Friday American follies

I'm pretty busy, but a few things to observe:

*  The Christian Science Monitor notes that not only Kansas has been playing with Laffer-ite tax cutting experiments, but so have Wisconsin and North Carolina:

But with a deadlocked Congress barely able to pass a budget, let alone rewrite the tax code, Republican-led states such as Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina have taken the lead – all sharply reducing taxes on individuals and businesses in pursuit of growth and jobs.
The results have ranged from poor to middling, suggesting that the most oft-cited success story – Texas – is more the result of the state’s energy economy than its fiscal policy.

As I have repeatedly noted, the Kansas experiment has had terrible outcomes,  but even in Wisconsin the policy has been at the cost of the education sector.   Seems a long term losing proposition to me...

*  The Guardian ran an article about concerns in America that cannabis legalisation is leading to corporate "Big Marijuana" that will push use just as recklessly as Big Tobacco.   My position - yes, it's hard to see how the American system of light regulation of this product will not lead to an unwanted increase in use by younger people, with long term detrimental consequences for educational outcomes and the economy.  Americans have this way of swinging from one extreme to another - the overly punitive drug laws were bad in their own way, too, for people simply using and not trading.  But legalisation with limited input into what's sold is an unnecessary extreme in the other direction. 

*  Just how depressed should one be at the state of America when Trump can even stand a chance of being elected?   One is tempted to despair at the gullibility of humans, but I guess the modern atheist would say it has always been thus.   Given the long history of bad ideas that people have proved capable of believing, I'm not sure that you can argue that they are dumber than they used to be, despite how obvious a conclusion that sometimes appears.   I still think the current blame ultimately has to come down to the awful, propaganda enabling effect of Right wing media and the information bubble it creates; and to a large extent, you have to blame Rupert Murdoch for his morally bankrupt willingnessly to make money this way.   People may not be fools, but their gullibility at the hands of information manipulators can certainly make them act very foolishly indeed.

 

Epidemics where you don't expect them

Official: Fourth-largest city in Russia has HIV epidemic

This Russian city has a population of 1.5 million (which means, I guess, that Russian cities must be pretty small on average, if it's the fourth largest) and has 1.8% of its population with HIV.  It's to do with drugs and (heterosexual) sex:

While the majority of new infections are acquired through intravenous
drug use, heterosexual sex is rising as a source of transmission and
accounts for just over 40 percent of new cases.

HIV infections in Russia are concentrated in large manufacturing
cities in southern Siberia and along drug trafficking routes that begin
in Central Asia and extend to Europe. Russia's Sverdlovsk Region, of
which Yekaterinburg is the capital, is the region most heavily infected
with HIV in Russia, according to Savinova.

Cease all time travelling now!

The US election has been reminding me lately about the classic Ray Bradbury time travel short story "A Sound of Thunder," wherein a time traveller inadvertently (by treading on a butterfly while dinosaur hunting) causes the world's time line to swap to a tyrant being elected.

I think this is a semi-plausible explanation of how a dangerously ignorant, conspiracy mongering doofus with the worst child-like personality traits can be edging close to becoming President.*

I'm not sure which organisation may be conducting time travel experiments at the moment (I wouldn't put it past CERN at the LHC, though), but they have to call a halt till after the election.



* I still don't believe he will win, though.  I would still put that at "high confidence," too.

PS:  I did Google to see if anyone else has been drawing a connection between this short story and this election - surprisingly, there seems to not be many, but there was one link to a person who wrote about this in August.   It's really hard these days to be the first with an idea!

Questioning "broken windows" policing

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong : NPR

The consensus seems to be that it probably did contribute somewhat to less crime, but not as much as early proponents claimed it did.   I hadn't heard of this research before

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

Hardly surprising

Hostility toward women is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support - Vox

You see in the Australian blogosphere, too.

Fair warning

There will soon be reason to dance in the streets, and/or shower me with money and thanks.  {Pay attention to the money part, in particular, kind readers.*}

I've noticed that I am getting very close to making my 10,000th published post....

*  I would like to think that a bit of information, from somewhere on this blog, that someone has been led to by Google has, for some reason, proved to be very useful and important to that person, somehow.  No one has ever left a comment to that effect, but who knows.  Of course, it might also take another 10,000 years for that to happen, too....

A click too far

It's remarkable how making just one extra click can dissuade me from checking in on the details of what Andrew Bolt, or Tim Blair, are complaining or writing about.

Since News Ltd (or News Corp, or whatever - I keep forgetting what it exactly is now) changed their blogs so that you just got a headline and one sentence, I find I just usually can't be bothered clicking further to read more.   I mean, I've disagreed with them about 8 times out of 10 (9.8 times out of 10 if we're talking Bolt alone) on most issues over many years now, and particularly dislike the puffed up, multi-media, Fox News lite act that Andrew Bolt has become, but at least I used to be able to get annoyed with them with just one click from my blog.  Now I can't, and I can't be bothered with the further click to confirm my annoyance.

I would be very surprised if their click rate hasn't tanked, as I've noticed some at Catallaxy saying a similar thing. 

This'll set off the Latin mass Catholics

In Show Of Unity, Pope Francis Marks 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation : The Two-Way : NPR

Sargent gets it

Greg Sargent, in the Washington Post, ends a post about the ridiculous and offensive (to reasonable people) way Trump is trying to play the latest email news with this:

...it’s remarkable that at this point, the political world just shrugs when one of the two major party nominees suggests that there is no legitimate way that our institutions can clear his political opponent of criminality. Either she is a criminal, or the FBI is corrupt to its core. That’s Trump’s actual argument, and it sometimes seems as if barely anyone raises an eyebrow anymore when he makes it.

As many have observed, Trump has broken the media's outrage meter by the relentless weight of outrageous statements.

The vast Right wing conspiracy network (for real)

Alex Jones, America’s most famous conspiracy theorist, explained - Vox

Took me a couple of days to get back and read this article, but it's a good explanation of how nutjob Alex Jones was granted credibility by the likes of Drudge and hairspray conspiracist Donald Trump.

Why can't God talk to Donald Trump?

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte Promises God He'll Stop Swearing : The Two-Way : NPR

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.