Ouija, again, and the dead walk in Mexico

Gee, everyone's doing stories on Ouija boards this year.  Is it because of that movie, which looks a bit silly to me?  Anyway, there is good anecdote or two from the article in The Guardian:

As the board’s popularity, and profit, increased, most of the early investors sought to highlight their role in the creation of the Ouija board. But Helen Peters wanted nothing more to do with it after the board caused serious damage to her family.

When some civil war family heirlooms went missing from Peters’ home, Peters asked the Ouija board who had taken them. According to Peters’ grandson, the board indicated a member of the family. “Half the family believed it and half the family said ‘bullshit’, including Helen,” said Murch. The event created a conflict that was never resolved, and tore the family apart.

After the fight, Peters sold all of her stock in the company. “Until her dying day, she’s telling everyone: don’t play the Ouija board because it lies,” Murch said.

I'm also rather surprised to read that Mexico City did not have an actual Day of the Dead parade until the James Bond Spectre movie invented it.  But now they do.  How very odd.

More Halloween fun

Found via Happy Catholic, who I don't drop in on very often, but she really is happy, all the time, and always puts up lovely artwork.  (She also demonstrates that Catholics aren't afraid of Halloween.  My daughter has a couple of friends of unclear Christian denomination who go to "Light Parties" on Halloween instead of doing the more traditional dress up.)   This is funny:

In time for Halloween

Vox has a good article up all about Ouija boards, and the ideomotor effect that makes them work.  Well, most of the time [insert ghostly, mad laugh].

Here are a couple of parts that I found particularly interesting: 

Before Ouija boards were invented, spiritualists and other would-be ghost communicators used makeshift devices called “talking boards” that served a similar purpose. Talking boards first became popular in mid-19th-century America, when millions of people suddenly gained an interest in talking to the dead following the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War. The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to exploit grieving war families, meant scientists actually started studying the ideomotor effect in the mid-century, well before Ouija boards and planchettes were patented in 1890.

I don't think I heard of "talking boards" before, but the internet knows all, and here's a very comprehensive (if not particularly well designed) website called The Museum of Talking Boards. 

And here's another bit of information that's rather curious:

The effect might also make the Ouija board an effective tool to help you tap into your own subconscious. In one study published in 2012, scientists found that using the Ouija board allowed subjects to recall factual information with more accuracy than if they weren’t using the board. Participants were instructed to answer a series of yes/no questions and to rate whether they were confident in their answers or merely guessing. Later, they were subjected to another round of questions, but used a Ouija board to indicate “yes” or “no,” once again rating their confidence level in their answers. In cases where participants believed they didn’t know an answer, they were able to give more correct answers, more often, when using the Ouija board than when they believed they were only guessing on their own.

The researchers behind that study have gone on to speculate that using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge could lead to insights about the early onset of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Well, I did post once before about ouija, and the subconscious, but it's worth following that last link for some further information.

 

The transmission of a simple mistake

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic

The details are really surprising for their simplicity, and for illustrating how a "good" but mistaken story gets spread and takes a long, long time to correct.  Ed Yong explains that, when first investigating the rise of AIDS in the US, the researchers found this:

One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas. Having had sex with patients from both California and New York, he seemed to connect the epidemic from coast to coast. As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a
U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.

That was an unfortunate move. “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,” says Richard McKay, a medical historian at the University of Cambridge, who recently tracked down the details of the case. By the time the CDC study was published in 1984, Patient O had become Patient 0. In the paper’s sole diagram, Dugas sits at the center, like the spider in a web of disease.

Labels have power. As “Patient Zero,” with its connotations of ground zero, Dugas came across as not just the center of that particular AIDS cluster, but as the source of the entire U.S. epidemic. The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On. Shilts identified Dugas by name, and while he never specifically claimed that the man was the source of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, reviewers and media commentators weren’t so restrained.

The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
“Whether it’s explicit or not, there’s always a focus on the potential moral failings of the first recognized individual,” says McKay. But the concept of Patient Zero has been weakening for years, with several lines of evidence showing that HIV—the virus behind AIDS—likely arrived in the U.S. well before Dugas was ever infected.


Now, a new study exonerates Dugas once and for all. It combines McKay’s historical detective work with genetic evidence compiled by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.

Let's check in on the brains trust

Yesterday, a bizarre and awful killing happened in public in Brisbane.  The police were very quick to say it appeared to be a random event.  Over at the Australian right wing's brains trust, a long time Catholic commentator (of Irish ancestry, if I recall correctly, but I stand to be corrected) was to be found speculating:

Today: 

The lawyer for the man accused of killing a Brisbane bus driver on Friday morning has described his client as 'numb' during his appearance in court on Saturday morning.
Anthony O'Donohue, 48, did not apply for bail when he briefly appeared in the Brisbane Arrest Court...

And from another report:

Outside court, Adam Magill described the matter as "very heinous" and said he did not expect his client to apply for bail.
"His major concern as far as I'm concerned at this point in time is his mental health, that needs to be assessed," he said.

Now, I guess Muslim outreach could be converting white, middle aged, Irish sounding men, but the photo showing the guy doesn't really indicate any religious dress:

Has the blog made any comment about this today?  Not that I can see.

Dictator talk

I am again struck by the danger to democracy and the separation of powers that Trump represents in his continual proclamations that HC is a criminal, and that the FBI should remedy its "mistake":

 “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office," he said.

He continued: "I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the DOJ are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understand. It is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected."

I am again gobsmacked by how the Right wing commentary in the US (and here) just goes along with this, with not a hint of  reservation that this is how dictators run things - telling their investigators and courts the outcome they want with respect to their political opponents. 

This is all in the context of a "re-opening" of an investigation that may not be a real "re-opening" of anything significant at all, regardless of what ageing reporters may think. 

Again - the public has no idea of the mess that security classifications represent;  there has been no evidence of anything of significance coming to foreign power's attention due to HC's use of a private server (I think it safe to assume that would have been disclosed by now, if it happened);  and Right wing pundits are playing on people's ignorance.  It's no mistake that Trump does best with the lowest educated, and younger alt.right revolting culture war losing wannabe warriors.

Evil clowns really exist

Of course I'm repeating myself, but I am truly gobsmacked at the US national harm that Trump is leading by his continued talking up of Clinton as being a criminal who would destroy America.   He's a big mouth idiot who pays no regard to the danger he is encouraging when his ratbag, heavily armed, "patriot" followers feel endorsed by his rhetoric.

More MOND wars

I see via Bee's blog that there's a further fight going on about whether a recent paper shows MOND to be on its last legs, or not.  

Amusingly, the abstract from (MOND creator) Milgrom's counter-attack begins:

Keller and Wadsley (2016) have smugly suggested, recently, that the end of MOND may be in view.

It seems that Bee also thinks that Keller and Wadsley won't hold up. 

Meanwhile, its fun to watch astrophysicists fighting.

A bit of pointless cruelty

In Bioethics, Unlike Game of Thrones, Decapitation Doesn't Always Mean Death - The Atlantic

Within this article, we read of a silly, gruesome experiment from the 1990's, when I would have thought we were past the worst of pointless animal experimentation:

Yet some bioethicists attack this equation of death and decapitation. Prominent among these critics are Franklin Miller, at the National Institutes of Health, and Robert Truog, at Harvard University. In denying decapitation as a definition of death, they cite a 1995 experiment
that was so gruesome, it would make Edgar Allan Poe shudder. In the investigation, a sheep about to give birth to a lamb was beheaded. Its headless body was then connected to a breathing machine, with a tube going down its severed neck. Thirty minutes later, a caesarian section operation was performed and the headless body gave birth to a now-motherless baby lamb. To Miller and Truog, “there is no ambiguity here: the sheep remained alive during the experiment.” Therefore, they conclude, “decapitated animals are not necessarily dead.”

This was challenged on common sense grounds:

This critique was subsequently challenged by John Lizza, a philosophy professor at Kutztown University. “Any criterion for determining death that would count artificially sustained decapitated human bodies among the living ‘we’ is mistaken,” he argues.

The Trump personality under scrutiny

What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show - The New York Times

Well, it's all pretty much what I expected, and confirmation that he's temperamentally completely unsuited to the job of President.

As people in comments say, what's also disturbing is that there is such a significant slab of the American public that would vote for him.

The Nagasaki mission

Fat Boy Blusters - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Don't recall reading before about how accident prone the flight that ended up dropping the bomb on Nagasaki had been...

Al Trump

I recently re-watched The Untouchables for the first time in many years, and one thing that struck me was the way de Niro's Al Capone was very Trump-like with his finger pointing and hand gestures.  Such as:

Compare:

And the classic:

It remains a great movie, by the way.  I want to write more about it, and soon will...

This is exactly right

Obama Was Right About Republican Extremism All Along | New Republic

The truly stupid on the Right of politics, here and the US, don't comprehend this yet; probably never will.

Some pretty specific rules here

Vatican bans Catholics from keeping ashes of loved ones at home | World news | The Guardian

Well, there goes my plan to have my ashes thrown into the airconditioning intake during a board meeting of the IPA...

But seriously, I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that it's good to have a place to visit the remains of a loved one, even if it is only in ash form, rather than throwing them in the sea or scattering them around the place.   Mind you, some societies can take wanting to commune physically with the deceased a bit too far:  the Washington Post recently had a photo essay up about some Indonesia tribe that digs up their deceased every few years, re-dresses then, and then puts then away again.  This was the most remarkable photo:

Still got all his hair, too...

A good attack on Ridley and his "lukewarming is just being reasonable" position

The middle ground | …and Then There's Physics

Strange success

Yes, the reviews are now coming in, and the vast majority seem to like Dr Strange.

Good.

What the American (and Australian) Right must accept to regain credibility

I reckon there are perhaps three key things that a re-aligned American (and Australia) Right must accept to be credible again, and they are all related:

a.  that climate change is real, and a very serious long term economic and humanitarian issue that needs addressing by all governments, but especially by the US as a leading industrial and research nation. Accepting science is not being a socialist - the very nature of the problem means a globalist approach is necessary;

b.  that the idea that government must be minimal government (except when it comes to Defence - where the Right always wants more) has had its day:  driven not only by the need for clear government policy and intervention regarding climate change, but also by credible economic research, and simple common sense comparisons internationally, that government has a key and important role in a wide variety of areas important for maintaining a society's overall well being*;

c.  that provision of adequate government services and infrastructure requires realistic levels of government income, and globally, the world has been "gamed" by a race to the bottom by the richest corporations and individuals who now pay tax at levels that would have been thought laughable last century.  The Right must abandon the obsession with insisting that the only way to advance a nation's economy is to cut taxes. 


* I wonder how much blame can be borne by Rand and/or Milton Friedman for the persistence of  this Republican view?  On the latter, as Paul Krugman wrote in 2007, he was a good and important economist, when it came to his specialised field, but on matters of the size of government and regulation, it was pretty much just ideology:

In the decades ahead, this single-mindedness would become Friedman’s trademark. Again and again, he called for market solutions to problems—education, health care, the illegal drug trade—that almost everyone else thought required extensive government intervention. Some of his ideas have received widespread acceptance, like replacing rigid rules on pollution with a system of pollution permits that companies are free to buy and sell. Some, like school vouchers, are broadly supported by the conservative movement but haven’t gotten far politically. And some of his proposals, like eliminating licensing procedures for doctors and abolishing the Food and Drug Administration, are considered outlandish even by most conservatives.

The lesson the Right needs to learn:  "single mindedness" has had its day.  Pragmatism, common sense and recognition of complexity should all trump ideology.

Trump and the expected Republican break up

I thought this piece in the Washington Post, about the Republican Party's problems (and widely anticipated break up/re-alignment after losing at the election) being more than just about Trump, was pretty convincing. I'll make another post about the Right wing's necessary re-alignments.  (Although long time readers can probably guess one of them!)

Right wing cartooning

The best service cartoonist Bill Leak has provided to national politics is indicating that it (sometimes, at least) takes a really decent knock on the head/brain injury to convert a person into a permanent right wing ideologue.   That lesson hasn't been learnt well enough at Catallaxy, I see, where the controversial Bill Leak aboriginal cartoon (and self serving sequel) is now up as a banner.  (Even before this, the blog was one of the last places in Australia to go for moderate and intelligent commentary on race issues.) 

As it happens, I can see both sides of the Bill Leak cartoon - I certainly understand many aborigines finding it offensive; but I can also see that it fits within the type of graphic commentary whereby cartoonists frequently treat their targets with an unfair broad brush.

Leak's sequel makes his original offensiveness to large numbers of aboriginal fathers worse - indicating that he makes no acknowledgement that he doing anything other than "telling the truth", and that he thinks he was being funny.   If he had somehow acknowledged that he knew you can't accuse all aborigines as alcoholic, hopeless parents, he might have earned some sympathy.  But, no.

Hence, while I would have thought a complaint about the first cartoon under 18C Racial Discrimination Act should have been dismissed, taking both cartoons together makes it appear to me much more likely that he may be found to be in breach of the Act.  Am I concerned about that?   Not really - the Australian, if it was a decent newspaper of any standing, should not have run the cartoon in the first place; or, at the very least, offered an apology for offence caused once the complaints started coming in.  (Did they do that editorially?  I wouldn't know.) 

But then again, nor do I think that Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommanase did his position much good by inviting complaints about the cartoon.  While publicising the role of his organisation is one thing, doing it in such a specific context is unlikely to do more than re-invigorate the culture warriors in the Coalition and media, who have nothing better to do with their time other than hound Gillian Triggs and her organisation to death, and agitate on behalf of the likes of Andrew Bolt.

The HRC needs to have a high profile complaint (such as the current QUT student matter) fail in order to confirm in the public mind that they and its judges do take a hard headed approach to matters and aren't there for frivolous or ill founded complaints.  I strongly suspect that this is what will happen in the QUT case, and a decision on that cannot come soon enough.  The commission also then needs to review itself from a point of view of procedural fairness.

I will see this movie

Doctor Strange: 5 things to know about Marvel’s best-looking movie yet - Vox

Despite my complaints about Hollywood spending way too much time on comic book movies, I'll see this one because:

a.  everyone likes Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton, don't they? Count me in, too.

b.  articles talking about it seem to suggest there are quite a few jokes to be had.  Marvel needs humour to be bearable;

c.   movies that are noteworthy for unusual visual effects still have some appeal.  Merely well done disaster scenarios, whether on a city or planet-wide scale, don't hold any interest, but this movie sounds more innovative than that.