Good thread

A test

 Is this working? 

That's odd.  Blogger isn't working properly in Firefox.   Did I change some setting?  Didn't think so...

Stop watching trashy reality TV

So Love Island has a particular reputation in England for ruining the emotional lives of participants.

I think the only reality TV format I have ever watched at length is My Kitchen Rules, and that was years ago now before the formula because too obvious and trashy.  I don't think I have ever watched any that involves romantic relationships developing - I have a natural aversion to watching people having such a private aspect of their emotional life broadcast to the world.  Even the more well intentioned ones, like the recent "Love on the Spectrum" - I saw some of it, but I have the same basic objection. 

Really, the format would die if people would not watch it.   But how to encourage people not to watch it?   Make better romantic fictional stories?   

A Big One coming

The ABC does these on line stories with graphics really well.   This one is about the high likelihood that there will soon be another big earthquake - this one centred on the West coast.

I think half of Auckland going under a new volcano would be more spectacular - and that is quite possible too.

Lying flat discussed

The best single column I've read about the Chinese government getting all panicky about the "lying flat" movement is this one by Matthew Brooker at Bloomberg.  Some parts:

It’s ironic (though perhaps inevitable) that, having adopted the methods of a market economy to achieve its goal of creating a moderately prosperous society, China now finds itself beset with an identifiably capitalist affliction. Opting out and doing nothing requires a base level of affluence that would be impractical in a country still trying to drag itself out of poverty. Yet beyond a certain point, material goals cease to satisfy human needs — a syndrome that is familiar in many developed countries.

Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine, driven by an inexorable logic of expansion. The profits of production are invested in more production, which requires ever-expanding markets to consume what is made. This gives rise to the advertising and marketing industries, whose job it is to convince consumers that fulfillment lies in more and better things. All this makes capitalism a prodigious generator of goods and services. It also tends to generate feelings of alienation and anxiety.

That’s because the answer to human happiness doesn’t lie in sating material desires (something that Buddhists have known for thousands of years).....

A Stalinist political system is a perpetual motion machine of another kind, fueled by paranoia. The motherland is surrounded by enemies, and the people must constantly redouble their efforts and unite behind their savior-leader to beat back the existential threats it faces. Having abandoned (or at least postponed) the Communist ideals of equality and solidarity, Xi has turned to nationalism and perceptions of a hostile world to reinforce belief in the necessity of the party’s leadership. “Universal values” such as democracy and human rights are a foreign plot designed to weaken and destabilize China; discussion of such pernicious influences has been banished.

What is intriguing about the “lying flat” wave is that it shows how similar the Chinese experience is when faced with the same conditions as other countries. Political control has its limits. For all Xi’s attempts to foster a sense of Chinese exceptionalism and reinforce Communist orthodoxy, society may develop in unexpected ways. It’s also a reminder that China has other traditions besides the rigid Legalist philosophy that characterizes Xi’s grip on power. Lying flat contains more than a hint of Daoism, which emphasizes harmony with nature. The Daoist poet Li Bai seems to have spent most of his time drinking wine and enjoying the company of friends; he reputedly drowned while leaning drunkenly out of his boat to see the moon's reflection in the river. The Communist press wouldn’t have approved.

 

 

 

About that excessive movie about excess

With reluctance, as I considered there was an excellent chance I would not like it, I watched Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday (on Netflix).   

And (surprise!), I didn't care for it.

That was pretty much going to be a certainty when Matthew McConaughey turned up unexpectedly in the first 10 minutes.   Actually, while this segment was pretty funny for its bizarre aspects, he still lived up to being my personal talisman for warning that the movie will be, at the very least, badly flawed.

My main problems with the movie?:

a.    it's excessively about crass excess - in such a way that it hurt the sense of realism.  I would say it  very often seemed more cartoonish than realistic.  Even apart from the scenes of carnal excess, which (as I expected) were extreme and many, I thought the whole trading floor atmosphere seemed over the top and fake.  Too many people in too small a place; too much noise; too much adoring love for their boss when they thought he was going.   The day after watching the movie, I did see on Youtube some video showing the real lead character (Jordan Belfort), both when the movie came out, and back in the 1990's.   These reinforced my impression that the artistic licence taken in showing this world went too far.  I appreciate that some people would have wanted to see the movie to see how outrageous the life of the rich and crass could be - but to me, it looked too unrealistic too often.

b.  It is way too long - both in so many individual scenes, and overall.   I read David Edelstein's review after watching it, and fully agree with this part:

In interviews, Scorsese’s brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker has said it was hard to cut the film down from four hours. Four hours?! As I watched, I kept thinking that every scene could be snipped at the halfway point, before yet another hot-dog monologue or leering shot of Belfort’s second wife, the startlingly pretty but soulless ­Naomi, the “Duchess of Bay Ridge,” played by Margot Robbie. I figured Leo must have been sitting in the editing room saying, “No, no, don’t cut here — my favorite line is coming up — 30 more seconds — okay, a minute — wait, let it run! It’s my Oscars scene!” But no, this was Scorsese’s design. Overkill is the ruling aesthetic.

c.  While I don't say it had to be more of a morality play, as it does fit into Scorsese's love of stories about corrupt men who think they have it made and then things start falling apart, there is one key scene which is problematic:  the one where the FBI agent (the best played character in the film, if you ask me, and I did think his scene on the yacht - invented for the movie - was well written and acted) is on the subway after seeing Belfort face justice at last.  As Edelstein writes:

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible. But you’re supposed to envy them anyway, because the alternative is working at McDonald’s and riding the subway alongside wage slaves. What are a few years in a minimum-security prison — practically a country club — when you can have the best of everything?

I think Edelstein is going too far in saying Scorsese wants the audience to envy the characters on screen, but it is hard to interpret the subway scene as anything other than invitation to share a moment of doubt that maybe it's sad that more people don't get to live life to a drug addled, VD infected, lobster eating, full.   As I say, problematic.

d.  A dated gratuitousness to the display of female nudity.   I hesitate to raise this, because I can see an argument that it suits the movies and pop culture of the era in which it was set.   But I just couldn't avoid thinking about it after the scene near the end where the Swiss banker waits for his young lover under his bed sheets, but when she makes her appearance, it's like a deliberate pause for a bit of full frontal nudity before getting under the sheets, which then start flying about in a Benny Hill style caricature of sex.   That just struck me as the way it would have been done in a 1980's flick, but not these days.   Sure, earlier there was Leonardo's butt side on during a (again) pointlessly protracted sex scene, and there was a comedy flash of a (presumably) prosthetic penis; but in retrospect, I think it is fair to say that the whole movie looked dated in the way the flesh displayed was primarily female.   (Although - now that I think of it - was trying to get more gender balance in skin on display the reason for the odd scene in which the college band came into the workplace floor but with the guys wearing no shirts?   That just looked weird in its own way to me - I can't see the uber macho male brokers being impressed, and there were few females working there anyway.)  

So there you go.  My thoughts, in too much detail, probably.

  

 

He's back

Barnaby Joyce isn't smart enough to use a condom while having an affair with a staff member, yet thinks he knows better than scientists about climate change and the environment.   The only people his return will impress is the still substantial climate change denial camp in the National Party. 

And now he's back, to try to drag the Coalition away from doing anything too fast on CO2.   

I don't think Morrison's very sharp either - but perhaps just sharp enough to know that there is no future in being the government of climate change inaction.

Sure, Labor has its own problems in keeping everyone on board re this issue - but it really is the Coalition that deserves to fall apart over it.  Turnbull should have outright called for party schism over this while he was still leader ("if you want to argue the reality of climate change, get out of the Coalition").   While he  (Turnbull) seems a nice enough man, his lack of bravery on the issue at the time he could have forced it into some form of resolution means he was a failed PM.  Sorry.

China in space

I was watching a couple of videos about the first astronauts from China going to their new (partly built) space station.

The odd thing, it seems to me, is that the videos give the distinct impression that the astronauts really have nothing to do - it looks as if a couple are napping during the launch:

 

 And have a look at this short clip of the docking:   the astronaut capsule looks as if it is designed in such a way that they can't reach the control panel without using (what looks like) a walking stick: 

 

That's an odd look inside a modern spaceship, isn't it? 

 

 

Sounds fair

That's sarcasm.

This is extraordinarily ridiculous:

Magistrate Rodney Higgins, who created controversy in 2019 by embarking on a relationship with a court clerk 45 years his junior, has successfully claimed her $180,000 superannuation death benefit even though it was bequeathed to her struggling mother.

Mr Higgins, who earns $324,000 a year as a magistrate in Bendigo, made the successful claim on the death benefits of his late fiance Ashleigh Petrie after the fund, Rest Super, agreed with his argument that he was her de facto partner and therefore her “dependent”.

But the payout has been delayed because lawyers for Ms Petrie’s mother, whom The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have chosen not to name to protect her privacy, have been fighting the decision for 15 months. They have appealed the super fund’s position to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.

The multi-decade age gap between Mr Higgins and court clerk Ms Petrie sparked frenzied media coverage in October 2019. Ms Petrie, 23, was hit by a car in the early hours of Monday, October 28, 2019, less than three weeks after the first story of her relationship was published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun.

Mr Higgins, then 68, and Ms Petrie were a couple for seven months and lived together for about four months prior to her death. They were engaged in September 2019. During her relationship with Mr Higgins, Ms Petrie nominated her mother as the beneficiary of her superannuation and life insurance.

But Mr Higgins has refused the mother’s pleas to share the money, citing his hurt that he was not given a portion of Ms Petrie’s ashes. Within months of the young woman’s death, Mr Higgins returned to his partner of 18 years, Lurline Le Neuf, whom he’d left earlier that year to be with Ms Petrie. They share a riverfront home in Shepparton.

Don't stand between Higgins a wallet you've spotted on the ground:  clearly, he'll bowl you over in the attempt to get it.

 

 

Yet more Tucker led conspiracy

Ah yeah, so the FBI organised the attempt to capture politicians and make them vote in Trump.   

Seriously, America is not going to be right in the head until the Murdoch empire decides to rein in its nutball, conspiracy promoting, evening line up.   

The Washington Post (link above) has the explanation as to why it's (of course) a complete crock.

A disappointing turn by Jon Stewart

Yeah, count me as disappointed that Jon Stewart should have turned up on Colbert's show to do a silly bit about it's obvious that the Wuhan virus lab must have been the source of the COVID virus.

His delivery was funny enough that the audience laughed, but Stephen Colbert's pointing out that he wasn't being all that logical - he should consider that maybe scientists do research at labs near where the viruses they are interested in occur naturally - was the bit of reasoning that needed to be said and the Right will ignore.

Stewart's bit has made him a hero to the wingnut right.  (Oh, now he's funny, that he's said something they can agree with.  Note that the Lefty Colbert audience still was laughing - showing perhaps that the reason Right wing comedians don't get laughs is because they are just not good at humour delivery, regardless of content.)

As Allahpundit tweeted:

And someone had a theory that, in retrospect, made some sense:

In expert commentary:

American neurophysiologist and radio host Dr. Kiki Sanford tweeted: “I saw the clip and am concerned to see Stewart promoting the conspiracy... even if it's just for laughs.” Sanford noted that she sees the joke Stewart was trying to make but said “it is at the expense of people who know a LOT about this kind of thing working really hard to figure out where the virus DID come from. The ‘well it must be’ narrative isn't science.” Others responded to Sanford’s tweet noting that Stewart’s segment was both “disappointing and tragic.”

I wouldn't be surprised if Stewart ends up doing a "it was just a bit, sorry" appearance about it, actually.  

Update:  the Washington Post's The Fix column has a good look at this, including noting journals and papers which had already detailed the Colbert retort.

So that's what's going on with avocados

So I'm not the only person wondering why we seem to have a huge supply of cheap, great quality, avocados at the moment.  The Guardian, favoured paper of those who love their avocado and crumbled feta on sourdough toast, tells me more about avocados than I thought I needed to know:

...this winter, Australians can afford to eat all the avo on toast they like, with the savoury green fruit selling for just $1 (55p, or 77c) each.

The eye-watering drop in price is due to a bumper crop – the result of good weather and new trees. Australia is home to three million avocado trees; half of those were planted in the last five years alone. The trees can take just three or four years to start bearing fruit.

“Avocado production is 65% higher this year since last year,” said John Tyas, CEO of Avocados Australia. “The planets have aligned and its phenomenal.”

For avocado lovers the good news just keeps coming. New technology developed this year by the University of Queensland could see 500 new trees produced from a one-millimetre cutting in future, compared to the single tree per cutting growers get now, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

“Like many people in the developed world, Australians didn’t really eat avocado 20 years ago,” said Tyas. [*]

He credits the local appetite for the spreadable fresh produce – technically a berry – with the fact that avocados can be grown year-round. Australians also eat avocados for breakfast – with the beloved and now ubiquitous “smashed avocado” – minced with a fork, seasoned and served toast – made world famous by Sydney chef Bill Granger.

 The country’s per capita avo consumption is 4kg a year – higher than the US at 3.6kg and way ahead of the UK’s 1.4kg.

Speaking of Americans and avocados, I think they get most of their's from Mexico, and there have been stories for a few years about Mexican drug cartels pushing into its avocado industry.  That's still a problem, according to this recent Al Jazeera report:

 

Pretty incredible: having to take up arms to guard your avocado orchard.  

Anyway, back to The Guardian:

Australian avocado production has more than doubled in ten years, from 40,000 tonnes in 2009/10 to nearly 90,000 in 2019/20 – at a value of almost half a billion dollars (A$493m). Of these, 80% were Hass avocados – with the much-maligned Shepard variety making up 17%. Just 5% of this is exported.

It is likely to double again in the next ten years, said Tyas.

The rest of the article says that we're trying to grow an export industry into Asia.  But fruit fly.

Anyway, looks like now I'll have to worry about not only carrots being too cheap in future.

*   This is an exaggeration, I think.  I have a clear memory of a discussion with someone where I worked in my late 20's about how much I liked avocado on toast for a quick lunch.   He said he liked that too.  Regretfully, this is now more than 30 years ago!

A good French film

Purely by accident (I searched Netflix for "90 minute movies" on Saturday night), I came across the French (Netflix produced) film from 2020 Lost Bullet.  It's very good.

It's a car action/corrupt cop film which is lean but moves along at a nice and engaging pace, with just the right number of narrative surprises; and is pretty impressive for the quality of some of the mini-Mad Max style road action too.  (I am completely uninterested in the post apocalyptic silly world of George Miller, and the obviously CGI nature of the Fast and Furious leaves me cold too;  but put some [relatively] realistic looking, small scale car action on the screen and it can still be entertaining.)

It's well worth a look.   Once again, it has a level of complexity and realistic enough characters, but on a modest budget, which makes me wonder why Australian films can't duplicate this.

 

On China and education

An opinion piece in the Washington Post argues that America, and the West generally I suppose, shouldn't be getting into a panic over a recent claims that Chinese high school education is beating the world:

As pointed out by several experts, such as Rob J. Gruiters, university lecturer at the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge, the China ranking is a sham. The 2018 PISA tests were given to 15-year-olds only in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, four of the most urbanized and affluent areas of the country. All 79 nations and political entities participating in PISA are asked to submit results that accurately represent their schools. China has not done that, but the people running PISA do little about it.

Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on international school assessments, summed up the situation after the 2018 PISA results were released:

“There is not one but two Chinas: one urbanized, mainly on the east coast, and rapidly growing in wealth; the other rural, in the interior of China or on the move as migrants, and mired in poverty. As a rough proxy, recent population numbers put the Chinese rural share at 41 percent. PISA assesses achievement of the first China and ignores the second.”

And the education standards in the poorer parts of the country sound pretty low:

Scholars rarely get a chance to look closely at rural Chinese education, but the available information is depressing. Loveless cited studies conducted from 2007 to 2013 showing cumulative dropout rates in rural areas between 17 and 31 percent in junior high schools. Only half of rural Chinese children went to high school and only 37 percent of that age group graduated.  A 2017 study revealed that in 27 provinces the average high school classroom had more than 45 students. In 12 provinces the average was more than 55. Loveless said the government’s official goal is no more than 56 students per classroom.

 

Because it worked so well in Hong Kong, I suppose...

Maybe this proposal has been around before, I'm not sure.  But it's being pushed on CGTN now:

At last: the Left wing academic criticism of Dark Emu

In 2019 I noted that there seemed to be a clear lack of detailed academic commentary on Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, with the only criticism coming from Right wing polemicists who obviously have some culture war axes to grind.  Nonetheless, I suspected they were correct - and my theory was that the Lefty world of academia was remaining silent rather than being seen as aligned with the world of Andrew Bolt and Quadrant.

Well, at last, it appears that the world of professional academic anthropology has finally broken their silence.  See this article in Good Weekend today, about a new book by two long established anthropologists. 

Perhaps I was unfair in thinking the academics were being silent because of political correctness - it would seem that they just didn't think a book by an amateur historical revisionist was worth looking into with much urgency - which is unfortunate, give that the cultural fashion world of educationalist academia was rushing to endorse it and see it promoted within classrooms.  Some extracts:

It was not until 2019, when Dark Emu had taken on a celebrated status, that Sutton gave it his full attention. He was deeply unimpressed, as he was when he read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, the 1987 bestseller combining fiction and non-fiction which popularised the notion of Aboriginal people singing the stories of the land, without much understanding of Aboriginal culture. Nothing in Sutton’s 50 years of research with senior Aboriginal people suggested to him that Pascoe was right. He was “disturbed” that Pascoe’s descriptions of Aboriginal life were based on – and to his mind, took liberties with – “the journals of blow-through European explorers, men who were ignorant of the languages and cultures of those they met”, rather than Aboriginal people, whose knowledge has been recorded for the past hundred years at least.

He was “disappointed” that in attempting to describe Aboriginal land use, Pascoe ignored the importance of spiritual tradition and ritual. He was “stunned” that the book was “riddled with errors of fact, selective quotations, selective use of evidence, and exaggeration of weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years. And he was “outraged” that school curricula were being changed to conform with the Dark Emu narrative, embracing Pascoe’s descriptions of an early agricultural society.

And clearly, this criticism is from a Left perspective - that Pascoe, by trying to re-classify aboriginal society as an agricultural one, was actually buying into conservative views: 

More than anything, he felt that Pascoe had done the Old People – as Sutton refers to them – a monumental disservice, resurrecting long-discredited ideas of social evolutionism that placed hunter-gatherers lower on the evolutionary scale than farmers. To Sutton, it was a rebirthing of the colonial philosophy used to justify Aboriginal dispossession in the first place: that people who lived lightly on the land had no claim to it, that farmers were more deserving of dignity and respect than hunter-gatherers.

More important to me is the specific criticisms of misleading dishonestly in the book, many of which had been raised by those Right wing polemicists, and are confirmed as correct.  (I always suspected they would be, because no one was coming out and showing the factual errors in the Right wing attacks.)

Pascoe records Mitchell’s astonishment on coming upon a large, deserted village during his Australia Felix expedition, which he estimated housed “over 1000” people. This, says Sutton, is “pure fiction”. “All Mitchell says is that his party ‘noticed some of their huts’; there is no mention of anyone counting anything.” Pascoe then quotes a member of Mitchell’s party, Granville Stapylton, as saying that the buildings “were of very large dimensions, one capable of containing at least 40 persons and of very superior construction”. But he omits Stapylton’s speculation that this was “the work of a white man”, probably the runaway convict William Buckley, who lived with the Wathaurong people for three decades.

Elsewhere, Pascoe cites Charles Sturt’s discovery of a large well and village somewhere north of Lake Torrens in South Australia, but neglects to say that Sturt saw no signs of recent occupation. When Sturt finds grass set out to dry and ripen, Pascoe guesses this was because of surplus grain, which suggested “sedentary agriculture”. Sutton ridicules the idea. “The suggestion, if that is what Pascoe intends, that anyone could practise ‘sedentary agriculture’ in that blasted desert environment is simply ill-informed,” he writes.....

Over 300 pages, Sutton and Walshe pick apart Dark Emu. Where Pascoe writes that permanent housing was “a feature of the pre-contact Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance”, Sutton dismisses this absolutely. “The recurring pattern, all over Australia, was one of seasonal and other variation in lengths of stays in one place,” Sutton writes. “No group is ever described, at the moment of colonisation, as living year in, year out, in one single place.” Where Dark Emu featured the use of stone for housing, Sutton answers that it was “the rarest in the Aboriginal record”, a “last resort” in the stoniest of environments.

And so on.

I expect that there are a dozen or so broadcasters from the ABC who will need the smelling salts after reading about this this book - Patricia Karvelas and Jonathan Green especially. They have shown a complete lack of interest in checking whether any form of criticism of Pascoe and his books had some truth or validity.

The Labor Party needs to be particularly careful about this.   I reckon there is a political price to be paid for showing too much credulity to pro-indigenous claims and politics.  The lesson of the Hindmarsh Island scandal seems to have faded too quickly from their consciousness.  

Update:  The Conversation features as positive review of the new book.

Add him to the list of "people unexpectedly still alive"

Michael Parkinson  makes an appearance in The Guardian.  No doubt due to already crinkled face appearance as a younger man in his television heyday, my mind assumed he must be about 125 years old by now.   In fact, he is (checks Wikipedia) 86 - which is still getting up there, really.

I wonder what my CGTN app will have to say about this

The BBC:

China has created a dystopian hellscape in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says

Seems a bit...harsh.   Xinjiang looks all fine to me on any CGTN report I see.  

And I did put the CGTN app on  my Vivo phone recently.   It works pretty well, although doesn't seem to have a search function beyond being to "Ask Panda" for some news from certain categories.  The live feed of the TV network is fine, though.  So anytime I need to watch a panel show about how great things are going in China, and how the West is not coping with its own problems, I can do so on my phone.  (I was somewhat amused to find the app asked for permission to access my media files when I installed it.  I declined that kind invitation, but it still works.  Now it just keeps asking to access cache, or something.  I'm still declining.)

I told my son that I downloaded the app so that in 10 years time, when we are stopped on the street by our  new Han overlords, I will be able to flash my phone and show then I have been following CGTN for years, so obviously I am trustworthy and should be allowed on my way.   As my son is taken to a re-education camp, I will say "told you so". 

[Sounds like I'm making light of a serious situation re Xinjiang.   I actually have been thinking for a long time, though, that the true situation is likely somewhere between the extremes of the reporting on this problem.]   

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.