Worrying tweets noted

 

In aquatic news of note

*  Alaskan snow crabs have been in steep and sudden decline:

The theories are many. The crabs moved into Russian waters. They are dead because predators got them. They are dead because they ate each other. The crabs scuttled off the continental shelf and scientists just didn’t see them. Alien abduction.

Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.

Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.

Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.

And then they weren’t there.

Scientists, despite earlier optimistic signs, found that snow crab stocks were down 90 percent. The season opened and the total allowable harvest went from 45 million pounds to 5.5 million pounds. Commercial fishers couldn’t even catch that quantity. 

*   Orcas have taken to nibbling boats.   

Killer whales are 'attacking' sailboats near Europe's coast. Scientists don't know why

 

To the North Pole by luxury icebreaker

I don't watch everything that the travel vlogging couple Kara and Nate put up on Youtube as they can be quite the drama queen act at times, when not being all too demonstratively affectionate to each other. 

But, when they do a special trip, such as on a ship to Antarctica a year or two ago, they do it pretty well and the videos are interesting and quite fun to watch.

They are currently doing a tourist trip to the North Pole, and on a recently launched icebreaker ship that is not what you normally envisage for that type of vessel.  It's a luxury icebreaker, French owned, it seems.

Here's there first video of the trip, giving a tour of the ship:

 

Travel on any ship this nice looking (and with an in-cabin mini bar that is free and refurbished every day) could not be cheap. (I assume they are getting it for free for the publicity value?) But I decided to look it up anyway, and yes,a 15 night cruise to the North Pole and back (starting with flight from Paris) will cost about AUD$55,000!!

Still, looks very impressive.   Perhaps it gives the feeling of tempting fate, Titanic style, though:  an engineer on the ship in the video said that if a certain heat pump stops working while at the North Pole, the entire ship would be down to about minus 25 degrees freezing within a hour or two so.    Brrr...

Good politics, for his country

I was looking at Youtube last night and saw that a National Day speech by Singaporean PM Lee was being live broadcast, so I started watching it, expecting some dry content about economic development, but instead the part I happened to join it at was the announcement about decriminalising male to male sex.  

I don't know how the audience in the auditorium were chosen, but I think it fair to say that the response was not exactly enthusiastic.  It was kind of funny to watch.

Anyway, PM Lee, playing what I think is smart politics for his country, immediately then swung into saying that while he believed most Singaporeans would support this bit of late modernity, they wanted traditional marriage protected, and the government wasn't going to risk a liberalising court in future find that the constitution meant the government had to recognise same sex marriage.  The answer:  they will amend the constitution to enshrine a definition of marriage as heterosexual.   This part of the speech gained more approval from the audience.

I guess that, in future, there might still be scope for government recognition of gay relationships for some purposes.   But it will be a long time before Singapore comes close to following the Western path towards full recognition of gay marriage.   Given the cultural mix there, with a mix of three  that are all highly orientated towards conservative views about family, recognising gay marriages as the equivalent of heterosexual ones would (I suspect) be a problem for the Indians and Muslim element in particular.  (I think there might be an argument for Chinese to be more malleable of the topic - at least given the example of Taiwan*.)      

Still, I do admire PM Lee, and all Singaporean politicians, for the calm and reasoned way they put arguments, and always seeking a path of national unity and security.   

 

*  Oh, but look at this article, indicating that legalisation in Taiwan has actually not been followed by improved public perceptions of gay marriage.   The reaction to legalisation is very dependent on the local culture, I guess:

...in the United States, public approval of same-sex marriage improved after its legalization. Similar trends have occurred in European countries where same-sex marriage is legal. However, as seen in South Africa, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, and Ecuador, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2019, public opinion does not always improve after legalization. One survey in Taiwan found that 93 percent of respondents felt their lives had not been impacted by the legalization, but when asked about the impact on Taiwanese society as a whole, only 50.1 percent indicated no effect, while 11.9 percent said the overall social impact was positive, and 28.4 percent said it was negative. 

 

Huh

Another very late review

Finally caught up with The Talented Mr Ripley on Netflix last night.  I was just married when this came out, and there was soon a baby on the way, so I had other things on my mind.

I thought it good but not great.   A large part of the problem is that I routinely don't care for Matt Damon's acting.  He doesn't put me off quite to the same degree that Matthew McConaughey does, but I would be very happy if he would just retire so I don't have to keep on wondering why I never find him convincing.

Anyway, on reflection, the story is a bit odd for the complete lack of a sympathetic male character.  (OK, maybe there is one, but even he appears pretty dumb by the end and doesn't survive.)  I think that the 3 key male actors all seemed a bit too, um, trying too hard?   Or perhaps that is more the problem I found with Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances:  Damon's acting was more controlled, but still not super convincing.   

The women, on the other hand, are likeable enough, and there's no denying Gwyneth Paltrow in her day had a charming screen presence.   But the one who stood out for me was Cate Blanchett - she was 30 when this movie came out and probably at the peak of her attractiveness, and does rich elegance so, so well.   It's a pity her role doesn't get more screen time.

I had a read on Reddit about it afterwards, and find it hard to believe some people were still saying after viewing it "was Tom Ripley meant to be gay or bisexual"?   Well, duh, it's an unavoidable conclusion from the movie.  However, I see from an online article that the book highlights more than the movie does a conflicted sexuality, and in fact an aversion to sex:

Tom’s aversion to all things sexual is central to his characterisation in the novel. He feels secure in his friendship with Cleo because ‘she never wanted or expected him to make a pass at her’, and dismisses Dickie kissing Marge as ‘cheap, obvious, easy’.

At the same time, Tom’s adoration of Dickie is painted in clearly romantic terms; he is drawn to Dickie’s ‘handsome’ looks and ‘the proud way he [carries] himself’, and fantasises about killing his girlfriend Marge for ‘interfering’ with ‘the bond between them’. In a moment of vulnerability with Peter towards the end of the novel, he briefly wonders whether ‘the same thing that had happened with Dickie could happen with Peter’. Tom’s asexuality and the fact that he is romantically attracted to men are given equal weight in the novel, but adaptations of the novel exaggerate the latter and ignore the former entirely.

So, he might not be cinema's first bisexual (or repressed gay?) psychopathic murderer and liar, but it's first asexual one who none the less feels romantic attraction (and is repulsed by it).  Interesting concept.  In retrospect, I can see how that is reflected to some degree in the film (there is never an indication that he gets physical with anyone, on or off screen), but it could have been made clearer and perhaps made for a more interesting explanation of his psychological problems.

I also see that the character went on to appear in another 4(!) novels.   So there was quite a following for this anti-hero.  Personally, I'm glad there have no more movies about him.   I'm not a fan of the bad guy winning.  

Update:  I did think during the movie about how it had themes very common in Hitchcock films, and see today that Patricia Highsmith, about whom I could recall little apart from knowing she had lesbian relationships, wrote Strangers on a Train.   This New Yorker article about her is pretty interesting.

Oh, so I can blame English royalty

As this BBC article explains, tattooing is pretty much normalised in most of the West now, and there is a push to get it recognised as a worthy artform, but you still can't convince me that 95% of what I see on "sleeves", legs, faces or backs of necks isn't trashy art. 

I don't think I knew this before:

"Western tattooing has been a commodity-based art form for only about 140 years," he explains, suggesting that one of the key drivers behind its commercialisation in the UK was King George V, who got a "desirable" tattoo of a dragon on his arm during a trip to Japan as a teenager in 1881.

Is it just me, or is there genuinely a lot of flash flooding happening around the entire globe now?

Of course, Google via Youtube is pushing a lot of this content to me lately, and maybe it's not above global averages:  but I suspect something genuinely novel is going on at the moment.  

Flash flooding stories are coming from all over the place:   Death Valley,  Afghanistan, France, China.   And that's only the past few days.  A couple of weeks ago it was Kentucky.   

It could all be confirmation bias, but sometimes I reckon the lay person can notice genuinely unusual sudden trends (or flips to a "new normal") that scientists do later confirm.

Update:   how convenient!  Just after I posted this, I see very credible climate scientist Andrew Dessler has a twitter thread on non-linearity in climate change, which is the sophisticated way of explaining what I am worrying about.

And, I might add, surely this has always been reason to doubt the credibility of economic forecasts on the long term effects of climate change - a topic I have posted about many, many times over the years.

Sand in the eyes

For what it's worth, I tried the first episode of The Sandman on Netflix and found it rather tedious and unengaging.

This type of fantasy is really not my thing.  I'm feeling happy that I've (mostly) avoided Neil Gaiman in written form.   The only thing I've read that had anything to do with him was the co-authored Good Omens, which everyone likes, but I presume the humour and light tone of it came from Terry Pratchett.

I have my doubts too

 Anyway, I'm betting on Trump is not going to be the GOP candidate.   He's in too much trouble...

Something we knew, but in more depressing detail now...

In Science magazine:

A nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts are calling the most expansive modeling to date of so-called nuclear winter. Although the exact effects remain uncertain, the findings underscore the dangers of nuclear war and offer vital insights about how to prepare for other global disasters, researchers say....

Scientists have long known massive explosions can throw enough dust, ash, and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, Mount Tambora in what’s now Indonesia unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in history. In the following months, its ash rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”—a cold spell in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe.

For decades, scientists have warned a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. Worries about climate effects of nuclear warfare emerged soon after World War II, and studies took off during the Cold War.

Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter studies, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to take the calculations further. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies—but used the models to simulate global cooling instead. “Now, we have the computational capacity to simulate these kinds of things in a sophisticated way,” says Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate change scientist, crop modeler, and team member at NASA and Columbia University.

So, how bad could it be?  Pretty bad! 

A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the researchers report. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.

Baum urges caution in interpreting the estimates. Although the climate models are “excellent,” he says, there’s too much uncertainty in how humanity would react to such a global catastrophe to get an accurate read on the death toll. Still, the study “makes a very worthy contribution” to envisioning these scenarios, he adds.

It's interesting that some people are putting effort into envisaging how emergency food production might work, though:

The nightmarish prospects have already inspired others to look for ways to fight the hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, who co-founded the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas including scaling up “resilient foods” such as seaweed, repurposing paper factories to produce sugar, converting natural gas into protein with bacteria, and relocating crops to account for an altered climate. He and his research associate Morgan Rivers think those approaches could dramatically increase the amount of food available to humans. “Even if [a substitute] doesn’t taste as good as sweet corn, it’s better than starving,” he says.

I don't know - maybe Soylent Green would actually happen in these circumstances?  All very unpleasant to contemplate.

 

 

 

Amusing tweet of the day

I don't know:  I'm pretty sure Morrison has managed to firmly take the title from Abbott for weirdest Prime Ministerial behaviour since Federation.

There are many, many jokes swirling around on Twitter about this, and I might add more later.

I reckon the GG should go in embarrassment too.
 

Stars get closer than I realised

Phil Plait writes that the evidence suggests some stars have cruised near our sun at surprisingly close distances, and will do so again:

A few years ago, research using Gaia data indicated that the last such close encounter was about 70,000 years ago, when the star WISE J072003.20-084651.2 — also called Scholz’s Star, after the discoverer — passed just 0.8 light-years from the Sun.

But that was then. Every few years the folks with Gaia release updated data from the mission, with newer numbers. This generally improves the accuracy of the motion measurements, because the longer you look at a star the more it moves and the easier that motion is to see. The third such data release occurred in 2022, and a team of astronomers used it to review the data on Scholz’s Star [link to paper].

Things changed with the revised numbers. They found the encounter occurred more like 80,000 years ago, and the distance was more like 1.08 light-years, with a small uncertainty of just 0.026 light-years.

But there's more:

The astronomers then asked, has there been another star that passed even closer with a high degree of statistical confidence?

The answer is yes! They found that the star UCAC4 237-008148 also once swung past the Sun. In this case it passed us at 0.844 ± 0.02 light years about 1.158 million years ago. Even within the uncertainty that’s closer than Scholz’s Star, breaking the record.

I’ll note that today, UCAC4 237-008148 is about 318 light-years away — a million years is a long time for it to move off — and Scholz’s Star is only 22 light years distant. 

The astronomers also looked at a third star, HD 7977, about 246 light-years from us now. They found that about 2.77 million years ago it gave us the incredibly close shave of just 0.49 light-years! That’s definitely violating our personal space.

 And if humanity can manage to last another million years, it sounds like it won't be too much of a stretch to hop over to this one:

So those are stars that zipped by us in the past. What about the future? The astronomers in this new work didn’t look into that, but with the new Gaia data I imagine that will be done soon. As of now, using older and less-accurate data from the Hipparcos satellite, the next star to come close is Gliese 710, a red dwarf that will slide past us at a hair-raising 0.163 light-years about 1.3 million years from now. I’d love to see how this might change with the new Gaia data.

As Plait writes, the problems of close encounters of these types is the danger of them disturbing the Oort cloud enough to send a lot of comets into the inner solar system.

All very interesting. 

The Republican walk back has started, but has a long way to go

Several lawmakers pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism of the FBI’s court-authorized seizure of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, with even some in the GOP warning that the violent rhetoric was “dangerous” and “absurd.”

Still, many Republicans continued to defend the former president, casting doubt on whether the FBI search of Trump’s Florida home earlier this week was justified — and whether the documents seized were actually top secret.

That's from the Washington Post (free link here.) 

As usual, I found Allahpundit at Hot Air has a decent take on the matter (the "he" here is, obviously, Trump):

If he truly wanted to turn down the political heat in America, I can think of a few things he might have done differently.

1. He could have returned all of the documents the first time the National Archives asked for them back.

2. He could have returned them later when the DOJ subpoenaed them.

3. Having failed to return them, he could have kept the search of Mar-a-Lago a secret. Remember, it wasn’t the feds who announced it. Trump announced it on Truth Social because he recognized that the incident would benefit him politically. The FBI even carried out the search dressed in civilian clothing so as not to alert bystanders as to what was happening. Trump alerted the country because he wanted to raise “the heat.”

4. He could now call on his followers to chill out before one of them kills someone, as nearly happened a few days ago in Cincinnati.

5. He could, at the very, very least, refrain from further inflaming the situation:...

Of course, the best way to have turned down the heat would have been to not remove classified material from the White House in the first place, thereby risking this sort of standoff over recovering the documents.

 

Weekend update

*   This remains the coldest Brisbane winter I can remember for years.   Pity the rest of the world is burning up (literally, in the case of Europe.)

*   I didn't realise before how much blood pressure jumps around.   I've been taking it three times a day, and have learnt the benefit of doing two readings within a few minutes.   Overall, it would seem my recently concerning BP is dropping down, presumably as a result of the modest increase in physical activity and/or the addition of flaxseed (and natto) to the diet.   I've not really started with walking every day yet, but I get the feeling it will be properly licked if I can get to doing that.   Somewhat warmer mornings will help.  

*  Flaxseed, especially ground flaxseed, really gums up your morning cereal or porridge, if you add a couple of tablespoons to it.   It has no great effect on taste, though, which is good. 

*  I didn't realise that the immediate effect of alcohol can be to decrease blood pressure.  Because it raises heart rate, I would have guessed the opposite.   So I guess one way to permanently decrease BP is to always be under the influence of 2 glasses of wine.  (Just kidding.)

 

That's interesting

As Ben on Urban Rescue Ranch would say:  "Well, well, well, well, well."   (It really is worth watching his eccentric act.)

I had wondering about the long term Fox strategy on the question of support for Trump as victim of the "raid".  They have clearly been edging away from him, but they felt they had to rush in to offer support again because, I don't know, it's what their audience would want, or something.

But clearly, a "higher up" (one of the Murdochs probably) has decided that someone on the network has to run a line that will give it plausible deniability on the question of how much they toed the Trump line if it turns out really bad for the Yellow One.  And Doocy drew the short straw:

As

 

 

Wish I had thought of this...

 

He must be getting close to revealing that Democrats authorised those alien anal probes

This is real:

 Update:  Seeing I've already used "anal" in the post, I suppose I may as well mention it again, in a much more serious context:   

Women in the UK are suffering injuries and other health problems as a result of the growing popularity of anal sex among straight couples, two NHS surgeons have warned.

The consequences include incontinence and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as well as pain and bleeding because they have experienced bodily trauma while engaging in the practice, the doctors write in an article in the British Medical Journal.

 And apparently, the fact that some men have it without apparent long term harm is down to anatomy:

...women who engage in anal sex are at greater risk from it than men. “Increased rates of faecal incontinence and anal sphincter injury have been reported in women who have anal intercourse,” the report said.

“Women are at a higher risk of incontinence than men because of their different anatomy and the effects of hormones, pregnancy and childbirth on the pelvic floor.

“Women have less robust anal sphincters and lower anal canal pressures than men, and damage caused by anal penetration is therefore more consequential.

“The pain and bleeding women report after anal sex is indicative of trauma, and risks may be increased if anal sex is coerced,” they said.

 I think the awful Sex and the City has a lot to answer for.

 

Nutty aggressive woman who likes to scare elderly men on the street foresees the end of America

She lives in such a permanent state of hyperventilation, I think it would be in her (and the public's) interest if someone would volunteer to shoot a tranquilliser dart at her in the street:

 

 

 

I'm outraged that there's not more outrage...

...from mainstream media about the vile "let's throw petrol on the fire" reaction of Fox News (and the even nuttier media outlets) when everyone knows Trump idiots are already bouncing off the walls with ridiculous calls for violence and revenge against anyone involved in investigative action against their stupid yellow leader.  A series of tweets from yesterday:

 

As I said yesterday, it's like the Murdochs want the country to burn, as long as there's a buck to made in the process.

UPDATE:   Oh look, seems like this is the first person killed with the assistance of Fox News.   Wouldn't be surprised if there are more.

An armed man who tried to break into the FBI building in Cincinnati on Thursday leading to a lockdown in the nearby area has been shot and killed by police.

 

UPDATE 2:   let's hope this magistrate sues Fox News for a lot of money:

 

It's dry in Europe

Axios reports:

Drought conditions are affecting about 60% of the EU and the U.K., exacerbated by climate-change driven record heat across Europe this summer, according to new research from the European Drought Observatory.

Why it matters: France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands are facing water shortages and riverbeds are drying out across Europe. Dry conditions are severely affecting energy production, agriculture and river transportation.....

What they're saying: "Droughts have become our summer reality," tweeted Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European Commission's commissioner for environment, oceans and fisheries, on Tuesday.

• 100 municipalities in France have no running water, the Rhine River's levels in Germany and France are so low the transportation of goods is under threat, and the Netherlands "faces an official water shortage," Sinkevičius noted.
• "Restoring Nature is the best solution to change this," he added.

What to watch: Another searing heat wave was forecast to hit parts of western and central Europe this week into next week.

• The Met Office has issued an amber heat warning for much of southern England and parts of Wales for Thursday through Sunday, on the heels of its first ever extreme heat warning last month. Heat alerts are also in effect across France.
• London is forecast to see temperatures of 90°F (33°C) or above for four straight days starting Thursday, and temperatures will

And in France, nuclear power is affected:

After a major heatwave in 2003, France's nuclear safety agency set temperature limits at 28 degrees Celsius for rivers, beyond which power plants were required to reduce their production in order not to make the water even warmer and preserve the environment.

Temporary exceptions allow some plants to raise this limit by a few degrees during "exceptional situations".

 

 

Social media outrages in context

OK, so in another Washington Post column which I will gift my readers, Megan McArdle writes about the recent on line controversy over an American chain restaurant offering plant based meat (as well as their regular meat menu),  and some MAGA types reacted on social media that this was outrageously "woke" and they wouldn't eat there again.

McArdle argues that the problem is that social media amplifies crank voices - what used to be a stupid opinion never used to have such a public profile, and we could all ignore easily:

Before social media, these people mostly had to share their crankery in person, unless they could get a local newspaper column or a segment on “60 Minutes.” And Americans knew how to deal with it: We nodded and smiled while Uncle Walter explained that he was never going back to Second Federal Bank because the new bank manager was German, and he hadn’t fought World War II to do his banking with a Nazi.

Then we turned to Aunt Irma and complimented her on how pretty her Jell-O mold looked.

We ignored these explosions because when we had to endure these tirades in person, we had a sense of proportion. Yes, Uncle Walter had crazy opinions. But everyone else we knew chose their bank based on where it was located, or who was offering the best interest rate on savings accounts.

Social media concentrates all the Uncle Walters in one place, where they start to seem like an army. But in fact, their numbers are still insignificant, relative to the 325 million people in the country.

This is true, and something worth remembering.

But I reckon her "calm down everyone" attitude leaves out a couple of things:

*   it's a pity she pitches it towards encouraging people to just ignore some extreme MAGA types, as if it is only liberals who over-estimate the number of nuts on the other side of politics.   For example, Right wingers get off on "Libs of Tik Tok" as if every gay teacher on there is representative of teachers as a whole.  Also, as someone said in a comment following the article:

Ok, so if a few dozen students protest a speaker at their college campus, then Megan will exercise the same sense of proportion and won’t claim that these people are threatening the very foundations of democracy. Right?

I think we know the answer to that.

*  More importantly, I reckon she's ignoring the effect of social media in the reinforcement of extreme views, because people who hold them readily a community of the like minded.   And they probably do what McArdle warns about - overestimate the size of that community - but that hardly matters, and they are not likely to be convinced of their overestimate anyway.   What's important is the mutual support in their nutty views, which help entrench them.   That's the bigger danger of social media free speech, especially in the USA, where you also have a media universe devoted to perpetual demonisation of Democrats and liberals.  This was also noted in a comment:

What happens when the cranks are on major media sites like Fox News, OANN, and they are accusing the president and the DoJ with a conspiracy to get Trump? We have a problem in this country of people who can't think in anything but in terms that the opposition is pure evil and their side is purity and light. Meanwhile, that "side" thinks of itself as purity and light is spreading lies and misinformation 24/7.

Indeed.       

The history of Trump disparaging the FBI

Philip Bump in the Washington Post (I'll gift the article) summarises the history of Trump attacking the FBI for patently political purposes. 

You know what's really sickening:  that most of the GOP politicians (even Pence, the pathetic figure still following the lead of the former boss who thought it was understandable that people wanted him to hang) see this as a good tactic too.  That's what 30 odd years of paranoid conspiracy mongering does to your judgement.  

And what about Fox News?   The Murdoch family never misses an opportunity to encourage the country to burn, presumably because there's money to be made that way.  (What other excuse is there?   Mental illness?)

As Bump writes:

Of course, there’s no reason that any Republican would need to weigh in immediately on Monday’s Mar-a-Lago search. They could simply wait and see, wait to learn why the search was executed and offer an assessment at that point.

But that’s not the culture of the modern Republican Party. Instead, there are rewards to be earned from moving quickly in casting the probe as suspect. Following an example set in part by Trump himself, GOP officials rushed to offer up products in the robust marketplace of social media commentary. The most outrageous denunciation of the search could earn more attention and more followers — and perhaps more clout. A number of people hustled to raise money off the news, including GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who suggested that angry donors contribute to the party’s Senate nominee in Georgia; J.D. Vance, a Senate candidate in Ohio; and Trump himself.

One reason that the Mar-a-Lago search might “unite [the] different factions in the party,” as a Trump aide told Politico, is that it isn’t pro-Trump but anti-FBI. Republicans from both the pro- and less-pro-Trump segments of the GOP get to express outrage at a group that Republicans are primed to distrust. Outrage at a government department that can be cast as the swamp or the Deep State or even the Elites, depending on who’s doing the casting.

Update:  Look at this.  Utterly disgraceful, how Murdoch and Fox News are basically begging the country to become ungovernable because half of it is consumed by conspiracy belief and complete demonisation of the other main political party:

Update 2:  Ah yes - the poisonous feedback loop between Murdochian media and the Republicans, who has resulted in the American Right turning into wannabe totalitarian conspiracy mongers:

 

 

 

An unexpected lead in eggs story

Gee, I would never have guessed that this was a potential issue for home gardeners in our big cities:

Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs, research finds

Our newly published research found backyard hens’ eggs contain, on average, more than 40 times the lead levels of commercially produced eggs. Almost one in two hens in our Sydney study had significant lead levels in their blood. Similarly, about half the eggs analysed contained lead at levels that may pose a health concern for consumers.

So how do you know whether this is a likely problem in the eggs you’re getting from backyard hens? It depends on lead levels in your soil, which vary across our cities. We mapped the areas of high and low risk for hens and their eggs in our biggest cities – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – and present these maps here.

Our research details lead poisoning of backyard chickens and explains what this means for urban gardening and food production. In older homes close to city centres, contaminated soils can greatly increase people’s exposure to lead through eating eggs from backyard hens.

Tim, I thought you might be interested in particular...

Short notes

* Olivia Newton John's singing and movie career was hardly something I personally found terribly exciting, but there never seemed any doubt that she was a likeable and decent person in real life, given how well people who knew her spoke about her.  (She also came across very well in interviews, and celebrities who do a lot of charity work get a big tick from me too.)    So yeah, sad that she didn't get to live longer.

* Ron Howard's dramatisation of the Thai cave rescuse - Thirteen Lives - has got good reviews.  Hope I can deal with the claustrophobia aspect though.  Watching people in tiny caves can actually make me feel very uncomfortable.  

* Schrodinger believed there was only "one mind" in the universe?  I think I had probably read that before, but I'm not sure:

In 1925, just a few months before Schrödinger discovered the most basic equation of quantum mechanics, he wrote down the first sketches of the ideas that he would later develop more thoroughly in “Mind and Matter”. Already then, his thoughts on technical matters were inspired by what he took to be greater metaphysical (religious) questions. Early on, Schrödinger expressed the conviction that metaphysics does not come after physics, but inevitably precedes it. Metaphysics is not a deductive affair but a speculative one.

Inspired by Indian philosophy, Schrödinger had a mind-first, not matter-first, view of the universe. But he was a non-materialist of a rather special kind. He believed that there is only one mind in the universe; our individual minds are like the scattered light from prisms:

A metaphor that Schrödinger liked to invoke to illustrate this idea is the one of a crystal that creates a multitude of colors (individual selves) by refracting light (standing for the cosmic self that is equal to the essence of the universe). We are all but aspects of one single mind that forms the essence of reality. He also referred to this as the doctrine of identity. Accordingly, a non-dual form of consciousness, which must not be conflated with any of its single aspects, grounds the refutation of the (merely apparent) distinction into separate selves that inhabit a single world.

 

This will send Trumpers into a frenzy (or, an even deeper frenzy)

 

The Mexico question

Noah Smith has written about why Mexico economic growth is not doing better, and as usual it sounds reasonable and interesting (as are the comments following.)   

I kind of get the feeling he ought to be working in government - although I guess government is always free to subscribe to his substack and consider his analysis anyway.   (The Mexico post is free to view, by the way.)

Some American political tweets

Stuff like this makes me grind my teeth when people go on about Lefty identity politics and "cancel culture" being the real seriously dangerous ideology around at the moment.

Yep.  

I do think the way Democrats have turned the "Dark Biden" idea on its head is pretty amusing:

Slate explains it here.

For a President who millions of dimwitted Rightwingers have convinced themselves is so mentally feeble he doesn't know what's going around him, he's suddenly making serious inroads into the Jimmy Carter style impression of paralysis.    

Axios explains what the legislation achieves:

The bill includes:

• $370 billion for climate change.
• Allows the federal health secretary to negotiate the prices of certain expensive drugs for Medicare.
• Three-year extension on health care subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.
• 15% minimum tax on corporations making $1 billion or more in income. The provision offers more than $300 billion in revenue.
• IRS tax enforcement.
• 1% excise tax on stock buybacks.

The significance of the climate portion: The bill is the largest investment in clean energy and emissions cuts the Senate has ever passed, with the climate portion totaling about $370 billion, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes.

• This includes tax incentives to manufacture and purchase electric vehicles, generate more wind and solar electricity and support fledgling technology such as direct air capture and hydrogen production. 
• Independent analyses show the bill, combined with other ongoing emissions reductions, would cut as much as 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, short of the White House's 50% reduction target. However, if enacted into law, it would reestablish U.S. credibility in international climate talks, which had been flagging due in part to congressional gridlock. 

• As part of Democrats' concessions to Manchin, the bill also contains provisions calling for offshore oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, and a commitment to take up a separate measure to ease the permitting of new energy projects.

 And why would the Republicans think it's a good idea to keep insulin ridiculously expensive?   How are they going to sell that to the voting public?   Can't say I have even seen any attempts to justify it.

Just call it "Christian Fascism"

Max Boot in the Washington Post:

Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.

These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.

Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized.

Why does he resist the term "Christian Fascism", when the  most prominent Trumpers are talking about their Christianity all the time?  

A geographically challenged movie

I tried watching Netflix's The Gray Man but had to give up after about 30 minutes.

Look, I thought for the first 10 or so minutes I was willing to go along with it - our hero seemed to have a conscience and wouldn't kill an innocent by standing kid, and the subsequent fight around fireworks going off was at least different.   

But the first warning that this movie was going off the rails was the apparent overnight trip by tuk tuk from Bangkok to Chang Mai.  Wait a minute, I thought:  isn't Chang Mai way in the middle of the country, at elevation, and no way you would make the trip overnight by tuk tuk.   And I was right - Google says it's nearly 700 km, and there are posts from Thai media apparently indicating that tourists who are thinking about copying the trip are saying "The Gray Man lied to me".   I think I saw someone saying you would more realistically allow 5 days (I assume tuk tuks are not known for good speed or climbing performance) but who knows, that might be an exaggeration in the other direction.

But then we had a terribly staged and edited CGI heavy plane flight and mid air struggle for a parachute that was completely and utterly unconvincing and mundane.   (And it started stupidly - no indication of how our hero anticipated that he was about to be stabbed by someone who had appeared to be an old friend.)   It only served to remind me of the actual quality stuntwork of Mission Impossible films, or nearly any Bond film, and how this whole sequence suffered from Marvel over-reliance on CGI, which replaces dramatic stakes with movement and colour. 

Then there was a very short shot which I am pretty sure was meant to show an Australian based quasi military hit squad of some kind getting on an aircraft - with the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background.  As if there was a runway at Garden Island instead of a naval base.  [I double checked this last night - the Opera House is there too, so yeah, it's as if they are getting on a significantly sized military aircraft either at Woolloomooloo Wharf, or Garden Island.]   

As I said, geography is not a strong point of the film, despite it repeatedly jumping around the world.

There followed a painfully badly written bit of dialogue between our hero and a teen girl he was to protect, and I gave up.

I see that it has scored only 46% on Rottentomatoes, although a suspiciously high audience score of 91%.   Is it possible that Netflix, having allegedly spent a couple of hundred million dollars, has paid for some positive audience feedback via some PR company?  It can't be hard to organise that, surely.

Anyway, I am starting to worry about Netflix and whoever it is that is greenlighting projects.

When I think about it, the things that have been "working" for the network have been pretty original (even if I don't endorse them) - like Squid Games, The Queen's Gambit, even Stranger Things is kind of original even if deliberately 80's retro.   What about the Roma movie - a black and white family drama set in Mexico in the 1960's - pretty original. 

But when they come to recent movies, it feels mainly like very tired retreads of old movie tropes that heavily rely on star power to generate interest.   And for me, that's not enough.* 

 

*  Alert readers might think "what about The Power of the Dog, which was pretty original, but you didn't like that."  Ah well, my rationalisation for that was that it was a retread of tired Jane Campion tropes, and she's never interested me.