There is a meditative quality to both Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson’s
work that sucks you in. For Rogan, it is his voice — a soft, curious,
always credulous murmur that lends itself to explaining complicated
topics. Watching Rogan deconstruct a mixed martial arts fight can be a
genuine pleasure for fans of the sport, like listening to a close friend
really nerd out over something they’re passionate about. Peterson is
not as blessed sonically — he sounds like Kermit the Frog as a freshman
philosophy major — but he too projects the same blithe confidence in his
own words that can make almost any topic sound compelling.
The only problem is, Joe Rogan and
Jordan Peterson are two of the dumbest people on earth. The wildly
successful podcast host and self-help author’s careers have intersected
and built on one another multiple times, as their core audience of
disaffected young men is largely the same. Their paths crossed once
again this week in a four-hour marathon conversation on The Joe RoganExperience, during which Peterson bizarrely and very proudly wore a tuxedo. Their topics were varied, but almost all of them were intensely stupid, if not incoherent.
....
This sort of credulity is both Rogan’s
biggest draw and his worst tendency. Rogan has built his brand around
open-mindedness, which he passes off as “free thinking.” But in
practice, instead of thinking
about what his guests are saying to him, Rogan’s first instinct is to
“mmhm” his way through topics that frequently stray into conspiracies,
bigotry, or simple stupidity. Rogan’s guiding ethos doesn’t seem to be
much more complicated than “seek out the controversial, and popular,”
which has led him, during the pandemic, to repeatedly platform or publish misinformation about coronavirus and vaccines.
A frog has regrown a lost leg after being treated with a cocktail of drugs in a significant advance for regenerative medicine.
The
African clawed frog, which is naturally unable to regenerate its limbs,
was treated with the drugs for just 24 hours and this prompted an
18-month period of regrowth of a functional leg. The demonstration
raises the prospect that in the future drugs could be used to switch on
similar untapped abilities for regeneration in human patients to restore
tissues or organs lost to disease or injury.
“It’s
exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an
almost complete limb,” said Nirosha Murugan of Tufts University in
Massachusetts and first author of the paper. “The fact that it required
only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long
regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may
have dormant regenerative capabilities that can be triggered into
action.”
It is breathtakingly stupid that American conservatives should rush to play a game of "whataboutism" to try to downplay how Trump talked about the press compared to Biden's very occasional snappiness with reporters.
There is just zero comparison.
How thick and dumb do you have to be to not see the fascist nature of continually, at rallies, and elsewhere, calling all mainstream networks and journalists "the enemy of the people" unless they are bootlickers to the most absurd character ever to hold the Presidency; and outright lying about things like "and look up the back, they're turning the cameras off now."
And you know what - it's weird, but the absolutely dumbest and most dishonest version of an American conservative seems to be gay conservative commentators - see Gateway Pundit and the awful Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald's denunciation of Biden's hot mic snark is so weirdly over the top that it seems many assumed he was being sarcastic, but the following tweets just confirm he is an absolute partisan nut with not an iota of a sense of perspective.
Does Murdoch think Putin empowerment by invading Ukraine is a good idea? If not, why is he relaxed (well, relaxed enough not to be exercising any editorial control) about Fox News gee-ing up the Trumpist conservatives into taking Putin's side? Is it really worth the money in the US, or does he think there is money to be made in Russia too? Is he smart enough to admit that Brexit is a populist failure? Surely he doesn't think he has successfully "punished" the Europeans, who he complained he cannot control, by forcing Britain out of the EU? Is he letting Fox's most influential "stars" take Putin's side as a second attempt at punishing Europe for not letting him do whatever he wants?
So many questions. Many brought to mind by David Frum:
From a book review in the New York Times, about a young-ish enlightenment seeking trekker (and internet figure) who disappeared in a Himalayan valley knows for its trekker disappearances:
What animates Shetler? We learn that he’s the child of divorce, on the
one hand having a father whose own experiences in India heavily
influenced Shetler (as did their father-and-teenage-son partaking of
hallucinogens) and a mother whose spiritual influence can be attributed
to the Hindu-inflected Eckankar religion, birthed in the 1960s by Paul
Twitchell, a onetime colleague of L. Ron Hubbard, promoting “soul
travel,” the chanting of the word “Hu,” and a belief system said to have
begun when an essence known as Gakko came to Earth six million years
ago from the city of Retz on Venus.
I have heard of Eckankar, but never bothered reading up on its esoteric beliefs.
So, it seems there is some discussion going on as to whether America's chronic homelessness problem is largely a result of a new form of meth that has been flooding in from Mexico.
I don’t know what is causing this very
quick descent into psychosis, symptoms of schizophrenia, etc., among
people using the meth that’s now on the street nationwide. I said this
in the book.
It could indeed be the
staggering quantities of the drug nationwide — certainly a byproduct of
how P2P meth is made — that leads in turn to far greater consumption. It
could indeed be its alarming potency. As I state in the book, there’s
no neuroscience on this — no studies of the effects of today’s street
meth on rats or mice. I hope the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will fund
those studies, using authentic street meth from around the country.
In
my book, I’m giving street reporting — just talking with folks who work
or have lived in this world — because there are no studies. If there
were any, I’d have cited them.
Also, people end up homeless for many
reasons. A shredded safety net, release from prison without any family
support, registered sex offenders who can’t find housing in the limited
areas they’re allowed to live in, massive childhood trauma, etc. The
list is probably as long and complex as the people who are homeless. I’m
quite sure the high cost of housing is among the reasons for many
people.
But people whose problem is a
lost job or an expensive surgery with no health insurance forcing them
out of housing do not collapse into a tent on the street. They usually
have family support, friends on whose couch they can sleep. Not so with
folks for whom using meth is the issue.
What’s
more, meth’s prevalence is now so complete that once someone is
homeless (for whatever reason) it’s quite easy to fall into using the
drug. Meth-induced psychosis allows a user to escape the reality of
living on the street. Getting out of homelessness then becomes a much
more difficult task. My reporting shows that often users do not return
to their former state of mental acuity once they stop using this meth.
Recovery of brain faculties can take months.
Despite
all this, on the list of causes of homelessness, this meth surge and
meth-induced psychosis seems to me, after a lot of reporting on it, is
the only topic that appears taboo
to discuss in many activist/advocate circles. The issue’s narrative is
almost entirely about the high cost of housing. Nothing else seems
permitted. There’s almost a prohibition, a woke censorship, that
prevents meth from being discussed.
...The new pill, called SER-109 and made by Seres Therapeutics, is derived
from human feces purified to winnow down the resident microbes. Stool
from prescreened donors is treated with ethanol, which kills many
viruses, fungi, and “vegetative” bacteria—those in a state of growth and
reproduction. Left behind are bacteria that can form hearty,
thick-walled structures called spores, many of them from the common
phylum Firmicutes. Bacteria in this group are valuable because they can compete with C. difficile in the gut, “taking its space and its food and its carbon sources,” says Seres Chief Medical Officer Lisa
von Moltke; the Firmicutes also change the composition of bile acids in
the intestines, making the environment less hospitable for C. difficile, she notes.
Still, you would want that gel coating to work well...
...Paul Waldman in the Washington Post notes what I have read elsewhere - despite Democrat jerks Manchin and Sinema defending the filibuster, what's more remarkable is that every other Democrat in the Senate has turned against it. Apparently, this was not the uniform opinion even relatively recently.
More in the series "What Google wanted me to learn about last night." It was quite interesting, and this guy's channel is full of esoteric historical aircraft information, by the looks:
There are a lot of familiar names in it, and some new-ish stuff I don't recall reading before. This section, for example:
Challenges to uncomplicated faith – or uncomplicated lack of faith –
have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of
spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is
that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes God’s death.
Within Christianity there is a tradition known as ‘apophatic theology’,
often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises
that God – the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal –
can’t be expressed in language. God is not something – God is the very
ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology – 2nd-century
Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – promulgated a method that has come to
be known as the via negativa. According to this approach,
nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He
exists. ‘We do not know what God is,’ the 9th-century Irish theologian
John Scotus Eriugena wrote. ‘God Himself does not know what He is
because He is not anything. Literally God is not’ [my emphasis].
How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the
centuries before Nietzsche’s infamous theocide was to understand that
God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything
else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this
void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple
atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their
thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This
is the answer of how to pray to a ‘dead God’: by understanding that
neither the word ‘dead’ nor ‘God’ means anything at all.
Well, that's one way to deal with a problem.
[Update insert: oddly, it reminds me of the opening lyrics of Birdhouse in Your Soul:
I'm your only friend I'm not your only friend But I'm a little glowing friend But really I'm not actually your friend But I am
I didn't realise they were summarising mystical/radical theology.]
I've always found the question of religion's response to the scientific changes in the understanding of the age of the planet, the size of the universe, and human nature, to be terribly interesting; and as I have written before, the older you get, the greater perspective you have on how it is not so long ago that these radical changes in understanding happened. We're still living within the lifetime of people who were young when Einstein revolutionised physics and an understanding of the scale of the universe was found at the end of telescope. It was only 50 or so years before that that evolution was being hotly debated as a new idea. Is it any wonder this is still having repercussions on religions going back a couple of thousand years before these changes in understanding?
Yet, it seems to me that quite a lot of people never think of this perspective - that the (seemingly newly invigorated) war within the Churches between conservatives and liberals are connected to this problem that is actually pretty new and still being worked through.
On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic
passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5
million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of
excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.
Working
out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple
as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some
official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more
than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or
actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.
And after explaining the complexities, concludes with this:
Amid the search for ways to count deaths, Andrew Noymer, a
demographer at the University of California, Irvine, says the pandemic
and the increased demand for real-time mortality figures highlight a
demographic shortcoming that goes back decades: many countries simply
don’t collect good data on births, deaths and other vital statistics.
“Demographers have been part of the problem, because we have helped to
put band-aids on this for 60 years. We’ve developed all sorts of
techniques to estimate demographic rates in the absence of hard data,”
he says.
That means the true death toll of COVID-19 might always
be disputed. “We still don’t know how many people died in the 1918 [flu]
pandemic, but I always figured we would know pretty well how many
people would die in the next one, because we live in the modern world,”
Noymer says. “But we don’t actually, and that’s kind of sad for me as a
demographer.”
Over at Science, the particular difficulties of counting deaths in India is discussed in detail in a paper. (I have always said that I would not be surprised if the true death rate effect of heat waves in that country was not clear at all.) Here's the abstract:
India’s national COVID death totals remain undetermined. Using an
independent nationally representative survey of 0.14 million (M) adults,
we compared COVID mortality during the 2020 and 2021 viral waves to
expected all-cause mortality. COVID constituted 29% (95%CI 28-31%) of
deaths from June 2020-July 2021, corresponding to 3.2M (3.1-3.4) deaths,
of which 2.7M (2.6-2.9) occurred in April-July 2021 (when COVID doubled
all-cause mortality). A sub-survey of 57,000 adults showed similar
temporal increases in mortality with COVID and non-COVID deaths peaking
similarly. Two government data sources found that, when compared to
pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27% (23-32%) higher in
0.2M health facilities and 26% (21-31%) higher in civil registration
deaths in ten states; both increases occurred mostly in 2021. The
analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021
were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.
I'm still really surprised at how long it is taking to get a good idea of the amount of damage in Tonga. It has reminded me of the start of King Kong, with an island that is unobservable. If ever we have a significant meteor strike causing tsunamis all over the Pacific, it's obviously going to take ages to learn the full extent of what has happened.
Tonga's internet could be down for more than two weeks after a violent
volcanic eruption cut the kingdom's only undersea communications cable,
isolating the country from contact with the outside world.
Surely Elon Musk ought to be promoting Starlink private internet services as a solution to this problem?
I don't have much interest in language as a topic, which probably explains why it had escaped my attention (until Google wanted me to learn it - yes I am talking recommendations on Youtube again) that it is widely held that the Koreans have the easiest writing system (alphabet) ever invented.
Huh. I just thought it looked weird, but as I say, languages are not my "thing".
I'm kind of surprised, in this modern day of communications, that Tonga could apparently be so easily cut off from the rest of the world. What about satellite phones? Do all governments keep a bunch of them on hand in case cables are cut? But then, I thought, maybe satellite phones don't do well under a giant cloud of volcanic ash? Anyway, some communications have taken place, apparently, but using what system?
It also would not be at all surprising to see some global cooling as a result of this:
I bought a new steam iron and it's good to be ironing with steam again. [Oh my. I just checked and it would appear that I have been putting up with using a water spray bottle while ironing, instead of using a continuous stream of steam, for just over 5 years! How did I last so long?]
Gone with Tefal this time - this one:
The company makes a song and dance about having "anti-calc" systems which involve openings into the iron and the ability to remove scale (or bits of it.) I was thinking of just using distilled water in it (as I happen to have some in the garage), but they actually recommend against using it!
I had been wondering about this: in frigid climates, if people drive electric cars, how long can the battery keep the interior warm if they are stuck in traffic for a very long time, as was the case recently in Virginia?
It turns out a guy on Youtube ran a test on two Tesla models, at least, and the results were pretty impressive. Starting at a 90% charge, and keeping the inside at a nice 21 degrees C (70F), and without any human body warmth to help maintain the interior temperature, the test indicated the batteries should last well over a day, perhaps 36 hours. (And in reality, people might turn the heater down to under 20 degrees if they have concerns about how much power was left.) This is better than I would have expected, to be honest.
So Joe Rogan, who I have never cared to listen to, got very publicly corrected on a COVID/vaccination risk point, and didn't like it, as explained in these tweets:
Man, I'm sick of the COVID messaging/expertise wars. I read the article yesterday in the AFR (which I can't link to now as paywall is up), about the fight between Nick Coatesworth and "Ozsage", which started:
A year ago, when he was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick
Coatsworth told colleagues to watch out for a group of doctors and
academics who, he felt, were so concerned by SARS-CoV-2 they would
advocate for excessive measures against the virus.
Yet Coatesworth himself was partially wrong in his pooh-poohing of 25,000 a day from Omicron:
University of NSW modelling has suggested NSW could have up to 25,000 new cases a day by February - eight times higher than the current number.
However, Dr Coatsworth slammed that figure as not 'accurate', challenging claims by clinical immunologist Dr Dan Suan that the state was 'sleepwalking into an Omicron disaster'.
Sure, you might say he turned out to be right "in the big picture" on his very early guess (because, really, that's all it could have been) that Omicron would result in much lower hospitalisation and might, maybe, be (kind of?) the end of COVID. (Although, as far as I can tell, it is still completely unknown how much protection an Omicron infection might give against future variants.)
I've complained from the start of the pandemic, pretty much, that people on all sides seemed to be overconfident of their positions on the basis of very clearly complicated and early information that would be very hard to sort out and take years in some cases to understand well.
If anything, it has made me think of the importance of consensus in science and policy matters - you will always get a range of opinion even from normally credible experts, and there will always be the influence of personal and social political philosophy on expert's views as to how to respond. But that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as valid expertise on which to draw reasonable policy responses.
The important thing, I think, should be is to look at a science and policy consensus position, and always have sufficient regard to the uncertainties of novel and evolving events.
The report by NOAA has some good analysis of the cost of weather/climate disasters in the US over recent years. I took this screenshot from it:
A reminder: conservative wingnuts obsess over the cost of BLM rioting - which was widely reported last year as probably ending up costing insurance between $1 to $2 billion.
My daughter started feeling over her COVID on Sunday, with no symptoms yesterday and today. She (and the rest of the family) are supposed to have RAT's today, the 6th day after her positive test was taken, but the problem was - how to get them. Apparently, there was a fair chance we could get them free if we went to a testing clinic, but as far as I know, people are still lining up for hours (whether in or out of a car) to get processed. (Last week, apparently, a friend of my daughter and her Mum went at 3 am to line up in their car for a test - and there were already 30 cars ahead of them. It took until 9 am!)
So, although the official rules for isolation say that I wasn't supposed to leave the house, as I had taken a negative RAT last Friday, and did not have any symptoms since, yesterday I decided to check 4 or 5 chemists near me, mainly 3 Chemist Warehouse outlets. No tests were to be found, and I went both in the morning and afternoon. People were practically stalking delivery vans, asking the guy if his delivery included tests. (I did ask too, at a smaller chemist.) People are obviously very happy to use these tests, and pay for them, if only they were available.
But then, behold, Facebook did something useful for once, and I got a text at about 7.30pm from my worker that they were available at Coles nearest me. They were selling only one pack per customer (or two tests), and so my wife (no symptoms either) came with me. Success!
About to test my daughter...she will be irate if it's positive!
Update: I reckon the test came back a clear "invalid". Ugh. I don't entirely trust this brand. My son's test didn't seem to give a clear result either.
Update 2: my wife and I tested negative, clearly. That's good, at least. Meanwhile, the government advice as to coming out of isolation for even the diagnosed is somewhat ambiguous. Clearly, though, they are changing the rules almost every day to deal with the problem with testing such a large number of people who would like a test, but can't get their hands on one.
I had to stop following this guy on Twitter, because his scores of oddball tweets every day were just too much to put up with, for the occasional one that I might be of genuine interest. But someone else has re-tweeted this, and it did remind that I don't think I have posted before about his absolutely nutty obsession with the (alleged) outrageousness of children wearing masks. Fortunately, some people in tweets are starting to tell him he's ridiculous:
I still don't know why it is that Sky News UK is allowed to be sensible and responsible in terms of its reporting and commentary on things like climate change and COVID, while Rupert wants Sky News Australia (at least at night) to be a wingnutty branch of Fox News in its takes.
Anyway, this explanation and analysis today of excess deaths in the UK from COVID is well done:
It illustrates why I think the correct line to take with wingnuttery in the Australian blogosphere that insists this was never a "serious" pandemic is just "you are too stupid to engage with". (The only trouble being, they vote!)
I think this is quite a balanced take on the matter of the increasing cost of natural disasters to the world, and the relationship with climate change, from DW News:
Talk about a curate's egg (good in parts) of a movie: the much discussed Don't Look Up on Netflix.
On the upside:
* all of the actors are really good, and I thought that Mark Rylands as the self involved tech billionaire was excellent. He's the sort of actor who seems to inhabit roles, rather than act them.
* some of the satire of Trumpian politics worked well - especially the dumb son as Chief of Staff. Meryl Streep herself wasn't bad, but the role as written was ambiguous - you never really could tell if she was just dumb, like Trump; or smart but just so self-involved as to be dangerous.
* sure, I get the overall intention of a satire where the political opportunism and media messaging (and tech's manipulation of what interests in the public) is more important than the actual information; but for broad satire to work it has to feel a tad more credible to me.
On the downside:
* I think there are two key problems - the first being that the screenplay seemed to bend over backwards to avoid the risk of characters being identified exactly with any living person or institution. So, for example, the Trump-ian President is shown getting a hug from Bill Clinton in a photo - is that just there so the writer can say "see, I'm not saying she's necessarily a Republican"? The tech billionaire - you got a sense he was designed to vaguely remind us of Steve Jobs, but a dumber version. (That guy's dead, so defamation wouldn't have been a problem if the character was more like him. It would have upset Apple fanboys, however.) We all know that the worst tech billionaire is probably Zuckerberg, but the character as written was not given any of his obvious features (in terms of age or terrible haircut), so it seems to me it was again "playing it safe". And the terrible morning TV show - surely Fox News should be the target, but they took a fair amount of care to make it something more generic. If I worked on one of the mainstream morning breakfast shows in the US, I would be a bit insulted by this aspect, actually.
* The second problem - is it too much to ask of satire to be more scientifically accurate? I think - without looking it up - that the chances of a comet being found to have valuable minerals is next to nil. An asteroid - sure - but if the movie had gone with that, they wouldn't have had the ability to make the joke that the disaster was literally staring the idiot part of humanity in the face. (Also, I suspect in real life, the comet would have been obvious in the sky earlier than it was in the film.) I didn't care for the silliness of the plan to cut up the comet, either. And really, very popular disaster films have made the public (and even media stars) aware of what the end of the world by giant meteor or asteroid strike would look like - it's just not really credible to have this news immediately downplayed on virtually any media network - even (dare I say it) Fox News.
I suspect that a more realistic scenario would have worked better as satire - say, that it was an asteroid, and that the problem turned out to be an ageing, libertarian inclined astronomer with Republican connections coming up with his own calculation that it was only a 50% chance of it hitting - not the 99% chance that NASA gave. (Or he could calculate that it would hit the North Pole and not really endanger the planet - just some unfortunate Russian Northern cities that can be evacuated.) And the President and her party runs with the contrarian advice...
It wouldn't be as broad a satire, but that would (in my opinion) be a good thing.
Google, via the Youtube algorithm, decided to get me looking at 1950's science fiction again, and so the other night I watched most of This Island Earth, of which I think I had only previously seen bits and pieces.
It is pretty deliciously silly, but it was in bright Technicolor and features an actor with the name "Rex Reason". I fell asleep in the last third, but saw the "climax" (it's a film with a remarkable lack of dramatic arc) which features the crash of the good alien's spaceship into the ocean, and - cut to credits. Lots of old science fiction had the really abrupt ending, I seem to recall. Perhaps because they often ran with another feature, so it's not as if it's the only thing the audience came to see.
So today, Youtube decided I would like to watch Commando Cody - Sky Marshal of the Universe - not a movie but a serial of 12 episodes given I think both theatrical then TV release. This guy:
He was the original rocketman character, and I have an early memory of getting a thrill from the flying suit sequences. And you know, I still kind of like the way they did them - I think it must be a dummy flying along a wire line, or something, but you can't tell exactly how it was done. (Have a look here, at the 3.50min mark to see the bits I am talking about.) The print quality of this on Youtube is high, but as for story - the space villain is ridiculously Flash Gordon in design.
Still, it's worth a laugh. Just as in This Island Earth, there's a lot of nuclear science being done in tiny laboratories. I guess the movie makers in the 1950s had much idea about the size of the Manhattan Projection.
A few posts back, I noted a list of potentially interesting looking movies due for release in 2022.
I should balance that by noting how God-awful a couple of trailers for some forthcoming big budget movies look - the first being Moonfall, by "the End of the World is my only interest" schlock director Roland Emmerich. As Ars Technica writes in its commentary on the trailer:
Hello, police? I'd like to report a murder—the sacrifice of credible science on the altar of entertainment,
The other really, really bad looking trailer is (unfortunately) featuring the very likeable Tom Holland, who apparently now does Spidernam level stunts even in movies in which he's not in that costume. Look how silly this looks:
It's based on some well loved games which I had never heard of. Not sure that there is any good movie that's ever been created that way.
It’s worth recalling here how shaky the
president’s position was from the start, seeking to govern with a
diminished, razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and a 50-50
deadlocked Senate. Despite that, he has passed some major bills and made
some big, even transformative moves. As the former speechwriter to
George W Bush David Frum puts it: “In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57.”
And
yet, it’s not enough. Biden passed a vital infrastructure bill, but his
larger package of social spending and action on the climate crisis is
stalled. His poll ratings took a hit with the speed of the Taliban
takeover of Afghanistan after August’s chaotic US withdrawal. And his 4 July declaration that America could celebrate its “independence from Covid-19” now looks horribly premature.
You can make a strong case that none of these things is Biden’s fault. His spending bill is stalled thanks to two Democratic senators
who simply refuse to get on board. (Given their politics, Biden
probably deserves credit for getting them to back him as often as they
have.) The withdrawal from Afghanistan was under a deal agreed by Trump;
indeed, Trump’s exit would have come earlier. As for Covid, what could
any president do when more than a quarter of the country – overwhelmingly Trump supporters – refuse to get vaccinated?
Poor old JC - he never knew who to listen to on climate change, and while he still argues with racist idiots at the Catallaxy replacements, on the lost Trump election, he has adopted the super convenient line of the truly stupid: "No, it's up to you to convince me that my suspicion is wrong. And you can't!":
The Economist has an article up about something that had crossed my mind over the last couple of Covid years - how bad will it be for churches in terms of diminishing congregations who have become used to not having to attend services?:
And this:
...the streaming of services has made it easier for worshippers to “church
hop”. In a poll of practising Christians in America in 2020 by Barna
Group, which conducts worldwide research into religion, 14% had switched
churches, 18% were attending more than one church, 35% were attending
only their pre-pandemic church and 32% had stopped going to church
altogether (see chart 2).
Certainly, the Right wing conservatives in the Catholic Church have been upset that Archbishops (and the Pope) went along with vaccinations and abiding by government restrictions on services at all; but I guess they will still be going along to whatever conservative parish they can find in any case.
So, unless the Queensland government guidelines have changed in the last 30 minutes (always a possibility), it would seem that as a close contact of a positive Covid case I am supposed to take a RAT immediately even though I have no clear symptoms. (I am now leaning towards the itch and kinda rash on my neck being an insect bite from a couple of nights ago - after standing outside for 10 minutes waiting for the dog to finish pooping, I did feel something soft and squishy on that side of my face which I flung off. A spider perhaps? But it didn't feel like I was bitten at the time. Odd.)
In one of the few useful things Zuckerberg has achieved, apparently it was Facebook that alerted my nearby co-workers that a gym nearby was selling RATs and they rushed and acquired a pack of five, and delivered one to my home. [Update - no the story of how the test was located is wrong - my co-worker had left their name at a pharmacy next to a gym, and maybe got notified this morning that they were in stock? But they were not giving them out to people walking in off the street. So Facebook remains a blight on humanity.]
Interestingly, the guidelines say that a close contact is not allowed to leave home quarantine to buy a retail RAT - only to go to a testing centre. I suppose they have to say that especially as the lack of RAT availability means people could be wandering around all day trying to find a shop with them in stock, but still, unless your lucky like me and was able to get one delivered home, this is a significant problem with reliance on home administered RATs. Would be much easier if they were available at doctors or pharmacies for free and people needing them allowed to go by car to pick one up. Now that I think of it, you could even allow for them to be handed to people in their cars.
I now have one in my hands. Self administered nasal. Ugh.
It all sounds very depressing, but there is one aspect I think the article doesn't seem to take into much account - the poisonous role of Murdoch, Fox News and the Right wing infotainment industry in creating and maintaining "pernicious polarisation", with the awful feedback loop it has built with the Republican Party.
What happens, I wonder, if Fox News has a major turnaround and becomes actually interested in not stoking Right wing doom-mongering and hatred? Yeah, I know, fat chance: and does it mean that its fan base just moves onto OAN instead? And the fascist problems in other nations in the last 40 or so years happened without the same media influence.
But does the obvious role of the Right wing media in US politics mean that it is actually capable of healing partisan divisions if major figures (cough, Murdoch family) took it on as their role to do so?
I'm clutching at straws for optimism, so sue me.
I'm also struck by the tiny amount of time the article devotes to this issue, which I think is an obvious problem that Americans (or the British) just never seem to spend much time contemplating:
Even more fundamental reforms may be necessary. In his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,
political scientist Lee Drutman argues that America’s polarization
problem is in large part a product of our two-party electoral system.
Unlike elections in multiparty democracies, where leading parties often
govern in coalition with others, two-party contests are all-or-nothing:
Either your party wins outright or it loses. As a result, every vote
takes on apocalyptic stakes.
A new draft paper by scholars Noam Gidron, James Adams,
and Will Horne uncovers strong evidence for this idea. In a study of 19
Western democracies between 1996 and 2017, they find that ordinary
partisans tend to express warmer feelings toward the party’s coalition
partners — both during the coalition and for up to two decades following
its end.
“In the US, there’s simply no such mechanism,” Gidron
told me. “Even if you have divided government, it’s not perceived as an
opportunity to work together but rather to sabotage the other party’s
agenda.”
Drutman argues for a combination of two reforms that could move us toward a more cooperative multiparty system: ranked-choice voting and multimember congressional districts in the House of Representatives.
Yes.
Meanwhile, I continue to agree with David Roberts' outrage. Some examples:
And someone else notes in the thread following, an observation that became clear to me years ago when reading Sinclair Davidson trying to run climate change denialism:
We're presently waiting for the outcome of a COVID PCR test for my daughter, which only took a 6 hour line up from 6 am yesterday to get administered.
She's not super sick, but the friend she was out with (and at whose house she stayed at) on New Years is apparently feeling very ill and tested positive. My daughter's symptoms: a sore throat and headache mainly, and not too bad for the first couple of days, but somewhat worse this morning. You can imagine how sensitised that is making me to every throat twinge or nose drip. Or even itch and whether my neck glands are swollen. I had forgotten how in the early days, there were lots of symptoms being associated with it.
So, of course, I am the type of person most keen to seen RATs actually available, and I find it hard to understand why no one knows when the stock is to be delivered. I think the head of Chemist Warehouse on Monday night was predicting plenty of stock by the end of the week, baring transport difficulties. But I noticed that Coles seems to be having trouble re-stocking even the stuff that is not the subject of panic buying - such as chips and nuts. So I guess Omicron may well be taking out truck drivers.
Anyway, maybe we will know more by tomorrow. Everyone else at home seems OK.
Update: on the topic of COVID more generally, I find far down on the Guardian's website this interesting article:
Update 2: Yes, daughter did get a positive PCR test for COVID, so now it's a case of de-ciphering the lengthy current rules for home quarantine for the rest of us. Do we have enough food to last the period? It actually might help encourage the using up of a ridiculous amount of frozen items we keep at home...
Once, maybe twice, a year we get to eat off our Spode fancy schmancy dinnerware. The ones with this pattern:
I must admit, I like how the busyness of the design encourages much staring and trying to work out what is going in the scene.
I'll crop for you:
We seem to have cows in the water, to the consternation of a man and woman (I think) on the shore. But what's going with the figure on the right, sitting on a box, and behind what exactly?
Maybe a priest? Or woman? Sitting behind what looks like a fake rock face, like what they would build for a film. Or is it something my brain just hadn't made sense of yet?
In fact, a lot of the design looks a bit Escher-esque, no? Like this:
I'm not sure all of those angles make sense. And now that I think of it, it's perhaps a tad Dali-esque too.
Anyway, maybe everyone else knows about this pattern, as it's more famous than I knew:
The Blue Italian design was launched by Josiah Spode II in 1816, and this decorative vignette provided the perfect showcase for his father’s revolutionary blue underglaze transfer printing process. It depicts a classic Italianate landscape – although the origins of the scene remain a mystery, as no single place in Italy seems to match the various elements.
And so it was that, when Blue Italian was launched in 1816, it
couldn’t have met with a more eager audience. Its Imari Oriental border
of exotic flowers and scrolls gave a nod to the industry’s history, but
within dwelt a fairytale as pretty as a picture. The scene is the
Italian countryside: a shepherd and his lady tend their flock by a river
that meanders lazily past a picturesque ruin, two lovers hold hands on
the riverbank and, beyond, the river curves dotingly around a tiny
chapel towards a medieval castle on high.
Trees and flowers permeate the landscape, both earth and sky, as if
Man and his soft-edged edifices are there merely by Nature’s benevolent
wish, and clouds scud overhead, reminding us that blue and white come in
so many beautiful hues.
The "lovers holding hands on the riverbank" certainly don't get much prominence.
The details of the design seem obscure enough that you could probably make a stupid Da Vinci Code style story out of it - it's a map to a hidden treasure somewhere in Italy, with the involvement of the Church (I'm going with the figure sitting on the mystery box being an Italian-ate priest.)
Over the break, I did have the chance to watch a fair bit of longer Youtube content, and caught up with recent ones by Indigo Traveller, the New Zealand guy who seems to make a good living now out of his independent, on the ground, documentaries about the current situation for ordinary people in some of the poorest and most troubled countries on the planet.
The recent series he did on Nigeria was really remarkable, and I strongly recommend it. I thought the over-water slum of Lagos looking pretty unique - although I still don't really understand how it came to be created, sitting above 4 or 5 feet of filthy water.
Well, I have much to confess about lack of background knowledge: I've managed to never watch a production of Romeo and Juliet of any kind, on screen or stage. I only know the story from summaries, as I'm not the sort of person to read Shakespeare for fun. Nor have I seen the original West Side Story in full - I started watching it once, and thought the finger clicking street dancing was a little silly. Maybe I saw a bit of later dancing, but never watched it all.
So, I come to the Spielberg movie with a moderately clean slate, which leads me to say this - I actually get why it hasn't found a young audience. The musical is a period piece of its day, based on a play with a story that surely must only convince by the poetry of its language rather than the probability of its plot. I mean, I certainly hope Shakespeare does a better job of convincing his audience that the love at first sight of this couple is plausible. (I don't deny that people do say they "knew at first sight", so perhaps I shouldn't be so dismissive, but I have a deep preference for the slow burn romance over the instant "I knew he/she was for me" any day of the week. In fact, let's mention now the deep irony that Robert Wise directed for the screen both WSS and The Sound of Music, the latter featuring the most utterly charming and convincing "falling in love during a dance" sequence that I know of in a movie - the crucial difference being that the second Maria had known this dude by being a part of his household for at least months before the ball. In West Side Story, it's more a case of seeing each across the crowded dance floor, a 60 second dance like a pair of mating birds, and that's it. I know which I find more convincing.)
For me, the musical is flawed in other ways - I thought a key dramatic song A Boy Like That, which I was hearing for the first time, is both musically and lyrically a real dud. In fact, that song is related to the biggest single thing that doesn't help the musical: Bernardo (who is killed by Tony/Romeo) being turned into Maria's brother instead of her cousin, as in the original Shakespeare. Sure, Maria seems to have a tense relationship with him, but she still seems to love him as a brother, making her instant forgiveness (and more!) of Tony much harder to understand.
OK, so I am full of criticisms - but despite all of this, the movie infected my dreams in the way that a good movie does - and all because it is exquisitely directed.
The dance numbers in particular - as I wrote before, I knew from as early as 1941 that he should be able to do them well, and honestly, the amount of pleasure I got from the way any dancing is directed and editted in this film was pretty immense.
So, it makes for a weird conflict in terms of recommending the film - I completely understand if you don't think it's a good musical, that it has a silly story, and even the actor playing Tony being the weakest of the stars (the women are uniformly terrific, and the other male leads really good too - and obviously ridiculously talented) - but you should see it anyway and be in awe of how it is put together. If you're lucky, it will give you some nice musical dreams afterwards, too.
On some end notes: the movie is remarkable for attracting highly political partisan commentary from both the nutty, Trumpian Right ("it's too Woke!") and the identity politics obsessed part of the Left ("it still trades on racial stereotypes - this musical should be forgotten!"). I think the attempts to drag it into more modern relevance were quite OK - and I find it hard to fault Spielberg and Krushner's liberal, inclusive, instincts. I thought occasionally that the lack of subtitle for some Spanish was a bit harmful to understanding, but as an artistic decision, I basically have no problem with it. The lack of youth appeal, as I said above, goes back to the faults in the musical itself. Oh, and young women (like my daughter) wanting vengeance on Ansel Elgort for sexting a girl while he had a girlfriend.)
Update: I watched this lengthy discussion of the two movies last night, and it goes into a lot of interesting history of the musical itself, how Hollywood treated stars who couldn't sing well enough, and casting decisions. (The bit about Natalie Wood being lied to as long as possible that her recorded songs were going to be used was pretty amazing.) All very interesting:
It's been an odd Christmas break - seems I have done both a lot, and little.
The family stayed at home, a decision which, given the showery, definitely not good beach weather, was a very wise for this year of an accurately predicted wetter summer. I suppose I should pity the people paying (at least) $1800 for a week in a seaside apartment only to be looking at the showers rolling in again, but instead I uncharitably just kept feeling upbeat that I was not in the same boat.
The (sort of) downside of staying at home was the decision to spend a lot of the break on cleaning things in the house that hadn't been cleaned for years, as well as doing certain maintenance that I had been putting off for months, if not longer.
Hence, the ancient fat encrusted (well, sorry, but on certain internal parts, it was true) rangehood got dismantled and replaced, more or less successfully, by me. (It works fine, but there remains something about the fit which makes me suspect I have done something wrong, but I can't see how it's possible. I think unless it's pointed out to a visitor, it would not be noticed. I certainly didn't til the next day!)
I also replaced a lot of sealant around sinks and benchtops in the kitchen, one bathroom, and laundry, with the guidance of handyman Youtube. I think I managed to make it look pretty neat and almost, but not quite, professional. It's the sort of thing you definitely get more confident with the more you do it. (I also didn't realise how much sealant you waste even when doing it "right".)
Curtains that hadn't been washed for (I think) 18 years (God, we sound a lazy household) were successfully cleaned, dried between showers and re-hung without falling apart, and windows, flyscreens and security grills cleaned thoroughly both inside and outside. There was one window in particular that was, to my mind, mysteriously filthy on the inside. It was behind a curtain behind the TV and near the modem and wifi router, but it seemed as filthy as an outside window that hadn't been touched for 20 years. Could electrostatic effects from the electrical equipment be behind this?
This has taken up a large amount of time, even with the occasional, reluctant, bits of assistance from 2 adult children. And we haven't even started on the upstairs yet! Or the outside, which badly needs attention. I might get something done today, as weeds growing out of the mulch in the gutter above the garage is not a good look. I did put up some replacement clothesline, though, this time with wirecore which hopefully cannot sag as quickly as your standard line does, with Youtube teaching me a new knot that turned out to be useful.
I think I have made 6 or 7 trips to Bunnings over the period to achieve this - not being a handyman by inclination means frequent realizations of not having the appropriate tool or equipment. As well as rangehoods not coming with the recommended carbon filters.
And for entertainment - very little happened. Both kids went off to their own parties on New Years Eve, and we didn't have people over either. I heard distant fireworks from bed at midnight, and was cool with it.
I did go see West Side Story, and it deserves a post of its own.
But yeah, I'm feeling somewhat satisfied with successful handyman stuff. Gee, before you know it, I'll be into woodwork for recreation, like ageing men often seem to. (Not likely.)
