Lost saint

An odd story at a Catholic news site:

ROME — The remains of St. Peter may have been and possibly still could be buried in catacombs under the Mausoleum of St. Helena after being moved from the Vatican hillside during anti-Christian persecutions in the third century, according to a paper published recently by three Italian researchers.

Labeling their conclusions as “conjecture,” the researchers suggested archaeologists could “validate” their findings with “excavation campaigns”; however, a leading expert in Christian archaeology and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology told Vatican News that the researchers’ hypothesis was “unacceptable.”

Emperor Constantine would never have gone through so much logistical trouble building St. Peter’s Basilica in the early fourth century “if it had not been contingent upon the presence of the venerated remains” below, where the saint’s tomb had been venerated since early Christian times, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai told Vatican News May 30.

“It is clear,” he said, “that Peter’s remains were found in the place of the original burial site on the Vatican hill when the formidable Constantinian basilica was built, the biggest basilica ever established in the city,” he said, adding that if later the remains had been moved “ad catacumbasto,” then that refers to a cemetery on the Appian Way, later called, the catacombs of St. Sebastian.

A previous Pope thought the saint's bones had already been discovered, but the means of identification sounds dubious:

While scholars are certain St. Peter’s ancient tomb was located on the Vatican hill where he had died a martyr and where Constantine ordered a basilica be built, his remains have been a source of much controversy and mystery.

St. Paul VI announced in 1968 that the “relics” of St. Peter had been “identified in a way which we can hold to be convincing,” after bones were discovered following excavations of the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, which began in the 1940s near a monument erected in the fourth century to honor St. Peter.

The pope had cases of the relics placed beneath the basilica’s main altar and in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. Scientists have confirmed the remains are those of a 60- to 70-year-old robust male, according to Vatican News.

 

The giggling cure

I am surprised to read this:

A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.  ...

Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.

In a prior study, the investigators tested the effects of a one-hour inhalation session with 50% nitrous oxide gas in 20 patients, finding that it led to rapid improvements in patient's depressive symptoms that lasted for at least 24 hours when compared to placebo. However, several patients experienced negative side effects, including nausea, vomiting and headaches....

In the new study, the investigators repeated a similar protocol with 20 patients, this time adding an additional inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide. They found that even with only half the concentration of nitrous oxide, the treatment was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide, but this time with just one quarter of the negative side effects.

Furthermore, the investigators looked at patients' clinical depression scores after treatment over a longer time course; while the last study only evaluated depression symptoms up to 24 hours after treatment, this new study conducted additional evaluations over two weeks. To their surprise, after just a single administration, some patients' improvements in their depression symptoms lasted for the entire evaluation period. 

Many years ago, a friendly dentist offered to give me nitrous oxide when I didn't really need it, just to see what it was like.   I did, indeed, giggle a lot at anything said.

Foucault the neo-liberal

I don't know that it's worth dwelling as much on Foucault as some academics like to do, but I was nonetheless interested to learn that there is a stream of criticism that he was too much of a neo-liberal.  That's news to me:

More recently, leftist thinkers have cast Foucault as a neoliberal, arguing that the kind of politics incipient in his thought paved the way to the hollowing out of the welfare state that took place under the signs of Reaganomics and Third Way liberalism. This counterintuitive assertion is the principal argument of The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. The collaborative work of Mitchell Dean, a scholar at Copenhagen Business School, and Daniel Zamora, a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a version of the book was first published in French in 2019 before being adapted into English this year.

Appearing with the radical publisher Verso, it offers a generous consideration of Foucault’s dalliance with neoliberal thought, coming to the conclusion that the French philosopher used the work of the so-called “New Philosophers” and American neoliberal thinkers in order to question what he perceived as the sclerotic totems of the welfare state. In so doing, they bring together a growing scholarship on the topic, including Foucault and Neoliberalism, a 2016 volume coedited by Zamora to which Dean contributed. Ultimately, though, The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault’s work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.

Stupid, stupid blowhard watch

 He's such a lightweight, wingnut troll now...

Feeling vindicated

David Roberts notes:

 Here's a link to the study, and here is the abstract:

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed. Research has focused on beliefs about narrow sets of claims never intended to capture the richness of the political information environment. Furthermore, factors contributing to this performance gap remain unclear. We generated an unique longitudinal dataset combining social media engagement data and a 12-wave panel study of Americans’ political knowledge about high-profile news over 6 months. Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals. The problem is exacerbated by liberals’ tendency to experience bigger improvements in sensitivity than conservatives as the proportion of partisan news increases. These results underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.

Psychiatric reversals noted

In a journal article about transgenderism* which I don't particularly recommend, I was nonetheless surprised to find this account of how the psychiatric establishment, over the course of a mere 30 years, swung from one extreme to another in its classifications regarding homosexuality:

The story of how disorders are first classified and reclassified within, and then eventually expunged from, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is telling. Homosexuality, for example, was included in the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, as a sexual deviation classified under the rubric “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance.”2 In the second edition (DSM-II) published in 1968 it became a sexual deviation classified as a nonpsychotic mental disorder along with pedophilia and exhibitionism.3 It was then declassified as a disorder altogether when DSM-II was revised in 1973. The DSM-III, published in 1980, was such a strong reversal of position from its predecessor that it actually classified any homosexual who wanted to be heterosexual as having a psychosexual disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality.”4 This was then dropped when the DSM-III was revised in 1987 (DSM-III-R).5

Why was I reading about transgenderism?  Because of this tweet yesterday, which told (to my mind) an improbable story:

Jessica's twitter feed is full of photos of herself, many with the needy "don't you agree I'm looking hot" kind of vibe that young transgender male to female folk seem to often yearn for.  It's not enough that they change their bodies to suit their own mental state - they insist that others join in giving positive comments on their new looks.   Which can be a rather, um, reality challenging call and a significant part of why transgenderism can be such a socially awkward thing for the rest of us.  

As one person on Twitter said:

 
 

*   Here it is.

Against the lab leak theory

There's quite a strong push back against the "the liberal media got the lab leak theory all wrong" in a column in the LA Times, which I got to via Twitter (and not paywalled.)   Some parts:

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.  ...

No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway.

That’s why the virological community believes that it’s vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans.

That was the conclusion reached in a seminal paper on COVID-19’s origins published in Nature in February 2020 by American, British and Australian virologists. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” they wrote.

“We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak,” the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. 

“However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely,” Andersen said. “Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence.”

Coauthor Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: “Our conclusion that it didn’t leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper.”

As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, “the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal.”

What remains of the lab-leak theory is half-truths, misrepresentations, and tendentious conjecture. ...

 

Let’s take a look at the science underlying the search for COVID’s origins. One important fact is that we may never get a definitive answer. The animal source of the Ebola virus, which was first identified 45 years ago, is still unknown, Maxmen reported in Nature.

Maxmen noted that it took researchers 14 years to trace the 2002-2004 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to a virus that leapt from bats to humans. ...

 

The lab-leak theory gains from a superficial plausibility — especially to laypersons. The Wuhan lab had a collection of bat viruses, including some that appear to be similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But some virologists say they’re not similar enough to mutate into SARS-CoV-2, even through deliberate manipulation, Garry says. “That’s a point that’s not going to resonate very strongly with people who haven’t studied viruses for a long, long time.”

 

 

 

 

More Right wing nonsense watch

 

Another quick movie review no one was waiting for

I saw the 2015 Jonny Depp film Black Mass last week, on Netflix, and was surprised how good it was.

I see that it was better rated on Rotten Tomatoes than I thought (73%), but it didn't make much money at the box office.  (Just under a $100 million world wide).  

It's true:  it is very much Martin Scorsese territory, and I think some people may have thought it was too much a repeat of Goodfellas and the rest of his oeuvre.  But I thought of it more as Scorsese material but done with a better and more satisfying story arc.   It is nicely directed, and Depp and all of the actors are very good.

The other film it's unavoidably close to is Scorsese's The Departed, which I thought was really awful and couldn't stick with, and even my son didn't seem to care for it.   It is a much, much better movie than that.    

Right wing hero watch

First, Milo:

 Second, Naomi Wolfe: 

Adam Creighton has been busy being upset about her banning:

 

Each of these characters have been mentioned favourably recently at Catallaxy. 

Update:  speaking of Catallaxy, I see that Steve Kates is now sharing Gateway Pundit fantasies of Fauci (and others) being on trial for...well, you can see.

Man with no problem with women blames them for...everything

It's one of the great mysteries of life that Sinclair Davidson seems to think he's performing a service to the world by keeping a forum running where his mates regularly show themselves off as, well, ridiculous idiots.  His former RMIT buddy Steve Kates is currently endorsing COVID as being a vast conspiracy to bring down Trump and hence Western civilisation.   But we've seen that before.  

 Today's entry,  rather, for going "straight to the pool room" comes from Man Who Loves Women (Just as Long as They are Exactly Like my Catholic Mum circa 1955), with this:

Seriously...

What the West needs

It's better than having a trade or other war.   The West needs to infiltrate Chinese social media and continue spreading this idea: 

Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying flat".

The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.

China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.

The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.

"Lying flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things."

The comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.

The idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a spiritual movement.

 

Theories

Orwell was wrong...

...in that the future was not the cynical Two Minute Hate, forced on a populace by authoritarian government, but a whole 180 Minute Hate every evening brought by an ageing billionaire for profit and influence:  

 

I mean, the Right in America (and any Australian sympathisers to it) have become just too stupid to engage with, and their obsession with attacking individual public figures like Fauci is just absurd.   

As with climate change, they think they can pluck any statement made by a perceived enemy out of context and think that it proves their point.   They think they're the smart ones, when they are just nasty and dumb and tribal to the point of preferring self harm to listening to expertise.   

 

Quantum computing on Youtube

I recently watched two videos of interest regarding quantum computing.

As you might expect, Google is going into it in a big way, and while the comedy in this does not really work, it's still interesting:

And Bee Hossenfelder had an informative video on the various approaches to creating quantum computing. I didn't realise there were so many: 

Update:   I have been meaning to say, since I first posted a photo of these early quantum computer set ups, that I like the lacy, intricate design of the Google quantum computer, which is all about the need for extreme cooling. Which has made me wonder - how do you cool something down to below the temperature of space? This article gives some indication, although I still don't understand exactly how it works: 

 “Quantum chips have to operate at very low temperatures in order to maintain the quantum information,” Clarke said. To do this, Intel uses cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems from specialist Blufors.

The refrigerator features several stages, getting colder as you go down - all the way "down to temperatures just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero - that is really cold. In fact, it's 250 times colder than deep space,” Clarke said. “We use a mixture of helium isotopes as our refrigerant to get down to these very cold temperatures, in the tens of millikelvin.”

While the refrigeration system can bring temperatures down to extremes, it can't remove heat very quickly - so if you have a chip in there that's creating a lot of heat, you're going to have a problem.

"You're probably familiar with the power dissipation of an FPGA," Clarke said. "This would overwhelm the refrigeration cooling capacity. At the lowest level of a fridge, you typically have about a milliwatt of cooling power. At the four Kelvin stage [higher up in the fridge], you have a few watts."

Future fridge designs are expected to improve things, but it's unlikely to massively increase the temperature envelope. "That imposes limitations on the power dissipation of your control chips."

 

A Trump world mystery

It is distinctly odd, the way the Trump blog has been abruptly discontinued.  The Guardian explains. 

Is there a connection with the widely discussed report that Trump is telling people he will be "re-instated" in August?   Did he write a blog post all about that, and people around him have thought it was going to hurt him if posted?   

A significant bit of commentary on the Porter case

This article at the Financial Review, and not behind a paywall, describes the issues in the case and argues the settlement definitely was a capitulation by Porter.    

I would also comment that the world of defamation lawyers seems particularly incestuous, even taking into account that the world of barristers and judges is routinely kinda incestuous.  

I think that everyone now is curious about the additional redacted evidence that Porter wanted to keep out of the trial.  Particularly from the guy who said he had a relevant conversation with Porter about his time with the deceased. 

A credibility issue?

Oh, so just as I thought from the look and manner of the guy, there is apparently reason to suspect the credibility of Luis Elizondo:

 

 

The Guardian writes:

A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out about UFOs is accusing his former agency of waging a disinformation campaign against him, a report says.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency, according to Politico.

and Jazz Shaw, the right wing blogger at Hot Air who is a firm believer in UFOs has a story about emails apparently deleted in the Pentagon, which he thinks is a Big Deal.   I wonder if it'll turn out to be more incompetence than anything else.  

China's building problems

According to some China critical Youtube channel I subscribe to, the Shenzhen SEG Plaza is still shaking from time to time, and remains closed and under investigation.

I see now that Bloomberg ran an informative story on the building, and the general problems with China's high rise industry:

In 1996, the company went public and rolled some of the proceeds into SEG Plaza. Last week, Chinese media unearthed a report on the building’s construction authored by a (then) graduate student. She noted that “Shenzhen speed” wasn’t speedy enough for SEG Plaza: The tower was raised at a rate of one floor every 2.7 days. She also found that the building’s construction began before the design and review process was even complete, and that updated plans were delivered throughout the project, meaning that completed sections would often have to be reworked.

SEG Plaza wasn’t the only project to cut such corners. For years, Shenzhen’s contractors made cement with sea sand. It’s far cheaper than river sand, and for good reason: It corrodes the structural steel that holds up buildings. In 2013, the city identified 31 companies that had used sea sand in construction and suspended eight of them for a year — but it never identified any at-risk buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, building collapses are a regular, recurring tragedy in China.

The writer says the plaza has long been home to shody electronics sales:

A few years after opening, for example, SEG Plaza became a global hub for trading cheap, used electronic components — rather than the new ones that the company had hoped to drive. Chinese traders in, say, New York might buy 5,000 used desktops from a Wall Street bank and ship them to south China. Within a couple of months, their semiconductors would be on sale in an SEG stall.

It wasn’t the kind of business that Shenzhen wanted to advertise to the world (when dignitaries were in town, the government would actually shut the plaza down). Its mere existence hinted at the city’s relatively flexible attitude to intellectual property. But over the years, the neighborhood surrounding SEG Plaza filled with malls also marketing used components to up-and-coming manufacturers who weren’t exactly scrupulous about patents and trademarks.

In recent years, it became obvious that SEG Plaza’s best days were behind it. Chinese consumers who once sought out the largely disposable electronics built from SEG’s inventories were moving up to better devices. When I first visited the tower in the mid-2000s, the dim 10-story mall at its base was a crowded and relentless warren of stalls, all packed with chips and computers for sale. In the last half-decade, the stalls have become increasingly populated with beauty products, electronic cigarettes and crypto-mining rigs. Shenzhen’s freewheeling days as an unaccountable manufacturer of low-cost goods are over. 

 

Sure...

France 24 has a story about UFOs being treated seriously now, and includes this very improbable story:

What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.

At least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a co-operation accord with them. 

“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."

Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to due to fears of “mass hysteria”.

Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and aliens".

I said ages ago that if some government agency had proof of alien presence on Earth that they thought should be kept secret, there is no way they would have told Trump, as he would blurted it out at his next rally and tried to take narcissistic credit for being the person to tell the world.

Update:   Eshed has made other claims:

Eshed makes implausible claims that include stories of how aliens prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.^[24][25]

Various thoughts

*  Christian Porter:   still a political problem for PM Smirko.   Labor is right to be calling for the independent inquiry which was the obvious thing that Smirko should have set up as soon as this started.   I suspect Smirko, who has shockingly bad judgement in this sort of thing, is going to try to tough it out as something not needing further consideration.  (And Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning did a bad devil's advocate style interview with Labor's Mark Dreyfus which set up the arguments you can see Smirko trying on.  He was probably taking notes.)

*  That Friend's reunion interview, which I have no interest in, has at least had the benefit of causing quite a lot of people on Twitter coming out as saying they never thought the show was very good, and many hated it.   I am not alone.  (I didn't hate it, but it was only intermittently amusing; certainly not worth watching at all in later seasons.   A show vastly overrated is the correct assessment.) 

*  Brisbane has had an unusually cold run of nights and mornings for this time of year.  Days are still OK, by and large.

  

The unnatural device

Only a week ago, I posted a Tom Scott video about the invention of the microwave oven, and it was soon followed by our home one breaking down.  

It's quite old, so time for a new one.

What we now have is one which has no rotating platform.  I didn't even know these were made for domestic use, although I think I may have seen one in a shop once.  

It's a little disconcerting, not getting that visual signal of operation.  But it seems to be working fine.  The salesman said they heat more evenly, but I haven't used it enough yet to tell.

And by the way, why do microwave manufacturers persist in putting in recipes in the user manual?  No one tries to cook an actual meal in them, ever, do they?  Sure, steam the veggies and heat the rice, defrost the meat - but actually cook the meat in a main meal?  No....

The portal is open

I have lifted moderation for Graeme to explain everything about UFOs, in the post made earlier this week.  He is inviting questions...

Only in your staff room, and your next dinner party

"Massive news"...

American mass shootings a bit "meh" now

It seems America has become so familiar with mass shootings - particularly workplace ones by disgruntled employees - that they just don't register in the news cycle much anymore:

A transit system employee in San Jose opened fire Wednesday morning at a light-rail facility, killing at least eight people before shooting himself, officials said.

This seems to have barely caused a ripple on Twitter, for example.

Unless it's got kids involved - or shoppers, I suppose, because mall shootings have a special ordinary folk suddenly gotta run and hide drama about them, I suppose - mass shootings have become news "meh".

Local germs

A somewhat interesting finding:

Cities have their own distinct microbial fingerprints 

When Chris Mason’s daughter was a toddler, he watched, intrigued, as she touched surfaces on the New York City subway. Then, one day, she licked a pole. “There was a clear microbial exchange,” says Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “I desperately wanted to know what had happened.”

So he started swabbing the subway, sampling the microbial world that coexists with people in our transit systems. After his 2015 study revealed a wealth of previously unknown species in New York City, other researchers contacted him to contribute. Now, Mason and dozens of collaborators have released their study of subways, buses, elevated trains, and trams in 60 cities worldwide, from Baltimore to Bogotá, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. They identified thousands of new viruses and bacteria, and found that each city has a unique microbial “fingerprint.”...

The researchers also found a set of 31 species present in 97% of the samples; these formed what they called a “core” urban microbiome. A further 1145 species were present in more than 70% of samples. Samples taken from surfaces that people touch—like railings—were more likely to have bacteria associated with human skin, compared with surfaces like windows. Other common species in the mix were bacteria often found in soil, water, air, and dust.

But the researchers also found species that were less widespread. Those gave each city a unique microbiome—and helped the researchers predict, with 88% accuracy, which city random samples came from, they report today in Cell.

 

 

The new relativism

I'm not sure that Ross Douthat does all that great a job of explaining it clearly enough without the jargon, but I think his basic point is (probably) sound enough:  

The impulse to establish legitimacy and order informs a lot of action on the left these days. The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world.

To this end, the categories of identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.

Meanwhile, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies.

This is a temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the ironies — however rich and telling they may be.

Yes, the French philosopher was undoubtedly a certain kind of genius; yes, as Shullenberger writes, “his critiques of institutions expose the limits of our dominant modes of politics,” including the mode that’s ascendant on the left. But the older conservative critique of relativism’s corrosive spirit is still largely correct. Which is why, even when it lands telling blows against progressive power, much of what seems postmodern about the Trump-era right also seems wicked, deceitful, even devilish.

In the end, one can reject the new progressivism, oppose the church of intersectionality — and still have a healthy fear of what might happen if you use the devil’s tools to pull it down.

I have commented  before on how the Trumpian Right are those who have most clearly provided a home -  unconsciously, perhaps? - to postmodernism's "truth is a social construct" by their acceptance of his lying and bullshitting.

In which I invite G Bird to opine in comments

I have not let through any Graeme Bird comments for quite a while now, but he can't take a hint and is still making appearances in moderation, calling me a Jewish c.. etc.   Do you really wonder, Graeme, why no one lets you comment for long on blogs?

But with my renewed interest in UFOs, and the particular evidence of the strangely acting "tic tac" thing over the ocean in 2004 that has impressed me so much (again, not the videos, but the pilots' accounts of what they saw), I am here to announce that I will let any comment that Graeme might like to make (on this post only) about what he thinks is going on.

Of course, any reference to Jews, or swearing, will mean the comment does not appear at all.

And by the way, I found myself in pretty much complete agreement with the commentary in this guy's video about the matter, which came out 8 months ago, but I only saw it recently:

Update: that'd be right. Just when you give him permission to comment on one matter, he doesn't. Not yet, anyway.

Weighing up edible animal suffering

An article at Vox argues that giving up beef, but at the cost of eating more chicken, results in a net increase in animal suffering.   Meat bred chickens have a much worse life than your average beef cattle, and it takes huge numbers of them to match how much meat you get off one cow.  In fact, I am a bit surprised by these figures:

Cows are big, so raising one produces about 500 pounds of beef — and at the rate at which the average American eats beef, it takes about 8.5 years for one person to eat one cow. But chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat per bird, with the average American eating about one whole chicken every two weeks. To put it another way, each year we eat about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow (and about a third of one pig).

I would have thought Americans (and Australians) eat a lot more of a pig in a year than that.   And one cow takes 8 years for one person to eat?   I just checked on my calculator - that's only about 500 g per week.   I guess that's possibly right, but it sounds on the low side to me.  (Wait - the calculation is based on per capita consumption - so taking into account those who eat no beef, I guess that means that those who do would take less than 8 years to get through a cow.)

Anyway - the ethics of working this out is all pretty slippery.   How upset should we be that millions of unwanted day old rooster chicks are sent through a meat grinder due to the egg industry?    I mean, they haven't lived long, and presumably not much has gone on in their brains...but they're sort of cute too and it feels - I don't know, wastefully wrong? - to bred something to only want to kill it on birth.   Is the small scale level of an individual suffering compounded when it's happening every day in the tens of thousands?*   (Fortunately, technology may put an end to the practice soon, anyway.)

At least there is one thing I feel pretty confident about - I am never going to be worried about bivalves and crustaceans and animal suffering.   Probably any fish too - although I don't want to think about octopuses too much!

 

* Again, my calculator tells me that if estimated of 12 million killed every year in Australia is correct, that's 32,000 every day.  :(

Analysing crime (and mental health) is complicated

In other things with counter-intuitive results:

A new study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide rates. After reviewing data from 21 countries, the researchers found no significant increase in suicide risk since the beginning of the pandemic, despite initial concerns that rates would increase. They urge vigilance and attendance to the long-term effects of the pandemic on mental health....

They attribute the lack of increase in suicide rates to several factors, including concerns being raised early on about the potential negative impacts of stay-at-home orders and school and business shutdowns on mental health. While self-reported experiences of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking increased during the time period examined, it did not appear to affect overall suicide rates in the countries included in the study.

An additional factor is the increased emphasis and accessibility of mental health treatment and services made available by some countries during the pandemic, which may have buffered against some of the damaging effects of the pandemic.

The researchers also highlight the role of community as being a potential protective factor. For example, communities made have made an effort to support individuals at-risk for mental health or other concerns, or households may have developed closer, stronger relationships through increased time together. An overall sense of togetherness as communities as a whole weathered the pandemic may have also protected against a rise in suicidality.

 On the other hand, in news that has given Adam Creighton an erection:

 

 

Natural signs from God

Hey, this is an interesting short item at The Conversation about how medieval smart Christians  understood that lunar and solar eclipses were natural, although they could read into them a sign from God.  

Good stuff. 

China and paper tigers

I find myself sympathetic to this take on China by David Frum:  the West is over-estimating its strength, and in a way that may be harmful to our own interests.  (He is basically repeating the argument made by another guy, but it sounds pretty convincing to me.  And I watch CGTN propaganda!)

Silly people

I would have thought climbers would have been more sensible about this:

A coronavirus outbreak on Mount Everest has infected at least 100 climbers and support staff, a mountaineering guide said, giving the first comprehensive estimate amid official Nepalese denials that the disease has spread to the world’s highest peak.

Lukas Furtenbach of Austria, who last week halted his Everest expedition due to virus fears, said on Saturday one of his foreign guides and six Nepali Sherpa guides had tested positive.

And as for "ultra marathons" as a sport - it seems to me these attract disastrous consequences for participants far too often.  Ordinary marathons are a dubious enough exercise in pointless exertion, if you ask me.  Making them more extreme is just silly.

 

 

Frozen rodents and James Lovelock

Well, this Tom Scott video, which features a short interview with the (still sharp) James Lovelock (age 101) was very interesting:

 

Did I know before this that rock-solid frozen rodents were capable of revival?  I think I had read about this, many years ago, although I don't think I knew Lovelock had been involved.  (If you asked me, I would have assumed it was research done in the United States).   It does certainly explain why science fiction from the 1960's on thought that this was a prospect for humans too.

As for James Lovelock - as I have noted before, we can safely ignore his opinions on climate change now, but he is still a remarkable and pretty charming man.

Military people and UFOs with unusual motion

If you have watched the 60 Minutes interview I linked to a few posts ago, or one of the other interviews David Fravor has given elsewhere, you will recall that both he and the other pilot who saw the object were puzzled by its erratic motion when it low above the ocean.

This reminded me of other, classic, UFO sightings where the object moved in a very odd fashion.  Do many people know about the way some have been described as having a 'falling leaf" motion as they descend?   Here's a classic account, for a book by David Clarke:

 Very odd.  Daylight sightings leave less room for misinterpretation of lights.

Still have a hunch that large scale flow batteries are going to be a significant thing in future

Here's the abstract from a Science paper out yesterday:

Aqueous redox flow batteries could provide viable grid-scale electrochemical energy storage for renewable energy because of their high-power performance, scalability, and safe operation (1, 2). Redox-active organic molecules serve as the energy storage materials (2, 3), but only very few organic molecules, such as viologen (4, 5) and anthraquinone molecules (6), have demonstrated promising energy storage performance (2). Efforts continue to develop other families of organic molecules for flow battery applications that would have dense charge capacities and be chemically robust. On page 836 of this issue, Feng et al. (7) report a class of ingeniously designed 9-fluorenone (FL) molecules as high-performance, potentially low-cost organic anode electrolytes (anolytes) in aqueous organic redox flow batteries (see the figure, top). These FL anolytes not only display exceptional energy storage performance but also exhibit an unprecedented two-electron storage mechanism.

A joke that was waiting to be made

 

There's some kind of deep irony going here...

...when its Right wing places like the Wall Street Journal and Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy decrying the effect of Left wing "woke" ideology on education standards, while it's the very same outlets which are full of readers who think they got a proper education before modern teachers ruined everything, but are also anti-Covid vaxxers and climate change deniers (or "do nothing" proponents.)   

Which is not to say that there isn't a valid argument to be made over the way education seems particularly prone to certain fads and fashions and ideologically motivated arguments.   But, seriously, look in your own backyard first, critics.

 

Some local pushback on the Big Lie

Allahpundit's post about the Republican election officials who have had enough of the "audit" in Arizona is a good read.

No, it's not really a bus, either...

Lots and lots of people on Twitter have said this in response to a tweet which seemed a little too excited about a Chinese thing:

But honestly, and at risk of being labelled a Tankie, I don't think it's right to call it an articulated bus.

The technology was discussed in an article at The Conversation a few years ago:

Trackless trams are neither a tram nor a bus, though they have rubber wheels and run on streets. The high-speed rail innovations have transformed a bus into something with all the best features of light rail and none of its worst features.

It replaces the noise and emissions of buses with electric traction from batteries recharged at stations in 30 seconds or at the end of the line in 10 minutes. That could just be an electric bus, but the ART is much more than that. It has all the speed (70kph), capacity and ride quality of light rail with its autonomous optical guidance system, train-like bogies with double axles and special hydraulics and tyres. 

It can slide into the station with millimetre accuracy and enable smooth disability access. It passed the ride quality test when I saw kids running up and down while it was going at 70kph – you never see this on a bus due to the sway.  

The autonomous features mean it is programmed, optically guided with GPS and LIDAR technologies, into moving very precisely along an invisible track. If an accident happens in the right of way a “driver” can override the steering and go around. It can also be driven to a normal bus depot for overnight storage and deep battery recharge.

As the article notes, Sydney might have been a lot better off with this system running down George Street (although I didn't realise how extensive the light rail in Sydney was until my last visit.)
 

Libertarian derp plus technobabble..heh

That unpleasant disease

This seems rather surprising:

Doctors are reporting a twenty-fold increase in people presenting with syphilis-related eye infections, as Melbourne grapples with a surge in cases of the sexually transmitted infection.

In the early 2000s the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital was recording approximately two cases per year of ocular syphilis.

A team of doctors at the hospital in East Melbourne then researched the condition from 2006 to 2019.

In 2018, 17 cases of ocular syphilis were recorded with infections increasing to 21 in 2019, seven of whom were women.

I would assume that this indicates that there are more women (and men) than before who are unaware of having caught it (because I would have thought this is not one of the likely first signs of infection.)  Then again, the CDC says:

Like neurosyphilis, ocular syphilis can occur at any stage of infection. Ocular syphilis can involve almost any eye structure, but posterior uveitis and panuveitis are the most common. Symptoms include vision changes, decreased visual acuity, and permanent blindness.

News stories of increasing rates of the disease usually talk about it in the context of gay men (or "men who have sex with men"), especially in light of reduced condom use due to reduced fear of HIV (and that PrEP medication gaining popularity.)   But this report seems to make a point of emphasising the number of women who are catching it.   A fair enough warning, I guess...

Eyewitness accounts can be the most compelling

I have said it before, but I will repeat - there may well be good explanations for the US Navy "UFO" videos, because it is hard to understand properly what you are looking at, and the aircraft and camera movement effects can be deceiving.   I'm also pretty sure that new radar systems can give bogus targets, so if there is any talk of new sophisticated radar systems seeing new stuff, I don't assume it is real.

Also, maybe it's just his physical appearance, but this dude does not sound or look like the sharpest person to be making intelligence assessments on UFO incidents:

He in fact gives me the impression of being an attention seeker.  

However, that Navy pilot David Fravor's account of his 2004 visual sighting of a "tic tac" object above the water, which then zoomed up towards him as he moved down towards it, has always sounded to me to be pretty convincing evidence of something completely novel and inexplicable as known technology.

But - I did wonder if he might just turn out to be a self promoting fantacist.   I mean, he seems smart and sincere and sensible, but you never know.

Well, that idea seems to be dealt with adequately by last weekend's 60 Minutes episode which for the first time showed us a second (female) pilot who was on the same sortie (in a second F 18) and backs up everything Fravor says on the many interviews he has been on.  She also appears smart and credible.  

   

It is very hard to see how their sighting could be a case of mistaken identity:  the most obvious "tic tac" shaped thing in the skies would have to be a balloon, but they both seem to say that it moved in complelely un-balloon like fashion, including departing the scene at incredible, almost instantaneous, speed. 

It's pretty fascinating that they also say that the whole ship knew within an hour or so that they had seen something that was commonly called a UFO, and everyone thought it was just a big joke.   Pretty amazing that it took so long for the story about it to actually come out.  

You know the other multi witness, high weirdness, case that this reminds me of - the O'Hare airport sighting of 2006.   The object sounds as if it was about the same size, and zoomed off at the same incredible speed.   I have never (to my recollection) seen interviews with the witnesses to that case, though.

 

Reason to live in high income country

New Scientist reported recently:

Piping an oxygen-rich liquid through the anus could be a life-saver. A new treatment for failing lungs that involves such a process has been successfully tested in pigs....

The researchers anaesthetised four pigs and put them on a ventilator that gave them a lower breathing rate than normal, so their blood oxygen levels fell. When they gave two of the pigs enemas of the oxygenated fluid, replaced once an hour, their blood oxygen levels rose significantly after each infusion. The same effect happened when the fluid was delivered by a tube surgically inserted into the rectums of the other two pigs.

If there is a similar-sized effect in people, it would be enough to provide a medical benefit, says Takebe. He thinks the approach could be especially useful in low-income countries that have fewer intensive care facilities. “Ventilators are super-expensive and need a number of medical staff to manage,” he says. “This is just a simple enema.”

One problem is that gut function may be impaired in people sick enough to need intensive care, which can cause diarrhoea, says Stephen Brett at Imperial College London. “It’s too early to say if this has got any legs,” he says.

Yes, interesting point about the enema aspect.  I wouldn't know for sure, but I didn't think it took all that much liquid insertion via enema for the intestines to want to shoot it out again.   How's that supposed to be stopped?

A worrying age related sign

I wore a black lambswool cardigan to work today.  And a white singlet under my shirt.  I was comfortable.

In my defence, the cardigan was from Uniqlo, which tries to make them cool: 

Yes, that's just what I look like in  my cardie.  (Actually, more like this dweeb from another page on their website:

I'm the one on the right.  Ha ha.)

 

Climate contrarianism raises its stupid head again

Of course, the Wall Street Journal would give high publicity to a new book by a guy who has been well identified as a climate change contrarian - a "do nothing" advocate, it's too expensive - and people like "Stagflation!" and "leave the tobacco companies alone!" expert Sinclair Davidson are impressed and his blog is covering the book like it's finally vindication.  

Ken Rice has a useful post showing how Koonin's arguments have been looked at and dismissed for a number of years.  Just because he has a new book repeating his past bad arguments doesn't change that.

UFOs, politics, and changes in world views

UFOs are in the news, particularly the Right wing news, again:

 

Ezra Klein did an interesting column last week in the NYT about what it might mean if there is about to be a disclosure of proof of alien intelligences operating on Earth.  I think this view is probably right:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

Leave the bears alone

I watched the 2020 Japanese movie Ainu Morir on Netflix on the weekend, and I recommend it at least as an educational exercise, despite some misgivings.

It's set in what I take to be a real Hokkaido village* where the old native folk from that part of Japan make a living from tourism.  The credits at the end would seem to indicate that a lot of people were playing themselves.

I have never read much about the Ainu - as far as I know, they are largely ignored by Japanese society.  The film might well be an attempt to remedy that.  As such, it is a pretty sympathetic treatment of them and their (barely holding on) culture.

The film's key plot is about their bear sacrifice ritual, which made it particularly relevant to me, given  my musing recently about the ubiquity of sacrifice in old human societies.   However, I am not sure it satisfactorily walks the fine line between respect for cultures facing modernity and the unwarranted romanticism of their tribal beliefs.  

To explain more, you would have had to have seen it.   Anyone who has, feel free to comment below.

 

*  Yes, here it is.   

Update:    Apart from the lengthy Wikipedia entry on the Ainu, there is this Smithsonian Magazine article which is a good read.

On worshipping bears generally, there's a short history here of different groups that have done it.  

I kept wondering while watching whether there might be an ancestral connection between Ainu people and native Americans, especially those in Alaska.  But no, genetic investigations indicate that's not the case.  They were just both really into bears. 

Well, actually, it would seem that according to that article, any native peoples living in bear country thought bears were worth worshipping.  Not to mention eating, but in a very ritual fashion: 

Erk.

Flaky Tony and the numbers

So, Tony Blair is in the news having a panic attack about "wokeness" killing the Left.  

While I don't doubt they are some culture war issues on which the Left looks a bit nuts, gullible, and sometimes illiberal, I wish Blair and this type of commentary would bear in mind that total Left wing vote is not as bad as that for Labour (or Labor) alone.

Look at the 2019 vote:

I assume you can call the Liberal Democrats centre Left?  Labour, them and the Greens make up 46.5%.  True, if you add Brexit Party to the Cons, their vote is up to 45.6%.  But my point still stands.

Blair might spend his time better arguing for preferential voting than sounding like Mark Latham lite.

 

Update:   see this article in Quartz looking at the terrible results that they get from their first past the post system.  It obviously stinks.   And I didn't realise that they had attempted to introduce a preferential system of sorts in 2011.   Then PM Cameron opposed it - another way in which he helped damage the country, I see.

My point about Blair is stronger than I realised - he would be better campaigning for another go at electoral reform, perhaps using a simpler preferential system