and ends up being unbalanced in their favour.

 Update:  yet more context -

That's from this article, which argues:

If you've been reading or watching mainstream media over the past week or so, you've undoubtedly heard a lot about a supposed screaming emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border. More migrants are trying to cross the border, which all three network Sunday shows gave frantic saturation coverage — ABC's This Week nonsensically held a panel segment on the border itself, as if that would somehow lend gravitas to a bunch of talking heads. On Monday, the networks' big morning shows all ran segments calling the story a "crisis" once more. CNN even ran a video of a repeated boat crossing that, as numerous experts testified to The American Prospect, gave every indication of being staged, possibly even by the Border Patrol.

This is nonsense. There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a "crisis." It's an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic.

Sounds pretty accurate to me...

Good gorilla Dads

Well, if you overlook the infanticide they might commit before having their own kids, at least.  Science reports:

A few years ago, four female mountain gorillas left home, abandoning not only their mate—a sick alpha silverback—but their infants, which were barely old enough to feed themselves. They may have sensed that their offspring would be safer with their ailing father than with new males that often kill infants from other groups. Still, most mammals abandoned by their mothers risk an early death, and researchers worried about the young gorillas.

Instead, the scientists got a heartwarming surprise. The juveniles’ uncle, a male gorilla named Kubaha, began to take care of them. “He let them sleep in his nest and climb all over him like a jungle gym,” recalls primatologist Tara Stoinski, chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Kubaha’s willingness to be a foster dad turns out to be surprisingly common in mountain gorillas, according to a new study. An analysis of 53 years of data on mountain gorillas at the Gorilla Fund’s Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda has revealed that when young mountain gorillas lose their mothers—and sometimes their fathers as well—they do not have a greater risk of dying or losing their place in the social hierarchy because the rest of the group buffers them from the loss.....

The study is “terrific,” says Duke primatologist Anne Pusey, who was not part of the work. The data come from one of the longest mammal field studies, she notes, and the number of orphaned gorillas is high enough to compare directly with data from young chimps. Those data show that chimps die young or suffer other ill effects if they lose their mothers because females don’t change groups often—and infants are more dependent on their care longer than are gorillas.

Now, researchers need to comb decades of data for bonobos and other species to see whether they, too, adopt motherless infants more often than believed, Zipple says. A study published last week found that two bonobo females adopted infants from another social group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The findings suggest such altruistic behavior is not unique to humans—and that dads play an important role in primate youngsters’ lives, says Duke behavioral ecologist Susan Alberts, who was not part of this study. “Nonhuman primates often are really good dads,” she says. “This shows that paternal care goes very deep in our primate lineage.”

 

 

Odd things that continue to worry me

I get the feeling I have mentioned one or more of these before, but just have had an urge to repeat them:

*   I am forever puzzled by the "too low to make sense to me" cost of carrots.  Is it is a sign of something wrong with how agriculture works in Australia?   I would not have these thoughts if they were, say, double the cost.  Perhaps I should offer to pay more at the check out?   I'm sure that's a conversation which wouldn't be awkward at all.

*  A significant reduction in CO2 emissions will not be possible until we outlaw Pringles, or imitation Pringles.  I mean, just slice and fry potatoes for a nice snack - don't expend all that energy on drying and powdering them, only to reconstitute it to bake them again.   It's ridiculous.

*  Elon Musk enjoys, I suspect, his Twitter avatar of his Starship looking rather pointy-phallic:  

*   OK, this one is serious:   just how much unnecessary crap do governments think we can put into orbit before it becomes so full of dangerous shards of debris that we can't do anything important there?:

China is ramping up plans for government-sponsored satellites to beam internet from space, taking on U.S. rivals like SpaceX and Amazon in the race to own the next frontier of connectivity.

Why it matters: There's growing concern that China is trying to enter the space internet market with the same strategy it used on earth with Huawei and 5G — use a state-backed company to undercut competitors and spread global influence.

What's happening: China is attempting to launch its own network to rival global competitors.

• China's "StarNet" would launch 10,000 satellites in the next 5 to 10 years, according to an Asia Times report that cites a publication run by the official China News Service.
• China intends to build a space infrastructure system for communications, navigation and remote sensing with global coverage as part of its latest five-year plan.

*   Speaking of China:   as far as I can tell, they have become good enough at rocketry, but still can't put together a decent airliner.  (And I think their military jets are all based on other nation's designs and tech, too.)   Doesn't that seem a little odd?   Maybe your basic rocket is relatively simple compared to a 777, and you don't have to worry about using it twice, so I guess it makes sense.   [And I have read that airline manufacture requires so many components that they all inevitably have input from other nations, even if it is a Boeing or (obviously) an Airbus.]   Is this technological barrier a reason to doubt China is genuinely in a position to take over the world - that if you can't put together a decent fighter or passenger jet in your nation, because other nations don't want to help you do it, you're not as powerful as you think you are?   

And toilets - based on a couple of Youtube videos, it seems Chinese toilets are, outside of your decent big city hotels, routinely horrendous.   Again, perhaps this is a measure of international power -  you are not a country ready to take over the world while ever a significant number of your toilets are holes in the ground.  But wait - maybe we only 10 years left!:

A “Toilet Revolution” was launched in China five years ago. The aim was to eliminate epidemics such as the deadly Covid-19 outbreak, which has so far claimed more than 1,800 lives and infected at least 72,000 people.

Geared to upgrade hygiene and sanitation in urban and rural parts of the world’s second-largest economy, up to 68,000 toilets were built or refurbished between 2015 and 2019.

By the end of this year, an additional 64,000 will come online as part of the ultimate goal to have a 100% “civilized” toilet culture by 2030.

“The toilet issue is not a small issue. It is an important part of civilized construction in both urban and rural areas,” President Xi Jinping said at the launch of his ambitious building program.

*  Radical African Islam - I mean, seriously, how do these people ever think they will be popular enough to actually really run a country.  In Mozambique, for example:

A leading aid agency says that children as young as 11 are being beheaded in Mozambique's Cabo Delgado province.

One mother told Save the Children she had to watch her 12-year-old son killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children.

More than 2,500 people have been killed and 700,000 have fled their homes since the insurgency began in 2017.

Militants linked to the Islamic State (IS) group are behind a conflict in the province....

The insurgents are known locally as al-Shabab, which means The Youth in Arabic. This reflects that it receives its support mostly from young unemployed people in the predominantly Muslim region of Cabo Delgado.

A group with a similar name has existed in Somalia for more than a decade. It is affiliated to al-Qaeda, unlike the Mozambican group which allied itself with the rival IS movement in 2019.

IS sees the insurgents as being part of what it calls its Central Africa Province. It released images last year showing fighters in Cabo Delgado with AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades....

Mr Briggs told the BBC World Service it was difficult to determine their exact motivations as they did not have a manifesto.

"They co-opt young people in to joining them as conscripts and if they refuse they are killed and sometimes beheaded. It's really hard to see what is the end game."

After visiting Cabo Delgado's capital Pemba last year, a delegation from the South African Bishop's Conference said that "almost everyone spoken to agrees that the war is about multinational corporations gaining control of the province's mineral and gas resources".

I don't know - but youth beheading even younger youth seems a, shall we say, very indirect way of dealing with too much control by multinational corporations.  

 

He's hopeless

I'm certainly hoping that more people are beginning to realise the asinine incompetence of Scott Morrison and the  LNP generally.   The sex scandals in Parliament are being appalling handled by a government more interested in self preservation than doing the right thing.

 Now, I see Morrison has apparently got all teary eyed about not wanting to let down his wife, daughters and mother.   Hasn't anyone told him to stop personalising it this way, as if he has no moral sense of sexism and misogyny unless he can personalise it to his own life?:

 And then he gets irritated with a media question:

And as Bernard says:

Update:   Yes, I keep thinking how the Coalition's moral authority on sexual conduct collapsed when its most conservative wing had Barnaby as a shining example:

Update 2:   I wonder.   Certainly the media's reaction to Morrison bringing up a sexual harassment incident within one of its outlets is so hostile, is anyone in the party starting to think leadership spill?   Maybe Dutton is getting itchy counting fingers again - although, really, his gradual (but now complete) scary head-morph into Darth Vader without a mask, or scowling version of Mr Potatohead, rules him out forever.  Frydenberg is surely the only person with a hint of charisma left in cabinet?  

Another thought:  isn't it ironic that sex in the workplace has caused the LNP so much trouble in recent years - I mean, arguably, Tony Abbott lost his job because many in his own party suspected he was sleeping with Peta Credlin.   (And, funnily enough, the most common opinion seems to have moved on to believing they were not, after all; their behaviour together just weirdly looked like it.)   

Similarly, it would be somewhat amusing if sex in the workplace (that he had no direct involvement in) brought down Morrison.

Stupid Prick

I can explain the title - James Morrow tweets/used to blog under the name "Prick with a Fork".   He now features on the ridiculous Sky News show Outsiders, and did he make a fool of himself on the weekend, or what?

Here is the Youtube story - entitled "This is the most important story about Trump story you never heard": 

 

It's about the Washington Post retraction of parts of a report which incorrectly quoted parts of a Trump phone call to Georgia election investigator Frances Watson.   In fact, the bits they had put in quotes was more like a paraphrase - and yes, they should never have portrayed it as otherwise without having heard the actual recording.

But - gormless Morrow runs his segment conflating two entirely separate telephone calls - he actually appears to believe that the retraction relates to the Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger - a call for which there was always a full transcript and recording published!

I cannot fathom how lazy and stupid Morrow is to not have read into the story in any detail whatsoever so as to not realise that the retraction relates to a different telephone call.   I mean, it was set out in easy to read detail at places like Vox:   The Washington Post's correction about Trump's phone call to a Georgia official, explained.

What's more, as I have read before, Sky News Australia's nutty night time line up is actually very popular with American Trumpsters - and after the Morrow story, there are thousands of comments from Americans saying things like "this is why we don't trust the fake news in America".   I scanned perhaps a hundred or two comments, and did not find one which recognised that the video was a crock.  The nearest I got was one person who said something like "but I thought I had read a transcript of the call?" - again, still not realising that Morrow was conflating two separate phone calls.   (And the one to Raffensperger was worse for Trump, too.)

It'll be something to do with the internet

Noticed this tweet today, which I guess is of renewed interest given that terrible shooting in Atlanta, but the news story it is from is nearly 2 years old now.   I guess things probably have not changed much since then, though:

 

Tucker spotting

 

 

 

Actually, there was a very good twitter thread about evangelicals and "sex addiction", which can be read here.

Friday trivia

I haven't read the article yet, but sounds like an plausible inspiration for a screenplay:

My feeling that not enough economists are being honest about not understanding stuff anymore continues

 

Interesting science

*   It seems sperm whales told each other how to avoid whalers in 19th century Pacific Ocean:

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.

“Sperm whales have a traditional way of reacting to attacks from orca,” notes Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his house overlooking the ocean in Dalhousie, Nova Scotia, where he teaches. Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead....

Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.

The hunters themselves realised the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’ says Whitehead.

*   Quanta has an article that is relatively easy to follow, about a paper showing that imaginary numbers are essential in quantum physics:

... physicists may have just shown for the first time that imaginary numbers are, in a sense, real.

*   They have measured a tiny amount of gravitational attraction:

An experiment shows that Newton’s law of gravity holds even for two masses as small as about 90 milligrams. The findings take us a step nearer to measuring gravitational fields that are so weak that they could enter the quantum regime.

 Still, sounds hard to believe it could lead to this:

The next step is to push on to even smaller masses — Westphal et al. suggest that gravitational fields of masses of the order of 10^–8 kg could eventually be measured. However, much work will need to be done to achieve this goal. The first task will be to substantially reduce damping of the oscillations of the torsion balance, which won’t be easy. But if it can be done, then perhaps quantum gravitational effects will finally be observed.

Tacky

Good grief:   this sounds like a new version of Leyland Brothers World:

Clive Palmer has promised to spend $100 million on resurrecting his derelict Coolum resort complex, giving it a “Wonders of the World” theme, complete with replica Trevi Fountain.

Can't the government resume the land and hand it over to a company that knows how to run a resort that isn't tacky?

About the American urban crime rate

 Sharkey, a sociologist, wrote a well reviewed book on the reduction in urban crime that came out in (I think) 2018.  Adam Gopnik reviewed it, and discussed the topic more broadly, at the New Yorker.

Maybe remote living is just kinda boring?

This is the synopsis of a story on ABC AM this morning:

In some of the Northern Territory's biggest remote communities Aboriginal organisations say youth crime is now so out of control that they can no longer deliver essential services.

They had hoped after the Northern Territory's Royal Commission into Youth Justice they'd get more support to help break their young people out of a cycle of offending.

But community leaders in the NT's largest remote community in Western Arhem Land say they've been facing a youth crime crisis for six months, and they're now begging for help.

On the audio version of the story I heard the following complaints:

*  need more housing (although part of the reason is some kids need to escape some of the dysfunctional households and so you get overcrowding in some houses)

*  need more diversion programs for kids - nothing much to do there; need more sports etc.  Kids think they are "ganstas";

*  government needs to do more.

You could have written the same story 20 or 30 years ago.

I actually assumed that Arnhem Land was probably one of the better "remote" areas for Aboriginal communities - it's green and fertile at least, isn't it?, unlike the useless, barren, hot red dirt of inland NT and South Australian remote communities.   Not that far from Darwin either.  But still, not much to do, there's apparently no economic activity and kids are bored.  

Just another example where "connection to land" of itself does not cut it as forming the basis of good living lifestyle for communities.   And all this reliance on government to fix dysfunction in the community

But how dare anyone say that out loud, hey?  

Your daily dose of "direct from Xi to you" CGTN propaganda (one is kind of cool, actually)

First, from the "dude, all the cool Hong Kong guys actually support China" files:  the "keybros" (who are doing this from London) might have made a spare pound or two by making their very sincere call to the citizens of their home city to be more open minded about mainland China:  

 

There's also a terrible attempt at pro-China rap to be found on the channel with the catchy title - the Song for the 14th Five Year Plan:

 

Gawd.  I can't quite work out how to feel about such shameless propaganda and the people who make it.   I mean, I guess it's at least better that it's cheerful rather than a full on racist diatribe against the rest of the world: but it's so unsubtle it keeps making me want to laugh, a bit like the pro-war propaganda segments in the Starship Troopers movie.

Anyway, one thing it seems the country is pretty good at is high speed rail, and this video about a new maglev version was pretty interesting, actually:

 

Porter and defamation

If PR smarts are any sign of suitability to be Commonwealth Attorney General, Christian Porter has spectacularly failed the test.

He was, apparently, so stressed out by having to deny a rape allegation that he couldn't work.  But he was cogent enough to spend (what is likely to have been) hours and hours in consultation with defamation lawyers.   

That's a very bad look for anyone, let alone a politician.

The media release seems to indicate that starting the action is about shutting down media commentary on the matter, and talks in a very legalistic sense about burdens and standards of proof.   Again, yeah, that's a real good look - using lawfare to try to stop a legitimate question in the mind of the public as to whether this guy is really suitable to be Attorney General.

Look, if Porter is about to resign from the position, and is going to be back in Parliament this week, I guess this action does not look so patently counterproductive.  

But if thinks this is otherwise a good move to help his career - well, he's too lacking in common sense to be AG, or even a politician.

I take some amusement, though, from imagining how Morrison - Scotty from Marketing - might be grinding his teeth about the PR aspects of this.  (If Porter has told him he is going to "tough it out" this way, at least.)   But then again, perhaps Porter ran this plan past the PM, who might have thought this is a good way to avoid having an enquiry.  But surely, keeping this whole issue in the public eye in the run up to an election early next year is not going to be helpful.  Is Morrison smart enough to see this as a PR disaster?   Who knows?

Update: fair point - 

Yet another dose of weekend stuff

*   Not much to report, really.   Bought a new hose for the Vacuum Maid ducted system.  The old one must have been nearly 30 years old, I reckon (assuming it was the original bought by the people who built the house.)   I doubt the new one will last as long.

*  Became more concerned that I am losing incentive to actually travel anywhere new, even when we can, because amateur/semi-professional Youtube vloggers do such a good job of documenting destinations.   I started watching a channel by young British guy Ben Morris (he seems OK-ish in personality, but a little tending to the shallow "rich kid turned influencer" genre) who has started living in Dubai.  Through him I got to see what a 7 million pound apartment in the Burg Khalifa looks like inside (he doesn't live there, but his "friend" Mohammed does.)   I was not overly impressed with the apartment, particularly with yet another example of the "this is what capitalism can lead to and it's kind of offensive" world of rich people collectibles:     

Apart from the cost of buying the apartment, which is large and I guess the price did not surprise me, the amazing thing was the cost of (what we would call) the body corporate levies.  I think he said 100,000 pounds a year ($180,000 AUD).   That's about 10 times the highest body corporate levies I have seen in Brisbane, in a nice, large, close to inner city apartment at Kangaroo Point.   Of course, that Brisbane apartment was probably about $2,000,000, so I guess we talking an apartment about 6 times lower in cost.  Still, the cost of living in the worlds tallest building (with those queasy full glass walls - which I don't trust) is expensive.

I also Ben Morris stay at that expensive hotel in Dubai, the Burj Al Arab (the one that looks like a sail, with a heliport near the top.)   Sure, the room is big, and I don't mind the hotel atrium, but the suite itself is Versace tacky in colour and style.  (How was Versace ever considered otherwise?)

 

So there, I feel I have sort of "done" Dubai now!

Porter watch

Let's watch Morrison continue trying to bat away calls for an enquiry:

A longtime friend of the woman who alleged she was raped by the attorney general, Christian Porter, as a teenager has said he had “clear recollections of relevant discussions” with Porter, from at least 1992.

Macquarie Bank managing director James Hooke released a statement on Friday afternoon as someone who has known Porter’s accuser, and Porter, for the past 30 years.

Hooke said the woman, who he considered to be a “very dear friend”, and he had “relevant discussions” about the event from “mid-1988 until her death”. Hooke also recollects speaking with Porter from 1992 onwards.

No wonder Porter was upset at his press conference - I reckon he knew there was more that might potentially come out, but he didn't know if it would or not.  That would cause considerable stress.

Now, it is always possible that James's conversations with Porter may confirm Porter has always denied everything.  Or, it may indicate something else.

Seems like James only wants to disclose that to an enquiry.   So, we won't know unless that happens.   

   

Good news and not so good news

The not so good news - the amount at which there was a clear benefit was only 2 drinks a week!  (I think a "standard" serving is 12 g of alcohol - the amount in one 100 ml glass of wine.)

Mind you, if I can read that graph correctly, it looks like "all cause" mortality is better at over 6 drinks a week than at under 6 drinks.  That's good to know!

Here's the abstract:

The new Rome?

Cullen Murphy writes at The Atlantic about America's current political state in "No, Really, Are We Rome?".  He wrote a book on the topic some time ago, and revisits the idea that we're watching a similar fall of an empire. 

If I were writing Are We Rome? today, one new theme I’d emphasize emerges from a phrase we heard over and over during the Trump administration: “adults in the room.” The basic idea—a delusion with a long history—was that an unfit and childish chief executive could be kept in check by the seasoned advisers around him, and if not by them, then by the competent career professionals throughout the government. The administration official who anonymously published a famous op-ed in The New York Times in 2018 offered explicit reassurance: “Americans should know that there are adults in the room.” Various individuals were given adult-in-the-room designation, including the White House counsel Don McGahn and Chief of Staff John Kelly. I sometimes imagined these adults, who included distinguished military veterans, wearing special ribbons. The obvious flaw in the arrangement was that the child could summarily dismiss the adults with an intemperate tweet.

For long periods in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the Roman empire was literally in the hands of children, as reigning emperors died unexpectedly and sons as young as 4 and 8 ascended to the most exalted rank. Adults in the room were appointed to serve them—often capable generals such as Stilicho (who served Honorius) and Aetius (who served Valentinian III). The idea was to acknowledge imperial authority as sacrosanct but at the same time have people in charge who could handle the job. And often it worked, for a while. The diplomat and historian Priscus described what happened when Valentinian grew up. The emperor’s intemperate tweet took this form:

As Aetius was explaining the finances and calculating tax revenues, with a shout Valentinian suddenly leaped up from his throne and cried out that he would no longer endure to be abused by such treacheries … While Aetius was stunned by this unexpected rage and was attempting to calm his irrational outburst, Valentinian drew his sword from his scabbard and together with Heracleius, who was carrying the cleaver ready under his cloak (for he was a head chamberlain), fell upon him.

There is no substitute, it turns out, for actual leadership at the top. Even so, when the adults are gone, the next line of defense is bureaucratic heroism. A civil service is one reason entities as large as the Roman empire—or the British or American one—have had staying power. Watch the behavior of imperial functionaries in the fifth century, when much of the Roman world was falling apart, and you see the ability of bureaucratic procedure and administrative competence—food goes here, gold goes there—to hold bits of the rickety scaffolding together when no one seems to be in charge. I’m not aware of ancient references to a civitas profunda, but the “deep state” is neither a modern nor a malevolent invention.

I do like this caution he gives in the article, though:

The comparisons, of course, can be facile. A Roman state of some sort lasted so long—well over a millennium—and changed so continuously that its history touches on any imaginable type of human occurrence, serves up parallels for any modern event, and provides contradictory answers to any question posed. Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past.

Oh look - another "deep state" traitor (who Trump appointed)

From Axios:

Former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller told "VICE on Showtime" that he believes former President Trump incited the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his speech preceding the deadly riot.

Why it matters: Miller, who Trump appointed to lead the Pentagon after firing Mark Esper following the 2020 election, said, "it’s pretty much definitive" that the riot, which left five people dead, would not have happened without the president’s “Save America” rally speech.

10 years on

Does it feel like 10 years since the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster?   I suppose it does.

I did not realise until I saw Foreign Correspondent last week the extent to which Japan is seeking to prevent a repeat of the same damage by building huge sea walls.  (By the way, that series continues to be brilliant this season - I have such admiration for the journalists who work on it, and the ABC for funding it.)    

I see that there are several stories going around that the nuclear accident didn't cause an increase in cancer.  There is the argument that the evacuation itself caused more deaths via stress and reduced care for the elderly, etc;  but this always strikes me as a "that's easy to say in hindsight" argument; one not so easy to take into account when the radiation risk is invisible and silent and drifting around according to wind strength and direction at the time.   Also, it strikes me as a bit of rhetorical to play down the the cost of clean up to prevent contamination causing cancer in future - and the natural reluctance of people (especially parents) to return to areas where they are nervous as to whether the soil really is safe.

The economic cost of the disaster, particularly the nuclear clean up, is huge:

I will look for more interesting stories to add...

Update:  from The Economist, I get the diagram I was hoping for, showing the (not insignificantly sized) area that is still not safe to return to:

 Also from the article, these points:

Kowata Masumi’s husband’s family had lived for more than 200 years in the same house in Okuma, one of the two towns next to the plant, growing persimmons, weaving silk and brewing sake. It is now in the “difficult-to-return” zone (see map), subject to 50 times more radiation than is typically considered safe. Former residents are allowed to make short visits in protective gear, but not to stay overnight. Ms Kowata, one of Okuma’s town councillors, found a monkey in her living room on one such trip, “wearing our clothes like the king of the house”....

In Fukushima prefecture 2,317 people died as a result of it, mostly because of disruption to medical care or suicide. That is more than the 1,606 who perished during the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown themselves. Some researchers argue the government should not have ordered a large-scale evacuation at all, or should have limited it to weeks rather than years.Yet it would have been hard to tell a fearful population, faced with the invisible threat of radiation, to stay put or return quickly. The meltdown destroyed confidence in experts. The lack of candour from officials in the early weeks and months after the disaster sapped trust in the authorities, pushing citizens to fill the gaps themselves. “There were so many things that weren’t convincing, so we decided to get our own data,” says Kobayashi Tomoko, an inn-owner and radiation monitor from Minamisoma, a city north of the plant. Even when the government lifted evacuation orders years later, putting an end to compensation payments for residents of those areas, some protested against what they saw as a ploy to force people to return under unsafe conditions. “Sensitivity to radioactivity depends on mindset, it’s difficult to treat as matter of policy,” says Iio Jun of the Reconstruction Design Council, a government advisory panel set up after the disaster.  ....

Many of those ordered to evacuate in the aftermath of the disaster, as well as others who fled the region of their own accord, have stayed away. In the areas where evacuation was ordered, only a quarter or so of the population has returned, mostly the elderly. As elsewhere in rural Japan, the prefecture’s population had been falling anyway, dipping by an average of 100,000 people in the nine years preceding the disaster. But 3/11 has accelerated the decline: in the nine years since, the population has fallen by an average of 180,000 a year (see chart 1)...

The enduring mistrust extends to nuclear power in general. Before 3/11 more than two-thirds of Japanese wanted to preserve or even expand it. The government wanted nuclear plants to generate half of Japan’s power by the middle of the century. A majority is now against it, including bigwigs such as Koizumi Junichiro, a former prime minister from the LDP, and Kan Naoto, who was prime minister at the time of the disaster. “I had supposed Japanese engineers were very high quality. I thought it was unlikely that human error could cause an accident in Japan,” says Mr Kan. “My thinking changed 180 degrees.”

 There is a lot more in the article, about the future of nuclear in the country.  Worth registering an account to read it for free. 

Update 2:  many astounding before and after slider pictures to be found here, at the Guardian.

Faking it for happiness

A short article at The Atlantic offers this suggestion for obtaining happiness:

None of us wants to be the purveyor of poison, especially toward those we love. Fortunately, research also shows that we have more control over how we affect others—and ourselves—than we might assume. The key is to act like a happy person would, even if you don’t feel like it.

Last year, researchers at the University of California at Riverside asked human subjects to behave in either extroverted or introverted ways for one week. They found that those purposively acting extroverted—which decades of research have shown is one of the most common characteristics of happy people—saw a significant increase in well-being. (Meanwhile, acting introverted led to a decrease.) Similarly, spending money on others and volunteering have both been shown to raise one’s own happiness levels.

One plausible explanation for why this works is that prosocial behaviors induce a cognitive dissonance—I feel unhappy, but I am acting happy!—which people resolve subconsciously by feeling happier. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, calls this the “As If Principle”: If you want to feel a certain way, act as if you already do, and your brain will grant you that feeling—at least for a while. In common parlance, “Fake it ’til you make it.”

 More specifically:

First, ask what happy people in your life situation would do to make things better for themselves and others. How would they greet others in the first Zoom call of the day? How would they write an email? Whom would they call just to check in? If you’re stuck, interview happy people you know about the little things they do for their acquaintances and loved ones.

Next, make a plan to follow through on everything you just imagined, and commit to it. Write three ideas for extra-kind greetings on a Post-it note and stick it below your computer screen before that Zoom call. Draft a sample email in the voice of a happy person, and use it as a template. Make a list of friends and family with whom you’re overdue for a chat, and schedule those calls in your planner.

These steps aren’t a set of direct happiness adjustments; they’re more of a bank shot. By deliberately preparing yourself to cheer up the people around you the way a happy person spontaneously would, you’ll create the conditions by which you can produce your own happiness naturally—and give the gift of happiness to others, as well.

 

I would have thought a lawyer might have something more to contribute than "my brilliant career - unlike hers"

There's an extraordinarily tin eared bit of reminiscence by Helen Dale in The Australia about her (apparent) time in high school debating in the late 1980's with the late rape accuser of  Christian Porter.

It will no doubt slide behind a paywall again soon, so let's preserve some bits here (with my bold):

I knew her for the best part of two years as she lived her best life, cutting a swathe through young Australia’s cultural and intellectual milieu, laying down a marker for future achievement that was never fulfilled.

Somewhere out there, there may lurk a television recording of us competing against each other in the national finals of a public speaking contest. My strong suspicion is that the recording no longer exists, for the simple reason that I went on to enjoy the sort of public success that everyone expected Jane to achieve, and that many of our contemporaries also achieved. That broadcast would surely have surfaced in 1995 if it were going to at any point; people were determined to find extant footage, and not merely photographs of me from high school.

Jane, Christian Porter, many of Jane’s friends so broken by her suicide, and I participated in a variety of events, organised in such a way that one kept running into the same clutch of high achievers from the same group of posh schools around the country over, usually, the last two years of high school. Jane was unusual in that she started young, in year 10, and so had a three-year run at the top.....

The activities in question formed part of an entire ecosystem — I have no idea whether it still exists — of debating, public speaking and academic competitions fought out among elite Australian high school students during the relevant period.

The largest of these was National Capital Seminar, held under the auspices of the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Trust for Young Australians. It’s the only event I will name, and I do so because it had 100 student ­attendees each year. There are simply too many people out there from Jane’s and my year who no doubt recall both of us for me to keep it hidden from their view. People from ­National Capital Seminar went on to become high-flyers in ­varied fields — politicians, QCs, scientists, ­industrialists, artists, entrepreneurs.

Rupert no doubt will be upset if I re-publish the whole thing, but let's just end with this:

At the time, Jane was openly spoken of as a future prime minister. Those friends who knew her post-high school and have suggested as much to the media are not dissembling on this point.

Mind you, the same was also said of me, and of another boy.

OK, Dale does go on to say that she never believed it herself, because she was closeted queer; but it's so refreshing, isn't it, to hear that everyone else thought she was brilliant.

Dale has long had people questioning her autobiographic claims, and not just the ones that formed the basis of her early identity scandal.  This article will do nothing to lessen the impression that she exaggerates when it suits.

In other, uh, "news"

 

Why aren't there more calls for an end to this self-gaslighting?

Honestly, I find the Right wing media's tactic of promoting every verbal stumble of Biden as evidence that he's virtually a nursing home patient let loose on the Presidency is despicable.

Not because I think the likes of Hannity actually believe their fool's game (although, you don't know - never underestimate the ease with which repeatedly pretending something is true eventually convinces you it really is);  but because far too large a slab of the country genuinely is in the grip of a miasma of politically self serving conspiracy theories, and Murdoch and his employees must know that this is bad and dangerous for functioning democracy, and society as a whole. 

It's especially ridiculous when the people buying this genuinely think Trump was the smart one.  

The end of this can only come from prominent Republicans calling for it to end - but they are gutless.

 

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.