What’s
left, then, is some distant hope that a profound national crisis could
jolt Republicans away from their embrace of authoritarian politics. Just
as the tragedy of Sept. 11 brought Democrats and Republicans together,
perhaps a major national shock could cause Republicans to rally back
toward democracy. But we’ve already had two major crises — Jan. 6
and a once-in-a-century pandemic — and they’ve made the GOP more
extreme, not less. If a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol aimed at
overturning an election and more than 770,000 dead Americans in the
pandemic aren’t enough of a jolt, what would it take?
The
conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the
Republican Party is over. The Trumpian authoritarians have won — and
they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime
soon.
So, I learn from Cathollaxy that Breitbart has a story up about how George Pell spent part of his time in cells writing up his whiny, non-expert, and patently out of date thoughts on how climate change is not real.
We've long known he was the captive of ageing crank geologist (and atheist) Ian Plimer's utter nonsense of climate change denial - funny how a religious conservative let himself be conned by a non believer into thinking that it was all hysteria caused by modern folk having lost religion!
I'm referring to the accuracy of GPS, about which I will never stop feeling awe as a technological and scientific marvel. I didn't realise, until watching a youtube about its monitoring applications, that high end, scientific research versions of GPS receivers can be this accurate:
High-end users boost GPS accuracy with dual-frequency receivers and/or
augmentation systems. These can enable real-time positioning within a
few centimeters, and long-term measurements at the millimeter level.
I have the feeling I knew this before, but had forgotten.
Here's the video, by the way:
Someone in comments to the video notes this:
I frequently vacation in coastal Oregon, where earth movement is a big
concern. GPS stations (the most accurate in the world) measure earth
movement as small as one third of a millimetre and they discovered the
study area oscillates east and west every two weeks. Japan uses the
same accurate GPS equipment, and I believe Oregon got their equipment
from Japan (the US military probably has more accurate stuff). Good
post! Thanks for sharing it with us.
Other people question the millimetre accuracy, but it seems not out of the question:
I'd assume it's not just GPS. I'm 99% sure GPS does not provide millimetre level resolution. They're probably using a combination of positioning systems.
New research has shed light on a sudden
cooling event 34 million years ago, which contributed to formation of
the Antarctic ice sheets.
High-resolution simulations of ocean
circulations show that the tectonic opening of Southern Ocean seaways
caused a fundamental reorganisation of ocean currents, heat transport
and initiated a strong Antarctic surface water cooling of up to 5°C....
“A 600m change in the depth of an ocean
gateway can cause a dramatic drop in coastal temperatures and,
therefore, the fate of the Antarctic ice sheet.”
The last land bridges connecting
Antarctica with its surrounding continents, Australia, and South
America, broke off about 34 million years ago. This tectonic event did
not only leave the polar continent isolated by other land masses; it
also led to a major reorganisation of ocean currents in the Southern
Ocean.
A circumpolar current started to flow,
preventing subpolar gyres from transporting warm surface waters to the
Antarctic coast. At the same time, ice sheets started to build on
Antarctica and the Earth underwent one of its most fundamental climate
change events, transitioning from warm Greenhouse to cold Icehouse
conditions.
The role of the opening seaways in the
formation of Antarctic ice sheets versus decreasing amounts of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has always been strongly debated by
scientists.
There is much excitement over at dover beach's Cathollaxy, a pro-Christofascist blog, over the "success" of the large demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney last week over vaccination and mandates, etc.
The so called ‘governments’ are taking orders from above.
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
and
flyingduksays:
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
Quite, some people are afraid this will lead to all out war, the people v their governments – I am afraid it wont.
Which led to a severe dressing down by the blog controller:
Hey, …..Hey, ……..they’re killing us.
They are killing our children.
They’re imprisoning, enslaving us.
They have taken all our freedoms and separated families.
The army are now dragging people away to camps.
But………Don’t be so uncivil and threaten violence back, FFS, says the forever submissive.
Write a strongly worded letter.
That should do it.
Well it didn’t work did it?
And peaceful rallies just increase the speed of their growing tyranny as they start to see the need for urgency.
What do they need to do before you suggest they’ve crossed a line , here?
At what point do you pick up a rock?
Dover beach was at the rally himself, and posted boring photos of it. He routinely notes dubious analysis of the Covid vaccines.
Catholic conservative wannabe Christo-fascism at its finest. [That's sarcasm, for any Federal domestic violence authorities who are reading.]
An article at The Conversation, about how Chinese school books are developing the personality cult around Xi Jinping.
I don't know - in the digital world, it feels it should be harder for a personality cult to be built up in children - or teenagers - especially when Grandpa won't let them play video games except for a few hours one night a week.
Not only that, but it seems to me that the wingnut Christofascim of Australia has a distinctly Catholic colour to it - unlike America where it's primarily Southern evangelical. I mean, last week it was a statue of Mary being paraded in front of the "hang Dan Andrews" rallies; on the weekend it was a long time nutter and Australia's own wannabe Michael Flynn starting his speech before the "Freedom rally" with the Lord's Prayer. (He is Catholic, and amusingly, I've noticed many people at dover beach's Cathollaxy think he's gone too nuts and Qanon-like.) Here's the video, if you can stomach it:
He called for a general strike until the country bends to his views - I am curious how many absentees there were today as a result of this call. I doubt it's many.
How much should we worry about the nutty Freedom rallies? They are scary in the way they illustrate the power of the internet to co-ordinate protest, internationally; but at the same time, the vaccination rate here (Australia) would indicate that their numbers over the entire population are not as large as they might think. I know - there would have been some vaccinated people in the crowd who were protesting for the rights of the un-vaccinated - but I suspect they would be in the small minority. So vaccination rates in the big states would tend to indicate the number of people whipping themselves into an anti-vaccination frenzy is probably under 10%, perhaps less than 5%? Yet the internet gives cranks the impression that their numbers are larger than they really are.
Children of women who use marijuana
during or soon after pregnancy are twice as likely as other kids to
become anxious, aggressive or hyperactive, according to a new study.
The findings add weight to a growing body of evidence linking cannabis
use during pregnancy to psychiatric problems in children. The behavioral
issues may be driven in part by changes in the activity of genes found
in the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the
growing fetus.
For pregnant women, cannabis isn’t just a means of getting high. Some women use it to ease severe morning sickness and anxiety, and they may not be aware that it can pose risks.
Women “tend to think smoking and drinking
during pregnancy need to be avoided at all costs, but not cannabis,”
said Yoko Nomura, a behavioral neuroscientist at Queens College, City
University of New York, and a co-author of the new study. “We have a
long way to go to educate pregnant women, policymakers and even OB-GYN
doctors on this issue.”
Research suggests that a growing number of women are using cannabis during pregnancy: One study found that in 2016, nearly twice as many women in California reported using cannabis while pregnant than in 2009.
Yet for more than 40 years, research has been raising concerns about the
effects of marijuana use during pregnancy. A longitudinal study
that began in 1978 linked maternal cannabis use with children’s
behavioral problems as well as deficits in language comprehension,
visual perception, attention and memory. More recent research has linked
cannabis use in pregnancy to low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems, although some other studies have not identified such associations.
Of concern, too, is that cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of
years past. Levels of THC, the compound responsible for most of
marijuana’s psychological effects, have increased significantly in
recent years. “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s,” said Dr.
Darine El-Chaâr, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at The Ottawa
Hospital in Canada who studies the health risks of marijuana use during
pregnancy and was not involved in the new study.
That's quite some list of potential poor outcomes for the child!
I still suspect the US is going to regret the normalisation of marijuana use.
The topic: superdeterminism as a "solution" to the quantum measurement problem.
The reason I am writing it: possibly, because my future self is causing me to do so; but more clearly, because I see that everyone's favourite Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder appears as co-author on a paper up at Arxiv with the title The Quantum Eraser Paradox.
She made a recent Youtube video in which she downplayed the retro-causality interpretation of the experiment. Let me post it: here we go -
Now, she has previously come out as suggesting that superdeterminism is probably going to turn out to be the best explanation of quantum measurement issues, and she has also gone on about how free will in humans does not exist.
In this new Arxiv paper, if I understand it correctly (and I have only had a quick read), it would seem that she and her fellow authors propose a new quantum experiment the results of which may show a difference between retrocausation as the explanation, and superdeterminism.
Interestingly, it seems there is some potential cross over between both explanations (the future causing the past, and the now being predetermined.) On the Wiki page, for example, it notes:
Some authors consider retrocausality
in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas
other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition
for distinguishing them exists.
But is that what Sabine addressing in her proposed experiment: a way of distinguishing the two, empirically?
In Anderson's article, he writes:
Although there is no information transfer from future to past, so you can’t remember the
future, there can be causal effects at the quantum level and relativity
is not violated provided cause and effect are within light speed of one
another. In that sense, you cannot know the future yet it can cause the
present and the past. It can change reality itself, switching the
electron spin orientation for example, or changing what reality was
before you became aware of it.
This
is why a better term for superdeterminism is “Future Input Dependency”.
Thus, my actions in the future might, counter-intuitively, be
determining my actions now rather than the reverse. Moreover, my future
actions might even determine reality itself in the present. Thus, how I
set up an experiment years in the future might determine the state of an
electron emitted now.
Well, still count me as confused, then.
But, I don't know - if what I do in the future in some sense influences a decision I made in the past, is that a backdoor way to let a kind of free will in? Because if it's myself doing the retrocausation, it has at least a whiff of free will about it.
But how much I trust my future self to make the best retrocausative decisions? Being good now seems a sound way to ensure your future self is not a complete jerk - hence retrocausation might fit in well with your classic way of thinking about ethics. It's just that it's all circular (perhaps with a Mobius strip twist) instead of straight line running in one direction.
It's funny, too, isn't it, how we feel it's comforting to think our love relationships were meant to be - we give free will a hall pass to wander off when it comes to something like that, but want it back if it also means we're destined to die an early death (or end up in Hell forever.)
Anyway, I've written posts about retrocausation before on this blog. I find it appealing, and I'm just here trying to work out why.
Buddhism is often described as the philosophy of the ‘middle way’, in
that the Buddha is alleged to have always urged his devotees to avoid
‘extremes’ in the quest for enlightenment – initially, the extremes of
asceticism or self-indulgence.
Many scholars, like Sangharakshita, have emphasized that Buddhism is a
form of ‘atheistic spirituality’ – a religion without a god – in that it
attempts to steer a middle way between the theistic spirituality of the
Hindu Vedanta tradition and the atheistic materialism of the Samkhya
and Lokayata philosophies. But given the focal emphasis that Buddhism
places upon the mind, its complete denial of a self, and the extreme
idealist tendencies that developed within the Buddhist tradition, it is
doubtful if Buddhism as a spiritual tradition ever took the middle way
doctrinally. Indeed, many later Mahayana Buddhists, including such
well-known figures as Daisetz Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa, may best be
described as advocating not a middle way between spirituality and
materialism, but a form of mystical idealism. ....
Aware of the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist concept of ‘no self’ (anatta),
and the Buddha’s apparent ethical emphasis on the human subject as an
embodied self with moral agency, some early Buddhists came out as
phenomenalists. They had the notion of two realms of being, that of
everyday life (laukika), and of a transcendental realm (lokuttara), which in turn was linked to the idea of two truths; the conventional truths of everyday life (our common-sense realism) (samvrti satya), and the absolute truths (paramartta satya).
The latter truths are alleged to give us knowledge and experience of
things ‘as they really are’. Under the latter perspective, not only are
human beings in an absolute sense now alleged to be ‘unreal’ or as
ultimately having no real (mind-independent) existence, so are all the
material things and organisms that humans acknowledge and interact with
in their everyday lives. We are thus informed by these Buddhists in
accordance with this ‘phenomenalism’, that ultimately speaking, the
substantive objects and enduring persons of everyday life do not exist:
they are ‘fictions’ or ‘illusions’, or more specifically, merely
constructs of the human mind. All material things are in this way
mind-dependent, hence the label ‘phenomenalism’ (‘phenomena’ is Greek
for ‘the things/experiences of the senses’). Buddhist phenomenalism is
therefore a completely anti-realist metaphysic. What exists and has
reality according to it are only fleeting mental events or moments of
experience – described in the Abhidhamma as dhammas.
This metaphysic is invariably linked by contemporary Western Buddhist
scholars to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, or to the
anti-realist subjectivism of postmodernist philosophy.
And further down:
It is doubtful if the Buddha expressed any real interest in
epistemology, nor was he really interested in understanding the material
world and its rich diversity of life-forms in any sort of scientific
sense. His concern – as he continually emphasized – was ethical: the
understanding and alleviation of suffering.
It is however clear that the Buddha’s emphasis on ‘right views’ and on the cultivation of wisdom (prajna)
has two very different interpretations. On the one hand it has an
empirically-sourced meaning: wisdom is a result of understanding the
impermanence of human life, and the fact that all things arise and cease
to exist according to specific causes and conditions. For the Buddha,
greed, hatred, and egoism invariably give rise to suffering. As with
Aristotle, wisdom involves the application of empirical knowledge –
about impermanence and conditionality – to ethics, thereby (for
Aristotle) enhancing human flourishing and well-being, or (for the
Buddha) enabling the alleviation of suffering with respect to sentient
beings. There is, therefore, no alienation between empirical knowledge
and practical wisdom. (It is also worth noting that what really ‘expands
the mind’ is not the ingesting of psychedelic drugs, nor inducing some
transcendental or mystical state through deep meditation, but empirical
knowledge – contrary to even what most Buddhists think.) On the other
hand, the ‘transcendental’ interpretation of wisdom has less to do with
empirical knowledge and ethics than with the cultivation of a spiritual
or mystical intuition, and the realization, through deep meditative
states, that the world – reality – is pure empty consciousness or
absolute all-mind.
I'm going to push my luck and extract more than I usually would, and press on:
It follows that both the experience and understanding of
enlightenment within the Buddhist tradition has two very different kinds
of meaning; either ethical (this-worldly) or metaphysical
(other-worldly). Similarly, although Buddhist scholars invariably equate
the concept of awareness or awakening (bodhi) with the experience of non-dual consciousness or emptiness (nirvana),
awareness and emptiness imply two very different conceptions of
enlightenment. Enlightenment as awareness suggests a common-sense
realism. It posits that things in the world are transient and
continually undergoing change, and that nothing is self-existent, in
that all things are subject to specific causes and conditions. The human
person as an ‘existing being’, to employ the Buddha’s own phrase, is no
exception. The person as an embodied self is continually changing, and
embedded in a complex web of relationships with both the natural world
and with other people. Enlightenment as awareness thus entails a theory
of knowledge that is historical, dialectical (that is, relational and
dynamic) and this-worldly. Enlightenment in this sense occurs when an
embodied self becomes fully aware of the truth that everything changes
and that all things are subject to causes and conditions. Ethical
conduct is here based on empirical knowledge, of the world as
experienced in everyday life. It requires us to realize that suffering,
along with sorrow and despair, arises from the three ‘poisons’, namely,
greed, hatred and delusion – all egocentric strivings. And, as
indicated, enlightenment as awareness also suggests a concept of wisdom
akin to that of Aristotle; namely the application of empirical knowledge
to the question of how to alleviate suffering, through the cultivation
of wholesome mental states such as compassion, non-violence, generosity,
and loving kindness.
In contrast, it appears that for many Buddhists – Daisetz Suzuki is a prime example – enlightenment as nibbana
or emptiness implies a quite different worldview – that of mystical
idealism. This involves the attainment of a state of mind that
transcends the experiences of everyday life. This is a state of mind
characterised as being unconditioned, eternal (or timeless), and empty
(or disembodied). So here enlightenment is described as a form of
non-dual consciousness that transcends both time and the material world
of things. It leads to the understanding that ‘physical reality is
created out of consciousness’ as one well-known scholar puts it (Bringing Home the Darma, Jack Cornfield, 2012, p.241). Enlightenment as nibbana
therefore implies that ‘things as they really are’ are ‘mind-only’, as
the ‘absolute all-mind’ or as the ‘cosmic consciousness’ beyond both the
subjective mind and the body. For Suzuki, as for Nietzsche, it is a
consciousness even beyond good and evil. This idea, however, appears to
be completely at odds with the Buddha’s ethical philosophy.
And a point I haven't really heard made before:
Many contemporary Buddhists are dissatisfied with what they see as the
overemphasis on meditation and the attainment of individual
enlightenment. They have instead stressed the crucial need for a
socially engaged Buddhism. This implies being directly involved in
contemporary issues, specifically those relating to the ecological
crisis and to social justice. It is also worth noting in passing that
concepts of ‘no self’ and the ‘unconditioned’ were for the Buddha
ethical concepts rather than metaphysical ones. They implied a rejection
of egoism, not of the embodied self, and of seeking freedom from the
unwholesome emotions of greed, hatred, and the craving for a permanent
self.
I think it fair to say that the general approach taken by the writer aligns with a view of Buddhism taken by Karen Armstrong in her biography of Buddha which I am (very slowly) reading. She keeps emphasising that his approach was actually very pragmatic - working out by his own experience what "worked" to solve his spiritual concerns.
Update: I wanted to further add that this analysis provides some justification for my long held feeling that the religion is too concerned with the self - even though it also believes there's no self there! And I like religions that are heavily into charitable works, but one that has an "anti-realist metaphysic" is hardly likely to be motivated to do that. I am happy to read that there are some Buddhists who want it to be more socially engaged.
The New York Times has a lengthy version of a story in Science (which I also subscribe to - $66 US a year - bargain!) about a scientist who thinks the WHO made a mistake in attributing the first case of COVID in Wuhan. He thinks it was a woman from the wet market, as were most of the other early cases.
The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading
expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of
Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had
already been made public in medical journals, as well as video
interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the
first two documented infections.
Dr.
Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale
Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’
connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began
there.
“In this city of 11 million people, half
of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer
field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that
pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”
Several
experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the
W.H.O., said that Dr. Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the
first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor.
But
some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to
decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero”
sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to
spread widely at the market.Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Dr. Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.
Hey, the New York Times just offered me a basic subscription for a year at 50c a week. Yeah, $2 (Australian dollars, too) a month for a year. That got me in as a first time subscriber. (Been paying for the Washington Post for quite a while - I just had to check, but it seems to only be $8.37 a month. $6 US.)
In Australia, I can get a subscription to the SMH for $3.50 a week; same for the Australian (as if). The Washington Post is substantially cheaper. Even after the end of my first year on NYT for small change, it says it will go up to $20 a month (AUD).
American newspaper subs are much better value.
The only other page I miss having free access to is The Japan Times - I always liked it, although the print version was getting extremely thin in my last visit there, quite a few years ago now. It's USD$15 a month on the cheapest plan, though.
What other paper would I like full access to? I thought the Straits Times was a very substantial paper when last in Singapore a couple of years ago - and I see I can get it for .99c a month for three months, thereafter $14.90 (SGD) a month thereafter. Tempting...
Gee, I see you can get the New Yorker for 12 weeks for $12 (US, of course). A full year at half price - $50, but full price is $100. Still, for a weekly publication, that is pretty cheap.
My problem is, though, that I still don't like reading lengthy articles on a phone, and I don't spend much time in front of the computer at home anymore. I have a very old tablet, which still has a good screen, but the battery is only lasting a few hours, and then takes overnight to re-charge. Maybe I should just get used to using it with a external charging battery in it all the time.
