I heard Noel Pearson on Radio National this morning, gushing how the "Yes"to the Voice side is coming from the side of Love. You can read about the message here:
This, it seems pretty clear, is an attempt to reset his advocacy from his (and Langton's, and quite a few others) position that (my paraphrase, of course) "to vote No is essentially a racist position that ruins everything about race relations forever, and so we will justifiably hate you and this country forever more."
Well, at least I'm glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to sometimes get a little confused between Naomi Klein and (now, generic mad woman) Naomi Wolfe.
I see the bizarre Canadian story about the mega fake boob wearing teacher is back in the news because (as hard to believe as this is) it seems he has been employed at a different school, which has warned parents they have to respect his rights to his "gender expression", and the school will take special security precautions (which sound inconvenient for the kids) because of the expected protests.
In any comments following articles about this, there are people who still suspect this is a massive troll by the teacher, who has at least once been photographed going about his normal life as a male and without the ridiculous fake boobs. (He has also, apparently, given all types of explanations as to them being "real".)
I guess, as a troll, it might be considered successful - the total apparent sincerity of the new school board showing that they have zero common sense and are complete ideological captives on such an issue is astounding.
But even so, how nutty do you have to be to carry out such a troll for so long?
I reckon that their working relationship would be lucky to last 6 months. Look at the history of other nuts who have tried to be on Team Trump.
By the way - Vivek is so crazy I don't have any substantial fear of him every support much beyond the MAGA (plus nutty technocrat billionaire and their fanboys) crowd.
I think Nikki Haley is capable of broader appeal - but as the last post notes, can she really get past changing her view of Trump every second week?
Here's a column by Frank Bruni at NYT pointing out the "pathetic" history of Nikki Haley's continual flip flopping on her support/condemnation of Donald Trump.
It's not just the intellectual dishonesty, it's the moral cowardice, and it applies to so, so many Republicans like her.
As an AI-based app currently in the beta phase, Magisterium AI “could be a game changer for the Church”, Sanders said.
The app is an AI that is trained by using a limited number of Church documents and which, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, can be used to generate human-like text on specific content that could be used by anyone from church scholars and academics, canon lawyers, students seeking well-sourced information to assist in studies, and anyone curious about church teaching.
According to Sanders, the difference between Magisterium AI and ChatGPT is that “our AI is trained on a private database of only Church documents”, and therefore there is less chance the AI will “hallucinate”, which is tech jargon for “make stuff up”.
Further down:
The app, launched earlier this year, currently has around 2,580
magisterial documents in its knowledge database, and the list is
growing....
Magisterium AI is currently partnering with the Orientale, which
contains the largest library on Eastern Christianity, to digitise the
library’s contents and add the documents it contains to the app’s
database so the AI can train on them and make them available to users
across the world.
I look forward to hearing from the new, future AI PopeBot.
He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the
frivolous activities common to university
students.[9] Yet
Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so
with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of
money to help defray the cost of living.
He would stay up late drinking wine and playing cards with his friends. He’d sleep late and eat too much and host big parties.
It
wasn’t until he turned 40 that he dropped it all and developed the
routine life he later made famous. He said that he developed this
routine at 40 because he realized the moral implications of his actions
and decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious
time or energy his consciousness had left.
I don't want to know that he dropped his time wasting ways at 40, though. In my screenplay, that's when he hit the higher class gambling dens and pleasure houses of Europe, as a Prussian James Bond, before becoming the uber-prude we all know and love. ;)
Recently Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, expressed some puzzlement in a post
on X, formerly Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were
also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I
can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”
OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.
If
you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those
involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong
correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and
cryptocurrency cultism.
I’ve written about some of these things before,
in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But in the light of Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek
Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the G.O.P. nomination but could
conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more
about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they
appeal to so many wealthy men.
The key thing is, success can easily lead to over-estimation of your ability to understand complicated stuff:
Success all too easily feeds the belief
that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject
without working hard to understand the issues or consulting people who
have; this kind of arrogance may be especially rife among tech types who
got rich by defying conventional wisdom. The wealthy also tend to
surround themselves with people who tell them how brilliant they are or
with other wealthy people who join them in mutual affirmation of their
superiority to mere technical drones — what the tech writer Anil Dash calls “V.C. QAnon.”
So
where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto
phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a
better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without
talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history.
Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the generations-old system of
fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse
into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that “hyperinflation will change everything. It’s happening.”
Now,
I’m quite willing to admit that monetary economics isn’t as solid a
science as epidemiology or climatology. And yes, even noncrank
economists argue about some big issues much more than their hard-science
counterparts.
But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote,
“a technical and difficult subject” — one on which you shouldn’t make
pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history —
although “no one will believe it.” Certainly people who think they
understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than
epidemiologists are also likely to think they understand money better
than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them
that the world doesn’t work the way they think it does are engaged in
some kind of hoax or conspiracy.
He adds near the end:
Thanks to the tech boom, there are probably more wealthy cranks than
there used to be, and they’re wealthier than ever, too. They also have a
more receptive audience in the form of a Republican Party whose
confidence in the scientific community has collapsed since the mid-2000s.
Woman complained of forgetfulness and depression before doctors pulled out an 8cm roundworm normally found in pythons
It's kind of interesting that her earlier symptoms were to do with digestion, though:
It was a fairly regular day on the ward for Canberra hospital infectious diseases physician Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, until a neurosurgeon colleague called him and said: “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.”
The neurosurgeon, Dr Hari Priya Bandi, had pulled an 8cm-long parasitic roundworm from her patient, prompting her to call on Senanayake and other hospital colleagues for advice about what to do next.
The patient, a 64-year-old woman from south-eastern New South Wales, was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.
By 2022, her symptoms also included forgetfulness and depression, prompting a referral to Canberra hospital. An MRI scan of her brain revealed abnormalities requiring surgery.
I'll gift a link to this Washington Post article talking about concerns as to whether commercial building values in inner cities are (due to Covid forcing us how to do remote working) going to drop so badly that it will stuff up the economy.
This was a worry I was muttering about early in the Covid pandemic - because it was pretty remarkable how quickly everything was able to keep ticking over despite the dramatic drop in the number of people who needed to be in the inner city. And it's not as if turning office blocks into apartments or hotels is an easy thing to do in most cases.
It's a tricky thing, though, in the sense that if you're worried about transport's contribution to greenhouse gases, remote working is a great thing. Is that why John Quiggin is (I think) not worried at all about this as a major problem?
But half empty city buildings - it still feels lonely, and wrong.
Update: Anecdotal evidence, but still -
By the way, as far as Brisbane is concerned: seems to me that it might turn out to be a case of lucky timing that the inner city is having major transport and facility upgrades for the Olympics over the next decade. They should make the inner city more appealing place to visit, if not work, I would have thought?
Slate has stepped away from it's first person "this is my weird sex life" stories (why does this magazine spend so much time on these often hard to believe, click baity advice columns? I only occasionally click on them - honest) to print the account of one of the women who accidentally ended up in the mouth of a feeding humpback whale a couple of years ago. I'm pretty sure I saw the video about it at the time.
From the story, there is this fact, which I don't recall being in my brain before (my bold):
...if you slow it down just a little bit, you can see us sliding right into
the whale’s mouth as he closes it and the only thing sticking out of
the mouth is my right arm. I guess it happens to sea lions a lot and
those kinds of animals because whales and sea lions are feeding on the
same fish. The throat of a whale is about the size of a grapefruit.
Anything that’s larger than that just kind of comes out. Thank goodness
for that. We were in more danger of drowning or being squashed.
Who ordered or arranged the completely over the top police/security escort to Trump's arrest in Atlanta last week?
Many people were commenting on Twitter about how ridiculously extreme it seemed. And even if there had been early concerns about the number of pro (or anti) Trump protesters who might be outside the courthouse, you would deal with that with police on the ground, not on motorcycles and in SUVs.
I am amongst those who suspect it was arranged by the creepy MAGA element within the local police force, in a "we ride with him as a sign of support"type vibe.
The first is by Singaporean content creator Sneaky Sushii, who for some reason has done a series of videos with a supernatural theme, even though he presents himself as an all round skeptic. (He's also not Buddhist or Taoist - I suspect based on his appearing dressed as a bishop in an old video that his family might be nominally Christian.)
There are two interesting things about the video:
1.that in a modern city like Singapore, they do brightly lit, drive in ghost concerts in their Chinese cemeteries;
2. in the comments following the video, so many of his young fan base praise him for his great bravery in going into the cemetery at night and trying to find a ghost to communicate with (indicating how Singaporean young folk still firmly believe in the supernatural, even if otherwise not so religious. Well, I doubt they are conventionally religious, anyway. A bit like the Japanese, I expect.)
Anyhow, the video:
The second video is a useful educational background on the history of the Chinese ghost festival, from the great Religion for Breakfast Youtube channel. Not much to say about this, except that as always, he does a really good job.
Oh, actually I do have something further to say. He points out in the video that the festival's most important date this year falls on 30 August. This does actually explain why at my work, a matter due to settle that day, involving a Chinese buyer, has been brought forward to 29 August.
I guess every year I should keep track of the date, just in case it affects other Chinese I'm dealing with...
