A fast food confession

This may well be considered controversial.

I prefer KFC mashed potato and gravy over their chips.

That is all.

Climate change and compound events

A new paper at Nature:

Floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts often result from a combination of interacting physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of processes (climate drivers and hazards) leading to a significant impact is referred to as a ‘compound event’. Traditional risk assessment methods typically only consider one driver and/or hazard at a time, potentially leading to underestimation of risk, as the processes that cause extreme events often interact and are spatially and/or temporally dependent. Here we show how a better understanding of compound events may improve projections of potential high-impact events, and can provide a bridge between climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers, who need to work closely together to understand these complex events.

Another case of murder by social media

What an appalling story, again illustrating the harm of social media:

Eight people have been killed in vigilante lynchings in Bangladesh sparked by rumours on social media of children being kidnapped and sacrificed as offerings for the construction of a bridge, police have confirmed.

The victims, which include two women, were targeted by angry mobs over the rumours, spread mostly on Facebook, that said human heads were required for the massive $3 billion project ($4.3 billion), police chief Javed Patwary said.

"We have analysed every single case of these eight killings," Mr Patwary told reporters in Dhaka.

More than 30 other people have been attacked in connection with the rumours.

Mr Patwary said police stations across the country had been ordered to crack down on rumours, and at least 25 YouTube channels, 60 Facebook pages and 10 websites have been shut down.

AFP has identified several posts still on Facebook that share the rumour, however.

Mob lynchings are common in Bangladesh, but the latest incidents are particularly brutal.

Do these countries where rumours that lead to lynchings spread like wildfire on social media try to educate the public that they cannot believe everything they read?

How hard is it for Facebook to have a local office that gets notice of a dangerous rumour and shuts down the account immediately?  Is part of the problem that you can't easily search Facebook content?  Does Facebook itself have the ability to immediately search posts across all accounts? 

Many questions I have.

Sammy Davis Jnr considered

There's a not so old documentary about Sammy Davis Jnr that has been on TV before, but I only saw it last night.  (Most of it, anyway.)

It fits in with something that has become a bit of theme here - as you get older, history feels closer than it used to.   As a child, something that happened 50 years before your birth feels like ancient history; but once you get into your 50's, you start thinking "hey, the 1960's doesn't feel so long ago", because you can remember bits of it directly, and lots of older people don't feel mentally much older than their perceived peak at (say) 30-ish.  Hence, anything that happened within any one lifetime doesn't now seem, in the big picture, all that long ago; and the timing of radical changes to our understanding of humanity (evolution, the "deep time" of the age of the Earth, the vast scale of the universe, etc) which are all still within roughly 150 years ago from today need to be considered in the perspective.    The intellectual and social reverberations of those discoveries have not had all that long to work themselves through.


Hence, watching the story of the rabid controversy in America that Davis Jnr's relationships with white women caused in the late 50's, but well into the 60's as well, is really eye opening.    Or things like the way blacks, at least in the 50's, had to drive way out of town to find somewhere to stay if working at Las Vegas.  (It wasn't entirely clear when that started to change.)  And the story of a motel operator being asked to drain the pool by a white person who saw Davis Jnr swimming in it, and they did (!).

This was all going on when I was a child, which isn't long ago.  It all puts nostalgia for the 1950's and 60's into perspective, and just because legislative action against discrimination happened,  no one should be surprised that lingering effects should take a long time to work themselves out.

It's all in the editing (and the understanding)

It's pretty funny to read how Right wing political punditry think the Mueller testimony was a disaster for Democrats (and it's true that quite a few on the anti-Trump side gave bad reviews to his performance as well), yet when you see on TV the key parts done as a 60 second highlight reel re-iterating the scandal that was the Russian interference, the welcome use by Trump of stolen emails, the lies of those around the campaign to cover it up, and Trump's trying to shut down the investigation, it doesn't look dire at all.  

Of course, others have made this point too:

As has been clear all along, this historic scandal is a case of Republicans gaslighting themselves about what went on and preferring fantasy Deep State conspiracy over reality.    All fed by their fawning to a President whose intense narcissism means that he cannot admit reality because he thinks it erodes the legitimacy of his narrow win.  (And in truth, it does.)

Republicans already look like fools - I can't imagine how bad they are going to look with the clear perspective of history.

The good balm

Another "if only I was an 'influencer'" post:   this product is ridiculously expensive (I think $45 for a tube) but if your spouse is taking hints as to what you might like as a birthday or Christmas present, you could suggest this:

It's a nice smelling "aftershave balm" that I find particularly good to use in the dry winter weather in Brisbane, when shaving does sometimes cause dry, sore patches near the corners of my mouth.  Or is that because I was dribbling in my sleep?  Who knows.

Anyway, it's moisturising but not in a heavy or oily way.  A little goes a long way, so the price is not as bad as it initially might seem.

I don't use it in hot, humid weather, when the cooling brace of an alcohol based aftershave is called for.   But for at least a third of the year (in Brisbane) it's great.

Thank you.

L'Occitane, please send me money, or a trip to Provence, at the very least.

A telling tale of the United States

So, the US could get him to the Moon and back, but couldn't assure safe surgery under their health care system?

Either that or I am being unfair and it was not the hospital's/surgeon's fault, but what about the ridiculous litigation infested US system that was unfairly used to enrich a white family that probably had money to spare?

Either way, I can turn it into a Lefty attack on the modern US.

Maybe he can tell us about Harry's Dad?

Well, what an odd story:

A television personality in Australia says that his four-year-old son has made a number of inexplicable and eerie statements which suggest that he was Princess Diana in a past life. The bizarre revelation reportedly came by way of a magazine article written by the boy's bewildered father David Campbell. He explained that the strangeness began two years ago when the youngster first pointed to a picture of Diana and declared "look, it's me when I was a princess."

According to Campbell, the boy continued to make spooky comments about what appears to be his past life, such as saying that he had two boys that he called his 'sons.' While the confounded dad initially dismissed these statements as fanciful talk from the toddler, he really took notice when they began to become more detailed. In particular, Campbell says that his son was able to name a site in Scotland where Diana frequently stayed and can describe the interior of the residence known as Balmoral.

Chillingly, the child has even allegedly made mention of Diana's tragic death, saying "one day the sirens came and I wasn't a princess anymore."

As might be expected

Over at Quillette, a profile of Boris Johnson has some lurid passages.  Here is a memory of him from 1983, debating at Oxford:

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:

You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.

Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:

The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.

Update:  following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:

Brexit was won with an impossible promise that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100 days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.

As they chunter in their think tanks and newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the elite. By anyone but them.

As if a rush to Mars wasn't nutty enough

Axios says that Robert Zubrin, who has spent a lot of time trying to promote a complicated way of getting to and from Mars, and a couple of other "space evangelists" got caught up in the excitement of the Apollo 11 celebrations by saying that actually, colonising Titan is a better long term for humanity.   By 2069.  

Ha ha. 

I will write a post about the continual confusion about the aims of a space program sometime soon.

But what's really important

What a tosser:

Yeah, because the fear of the white male (and the occasional Asian one) being so oppressed that they can't talk about how annoying they find the cultural Left is the major danger to the world at the moment.  

Actually, last night I was thinking:  people like Latham and his latest acolytes from Catallaxy past and present (he is big at Catallaxy at the moment, which people should take as a bad sign) complain that the cultural Left is all about "feelz" - claiming victim status, seeking out offence whether it intended or not, etc.    But their reaction against it has exactly the same over-emotional colour - how else can you inflate the matter of "PC-oppression" into such a large scale, crushing problem of global proportion?    You're into the "feelz" just as much as they are, Latho. 

Sounds all above board [sarcasm]

I really like the spaghetti diagram of Adani's financial set up in this article which lists these key points:

 Key points:

• The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
• The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
• Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

Woke mining executive

The chief executive of the world's largest mining company has endorsed drastic action to combat global warming, which he calls "indisputable," and an emerging crisis.

"The planet will survive. Many species may not," BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a business breakfast in London on Tuesday.

"This is a confronting conclusion but as a veteran geologist once said, 'you can't argue with a rock.'"

The link is here.

A pod of pea brain opinion writers for The Australian are drafting their pooh-poohing columns in response as I write.

Domestic violence of the American kind

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy — though an FBI spokeswoman later clarified the percentage is smaller.   ......

At a congressional hearing in May, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division testified that the bureau was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases and that of those, about 40 percent involved racially motivated violent extremists. Most in that group, he said, were white supremacists.

That's from the Washington Post.

But the real problem is that a journalist/opinion writer who knows he gets up the nose of Leftist thugs stood in the middle of a protest involving some of them and got beaten up, hey Jason.  

Some Guardian funnies

Author John Marsden has a piece at The Guardian in which he complains about over-parenting and the harm he sees it doing to kids education these days.  (He apparently now runs a couple of private schools in the bush where physical activity is far from discouraged.)

Anyway, I thought this comment was not too far off the mark, but the follow up comment was a bit funny nonetheless: