Why Warren has the right idea

Another great piece at Vox by David Roberts, arguing that the sickness in American politics, caused by the American brand of conservatism, is a systemic one about which only Elizabeth Warren seems to have clearly thought about.

His summary of the problem is not new, but I like it nonetheless:

As I have recounted at great length in other posts, over the last several decades, conservatives have waged war on social and political trust, calling into question the fairness and independence of almost every major US institution from journalism to academia to science. They have created parallel institutions of their own, meant to support their factional interests. And they have relentlessly cast “libs” as an enemy within — an alien, hostile, and ultimately illegitimate force.

As a result, a large faction of the country has descended into paranoia and conspiracy theories, fighting intensely against the basic rules, norms, and post-war assumptions of American life. And because that faction has successfully rendered all political fights — even fights over basic facts — as vicious, zero-sum partisan struggles, another large faction of the country has simply tuned out, coming to regard politics and public life generally as corrupt and fruitless. Americans’ trust in their institutions and in one another is at record lows. 

This serves the right’s purposes. If all common identity is dissolved, all transpartisan facts and norms, then there is no longer any ability to communicate across factional lines. What remains is raw power struggle. That is the milieu in which an identitarian like Donald Trump feels at home; witness his purging of public servants he deems insufficiently loyal. 

But it works against the left’s purposes. The left needs for voters to believe that effective, responsive governance is possible — that we can, in fact, have nice things. The left needs social and political trust. Without them, collective action for collective benefit, the left’s stock in trade, becomes impossible. 

This is the left’s challenge in the US: how to break out of the doom loop and get on a trajectory of better governance and rising trust.

 As to the difficulty of addressing this, politically, you should go read the rest of the article.

COVID-19, explained

Someone just cut and pasted this on twitter, and I can't see whose account it is from.   Probably for the best:

American cuisine can be...excessive

Look, even though I can enjoy a good steak, a 250 to 300 g cut is plenty.   But the American way with meat can be pretty over the top and look distinctly unappealing.  And what is it with the meat on the rib?  Looks like it is charcoal:

I vote Gore

Talk about your trivial First World problems, but The Guardian has an article speculating on who a good replacement director should be for the next Indiana Jones film, now that Steven Spielberg has dropped out.

I don't know anything about most directors on the list, but I agree with the section on Gore Verbinski:  he is extremely talented with protracted action sequences, and I would love him to have a go at an Indiana Jones.

The success of the film, however, will be extremely dependent on its screenplay, and who it sets up to taking over the hat.   The idea flown in the last film obviously didn't pan out.  (Not that it was as bad a film as everyone makes out.)

I am not at all convinced that it is a good idea to be making another one at all.  Harrison Ford looks very old now, and films in which ageing actors are trying to appear too active often look a bit pathetic.   (There are many examples in recent years.) 

BUT I STILL SAY THIS:   the perfect last appearance for Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones would be for him to be one of the astronauts going into the Mothership at the end of Close Encounters.

A fruity observation

I usually notice what fruit and vegetables are good each season.   A couple of summers ago, I think it was, stone fruit seemed to have an exceptionally nice season.  After that, maybe a year or so ago, we seemed to have a flood of cheap but good quality pineapples.

This summer, I have often been impressed with - tomatoes.   I don't know who is growing them now, and how they have got them to develop better flavour and colour, but I reckon tomatoes have been really good, and often not very expensive, this summer.

Back to your more important reading, now.

Possible outcomes of COVID-19 taking off in the USA

While this guy bemoans (rightly) the politicisation of COVID-19 by Trump, he doesn't go on to note that it's possible that the result of the gullibility of believing Donald and his conspiracy mongering mates might be a reduction in the population of Donald Trump supporters (seeing the virus is most deadly in the older demographic):

As for a more, slightly paranoid, pondering about what might happen:

Update:   Trump calms a troubled nation:

Google and loneliness

I got given a couple of Google Home Minis (now called Google Nest Mini) for Christmas, and I have set one up in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom.  

I don't do all that much with them:  listening to radio streams is one useful thing (so I no longer need to use a portable radio in the bathroom to listen to the ABC while shaving in the morning);  asking it to find my mobile phone by making it ring is another useful feature, as is asking for the day's weather.   I've played guessing games, or quiz games, and asked it to play named songs from Spotify too.   I see that you can also buy screen "hubs" for the system too, as well as lights controlled by it.   Also a combined pack with a Googlecast for the TV with a mini speaker too, presumably to help make searching for content easier.

Despite the limited use to which I have put mine, using it has made me think that it must have considerable potential to help older people fight loneliness, and cope with technology in the easiest way possible.   Having a voice respond to a request is surely a more psychologically comforting thing than poking at a screen.  

I would guess that some psychology department somewhere is already doing a study along these lines:  perhaps setting up Google Minis in half of a retirement village and training the residents how to use it, and comparing their mood after 6 months to those residents who don't have access to the service?

I would not be surprised to find it has a positive influence.  

Guilt increasing

Yeah, I have been aware of this for some time (and although the figures are for America, I think it is similar here):

One in five pounds of beef sold come from Holstein or Jersey cows, which frequently are decommissioned dairy cows past their prime. Almost all of the meat from dairy cows is ground (it’s generally not marbled enough or muscled enough for steaks) and made into inexpensive hamburger for food service. So, it’s our consumption of milk and cheese that ultimately fuels the avalanche of burgers at fast-food restaurants.

I think young male calves from dairy production often face the same fate.

When buying cheap mince from Coles or Woolworths, it usually does cross my mind how it is from cows, which I like to think don't suffer much in the milk production phase of their life.  (Although they do get calves taken away from them.)

At least steak from adult cattle is from an animal that had a pretty good life.

While I enjoy a good steak, I can imagine a life in which I give up beef.   I can't bear the idea of giving up on cheese, though.  Which reminds me - why don't we hear more about the question to make "cow-free dairy products"?   The company is apparently selling (on a very small scale, by the sounds) an ice cream product, but it attracts very little attention.

Something good comes from an (almost) pandemic

France 24 reports:

China on Monday declared an immediate and “comprehensive” ban on the trade and consumption of wild animals, a practice believed responsible for the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

The country’s top legislative committee approved a proposal “prohibiting the illegal wildlife trade, abolishing the bad habit of overconsumption of wildlife, and effectively protecting the lives and health of the people,” state television reported.

Previous temporary bans have been put in place, including after the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus killed hundreds of people in China and Hong Kong in 2002-03 and was also traced to wild animal consumption.

That prohibition was short-lived, however, and conservationists have long accused China of tolerating a cruel trade in wild animals as exotic menu items or for use in traditional medicines whose efficacy is not confirmed by science.

Sounds as if the government might be serious about keeping this as a long term ban.  

Rules for Life (continued)

I mentioned my ever-so-slowly-compiling Rules for Life previously today, and TimT seems to have been missing them.   (My readers really are inattentive at times!)   Anyway, it did remind me that I had not added the important one about witchcraft.  So the update:

1.  Always carry a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket.  Always.
2.  Never buy into timeshare apartments or holiday schemes.
3.  If you have a choice, buy the washing machine with a 15 minute "fast wash" option.
4.  Always buy reverseable belts. (You know, usually black on one side and brown on the other.)
5.  The best souvenir when on a good holiday is a distinctive cup or mug, which is to be used semi-regularly on your return.
6.  If an activity hurts a lot and causes inflammation - stop doing it.  Permanently, if it keeps hurting.
7.  If a potential boyfriend or girlfriend says, with intended irony, that they know that they can be a bit of a creep (or difficult) at times - don't believe the irony.   Just don't get into a relationship of any kind with them.

and the new one I remembered today:

8.  Do not take holidays in countries where witchcraft or sorcery is still an offence on the books.   It basically means you can be arrested for looking the wrong way at someone.  

I'll have enough for a book any year now...

Update:  I think this one should be added, too:

9.  If you like mashed potato, buy and use a potato ricer.   No - just do it.  The uniformly smooth results for every future batch of mash will give you pleasure for the rest of your life.   

Misogynists upset with Coalition

Sinclair Davidson has an unsubtle view of politics in which he thinks the winning party should crush all Opposition under its heal and never concede to it on anything.   He was, for example, probably the only academic in the land who thought the asinine and highly partisan Bronwyn Bishop was a good Speaker in the House under the Abbott government:  a truly eye roll inducing attitude for an educated observer of Parliament at the time.

So, naturally, he is upset with this (somewhat surprisingly uniform, but pleasing) vote yesterday:

The Coalition government has supported Labor’s motion in the Senate to call for men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt to be stripped of her Order of Australia award over her comments on last week’s horrendous murder-suicide in Brisbane.

The successful motion puts more pressure on the Council for the Order of Australia to remove the AM Arndt received in the Australia Day honours.

The Senate motion was carried 55-2, with only One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts voting against it.

It said Arndt’s comments “are reckless and abhorrent”.

“The values that underpin Ms. Arndt’s views on this horrific family violence incident are not consistent with her retaining her Order of Australia,” it said.

And look at the misogynist commenters agreeing how "disgraceful" this vote was.

Seriously, a bunch of people who routinely speculate that the downfall of the West began with women getting the vote (I'd like to know how often they say this in front of their wives - those of them that have or still retain wives) should take a hard look at their own attitudes and realise why they are ignored by the politicians they vote for.

I bet Arndt is smarting over this, too.  If only she could be "driven too far" to drop out of public commentary and culture warring.

Another important woman in science I'm only just hearing about...

At Nature, a review of a biography about a woman astronomer (Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin) who was big in her field, but not famous in the public mind:

In 1925, Payne was the first person to be awarded a PhD in astronomy at Radcliffe College, at the time the women’s branch of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her thesis on stellar atmospheres is her greatest contribution: she related the line patterns in the observed spectra of stars to their physical conditions. She also discovered that hydrogen is the main component of stars, followed by helium. Her discoveries and expertise were eventually recognized with prizes and honours, culminating in a life-achievement lectureship from the American Astronomical Society.

The brilliance of Payne’s thesis was acknowledged by the most prominent US astronomers of the early twentieth century: her supervisor, Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory; and Henry Norris Russell at Princeton University in New Jersey. But both disagreed that hydrogen is the main component of stars. She based her theory on painstaking analysis of the large cache of stellar spectra in the Harvard collection. It was informed by the predictions of Indian physicist Meghnad Saha’s theory of ionization, which relates the observed spectrum of a stellar atmosphere (assuming it is a gas in thermal equilibrium) to its temperature, pressure and composition.

Her conclusion went against a view widely espoused by prominent astronomers, including Arthur Eddington: that stars are made up of essentially the same elements as Earth (silicon, carbon, iron and so on). In response to this criticism, and because she was anxious to get her results published, Payne downplayed her finding as a possible error. Russell was later credited with the discovery, having reached the same result by different means. Payne’s role stayed hidden from the wider scientific consciousness for several decades.

It doesn't sound like she was very likeable at a personal level, though:

I met Payne in the mid-1970s. I remember her as a stern, chain-smoking presence stalking the halls of the observatory: she scolded me for being late for a meeting (recently arrived from Italy, I regarded being precisely on time as impolite). After reading Moore’s well-researched book, I realized that she was a complex figure with whom I can empathize despite being two generations younger and from a different background. A committed scientist and mentor to a new generation, she successfully juggled career and family with a love of the arts and world travel.

Her autobiography (published privately as The Dyer’s Hand in 1979, and publicly as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1984), is worth a read for its personal view of her multifaceted life and her interaction with observatory colleagues, including the female ‘computers’ who processed astronomical data. I also recommend for its immediacy her 1968 interview for the American Institute of Physics oral-history programme, conducted by Harvard astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich (see go.nature.com/37nm0vr). It captures her essential briskness and rare ability to talk in complex and nuanced sentences.

I expect Graeme (who has argued, from God's knows what line of reasoning, that planets grow up to be stars, to argue in comments that Arthur Eddington was right all along.) 

Some observations

*  Last night's Foreign Correspondent, about Saudi Arabia's attempt to open up to foreign (well, Western) tourism actually showed the place to be of much more archaeological and geographic interest than I realised.  (Call me ignorant, but I didn't expect some of the mountain-y bits in the country.  I usually just imagine it as all sand dunes with a handful of cities.)   I still don't want to go there, though.   It's one of my Rules of Life:  do not holiday in countries where you can be charged with witchcraft.

*  I really think American pundits spend too much time trying to analyse the potential performance of Presidential candidates.   Polling is difficult in the country, with their voluntary voting and weird system of voter registration into categories that people may not follow on the day anyway;  international and domestic events are quite unpredictable;  and with any luck it would be Trump, who appears to get no sleep anymore and slurs regularly at rallies and speeches, who might have a health crisis before November.  Hence I am cynical about this study, indicating that Sanders can only do win  if he gets a surge of new young voters, and the way people like David Roberts are already certain that with Sanders, who they don't mind, is still bound to lose.

*  That Malaysian king seems pretty considerate, for a king:

By the way, Jason - do you follow that Erin Cook on Twitter?  She seems to combine smart, informed, on the ground commentary on South East Asia together with a fragile personal life in which she is always broke and emotionally just scrapping through.   

*  Oh, and here is some analysis of what is going on in Malaysia at CNA.  It includes this bit:

Professor James Chin, director of the Asia Institute Tasmania at the University of Tasmania, told CNA that Dr Mahathir’s decision to resign on Monday was purely tactical as he never wanted to hand over the baton to PKR’s president Anwar Ibrahim.

He said Dr Mahathir had agreed to the PH succession pact to hand over the premiership to Mr Anwar before the May 2018 polls because he needed the help of PKR, Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah) to overthrow former prime minister Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition.

“Prior to the election, everybody got together because everybody wanted to get rid of Najib. You can’t really hold them to what they agreed on before the election because back in 2018, it was widely understood that Najib had damaged Malaysia because of the 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Berhad) corruption case,” he said.

Prof Chin said the bitter history between Dr Mahathir and Mr Anwar suggested that the succession would never have happened between them.

“The general consensus in Kuala Lumpur is that Anwar will not be prime minister this year or next year and will probably miss his chance to be prime minister in the future as well.

“As long as Mahathir is in charge, he will try to hand over the prime minister position to somebody else,” said Prof Chin.

More reason to admire Singapore

CNA may be the Singaporean government's PR outlet, but I still say that watching it always shows that there is much to admire in the whole technocratic/economic interventionalist/social-engineering-for-multicultural-harmony approach of the Singaporean government.   As I have said before, watch any Singaporean government (or even corporate) spokesperson or minister on CNA, and you can't help but be impressed with their apparent intelligence, reasonableness and the general tone of optimism.  

The latest example:  Singapore tourism is taking a hit already due to the COVID-19 problem, so the government has offered to increase payments for tourism workers to get training while their sector suffers.  Don't just lay them off, they are telling hotels, etc, but we pay for them getting additional or other training during this down time.    You can view the CNA video version of the story here.

For those who want more detail, and get a feeling of sad longing for the way the city state manages to show the way government should be, more details are here: 

To help mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) and Workforce Singapore (WSG), together with the Singapore Hotel Association (SHA) and the Food, Drinks and Allied Workers Union (FDAWU), have jointly announced various support measures for the tourism sector.

As part of the Stabilisation and Support Package announced by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat on 18 Feb during the Budget 2020 statement, these measures were introduced today by Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Manpower, and Mr Chee Hong Tat, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of Education, during a learning journey to Copthorne King’s Singapore. At the event, SHA and FDAWU had also signed an MOU to commit to working together to save jobs, build confidence and deepen capabilities of employees to prepare for recovery and growth. The MOU was facilitated by STB.

Such ground-up efforts and commitment from the employers and the union, together with the support measures rolled out by the various government agencies, make up the latest wave of relief measures to minimise potential retrenchment, upskill workers and redesign jobs to prepare the sector for when business demand returns. Businesses will also continue to receive support in defraying the costs involved in business transformation and job redesign, such as the Hotel Job Redesign Initiative and the Lean Enterprise Development Scheme.

Encouraging tourism sector to leverage downtime to reskill and upskill

To provide tourism companies with more support to upgrade the capabilities of their workers, STB will be enhancing the Training Industry Professionals in Tourism (TIP-iT) fund to fund up to 90% of training course fees and trainer fees, up from the previous cap of 50%. In addition, funding for absentee payroll will be increased from $4.50/hour to 90% of the worker’s hourly basic salary, capped at $10/hour.

In support of STB’s measures, SSG will also be providing time-limited, enhanced training support for the tourism sector. Employers in the tourism sector who send their workers for selected sector-specific training programmes in the next three months will receive: (i) enhanced Absentee Payroll (AP) support at 90% of hourly basic salary capped at $10 per hour, and (ii) enhanced course fee support at 90% of course fees. SSG will work through appointed training partners to ramp up training capacity for such programmes. Training programmes will include courses in digital marketing and SkillsFuture for Digital Workplace programmes.

 Gah.  That sounds such a reasonable thing to do.    And supported by government, unions and business.   I know that a tiny city state may find it easier to quickly come up with such proposals - they don't have to run it across a bunch of States like in Australia - but still, I find it impressive.

Some thoughts on COVID-19

*   COVID-19:  I have said very little about it, because I guessed there was a good chance that it would be SARS-like in its limited expansion.  Now that this seems a wrong guess, how dangerous is it compared to other famous pandemics?:

Fourteen percent of confirmed cases have been “severe,” involving serious pneumonia and shortness of breath. Another 5 percent of patients confirmed to have the disease developed respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multi-organ failure—what the agency calls “critical cases” potentially resulting in death. Roughly 2.3 percent of confirmed cases did result in death.  ....

The latest data from China stem from an analysis of nearly 45,000 confirmed cases, and on the whole suggest that the people most likely to develop severe forms of COVID-19 are those with pre-existing illnesses and the elderly.

While less than 1 percent of people who were otherwise healthy died from the disease, the fatality rate for people with cardiovascular disease was 10.5 percent. That figure was 7.3 percent for diabetes patients and around 6 percent for those with chronic respiratory disease, hypertension, or cancer.

While overall, 2.3 percent of known cases proved fatal—which many experts say is likely an overestimate of the mortality rate, given that many mild cases might go undiagnosed—patients 80 years or older were most at risk, with 14.8 percent of them dying. Deaths occurred in every age group except in children under the age of nine, and, generally speaking, “we see relatively few cases among children,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week.

This pattern of increasing severity with age differs from that of some other viral outbreaks, notably the 1918 flu pandemic, for which mortality was high in young children and in people between 20 and 40 years of age. However, it’s broadly consistent with records of the SARS and MERS coronavirus outbreaks, notes Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “If you’re over fifty or sixty and you have some other health issues and if you’re unlucky enough to be exposed to this virus, it could be very bad,” she says.

OK, I don't want to risk getting it, but still, this doesn't sound like it carries the same sort of demographic and economic issues as the Spanish flu.

* I feel very sorry for Japan and its Olympic organisers, and every person working for a business that has made specific plans assuming the event proceeds.

* Of course, the oddball nation of South Korea would have a specific issue related to its propensity for cultish, nutty religions:

Health authorities are also focusing resources on the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, founded in 1984 by charismatic pastor Lee Man-hee, whose followers, estimated at up to 240,000 worldwide, believe he is the messiah. Shincheonji is Korean for "new heaven and earth." Its critics say it's a cult.

Authorities are not sure how the disease was first transmitted to the group, but investigators have been looking into it. More than 9,000 Shincheonji members have been put under quarantine, and the government plans to test all of them for the virus.

Critics say the disease may have spread within the church quickly because of the way that it worships. "Shincheonji followers hold services sitting on the floor, without any chairs," packed together "like bean sprouts," says Shin Hyun-uk, director of the Guri Cult Counseling Center, an organization in Gyeonggi province that works to extract members from the church. Shin was a member of the Shincheonji group for 20 years, managing the church's Bible study instructors, until 2006.

"A bigger problem is that they shout out 'amen' after every sentence the pastor utters, pretty much every few seconds. And they do that at the top of their lungs," sending respiratory droplets flying everywhere, he adds. These droplets are believed to transmit the coronavirus.

He says that group members proselytize in secret, without revealing their identity. This is because many Koreans are wary of the group and its reputation. As a result, this makes it difficult for people who may have been targeted to know whether they've been in contact with a member of the sect. "Because Shincheonji members cannot reveal themselves, they make it impossible for others to be cautious and self-quarantine themselves."