Depressing news day

What a day for seriously depressing headlines at the Washington Post:

 

That last story contains a table with interesting figures for the most overdose prone occupations:

No surprises in number 2, I guess. 

Also, the relationship between higher education and not overdosing seems really strong.

But anyway - back to the simply depressing:

I don't know, but if the aliens taking snapshots of us are really about to stage an intervention, as so many loose nuts on Twitter seem to think now, this would probably be a good time to distract the world from other things...

The Saudis as a regional leader for peace?

I will gift link this opinion piece from the Washington Post which argues that getting behind Saudi Arabia's hopes for resolution of the Palestinian issue is the only way forward.   

Feels odd, pinning hopes on Saudi goodwill, even though the West has had to be polite to it for most of my life...

Internal criticism noted

I don't know:  while it's appalling judgement for a politician to make a statement as simplistic as "I stand with Palestine" when its leadership has just carried out a terrorist attack aimed largely at civilians,  I also feel that if an Israeli newspaper can say this:

then the pro-Jewish lobby outside of Israel should cut some slack to Westerners who dare say something similar...

 

There is so much hyperventilation going on about this

Like this:

And this: 

And this:

Update:  Noel Pearson being ponderous and self important and unhelpful to his own cause -

 Noel Pearson says he will walk away from advocating for a “middle path” of compromise if the voice to parliament referendum fails, claiming reconciliation would not be viable in the event of a no vote.

The longtime Indigenous activist and respected community leader says he would instead allow a new generation of Indigenous leaders to chart a different path forward.

Pearson said he fears “for the future of my people” if the referendum is defeated on Saturday, making a late plea for voters to vote yes in recognition of Australia’s history and avoid a failure he says would be “ugly as sin”.

“We’re reduced to being told by the no campaign ‘leave it to the politicians’,” Pearson told Guardian Australia. “My pitch to the Australian people, is, ‘Guys, you know that will not work. You know that relying on politicians will not work. It hasn’t worked in the past and won’t work in the future.’”

It's good not to live in the Middle East

Apart from the terrible events in Israel and Gaza, it's very depressing to read the MAGA reaction in America, where they live in a fantasy conspiracy world that means absolutely everything bad that happens in the world is the direct fault of Biden/Democrats/Leftists (basically, anyone who isn't in their cult of "our Leader would have prevented this".)

Also depressing to see how the MAGA blame game spreads like wildfire through Twitter/X, and the mainstream press kind of ignores it, for now.

Anyway, I thought Max Boot's commentary on the whole thing was pretty reasonable.

 

More eggplant

Ok, just for my future reference.

Eggplant pasta casserole:  bake chopped eggplant and at same time, halve a red capsicum and put it in the oven too.  About 30 min at around 180 to 200 degrees.  The capsicum skin will be able to be peeled off when it cools down. 

Cut two chorizo sausages into discs and fry both sides.  Take out and drain off some of the rendered oil. Fry up a chopped onion in the same pan, and a few cloves of garlic.  Add around a teaspoon chili flakes.

Here's the bit I need to remember...I used 300g (dry weight) of penne pasta and wasn't sure how much sauce it needed.  I used a 400 ml bottle of passata, maybe 100 ml of pasta water, and about half a can of crushed tomatoes.  It worked out to be enough.  So, about 600 to 700 ml of sauce.

Cook pasta, and while that's going, add the passata to the onions, throw in the chopped up baked capsicum and chorizo.  I guess the eggplant could go in too, although I just added it to the casserole dish.

Anyway, the drained pasta goes in casserole dish and, of course, the tomato sauce with everything else goes in and mix it well.  Some green vegetable wouldn't hurt...I actually used fresh broadbeans for the first time in my life, but their taste got a bit lost.  I think broccolini would work well.

Sprinkle cheese and bake 20 min or so.

Nice...

It's good to not live in the USA

The Washington Post has a long article up that will annoy Republicans:

How red-state politics are shaving years off American lives 

Makes quite a strong case, though.  Some surprising parts:

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.

Like other hard-hit Midwestern counties, Ashtabula has seen a rise in what are known as “deaths of despair” — drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicides — prompting federal and state attention in recent years. But here, as well as in most counties across the United States, those types of deaths are far outnumbered by deaths caused by cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking-related cancers and other health issues for residents between 35 and 64 years old, The Post found. Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records.

Most of the article is about two public health issues - tobacco taxes and car seat belt laws. Libertarians are bad for health.

Just how big is this solar system, anyway?

From Science:

There just doesn’t seem to be enough of the Solar System. Beyond Neptune’s orbit lie thousands of small icy objects in the Kuiper belt, with Pluto its most famous resident. But after 50 astronomical units (AU)—50 times the distance between Earth and the Sun—the belt ends suddenly and the number of objects drops to zero. Meanwhile, in other solar systems, similar belts stretch outward across hundreds of AU. It’s disquieting, says Wesley Fraser, an astronomer at the National Research Council Canada. “One odd thing about the known Solar System is just how bloody small we are.”

A new discovery is challenging that picture. While using ground-based telescopes to hunt for fresh targets for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now past Pluto on a course out of the Solar System, Fraser and his colleagues have made a tantalizing, though preliminary, discovery: about a dozen objects that lie beyond 60 AU—nearly as far from Pluto as Pluto is from the Sun. The finding, if real, could suggest that the Kuiper belt either extends much farther than once thought or—given the seeming 10-AU gap between these bodies and the known Kuiper belt—that a “second” belt exists.

I like this bit of added mystery: 

Just as intriguing as the new objects is the apparent gap between 50 and 60 AU, says Mihály Horányi, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder who oversees New Horizons’s dust counter. “One way or another, something is responsible for maintaining that gap.” In other solar systems, planets orbiting within a dusty disk carve gaps by hoovering up material. But no large planet has been seen in the gap. The gap could also be a relic from the Solar System’s infancy, caused by waves of pressure in the disk.

Hey, I still like the idea that a very small, primordial black hole is rambling around the edge of the solar system.  

So, the ABC continues to explain how the Voice hardly seems necessary...

Thanks, ABC, for this article:

How different would the Voice to Parliament be from other advisory bodies?

It notes this:

There are currently 110 advisory committees or groups that "develop policies and provide advice on specific issues" registered on the federal government website.

Some of them you might have never heard of, or even noticed were advising the government, such as The National Blood Borne Virus and Sexually Transmissible Infections Surveillance Subcommittee or the Foods for Early Childhood Reference Group.

Each group holds a number of experts in their field, such as the 31 medical professionals who work for the aforementioned subcommittee on sexually transmitted diseases. 

The Voice is expected to work in the same way in that it would be set up to give advice to the government

Question:  is the expectation that "advisory committees" would in future not just be approaching Government directly with recommendations, but also (or alternatively?) having to urge the Voice to take up the issue?   Is the Voice going to be a "filter" for all, or most, or none, of the current groups on recommendations to government?

The Voice group itself is said to likely be something like this:

The government hopes the Voice would be the first body designed with gender balance in mind and the members peer elected on a national scale. 

According to a current proposal of the body, which is subject to consultative change, something else that differentiates the Voice from any other Indigenous advisory group is its geographical spread, of the proposed 24 members.

Two from each state and territory — 16 all up, five from remote communities, two from the Torres Strait and one representing Torres Strait Islanders on the mainland.

Individuals would serve four-year terms and would only be allowed to serve twice and two full-time co-chairs would be elected by the members themselves.

Now, for this group to be effective, and to potentially be on the receiving end of submissions from more than 100 current groups, there is no doubt at all that it is going to have to have a substantial staff.  What's the likely staffing ratio, and the travel costs?   I see that in 2004, an ATSIC commissioner got $136,000 or so in total remuneration.   Bringing that up to date, I would guess that $200,000 would be in the ballpark?   Times 24, that's less than $5 million, but does it include travel expenses, which I assume will be substantial.  But how many staff does it need?    The total cost might not be huge, in terms of government expenditure overall, but it's still a diversion of funds.  

All of which is to achieve - what exactly?    Essentially a "feel good" exercise in empowerment.

The fundamental reason for seriously considering a "no" vote is that such an organisation would be, essentially, an expensive duplication of advocacy that is already happening - and at least in some cases - already achieving results. 

The reason such bodies might work fine in some countries, but the same is likely to be an ongoing source of friction in ours, is because of the size of Australia, which results in the vast number of "first nations" competing for attention for very differing issues in different parts of the country.

In short - there are a lot of racist and bad reasons for arguing against it.  There are also solid practical reasons for at least considering a "No" vote...

Update:   May God forgive me for what I am about to do:  cite a Quadrant article with approval -

Is the Voice Redundant?

 

Perhaps the Republicans should let an AI be speaker?

 Truth be told, I don't really understand the significance of this.  More explanation needed...

An encouraging story

I hadn't noticed that there are some (not perfect, but pretty good) vaccines for malaria being deployed now.

As NPR reports, the disease is ridiculously widespread in parts of Africa:

For example, in Burkina Faso in West Africa, pretty much everyone gets malaria. Last year, out of a population of 20-some million, about half got sick. Halidou Tinto was one of them. He leads the Clinical Research Unit of Nanaro in the country. His six-year-old twins also fell ill with malaria this year.

"As soon as [the children] are febrile or they complain about headache," Tinto says, "you have to think about malaria and treat them immediately. And you can avoid any bad outcome of the disease."

The worst outcome is death. Tinto says 4,000 people died of malaria last year in Burkina Faso alone. In 2021, across Africa, it's estimated that 619,000 died of the mosquito-borne disease, most of them children.

"People are living with the disease," says Tinto. "But of course, we are not happy and we are not proud of this."

But on the "up" side:

They're the first vaccines designed to work against a human parasite.

The first, called RTS,S, was unveiled almost two years ago. The second one, recommended by the World Health Organization this week, is called R21/Matrix-M and is intended for children between 5 and 36 months, who are among the most vulnerable to the disease....

This is what makes WHO's approval of the second malaria vaccine such welcome news. Tinto ran the clinical trials in Burkina Faso that led to its recommendation. Across four African countries, these trials showed a 75% reduction in malaria cases in the year following vaccination of young children.

"I am very, very happy," says Tinto, "and we are pretty sure this vaccine will have a big impact in term[s] of public health."

 

Does pay to shop around

An increase in the cost of  house insurance has been in the news lately, and this year, yes, I was surprised that my RACQ Insurance home and contents cover went up from about $2,000 last year to $2,400. (I have not made a claim on it for perhaps 8 years?)

I rang them and asked if there was a way to trim the policy cost (for example, flood cover was automatically in it, and my house is far, far above any conceivable flood line.)  No, I was told, this is just standard, and (I didn't bother checking if this is true) they define flood to include all water entry, including from an overflowing roof, for example.

I did some online quote searching, and quickly found a company that would do the same cover (using the same cost of rebuilding, and the same contents cover as in the RACQ renewal.)  It was about $1,800.

I then did another search, and found cover at $1,700.

RACQ Insurance cover my family's cars as well, and I recently had to put a claim through them, and they are very easy to deal with.   Once, in the past, I even had to ring them on Christmas morning for some reason (I forget why - I think it might have been to do with whether my son was listed as an authorised driver for a car) and they were there, and able to deal with it immediately.   So, generally, I like dealing with them.

But when it comes to house and contents, something seems to have gone seriously wrong with their financial exposure if they are $700 more expensive than some of their competitors....

Various forms of insanity

*   Elon's plaything is still kind of amusing because of the way my version of it has been chock full of  the more nutty kind of UFO content in the last week.  I'm not sure whether this is happening to everyone who uses "X", or just me because I do click on some of those tweets.

*  Given Musk's boosterism to Right wing and Trumpian politics, there must be many, many users who would love to drop it, but the alternative app has still not appeared.   What is the problem??

*  The Republicans in Congress look, and are, a complete shambles.  Newt Gingrich says creepy Gaetz must go.  Gaetz leaves open the prospect of someone outside of Congress could be speaker.  (The only thing stopping him suggesting Trump is presumably the amount of time Trump has to spend in court - but as if lazy Trump would take on a job that requires long hours and understanding stuff.)   Even Fox News doesn't seem to know how to handle it.  

Update:  Hahahahahaha!

 

Climate change denial struggling with reality

This tweet:

is a result of this, from Roy Spencer's satellite temperature blog:

 Yep, that's some spike...

So, the ABC tells us that "listening" has been happening...

Once again, I give credit to the ABC in telling a story that shows how government programs have been working with aboriginal communities for health improvement (as I showed last week has also been happening with rheumatoid heart disease.)   This time it's improvement in trachoma rates.

On the pro-Voice side, it's being held as an example of why 'listening' works, and the implication being that the Voice will increase the amount of listening.

On the 'the Voice is completely unnecessary' side, we have the fact that, well, we didn't need the Voice to get these improvements.   Now, I really do think Warren Mundine is a flaky guy, but his point on this story is pretty valid, even if he goes over the top in the claim as to how much money a Voice organisation is likely to cost:

Warren Mundine, one of leaders of the No Campaign, said the success of trachoma demonstrated that Indigenous people already had a voice and what was really needed was better coordination of services.

"Through the Voice process, we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars when that money can be better spent actually doing similar things that this health project did," he said.

He said the problems of housing, health and education were largely state government responsibilities that would not be solved with a federal voice to parliament.

While I would agree that the "no" side has the nuttiest people on it, I also am somewhat amused as to how on the "yes" side you have so many on the arts and entertainment industry showing themselves as stereotypically completely captured by emotional arguments that are full of hyperbole.  I forget who I saw this morning saying "if you vote no, you want the indigenous gap to get worse".    It's like they refuse to think more deeply about matters beyond sloganeering.