Jinn fizz

An unusual jinn story found in Gulf News:

Kuwaiti woman pays $96,000 to get rid of jinn

Cairo: A Kuwaiti woman has accused two other women of swindling nearly 30,000 dinars from her by purportedly ridding her of jinn, local media reported.

The woman, whose name was not disclosed, claimed that another Kuwaiti woman and her stateless Bidoon assistant had duped her into believing that she was possessed by a jinn.

In her report to the police, the 37-year-old woman provided evidence of paying KD25,080 via bank transfers and an additional 4,000 dinars in cash to expel the alleged jinn.

The alleged victim had been tricked by the two charlatans into paying the money on different occasions during the sorcery sessions, according to a security source.

“She presented a bank statement proving the payments,” the source said.

An investigation into a fraud case has been opened and the two alleged defendants will be summoned for interrogation.

I always feel I don't know enough about how widespread worrying about jinn might be in the average Arab mind.

 

 

Time travelling at the University of Queensland

I have written many posts over the years about time travel, and while I am pretty sure I read this article in 2020 about some theoretical work at UQ, I don't think I got around to posting about it.    

Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible, according to the mathematical modelling of a prodigious University of Queensland undergraduate student.

Fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) student Germain Tobar has been investigating the possibility of time travel, under the supervision of UQ physicist Dr Fabio Costa....

 

“The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” Dr Costa said.

“Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus.

“However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.

“This is a paradox – an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe.

“Some physicists say it is possible, but logically it’s hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action.

“It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur.”

However the researchers say their work shows that neither of these conditions have to be the case, and it is possible for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action that the time traveller makes.

“In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” Mr Tobar said.

“No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.

“This would mean that – no matter your actions - the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it.

“Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency.

“The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”

The research is published in Classical and Quantum Gravity (DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc).

 Actually, while searching this place for previous time travel posts, I realised that I had been thinking about a certain idea since at least 2013 - much longer than I would have estimated. 

Time flies, I guess.

Needling

Has anyone else noticed that news camera operators (I was going to say "camera men", which most of them surely are, but I decided to be PC) in Australia are taking particular delight in showing needles going into arms in clear close up in any story they are doing about Covid vaccinations?

I am not needle phobic - in fact, I used to donate blood in my younger days - but I still don't particularly care to watch needles going into arms, whether it be mine or anyone else's.   I do get people's squeamishness about it, and it seems to me the media is not helping vaccination rates when they ensure that any needle phobic person is reminded each time they watch the news about how far in the needle goes.

Someone should tell them to stop it.   (I reckon there is much greater reticence in the American news I have seen to do the same thing.) 

Some drug comedy

It's a couple of weeks old now, but I thought this sketch on Conan was pretty funny:

Pet ownership is great, but really...

The SMH reprints a story I had missed in the Washington Post:

Taiwan is home to one of the world’s most active communities of pet psychics - or animal communicators, as Hsu and her colleagues prefer to call themselves. The cottage industry is fuelled by residents’ growing devotion to their animals - increasingly a replacement for children - and desire for companionship during the pandemic.

Every few months, the Taiwan Animal Communication Centre graduates a new class of students, keeping a roster of more than 80 certified professionals for hire. Hundreds like Hsu have been trained by other teachers at home or overseas, including the United States and Britain, where the idea of pet telepathy emerged earlier but has not been as popular as in Taiwan. It takes months to get an appointment with the most popular communicators.

“There are more communicators per capita in Taiwan than anywhere else I’ve seen,” said Lauren McCall, a British American animal communicator who has run workshops for students in Taiwan for seven years.

This takes the idea of fraudulent mediums to another level. 

China and crypto

I haven't been paying much attention to the situation of China with cryprocurrency, but last night on China's All Propaganda, All the Time news network, I watched a video of a guy explaining Bitcoin:

 

So, oddly, it says at the start that China is going to wind down some coin mining in Mongolia because it is using up too much energy, but the general gist of the video still seems to be to encourage acceptance of cryptocurrency as the future of currency.

Which reminded me of some stories I had briefly seen but not paid too much attention to in the middle of last year about how China was going to introduce a digital currency that may challenge Bitcoin.

But the digital currency being talked about last year had the distinctly un-Bitcoin feature of enabling better government tracking of financial dealings?: 

China's version of a sovereign digital currency is set to revolutionise the ability of regulatory authorities to scrutinise the nation’s payment and financial system as officials will acquire more power to track how money is used by its citizens.

“Looking back years later, the two defining historic events of 2020 would be the coronavirus pandemic, and the other would be [China’s] digital currency,” said Xu Yuan, a senior researcher with Peking University's Digital Finance Research Cen­tre.

Here's another recent story about it:

One of the ways the PBoC can keep companies like Ant Group and Alibaba on a leash in future is to embed the e-renminbi into the monetary system. It is arguably a perfect example of how the most central of authorities can use a distributed technology network to its advantage.

“You can say it [blockchain] is decentralised, but actually if you want to track everything you can do it easily,” says Zabulis, “they can see all the flow, all the wallets. It’s extremely powerful.”

China has long been concerned about regulating and limiting shadow banking activities. Blockchain ledgers are the perfect way to monitor loans. Before stricter oversight was introduced late in 2017, much shadow lending had been via banks’ off-balance sheet wealth management products, along with various trust products from non-bank institutions.

So, yeah, I guess I am a little confused about this.   Cryptocurrency has never made much sense to me, and its appeal to libertarians and small government types like Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg seemed to always be based on it reducing government control of money.   Because of that feature, I assumed that all governments would eventually legislate to control it.  

And is the reality that the blockchange technology that the RMIT crowd swoon over actually will ultimately allow real Big Brother government knowledge of all financial dealings?  

Update:  recent stories like this one  have talked about the complicated situation with cryptocurrency trading from China.

I don't really understand all of this, but it all smells a bit like big trouble to come, if you ask me...

 

New Age men and Qanon

At the Washington Post, an article about the odd cross over between some New Age masculinity fans (like the horned guy at the 6 January riot/insurrection) and Qanon.   This goes back a long way:

Jules Evans, an honorary research fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, has investigated the history, philosophy and psychology of well-being. In an article for Medium called “Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap,” Evans wrote about how leading members of the Nazi party in the 1930s and ’40s were followers of alternative spirituality and medicine. “There was an idea that western culture has lost its way and we need to return to traditional sources of wisdom, whether that be Hinduism or Sufism or traditional gender roles,” Evans told me. It’s a concept that’s popular today with the alt-right. “There is an overlap,” he says, “between New Age and far-right populism in traditionalist thinking, that the West has lost its way with feminism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and we need a return to order.”

Moving forward:

...the men’s movement took off in the ’70s and ’80s. It manifested in three expressions, says Cliff Leek, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado and vice president of the American Men’s Studies Association: “You get pro-feminist [men’s] groups that do work around reproductive health and sexual violence; and, on the other end of the spectrum, men’s rights groups that say, ‘We are gendered and the system is out to get us.’ The middle way is the mythopoetic: tying masculinity back to the sacred and mythological.”

 The prevailing figure in the mythopoetic movement is the poet Robert Bly. In 1990, Bly, who was in his 60s (he’s now 94), published “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which includes lines like, “Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.” Bly’s idea, told through Jung-influenced archetypes and fairy tales, was that men had been robbed of true masculinity via emotionally withholding fathers who raised soft sons. With some reflection — and maybe some banging on drums with other dudes in the forest — they could reclaim their inner Zeuses and thrive. The book was sometimes the butt of jokes, but spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

 And further down:

“As soon as we tie masculinity to spirituality, we turn masculinity into something ‘sacred’ as well as distinct and exclusive of women,” says Leek. “I’m not entirely sure that is something that can be done in a way that doesn’t reinforce or naturalize inequalities.” These retreats seem to be encouraging strong behavior from a group — White, ruling-class men — who are already the most privileged in our society. But you also see this core message about strong men in socially conservative packaging. There’s a fear of women getting too powerful and a veneration of the housewife that, frankly, reminds me of the Proud Boys, the alt-right group with a history of violence that believes women are best left at home raising children.

“The wellness and spirituality world is very parallel to the evangelical Christian world, especially when it comes to the messaging around masculinity,” Leek explains. “The mythopoetic aspect of the men’s movement is very much rooted in patriarchal notions of chivalry and men as protectors and warriors. Evangelical masculinity is basically identical.” He wasn’t surprised to see the QAnon Shaman beside evangelical groups at the Capitol. QAnon, with its fixation on pedophilic conspiracies led by Hollywood and the liberal elite, can give a certain kind of man in search of purpose a way to feel like a literal protector.

Interesting.   

So that's how the Right goes wrong with an unwarranted emphasis on the differences between masculinity and femininity, but does the Left do the same with its uncritical takes on transgenderism? 

Space sounds even more unhealthy than expected

Gee, I seem to recall that Arthur C Clarke and other science fiction optimists used to speculate that heart patients might benefit from a period in freefall in orbiting hospitals, the idea being that it would help recovery for the heart to have less "work" to do.

That idea has probably long gone out the window, but this article at the BBC sheds more light on the matter:

Spending very long periods of time in space has something in common with extreme endurance swimming: both can cause the heart to shrink.

That's the conclusion of a study that compared the effects of astronaut Scott Kelly's year in space with a marathon swim by athlete Benoît Lecomte.

Both remove the loads on the heart that are usually applied by gravity, causing the organ to atrophy.

Exercise wasn't enough in either case to counteract the changes to the heart.

I didn't know endurance swimming could have that effect, but here's the explanation:

On 5 June 2018, Benoît Lecomte embarked on an effort to swim the Pacific Ocean, having previously traversed the Atlantic.

He swam 2,821km over 159 days, eventually abandoning the attempt.

Swimming for very long periods also changes the loads placed on the heart by gravity because the person is in a horizontal position rather than vertical.

Lecomte swam an average of 5.8 hours per day, sleeping for around eight hours each night. This meant that he was spending between nine and 17 hours each day in a supine state.

Scientists sometimes use bed rest studies to simulate spaceflight because lying down eliminates the head-to-foot gradient that places a load on the heart. But Prof Levine said water immersion for long periods in a prone position is an even better model for time spent in orbit.

"Now you take away the head-to-foot gradient and then you put the person in the water, so you adjust that gradient too. It's just about like being in space," said Prof Levine.

The possible health consequences of a smaller heart in space:

The heart adaptations, however, aren't long-term - both men's hearts returned to normal once they were back on terra firma.

But chambers in the heart known as the atria expand in space, in part because of changes in the way fluid passes through. This might lead to a condition called atrial fibrillation, where the heart beats fast and in an irregular manner. It can impair exercise, but may also increase the risk of stroke.

And what's this?  A whole new idea as to how radiation may hurt health?: 

There's also another risk to this vital organ from space travel. The higher radiation levels in space might accelerate coronary heart disease. Astronauts are screened for atherosclerosis, but they are generally middle-aged when they go into space and scientists know this is a problem that builds with age. 

The Pentagon blowing up the ship and the canal not necessary after all

News just now:

A huge container ship that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since Tuesday has reportedly been refloated.

Video posted social media on Monday appeared to show the stern of the Ever Given swung towards the canal bank, opening space in the channel. Maritime services company Inchcape also reported the vessel was freed.

Which reminds me of the stupidest take on the whole matter by one T Carlson:

 

Fertility worries

A somewhat interesting interview with a professor of environmental medicine who is sounding the alarm bell about declining fertility and chemicals.

Earlier this month I mocked Tucker Carlson running a story about falling sperm counts, and he perhaps was inspired by this professor's new book?     I still mock him anyway - because it's not as if conservatives and Republicans (and Trump) had or have the environment runs on the card when dealing with environmental contamination of any kind.     (And the key blame appears to rest on chemicals.)

The stool of wisdom

Well, this gut flora influences everything idea might be able to be taken to the next level:

The new Frontiers in Psychiatry study involved 187 participants, ages 28 to 97, who completed validated self-report-based measures of loneliness, wisdom, compassion, social support and social engagement. The gut microbiota was analyzed using fecal samples. Microbial gut diversity was measured in two ways: alpha-diversity, referring to the ecological richness of microbial species within each individual and beta-diversity, referring to the differences in the microbial community composition between individuals.

"We found that lower levels of loneliness and higher levels of wisdom, compassion, social support and engagement were associated with greater phylogenetic richness and diversity of the gut microbiome," said first author Tanya T. Nguyen, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

The authors said that the mechanisms that may link loneliness, compassion and wisdom with gut microbial diversity are not known, but observed that reduced microbial diversity typically represents worse physical and mental health, and is associated with a variety of diseases, including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and major depressive disorder.

Of course, while it might be a simple as wise and socially engaged people eat better and that encourages a certain healthy gut flora, it would be funnier if wisdom and compassion could be spread by, say, our Einsteins and (I dunno) Dalai Lamas of the world providing their poop for fecal implants amongst the unhappy. 

 

 

Going to a Roman pub was a little different back in the day?

From an interview with a historian who has written a pop history book about murder in ancient Rome, she explains why she got into ancient history (my bold in the paragraph itself):

Ars Technica: They rarely teach you the good stuff in history classes.

Emma Southon: It's true. Everything's hampered by curricula, is the problem. Curricula are never, like, "You know what you should do? You should show them a tintinnabulum [a decorative bell mounted on a pole] and then get people to talk about the tintinnabulum and about why somebody might put a penis-headed lion with a penis for a tail [on it]."

This is why I ended up doing ancient history. I did modern history at school, until I was 16. It's all battles and treaties and Hitler, and then some more treaties and battles. It just was so tedious. Ancient history sounded more fun. I got a copy of Suetonius and read it and thought, "These guys are great." It's all just gossip and people having rude pictures and ghosts and omens. And then I read Aristophanes, a Greek comedy playwright; it's just dick jokes all the way down. I thought, "Clearly, this was where I was always meant to be."

The history of ancient Rome is not this boring world of Cicero shouting or Julius Caesar marching around. It is this world where they would get really upset if they stubbed their toe while they were going to an important meeting, so they'd have to go home and end the whole day because that meant the gods didn't want them to do it. Or where they were nude all the time in the bars and had all seen each other's penises. They're such a weird and contradictory set of people. I love them more every year.

 The article opens by noting this story:

There once was a wealthy Roman man named Vedius Pollio, infamous for maintaining a reservoir of man-eating eels, into which he would throw any slaves who displeased him, resulting in their gruesome deaths. When Emperor Augustus dined with him on one memorable occasion, a servant broke a crystal goblet, and an enraged Vedius ordered the servant thrown to the eels. Augustus was shocked and ordered all the crystal at the table to be broken. Vedius was forced to pardon the servant, since he could hardly punish him for breaking one goblet when Augustus had broken so many more.

That servant seems to have been spared, but many others had their "bowels torn asunder" by the eels.

and lots of people in comments say "really?  your run of the mill eels don't have significant teeth."   

Googling the topic shows that there is the possibility that it was moray eels - and if they are kept hungry enough...maybe they become instant maneaters?   The Romans were really into eels, for some reason:

In researching this story I realized that there is some confusion as to whether Vedius Pollio had a pond filled with the razor sharp toothed moraena (moray) eels or the jawless, funnel mouth blood sucking lamprey. Both were popular in the diet of wealthy Romans.

The muraena (moray) eel was larger and more spectacular. Pliny the Elder wrote the fish was actually named after Lucinus Murena who is credited with the first muraena eel farm, although Lucinus might have been called Murena because of his love of the eel. The eels were considered more valuable than the slaves who tended the ell ponds.

During the 1^st century Roman elite made pets of their eels. Antonia the Younger, the daughter of Mark Anthony and mother of the Emperor Claudius fastened earrings to the dorsal fin of her pet eel.

Lampreys, which I would have thought one is hard pressed to find on a menu these days, apparently don't taste like eel (which, having been to Japan, I've eaten quite often).  And maybe they still get lamprey to eat in England?:

I’ve been told Lamprey meat tastes like squid. Eel pies (made with lamprey) have been an English tradition since the 19^th century. You can still find Eel, Pie and mash (potato) shops in the UK.

So, there's your oddball history for the day...

 

 

Go home, Liberal Party, you're drunk

So, some Liberals are disputing Peta Credlin's "I sacked the gay guy, but someone re-employed him" narrative:

Federal Liberal MP Warren Entsch has emphatically rejected Peta Credlin’s claim that several years ago she was responsible for sacking a Coalition aide dismissed again this week for allegedly masturbating over a female MP’s desk.

Entsch, the member for Leichhardt and former chief opposition whip, told Guardian Australia that not only did Credlin have no input into his decision to sack the staffer in 2012, but in fact, he dismissed the aide for an alleged unauthorised leak from his office to Credlin who was then Tony Abbott’s chief of staff.

Alex Somlyay, the chief whip before Entsch, has backed Entsch’s account and added that he had originally hired the staffer on Credlin’s suggestion.

Guardian Australia revealed on Tuesday the man had been employed on and off for more than a decade working for senior Liberal figures. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, later confirmed his employers included former chief whip Nola Marino in whose office the masturbation incident allegedly took place.

What a completely dysfunctional mob!

PS:  I am somewhat sceptical of her "gay orgies" claims, too.   I am not entirely sure how many participants it takes to make an orgy, but I wonder if she is counting any number greater than 2 as fitting the definition, when most people wouldn't.    

Is the Coalition having some kind of collective nervous breakdown about their sexual behaviour?

I thought it was supposed to be only Labor, and perhaps the Greens, who were all busy having illicit sex since the 1960's because they were the ones who were all cool with the sexual revolution.

Instead, according to this bizarre bunch of claims by Peta Credlin, it's the Liberals who had many gay staffers (and a minister with a predilection to male prostitutes) creating sordid mayhem in Parliament House over the last - what? - 12 years?   

The former chief of staff to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has also warned she knows the culprits exposed in sick videos of men masturbating on desks in Parliament House.

And she also said — for the first time — that she had sacked one of the men involved in the videos nearly a decade ago and had vowed he would never set foot in the building again.

Ms Credlin claimed that in one historical instance — that did not involve any of the men in the video — that evidence was found of a Liberal staffer involved in “orgies”.

After one man was sacked for what she described as “disloyalty” she revealed that evidence was found of “orgies” when MPs left the office for Question Time....

Ms Credlin said the names of other Liberal staffers involved in the masturbatory acts at Parliament House were known to her.

“The other three that Peter van Onselen broke in his story this week, I know who you are. I see you,” she said.

“The former minister who is alleged to have male prostitutes delivered to Parliament House … the former minister? I see you too.

“For years I copped hit after hit from unnamed sources. I stand by every decision I made. I would do it all again. And as a woman, boy I made some enemies. I have never publicly spoken about my side before.

“But I am not going to stay silent anymore.”

But is it fair to target the gay men as the source of most of the problems?   It has a touch of the conservative Catholic "it's all gay men becoming priests that caused the sex abuse scandals" excuse making about it, I think.   I mean, sure, men taking selfies of themselves masturbating and distributing it to other men is not exactly something heterosexual men are known for, is it? (at least, if they didn't go to an all boy's private high school?);  but doing it on a female bosses' desk sounds like awfully like a creepy misogynistic, straight male dominance thing.  And what was most of the sex that is said to taken place in the "prayer room":  gay, or mostly straight?   

In any event, as I said yesterday, its all weirdly amusing that it's the conservative side that is coming unstuck with sexual scandals of this kind.

Speaking of funny, maybe I had seen this before, a long time ago, but Tony Martin today tweeted it as "a new video from the LNP" and it really made me laugh:

 

The media is very bad at context, sometimes

Even the great Planet America show last week did not seem to emphasise this enough - they showed similar graphs, ran a full length interview with a conservative from the Heritage Foundation, and just a snippet from a Cato Institute guy saying that it's not all Biden pull factors, we've seen seasonal surges before.  This is the graph:

Honestly, how much media attention is being given to the 2019 surge under Trump?  Very little, if you ask me.  There's also pretty small attention being given to the ease with which Trump's wall is being breached.

Planet America, I reckon, too often tries too hard to be "fair" to conservatives and Republicans, and ends up being unbalanced in their favour.

 Update:  yet more context -

That's from this article, which argues:

If you've been reading or watching mainstream media over the past week or so, you've undoubtedly heard a lot about a supposed screaming emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border. More migrants are trying to cross the border, which all three network Sunday shows gave frantic saturation coverage — ABC's This Week nonsensically held a panel segment on the border itself, as if that would somehow lend gravitas to a bunch of talking heads. On Monday, the networks' big morning shows all ran segments calling the story a "crisis" once more. CNN even ran a video of a repeated boat crossing that, as numerous experts testified to The American Prospect, gave every indication of being staged, possibly even by the Border Patrol.

This is nonsense. There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a "crisis." It's an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic.

Sounds pretty accurate to me...