A depressing line of work

As reported at Science, another large scale vaccine failure for HIV:

The failure-ridden search for a vaccine that can stop the AIDS virus has delivered yet another frustrating defeat. The HIV vaccine that had moved furthest along in human testing does not work, and the $104 million trial in South Africa evaluating it has been stopped early. “There’s absolutely no evidence of efficacy,” says Glenda Gray, who heads the study and is president of the South African Medical Research Council (MRC). “Years of work went into this. It’s a huge disappointment.”

The efficacy study, which began in October 2016, is known as HVTN 702. It enrolled 5407 sexually active, HIV-uninfected men and women between 18 and 35 years of age at 14 sites across the country. Researchers randomly assigned half of the participants to receive a pair of HIV vaccines used in a one-two punch called a prime boost, whereas the other half received placebo shots. The trial was supposed to last until July 2022. But on 23 January, an independent monitoring board that takes scheduled, sneak peaks at the data to evaluate safety and efficacy, informed Gray and the other leaders of the study that it was “futile” to continue. There were 129 infections in the vaccinated group and 123 in those who received the placebo. “I was catatonic,” Gray says.

No evidence exists that the vaccine caused harm, as happened in a different large HIV vaccine study that was abruptly halted in 2007. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired that earlier sobering study, congratulates her colleagues in South Africa for conducting a scientifically rigorous, complex trial. “The trial was incredibly well done and we got a definitive answer, and that’s what science is about,” says Buchbinder, who is the chair of a multicountry trial, Mosaico, that now is the most advanced large-scale HIV vaccine study underway.

It's sort of hard to imagine a more depressing end to years of research work on making a new vaccine (or drug) only to find it's completely ineffective.

I also note this:

In the halted trial, funded by MRC, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the “prime” was a harmless canarypox virus that carries genes for HIV’s surface protein and two of its other structural proteins. 

Not that I am saying that Bill Gates wasn't good to fund this attempt, but it goes to show that his Foundation doesn't always back winners.   His devotion to advanced nuclear might face a similar outcome.  

Fortune telling history

Interesting article at The Conversation on the rise of fortune telling as a popular, if technically illegal, pursuit in the first couple of decades of the 20th century in Australia. 

I thought spiritualism was supposed to have received a popularity boost due to the First World War (perhaps more in England than here), but did not appreciate that more generic fortune telling was popular in the same period.

Bad habit

How good is chewing betel nut?  Presumably, it must make for quite a good feeling, because of the obvious awful side effects people put up with to keep using it:

Betel nut black market boom in Australia has experts warning of devastating health impacts 

The tropical nut is chewed widely across South-East Asia and the Pacific and often mixed with lime powder (calcium hydroxide) to produce an addictive paste that stains the teeth and mouth a vibrant red.

It can also cause bad breath, tooth wear, gum recession, bleeding gums, and mouth cancer in regular users.

Ms Groves stopped selling betel nut when authorities cracked down on the product in Cairns, but said regulations had resulted in a booming black market for the product.

"[People] now just sell it at home," she said.

The Queensland Police Service said one person had been charged for possessing betel nut in 2019.
Australian Dental Association oral medicine specialist Professor Michael McCullough said the product was readily available in Melbourne where dentists are reporting a large increase in the number of concerning presentations associated with the product.

Have a look at two of the photos in the story:

The Big Questions

Why do country people think Barnaby Joyce is great?   What do they see in him that I don't?

Remembering that I used to see some appealing self deprecation in him, his personal image deserves to be strongly hit by a few things:

* he seems increasingly bitter, despite having had the benefit of a media covering up his infidelity during an election;
* apart from the relationship with a former staffer, there was the allegation of apparently serious level, drunken sexual harassment for which the National Party returned "no verdict";
* he gives the impression of drinking more now;
* at a time when he has just established a second family, and (if I recall correctly) having previously given the usual "it's so hard for a marriage, being a politician who has to be away from family so often" comments before he left his family, he is now deciding to increase his time on the job with his second set of kids;
* he gives the impression of doubling down on the "climate change and drought and bushfires - no connection" meme, at a time one would like to think that at least some country people might be starting to have doubts.

On the last point though - how many rural people are stupid?   Quite a lot, seems to be the increasing lesson of election results.

China and speed building

My first reaction when seeing, merely days ago, a field full of excavators preparing the grounds for a new Wuhan hospital was that it looked like a con: there were so many and they didn't look particularly well organised.   They seemed as if they were just pretending to be busy.  And besides - were they even the right bit of gear with which to be preparing the ground?  

But reporting from the BBC seems to indicate that the building has gone up in 6 days.  I didn't even think the concrete would be set solidly enough in that time.  Apparently, a similar "instant hospital" project was done in Beijing in 2003, taking 7 days.  Slackers.

It's hard to tell, but from some photos at the last link it looks like it might be a modular style construction.  Is that the only way it could be done?  Modular buildings can be assembled very quickly. 

Of course, getting a building up is one thing - having it properly plumbed and wired and safely finished is another.

I would like to see a walk through of the place in another couple of weeks time, just to see how it looks on the inside. 

Trump chastised - as if

There have been a few Republicans saying that things like "yeah, we know what Trump did was concerning, but it was not the sort of thing you remove a President for, and I like to think he will feel he has learnt something from the experience."

The "Trump will learn from this" aspect is a complete and utter, evidence free, crock of a take, and I would say there is an extremely high chance that Trump will utterly ruin their fantasy in his State of the Union address.

After all, Trump views everything in the most narcissistic way possible, and he knows his "base", with their self induced blindness and cult membership, thinks he did absolutely nothing wrong and that Joe Biden is the one who is shown to be corrupt.  They (encouraged now by most of the Republican Senate) are simply impervious to the objective reporting that there is no evidence that Biden was pushing to have Shokin sacked in order to help his son.   


Here's Axios reporting:

Trump's sense of invincibility 

President Trump often says he's the smartest person in the room on virtually every topic. Now, after taking several risks on what he privately calls "big shit" and avoiding catastrophe, Trump and his entire inner circle convey supreme self-confidence, bordering on a sense of invincibility.

The state of play: Three years into Trump's presidency, their view is the naysayers are always wrong. They point to Iran, impeachment, Middle East peace. Every day, Trump grows more confident in his gut and less deterrable. Over the last month, 10 senior administration officials have described this sentiment to me. Most of them share it....

Between the lines: Over the past month, Trumpworld's sense of being unbeatable has only grown. This is partly because the president sometimes defines victory in narrow terms, like pleasing the base and juicing the markets.

FDR re-considered

Noah Smith had some tweets over the weekend in which he discusses the comparisons that people like to imagine there would be between FDR and a Bernie Sanders presidency.  This included linking to an article in The Atlantic earlier this year that explained how FDR's policies were, in many cases, not "big government" ideologically driven, but combined pragmatic ways to get both government and the private sector involved.

I thought it very interesting:   

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

 It's worth clearing your browsing history to read!

A Soviet mountain mystery, and the conspiracy worlds shared by Russians and the American Right

The Atlantic has an article about a Russian mystery from 1959 that has sparked many conspiracy theories:

Precisely 61 years ago, a band of skiers trekking through the Ural Mountains stashed food, extra skis, and a well-worn mandolin in a valley to pick up on the way back from their expedition. In a moment of lightheartedness, one drew up a fake newspaper with headlines about their trip: “According to the latest information, abominable snowmen live in the northern Urals.” Their excess equipment stored away, the group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened.

Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.

Today, the “Dyatlov Pass incident,” named after one of the students on the trek, Igor Dyatlov, has become Russia's biggest unsolved mystery, a font of endless conspiracy theories. Aliens, government agents, “Arctic dwarves”—and yes, even abominable snowmen—have at various points been blamed for the deaths. One state-television show regularly puts self-appointed experts through a theatrical lie-detector test to check their outlandish explanations.

The article notes that Russian has a very, very long history of conspiracy theories coming from the top down, going back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and makes this surprising claim about how widespread belief in conspiracies remain:

An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.

Which is interesting - the Trump supporting, Wingnut Right in America now has moved to a similar world of conspiracy belief,  with the conspiracies not so much originating from the top, but created or vigorously promoted for profit (see Rupert Murdoch, and the alt Right corporate and private media universe) and then being adopted by the top for cynical political benefit.    But they have both ended up in the same place regarding a post-truth world of politics.

Communists in the kitchen

This NPR story is from 2014, but I saw someone tweet about it yesterday, suggesting he would like to see communism and the return of apartment blocks with shared kitchens. (It was not serious, I think, but nonetheless scores of comments followed expressing horror at the suggestion, based on their experiences with multi-person shared kitchens). It's pretty interesting, anyway:

How Russia's Shared Kitchens Helped Shape Soviet Politics 

Some (lengthy) highlights:

In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, most people in Moscow lived in communal apartments; seven or more families crammed together where there had been one, sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. They were crowded; stove space and food were limited. Clotheslines were strewn across the kitchen, the laundry of one family dripping into the omelet of another.

As the Soviet Union industrialized from the 1920s to the 1950s, and millions poured into Moscow from the countryside, one of the goals of the new government was to provide housing for the workers. It started putting people into apartments that had been occupied by the rich or by aristocrats who had been driven out by the new regime.

"The communal apartment was like a microcosm of Soviet society," says Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. "People from all walks of life, sometimes absolute class enemies, living next to each other. The expression was 'densed up.' The allotment was 9 square meters per person."

 Gregory (Grisha) Freidin, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University, grew up in a communal apartment of 10 families about five blocks from the Kremlin in the 1940s. "On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses at the local morgue. There were two rooms where the mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was the woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked."

In Freidin's kitchen, every family had a small kitchen table that housed a few pots and pans. There were two four-burner stoves. Everyone cooked their own food — cabbage soup, borscht with beets, potatoes, buckwheat groats, boiled chicken.

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict....

But there was apparently some very Orwellian motivation for the shared kitchens:

"Communal kitchen was a war zone," says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. "During the Stalin era [1928-1953] it was the most dangerous place to be — in the kitchen."

Shenderovich agrees: "Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting."
But Anya von Bremzen remembers there was camaraderie as well. "There was always a grandmother to take care of the kids, and share a bit of cutletta or salat Olivier. And when they began to disband the communal apartments, the communal kitchen was an institution that many people actually began to miss."

The reason Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

"The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time was they would like to have houses without kitchens," says Genis. "Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property."

The article then goes on to note that there was an early idea that communism would set up cafeterias where most people would eat most meals, freeing Soviet women from the tyranny of cooking, so they could concentrate on self fulfilment.   Of course, it never happened, and the country soon faced mass starvation instead.  

And I guess I had not realised how thoroughly you could blame Communism for the poor reputation of Russian food:

"Bolsheviks were not into food. [Vladimir] Lenin was not a foodie," says von Bremzen. "They saw it as fuel; they had to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy. And private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized."

Following the civil war, the shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. Stalin's industrialization program included the industrialization of food. Completely new, mass-produced food appeared — foods like canned and processed soup, fish, meat and mayonnaise.

"The whole of the Soviet Union, all 120 different ethnic groups were suddenly being served exactly the same stuff," says Grisha Freidin. "Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the politburo level. The kinds of candies that were being produced was decided in a special meeting with Stalin and [Vyacheslav] Molotov."

Fascinating.   

Ian McEwan looks back at Brexit

The take in this op-ed in The Guardian by Ian McEwan sounds entirely right to me.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

It’s done. A triumph of dogged negotiation by May then, briefly, Johnson, has fulfilled the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands. The rest of the world, presidents Putin and Trump excepted, have watched on in astonishment and dismay. A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause. We must pack up our tents, perhaps to the sound of church bells, and hope to begin the 15-year trudge, back towards some semblance of where we were yesterday with our multiple trade deals, security, health and scientific co-operation and a thousand other useful arrangements.

The only certainty is that we’ll be asking ourselves questions for a very long time. Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion”. How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.

Yes, this last aspect makes a mockery of the stupid arguments put by conservative and libertarian Right alike (and, for reasons I could never follow, also endorsed here in comments by Homer!) that not going ahead with Brexit after the referendum would be some sort of heinous travesty of democracy.   

While I am attacking my readers, I should add that I don't think I have ever seen Jason point to any analysis (outside of the self-serving pro Brexit campaigners, who we know were lying about numbers) to show that it would actually be a benefit in the long run for England.   I sometimes look at Helen Dales's tweets too, and read some of her commentary.  Same thing can be said about her.

So basically,  the people who would like to think of themselves as moderate Right, whether as classic liberals, or those with a stronger libertarian bent like Sinclair Davidson, simply supported it for the simplistic, ideological, belief that a multinational organisation means more "red tape", which = bad, regardless of any actual or serious analysis of the efficiencies the organisation achieves.

Not sure who to blame for this one

I like to attack traditional Chinese (or Asian) medicine ideas that lead to endangered animals being killed or mistreated for their imaginary health benefits; but I have another Eastern mystical idea that deserves rubbishing - that men holding back from ejaculation during sex is fantastic for their health.  (Not sure whether to blame the Chinese or Indians though - it appears to be endorsed both in yoga and in Taoist ideas.  It also appears to have had the famous Zen Buddhist Alan Watts on side.)

I'm talking about this because of this article at AEON, which takes a somewhat cynical, but still  open minded, attitude to the topic.

I just think it's very silly.   Oooh - semen is magic and holding onto it makes dudes live almost forever.   I mean, really.   Sure, if some couples want to have stationary sex and if it makes them feel good, go right ahead, don't let me stop you.   But this mystical overlay...

Besides, given the nature of the prostate and studies about ejaculation and prostate problems, it's hard to believe that it is healthier than normal sex.  

Here's an amusing part of the article, where the author describes a conference in Thailand he went to (with his wife) in 2015:

To be frank, my first impression of the Tao Garden’s conference was that it could have made a delicious subject for another Huxley satire, à la Brave New World. The clinic offered every kind of New Age therapy imaginable, including blood irradiation with strange blue light, Ayurvedic massage, colonic irrigation, full-body cupping, and a very painful treatment where so-called granules in the blood vessels of your anal canal and testicles are squeezed flat by muscular Thai grandmothers. The ecstatic screams of Tantra’s female acolytes were so loud at night that nearby condo owners threatened to call the police. My wife sensibly spent most of her time sunning herself by the swimming pool, sipping pineapple drinks, and watching the well-muscled tantrikas do laps in their G-string briefs, while I attended lectures and demonstrations in such subjects as ‘Preserving the Yang Element’, ‘Nine Sexual Secrets’ and ‘Awakening the Goddess’.  

The next section gets explicit:

The highpoint of the conference was a public demonstration of ejaculation control training for which a young man among Muir’s followers had volunteered. (At lunch that day, the same young man had told my wife and me that he was torn between dedicating himself to Tantra and becoming a dentist as his parents fervently wished.) The demonstration took place in a large room whose only furnishings were floor mats. As the young man disrobed and lay down, Leah Alchin Piper, Muir’s former lover and now business partner, opened her shirt and began ....

 Interested readers can go to the article to finish reading the description.  :)  It does have its amusing aspects.

What does Andrew say?

Two observations from looking at Andrew Bolt's blog:

*  Here's how he talks about the Morrison government's "sports rort":

MCKENZIE'S SPORTS RORT IS AN INSULT TO AUSTRALIA'S VOLUNTEERS

When Morrison's blathering attempts at excuse making are not convincing Andrew Bolt, it's time for Scotty from Marketing to give up and sack someone.

*  He's downplaying the seriousness of the coronovirus outbreak.   ("Hasn't killed anyone outside of China yet".)  

Given he doesn't have a clue about sound judgements on risk (see climate change), this probably means we should really start to panic now.

A mental problem to avoid

I didn't know that OCD could manifest as intrusive and unwanted sexual thoughts:

My doctor mistook my OCD for paedophilia 

but yeah, seems this can be a thing.   And I can understand how uncomfortable it must make other people feel (and how uncertain as to how to react) when they know someone is suffering from this.   

You know it's a stupid idea...

....when both my rather apolitical wife (like all sensible people, though, she thinks Trump is a joke and complete embarrassment) and someone at Catallaxy says word to the effect "this idea of putting Australians flown out from China into quarantine on Christmas Island seems unnecessary and over the top".

And the reasons are that it is just ridiculously expensive to use Christmas Island, and is surely likely to put the Australians at unnecessary risk of not being able to get the best treatment and drugs should they be needed.

I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea of quarantine per se - but is the government seriously suggesting there is no where suitable on mainland Australia near a capital city (or large rural centre with a major hospital) where the quarantining can be done?

Update:  The Chaser take on it probably has an element of truth behind it - the government is probably itching to get more people into a facility it is already spending money on unnecessarily:

Update:  and here's some support for my take:

Christmas Island is ill-prepared to receive a planeload of Australians from the coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan, with its medical facilities inadequate if somebody falls seriously ill, Australia’s peak medical body says.

Head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Tony Bartone, said Australia was ranked among the most capable countries in the world at containing the spread of infectious diseases, but that Christmas Island, chosen for its remoteness and because it has a detention centre, was ill-conceived as a health quarantine location.

But I see that Labor has decided to not rock the boat - which seems ridiculous.   I just do not believe that this could not be done cheaper and more effectively on Australian soil:

The Federal Opposition is backing the decision to use Christmas Island to quarantine Australians returning from Wuhan.

Plans are underway to evacuate as many as 600 Australians from the epicentre of the Coronavirus outbreak in Hubei Province.

  

Not something you really want to read at the airport

Boeing Dreamliner production problems threaten the aircraft's safety, former quality manager warns