Perchance to dream

A BBC story about the (very common) exam anxiety dream:

We may have lots going on in our lives, so why is it that exams can stand out in our dreams?

"It's a common theme to dream about anything that is threatening," says Prof Espie. Just because something is threatening it doesn't mean it's bad, he says, but it can mean it's challenging - and exams are, almost by definition, challenging.

"For most people, they don't look forward to their exams, right?"

"It's on your mind during the day, and it shouldn't surprise us that it's on our mind during the night."

Exam dreams are quite common, according to Prof Espie. "Pretty much" everyone has dreams even if they do not remember them.

"For a proportion of people those [exam dreams] are not breaking into consciousness, so you're not aware of them at all," he says.

"For some people it will be breaking through a little bit more and it will be occasional, and for some people it will be an every night problem."

I do find it somewhat surprising that, even after 40 years since my last significant exams, I can still have the occasional exam dream of the typical "but I haven't prepared for this" scenario.

Lately, I seem to be having a fair few dreams in which the problem is that I can't remember whether or not I have done something important I had to do.  I hate it when you get that type of dream and you half awake, try to think "wait, that's only a dream, isn't it?" and them fall back into semi-sleep where the anxiety feeling of not having done something resumes.

There was also an article recently in the Washington Post about what the elderly tend to dream about:

It’s one of the mysteries that sleep scientists still ponder. Do dreams change as we age? If so, how and why?

Research suggests that they do, and experts say it’s probably because of changes that occur over the life span, including in jobs, relationships, trauma, even death. Dreams often reflect these changes in ways that can be disturbing as well as pleasant. They also can include old memories that the elderly relive while sleeping, such as dreaming you are back at an old job long after leaving it.....

As we age, the frequency of erotic dreams and sports dreams declines, said Michael Schredl, research director of the Sleep Laboratory at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. While students are more likely to dream about friends, the elderly more often dream about relatives, he said. Older people also have nightmares less often, he said. But dreams about people who have died increase.

Older people also report dreams of being lost in a strange environment, or of searching for their car in a foreign city, Schredl said. “And there are a substantial number of work-related dreams in retired persons, often negatively toned — being back in the old job — if the job was stressful.”

Well yes, I still have dreams about my former job relatively often.   

The comments following the article are interesting too:

As a retired English professor, I often dream about being in class and teaching a topic that I have not prepared. For years, I had dreams about having a thirty page research paper due, and it is the night before the due date, and I have not started writing. Fun stuff. 

And:

I retired at age 81. My dreams since retiring are so real that I have to remember upon awakening that it was a dream. I also dream of trying to get home from a downtown area without a way to get home. I was really wondering why my dreams of work were so real and if something was going wrong with my brain. Loved reading that it is common for retirees.

More:

I’m a 77 year old man. Certainly have way fewer erotic or even pleasant dreams. And, consistent with your article, my dreams consist mainly of work related (I’ve been retired quite awhile) and travel. I’m often lost,can’t find my car, missed trains and the like.  

And the answer to this seems to be "no":

Will the "Oh My GOD I forgot to attend class all year now I have a final and I will fail and never graduate" dreams ever end?

Never had them in college. Started after I graduated

A few people miss having flying dreams.  (I'm not alone in enjoying them, then):

At 84 sadly I never dream of flying ! I loved those dreams ! ....

I used to have flying dreams once in a while. Where are those dreams? They were great.

Weren't they! I'm the same age as you and flying used to be a recurring lovely dream that I too haven't had for over 20 years. I could levitate and soar through the air just by stretching my arms out and making gentle movements like one does treading water. People would watch in amazement, but it was so easy for me! 

 That sounds just like my flying dreams! I would soar about 10 or 15 feet above the ground ( never higher which is good as I am afraid of heights) and be moving slowly and gently, more like floating. But the sensation was so strongly felt in my body that when I awoke I would be thinking I really ought to be able to do this during the day. Loved those dreams and also haven’t had them for about a decade.

I haven't read of anyone who has had my recurrent "proof of flying" dreams - which I described way back in 2006.    Haven't had one of those for some time, though.

Feeling sorry for the subcontinent (again)

In India:

Temperatures in Delhi have hit a record high of 52.9C (127.2F), as authorities warned of water shortages in India’s capital.

A heatwave alert has been in place for large parts of India since last week, but on Wednesday the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said the temperature in the suburb of Mungeshpur had passed 50C for the first time in the city.

The temperature was more than 9C higher than expected, the IMD said, and came on the second day of record-breaking heat. On Tuesday a high of 49.9C was hit in Mungeshpur and Narela, breaking the 2002 record of 49.2C....

Many blame the soaring temperatures on scorching winds from Rajasthan state, where temperatures on Tuesday reached 50.5C.

At the SMS hospital in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, so many bodies of casualties of the heat have arrived at the mortuary that its capacity has been exceeded. Police in the city say many of the victims are poor labourers, who have no choice but to work outside, and homeless people.

(As I have said in previous years, it's always hard to believe that the death toll from heat in India during heatwaves is not higher than what is reported.)

Meanwhile, recently in Pakistan:

Temperatures rose above 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh, the highest reading of the summer and close to the country’s record high amid an ongoing heat wave, the met office said on Monday.  

Yes, as hellish as that sounds, the top temperature a few years ago was even worse:

The highest temperature recorded in Pakistan was in 2017 when temperatures rose to 54 C (129.2 F) in the city of Turbat, located in the Southwestern province of Balochistan. This was the second hottest in Asia and fourth highest in the world, said Sardar Sarfaraz, Chief Meteorologist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department

 

In which I get to gloat a bit about commercial failure

So, that Furiosa movie which I was happy to criticise sight unseen (honestly, the chances of my liking it after I panned Fury Road were so infinitesimally small they can be ignored)  has more-or-less already been declared a box office failure because of its opening weekend take.

Really, we shouldn't be surprised.   There are lots of signs that the public is, generally, pretty much over sequels:  see the increasingly bad take of Marvel movies, the worse than expected performance of the last Mission Impossible despite good reviews, and the really bad performance of the last Indiana Jones (although many poor reviews - based more on an unfair allegation that it was too "woke" - did likely affect it.)    Yet the high brow Oppenheimer and the lightweight, but at least novel, movie Barbie did spectacularly well.

What's more, as at least one "bro" reviewer (The Critical Drinker - who didn't mind Furiosa and loved Fury Road) remembered to note:  the fans seem to think that Fury Road was a much bigger commercial success than it really was.   As someone in Forbes writes:

At baseline, Mad Max: Fury Road is not some extremely massive blockbuster superhit. The film earned $380 million worldwide on a $150 million budget and even more in marketing. Solid, but nothing too insane.   

People also seem to forget how long ago Fury Road came out - 2015!    I do agree with most people that it is doesn't feel like it was 9 years ago, but maybe the Covid years have warped our sense of time.   I guess the Star Wars prequels show that you can still make money from a long gap in the series, but they are probably the exception more than the rule.

Anyhoo - if I were in control of Hollywood at the moment, I would be throwing money at anything that is novel in both story and vision, not based on comics, and is good for charismatic new actors under 30.   (There seems to be a significant gap in the acting market in that age range.)

And yeah, the "remake old stuff but with a powerful female lead instead of a male" as a concept has finished its run, too.   

I'm busy (and I have a new phone)

 I would have bought another Vivo if only they hadn't abandoned the Australian market, so instead I went with a Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro - a model that seems to have had reasonably good reviews.   I paid $629 (and an extra $70 for the fast charger - which is a tad annoying, since unboxing videos on Youtube show that in some countries, they include the charger in the box.)

This is the most expensive phone I have ever bought - I'm probably really in the "mid" range now (maybe "lower mid"?), rather than "upper budget". 

Of course, being Android, with a company overlay, it takes some getting used to learning how exactly the settings are named and hidden.   My initial impressions are that this phone does not like sticking permanently to options I tell it to use - but it is also quite likely that this is due to my lack of understanding the settings yet.   I said to someone that the trickiness of changing Android phones might be useful for helping stave off dementia - we should make the elderly swap Android phones every 12 months for this reason, as a public health measure.

Anyway, I like the screen, but it seems to keep giving me notifications on the lock screen that I don't find easily when I unlock the phone.  Odd.

This phone is also supposed to have an eSim option, but it's not obvious from the settings.  I will be annoyed if that is not really there.  More investigation needed.

So yeah, these initial comments are sounding pretty cautious - hopefully it's just teething issues. 

Update:  Am feeling pretty sure that there is in fact no eSim capability, despite the advertising on the JB Hi Fi website, and the specific enquiry about that when I was buying it.  Further discussion with the store is taking place.

Update 2:  Now, I'm not so sure.  Optus App says my phone is compatible to buy eSim here.  Yet in settings, there is no reference to eSim at all.   I almost feel forced to try buying a cheap eSim plan and try loading it to make sure it's real...

Update 3:  Well, that took another couple of hours of investigation and fiddling, and even then the answer was only found via a Reddit search!  To get the phone to show the "Use eSim" option in network settings, you have to change the region from Australia to another country - UK, Singapore, or Malaysia all work, but other countries are like Australia and don't show it at all.   (By which I mean - the slide button to "Use eSim" simply does not appear.  Change region, and it's there.)

I then could load a cheap local eSim for data service only (bought online for US$4.50), and it worked!  I don't know if I had to, but I switched the region back to Australia and it still worked.    This is secret knowledge that was not easy to track down.  Ordinary Google searches did not turn it up.

This is excellent:   I can now pre purchase an eSim and be ready to go without finding a sim card at the airport on arrival.  

The game-ification of violence [an old(er) man complaint]

There was very little chance that I would like any series based on a video game that begins with a warning of "strong blood and violence", but I gave the first episode of Fallout a go.   

I found it very un-engaging and dull:  as I said to my son (who didn't exactly give it a rave review, either) nothing about it feels real.   By which I meant:  "of course a story based on a post apocalyptic video game is not going to 'feel real' in a literal sense, but in the shallow way the characters feel drawn, the emphasis on visual effects, and the over-the-top violence and blood, its video game origins are far too obvious."

And the frequent ironic use of 50's music just played like a tiresome gimmick we've seen before that was trying too hard.   Hey, I've found a review that complains about it feeling shallow, too:

Startlingly glib, one-note, and yet self-assured in its vacant design, the series reveals its shallow hand very early. “Fallout” endlessly reprises the wholesome quaintness vs. the grotesque or freakishly ruthlessness mode of apposition and fails to do anything remotely interesting with it, reinforcing what swiftly becomes a long, tiresome pattern and slog....

...the game’s milieu was one of atompunk retrofuturism, juxtaposing 1950s post-war idealism—the naïve promise of space-age technology and nuclear war anxieties— against the framework of a ravaged and dangerous apocalypse. While “Fallout,” the series, presents the concepts and throwback aesthetics faithfully, that’s unfortunately all it’s got in its trivial toolkit. What it does with it beyond that devoted presentation is just banal, insipidly trying to make a big meal out of a thin idea that is barely sustainable nourishment. 

Finally, let me slip into my oft-repeated complaint:  the "game-ification" of, and desensitisation to, ultra violence that both modern movies and video games have brought is shameful and a bad thing for society.   (And my follow up for even-handedness - I know, past generations might have thought nothing of a day out to view a real execution, or of kids watching a cow or pig being slaughtered.   I don't think watching human executions is ever a sign of a good society, either.)    But the way we have gone from at least some adults thinking that young kids playing with toy guns was an unfortunate endorsement of violence, to now barely a parent being concerned that their 10 year old is splattering characters and watching them explode in a gallon of blood is, well, really something. 

Anyway, I think it likely that the really enthusiastic reviews will mainly come from people under 40 who have played the game.  As Rolling Stone wrote:

...like the soundtrack, there are pieces of so many other movies and shows — Apple’s Silo beat it to market by a year with its own (albeit more dramatic) portrait of post-apocalyptic underground life — that much of it plays as ripping off other material, even though the games have been around in various forms since the late Nineties. 

...even if Last of Us didn’t exist, Fallout would still feel like an arch and overly-familiar series, with enough interesting performances and background details to keep it from being a waste of time, but not enough spark of its own to be fully satisfying. Though maybe fans of the game will feel differently.

 

Turbulence worry

I'm pleased to see that the nearly all reporting on the terrible Singapore Airlines turbulence injury story has included reference to studies that said climate change has already increased turbulence and it will get worse.   I had wondered if this might be overlooked, but no:

Here's a Nature article about it. 

What a surprise - Republican shameful cowardice on full display

From the Washington Post, the predictable but still appalling retreat:

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who suspended her run for the Republican nomination for president in early March, announced she will vote for Donald Trump but reiterated that he should not assume that her supporters will back him.

“I will be voting for Trump. Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech,” Haley said Wednesday. “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does.”

From the comments that follow:

If the bootlickers had any sense they would realize that they could stop having to lick boots if they simply joined forces. But they don’t.

And:

Odd history I did not know

There's a lot of history about, so can I forgiven for not knowing this until it turned up in a Twitter thread recently?:

Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.

The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.

Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.

After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.

As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

That's from his New York Times obituary, and it goes on to note some controversy over his claims, and this is explained in lengthy detail at Wikipedia. 

The main reason I am inclined to post about it is because I didn't know the KKK was mocked in the Superman radio show.  According to this site's account, the show really was influential in the decline of the outfit:

The Superman writers created a thinly disguised version of the Ku Klux Klan for "The Clan of the Fiery Cross". A newly revived Klan had emerged in the aftermath of WWII and was making plans to expand recruitment into the Industrial Belt and the West. Folklorist Stetson Kennedy had infiltrated the Florida branch of the revised Klan to learn their secrets and became understandably frightened by what he had learned. Even more frightening, when Kennedy presented his discoveries to local authorities, the police were either frightened to move against the Klan or were already under Klan control. However, Kennedy was able to share his information with the Superman writers.

"The Clan of the Fiery Cross" story arc was developed and broadcast in June of 1946. The story begins with Jimmy Olsen managing the Unity House baseball club and excited over their prospects with new pitcher Tommy Lee whose family recently moved to the neighborhood. Naturally, this upsets the team's former pitcher, Chuck Riggs, who crowds the plate during batting practice and accidentally gets beaned. Riggs' uncle Matt, the Grand Scorpion of the Clan of the Fiery Cross, decides that Tommy Lee and his family are not "real Americans" (it is not revealed until the third episode that Lee's family are Chinese and his father was appointed to the city medical department over one of Riggs' friends).

Through most of the sixteen episodes of the "Fiery Cross" story arc, the Clan and its Grand Scorpion manage to stay one step ahead of the Man of Steel until they try to execute Jimmy Olsen and Daily Planet editor Perry White. Superman steps in with seconds to spare, but the Grand Scorpion escapes to confer with the Clan's national leader, the Grand Imperial Mogul. The Mogul berates the Grand Scorpion for actually believing the Clan's racist propaganda, stating that it was simply a device to get new members and that the Clan's hierarchy was taking a cut on the sale of robes. The real KKK found nothing amusing about the story arc and tried to start a boycott against the sponsor, Kellogg's PEP Cereal. By this point, the Klan had been made to look foolish, the boycott went nowhere, and Mutual reported an increase in Superman's ratings.

Interestingly, the Fiery Cross story arc kept the actual Ku Klux Klan thinly disguised, but the real damage to the Klan came in the fourteenth episode when Matt Riggs visits the national leader, The Grand Imperial Mogul of the Fiery Cross. The Mogul cannot believe that Riggs believes the hatred hokum the group uses to attract "the suckers". Had the Klan simply ignored Superman's accusations, the revelations of their ceremonies and codes probably would have dismissed or forgotten. Instead, the Klan began calling for a boycott against the program's sponsor, Kellogg's PEP Cereal. To Kellogg's credit, the folks in Battle Creek stood by the Man of Steel. The Klan's reputation and power depended upon their mystique. With their ceremonies and secrets revealed and made to look ridiculous, the Klan's mystique and power evaporated. Recruitment dried up in the months after "The Clan of the Fiery Cross". The Klan resurfaced briefly in the late 50's and early 60's, but they were recognized as being little more than a white supremacist terrorist group with little or no political power. The most important lesson of The Clan of the Fiery Cross is that the power of hate groups evaporates when the light is shone on them and their tactics. 

Yay for Superman, I guess...

Who put a curse on the Olympics?

The Tokyo Olympics should have been a fun time in what is now a wildly popular international tourist destination.  But instead, Covid meant it was an empty audience affair that was pretty much devoid of memorable highlights.

Now, Paris is getting close to its hosting role, and could the international climate possibly get any worse for the expectation of violent, possibly murderous, protest, especially given the city's high Muslim population?   The gendarmes heading into New Caledonia will probably end up killing a few Kanaks too, and I can imagine South Pacific Islanders wanting to protest colonialism.  I also wouldn't be entirely comfortable if I were a Russian competitor or supporter either - even though they are attending under a neutral flag. 

It all puts the case for locating the games permanently in Greece all the stronger.  Maybe Brisbane should offer to help fund a relocation of its Olympics to Athens, too.  Would save a lot of the hassle and indecision we're seeing here...

AI stuff, again

Here's an article suggesting that artificial superintelligences going rogue is what prevents civilisations ever spreading beyond their home planet:

 I believe the emergence of ASI could be such a filter. AI’s rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilization’s development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multi-planetary one.

This is where many civilizations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.

The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.

The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilizations before they ever get the chance to become multi-planetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilization, including the AI systems themselves.

In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years. That’s roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960) and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years.

Interesting bit of speculation.  

And here, at the New York Times, an article explaining that it seems we are getting a better understanding of how Large Language Models "think", which is a good thing if you want to be able to control them:

The team summarized its findings in a blog post called “Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model.”

The researchers looked inside one of Anthropic’s A.I. models — Claude 3 Sonnet, a version of the company’s Claude 3 language model — and used a technique known as “dictionary learning” to uncover patterns in how combinations of neurons, the mathematical units inside the A.I. model, were activated when Claude was prompted to talk about certain topics. They identified roughly 10 million of these patterns, which they call “features.”

They found that one feature, for example, was active whenever Claude was asked to talk about San Francisco. Other features were active whenever topics like immunology or specific scientific terms, such as the chemical element lithium, were mentioned. And some features were linked to more abstract concepts, like deception or gender bias.

They also found that manually turning certain features on or off could change how the A.I. system behaved, or could get the system to even break its own rules.

For example, they discovered that if they forced a feature linked to the concept of sycophancy to activate more strongly, Claude would respond with flowery, over-the-top praise for the user, including in situations where flattery was inappropriate.

Chris Olah, who led the Anthropic interpretability research team, said in an interview that these findings could allow A.I. companies to control their models more effectively.

Neat.  I mean, if Dr Smith managed to reprogram the Jupiter 2's robot so easily, LLM's should be equally susceptible to controlling manipulation! 

 

Maybe the last photo from the Vivo

The light coming in from the window yesterday morning was striking just this camillia flower in a vase on the dining table.  So, a photo was attempted, and I think it looks pretty nice:

The phone has stopped restarting long enough for me to post this. Good.

Oh!  Now that I recognise the pepper mill on the left, maybe re-cropping is in order.  Here we go...

Now it seems the vase is slightly crooked. A tiny straightening is called for...

Ok, still not happy.  I'm going to start again, and object erase out the pepper grinder, and straighten the vase.

That'll do.

Time for a new phone

Oh dear.  I had been thinking it was time for a phone upgrade, even though the almost completely unknown Vivo model I bought in 2020 was still showing great battery life and had been very reliable (as I said to my daughter only last week, prompting her warning "Don't say that - it will stop working now!").  Yes, it has today developed a troublesome major problem.    My daughter, the soothsayer.  (I did drop it on a hard floor recently - but I've done that before, so I don't know if there is any connection with its current problem.)

Sadly Vivo, a brand name which festoons many a shop in Singapore and Malaysia, has apparently abandoned the Australian market, and the only models to be found here seem to be the very cheap ones probably left over from bulk buys a couple of years ago.

In fact, I like the look of a new Vivo model (mid range - I am still unconvinced of the benefits of expensive models) just released in Asia. But short of buying it from an Ebay seller based in Malaysia, or another trip to Singapore, I am unable to get it here.

I am very unsure of what to buy in its place.  I am been tempted to go with Xiaomi - I like to keep with Chinese brands as I figure they will help me when forced to welcome My New Asia Overlords on the streets sometime in the next decade. "Look!" I will exclaim while waving my phone at them "I've been using your nation's phones for years!  And I have the CGTN app." 

But the mid range Google Pixels get very strong reviews.  They just look a little bland to me.   

I know Oppo is made by the same company that does Vivo, but when I see their screens in the stores, they just don't seem as good as on my lovely, apparently dying, Vivo.

I was pretty happy with my Motorola cheapo - in fact, I can't remember why I stopped using it.  I think it was just the battery?   Motorola has kept strong in the market and has a good range of phones now, but I'm just not sure how they are in the camera game, which really has become the important thing for me.

I've even considered going back to a Samsung mid ranger - quite a lot of people seem to like the A55 which is pretty new, but gee, you don't even get a charger in a Samsung box now.

I see that the Xiaomi Redmi phones have eSim - something I think will save a lot of fuss when travelling overseas.  That and a camera with a whopping 200MP sensor probably means it's a done deal.

We'll see....

 

Not an age thing: it's a Hollywood thing?

I finally caught up with the 2020 science fiction movie on Amazon "The Vast of Night" on the weekend.   As it got good reviews, and I'm generally a sucker for a decent UFO movie (not that there are that many around), I had reasonably high hopes.

Unfortunately, they weren't exactly met.   Sure, the film looks good and is technically accomplished (with its long tracking shots, primarily) and is very atmospheric in its 1950's remote small town America at night setting; but there are a couple of choices by the writer/director that are very odd and just jarring:

a.  the whole framing devise as if we are watching a remade Twilight Zone style show.  Why??  This made no sense to me.  I had the feeling it was going to be explained by the end in some meta context, but no.

b.  the pace of dialogue - I'm not sure who can most be blamed amongst modern directors for thinking it makes a film realistic if you have the characters always talking at (and often over) each other at a furious rate, but this film certainly has it to excess.   It just did not feel authentic to the way people you would expect small town Americans in that era to interact.  

On a more depressing note, this film did make me realise - gee, it seems a good few years now since I felt really blown away by a film - or even just "pleasantly surprised that this is so much better than I was expecting."   I mean, I've seen films which were OK, or enjoyable enough, or interesting in their way, but I would have to search to find the last one I just really thought blew me away and that I had no issues with.    

And this also made me think - weren't my parents, in their 50's and early 60's, similarly dismissive of films coming out at that time?   Am I just suffering the age related "films/music/culture generally? was/ were so much better back when I was younger" effect.

Somehow, I don't think it's a case of age related disappointment - there seems to be enough general unhappiness with the state of Hollywood to soothe my concerns.

But gee, it's hard to feel certain...

Sounds pretty appalling

Who would want to live there?:

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023....

Court records released in April showed that in the weeks leading up to the murder, Perry sent racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating outside his house. In a 76-page filing containing Perry’s private and public communications, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit”.

Abbott’s demand for a review of Perry’s case followed pressure from the far-right former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who on national television had urged the Republican governor to intervene after the former sergeant was convicted at trial in April 2022. While Carlson was still a top-rated host at the network, he dedicated a segment to directly challenging Abbott to appear on the show and discuss pardoning Perry – calling the case a “legal atrocity” that he blamed on progressive prosecutors. Abbott announced he was directing a review of Perry’s conviction the next day.

It would seem that the jury thought the guy was not acting in self defence, but the board of pardons just decided "we don't care what the jury thought":

Prosecutors argued at trial that Perry could have driven away without opening fire and witnesses testified that they never saw Foster raise his gun. The sergeant’s defense attorneys argued Foster, who was white, did raise the rifle and that Perry had no choice but to shoot. Perry, who is also white, did not take the witness stand and jurors deliberated for two days before finding him guilty.

More appalling Republican stuff:

 

 

Max leaves me cold (and puzzled)

I can't for the life of me understand the critical approval George Miller gets for movies set in a dystopian world with (as far as I know) no particular explanation as to how it got that way, characters for whom there is nothing to emotional invest in, and no real thematic coherence:  just an excuse for car chases combined with circus acts and a general heavy metal vibe.   I mean, if the only approval it got was from recreational drug taking revheads and heavy metal freaks, I could understand it - they might think it a kind of world they would enjoy living in.  But no, lots and lots of otherwise credible, mature age critics thought Fury Road was the bee's knees, including Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian, whose byline photo makes him look like the last person on Earth who would be caught owning a V8.

I mean, I don't "get" Tolkien either - but I can kind of see why some might take enjoyment from him.  I just put it down to "a difference in genre tastes".   But with Mad Max, I am at a complete loss as to understand why it doesn't have the smallest audience, and (perhaps more importantly) why more proper critics don't agree with me!

Anyway, that's by way of background to noting that (thank God) the new Mad Max film which is soon in cinemas is getting "not quite as good as Fury Road" reviews, but still reviews that are (no doubt) far too good.  (Again, see Peter Bradshaw).   

I hope it is a box office disappointment, but it will probably be me who is upset. 

Update:  I just went back and re-read my 2016 opinion of Fury Road.  It was even more savage than I remembered.:)

 

 

   

Just when you think you couldn't think any less of Scotty from Marketing

 Also - it seems like Trump's makeup was applied with a boot brush.

Update:  This is funny, but the reason why will be forgotten for the casual reader in 30 years time:

A depressing story

The underfunding of psychiatric care in virtually all Western countries seems just standard practice nowadays, but it's depressing to read about its effects in your own locality:

Three people have taken their own lives inside a locked mental health unit at The Prince Charles Hospital in the past 16 months, triggering an independent review.

Two other patients were able to severely self-harm inside the 60-bed unit during the same period, the last one being in April.

Families of the patients and unit staff have this week been advised of the review, which will begin later this month and is expected to be finished by late July.

Mental health support organisation SANE said families "have an expectation" that their loved ones were "going to be safe" when they were in hospital.

"Families and carers often express significant relief having gotten someone to hospital, that's often a very difficult thing to do to actually get someone admitted," chief executive Rachel Green said.

Further down, look at these figures:

Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed 18 people died by suicide in an acute psychiatric unit in 2020-21, up from 15 the year before. 

Adjunct Professor Hancock said the five incidents inside The Prince Charles Hospital mental health unit involved both men and women across different age ranges and under the care of different psychiatrists.

Incidents had occurred inside both wards of the mental health unit....

Professor Emmerson, a member of the Queensland Mental Health Commission advisory council, said the state was about 3000 mental health staff and 370 beds short of what was needed in the public sector.

"Our mental health units are full all the time," Professor Emmerson said.

"Psychiatrists are faced every day with having to make decisions of discharging people early who should be in hospital, but because you've got sicker people, and riskier people, sitting in the emergency department, we're forced to discharge people from hospital prematurely.

"We don't yet have the capacity in the community mental health teams to provide the follow up these people need."

 

This decade's high colonic, I guess

"High colonics" must have started as an American, middle-class-to-rich person's health fad in the late 1980's, I would say, given that it was well known enough to feature as a joke in Steve Martin's amusing 1991 movie LA Story.

You don't hear much about them anymore, and I see from this article in the New York Times that the new thing for the person with too much money is IV drip therapy.   (Maybe its been around for a while and it's just me who hasn't noticed.)   From the article:

IV drip therapy was first popularized about a decade ago as a novelty reserved for vacations and bachelorette parties, but it has since become embedded in the wellness sphere. The 30-to-45-minute treatments cost anywhere from $100 to $1,000, depending on the concoction and provider, and have been embraced by the Hollywood elite — Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen and Harry Styles have all partaken. Today, IV drip therapy is a staple at medical spas, resort hotels and strip malls. Some companies even make house calls.

And over the last several months, a handful of high-end residential buildings in Los Angeles, Miami and Manhattan began offering the treatments in house, allowing tenants to make them a core feature of their personal wellness routine.

At the Park, which started offering the service at the end of 2023, tenants can schedule an IV drip in their apartment or in a treatment room where they can also book massages, Botox or fillers.

“If you are a healthy person, you really can’t do it too often, unless you’re doing it three or four times a day,” said Danielle Remington, director of events and partnerships at Drip Hydration, the service provider for the Park.

Drip Hydration and other providers market their formulas as elixirs that can improve sleep and mental clarity, brighten your skin and boost your athletic performance. However, there is scant scientific research to bolster these claims. Critics argue that at best, IV drips are a wildly overpriced alternative to drinking a glass of water, and at worst, they could harm people with underlying health conditions like kidney disease or hypertension. In 2018, Kendall Jenner was hospitalized after a bad reaction to an IV drip. And last year, a woman died after receiving IV drip therapy at Luxe Med Spa in Wortham, Texas; its medical director’s license was later temporarily restricted by the state’s medical board.

Not good.

 

 

Oh my Gawd...

In The Guardian:

So Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames, and all his sins were washed away. Cheaper than a lawyer, I suppose

And Bear Grills, who I have also disliked for a long time, was part of the show.

As some paragraphs at the end explain:

Both are prone to emanating a certain sense that the rules that apply to lesser mortals are an affront to themselves. Discussing his financial affairs, Grylls once told an interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” Mm. Can’t help feeling he should toughen up a bit.

There’s not a whole lot less appealing than someone now worth an estimated £20m whining about paying his fair share like everyone else from nurses to teachers. That said, I’m a huge fan of people who talk about making extremely lucrative TV shows like it’s a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Appallingly, Bear’s only got an OBE. Where’s his George Cross for taking down Una from the Saturdays in the Central American jungle? 

Concluding with Brand, his spiritual journey has been what you might expect of a bog-standard sex-case-turned-wingnut. He was previously a Buddhist, then earlier this year began endorsing a Roman Catholic prayer app called Hallow, and seems to have settled for now on whichever branch of the Anglican faith permits telly survivalists to rebirth you. “Week one as a Christian has been amazing,” Brand said the other day, adding that he felt “changed, transitioned”. Onlookers are unlikely to spot the difference. He still has a conspiracist TV portal in which viewers are treated to material on the deep state/Bill Gates/the plandemic – in short, all the usual suspects of the usual suspects. It’s hard to know how long his conversion will last. But you can’t help thinking there will only be room for one messiah in that relationship – and unfortunately, it won’t be Jesus.

 

Feeling sorry for Noumea - and me!

Just when I was contemplating a possible trip to Noumea later this year, this news:

New Caledonia has announced a curfew from 6pm to 6am following overnight riots that saw vehicles torched and roads blocked in the South Pacific French territory, following proposed constitutional reforms.

In addition, the country's main airport, La Tontouta International, has been closed.

Protests and violence broke out ahead of a vote in the French National Assembly on changes to the New Caledonian constitution.

The French High Commission in New Caledonia said in a statement overnight on Monday that there had been further significant and ongoing disturbances in the capital, Noumea and surrounding townships.

It added that security forces had been mobilised.

All gatherings had been banned in the greater Noumea area, and a curfew and liquor ban had been put in place.

 The place has a personal significance, as it's where I met my wife...

Cass talks about the American situation

Interesting interview with that Hilary Cass about her report on transgender youth treatment in the UK, and comparing it to attitudes in the US.

(At one point she makes the obvious point that the aggressive political response by Republicans probably means you get the medical groups being overly defensive in reaction.)  

Continued polling panic

So, lots of people I follow on Twitter are feeling a bit panicky about the latest NYT poll which shows Trump winning in most of the six "key swing states".   

Here, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post looks at the figures more closely, and it does indicate some really odd dynamics currently playing out in US politics.  For example:

Particularly remarkable is how much better the Democratic brand does than Biden.

While Biden trails by six points in the six states combined, a generic Democratic Senate candidate leads by four points among likely voters — a 10-point gap, on the margins.

While Biden is close to tied among young and Hispanic voters, that Democratic Senate candidate leads among them by 19 and 16 points, respectively. That generic Democrat also leads by 59 points among Black voters, compared to Biden’s 40-point edge.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, the biggest gulf in performance between Biden and other Democrats is in Nevada, where Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) takes 28 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of young voters who are otherwise voting for Trump.

All of which suggests that many of these voters aren’t balking at Democrats — just Biden.

Overall, I would say the strength of Trump in Arizona doesn't make much sense - I had the impression that his permanently soft focus, chronic Trump suck up Kari Lake was floundering quite a lot.   

And it seems wildly strange that primary voting Republicans are still registering protest votes against Trump in pretty substantial numbers, yet this doesn't seem to show up in polls.

(I also find it hard to believe that Trump is gaining popularity from his court room appearances.  His recent rallies are playing as duds, too.)   

It's a very weird situation.   Given all of the factors (including reports of Republicans far behind in getting organised for the election), I still don't think the polling can be an accurate prediction of what will happen in November.

Update:  Sure, I agree that the nutty Left is very nutty at the moment - the ones who say they will punish Biden for not being tough on Israel by helping ensure a rabid pro-Israel supporter like Trump gets the job instead.   And this is bad optics for Biden.   But as many have been saying, it's not exactly like the same crisis as the anti-Vietnamese war era, and I doubt it will be as electorally important come November as it now seems.

 

On a technical note - oddities of Google Chromecast

I don't know how many people use these, as I only use one because my (now getting old) Samsung TV's operating system would not allow the app for one of the newer streaming services to be added, but I use a Google Chromecast dongle plugged into the TV.

So now I have the choice to watch Youtube either on the old app already on the Samsung (which works fine), or to watch it using the version of the app that came loaded already on the Chromecast.   I usually use the Chromecast version, as the Chromecast provides quick access to Netflix as well.

Within Youtube, I have two accounts - but I mainly use one. 

For some reason, on the weekend, videos watched through the usual account started playing in really low quality.   It was obvious, and I knew something was wrong.   

I initially suspected a very low internet speed, as on one recent check, it had been abnormally slow.   But the speed wasn't too bad (by Australia's low standards), so I checked for fault within the TV, and spent much time checking settings, rebooting it, etc.  Then I tried rebooting the Chromecast, checking its settings, and considered re-setting the app.   

I then realised that videos watched via the Samsung Youtube app (using the same account as on the Chromecast) worked fine.  And then I discovered that videos on my second Youtube account on the Chromecast app were normal resolution too.   Why would that be?   It was making little sense.

I finally discovered that within the main account, on the Chromecast Youtube app, if I went to the information screen for an individual video, I could check resolution, and found it was set as 720p.

Changing the resolution on just one video (from the access to settings within the video info screen) to 1080p changed it for all videos on the main Youtube account.

This is pretty odd - I have no idea how the resolution setting from that part of the app would have got changed to 720p - I never have normal cause to be looking at Youtube settings at all.

 And why such a settings change, if it arose spontaneously within the app, would affect only one account, and not the secondary account, I have no idea.

This may be a boring post, but it just serves as an example of weird things that can happen with Google apps, and take a long time to resolve.   (I Googled the issue asking in many different ways, but it was such an odd problem to explain to get useful suggestions.)     

Monday catch up

I've been very work busy lately.   Still am.

Here's a catch up of things that have caught my attention:

American infrastructure really does sound crap:

From the Washington Post, a description of the very decrepit sounding courthouse where Trump is being tried in Manhattan:

When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”

He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.

The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.

Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.

Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.

Jealous that I'm not in Tasmania:

More about Buddhist influence only Greeks and others

Remember how three four years ago I posted about my surprise that Buddhists had probably travelled as far West as Egypt well before the time of Christ, and how Greeks had seemingly had some interaction with them?  No?  Well, you just don't pay enough attention.

Anyhow, instead of reading, you can now view a video from the wonderful Religion for Breakfast pretty much on the same topic.  (Lots of people in the comments that follow say things like "yeah, this really is not common knowledge, and perhaps it should be."  So it's not just me.)

 

Climate change and extreme weather

It seems that every few days lately there is another extreme flood from some part of the world, as well as temperature records being broken.  (South East Asia has been dangerously hot for the last couple of months.)

It's kind of interesting how people who decided a decade or two ago that climate change was all an imaginary crock (not that they will admit it, but their implicit view is that it's a grand conspiracy theory by thousands of scientists) can look at the news and just think "meh, the weather hasn't been too exceptional outside my front door lately, so there's still nothing to it."

The old cranks at the remnants of Catallaxy blog will never change their mind - there's too much face to lose by admitting they picked the "crank" side of the debate long ago.  I wonder if Sinclair Davidson has recanted?   We don't hear much from him anywhere any more.

Jail and alternatives

Since I recently posted that we don't hear enough from criminologists, I should post here about the article that appeared a couple of days ago at the ABC:

There are fresh calls to put more domestic violence offenders in prison. But mounting evidence suggests that 'jailing is failing'

With articles like this, I tend not to have trouble with the analysis of the problem (broadly, how our current implementation of custodial punishment is not working well from a rehabilitation point of view), but have more concerns about the vagueness of how alternative programs could be expected to work on a large enough scale.   

To be fair, I don't have this attitude from an extensive reading on the topic - but it just seems an obvious problem that there seem to be so few successful example of programs that they can point to within Australia, and that overseas examples are often specific to those countries settings and may not be easily translatable to here.

For example, in this article:

In fact, alternatives to incarceration have been shown to be radically more effective at reducing reoffending rates. Instead of one-in-two going back to jail, a recidivism rate of as low as 13.6 per cent has been achieved in Spain by emphasising and supporting healthy lifestyle choices, connections with family and emotional development.

The Productivity Commission recommended Australia pursue policies like those in Norway by paying more attention to "the underlying causes of offending" to achieve "better long-term recidivism outcomes" and lowering the cost of crime to the community. Doing so, it said, "would move Australian prison systems towards a stronger emphasis on rehabilitation and have the potential for better long-term outcomes".

 OK, because I have trouble imagining that the social environment from which criminality arise in Norway translates at all well to that from which a large part of ours comes (indigenous population, often in rural and remote areas), let's look at the link to the Spanish story.

Hmmm.   It reads rather like strong self promotion by an organisation (Diagrama Foundation) that claims large success in Spain, but these are the groups they are largely helping there:

We work with some of the most disadvantaged children in society. In our centres we work
with boys and girls aged 14-23 3 , typically convicted for violent offences. They face a full range of challenges – disengagement from education, from different types of family background, and with a wide range of health, social and other challenges, including learning difficulties, substance misuse and mental health issues. Many of our centres include therapeutic units for those with significant mental health conditions and we also run specific centres solely for young people in the justice system who have mental health issues.

When our centres were first established, more than 85% of those we worked with came from Roma communities, marginalised by society. We continue to work with children and young people from diverse backgrounds across all our services. We run over 75 residential shelters for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as well as integration programmes to address the challenges faced by people socially excluded by race or religion. We also manage medical and educational programmes for vulnerable communities in Senegal and Kenya.

We are commissioned by 15 of the 17 counties in Spain to run either custodial or non-
secure facilities. Each region of Spain is different in terms of culture, language, climate and
geography. We run centres in the middle of cities, and in distant parts of the countryside. 

While I don't doubt that Roma communities are far from ideal for children being raised within them, I also find it hard to believe that the social background is anything much like the social dysfunction in the Northern Territory towns the report is looking at. 

Also - I'm a tad sceptical about the section of the report which says they achieve this in Spain with about half the staffing of current detention facilities in the NT.

And here's the thing - many of the facilities in Spain are in towns and cities, where it is surely going to be much, much easier to attract the type of worker you need in the very "hands on" rehabilitation centres, compared to trying to fill such jobs in places like Katherine or Alice Springs:

Social educators - Qualified to degree level and guided by the Technical Team, they support young people throughout every aspect of their day, from getting up in the morning to when they go to bed and including in classes, vocational training and leisure activities. They are at the heart of our approach and genuinely care about the young people they work with.

Technical Team - formed of qualified psychologists, social workers and reintegration workers (who support planning for release - housing, education, jobs), working alongside healthcare staff. They plan and deliver assessments, integrated case management, interventions and reintegration programmes.

Security staff – who act as a last resort in incident management. 

So yeah, I am far from convinced about how readily you can make that work here.   

Not that I know what the alternative is, really....

The brainworm candidate

Wow:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who has marketed himself to voters as a younger, healthier alternative to the two major contenders, contracted a parasitic worm that got into his brain years ago and ate a portion of it before dying, his campaign said Wednesday.

The 70-year-old scion of the powerful political family revealed in a 2012 deposition during divorce proceedings from his second wife, which the New York Times obtained and first reported Wednesday, that he had short- and long-term memory loss and described himself as having “cognitive problems, clearly.” Around the time of the discovery of the parasite, Kennedy was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning that he attributed to his diet, he said in the deposition, a condition that can also cause memory loss. Kennedy told the Times that he has since recovered from his fogginess.

Down at the bottom of the report, there's even more discussion of his far from stella health record:

Kennedy has previously disclosed other health issues. He has said his strained, sometimes hoarse voice is caused by spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the muscles of the voice box. He also has told others he became infected with hepatitis C, which was treated, from intravenous drug use in his youth.

In 2001, Kennedy was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat caused by a common heart abnormality that can cause strokes, according to news reports at the time. Kennedy said in the 2012 deposition he was hospitalized three other times for that condition, which he told the Times has not caused any other incidents in a decade.

Bryan Appleyard lives

While searching for something on this blog recently, I realised how often in its early days I used to link to articles by Bryan Appleyard.  (In fact, he turned up in comments once!)

I had last year searched around for more recent material from him, and found that his website had gone, and although I could see he had written another book in 2022, I thought he must not be very active anymore.

I don't know why, but I didn't look for him on Twitter, and now I see that he is there, posting infrequently, but providing links for pieces he writes in various places still, including the Spectator (which I only occasionally view now, due to the terrible quality of the Australian edition.   Yes, the UK version is still worth a look, but I just don't think to look often.)

Anyway, I see that he has some articles posted at a place I have never heard of before - Engelberg Ideas - including this recent one skeptical about Musk and his brain fiddling desires.   

In terms of books, a recent-ish one I did not know about is one he co-authored with James Lovelock shortly before he died.  From the Wiki description:

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence is a 2019 non-fiction book by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. It has been published by Penguin Books/Allen Lane in the UK,^[2] and republished by the MIT Press.^[3] The book was co-authored by journalist Bryan Appleyard.^[4] It predicts that a benevolent eco-friendly artificial superintelligence will someday become the dominant lifeform on the planet and argues humanity is on the brink of a new era: the Novacene.

This sounds worth a read!

I wonder if Bryan still Googles his name and might turn up here again.

If he does, I ask that he read at least this recent post.   And calls me brilliant, or something.   :)

 

Bluetooth for tooths

I'm a pretty late adopter of electric toothbrushes.   I started using one, the base Oral B model, maybe 3 or 4 years ago?, and that was only because my daughter didn't like using it at that time.  

That one's battery performance finally deteriorated enough to get a new one on the weekend, and I was surprised to learn that for only $99 I could buy an Oral B model with Bluetooth connectivity.  It apparently tells an app on your phone about how well you are brushing.

This seems faintly ridiculous to me.   (As indeed does that way Oral B seems to flood the market - which I assume it already dominates - with seemingly 12 different models, many with very small differences.  It's a bit like how some mobile phone companies operate.)  I don't want my brush reporting on me to my phone, or indeed, the head office.   

Anyway, I went with what's probably only one model up in sophistication from the very base model.  Now I not only have a 2 minute timer (which had stopped working on the old one), but every 30 seconds it stutters to tell me that I have spent enough time on that quadrant of my teeth, and I need to move onto the next quadrant.  I actually like the 30 second feature.

Electric toothbrushes do feel like they have given teeth a thorough clean, and I see that research into the comparison with manual teeth-brushing backs up the impression.  

I would prefer that the brush heads were cheaper, but can't have everything...

 

Boot on the university protests

Yet more Washington Post content for you:  I find it very hard to find any fault in Max Boot's criticism  of the  pro-Palestinian university protests.   I'll extract some parts:

In a 1988 academic journal, two scholars who studied the impact of the Vietnam-era protests concluded that “anti-war protesters were viewed negatively by the great majority of Middle Americans” and that “anti-war protesters probably increased support for the war.” Indeed, revulsion over campus unrest helped rally the “silent majority” behind President Richard M. Nixon and allowed him to keep the war in Vietnam going for four more futile years in a failed bid for “peace with honor.”

 So, too, today’s pro-Palestinian protesters are their own worst enemies; they have even been reenacting some of the excesses of the past, such as briefly occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall last week before police cleared them out. The students are not succeeding in forcing universities to divest from Israel, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have much impact on Israel’s economy.

Instead, the demonstrations are making an in-kind contribution to former president Donald Trump’s campaign by fostering an erroneous impression that the country is out of control and requires his authoritarian rule to restore “law and order.” The damage will only grow if demonstrators disrupt this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August as they did the one there in 1968.

I particularly liked this part, about the stupid "settler" rhetoric that we also see gushing from dubious academics in Australia who couldn't find anything useful to do apart from organising tiny conferences for themselves and writing the next application for funding from the ARC:

The protesters’ agenda does not end in the Middle East; indeed, the movement’s ideologues see Israel as merely an “imperial outpost in the Arab world,” even though Jews have lived in the area since antiquity. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto proclaims: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.”

Reading this politically correct claptrap, I was left with many questions, beginning with: What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was a name used by some indigenous groups for Central America and North America, but that only raises another question: Who do the students want to liberate “Turtle Island” from? Assuming that most of them aren’t Native Americans, aren’t they occupiers, too? Many of the other territories listed are just as puzzling — who, exactly, is occupying Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Haiti, Cuba or Korea (either North or South)? I can guess who is supposedly oppressing Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but I’m at a loss to say what this oppression consists of. Too much tourism?

Just as notable are the omissions — there is no call to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation, the Uyghurs from Chinese imperialism, Syria from Bashar al-Assad’s bloody reign or North Korea from Kim Jong Un’s Stalinist police state. This is not an objective list of global injustices; it is a grab bag of far-left grievances that includes trendy but vacuous calls for “creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization.”

An eye-catching headline, or two

You know, I prefer the Washington Post to the New York Times.   Here are a couple of eye-catching stories from the former, this morning:

 

Gift link here.   It does make me think better of this Pope, but there is no doubt that his Pontificate shows up all of the internal tensions of the Catholic Church that he somewhat clumsily tries to reconcile (or paper over); but I fear it is a doomed project, for any Pope.    

And on a somewhat amusing note, this article about a former US Navy Admiral who went to jail over a major corruption scandal reads like fodder for a Coen brothers movie:

Well worth the read.  (Gift linked.)

Update:  By the way, reading that article about the way the US Navy worked made me think that navies the world over seem to attract officers who are there for a good time, so to speak.

Based on my own military service, I always thought that navy officers I met were good humoured and the most relaxed to be around.  Army officers were the most likely to be very serious, very certain of their worth, full of bad management decisions, and often unpleasant company.  The air force, being dominated by pilots and those who support pilots, was more a haven for individuality and not being bothered with all the trad military stuff.   As such, many are not outgoing like navy officers tend to be, but it's a much more relaxed, and sensible, service than the Army.

At least one new thing

I don't post on weekends very often anymore.  Largely, that's because I don't have a decent desktop at home, and usually leave my laptop at work, and doing any significant amount of typing on a tablet isn't much fun.  I should probably buy a decent bluetooth keyboard for the Lenovo and see how that is for ease of tablet posting.  In fact, my wife has one, I think?  Further investigation is warranted.

What I have found lately is that, unless I have posted about something new or interesting, it doesn't feel as if I have had much in the way of new thoughts.  (And I don't like to go any length of time without feeling like I have some new thought.)  This becomes especially noticeable towards the end of a long weekend, like the one about to expire in about 30 minutes.  

I mean, I may have watched a large number of Youtube videos on various topics and surely learnt something new, read a thousand tweets, scanned some news stories, listened to some ABC podcasts, had a beer with friends, cooked a nice meal or two, and so on, but unless I get around to posting about any of that here, it doesn't feel they are adequately committed to memory or as appreciated as they should be.

Is that a downside, perhaps, of writing a blog that's pretty much an open diary for 19 years?  Maybe.

There's also the way the constant flow of new snippets of information in front of your face makes it very hard to concentrate on one topic in a way that used to come with starting a book - and finishing it.  Yes, damn you, internet for being both wonderful and concentration eroding at the same time.

Anyhow, this is a long winded way of saying that it seems I had a pleasant enough, relatively uneventful weekend, but it feels as if something is missing.  

Alright, I will post one Youtube video consumed this weekend which had a not particularly promising title but, after the first 5 minutes or so of covering old ground I certainly was aware of before, did indeed teach me something about cosmology that I hadn't realised before.  (It's to do with the size of the universe.)   That's worth committing to searchable memory.   Here it is:

Kids and their past lives

An article in the Washington Post takes a pretty open minded attitude to the stories of children who, at a young age, seem to recall a past life.

And look - 3000 comments follow it!   People are very interested in the topic, and it seems many people have a story to tell about how their young child spooked them for a time.

When public health campaigns were not de-railed by ratbags...

It's one hundred years since one of the most successful public health campaigns, ever, started:

On May 1, 1924, the first iodized salt appeared on shelves, quickly solving an iodine deficiency crisis that plagued the northern U.S. “goiter belt.”

In the early 20th century, iodine deficiency was ravaging much of the northern United States. The region was widely known as the “goiter belt,” for the goiters — heavily swollen thyroid glands — that bulged from many residents’ necks.

The issue was more than cosmetic: Iodine deficiency during pregnancy and lactation often led to children with severely diminished IQ and other permanent neurological impairments.

And Michigan was at the epicenter of the crisis.

The soil there didn’t have much iodine. Nor did the freshwater Great Lakes. And so the inhabitants didn’t have much iodine, either.

The prevalence of iodine deficiency in the state became strikingly apparent after the outbreak of World War I. Simon Levin, the medical examiner for the draft board in Michigan’s Houghton County, observed that more than 30 percent of registrants had a demonstrably enlarged thyroid, which could disqualify them from military service. In fact, it was the leading cause of medical disqualification in northern Michigan.....

 These developments came to the attention of David M. Cowie, the first professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. Having studied in Germany, he was familiar with the Swiss practice of adding iodine to table salt.

At a 1922 symposium held by the Michigan State Medical Society, Cowie recommended the iodization of salt, a near-ubiquitous food product that would quickly reach a large percentage of the population. 

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So the Michigan State Medical Society launched an initiative to educate locals on the need for iodine. Cowie, along with colleagues from the University of Michigan and state health department workers, began delivering iodine lectures across the state. Many thousands of receptive listeners came, at a time when the American public was beginning to show an interest in vitamins, minerals and other aspects of nutrition.

Cowie also presented the case for iodization to the Michigan Salt Producers Association. The salt producers, seeing the potential for profits from the new product — and perhaps wanting to do a public service — were easy converts. They agreed to iodize salt for animal consumption as well, as many Michigan farm animals were contending with their own goiters.

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Customers still had a choice to buy iodized or noniodized salt, but increasingly they were going for the iodine. Within a decade, iodized salt accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Michigan’s salt sales. And the results were undeniable: A 1935 survey found that incidence of enlarged thyroids had decreased in the state by as much as 90 percent.