Although parts of Fox News have apparently been flying the "DeSantis is the new Republican leader" line, I would think that Carlson's and Hannity's take on whether Trump or DeSantis should be the next candidate is going to be more important.
Update: Oh, the (quite influential, I think) professional wingnut blog Powerline has John Hinderaker strongly attacking Trump:
At this point, Trump is a giant anvil around the neck of the Republican
Party. In many areas, likely most, he is absolute poison. To be
associated with Trump is to lose. Pretty much everything he has done in
the last two years has been not just ill-advised but massively
destructive to the Republican Party and to the United States. He has
teased a “big announcement” in the next few days. I hope he announces
that he is moving to Bulgaria.
This happened to be streaming live this morning on Youtube, so I got to watch Biden deliver prepared comments, but then go on to take an extensive number of questions from the Press. He played it very straight, Presidential, and reasonable; promising to try to work with Republicans to get things done, but also saying there are key initiatives he is not to going to go back on. Pointed out that even with a majority in the House, if it not overwhelming, there is always hope to move some Republicans towards consensus support on certain things. Repeated his optimism for America going forward. And, of course, not sounding the least bit like someone suffering dementia:
On that last point - if I haven't made it clear before, this is why I say "journalists" or opinion makers who persist in building a narrative of "dementia Joe" (based on things like 5 second clips of his not knowing which way he is meant to leave a stage) deserve zero respect and are appalling people. And the right wingers who repeat this line are dumb and gullible and need to be sat down and made to watch material like this video and then be challenged "seriously, you think this is a man who is so feeble he doesn't know what he's doing?"
Many people already speculating that a Trump/DeSantis showdown over the Presidential nomination must now happen, given Trump's high profile mid term picks did pretty poorly, and DeSantis did so well. Some say DeSantis should sit it out and run in 2028 - he's only 44 (gawd - he could pass for older.) But surely, there are enough in the GOP to know that Trump won't win in 2024?? Biden may not be super popular, but Trump is extremely damaged goods outside of his cult following, and stuck in stale repetition. Even the ageing Australian dimwits at the post Catallaxy blogs are mostly against Trump running again.
Finally, are we going to have an actual confrontation between the Trump MAGA idiot wing of the Party, and the rest of it?? I hope so.
And incidentally, I don't think DeSantis has any noticeable charisma at all. I don't expect him to do well at the national level.
There are lots of seats still up for grabs, but I took a screenshot of this from the NYT to show how red and blue is pretty mixed up within most states:
At the time of writing - nothing is 100% clear, except that it was not a "red wave". Seems most likely that the Senate may be the same as it was (Dem control with the VP vote), but lose the Reps by a small number. (Although some are saying it is still conceivable that the Dems keep the Reps by one. That would be impressive...)
I strongly recommend this video, which explains clearly the issue which millions of climate change denialists have clung to for a decade or two: climate change can mean both worse floods and worse droughts. It's not that hard to understand, but it does have its complications (in terms of the different effects in different parts of the globe):
The video also brings to my attention a massive American historical flood of which I was unaware - the Californian one of 1861-2.
It's remarkable - the way they pre-arm themselves with conspiracy claims as the being the only reason they could possibly lose. Read about it at the Washington Post (gift link.)
Prominent Republicans who do not call out this divisive fantasy BS on their own side are at the core of the problem.
One of the most surprising things about Singapore is that it's not only so lushly green and fecund with plant life, but it's increasingly attractive to wild animal life. I haven't managed to see the otters yet, but this last recent trip, it became quickly obvious that wild chickens are now a "thing" there.
The photo above was near my hotel, pretty close to Chinatown, and as you can see, the busy road was no deterrent. (It was, perhaps, thinking about crossing it...ha ha.) This was not the only one I saw. While having dinner at a footpath place there were a few on the nearby bit of lawn one evening.
Since 2020, the National Parks Board (NParks) has received more than
1,000 reports annually about free-ranging chickens, said Ms Jessica
Kwok, group director of NParks’ Animal and Veterinary Service (AVS).
Animal Concerns Research and Education Society's (ACRES) co-chief
executive Anbarasi Boopal told CNA that the animal welfare group has
seen an increase in feedback related to the chickens. There were nine
reports in 2019 as compared to 18 reports last year and 14 reports in
2022 so far, she said.
Feedback came from locations “more or less” all over Singapore, such
as Marine Parade, Pasir Ris, and Ang Mo Kio, said Ms Anbarasi.
Add to that list - Tanjong Pagar, where I saw "my" chickens. I think they are more widespread than even that recent article notes. More from it:
The issue of wild chickens came to the fore in 2017, when the
Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) revealed that it
put down 24 chickens that were wandering around Thomson View and Blocks
452 to 454 Sin Ming Avenue. There were about 20 complaints from
residents there, mainly about noise.
The incident sparked an outcry. AVA later clarified that it was not
because of complaints of noise, but the risk of exposure to bird flu
that prompted them to cull the chickens in areas where there are
“relatively high numbers” of them.
Since then, a task force has been set up to deal with the chicken population at Sin Ming.
But just a moment - was my chicken actually a "junglefowl":
At the same time, not all wild birds are alike.
Often confused for wild chickens, native red junglefowl can also be
spotted throughout Singapore even though they were rare a decade or so
ago.
While they may look similar to chickens, they have a number of
characteristics that set them apart, said Dr Yong Ding Li, the regional
coordinator for migratory bird conservation and an ornithologist at
BirdLife International.
These junglefowl have grey legs, unlike domestic chickens which
generally have yellow legs. They also have a shorter and more abrupt
call and a white tuft of feathers on their rump. However, many hybrids
exist and it can be hard to tell them apart.
"It's very common that junglefowl come into contact with these farm
chickens and they hybridise on and off, on and off, so the genes of
these junglefowl and chicken have been mixing," he said.
Junglefowl have become increasingly common over the last few decades
as they have "colonised" more habitats across the island, added Dr Yong.
In the early 2000s, red junglefowl were mostly found in the Western
Catchment Area and Pulau Ubin, but they can now be spotted in many urban
areas and most nature reserves, he added.
OK, so maybe my picture is a fine specimen of a junglefowl, but it's still surprising that such a densely packed city like Singapore has more of them around than ever before. (Or, I guess, maybe it's just a case of reduced bushland in which to hide.)
Watching a bit of CNA today brought this example of pretty shameful British behaviour to my attention for the first time. I see now that there was a long article in The Guardian about it last year, from which these extracts come.
First, I didn't know this about Liverpool before:
By most reckonings, Liverpool has the oldest
Chinese community in Europe. At the root of this relationship was the
shipping group Alfred Holt & Company, founded in Liverpool in 1866,
and their major subsidiary the Blue Funnel Line, whose cargo steamships
connected Shanghai, Hong Kong and Liverpool. Alfred Holt & Co
quickly became one of Britain’s biggest merchant shipping companies,
importing silk, cotton and tea. Over time, some of the Chinese seamen
settled in Liverpool, starting businesses to serve those on shore leave.
Records from the turn of the century show Chinese-run boarding houses,
grocers, laundries, tailors, a chandler and, in Mr Kwok Fong, even a
private detective. The 1911 census shows 400 Chinese-born residents,
with many more coming and going. By the end of the first world war, the
community numbered in the thousands.
So, in World War 2:
The second world war would bring many more Chinese seamen to Liverpool. China was, in historian Rana Mitter’s formulation,
“the forgotten ally”. Not only did China play a vital role in the fight
against Japan in Asia, Chinese seamen also kept the British merchant
navy going. Beginning in 1939, Alfred Holt & Company, along with
Anglo-Saxon Petroleum (part of Shell), recruited men in Shanghai,
Singapore and Hong Kong. They were to crew the ships on missions across
the Atlantic, bringing essential supplies of oil, munitions and food to
the UK, and escorting convoys to the front. This was exceptionally
dangerous work. About 3,500 merchant vessels were sunk by Nazi U-boats, and more than 72,000 lives were lost on the Allied side.
One Chinese merchant seaman, Poon Lim, became famous
for surviving 133 days adrift on a tiny raft, after his British vessel
was torpedoed by a U-boat in the south Atlantic. Lim and his countrymen
were hailed
as firm comrades in a 1944 Ministry of Information propaganda film, The
Chinese in Wartime Britain. “East met west, and liked it,” explains the
film’s narrator in his finest Pathe News accent, as we are shown these
new friends working as doctors, engineers and scientists, and then
recovering on land in between missions, drinking tea, practising
calligraphy and playing table tennis. The Chinese merchant seamen fought
“shoulder to shoulder in the greatest battle of naval history,
alongside their British seamen comrades. They, too, brave the torpedoes
and the bombs and the mines, making history under fire … life at sea
fuels a unique spirit of comradeship between the men of all nations.”
For the Chinese seamen, official British gratitude and friendship did not extend far beyond the silver screen.
In reality, they were (at least initially) paid half of what the British seamen got and did the worst and most dangerous jobs. A strike improved their pay. But their numbers were large:
During the war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping
industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat,
and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis
attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. The seamen were a
vital part of the allied war effort, some of the “heroes of the fourth
service” in the words of one
book title about the merchant navy. Working below deck in the engine
rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under
heavy attack from German U-boats.
But the kicker at the end of the war was that the government decided that they couldn't stay in England, and were secretly and forcefully deported back to various Chinese ports, leaving behind wives and children in many cases. (Apparently, the families often initially assumed they had been abandoned by their partner or father.)
The plan was deceptive in many respects - dates were amended on papers allowing for the police to treat them as "overstaying", and men with families were deliberately not told of their right to stay:
Although marrying a local woman did not give the
Chinese men the right to British citizenship, the Home Office was aware
that it did give them the right to stay in the UK. This information was
deliberately withheld. On 14 November, Liverpool Immigration Officer JR
Garstang had written to London that “it would be unwise … to give any
indication to the Chinese that because a man is married to a
British-born woman he will have a claim to domicile in the UK”. In a
follow-up letter, sent on 15 December, Garstang reiterated that it was
best not to give the married men “a lever in their claim for domicile”.
The authorities were determined to finish the job they had started.
The
secret repatriation campaign was not a placid or cooperative affair.
Written records suggest that it was conducted as a manhunt. The phrase
“roundup” is used repeatedly in official correspondence. An immigration
officers’ report to the Home Office filed on 15 July 1946 announced
that: “Two whole days were spent in an intensive search of approximately
150 Pool boarding-houses, private boarding houses and private houses.”
They had “spread the net as widely as possible”, they promised, alerting
police chiefs across the country to look out for Chinese seamen. The
report concluded: “When the operation is completed within the next few
days I shall be satisfied that every possible step has been taken to
secure a maximum repatriation of Chinese.”
I also didn't know before that the Chinese had even been of substantial assistance to Britain in World War 1:
Now that the war had come to an end and
Japanese troops in China had surrendered, the Chinese coast opened up
again – allowing the British government to commence, in its own words,
“the usual steps for getting rid of foreign seamen whose presence here
is unwelcome”. (Those “usual steps” probably refer to an earlier mass
deportation: 95,000 Chinese men were recruited by Britain as
non-combatant labourers and merchant seamen in the first world war. They
were not allowed to settle in the UK after the war, either, and their
sacrifice has likewise long been overlooked.)
Chinese workers helped rebuild war-torn Europe, says Hong Kong
University historian Xu Guoqi. About 140,000 worked for American,
British and French troops in France, his research shows. Up to half a
million Chinese workers laboured on the eastern front for Tsarist
Russia, before the empire crumbled in the 1917 Communist revolution,
according to the unpublished research of historian Li Zhixue of Jinan
University.
Xu, who traced the journey of Chinese labourers from Shandong to France in his 2011 book Strangers on the Western Front
published by Harvard University Press, says the mostly illiterate
farmers played a crucial role not only in the war, but in shaping
China’s role in the new world order that emerged as empires fractured
into nation-states worldwide.
Many died, too, in tragedies of war:
By trains and ships, the Chinese made their way to Europe. Hundreds,
if not thousands, died along the way. Xu estimated at least 700
perished. Between 400 and 600 workers died on February 17, 1917, alone
when a German submarine sank the French passenger ship Athos near Malta.
Many more died crossing Russia, according to Li’s research.
About 3,000 Chinese workers died in France, on their way to the
Western front in Northern France, or on their return to China between
1916 and 1920, Xu estimates. Up to 30,000 Chinese died on the Russian
front, estimates Jinan University scholar Li.
To avoid further German submarine attacks, Britain shipped more than
84,000 Chinese labourers through Canada in a campaign kept secret for
years in the then British dominion.
“In view of the suspicion that certain Chinese are being used as a
medium of communication by enemy agents”, Canada banned news outlets
from reporting on the train convoys that crossed the country on their
way to France.
I had no idea.
Both of these stories would be a good source for fresh stories for novels or cinema too, I reckon. Barely know history is always good for that...
Look, I could kind of respect climate change activists more if they were actually prepared to do dangerous direct things against the fossil fuel companies they (with some justification) despise - I mean, get armed up like a 1960's Leftist radical, hijack an oil tanker and sail it to a remote island with no refinery. Hold the crew hostage, even, while trying to get some concession from the company. Or blow up a railway track that is only used by a coal mining company to get the black stuff to port (lots of opportunity in Queensland for that.) I mean, I wouldn't exactly endorse those tactics, but I could at least see the perpetrators as people willing to put their lives and liberty on the line with radical action for their basically legitimate cause.
But they are just uselessly naive and annoying to think that protesting by inconveniencing ordinary people in traffic (and putting their lives in danger - if they are in an ambulance waiting to get to a hospital), or doing theatrical things to great art, is useful: it is just patently not going to work.
We need politicians and climate scientists to be saying this, and not letting useless forms of activism lead to any increase in the Right wing vote in any country, with their dedication to not doing much.
Twitter (when not spending time in glorious schadenfreude about Musk losing advertisers and trying to blame everyone except himself) is talking a lot about the Republican favouring polls "flooding the zone" in the last couple of weeks. Early voting, however, has been high, and traditionally favours Democrats - although I have also noticed that some people are claiming that Republican early voting is high in a couple of places (I think Florida is one of them.) But I don't know how they know they know how the early voters voted.
This weekend, there are some (such as Kristol above) suggesting that the Democrats are going to do OK after all (although his tweet above doesn't actually say they will retain control of congress), and it is no doubt based on stuff like this:
And this is one theory about Republican polling:
As is this:
Yes - that is one safe bet. If Democrats do surprisingly well (compared to the way the MSM is currently skewing their reporting on the assumption that the Republicans will do well), there are going to be millions of stupid American wingnuts (and their Australian counterparts) claiming it is due to electoral fraud, but (again) with no actual evidence.
The reality is, however, that polling is extremely difficult in the US and surprises have happened before.
Went out to Mulgowie farmers market again on Saturday, which might seem a long way to go to get really fresh corn, potatoes, beans (and locally grown garlic) but it's a nice drive.
The dams are full everywhere around Laidley, and for some reason, there seems to be an enormous amount of corn planted at the moment (see above - well I think it's corn. This is right besides the market, but we drove around to Forest Hill, and up to Lowood, and corn was everywhere. If the market is soon flooded with cheap corn, you heard it here first. Actually, it's already around $1 a cob, I think, so it's not even that expensive at the moment. Why is so much being grown?)
It was also surprisingly cool for November. The weather is still very wonky at the moment. I kind of don't recall wanting to wear a jacket in November anywhere near Brisbane before.
I like using Himalayan rock salt in cooking and on my food - it's pink, and makes me think about how incredible it is that I'm using something mined out of a hill in Pakistan that is incredibly ancient.
The formation of oil takes a significant amount of time
with oil beginning to form millions of years ago. 70% of oil deposits
existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years
ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and
only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years
ago). This is likely because the Mesozoic age was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the ocean.
I had to check, of course, but Ediacaran period starts at 635 million years ago and ends at the (oddly specific) time of 538.8 million years ago (according to Wiki). For more context, at that time, there weren't even land plants in existence:
We have land plants to thank for the oxygen we breathe. And now we have a
better idea of when they took to land in the first place. While the
oldest known fossils of land plants are 420 million years old,
researchers have now determined that pond scum first made landfall
almost 100 million years earlier.
"[This] study has important
global implications, because we know early plants cooled the climate
and increased the oxygen level in the Earth's atmosphere," conditions
that supported the expansion of terrestrial animal life, says Tim
Lenton, an earth system scientist at the University of Exeter in the
United Kingdom who was not involved with the work.
There were squishy things in the ocean, and that was about it. (Backbones didn't turn up until about 500 million years ago.)
So yeah, the salt I'll be cooking with is older than most oil, and probably pre-dates even plants!
(Although, for some reason, some salt company sites refer to Himilayan salt as being "more than 250 million years old" and one says only 200 million years. But I trust Wikipedia, and NPR, more than them and think the 600 million year figure is more correct.)
I intend to impress my family with this news over dinner this weekend. (It's the sort of thing I loved telling kids when they were school age, but I like to inflict science stuff on anyone of any age.)
Too late for the millions of Trumpy culture warriors who will go on believing this was real:
Joe Rogan has admitted he lied about a school letting “furry” children use litter boxes, walking back his claims from a month ago that have since been amplified by Republican Senate Don Bolduc. In an October podcast, Rogan told guest Tulsi Gabbard that his friend’s wife taught at a school that “had to install a litter box in the girl’s room because there’s a student that’s a furry.” Now, he’s saying “I don't think they actually did it,” attributing the whole situation to “one wacky mother” who the school ignored. Claims that furry students are using litter boxes have been debunked over and over, but the lie has persisted as a right-wing talking point. Bolduc accused a school of using litter boxes in a campaign town hall, saying “I wish I was making it up.” Lucky for the New Hampshire Republican, he was. “I fed into that,” Rogan said in his podcast, admitting he had no facts to back up his claim.
I mentioned this guy recently, and really don't know how much credibility I should give him. But in these videos, he appears reasonable, and he is just putting up pilot and ATC recordings that seem genuine, and somewhat puzzling:
What puzzles me in particular is that if it is a military test of something, why do it in that location, and with a brightness that is going to be seen from far away and attract attention.
Yes, I have felt this way about this guy. The pressure to keep high numbers (and good income from it) is very likely what has brought down his credibility:
Government officials believe that
surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other
airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial
phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in
past years.
The sightings have puzzled
the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories
about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using
advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents
have far more ordinary explanations.
It goes on to note that the Mick West explanation of the "Go fast" and "gimbal" video seems to be accepted by the Pentagon, and that there is nothing to the "green pyramids" video too. (I always said that the latter was rubbish - any UFO video that shows lights of any kind flashing in a typical aircraft or drone type sequence is likely to be an aircraft or drone.)
Anyway, still no explanation for the verbal report of the Nimitiz Tic Tak case - confirmed by three pilots. What a shame there is no good video of what they saw...
Even though there can be problems with prosecutors rushing out evidentiary material because of political pressure, I reckon it would be a ridiculous look if video showing that the wingnut narrative about the Paul Pelosi attack is a 100% conspiracy fantasy only comes out after the mid term elections. (The Axios version of this story does not say that the video is recorded, but I think the Wapo story said it was.)
Philip Bump writes about this at the Washington Post, noting how the current calls to release the video are mainly coming from those who want to further conspiracy belief, because any delay is "suspicious". (Mind you, Bump also seems to think that we can sure than any ambiguity in the video will be used to spin further conspiracy, which is probably true, but it would likely have to be a completely different conspiracy to the one that millions of dumb, conspiracy addled American brains currently believe.)
The Youtube algorithm recently led to me listening to Don McLean's "American Pie" for the first time in years. (It was one of the videos where they use one of the AI art apps to illustrate lyric lines.)
Anyway, it occurred to me while listening that it is incredibly well produced. (The amount of attention given to George Martin's role with the Beatles, as well as some other Youtube "making of" content I've watched, is no doubt why such a thought now occurs to me. It would not have when I was younger.)
So I decided to look up who produced it, and it was a guy who isn't famous enough to have a Wiki entry - Ed Freeman.
Nevertheless, my hunch that this song likely had a huge amount of input from the producer seems to be correct. Look here:
Producer Ed Freeman stated that the “American Pie” single is a
combination of 24 different takes of McLean’s voice. This happened
because the singer wasn’t the easiest person to work with, and as such,
multiple takes were taken during the same session on May 26, 1971, with a
live and unedited backing band track.
The producer also stated that even though McLean was a very talented
singer, he was sometimes criticized for singing with the same vocal
inflections, so he decided to be more improvisational. “In my head, I
knew what it was supposed to sound like—I don’t now remember how I
arrived at that, but when I kept asking him to sing it in a certain way,
he wouldn’t do it. He wanted to play with it every time, inserting
slides, melismas and other things that, to my mind, didn’t fit. So we
ended up recording him 24 times on 16-track tape and took different
parts from different takes until I got every word the way I wanted it,
without all the play, and I don’t think Don appreciated that very
much…In Don’s case, I think he was happy with the finished vocal, but he
was not happy with somebody else having that much influence,” said
Freeman. ...
As for the challenges the length of the song brought to the producing
team, Ed Freeman remembers that “it was a complete nightmare to fit an
eight-and-a-half-minute track onto one seven-inch single.” The track had
to be cut in half very carefully and added to both sides of the record.
The final running times were 4:11 minutes for Part One and 4:31minutes
for Part Two.
Don McLean is now 77, and looking haggard. Not sure that he is very likeable in person. But good song that still sounds great when you haven't heard it for years...
* Noah Smith on Twitter seems to be unusually cranky and coming out with some very dubious takes at the moment. Holidaying doesn't seem to do him any good.
* Elon Musk is being nearly universally derided by "blue tick" people at Twitter over his plan to charge them for the privilege. Once again, we have the puzzle - just how smart is this guy? It's pretty clear he has a modest amount of emotional intelligence and a fragile ego (the "pedo" insult for someone rejecting his impractical idea sealed that forever), but in terms of engineering and other problems, is he really just a hyped up latter day monorail salesman who got lucky? That's pretty much the vibe he gives me.
* Everyone on Twitter is also puzzling still about the lack of a convenient and appropriate replacement. Surely it will arise soon, though.
I don't usually like to say anything that suggests I'm dehumanising a politician or celebrity, but that Kari Lake is so intensely smooth-skinned and over-groomed (and video filtered to look like she's beaming in from the soft glow world of 1980's cinematography) that I would not be at all surprised if turns out to be a robot from some Peter Thiel funded lab:
To me she absolutely reeks of manipulative insincerity and artifice to a skin crawling degree. I rank her worse than the appallingly unself-aware dumbness of Marjorie Taylor Greene because she seems to have a degree of intellect that's capable of worse manipulation.
Rarely do I have such a strong feeling from a politician's manner and appearance, but she does it for me (in the worst possible way).
I'm posting this just a little late for Halloween, but the New York Times ran in their lifestyle section last week an article How to Live with a Ghost - about what happens when people think their residence is haunted. It talks about people who have learnt to live with it, whether Americans have to legally disclose that a house is believed to be haunted when selling, and how many people do believe in ghosts.
I recently wrote how dismissive I am of the paranormal investigation cable TV shows, and I have to say that I find a well written, plausible sounding, first hand strange incident is much more convincing than anything I have seen on a TV show with investigators with their "ghostbusting" style equipment. ("Spirit boxes" are just the most ridiculous idea for claiming communication evidence - it's like the perfect way to encourage imagined messages.)
But take this story, which starts the NYT article, as it is easy to imagine as quite disturbing if it happened to me:
On a routine afternoon, Shane Booth, a
photography professor living in Benson, N.C., was folding laundry in his
bedroom, when he was startled by a loud, crashing noise. He stepped out
to find a shattered front window and his dog sitting outside it. He was
confused, how could his dog have jumped through the window with enough
force to break it?
After cleaning up
the glass, Mr. Booth came back to his room, where all of the clothes he
had just folded were scattered and strewn about, he said. “That’s when I
thought, this is actually really scary now,” said Mr. Booth, 45.
A few things it would be good to know, though: has Mr Booth always enjoyed good mental health, and does he also have a mad cat as well as a dog? Was he folding clothes into a basket, and did he tip it over as he ran out of the room? Rarely do reports of odd incidents cover off such obvious matters, which is somewhat disappointing.
Stories of footsteps in unoccupied upstairs rooms are a very common haunting trope, and one that is certainly sometimes capable of mundane explanation. But I also have little doubt that it can be pretty convincingly concerning, in the right circumstances.
Things moved to wildly improbable locations are perhaps harder to explain, unless you sleepwalk. I like this story, though (from comments in the NYT) to a follow up article:
Never believed, just thought here are some things we may not know about
our world/universe.
Then stayed at a hotel (not that old) and woke one night to a the
absolute conviction that someone in the darkness was standing behind me.
I whirled around and clicked the light as fast as I dared....no one.
The large, closet doors were suddenly wide open though. I closed them,
thinking I had perhaps left them like that (knowing full well I never
leave closets open, since childhood). My room door had it's latch on, no
one could have entered.
The next morning, my small camera, charging in it spot, was gone. The
chord was still there. I looked everywhere, called housekeeping asked
about stollen goods, etc...nothing.
Finally, upon packing to leave a couple days later, I pulled out my pair
of floppy-top boots I never wore on that trip-- and out fell my camera
from inside. There was no way it could have fallen into them.
I left bewildered--- and when I mentioned it to the receptionist, he
shrugged in a bored manner--- "Oh room number 225? Yeah, he likes to
move stuff around sometimes."
I chose another room the next time.
OK, nothing particularly convincing about waking up and feeling a presence, as tha's a common feature of sleep paralysis (from which my daughter suffered, so I'm pretty familiar with first hand descriptions.). But if this was the first time you ever had the experience, and it was combined with the camera moving to a weird hiding spot, it would creep you out. (Frustratingly, sleep walking would be a possibility impossible to disprove unless you had the foresight to set up cameras, and who is going to do that before the object is lost?)
Similarly with stories of ghost voices - highly suggestive of something supernatural, but also explicable as convenient auditory hallucinations. This story, for example:
As an engineering major with a strong education in science, I didn’t
believe in the supernatural. But then I lived ten years in a house my
wife insisted was haunted. One day, I was watching my three year old son
while my wife and daughter went shopping. I was surfing the net while
he toddled around the room. Then I zoned out reading an online article.
Then I heard a voice: “where is your son?” I looked around and wondered
where the voice came from. “You need to find him,” the voice said. I
thought that was probably a good idea so I went looking for him and
found the front door open. I went outside and found him toddling down
the driveway toward the street. I raced over and snatched him up. When I
got back inside, I said to the air: “thank you, whoever you are!” Years
later I told that to my wife and after scolding me for my negligence,
told me I’d heard the ghost. And for the epilogue, that son just called
me from college to check in and see how his old dad is doing. I’m still
grateful to that ghost who may very well have saved my son’s life.
The ghost voice that is challenging rather than useful is perhaps less readily explained as the brain talking to itself. I think I wrote here before that the woman in charge of the nursing home my mother lived in until she died told us that she would not work in her (somewhat isolated) office in the old convent building at night, as soon after she started there she had heard a clear voice ask aggressively "who are you?" and felt her hair being flicked, when no one was around.
Some people in the article are like me - quite fascinated with the topic, and very open to the possibility of experiencing something personally, but it never happens. About the most puzzling thing that has happened to me overnight is waking up one morning (in my 20's) perfectly reversed in my (single) bed in the dorm style room in which I lived alone: my feet on my pillow, my head at the foot of my bed, and somewhat tangled up in the sheet. Has happened exactly once in my life!
Anyway: in another, somewhat charming story from Singapore, I like the way the government respects, but tries to handle co-operatively, the Chinese tradition of burning joss paper to provide goods to the family deceased. There are incinerators around apartment blocks to allow for this, although it does cause complaints when the smoke and waste interferes with residents. This is such a significant issue that the government news service likes to point out there has been a reduced number of complaints about this year:
I funny it a little amusing that there are public servants there whose job it is to keep track of complaints about burnt offerings to ghosts. Well, more charming, really.
The conspiracy addled brain, once having decided it has spotted a conspiracy, will cling to "there must be a conspiracy of some kind here" regardless of evidence.
Update: The Department of Justice on Monday announced two federal criminal charges against David DePape.
“DePape was charged with attempted kidnapping, and with retaliating
against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member.”
CNBC reported.
The US government will now control and hide the evidence – and shape the national media narrative.
As to any inconsistencies or changes to the initial reports about the incident - what moron could have missed that this is exactly what happened in the recent Uvalde shooting case, to a spectacular degree. Initial stories often aren't 100% clear, with both journalists and police not always being accurate. Hence, someone made up (then retracted) that the assailant was in his underwear - and millions of conspiracy addled Trumpists will never believe otherwise, as well as the ludicrous elaboration that all stem from that piece of misinformation.
What can be said, I think, is this: Biden and the Democrats got a lot
done, despite very slim majorities. They rolled out vaccines and
therapeutics nationwide but we remain far from finishing the job on
pandemic preparedness. They have run the government in a dignified,
decent way, but we remain far from turning the page on Trump.
I am completely on side with this comment that follows (and I am surprised that there are not more who are upset at the framing):
Paul Phoenix, AZ2h ago
Notice the harm done to the country by op-eds like this one.
It is bad enough the mainstream media has made pro-democracy/anti democracy int just another political horse race issue like taxes or crime or climate change, but now they are asking if the pro democracy party deserves to even be re-elected.
Arguing over granular issues like the prioritizing of BBB components while the Speaker's husband is getting his head bashed in by a Trump motivated supporter (his mental status is a non factor, as is Trump's, it seems), as well as stating openly they will not accept any result of the 2022 elections that does not make them the winner, shows how completely out of touch the media has become in its now out of control false equivalences.
With Musk's disgraceful "I'm just asking questions" style of promoting Right wing conspiracy (you can read all about it at the WAPO - gift link), I'm sure that, more than ever, most of the people I follow on it would be happy to abandon Twitter so as to watch it become a valueless conspiracy sewer like the other failed social media outlets.
Update: Elon really is trying to seal the failure of Twitter in record time -
So, trying to joke his way out of the seriousness of promoting conspiracy mongering from a junk Right wing site by encouraging the Trumpian Right wing that the MSM is full of fake news and can't be trusted. That'll work.
I know that bad news is often a case of out of sight, out of mind, so that you can get some tragedy in some distant country that doesn't register; but it seems this morning was just full of one bad news story after another. The (apparently spontaneous) party crowd crush fatalities in Korea; Putin being a jerk who prioritises winning his culture/land war over people getting fed; Iran promising violence against its citizens; car bombing of the education ministry in Somalia. Not to mention the worry about the state of the USA after mid term elections. (Although I am holding out slight hope that the very high early vote in some areas might be heavily Democrat - it usually is, isn't it?)
I'm pretty sure we bought this tiny, one egg size frying pan on a bit of a whim when my daughter was young and thought it cute when she saw it in a kitchen shop:
But...I love it and use it at least three times a week, usually to get an egg cooked for a lunch sandwich quickly and easily and with the quickest clean up possible. It's used on the smallest burner, too, so is very gas efficient.
It's my "life hack of the decade" and it's utility should be on the high school curriculum.
Now: Back to watching how Musk is going to destroy Twitter.
PS: yes, I know the stove needs cleaning. I could try to clean the metal handle of the fry pan too, I suppose. But it is probably 10 years old, I reckon.
That's the problem with America - there is too much reliance on litigation as being the only way for victims of conspiracy mongering to get any justice, and that takes years to get through the courts.
Of course it is too late to change the minds of millions of Trumpists - and this way that disinformation and lies operates is something that evidently is of little concern to the likes of Elon Musk.
Well, that Brittany Higgins aborted trial is a spectacular example of the problems with jury trials. But man, is it causing the angry old reactionary ants of the post-Catallaxy blogs to be very, very upset. (They hate Brittany, and think this is a the biggest injustice since George Pell was convicted - although I still strongly suspect that he and his barrister made a bad, bad decision in not giving evidence in defence. Also: no one ended up nude in an office the next morning in his case, making the circumstances of this allegation significantly different.)
I find it very easy to not be emotionally invested in cases like this, as having a good feeling for why a jury is inclined to decide one way or another (or can't decide) is very hard to do without being an observer in the court. This cautionary concept seems completely novel to many people - and true, this can apply to Lefties as well as to mad angry Rightwingers.
We do seem to be at some sort of peak of hyperbolic culture warring at the moment. Well, I hope it's a peak.
To be fair, an example of this on the Left is to be found by those on Twitter who have gone berserk that the media is not spending all day calling the beating death of a 15 year old aboriginal boy in Perth at the hands of a white guy a racist lynching. Many seem to think the story hasn't been reported at all.
Unlike cases in America of the "white guy shoots random black guy thinking he's the one who broke into the neighbour's house" type, the arrest here was swift and the trial will likely be on pretty soon too. A lengthy sentence is assured.
It is a shocking case, but seems to me to be of a kind that's pretty rare, too. Calm down people.
While I suppose I would generally lean more towards the "experimental secret - probably defence - technology" than "alien surveillance craft" explanation for the current UFO increase, there is at least one aspect of that which gives me major reservations.
That is, if the "craft" are executing extraordinary physics in what they do - like turning on a dime, or pretty much instantaneous acceleration - it would indicate that the technology involved is truly revolutionary, and probably involving "new" physics not taught in text books.
But - wouldn't such new physics be of massive relevance to electricity production? And if so, given the obvious need for a global turn to clean energy in a very short space of time, why would you keep such physics hidden from the broader research community which could be looking at using it for something more useful than a small craft that can do surprising tight turns in the sky?
There is also the matter of how well you can really expect secret programs to remain secret. Big, mysterious triangle craft moving through the night skies (or being seen from an oil rig!) have been around for a good few decades now, and it seems we still have no confirmation that there is a secret hypersonic aircraft - or more dramatically, one that can move slowly and silently. There surely are secret government craft, but how do they manage to keep them officially undisclosed for so long? And really, why keep them secret for so long? I mean, the cutting edge aircraft of the 1960's don't seem to have been kept hidden for so long.
So, yeah, it's all pretty puzzling. It might all turn out to be relatively mundane stuff - but why the secrecy? Cue X Files music...
Seems to me that the highly worrying state of world politics is causing significant distraction from interesting UFO news. Yeah, I know: the media is reporting how NASA is now investigating*, etc, but there are a few stories of pretty recent, intriguing, pilot sightings (over the Pacific Ocean, mainly) which I think would normally attract more attention. They don't sound easily explained either, as Starlink or other rocket launches.
Here's a very short video about it:
The guy who makes an appearance in that report does longer videos about it, but I can't find his channel right now.
The Warzone website contains lots of interesting stuff from FAA records about unidentified aircraft, and drones, around the USA, too. See this post, for one. Or just search "unidentified aircraft" or "UFO" in their search bar. (Of course, the massive market in private drone ownership would be behind much of the recent upsurge in UFO "sightings" - but there is something bigger going on, it seems.)
Update: Oh, I see now that I search his name that the guy who did a long video that I can't find on the pilot sightings is a "paranormal researcher" who has made whole TV series about it, and claims his own sightings too. I have to downgrade his credibility. But still, recordings from pilots puzzling over what they are seeing are strong evidence.
* The people chosen seem to not come with any "baggage" as to prior speculative claims about UFOs, as far as I can tell.
...that Petra has a sister "city" in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia, that has only recently opened to tourists. It includes eye catching structures like these:
This has been circulated on Twitter a lot recently, and it almost looks like a parody of The Entitled Upper Class Twit who Was Born to Rule from Monty Python. But it's real!
It just continues to gobsmack me that key figures in Republican leadership (and ordinary party members who would prefer Trump to go) are silent on the massive personal harm and harassment that comes from the lies and conspiracy spread by Trump, his followers, and the pandering Right wing media. It's just such extraordinarily immoral and cowardly behaviour - and to be honest, it's cowardly of journalists to not confront the leadership about this at every opportunity.
Gee, one of the (increasingly rare) good reads from Slate - an account of the American conspiracy belief in the Illuminati - and how remarkably similar it is to modern conspiracy belief.
Morse unspooled a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that a shadowy
cabal of villains called the “Illuminati,” an offshoot of the
Freemasons, were aiming to destroy everything that Americans held dear.
This group of philosopher zealots, according to Morse, had “secretly
extended its branches through a great part of Europe, and even into
America.” Their goal was to abolish Christianity, private property, and
nearly every foundation of good order around the world. According to
Morse, they opposed marriage, encouraged people to explore all kinds of
“sensual pleasures,” and proposed a “promiscuous intercourse among the
sexes.” Just a few masks short of a Stanley Kubrick film, Morse’s story of the Illuminati played upon the darkest nightmares of the nation’s many devout Christians.
Morse told his congregation that the Illuminati hoped to infect the
people of America through a kind of cultural warfare. They were
spreading their doctrines by worming their way in among “reading and
debating societies, the reviewers, journalists or editors of newspapers
and other periodical publications, the booksellers and post-masters” and
infiltrating all “literary, civil and religious institutions.” The most
prominent Illuminatus named by Morse was Thomas Paine, whose radical
pamphlet The Age of Reason (published in installments in 1794, 1795, and 1807) had caused a political stir in the United States.
If
the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according
to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil
society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to
hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event
following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing
radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse
that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of
the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.
That is extraordinarily similar to the types of conspiracy mongering the modern American Right (and their nutty Australian acolytes) believe now. Indeed, towards the end of the article it notes:
The names and characters change over time, but the basic template has
remained remarkably durable over the centuries: A small, yet nearly
omnipotent, group of amoral globalist elites secretly directs world
events. This paranoid vision has persevered in large part because it
helps their believers to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The
faceless structural forces remaking our present—such as globalization,
accelerating inequality, deindustrialization, racial justice movements,
and cultural fragmentation—require explanation.
The article explains, by the way, that the reason the Illuminati conspiracy took off so well was that it was seen as an explanation as to why the French Revolution had gone off the rails.
But it just seems a significant chunk of Americans have always, for odd reason, been especially prone to paranoid conspiracy beliefs.
This week's Youtube from Sabine Hossenfelder finally deals with a quantum interpretation that has has always appealed to me, but attracted little attention - John Cramer's transaction interpretation. (You can search his name in my sidebar search and find past posts about it).
One thing I'm not sure about, though: Sabine's attitude to it seems to be "well, no harm in imagining that this is what happens, if that makes you happy, but I'm just sticking to the simpler Copenhagen interpretation." I thought the problem with the Copenhagen interpretation was it was more like a refusal to speculate on what is "really" happening with the wave function. In that sense, Cramer's idea seems to at least offer something to fill in a gap.
One other thing I have been meaning to note. I didn't realise until she did a video on it that the "quantum eraser" experiments were the subject of debate as to what they really show. Sabine's debunking video seemed pretty convincing that they were not showing retrocausation in any sense.
However, while browsing arXiv last week, I noticed a paper that proposed a different version of the experiment which raises more of a "mystery" than the former versions:
Considering the delayed-choice quantum eraser using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a nonsymmetric beam splitter, we explicitly demonstrate that it shares exactly the same formal structure with the EPR-Bohm experiment. Therefore, the effect of quantum erasure can be understood in terms of the standard EPR correlation. Nevertheless, the quantum eraser still raises a conceptual issue beyond the standard EPR paradox, if counterfactual reasoning is taken into account. Furthermore, the quantum eraser experiments can be classified into two major categories: the entanglement quantum eraser and the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser. These two types are formally equivalent to each other, but conceptually the latter presents a "mystery" more prominent than the former. In the Scully-Drühl-type quantum eraser, the statement that the which-way information can be influenced by the delayed-choice measurement is not purely a consequence of counterfactual reasoning but bears some factual significance. Accordingly, it makes good sense to say that the "record" of the which-way information is "erased" if the potentiality to yield a conclusive outcome that discriminates the record is eliminated by the delayed-choice measurement. We also reconsider the quantum eraser in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), making clear the conceptual merits and demerits of the MWI.
The author acknowledges the debate over the correct interpretation of the previous experiment:
Ever since the idea of quantum erasure was proposed, its interpretation and implication have been a subject of fierce controversy that continues to today [6–13] with divided opinions ranging from “a magnificat affront to our conventional notions of space and time” [14] to “an experiment that has caused no end of confusion” [15]. Particularly, by analogy to the the EPR–Bohm experiment [16, 17], Kastner argued that the quantum eraser neither erases nor delays any information, and does not present any mystery beyond the standard EPR correlation [12]. Later on, by considering a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which conveys the core idea of the quantum eraser more elegantly than a double-slit experiment, Qureshi further elaborated on the analogy between the quantum eraser and the EPR-Bohm experiment and claimed that there is no retrocausal effect whatsoever [13].
So, I take it from this that Sabine H is correct that you don't have to interpret it as retrocausation, but I would like her to comment on the different set up which this author claims does re-introduce "mystery".
Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on
Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking
and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that
included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support,
two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen
stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he
had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober
living facilities. ...
The book is full of painful revelations, including one about
short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which
Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his
jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell
out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)
Kind of hard to believe that line about how long he had been in "sober living facilities" - 24 years? - could be right.
I never cared much for "Friends" - it was a vastly overrated show if you ask me - but I guess it's nice to know that the other actors did care about his addiction problems to confront him sometimes.
The article notes that he was making $1 million an episode at the peak of his sitcom days - and it ran for 10 years! I guess part of the problem with being a super rich addict is that you never have the economic incentive to get clean because you can't afford the drugs.
Anyway, money doesn't buy happiness, as we all know. But I still have bought a ticket for this week's Powerball $160 million dollar jackpot. If I win, I might finally migrate the blog off Blogger! Haha.
Yeah, I have to admit, I don't understand why Biden staffers would think it's a good idea for him to be interviewed by the transgender guy (comedian?) whose Tik Tok act is to parody "girl" behaviour. Biden's comments in the interview were not unreasonable, but I think you still have to be careful about who you are seen with when buying into the trans culture wars. I mean, the American Right take this very seriously - and while they are wrong in much of their response, it doesn't help move them into any more reasonable takes if those on the activist side are so hard to understand. (To take an Australian example - I have read mad old Cassie at Catallaxy say she has no great problem with Cate McGregor - who transitioned as a mature adult and whose behaviour and appearance could not be said to resemble a parody of feminine behaviour. Same with that trans former golf pro, whose name I forget. Conservatives don't have that big a problem with trans who transition later in life and act conservative and respectful of "traditional" feminity.)
As for the other big trans news item in recent days: I am reluctant to spend too much time on the matter of Jordan Gray (first time I'd heard of him*) doing a live strip to display his breast/penis combination on Channel 4 in England. His song performance reminded me very much of Tim Minchin, with its intense crudity overlaying an obvious talent - but the intention behind the appallingly bad taste lyrics remains unclear to me. Was it meant to be satirical of transgender self promotion as being "better than normal"? I think so - but if you then strip to show off your trans body on national TV, it seems a case of "sorry, not sorry", doesn't it?
It did get me thinking of the ways in which male nudity can be seen to be funny - it's often just the unexpectedness of it, especially if its from a character you would never think of in the undressed state. (I am thinking of some TV show, a long time ago, in which that JJJ Sandman character suddenly appeared nude on stage.) But this Gray incident had an obvious political and advocacy motive, taking the "just innocent fun" aspect out of it, at least to those of us who have a lot of trouble understanding this issue and who feel there is an extreme element that has set up a cultural divide that's becoming harder and harder to find common ground with.
* I didn't even realise I wrote "him" - perhaps it was under the influence of assuming a body which has just been displayed on TV with a penis is indeed a "him".
I knew about Manichaeism a little from remembering that St Augustine has attacked it a lot (I had sort of forgotten he was a former follower), but this great explanation from Religion for Breakfast enlightened me as to how eccentric some of its beliefs were. (It's the talking vegetables that really threw me!)
But beyond the whole vegetable issue, which seems almost to be a way a priest class could get food delivered to them for free, the religion seems to have had no great problematic elements, and represented a real effort towards a syncretic amalgamation of two or three of the then current great religions. (Christianity was still finding its way at the time, though.)
The thing is, I feel broadly sympathetic towards syncretic religions, while at the same time somewhat bemused by how someone goes about inventing a new religious explanation of the universe without feeling any hesitation about how they are, well, just making stuff up.
I mean, one can be cynical and say that the creators of new religions are usually just self interested con men (*cough* L Ron Hubbard, and - probably - Joseph Smith), but it feels harder to see other creators of big religions as being as self interested as them. I suppose dreaming up stories under the influence of hallucinogens, or actual mental illness, is one way of explaining it. Or - possibly - followers who take something more seriously than the originator?
In my lifetime, if you accept that Scientology is not exactly taking over the world, there seems to be a distinct lack of successful innovation in syncretic new religions. Perhaps George Lucas had a chance here, with the Force, but as I have said before, he really blew the potential by being thoroughly inconsistent in the approach to it in his invented universe. No doubt, he would say he doesn't see it as desirable to be the inadvertent creator of a new religion, and I get that. But I still think it's a bit of a pity, the way the world's old religions are going...
