Hardly surprising that idiots don't recognise a useful idiot

I should have taken a screenshot of a tweet last night which summed up the wingnut, wetting-their-pants-with-excitement, reaction to Tucker Carlson doing an interview as Lord Haw Haw/Tokyo Rose with Putin:   the Deep State/Left is going berserk over it because they know that if normal people watch Putin being interviewed at length, they will realise what a decent human being he is, only interested in saving the world with decent Christian values (and against the LGTB takeover of the West.)   This wasn't the tweet, but it's similar:

There were several tweets following along the lines of "yes, I have made a study of Putin speeches given over the last few years, and people just don't understand how reasonable and likeable he is."

But I find it hilarious that MAGA, culture war, "save us Putin!" types live in a world where they constantly imagine their culture war enemies as being in a permanent state of terror that The Truth is About to be Revealed and We Must Stop That; instead of the reality that we are simply appalled that so many have gone down a conspiracy rabbit hole and are too stupid to recognise their own manipulation by a murderous autocrat with no interest in democracy or stability in the West.

As has been obvious for years, the reason many of the MAGA Right is in love with Putin is purely due to culture war issues, especially on sexuality and gender, on which the Right has (to a large extent) already lost the war.  (Sure, they are making some ground on trans issues, but there's no way you could say that the recognition of gay relationships is at risk of going backwards in those parts of the world where they have made ground.)     

There are other reasons involved too, of course, as noted in greater length in previous posts like this one, but the depth of oblivious idiocy on Musk's madhouse (Twitter) has become bottomless, all aided and abetted by Musk himself.   

Trump and immunity

I thought this analysis piece in the Washington Post about the appeals court decision that Trump didn't have immunity was pretty good, so I'll gift link it.

You can thank me later. 

Apparently, about the only (formerly) significant lawyer disagreeing is Alan Dershowitz, who has long joined the ranks of "old fools for Trump".  

The giant expanding Liberal/National melon heads

I missed the first episode of the ABC's political doco Nemesis, but caught most of the second instalment last night.  

It was kind of depressing, being reminded of the rapidly increasing lack of charm, intelligence and competence that became the hallmark of the Liberal/National Parties over the last decade.  (I should watch the first episode, to see what was said about the universally acknowledged - except by them - deeply weird relationship of Abbott and Credlin.)

Of course, I still have something of a soft spot for the intelligence and frequent charm of Turnbull, while accepting that his high regard for himself was never likely to inspire a lot of loyalty amongst his fellow parliamentarians.   (Somewhat like Kevin Rudd in that regard, really.)    But the inevitability of his unpopularity with many on his own side just makes it all the easier for me to condemn him for cowardice for not  inciting an actual split in the party between those who deny the reality and seriousness of climate change, and those who, you know, have always accepted science and been vindicated year after year.   (It seems that instead of the conservative side having an actual split over the issue, we just have to wait until the gullible losers within it who backed the wrong horse 15 or 20 years ago die off gradually.  It's a pathetic way to ensure policy paralysis for an entire generation.)   

But one other thing I noticed was that (whether it was the camera lens used, the lighting, or just my imagination, I'm not sure),  the show made it seem that ageing conservative politicians in Australia often suffer from expanding melonhead-itis.  Look at George Brandis, whose head was always large, but now seems close to Moon size, and with flaky skin that makes him look in dire need of not only a diet, but a dermatologist.  (Actually, I think his skin has always looked bad, and it could be a condition hard to treat, so I feel a bit guilty for pointing it out.)  

But Barnaby Joyce - what an unhealthy looking specimen with a huge head and an utterly unapologetic approach to adultery with staff.   (He's just upset that he was the one caught out, is what it comes down to).   Warren Entsch was made to look big headed.   And John Howard's head seems to be expanding sideways.   

There are others I have probably forgotten.  Malcolm Turnbull seems to have escaped the fate, but there is something pretty typical about the physical way a lot of Liberal politicians seem to age (see also Peter Costello) that is pretty unattractive.  Too many dinners on corporate boards probably accounts for much of it.

Sunrise really, really wants a change of government in Queensland

I've been lamenting for years about the swing to Right wing populism very evident on Channel 7's morning Sunrise show.   It seems to me that there must be producers with connections to the Liberal Party now, even though you could say a similar thing from the other direction back when they spent a lot of time priming people to accept political nerd Kevin Rudd as a potential Prime Minister.    (Yes, and what a dubious call that was, too.)

Anyway, the appalling murder of a grandmother in the far Western suburbs of Brisbane (technically, a suburb of Ipswich) on the weekend by an African migrant youth got the full political treatment on Sunrise this morning, with Liberal Opposition Leader David Crisafulli given free rein to score points on it in an election year.   Sunrise itself, in the form of its (relatively new) host Matt Shirvington was completely into helping Crisafulli, with plenty of "this is so outrageous" comments in support.  

Crisafulla went on about a youth "law and order crisis" in the State and gave populist responses about howit was because the courts are being too soft, etc.   But anyone with a brain who has been following the issue knows its not as simple as that - dealing with youth crime is particularly complicated, given that there is obviously the question of family support is involved too, and that criminology research indicates that mere incarceration as a widespread response can lead to more re-offending as youth age, not less.  In fact, Labor in Queensland has been widely criticised from the Left for already taking steps such as allowing kids to be kept in watchhouses meant for adults, and has faced enormous difficulty in getting youth detention facilities adequately staffed so that kids don't have to be locked up in their cells all day when they cause trouble.

Don't get me wrong - I am somewhat sceptical of much of what passes for justice reform commentary from the Left.  (I am particularly struck by the continual lack of detail in how diversionary programs are supposed to work, even if fully funded, when it seems increasingly the case that it is hard to get adults who want to work in the field.  Especially amongst the indigenous, the idea that only fellow indigenous can deal culturally appropriately with troubled youth must surely limit the practicality of such schemes.)

It's also not as if it is always clear what drives crime rate rises and falls - in America, they have arguing about it for a decade or two now.   Criminology just seems an inherently complicated and tricky topic.

So yeah, it bothers me when either side of politics seeks to capitalise on crime and justice issues when we all know that, in reality, they are really difficult problems for any side of politics, and there is virtually never a simple or obvious solution.     

But I do think that, as an issue, it is one on which Queensland Labor is likely (but unfairly) going to lose votes.

One has one's doubts

In an article on the BBC news website entitled:

Neuralink: Can Musk's brain technology change the world?

we get this amusing comment:

The real trick will be developing a system which can interpret or translate the signals coming from the brain with a far greater level of accuracy. If and when that happens humans may be able to communicate with computers and other electronic devices in a way that is difficult to comprehend today.

Imagine being able to order a takeaway with your thoughts, or search the internet, or translate one language to another immediately in your head, just by thinking about it.

Musk himself has already talked about a future where his device could allow people to communicate with a phone or computer "faster than a speed typist or auctioneer". ...

Others are more sceptical: "At the moment, I'm struggling to see an application that a consumer would benefit from, where they would take the risk of invasive surgery," says Prof Vanhoestenberghe.

"You've got to ask yourself, would you risk brain surgery just to be able to order a pizza on your phone?"

Given the plentiful evidence on Twitter of Musk not thinking things through very carefully, the idea of a future version of him making super rapid decisions without careful analysis first sounds more dystopian than anything else... 

So about that Apple headset thingy

Some Tweets:

 

Some nuance:

On that last point, though, I posted years ago about WhatsApp or similar helping promote lynchings  and other panics in some poor countries.  Let me find it.  Ok, here it is.

I watched some reviews of the Apple headset on the weekend.  It's nearly universally greeted with "Well, this is amazing, but you could only use it for an hour or so due to the weight and eye strain, but it shows us the future.  Don't sweat it, it'll be really good when they improve it in the upcoming versions - maybe in 2 or 3 versions time."

As such, I still don't expect it to get a large following.

Right wing insane conspiracy watch. Brought to you by Elon Musk (sometimes personally)

Here's a choice selection from Musk's home for the deranged:

The other war in Russia

From The Guardian:

Russia hands out first convictions in connection with anti-LGBT law

On Thursday, a court in the southern region of Volgograd found a man guilty of “displaying the symbols of an extremist organisation” after he posted a photograph of an LGBT flag online, according to the court’s press service.

The man, known only as Artyom P, who was ordered to pay a fine of 1,000 roubles (£8.69), admitted guilt and repented, saying he had posted the image “out of stupidity”, the court said.

On Monday, a court in Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, sentenced a woman to five days in administrative detention for wearing frog-shaped earrings displaying an image of a rainbow, according to Aegis, an LGBT rights group.

The woman was called to the police station after a man filmed himself approaching her in a cafe and demanding she remove the earrings, and posted it online.

A trial will resume next week in Saratov, south-west Russia, of a photographer who posted images of rainbow flags on Instagram, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported.

 

Wall sitting my way to lower blood pressure

Here's the Washington Post story about how wall sitting seems to be remarkably good at lowering blood pressure:

A recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that isometric exercises, like wall sits (also known as wall squats), can help reduce blood pressure even more effectively than other forms of exercise, including aerobic activity, weight training or high-intensity interval workouts.

The research is good news for people who struggle to meet physical activity guidelines that recommend at least 150 minutes of weekly moderate-intensity exercise, like brisk walking or bicycling. The new analysis found that about eight minutes of isometric exercise, three times a week, can lead to a meaningful reduction in blood pressure.

This means holding a wall sit for two minutes and resting for two minutes. Repeat for a total of four wall sits with breaks in between. A single session, including rest, will take only 14 minutes.

Given that I'm always up for the quickest and laziest way to keep my health, I might give this a go.   

Movies on a plane

On my recent trip I got to watch two movies and offer my brief review:

Barbie:   Yeah: cute, amusing, "heart-in-right-place" kind of movie, and Margot is drop dead gorgeous and very likeable.  It still felt a little underwhelming to me, but there are many worse movies that have been mega successful, so I'm not going to sweat it.

The Holdovers:   as virtually all the reviews say, it's a character driven period piece (set in 1970) that really feels like the character driven movies that came out in that era (or at least, before the summer blockbuster changed the movie business, seemingly forever.)   As such, it's a refreshing, welcome revival of the type of movie adults used to enjoy seeing.   Nonetheless, I did feel that the ending needed something a bit more cathartic than what we got.  Realism is fine, but sometimes we feel it needs more.  (I'm sounding a bit like Spielberg, perhaps, who obviously felt exactly the same way regarding how he handled Oskar Schindler's departure scene, which is nearly universally seen as a fault in an otherwise devastating film.) 

The future of floods?

I'm not sure how many people in the rest of Australia realise this, but it seems to me to be a pretty remarkable thing that the weather in Queensland this summer has not only been wetter than forecasts suggested (based on the general rule that El Nino summers are more likely to be - but are not necessarily - dryer), but the flooding that has been happening on a frequent basis has been so localised.

In other words, we seem to keep getting examples of intense, but quite localised, rainfall rates, causing flash flooding that only extends over a relatively small area - a couple of suburbs, but no further.

I meant to comment about this a few weeks ago when I woke up to see houses inundated in suburbs to the West of mine, but we hadn't even had any rainfall at all overnight.   

Something similar seems to have happened again a few days ago, where some northern suburbs were overcome with flash floods, but the rest of Brisbane had a pretty "normal" wet day. 

I would not be at all surprised if this is a pattern that continues in future, and it is recognised as a (more or less) unforeseen and problematic consequence of climate change in many parts of the world.

 

Krugman on Europe and the US

Here's Paul Krugman, in his witty style, looking at comparisons between Europe and America:

In my most recent column I had a bit of fun with Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who has ominously warned that President Biden will turn us into Europe. I joked that this would mean adding five or six years to our life expectancy. When I shared Noem’s remarks on social media, some of my correspondents asked whether this meant that we’re about to get good train service and better food.

A note to younger Americans: We already have better food. It’s true that Bolognese remains infinitely better in Bologna than anything you can get here, even in New York, but you have no idea how bad American cuisine was in the 1970s.

And this:

I fairly often encounter people who believe that Europe suffers from mass unemployment and has lagged far behind the United States technologically. But this view is decades out of date. At this point adults in their prime working years are actually somewhat more likely to be employed in major European nations than in America. Europeans also know all about information technology, and productivity — gross domestic product per hour worked — is virtually the same in Europe as it is here.

It’s true that real G.D.P. per capita is generally lower in Europe, but that’s mainly because Europeans take much more vacation time than Americans — which is a choice, not a problem. Oh, and it should count for something that there’s a growing gap between European and U.S. life expectancy, since the quality of life is generally higher if you aren’t dead.

 A key point:

In real terms, the U.S. economy grew a lot more over those two decades — 53 percent versus 31 percent. But almost all of that difference is explained by the fact that the U.S. working-age population (conventionally, if somewhat unfortunately, defined as adults 15 to 64) grew a lot, while Europe’s hardly grew at all (and has been declining in recent years). Real G.D.P. per working-age adult rose 31 percent in the United States and 29 percent — basically inside the margin of error — in the euro area.

 

There be dragons

I'm back from a quick trip to Singapore, where Chinatown is all lit up for Chinese New Year, and the upcoming Year of the Dragon. 

 

 

 

 

As I have had to explain to many people, despite having been there probably half a dozen times before, I blame the sweaty weather for meaning that my sightseeing has always progressed slowly, given that you really don't want to be outside and walking around between about 10 am and 6 pm.   So visits tend to involve a lot of middle-of-the-day time spent in single airconditioned locations, be they shops, back at the hotel, museums, etc.

I've also been slow to try some popular food and drinks.  (I don't think I have ever had chilli crab there - it is pretty expensive, and I think you can get a decent version in Australian chinese restaurants at similar cost.)

Anyway, here's a list of "long delayed, first time" things from this trip:

*    kaya toast set for breakfast (twice, and nice - it's the soy sauce on the eggs that makes the difference);

*    sugar cane juice with lemon (I always thought it would be too sweet, but it isn't);

*    the Night Safari (the personal highlight of which was touching the rhino's nose while it was being hand fed);

*   seeing wild monkeys (on the boardwalk at Rifle Range Nature Park - not a particularly well know park for tourists, but worth visiting)

*   visiting Yishun in the north, the suburban area which Singaporeans joke about as being the place where weird and dangerous things happen, and of course, it was completely fine.  (I was there to visit a particular shop - more about that later.)

*  visiting the highly eccentric Haw Par Villa park and its Hell's Museum.  That will definitely get its own post.

Things I did that I (nearly) always do when visiting Singapore:

* shopped at Uniqlo (even with the currency conversion, it still works out cheaper than buying in Australia for most of their products);

* shopped at Chinatown for belts and other bits and pieces;

* ate stingray with chilli;

*  got completely bewildered when trying to navigate my way between different terminals at Changi.  Look, I think it is just impossible to hold in your head the layout of this massive airport, with its 4 terminals and the Jewel shopping centre and connecting Skytrains, and this time I found that even Google maps seemed to get continually confused about where to direct my walking to catch a bus towards the city.    I mean, I both love it and find it completely exhausting.  [And by the way, I am convinced that they have deliberately put the office at which to get the $10 refund on the Singapore Tourist Pass in an odd position in the Changi MRT station in the hope that most people won't bother tracking it down as they arrive to depart.  Why they can't automat the refund, when everything else about using public transport in Singapore is so easy, I don't know.  I suspect it's to discourage it being claimed, though.]

 UPDATE:  For my future reference, this chain of stores, often in shopping centres - Nam Kee Pau - makes very delicious (and modestly priced) steamed buns.

       

I mean, I may be ageing myself, but still...eew

From the Washington Post, in an article noting that STDs have increased amongst over 65 year olds, the second sentence here sounds a tad creepy:

It’s healthy to be sexually active as an older adult, and it correlates with greater enjoyment of life. My patients tell me that nursing homes can present really exciting opportunities to make new friends in this regard.

The following paragraph made me laugh, given that I don't know much can be extrapolated from Sweden:

In fact, 40 percent of adults aged 65-80 are sexually active and about 10 percent of people older than 90 are sexually active, though it bears noting that the latter figure is based on a survey limited to one municipality in Sweden.

Placebos considered

Everyone loves hearing about placebo studies, don't they?   Here's a cool article at The Conversation about them, with some new aspects I hadn't heard of before:

When a doctor prescribes ibuprofen for back pain, the effects are due to the ibuprofen and the patient’s beliefs and expectations, which can be influenced by the doctor’s communication. Doctors who offer positive messages in a warm, empathic manner will increase the effect of the drugs.

The size and colour of the pill can also influence the effect. A large, orange pill can reduce pain more than a small, red one.

By contrast, blue pills generally have a sedative effect – except for Italian men, for whom blue pills have an excitative effect), probably because their revered football team wears blue.

Doctors’ ethical duty to benefit patients suggests it is an ethical duty to maximise the placebo effects of all treatments they provide.