Recently, Noah Smith a couple of other mostly sensible people on Twitter noted that Richard Hanania seemed to be making some reasonable posts on the current state of politics. (He has made so many bad or peculiar posts on all sorts of things I had to stop following him, it was too much.)
Today, I see we are well and truly back to "very peculiar":
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I'm not at all sure that it is worth spending 5 minutes on this topic, but the mystery around what exactly was going on in the heads of both (shall we say) "low quality" breakdancer "Raygun", and the collective heads of those who selected her, seems very deep.
I even saw a tweet by old blogger Mark Bahnisch criticising her from the Left (although it seems most of her defenders have been on that side):
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Further down he even said this:
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Anyway, it may well mean no breakdancing next Olympics, and I'm not going to shed a tear over that.
Trump falsely accuses Harris campaign of fabricated AI crowd photos
I mean, everything points to Putin, Xi and Kim just needing to say "we really think you're doing a great job as President, Donald - the best President there's ever been. As for that question about whether we did X, no of course not. We wouldn't lie to you." And Trump would go out and announce to the press that there's no way they did it, regardless of the evidence his own officials are waving in front of his face.
Update: the other story that should be being pressed harder in the media is Trump's helicopter story. It is looking very, very likely to be either a deliberation fabrication, or a result of a completely muddled memory. (The key element and reason for telling it, that Willie Brown told him some terrible things about Kamala Harris, looks especially invented.)
We all know how the press would treat it if it had been Biden telling it.
I don't know the politics of James O'Brien - never heard of him before, to be honest - but the takedown in a calm manner of someone who rang him to defend "Tommy Robinson's" role in starting riots in England on the basis of a lie is something pretty awesome to listen to. (Also pretty rare that the caller would keep his cool and keep on the line while he continously loses credibility in his initial position:
Of course, all I know about him is what I have learnt in about 12 hours, but he certainly presents as a likeable "regular guy", with good experience in life and politics.
Not weird at all.
When I hear of someone being taken by a crocodile in North Australia, my initial reaction is usually to think they were probably doing something dangeroous that they shouldn't have been doing. Going for a swim in a dangerous spot, fishing close to the murky water's edge - something like that.
But the latest victim - wow, I feel for his wife - and it's like it's out of a movie:
Police say Newcastle man and GP David Hogbin, 40, was with family members when he fell into the Annan River near Cooktown and failed to resurface on Saturday.
A police spokesperson said it was understood Mr Hogbin was not fishing at the time of his disappearance.
Friend Alex Ward, who started a GoFundMe fundraiser for the family, wrote that the family was walking on an "established path" on the riverbank when it gave way under Dr Hobkin.
He said his wife Jane heard the splash and tried to help him out.
"Due to the steepness and slipperiness of the bank Jane was able to grab his arm but began slipping into the river herself," the post reads.
"Dave's final, decisive act was to let go of Jane's arm when he realised she was slipping in, an act that likely saved her life."
It was then he was taken by the crocodile.
"One small consolation is that none of Dave's children witnessed this event," the post reads.
Even apart from the weird original story - what the hell is he doing talking to Roseanne Barr on the video??
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, confessed on Sunday that he had left a dead bear cub in Central Park in Manhattan in 2014 because he thought it would be “amusing.”
Mr. Kennedy posted a video detailing the bizarre story on social media apparently ahead of an article in The New Yorker.
“Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” he said, tagging the magazine.
In the video, Mr. Kennedy appears to be seated in a kitchen as he casually tells the actress Roseanne Barr about the ordeal. He says that he was driving through the Hudson Valley when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.
Full story from the NY Times here (gift linked.)
Update:
I have always liked this noodle/soup bowl, which I am sure was purchased after I was married, and while my wife may remember where we bought it, I have forgotten. Must ask her. (It wasn't expensive, but I just like these sort of colours and patterns on bowls and plates. I did post before about how much I like Peranakan examples.)
I took this photo for no particular reason yesterday, then Youtube came up with this interesting story about China recovering nice ceramics, many with a not dissimilar look, from a 500 year old shipwreck. I had the feeling that China's interest in this (and the reference to where the wreck was found) has a subtle tie in with their ridiculous expansionist claims of territorial rights in the ocean, but I was still impressed with the quality of some of the ceramic pieces. Here's the video:
This is a surprise: I went to Quadrant on the off chance of finding some laughable fanboying of Donald Trump, and instead found something well written and not cringeworthy - an obituary for Alexander Waugh: grandson of Evelyn, son of Auberon. He recently died at the age of 60 (prostate cancer - ugh), and as the article notes:
Alexander’s death on July 22 sadly mirrors the early demise of Evelyn at 62, and Auberon at 61.It's written by Mark McGinness, a name which sounds a bit familiar but maybe I'm imagining it. It reads like it was for a better publication than Quadrant, but there is no attribution, so I don't know.
Anyway, eccentricity and writing talent seems to have been in his genes, if not longevity. It's an interesting read.
Nearly a year ago, I posted about how I was very impressed with the AI tool Perplexity - and since then I have seen it increasingly mentioned on line as what a lot of people use instead of, or combined with, Google for searching the internet now.
(There was an interesting thread on Twitter yesterday started by Noah Smith about how the internet has become a lot worse for finding certain information - he blamed it on people and institutions now not putting stuff up on simple web pages like they used to. Many people agreed, complaining about how bad Google search has become, and how you sometimes find an answer faster by searching Youtube or Reddit. But of the AI search tools that got mentioned most often, I think Perplexity was the top one.)
I have used Perplexity at work a few times recently, and yes, the results were startlingly good and accurate. I also used it on (what I thought) a rather obscure matter local to Brisbane and someone I know who lives here, and the detailed answer was, once again, just great.
Once again, therefore, I recommend it to any reader. I usually use just the "quick" search but there is a "pro" search available that I haven't tried. There are limits on the number of pro searches you can make in a day, but you can subscribe (not so cheap - about $34 a month) to get a lot more Pro searches per day.
I have told both of my university educated kids about it, and neither had heard of it. Yeah, the ageing Dad felt boastful about knowing something new and valuable in the online world that they didn't.
Good to see that Krugman is still a complete cryptocurrency skeptic, but he admits being surprised at the fact it is still a thing.
I really hope that the rumours I have seen sometimes on Twitter are not true: that someone acting on behalf of Harris have been making approaches to crypto world to try to convince them that Democrats can support their vapourware idea just as Republicans can.
After the pathetic performance at that black journalist forum, and an increasing number of polls showing Harris already beating him in some of the key swing states, the cherry on top is his best mate Putin deciding to do a deal with the supposedly lame duck Biden (that makes Biden look good).
It's impossible for Trump not to be furious about that.
At this point, although it may be tempting fate to say so, I remind readers that I have always said Trump would not win re-election.
I must have grumbled here before about the constant stream of complaint about the high rate of indigenous child family removal by child safety authorities - largely because I find it incredibly hard to believe that Australian social workers, being for decades now the career choice for the Lefty-ist of progressives on any university campus, aren't highly sensitive to the racial issues when they reluctantly remove a child.
Therefore, I was interested in this story on 730 this week, which showed an apparent success story in a modest sized indigenous run support service in Sydney that has helped kids stay in their troubled homes, while their parent/s got their act together (apparently):
It was obviously slanted to show this as a "way forward" - basically an argument for higher funding for such services.
But, my skeptical take on it came up with these thoughts while watching it:
* this looks like such a time intensive way of helping the families, the cost must be enormous. I mean, were they actually qualified social workers making the visits to the house to do such mundane things as checking the parent is doing the washing, knows how to cook a decent meal, and has a timetable on the wall so as to remember when the kids have to go to school? I think so, but it wasn't made 100% clear. I mean, I have no doubt that some people with long standing addiction issues may need a lot of help working out how to do things the average non-drug addled person manages to work out for themselves, but the cost of such one-on-one support must be high.
* The charity/support featured seemed to have several staff, but was obviously located in suburban Sydney. (Indeed, the residence of the mother who was being assisted by them looked pretty comfortable and well appointed, especially if it was social housing - which I presume it probably was?) OK, so finding the (apparently) aboriginal background people of suitable qualification to work with "at risk" families is one thing in Sydney - but how many child removals are from regional parts of the country, and how hard is it to get workers to live there and supply the same kind of support these women provided? My guess - extremely hard indeed. In other words, I would not be surprised if the high rate of indigenous child removal is to a large extent explained by the practical impossibility of getting enough people to work in this field in the regions with the highest rate of problems. If that is true, what else can be done but take the children out of the home?
* Finally - how to put this without sounding like a Bolt-lite? - the clear change in the approach to indigenous activism in the last 20 or 30 years to a more radical and grievance based approach is one with some dubious consequences for encouraging personal responsibility. I don't doubt that bad treatment of some indigenous can have had generational effects - but I'm also pretty sure that well intended social workers who continually endorse the attitude that all problems are rooted in racist or unfair treatment of the past are not sending the best message to some of their clients.
Last month, I posted about the depressing fact that no one seemed to have any good ideas regarding the future governance of Gaza - just a bleak picture of a hopeless place gradually being re-built while its youth will still be taught that the ultimate violent triumph over Israel is just around the corner, despite the lessons of history.
I see that my pessimistic musings are pretty much confirmed in this article in Foreign Affairs headed "Can anyone govern Gaza" that pretty much comes up with the answer "nope". But it does think there is one (slightly?) least worst option:
All options for Gaza’s future are bad, but to prevent outright chaos, it is worth focusing sharply on the least bad scenario—the return of the PA to Gaza. It is a more plausible solution than imposing a government controlled by an international trustee or by unaffiliated Palestinians and a less disastrous option than a failed state or the return to Hamas rule, whether outright or covert. Although the PA is unpopular among Palestinians, they prefer a PA-run Gaza to a direct occupation by Israel. In the long term, it might also be preferable to Israelis—after all, there is a reason Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
The United States can do much more to ensure the PA beats the odds and governs Gaza. To help the PA, Washington must provide more training and aid. The Department of Defense and intelligence agencies should also step up efforts to train and equip the PA’s security forces to fight insurgencies. Yet technical training is only the first step. The bigger problem, as the United States learned the hard way in Afghanistan, is that security forces must have a government that inspires confidence. Right now, the PA is not worth fighting for. The PA will need to help itself by changing its leadership. Abbas is too old, inept, and unpopular to run Gaza, or even to continue running the West Bank. The United States should coordinate with international and Arab donors to the PA to identify younger, more qualified Palestinians to play leadership roles. Donors should restrict some aid if Abbas resists change and increase it if new leadership is brought in.
To further add to the depressing endless cycle of no end to the problem, I see from a 2007 post about the civil war-ish situation in Gaza at that time, I quoted this from Slate:
It's no wonder that everyone involved in this issue is now madly seeking "new ideas." A state in the West Bank only, leaving Gaza to its fate? (Would that state be viable, and who would take care of Gaza?) A three-state solution? (Why give Hamas a base from which it could cause trouble?) A return to the Jordanian-Egyptian solution? (Let them deal with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. There's one problem: They aren't interested.) An international force? (Hamas promised to treat such a force as an "occupying power." Any volunteers?) Start talking to Hamas? (This won't solve the internal Palestinian problems.) Keep fighting for Gaza? (Fatah seems to be losing its appetite for conflict, and, even with the support it has received from the West, doesn't have enough muscle to stay in the fight.)
In an effort to try to end on less than a completely depressing note, someone in this lengthy article from October last year (Arab Perspectives on the Middle East Crisis) writes:
The history of the region has taught us that, out of crises of this magnitude, political breakthroughs can be achieved. The 1973 October War led to peace between Egypt and Israel. The first intifada, followed by the first Gulf War, led to the Madrid peace conference.
But then follows that with this:
But this time, the situation is different. The international community is faced with a radical Israeli government that is not interested in any compromise, an ineffective Palestinian leadership that has been further weakened by the current events, and a U.S. administration that is preoccupied with presidential elections next year.
The stars are not aligned for a political initiative. Such an initiative needs the willingness of both parties to seriously engage, as well as the leadership of a U.S. administration that has so far been disinterested. Yet the longer the world continues to focus only on the here and now, the more it has to deal with casualties on both sides.
Great...
Remember, I like universities and don't have any issue with them being attractive to overseas students. But they will harm their reputation if they don't get on top of the serious problem of passing students who effectively cheat by use of AI or other assistance.
This is from the second part of a series in The Guardian:
Guardian Australia spoke to multiple academics and students, who described wholesale use of genAI going largely unchecked at many institutions.
A humanities tutor at a leading sandstone university said she was “distressed” to find more than half of her students were flagged to have used AI in their first assignment for all or part of their work this year – a “huge increase” on 2023.
She believed the real number was much higher. But any repercussions were minimal.
“We’re not holding students to a standard,” she said. “It’s not fair on anyone who thinks a degree is worthwhile – a lot are not at the moment. It’s just proof they’ve been paid for.”
She has worked at a number of universities over three decades and said she had seen a “huge dependence” on the international market in recent years, so much so that tutors felt under pressure to pass students in order to keep the revenue coming.
“Nobody is blind to it,” she said. “It’s not a social or educational environment; it’s a box-checking exercise. A master’s degree is not worth what a bachelor’s used to be.”
Up to 80% of her courses were composed of full fee-paying overseas students, she said. Many struggled with English language skills in classes and meetings yet produced perfectly written essays.
It certainly sounds like it causing a lot of consternation amongst staff:
Academics told Guardian Australia they often felt unsupported or discouraged when they spoke up about alleged cheating.
A science tutor at a sandstone university alleged they faced repercussions last year when raising concerns over papers during the first wave of AI.
“There was a near mutiny among the teaching staff when we were told that we had to mark [apparently] bot-written papers as if they had been written by students,” they said.
I almost lost my job raising our common concerns about this to the subject coordinators. About one-fifth of the papers were plagiarised that year. I don’t think many people, if any, got seriously disciplined in the end.
“Far from discouraging AI use, they’re doubling down.”
“Our current directives are not to report them without a smoking gun,” they said.
I mean, if it was the Daily Mail, I would have more doubts, but when it's The Guardian deciding to run a series on this issue:
Australian universities accused of awarding degrees to students with no grasp of ‘basic’ English
I do pay attention.
Mind you, I also don't have any doubt that Universities can harbour right wingers on staff who may well exaggerate this problem. (I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if UQ's pro-Trumper James Allen was one of the anonymous academics for the article. But then again, he's in the law school, and I expect that not too many non English speaking overseas students pick that as their subject.)
I think all of us suspect that there are cases of overseas students unfairly sailing through to a degree with very little useful english by relying on the myriad ways that technology (and capitalism) can help. But the question is how often it happens and how seriously the universities treat the issue.
The guy has always seemed basically likeable, but how I wish more people would be as blunt as this about crypto:
An article like this probably gets published every modern Olympics, but this version had a couple of details I don't recall reading before:
...competing in the games could be dangerous.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 50 BC-c. 40 AD) describes how a father lost both sons in the “pancration”, a type of combat sport that was a violent mixture of boxing and wrestling:
A man trained his two sons as pancratists, and presented them to compete at the Olympic games. They were paired off to fight each other. The youths were both killed together and had divine honours decreed to them.
Gee - I wonder if the father ever got over that, or if he was satisfied with the "divine honours".
Also, venue facilities were not great for a long time:
As the contest was held in the middle of summer, it was usually extremely hot. According to Claudius Aelian, some people thought watching the Olympics under “the baking heat of the sun” was a “much more severe penalty” than having to do manual labour such as grinding grain.
The site at Olympia also had problems with freshwater supply. According to the writer Lucian of Samosata (2nd century AD), visitors to the games sometimes died of thirst. This problem was fixed when Herodes Atticus built an aqueduct to the site in the middle of the 2nd century AD.
And I didn't know "the famous story" about Plato attending:
There is a famous story about what happened when the philosopher Plato (428/427-348/347 BC) stayed at Olympia for the games.
Plato lived there with others who did not realise he was the celebrated philosopher and he made a good impression on them, as the Roman writer Claudius Aelian (2nd/3rd century AD) recalled:
The strangers were delighted by their chance encounter […] he had behaved towards them with modesty and simplicity and had proved himself able to win the confidence of anyone in his company.
Later on, Plato invited his new friends to Athens and they were amazed to find out he was in fact the famous philosopher who was the student of Socrates.
It’s unclear how many people actually visited the ancient games each time they were held, although some modern scholars think the number could have been as high as 50,000 in some years.
Of course, there is also the minor point that it was a (nearly) all male audience watching male athletes compete in the nude, which I mainly find amusing by imagining how MAGA would deal with that scenario today.
These two Canadian doctors (both orthopaedic surgeons, but they get guest specialists on to talk about other subjects) are easily the most likeable and reasonable sounding doctors who pump out content on Youtube. Yet they have less than a million followers. 😕 They deserve more.
Anyway, I learnt a lot about "holes in the heart" by watching their last video. I just didn't know any of this, which makes me feel a bit dumb:
If my experience of using Twitter is any guide, there's no doubt that Musk uses it to push unwanted Right wing, and Republican, views on the "For You" side. That's how I know how so many Republican politicians, for example, freaked out about the Olympic opening ceremony, with the (admittedly oddball) queer Last Supper set up, featuring a near naked blue Smurf-y guy singing - something. (I see now that he was meant to be Dionysus. Huh.)
And then lots of American Evangelical types called the robot horse "Satanical", "straight out of Revelations", and how it was all out war on Christianity, etc etc.
Even Musk himself decided to join the chorus - yes, the guy whose personal life is about as Christian as Donald Trump's.
I think it's all a storm in a teacup. Sure, it perhaps stands as a warning to giving the top creative job of such an event to someone evangelically gay (so to speak) - but the bigger lesson to take from it is how dangerous the American Christian Right is, with their spurious religious claims and desire to force it on everyone.
Update: I see that the artist director (and others) have said it was inspired by another painting showing a Feast of Dionysus. But the halo like thing around the central figure seems to counter that. I think they were probably trying to have it both ways. In any case, it didn't seem particularly French (even the Smurfs, if that was the look the singer was going for, were Belgian, not French), or Olympian.
But as Adam said:
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I'm getting the impression that there are people on both sides of politics who want to put the boot into Paris and its Olympics: on the nutty Right, they think the city is full of dangerous Leftism, multiculturalism, Muslims and snooty cultural superiority, so they are lapping up (and sometimes inventing) stories of crimes and organisational failure on Twitter.
On the nutty Left, I haven't actually got evidence of this on Twitter, but if there was to be some outbreak of anti-Israel protest (even involving moderate levels of violence), they would almost certainly think it was warranted. (I'm not suggesting they want it to be a repeat of Munich 1972, but I still bet they would welcome some form of disruption for the cause.)
But the French military and police are out in force, and for a country that has had the unfortunate insult of "cheese eating surrender monkeys", I think everyone knows the men (and occasional woman) in the security services always look very serious and capable. I really would not want to be a visitor who thinks they can make a "joke" threat in front of them.
Finally, I don't yet know where the Olympic flame is set up for the games, but if they get too tricky with the way it is to be lit (I'm thinking of the famous blazing arrow of Barcelona), wouldn't be it funny if they accidentally torch Notre Dame again? :)
A federal judge in Florida threw out a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit, ruling that the site, which is known for spreading conspiracy theories, sought bankruptcy protection in “bad faith” to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site’s reporting on the 2020 election.
The Thursday ruling from U.S. bankruptcy judge Mindy Mora in the Southern District of Florida means that defamation cases from two Georgia election workers, as well as one from a former Dominion Voting Systems executive, can proceed. The defamation cases had been held up while the bankruptcy case was ongoing.
Excellent - there is no way in the world that those two Georgia election workers are going to lose against him. The most appalling thing is that in the US they have to spend years in litigation to get justice for the most blatant and dangerous lies.
* In a case of "it's about time", the NY Times reports:
Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California state officials on Thursday to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, the nation’s most sweeping response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.
More than in any other state, homeless encampments have been a wrenching issue in California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, complicating the many other factors that contribute to homelessness. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, and most of them were unsheltered. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, called on state officials and local leaders to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces” and act “with urgency,” prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.
This is an important move for changing the perception of Democrats being paralysed by good intentions that lead to bad outcomes for everyone.
* And, of course, there is the substantial poll improvement for Harris. I hope she appoints the astronaut over the smart gay guy as her running mate - it will make the ticket look more balanced.
I'm getting to the age where dementia protection news grabs my attention. From The Guardian:
Researchers have raised hopes for delaying dementia after finding that a recently approved shingles vaccine was linked to a substantial reduction in diagnoses of the condition in the six years after receiving the shot.
The discovery, based on US medical records, suggests that beyond the health benefits of preventing shingles, a painful and sometimes serious condition in elderly people, the vaccine may also delay the onset of dementia, the UK’s leading cause of death.
Dr Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford, the first author on the study, said the results supported the idea that shingles vaccination may prevent dementia. “If validated in clinical trials, these findings could have significant implications for older adults, health services, and public health.”
Shingles is caused by the herpes zoster virus and can flare up in people who have previously had chickenpox. When a shingles vaccine, Zostavax, was first rolled out in 2006, a number of studies found hints that the risk of dementia seemed to be lower in those who got the shots.
The development of a new and more effective shingles vaccine, Shingrix, led to a rapid switch in the US in October 2017, meaning those who were vaccinated before that date received Zostavax, while those vaccinated after tended to have Shingrix.
The Oxford team studied the health records of more than 200,000 US citizens vaccinated for shingles, about half of whom received the new vaccine. Over the next six years, the risk of dementia was 17% lower in those who received Shingrix compared with Zostavax.
For those who went on to develop dementia, that amounts to an extra 164 days, or nearly six months, lived without the condition. The effect was stronger in women, at 22%, than in men at 13%.
Many years ago, I got a very mild case of shingles on my back. So I was always planning on the getting the vaccine anyway.
I've been waking up and remembering bits of a lot of dreams lately, and some have been very strange.
As I've said before, a little reflection usually turns up what I have read, seen or heard in recent days that would have inspired the content, but this morning I was having trouble working out why last night's dream featured me as a different person who bought a cooked human brain and was eating it (!) (I really did not care for the texture or taste, and was wondering why I was even doing it. It was also my brother's brain, which I thought was good because it probably reduced the risk of getting a prion disease from eating a random one. Cooked brains were, by the way, commercially available in the dream - I wasn't boiling it at home).
Other snippets of dream I could identify - going to an odd opera (I had been listening to an opera director on Radio National the other day), and being in a Singaporean grocery store (no mystery at all - I watch a lot of Singaporean content on Youtube.) But eating a brain??
Then it came to me this afternoon - it's almost certainly because of Donald Trump's ridiculous recent referrals to Hannibal Lector, and every time he does it, it turns up on Twitter.
So there - I don't need to worry that my true core identity has always been as a cannibal, and it's only surfacing now in later life. It's just Trump eating my mind....
Over at NPR, there's a discussion of a new book by Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World. Sounds interesting:
Autocracy, Inc., is not a club. There are no meetings like SPECTRE in a James Bond movie, where villains give progress reports on their kleptocratic gains and attacks on democracy. Instead, Applebaum writes, it is a very loosely knit mix of regimes, ranging from theocracies to monarchies, that operate more like companies. What unites these dictators isn’t an ideology, but something simpler and more prosaic: a laser-focus on preserving their wealth, repressing their people and maintaining power at all costs.
These regimes can help each other in ways large and small, Applebaum writes.
Countries such as Zimbabwe, Belarus and Cuba voted in favor of Russia’s annexation of Crimea at the United Nations in 2014. Russia gave loans to Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, while Venezuelan police use Chinese-made water cannons, tear gas and surveillance equipment to attack and track street protesters.
Of course, U.S. companies have also supplied authoritarian regimes. When covering the crushing of the democracy movement in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, I rummaged through bins of empty rubber bullet canisters made by a company in Pennsylvania.
More recently and more alarming, though, have been China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s June visit to North Korea, which the U.S. accuses of supplying weapons to Russia.
But Autocracy Inc., uses more than conventional arms to attack democracies. In order to retain power and build more wealth, autocrats also undermine the idea of democracy as a viable choice for their own people. Fearful of its former Soviet republics drifting further West – see Ukraine – Russia and its three main TV channels broadcast negative news about Europe an average of 18 times a day during one three-year stretch.
China extends its message through local media and helps other dictatorships. After satellite networks dropped Russia Today – RT – following the invasion of Ukraine, China’s StarTimes satellite picked up RT and put it back into African households, where it could spread Moscow’s anti-Western, anti-LGBTQ message, which resonates in many African nations.
The goal is not to persuade people that autocracy is the answer, but to encourage cynicism about the alternative. Applebaum says the message is this: You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided and dying.
And of course, we know which side of politics is responding to this message - the reactionary MAGA Right and its admirers in other Western nations, because they often like the social conservatism of most autocracies when it comes to gay and other identity politics. "Yeah sure, Putin may poison his critics and potential political rivals, but he does hate the gays and calls them pedophiles, so that's good enough me."
...I'm pretty sure that if even a tiny edge of an AR15 bullet hit your ear tip, it would do more damage than a mere scratch that doesn't need stitches. Kinetic energy, and all that.
I would bet money on it being shrapnel, especially as there are reports of others being hit by it too.
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I guess I should add that it doesn't matter much: either way, he obviously did come close to being hit by an actual bullet. (And then got an immediate narcissistic thrill that he had been missed, which he turned into political theatre instead of leaving in a hurry in case there was a second gunman somewhere.) It is irksome for him (and his cult) to refer to an ear scratch, probably from shrapnel, as "taking a bullet", but of course he lies continually and everyone knows that, so just add it to the litany of self- aggrandisement that is Trump.
I thought it interesting at the convention that Trump also specifically praised the crowd for not "running for the exits". Oh yeah - MAGA followers are so "brave" that they don't even all have the common sense to duck when there are bullets flying around. (Some did, but many just stayed standing, and videoing it on their phones.)
Well, does this mean the monarchy (sort of?) pays for itself?:
LONDON — The British royal family will be receiving a 53 percent raise, worth more than 45 million pounds ($58 million), thanks to a record increase in its estate’s annual profit, propelled in part by offshore wind farm leases on seabed plots owned by the monarchy.
It showed that the Crown Estate generated a “record net revenue profit” of 1.1 billion pounds ($1.4 billion) — 658.1 million pounds more than last year — and revealed the royal family’s plans for future purchases with its share of that money, including two new helicopters.
The Crown Estate is formally owned by the royal family but is controlled by the British government. Profits that the estate generates each year go to the state treasury, and the government returns a percentage to the royals under what is known as the “Sovereign Grant” to cover the operating costs of the royal household — including staff salaries, entertainment, property maintenance and travel....
In recent years, the royal family has received 86.3 million pounds ($111.4 million) from the government, and will again in 2024-2025. That figure will rise to 132 million pounds ($170 million) for 2025-2026.
The grant will support ongoing 10-year renovation projects at Buckingham Palace, British media reported, citing royal officials.
The program, whose total cost will be 369 million pounds ($476 million), is “making progress” according to a report published Monday by Britain’s National Audit Office, a public spending watchdog.
I see that Sabine Hossenfelder and others have videos out about the latest cost blowout, and delays, in the ITER project that is only a research project for fusion, with no prospect of it ever actually being an electricity generator.
For reasons I have outlined before, I am firmly on the sceptic side of fusion energy ever being a practical source of energy.
But this latest problem did make me think about how it's odd that both high-tech ideas for future energy (fusion, or even new fission reactors) and a much more modest-tech idea (large scale deployment of renewable energy plants which already work, but still have practical problems in replacing old style generators) both share a similar issue: they are hampered by continual changes in technology that make planning for their development (or deployment) very difficult.
I mentioned in a recent post about how, even over the (nearly) two decades of writing this blog, you can see how ideas for new renewable energy have been floated, sometimes partially developed, and abandoned: in many cases surpassed by the steady increase in efficiency and manufacturing improvements in the "been around forever, but getting way better all the time" sources (mainly solar panels and wind generators). And now we are at a point where we know we need renewable energy deployed very rapidly to drop CO2 before we bake the world even further, but the issue of energy storage is still seemingly at the stage "too many ideas", and no one really knows the best way to deploy it for maximum efficiency and best cost outcomes. A large part of the problem is surely that some ideas (molten salts, hot rocks or sand, chemical flow batteries, etc) will be beaten out of contention by improvements in competing systems, as nearly all storage ideas are still undergoing a lot of development and research and technological improvement. Hence, it may sound like a good idea to subsidise (say) Tesla powerwalls for domestic use on a massive scale - but I would presume that all battery storage is likely to be better, cheaper and safer in (say) five or ten years time, so just how much money is it wise to spend now on the current model?
On the fusion question, I have seen it said (I presume reliably) that a large part of ITER's problem is that it was designed on the basis of magnet technology current (I think) a couple of decades ago, but that has been surpassed by big improvements in the field. Hence it is in one sense already a white elephant, and becoming more white elephant-y every year a cost increase or repair delays its operation.
I would guess that the same could be a significant issue in the field of new fission reactor designs - what company wants to spend a ton of money on a design that might work but be soon out-competed by an alternative new design in terms of cost, efficiency or safety?
I guess there is likely a simple name for this in economics, or some management field - this race between technological development and its deployment on the one hand, and redundancy on the other - but I don't know what it is.
I also don't really know the solution.
What I do think, though, is that surely the billions spent on a research reactor for a source of energy that may never be economically viable could have gone a very long way towards resolving the issue of the best way to store energy from renewables, and likely come up with some good answers on that a great many years before ITER is even switched on.
Oh my, Twitter (unfortunately) still throws up links worth reading - such as this 2022 essay on Substack by John Ganz entitled "The Enigma of Peter Thiel - There is No Enigma - He's a Fascist".
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So Elon is in the "I create my own reality" world of MAGA now. I could have sworn that the reality is the opposite of what he claims here: it was the mainstream media that was extremely keen to choose stories to promote (and even specifically editorialise) the take that "Biden should withdraw from re-election because of public concerns about his cognitive decline after the debate".
I don't really know why it isn't the Democrats saying something like this: "We don't see any point in a further 'debate' with Donald Trump. As demonstrated in the last attempt, he does not know how to 'debate' - he simply states lies, falsehood and misleading statements and if challenged, simply reiterates that 'its true', which in the world of MAGA is accepted as the final word. As such, giving him a platform to repeat lies and never concede when they are demonstrably wrong simply worsens the epistemological crisis that the Right Wing has created over the last decade by making impossible any genuine debate based on certain facts being 'real' and needing to be conceded as such."
* Not much news seems to come out regarding Russian progress in Ukraine, so I assume they aren't advancing much, if at all, despite it being summer and (presumably) the best season for them to do so?
* I get that it certainly doesn't look like the Secret Service did a good job with the Trump protection, but I do wonder at the idea that the head of the organisation should be personally responsible for every single failure even if they have nothing to do with the particular job. (I accept that it seems she is getting flack from both sides of politics, and she may not have performed well before the MAGA nuts, but still it seems odd that the MAGA types rushed to judgement that she was personally responsible before she even got there. It paints a bleak image of how terrible government management would be under a new Trump administration.)
* Why are Elon Musk fanboys - or shareholders in Tesla - not worried about his full backing of the side of politics that is completely dismissive of the value and utility of electric vehicles?
* Why did I have a cinematic style dream the other day about a horse that sacrificed itself to protect its owner, and it was very moving?
A few thoughts:
* So the alien Mark Zuckerberg is the latest tech billionaire to suck up to Trump, calling his interference with the Secret Service effort to get him off stage "badass", while claiming to be declining to actually endorse him. Uhuh.
Peter Theil - another person who gives the appearance of being barely human - apparently has the ultimate opportunist and Trump flip-flopper JD Vance in his pocket.
As many are saying, the explanation appears simple - billionaires like both tax cuts (because, presumably, they think they are the smartest person to know what to do with their money, despite evidence to the contraray) and are happy to support someone they know is dumb but able to be manipulated.
And Trump doesn't even pretend to be not be open to being bought!
* I started writing this post yesterday, and was tempted to say "so, the predictions in many media outlets that Biden was going to resign Sunday seem to have been wrong." Then I wake up this morning, and he has! Can't say I am too surprised - and I think Biden's reputation in history will only be enhanced.
* Meanwhile, I am just continually flabbergasted at how Trump diehards are simply beyond reasoning with. I mean, look at this patent cult post:
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But even for Trumpists less emotionally unstable than Woods, how can they talk themselves into dismissing the scores of people who worked with Trump in his first term and who refuse to endorse him now - up to and including his own Vice President? (I know the reasoning they commonly use - they were never "true" supporters, and he is just bad at picking people. OK, that's cult reasoning - but why do they think he has overcome the inability to pick only "good" people?)
How do they think that it isn't pure opportunism that explains people who have condemned Trump in the strongest possible terms who now endorse him? (Like Barr, Vance.) I know the reasoning they use - it's like Woods - they fantasise that the US is the midst of the worst Presidency of all time (their cult leader told them) - but it is patently untrue on any metric you can pick. Of course, they are also bolstered in their belief by RW media - but how can they not see that they are simple propaganda outfits for the purpose of making money?
The short take is: they cannot be reasoned with. The Republicans have decided this is the way to power, so they are not going to encourage voters to ever listen to evidence and reason. It's appalling.
There's an interesting article up at Science about developments in the search for a good blood substitute. It starts with this bit of history that I think is new to me:
In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. Thomas was the most outspoken advocate of the practice.
At the time, severe bleeding was often a death sentence. Blood transfusion was practiced, but it was something of a crapshoot. Medical science was still 3 decades removed from discovering blood types. Patients who received mismatched blood suffered discolored urine, itching, and a sometimes-fatal complication: hemolytic shock, wherein their own immune systems attacked the transfused cells.
Doctors in the U.S. were looking for something less risky to stabilize a hemorrhaging patient. Thomas was sure milk was the answer. In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. Thomas subsequently performed seven separate milk transfusions, publishing his results in several medical journals, and predicted their “brilliant and useful future.”
It was not to be: Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding.
Gosh. They really did try any old idea in the hope it might work.
Anyway, the other curious thing in the article is that a new experimental blood substitute has been developed by a doctor with the surname "Doctor". Here's the reason why it could be useful:
Doctor is as fervent an advocate for hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs), as ErythroMer and its predecessors are more formally known, as Thomas was for lacteal transfusions. Donated blood has a shelf life of just 42 days. There’s also not enough, even in developed countries with well-organized blood donation systems: In January 2022, the American Red Cross, which distributes 40% of the country’s donor blood, declared the first-ever national blood crisis, as its supply—especially precious O-negative blood, the universal type—dipped dangerously low. Meanwhile, hemorrhagic shock caused by severe blood loss kills some 20,000 people in the U.S., and 2 million globally, every year.
An artificial “blood” could, perhaps, fill the void. In settings where fresh blood is hard to come by, such as battlefields and rural areas (where ambulance wait times are sometimes as high as 45 minutes), ErythroMer could be given on the fly to maintain the vital flow of oxygen to organs until someone reaches a hospital. It’s a freeze-dried powder that remains usable for years and can be reconstituted by simply mixing it with widely available saline. And ErythroMer should be safe for any blood type, because its membrane doesn’t include the red blood cell surface proteins that cause mismatches.
....
So far Doctor’s creation remains in animal testing, but it isn’t the only effort to package hemoglobin inside lipids to fashion a viable blood substitute. A rival product in Japan has already been tested in a few people and generally appears safe.
But the success of these new products is far from guaranteed. Barely 2 decades ago, earlier formulations of HBOCs were scuttled or sidelined after trial participants died. Subsequent attempts haven’t fared much better. The most advanced HBOC to date, approved for people in South Africa and Russia, has struggled amid concerns about side effects.
All very interesting...
I very much doubt a bad word has ever been said about Bob Newhart as a person - he just seems a very modest man who rode a great talent for deadpan comedy delivery (of which I am generally fond) to great success. I hadn't realised until I watched this story that he had been so spectacularly successful with his first album so quickly:
Update: I see that he got a mention in my 2005 (!) post about how I rank the sitcoms I have watched over my life. I don't think I would change a thing about that post, either. On a side note, though, I have been meaning to say here that the funniest comedy show I have been watching lately on streaming (Binge) is the TV version of vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows. It had several seasons, but really hasn't attracted as much attention, in my opinion, as it deserves for routinely being very funny.
Update 2: I liked this bit from a NYT interview when he turned 90:
Has your sense of humor changed since you started?
Something very sick makes me laugh. My wife says to me, “If people ever found out what you find humorous, they’d stop showing up.” I said to her: “That’s our little secret.
Generally speaking, I have been agreeing (mostly) with Jennifer Rubin's "hot takes" on Twitter about the Biden situation, even though she decided about a week or so ago (I think) that Biden does have to give up. Here's one she wrote, updating her take on the whole matter, that I saw yesterday:
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And this is exactly how the NYT will frame it:
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Apart from all the dumping on Trump he did before he decided he could make a better living by being a Trump suck up, people have been looking for other stuff JD Vance has said, and this one is "good":
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But the media shrugs and reports it as if it is just normal political talk now....
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And on the local scene:
Seems to me the Republican convention is far from going smoothly. Trump seems to be wanting to broaden the party out to any old weirdo who'll bend the knee - see speech from Amber Rose (who I had never heard of before, but seems she is either an atheist or satanist - or maybe former satanist, I don't know); the video of Trump sucking up to complete nutjob RJK junior (in which he sounded very "up", compared to his very low energy appearance on the first night); Johnson walking off stage when the teleprompter stopped; Gaetz looking like he wanting to punch out Kevin McCarthy; Rudy falling over; nutjobs realising Vance has an Indian wife; Melania still in a bunker somewhere.
All looks perfectly normal - not. This article from WAPO gives some good detail on internal divisions within the party being shown up in the convention.
And yet the NYT is still drumming up the "Democrats are in panic" line.
How many MSM outlets published images of Trump looking asleep on the first night? If it was Biden in a similar situation it would be on the top of every single web page.
The double standards on display are astounding...
PS: Noah Smith has become far too pessimistic lately, I reckon. His judgement is going wonky on some issues:
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