A credibility issue?

Oh, so just as I thought from the look and manner of the guy, there is apparently reason to suspect the credibility of Luis Elizondo:

 

 

The Guardian writes:

A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out about UFOs is accusing his former agency of waging a disinformation campaign against him, a report says.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency, according to Politico.

and Jazz Shaw, the right wing blogger at Hot Air who is a firm believer in UFOs has a story about emails apparently deleted in the Pentagon, which he thinks is a Big Deal.   I wonder if it'll turn out to be more incompetence than anything else.  

China's building problems

According to some China critical Youtube channel I subscribe to, the Shenzhen SEG Plaza is still shaking from time to time, and remains closed and under investigation.

I see now that Bloomberg ran an informative story on the building, and the general problems with China's high rise industry:

In 1996, the company went public and rolled some of the proceeds into SEG Plaza. Last week, Chinese media unearthed a report on the building’s construction authored by a (then) graduate student. She noted that “Shenzhen speed” wasn’t speedy enough for SEG Plaza: The tower was raised at a rate of one floor every 2.7 days. She also found that the building’s construction began before the design and review process was even complete, and that updated plans were delivered throughout the project, meaning that completed sections would often have to be reworked.

SEG Plaza wasn’t the only project to cut such corners. For years, Shenzhen’s contractors made cement with sea sand. It’s far cheaper than river sand, and for good reason: It corrodes the structural steel that holds up buildings. In 2013, the city identified 31 companies that had used sea sand in construction and suspended eight of them for a year — but it never identified any at-risk buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, building collapses are a regular, recurring tragedy in China.

The writer says the plaza has long been home to shody electronics sales:

A few years after opening, for example, SEG Plaza became a global hub for trading cheap, used electronic components — rather than the new ones that the company had hoped to drive. Chinese traders in, say, New York might buy 5,000 used desktops from a Wall Street bank and ship them to south China. Within a couple of months, their semiconductors would be on sale in an SEG stall.

It wasn’t the kind of business that Shenzhen wanted to advertise to the world (when dignitaries were in town, the government would actually shut the plaza down). Its mere existence hinted at the city’s relatively flexible attitude to intellectual property. But over the years, the neighborhood surrounding SEG Plaza filled with malls also marketing used components to up-and-coming manufacturers who weren’t exactly scrupulous about patents and trademarks.

In recent years, it became obvious that SEG Plaza’s best days were behind it. Chinese consumers who once sought out the largely disposable electronics built from SEG’s inventories were moving up to better devices. When I first visited the tower in the mid-2000s, the dim 10-story mall at its base was a crowded and relentless warren of stalls, all packed with chips and computers for sale. In the last half-decade, the stalls have become increasingly populated with beauty products, electronic cigarettes and crypto-mining rigs. Shenzhen’s freewheeling days as an unaccountable manufacturer of low-cost goods are over. 

 

Sure...

France 24 has a story about UFOs being treated seriously now, and includes this very improbable story:

What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.

At least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a co-operation accord with them. 

“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."

Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to due to fears of “mass hysteria”.

Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and aliens".

I said ages ago that if some government agency had proof of alien presence on Earth that they thought should be kept secret, there is no way they would have told Trump, as he would blurted it out at his next rally and tried to take narcissistic credit for being the person to tell the world.

Update:   Eshed has made other claims:

Eshed makes implausible claims that include stories of how aliens prevented potential nuclear disasters, including an unspecified nuclear incident during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.^[24][25]

Various thoughts

*  Christian Porter:   still a political problem for PM Smirko.   Labor is right to be calling for the independent inquiry which was the obvious thing that Smirko should have set up as soon as this started.   I suspect Smirko, who has shockingly bad judgement in this sort of thing, is going to try to tough it out as something not needing further consideration.  (And Fran Kelly on Radio National this morning did a bad devil's advocate style interview with Labor's Mark Dreyfus which set up the arguments you can see Smirko trying on.  He was probably taking notes.)

*  That Friend's reunion interview, which I have no interest in, has at least had the benefit of causing quite a lot of people on Twitter coming out as saying they never thought the show was very good, and many hated it.   I am not alone.  (I didn't hate it, but it was only intermittently amusing; certainly not worth watching at all in later seasons.   A show vastly overrated is the correct assessment.) 

*  Brisbane has had an unusually cold run of nights and mornings for this time of year.  Days are still OK, by and large.

  

The unnatural device

Only a week ago, I posted a Tom Scott video about the invention of the microwave oven, and it was soon followed by our home one breaking down.  

It's quite old, so time for a new one.

What we now have is one which has no rotating platform.  I didn't even know these were made for domestic use, although I think I may have seen one in a shop once.  

It's a little disconcerting, not getting that visual signal of operation.  But it seems to be working fine.  The salesman said they heat more evenly, but I haven't used it enough yet to tell.

And by the way, why do microwave manufacturers persist in putting in recipes in the user manual?  No one tries to cook an actual meal in them, ever, do they?  Sure, steam the veggies and heat the rice, defrost the meat - but actually cook the meat in a main meal?  No....

The portal is open

I have lifted moderation for Graeme to explain everything about UFOs, in the post made earlier this week.  He is inviting questions...

Only in your staff room, and your next dinner party

"Massive news"...

American mass shootings a bit "meh" now

It seems America has become so familiar with mass shootings - particularly workplace ones by disgruntled employees - that they just don't register in the news cycle much anymore:

A transit system employee in San Jose opened fire Wednesday morning at a light-rail facility, killing at least eight people before shooting himself, officials said.

This seems to have barely caused a ripple on Twitter, for example.

Unless it's got kids involved - or shoppers, I suppose, because mall shootings have a special ordinary folk suddenly gotta run and hide drama about them, I suppose - mass shootings have become news "meh".

Local germs

A somewhat interesting finding:

Cities have their own distinct microbial fingerprints 

When Chris Mason’s daughter was a toddler, he watched, intrigued, as she touched surfaces on the New York City subway. Then, one day, she licked a pole. “There was a clear microbial exchange,” says Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine. “I desperately wanted to know what had happened.”

So he started swabbing the subway, sampling the microbial world that coexists with people in our transit systems. After his 2015 study revealed a wealth of previously unknown species in New York City, other researchers contacted him to contribute. Now, Mason and dozens of collaborators have released their study of subways, buses, elevated trains, and trams in 60 cities worldwide, from Baltimore to Bogotá, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea. They identified thousands of new viruses and bacteria, and found that each city has a unique microbial “fingerprint.”...

The researchers also found a set of 31 species present in 97% of the samples; these formed what they called a “core” urban microbiome. A further 1145 species were present in more than 70% of samples. Samples taken from surfaces that people touch—like railings—were more likely to have bacteria associated with human skin, compared with surfaces like windows. Other common species in the mix were bacteria often found in soil, water, air, and dust.

But the researchers also found species that were less widespread. Those gave each city a unique microbiome—and helped the researchers predict, with 88% accuracy, which city random samples came from, they report today in Cell.

 

 

The new relativism

I'm not sure that Ross Douthat does all that great a job of explaining it clearly enough without the jargon, but I think his basic point is (probably) sound enough:  

The impulse to establish legitimacy and order informs a lot of action on the left these days. The idea that the left is relativistic belongs to an era when progressives were primarily defining themselves against white heteronormative Christian patriarchy, with Foucauldian acid as a solvent for the old regime. Nobody watching today’s progressivism at work would call it relativistic: Instead, the goal is increasingly to find new rules, new hierarchies, new moral categories to govern the post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-cis-het world.

To this end, the categories of identity politics, originally embraced as liberative contrasts to older strictures, are increasingly used to structure a moral order of their own: to define who defers to whom, who can make sexual advances to whom and when, who speaks for which group, who gets special respect and who gets special scrutiny, what vocabulary is enlightened and which words are newly suspect, and what kind of guild rules and bureaucratic norms preside.

Meanwhile, conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a “systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates” — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies.

This is a temptation I wish the right were better able to resist. Having conservatives turn Foucauldian to own the libs doesn’t seem worth the ironies — however rich and telling they may be.

Yes, the French philosopher was undoubtedly a certain kind of genius; yes, as Shullenberger writes, “his critiques of institutions expose the limits of our dominant modes of politics,” including the mode that’s ascendant on the left. But the older conservative critique of relativism’s corrosive spirit is still largely correct. Which is why, even when it lands telling blows against progressive power, much of what seems postmodern about the Trump-era right also seems wicked, deceitful, even devilish.

In the end, one can reject the new progressivism, oppose the church of intersectionality — and still have a healthy fear of what might happen if you use the devil’s tools to pull it down.

I have commented  before on how the Trumpian Right are those who have most clearly provided a home -  unconsciously, perhaps? - to postmodernism's "truth is a social construct" by their acceptance of his lying and bullshitting.

In which I invite G Bird to opine in comments

I have not let through any Graeme Bird comments for quite a while now, but he can't take a hint and is still making appearances in moderation, calling me a Jewish c.. etc.   Do you really wonder, Graeme, why no one lets you comment for long on blogs?

But with my renewed interest in UFOs, and the particular evidence of the strangely acting "tic tac" thing over the ocean in 2004 that has impressed me so much (again, not the videos, but the pilots' accounts of what they saw), I am here to announce that I will let any comment that Graeme might like to make (on this post only) about what he thinks is going on.

Of course, any reference to Jews, or swearing, will mean the comment does not appear at all.

And by the way, I found myself in pretty much complete agreement with the commentary in this guy's video about the matter, which came out 8 months ago, but I only saw it recently:

Update: that'd be right. Just when you give him permission to comment on one matter, he doesn't. Not yet, anyway.

Weighing up edible animal suffering

An article at Vox argues that giving up beef, but at the cost of eating more chicken, results in a net increase in animal suffering.   Meat bred chickens have a much worse life than your average beef cattle, and it takes huge numbers of them to match how much meat you get off one cow.  In fact, I am a bit surprised by these figures:

Cows are big, so raising one produces about 500 pounds of beef — and at the rate at which the average American eats beef, it takes about 8.5 years for one person to eat one cow. But chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat per bird, with the average American eating about one whole chicken every two weeks. To put it another way, each year we eat about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow (and about a third of one pig).

I would have thought Americans (and Australians) eat a lot more of a pig in a year than that.   And one cow takes 8 years for one person to eat?   I just checked on my calculator - that's only about 500 g per week.   I guess that's possibly right, but it sounds on the low side to me.  (Wait - the calculation is based on per capita consumption - so taking into account those who eat no beef, I guess that means that those who do would take less than 8 years to get through a cow.)

Anyway - the ethics of working this out is all pretty slippery.   How upset should we be that millions of unwanted day old rooster chicks are sent through a meat grinder due to the egg industry?    I mean, they haven't lived long, and presumably not much has gone on in their brains...but they're sort of cute too and it feels - I don't know, wastefully wrong? - to bred something to only want to kill it on birth.   Is the small scale level of an individual suffering compounded when it's happening every day in the tens of thousands?*   (Fortunately, technology may put an end to the practice soon, anyway.)

At least there is one thing I feel pretty confident about - I am never going to be worried about bivalves and crustaceans and animal suffering.   Probably any fish too - although I don't want to think about octopuses too much!

 

* Again, my calculator tells me that if estimated of 12 million killed every year in Australia is correct, that's 32,000 every day.  :(

Analysing crime (and mental health) is complicated

In other things with counter-intuitive results:

A new study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicide rates. After reviewing data from 21 countries, the researchers found no significant increase in suicide risk since the beginning of the pandemic, despite initial concerns that rates would increase. They urge vigilance and attendance to the long-term effects of the pandemic on mental health....

They attribute the lack of increase in suicide rates to several factors, including concerns being raised early on about the potential negative impacts of stay-at-home orders and school and business shutdowns on mental health. While self-reported experiences of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking increased during the time period examined, it did not appear to affect overall suicide rates in the countries included in the study.

An additional factor is the increased emphasis and accessibility of mental health treatment and services made available by some countries during the pandemic, which may have buffered against some of the damaging effects of the pandemic.

The researchers also highlight the role of community as being a potential protective factor. For example, communities made have made an effort to support individuals at-risk for mental health or other concerns, or households may have developed closer, stronger relationships through increased time together. An overall sense of togetherness as communities as a whole weathered the pandemic may have also protected against a rise in suicidality.

 On the other hand, in news that has given Adam Creighton an erection:

 

 

Natural signs from God

Hey, this is an interesting short item at The Conversation about how medieval smart Christians  understood that lunar and solar eclipses were natural, although they could read into them a sign from God.  

Good stuff. 

China and paper tigers

I find myself sympathetic to this take on China by David Frum:  the West is over-estimating its strength, and in a way that may be harmful to our own interests.  (He is basically repeating the argument made by another guy, but it sounds pretty convincing to me.  And I watch CGTN propaganda!)