Too much to post about...

Hey, work is busy, and the appalling state of politics has so much to complain about at the moment.  Such as:

*  what absolute pieces of work and jerks are those still willing to work for Trump, particularly Pompeo and Barr.   With Pompeo, the NPR reporter was completely vindicated in the emails released showing her intentions were clear, and the obvious problem was Pompeo's staff not passing on what they knew she wanted to cover.   Yet here is Trump and his bunch of obnoxious cult followers giving him congratulations:

With Barr, it looks like Bolton will say he also worried about Trump, but cult loyalty overcomes everything.

*  The impeachment looks like it might get Bolton as a witness after all.   That will be real popcorn eating viewing, for sure.   Of course nearly all of the cult followers won't budge in their view regardless of what Bolton says - because as always predicted, they have changed their position  from "of course it would be concerning if the President did that, but he didn't do it"  to "the President 100% did the right thing".  And they will maintain that even when someone they formally thought was a great appointment well matched to the Trump priorities says "no, you can't run foreign relations like that. It's wrong and corrupt."

Any and all Trump supporters have self-gaslite themselves into not being able to recognise truth from fiction.   It's what cults do.   One feels this cannot go on forever - but it is distressing that it has gone on for as long as it already has.   (And really, it is a pre-Trump phenomena that has been building over more than a decade.)

*  In Australia, is it a case of the Morrison government thinking it can bluster its way out of an obvious scandal, following Trump's lead?    There is a case for saying Ministerial standards used to be too tough, back in the day;  but it is ridiculous that Morrison is trying to bluff his way through this sports grant scandal.   

Bats and racism

A few points about China, coronavirus, and racism:

*   does Sinclair Davidson not mind at all that his blog for old fools is crammed with comments using "chinks" for Chinese since the outbreak of the coronavirus.   He certainly doesn't care enough to insert his own objection into threads or posts - not that I can see.  Update:   doesn't he teach at a tertiary institution that has lots of high fee paying Chinese students?    Wouldn't RMIT find this lack of control over his own blog concerning (remembering that commenters are forever complaining that certain words are on a "ban" filter that stops their whole comment ever being published.)  In other words, he could stop the casual and repeated use of a word almost universally regarded as offensive/racist if he wanted, but he doesn't.  Why?  

*  I had missed this about the "bat video":

As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China.

There was just one problem. The video wasn’t set in Wuhan at all, where bat isn’t a delicacy. It wasn’t even from China. Instead it showed Wang Mengyun, the host of an online travel show, eating a dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation. Sampling the bat was simply an addition to the well-trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

That's from a Foreign Policy opinion piece, that needs a subscription to read the rest of the article, which goes on to talk about how the idea of Chinese being dirty disease carriers has a long racist history.  Unfortunately, though I cannot read the whole article.

*  I have made comments over the last couple of years about how I wish that the Chinese (and other nearby Asian cultures) could get over the traditional medicine ideas that eating certain animals carries certain specific health benefits, usually (I think) based on the perceived spirit characteristic of the animal.   The harm I referred to, though, is to the endangered wild animals caught up in this quasi magical belief system.  I don't really care if people eat something wild that is not endangered (insects or rats, for example), although I guess I have a general bias towards the idea that eating farmed animals generally is a safer thing to do from a "risk of catching exotic disease" point of view.  (Even then, a lot depends on the hygiene in the farms too, I guess.)

In any event, I don't see an objection to the eating of endangered animals for a fanciful health benefit is a racist thing:  just in case anyone was going to throw that at me.

An interview worth listening to?

I missed this on Radio National this morning, and they don't do transcripts of interviews, but I have to listen to the audio at the link.  Can't do that now, but perhaps later:

A lightweight start to the week - what I've been watching on Netflix

For one reason or another, I still haven't managed to get to the cinema this summer.

But on Netflix, been enjoying the following:

Sacred Games - quality crime, corruption (and mysticism?) in Mumbai.   I only found this via a recommendation in some newspaper article, but it's really good, and I see from online review sites that it is well regarded by critics and viewers.  And the Indians are still doing the thing that amazed me so much in the much sillier Typewriter series - moving in and out of English (sometimes mid-sentence) so easily that it hurts and embarrasses my pathetic monolingual brain.

Dracula - the short series just released by the Moffat/Gattis team that brought us Sherlock.  Only saw the first episode last night, but it was very witty, and certainly interesting enough to continue watching.   I am not sure I am completely convinced by the wisecracking Dracula lead actor, and also questioned the deliberate use of very retro looking special effects sometimes; but as I say, a pretty high hit rate with amusing lines.   I did wonder early on whether vampirism was being played as an allegory for AIDS, which would be unusual given the very gay-friendly writers (Gattis is actually gay, I see), and I wonder if anyone else got that impression.

The Meg - yes, the 2018 megashark movie is indeed like a B or C Grade monster movie with hammy acting and script (and D grade science),  but done with an A grade budget and production design.  Gee, I enjoyed it, though.   The perfect movie to watch at home instead of the cinema so that you can make jokes out loud about who might be eaten next,  and the silliness of many of the decisions the characters are making.   I loved the mini "glider" subs; I would have killed for a toy version of one of them as a 9 year old:

Perhaps I liked it a lot because I could sense how even more intensely I would have liked it as a 10 year old?   Anyone, a lot of fun, very competently made.

Not enough environmental disaster for you yet?

In the SMH today:

The threat of mass fish kills is emerging across the Murray-Darling Basin as low river flows and the influx of soil and ash from bushfires reduce water quality.

In recent days, fish deaths have been reported in the Macquarie River near Dubbo and the Macleay River east of the Dividing Range in NSW, while a "wall of mud and ash" is moving down the Upper Murray.

"Fish are just rolling over dead everywhere, it's a double-pronged disaster," said Lee Baumgartner, a fisheries expert at Charles Sturt University.

Professor Baumgartner said a NSW Fisheries team arrived near Tumbarumba in southern NSW to rescue endangered perch, only to witness sludge moving down the river "with the consistency of cake mix".

"They didn't rescue a single fish," he said. "It's just horrible."

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority revealed the scale of the threats to the health of freshwater ecosystems on Wednesday, with the release of a map showing almost all the major river valleys faced problems.

These ranged from "almost certain" algal blooms and low dissolved oxygen levels to high salinity and bushfire contamination.

A touch of nudity

Oh, this should be interesting:

Since classical times the naked figure has impressed, titillated and offended viewers. In a new BBC Two series Mary Beard examines why nudity holds a key place in western art

It's called "The Shock of the Nude".

Which reminds me, as I always find the topic of the social nudism movement in the 20th century interwar years in Europe amusingly peculiar, I was a tad surprised to read recently that men in England were being arrested in the mid 1920's for sunbathing shirtless:  

 I did establish, in a photo in another post, that in Brisbane by 1935, at least some men were going "topless" at the suburban beaches, in front of women too.   So I suspect that a male torso being exposed in a park might not have been quite the scandal here that it apparently was in 1927 England.  
Or am I wrong?  Was the decade from 1925 to 1935 the period in which men's bare chests in public suddenly transitioned into being acceptable?  Actually, in England, yes it does seem the crucial decade:

The craze for sunbathing changed bathing costumes out of all recognition. It would simply not have been possible to get a tan wearing the cumbersome costumes of the Edwardian age. The classic male costume, a one piece affair in cotton with legs and sleeves, often decorated with horizontal stripes was laughed out of existence. Men's costumes now had shorter shorts and straps replaced sleeves, but the torso was still covered. In the 'twenties plain colours were generally preferred. Black, navy, maroon or royal blue were the norm. In the early 'thirties the top was often a different colour to the shorts and occasionally striped. Men in continental resorts in the 'twenties began to wear trunks and gradually the trunks became shorter, although still of the mini shorts style. By the 'thirties, trunks became acceptable in England, although some resorts still did not permit bare chests.

The "look at me" candidate

First, let's start with another good burn:

I see that when not suing Hilary Clinton as a way of pandering to the Tucker Carlson, Trump loving, Hilary hating audience,  Tulsi is advertising this:

Now, this may be an admirable policy in a Democrat candidate, but I don't see it sitting all that well with the Tucker Trump voters who love their gormless President going on a massive ramp up of  military spending, including on new nuclear weapons.

She is, in other words, just a chronic attention seeker who Republicans will love because of their shared hatred of Hilary Clinton, but for whom they will never vote.   And, of course, because she is pandering to Republicans in this way,  next to no self respecting Democrat is going to vote for her either.

Just a useless spoiler for the side she claims to belong to.

Update:  I was trying to think what Australian politician she reminds me of, but the best I could up with is that she's like a noxious amalgam of Tim Wilson, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd.

Quite the burn

Nuclear, again

Ah, Jason:  another day, another re-tweet of a wrong, Right wing take:

I agree with this response, and think Gray's response is so weak:

I have to run and do something - I will come back later to update this.

Update:   Connolly claims this -

I want him to quantify "many".   I mean, there's him and Jason Soon - and who else?

Another Tweeter makes the point about the current subsidies nuclear is needing (go and read the thread):

I suppose that attack is a little unfair, if you read Connolly's endorsement of a carbon tax for nuclear as an admission that nuclear does need subsidies.   But then, it does make his "I hate renewables because it needs subsidies" argument sound distinctly dubious. 

John Quiggin has been pushing this line recently - OK, conservatives, let's not rule out nuclear as long as you will agree to a carbon tax to make it work economically.   And you are getting some people like Connolly saying "OK".

But - are they going to live with the consequence that, with a carbon tax working as a "subsidy" for any form of clean energy (I mean, wasn't this is how a carbon tax was meant to work, free market conservatives?), no one thinks that energy investment is going to head into nuclear anyway?

As many on the Left correctly perceive, resistance to renewables is not as objective and reasonable as conservatives like Connolly like to pretend.

And when he can start pointing to even a substantial minority of Coalition politicians who are  endorsing an "economy crushing" (as they have argued for more than a decade) carbon tax, I might take him more seriously.


   

Tide turning, at last

It's about time, but it appears America is starting to finally move  back from the nutty airline pet free-for-all that is "emotional support animals" on planes.   Service animals are still allowed though, including for psychiatric issues, but at least they are proposing it be limited to dogs.   (Even though dogs have caused some of the biggest issues.)

If the comments to the article are anything to go by, Americans are well and truly sick of the ridiculous situations passengers there have had to deal with.  For example:

After Christmas I was waiting to board a flight after the people had deplaned.  While they were coming into the terminal, two dogs from two different owners got into a fight.  The owners got control of them, but not before the entire terminal was suddenly filled with the sound of various barking dogs.  The man next to me said:  "This is insanity."

Then, as we were boarding a young, strong man boarded first with a huge black German shepherd.  Neither the man nor the dog looked as though they needed emotional support, but the dog was pretty intimidating....

 I sat by a woman with Bernese Mountain dog support animal on a flight. He was almost as big as a small pony but very well behaved thankfully ....

I flew last year from DC to Chicago and ended up next to a woman with an "emotional support" dog. She let it out of the carrier and it was sitting next to her feet when I reached into my bag which was under the seat in front of me.  The dog yelped, snapped at me, and tried to bite me in the face. The woman corralled it, but it was terrifying. I asked the flight attendant for another seat and she said they could only accommodate me on a later flight. I asked about putting the dog back in the carrier and the woman yelled at me and the dog started growling. I needed to get to Chicago, so I squeezed up to the window and tried not to move for the two hour flight. It upsets me just to think about it now.

So whose "emotions" are we supporting here, anyway? ...

Yes it's totally free, that's the point. To take a pet on the plane is usually $125, but, if you have a letter that claims that it is "an emotional support animal," fees are waived. I have seen many people bragging on social media that it costs less to buy a bogus "emotional support animal" letter than the fee for one flight....

Most of these animals are "certified" by coughing up $50 on some therapists website who emails you a signed ESA letter. It is 100% a scam that makes it harder for people with real disabilities. Should fine these people, and if you show up with an animal certified by a blacklisted "therapist" your ESA iguana/pig/rabbit/parrot/whatever doesn't get to fly in the cabin....

In my neck of the woods, it only costs $25.  You're being overcharged for a phony certificate.  $25 should do it.

Another complete embarassment

Mark Latham follows Pauline Hanson into the depths of clueless Right wing alternative reality:

Andrew Bolt misses the White Australia policy, apparently

Of course I don't subscribe to any Murdoch rag that Andrew Bolt appears in, so I just get to see the start of a post on his "blog", which I will not link to:

I've said immigration is now more like colonisation. From last week: "More people from Nepal settled in Australia last year than from the United Kingdom...  Tara Gaire ... said he felt very at home in Melbourne’s multicultural environment. 'We catch up with community members, we go to the temple, it doesn’t feel like we’re overseas.'"  

What an appalling hypocrite:  

Bolt was born in Adelaide, his parents being newly-arrived Dutch migrants. 

His parents were the right colour though, hey?

I mean, he doesn't even have fear of Muslim terrorism from Nepal as a basis for his snide insult:

According to the 2011 census, 81.3% of the Nepalese population is Hindu, 9.0% are Buddhist, 4.4% are Muslim, 3.0% are Kiratist (indigenous ethnic religion), 1.4% are Christian, 0.1% are Sikhs, 0.1% are Jains and 0.7% follow other religions 

And, he's an agnostic himself, so he can hardly be concerned that Christianity is being displaced - what does it matter to him if it is?

It comes down to a creepy Pauline Hanson line - "they're different and I don't it."

He has become appalling stupid and a deep embarrassment to the Right side of politics.

I'll believe it when I see successful, commercial products

NPR reports on a "cell-based meat" start up that is building a pilot production facility.

It notes the big issue:

But Memphis Meats and its competitors face quite a few hurdles in bringing cell-based meats to market. For starters, the cost of production needs to come down. Back in 2018, Wired reported that a pound of Memphis Meats takes $2,400 to produce, in part because of the expensive growth mediums — or feed — needed to culture cells.

"Our costs have continued to come down significantly over the last three years," Valeti told us in an email Wednesday. "We have a clear path to bringing a cost competitive product to market as we scale our production and that's part of what our latest funding round will help us to unlock," Valeti said. He said the company will continue to work on developing low-cost feed for the cells, which is one significant piece of the puzzle.

And also notes the second issue - the one of texture:

I got the chance to sample Memphis Meats' chicken, which was pan-sautéed with some oil and served with greens. It tasted pretty close to chicken breast produced the traditional way — but without as much textural variation among bits of muscle, fat and connective tissue.

I think we can all agree that vegetable protein imitation chicken (or beef) also has the soft texture issue;  but in terms of copying flavour, they are also getting pretty close.   (I have taken to eating Rebel Whoppers from Hungry Jacks as my default fast food burger.  I had one last night in fact.  I am quite satisfied with it.)  But the difference is, of course, it's massively cheaper and quicker to make than growing cells in an expensive medium. 

So if both ways of making imitation meat leads to a soft-ish product that has similar flavour of real meat, why use the incredibly expensive and complicated way of making such a product??

The fact that billionaires are encouraging this product just indicates to me that billionaires can make wrong calls on things outside of their expertise, just like any of us can.

The future in fake meat is going to be in better vegetable protein imitation meats, and (eventually, I suspect) in microbial sourced protein as the base for imitation meats.

Disinformation warning

Just read this good opinion piece by a former US Ambassador to Russia that was in the Washington Post last week:

Be prepared to fight a dangerous new wave of disinformation during the Senate trial

I liked his summary of Russian disinformation tactics:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his proxies deploy several methods of disinformation to strengthen their power and influence. The first is to deny facts. For instance, Putin initially denied that Russian soldiers had seized control of Crimea in February 2014, denies Russian involvement in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, and denies any Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

A second tactic is to deflect attention from the facts, also known as “whataboutism.” When criticized about Crimean annexing Crimea, Putin’s media shoot back, what about Kosovo? Or New Mexico? When criticized about civilian casualties from Russian military intervention in Syria, Kremlin defenders retort, what about Iraq, Vietnam or Hiroshima? When confronted with evidence of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, the Russian standard refrain is, you do it all the time.

A third practice is the dissemination of lies. Russian state media once asserted that President Barack Obama and former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi embraced the same ideology. I may be more sensitive than most about this tactic, because when I was serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia, Kremlin media outlets accused me of fomenting revolution against Putin’s regime; perhaps most disgustingly of all, a video was circulated suggesting I was a pedophile. When Putin met with President Trump in July 2018 in Helsinki, the Russian president again lied about me, claiming I had broken Russian law while working in the White House.

A cumulative effect of all these tactics is nihilistic debasement of the very concept of truth. Putin is not trying to win the argument; instead, his propaganda machine aims to convince that there is no truth, no right and wrong, or no data or evidence, only relativism, point of view and biased opinion.

His summary of what Joe Biden did in Ukraine is also a good, succinct summary, one which my reality challenged reader from Catallaxy, JC, has never got through his thick head:

Former vice president Joe Biden was not freelancing on behalf of his son when implementing U.S. government policy — supported by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, Republican senators, and the Ukrainian anti-corruption nongovernmental-organization community — to seek the ouster of corrupt Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Indeed, because Shokin was not prosecuting corruption in Ukraine, his removal produced greater scrutiny, not less, of the now-infamous Burisma Holdings energy company on which Hunter Biden used to serve as a board member. As Shokin’s deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, reported, “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky [Burisma’s owner]. … It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” Trump’s own political appointee, former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, confirmed, “The allegations against Vice President Biden are self-serving and non-credible.”

And you thought the Royal Commission into Aged Care disclosed bad treatment of old folk...

A story at the BBC (basically about the economics of looking after old people) starts with some extreme examples:

"I customarily killed old women. They all died, there by the big river. I didn't used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. The women were afraid of me."

No wonder. That's the account of a man from the Aché, an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay, as told to anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado.

He explained grandmothers helped with chores and babysitting but when they got too old to be useful, you couldn't be sentimental.

Brutally, the usual method was an axe to the head. For the old men, Aché custom dictated a different fate. They were sent away - and told never to return.  ....

As another anthropologist, Jared Diamond, points out, the Aché are hardly outliers. Among the Kualong, in Papua New Guinea, when a woman's husband died, it was her son's solemn duty to strangle her.

Update:  I see via Wikipedia that the practice is called "senicide", and it seems an entry that could have a lot more examples added to it, if the above story is anything to go by.  Most of their examples are from pretty ancient history, such as this one, notable again for its gruesomeness: 

The Heruli were a Germanic tribe during the Migration Period (about 400 to 800 CE). Procopius states in his work The Wars, that the Heruli placed the sick and elderly on a tall stack of wood and stabbed them to death before setting the pyre alight.^[7]

 Oh look, allegedly (there is no citation!) in Sardinia, the women got to be the "terminators":

An alleged custom was to throw incapable or ill elders off certain cliffs, a confirmed practice was the performing of euthanasia on ill, senile or suffering elders carried out by selected women named accabbadoras (lit. 'terminator' or 'ender') that after a blessing of the soon to be deceased would proceed to kill them through suffocation or blunt force to the back of the head by wooden mallet.