Rich vampires already exist

Vanity Fair notes:

Jesse Karmazin agrees. His start-up, Ambrosia, is charging about $8,000 a pop for blood transfusions from people under 25, Karmazin said at Code Conference on Wednesday. Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Some are Silicon Valley technologists, like Thiel, though Karmazin stressed that tech types aren’t Ambrosia’s only clients, and that anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions.

Karmazin was inspired to found Ambrosia after seeing studies researchers had done involving sewing mice together with their veins conjoined. Some aspects of aging, one 2013 study found, could be reversed when older mice get blood from younger ones, but other researchers haven’t been able to replicate these results, and the benefits of parabiosis in humans remains unclear. “I think the animal and retrospective data is compelling, and I want this treatment to be available to people,” Karmazin told the MIT Technology Review

According to the article, Ambrosia says that Thiel is not one of their customers, but there are rumours that he has his own source of young blood.

So, how's Prof Davidson's Catallaxy blog taking the Paris Accord news?

Of course, they are popping champagne corks, but the nuttiness and offensiveness of some - who view accepting the reality of climate change as somehow affecting their masculinity - is on full display.

Stand tall, Professor Davidson.  

Update:  In examining the Paris decision,  David Roberts at Vox re-visits his tribalist/cosmopolitan dichotomy explanation for Trump, and at the end of this section, the "masculinity  must dominate again" aspect gets a mention:

Trump is a tribalist

The hallmark of tribalism (a term I prefer to “nationalism,” as it gets at the deeper roots) is that it views the world in zero-sum terms — if one tribe benefits, it is at another tribe’s expense. As has been much remarked (see my post on Trump’s mindset), this describes Trump to a tee. He views all interactions, both personal and international, in terms of dominance and submission.

Tribalism has also entirely subsumed the US conservative movement. The intellectual core has all but rotted; what remains are older, rural and suburban white men and their wives, angry that their tribe is being demoted from its hegemonic position. At a barely beneath-the-surface level, Trumpism is about restoring old hierarchies: the powerful over the powerless, whites over minorities, men over women.

 Clearly, you can see how this is so true, when you read the many examples at Catallaxy.

Rain on the move?

From Climate Central:

A new study ....suggests that Earth’s rain belts could be pushed northward as the Northern Hemisphere heats up faster than the Southern Hemisphere. That shift would happen in concert with the longstanding expectation for already wet areas to see more rain and for dry ones to become more arid.

The study, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, “adds to the large body of evidence that climate change is going to mess with the large-scale motions of air and water in the atmosphere. And this matters, because those patterns largely determine where it's rainy or arid, broadly speaking,” NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel, who wasn’t involved with the study, said in an email.

These changes in rain distribution could have implications for future water resources, particularly in areas where water supplies are already stressed, such as the western U.S. and parts of Africa.

...which regions are wet and dry are also determined by the locations of the Earth’s main rain belts. The positions of those rain belts, in turn, are tied to that of the so-called thermal equator (the ring around the planet’s middle where surface temperatures are highest). And the location of that equator is impacted by the balance of temperatures between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Because the Northern Hemisphere has more landmass, it is heating up faster than the Southern Hemisphere, and, as some climate models have suggested, this could push the thermal equator northward, and along with it those key rain belts.

Makes some sense, and intuitively, one of the most serious potential consequences of climate change.
 

Look at my tatts

Good grief - given my aversion to tattooing, especially when on prominent display on women - I am less than pleased to see a tattoo promoting article on The Conversation by a female academic at RMIT.   (What an academy...)  

Even though she writes:

My interest in tattooing stems from my upbringing. Living in Aotearoa, from roughly the ages of eight to 28, meant that I was exposed to Maori and Pacific Islands tattooing attitudes.

I don't think she has a tribal reason herself for getting tattooed - and the tattoos of her own that she puts in the article are not of a tribal design.   She further gives the "high brow" justification for the practice:

If I see my tattoos as permanent records of rites of passage and power over adversity, ancient women and their societies may have been doing the same - but with a more restricted range of motif options. The limited range of motifs would have been due to both social conventions, the skill of the tattooist, and the tools used to create the tattoo.

Just because women got it done 2000 years ago in Greece or Egypt, I see no particular reason why this should encourage women to get kitchy art permanently fixed to their body now.  (And I maintain - the great majority of tattooing done in the West is kitch art.)

Anyway, each to their own, as they say;  just that I'll keep complaining about it, too, until fashions change.   (I still suspect it will, someday, somehow....) 

Psychological issues

The thing that immediately struck me, on listening to extracts of Trump's "we're leaving the Paris Accord" speech this morning, were the references to other countries "laughing at" the US because they knew the US was being hurt by the deal.  (And he threw in a snide reference to Germany, or Europe, in particular.)     

I was going to say that this is a case of psychological projection - but it's not quite that, I suppose.   It's whatever the term is for psychological deflection - mistaking laughter at him personally, for all of his obvious personal and intellectual shortcomings, as being directed at the country as a whole.  

And as such, it is example of what makes him so unsuited to making decisions on diplomatic and military matters (yes, including the nuclear codes) - you can imagine him mistaking a slight meant to be directed to him as deserving response on behalf of the whole country (because he will think that the country is the intended victim, not him personally.)

Given that Bannon is seem as a key person behind the Paris decision, you can well imagine him having some similar psychological issues too.   (He has been married and divorced 3 times - a bit of an obvious warning sign regarding personality.  He's also looks remarkably old and unwell, for his physical age.  Is he sensitive on that front?)

Apart from the intrigue of what drives the tiny mind of the President,  everyone will be making the obvious point in response to his claimed reasons for withdrawing.  As the Washington Post puts it:

“As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” Trump said — a phrase seeming to contain a logical contradiction. If the agreement is nonbinding, then what burdens can it impose?

And that contradiction gets to the heart of why Trump seemed, on Thursday, not to be arguing against the Paris agreement itself, but rather, against the Obama administration’s pledge under that agreement, in which the United States would cut by the year 2020 its emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels.

But the agreement does not require a particular level of emissions cuts for a particular country; rather, the United States and any other nation can choose its own level of emissions reductions.

“It seems very unnecessary to have to withdraw from the Paris agreement if the concern is focused on the U.S. emissions target and financial contributions,” said Sue Biniaz, who served at the State Department as the United States’ lead climate change lawyer from 1989 until earlier this year. “The U.S. can unilaterally change its emissions target under the agreement — it doesn’t have to ‘renegotiate’ it — and financial contributions are voluntary.”

 As I expected, the attempted explanation of Trump is in part meant to placate his daughter - he didn't take the chance to deny climate change, and he leaves open the possibility of "renegotiation" - of a deal that doesn't bind the country to a particular target anyway.  

It's all nonsense, and the world will laugh - or grimace - again at the President.

Old news, but I like the sarcasm

While wandering the interwebs, just found this pleasantly sarcastic note at Crikey, from February this year:

“Some exciting Friday afternoon news,” IPA long-term inmate and senior fellow Chris Berg writes. The passionate free-marketeer and advocate of low taxes and small government will be taking up a postdoctoral position at … RMIT, the publicly funded university. Your low taxes at work. The old workingmen’s college is a hotbed of free-marketeers, with Catallaxy-blog aficionadi Sinclair Davidson and Steven Kates both having spent years there. How selfless of these men to deny themselves the bracing challenges of the free market, and teach the evils of government funding in an institution that receives about $550 million of its billion-dollar budget from government sources. How interesting it would be to see them offer their sevices in the market, and see how many would pay. Don’t worry, no chance of that. You’ll be working to support free-market advocacy for many years to come. Exciting Monday morning news! — Guy Rundle

 

Update on unemployment

I did note a week or so ago that Adam Creighton seems determined to be a contrarian (and of the kind who would appeal to dumb populist politicians) when it comes to matter of unemployment figures; even when a fellow "small government" traveller like Judith Sloan has long been dismissive of the argument.

Well, for more detail as to why Adam's argument is (largely) crap, Greg Jericho has done a sterling job of explaining it all here. 

Long term lead

Interesting to see that glaciologists looking at lead levels in the European environment, at least, have now realised that lead mining and smelting has been polluting the place above natural levels for a very long time:

When the Black Death swept across Europe in the 14th century, it not only killed millions, it also brought lead smelting, among many other commercial activities, to a halt. That cessation is reflected in a new analysis of historical and ice core data, which researchers say provides evidence that the natural level of lead in the air is essentially zero, contrary to common assumptions.
"These new data show that human activity has polluted European air almost uninterruptedly for the last [about] 2,000 years," the study's authors say. "Only a devastating collapse in population and economic activity caused by pandemic disease reduced atmospheric pollution to what can now more accurately be termed background or natural levels."

Why I am not too worried

As much as I want there to be serious, proper and appropriate government policy directed to urgently work towards reducing greenhouse gases, I am tending towards the sanguine on the matter of Trump (possibly) saying the US will pull out of the Paris Accord, for the following reasons:

a.   while there are those who are ecstatic at the prospect of Trump confirming withdrawal,  it has been clear for years now that you either have to be dumb, old or a libertarian (or a combination of all three) to not believe the science and that political policy addressing climate change is appropriate and necessary.   Thus, they may celebrate it as a great victory, but quite frankly, they don't have the smarts to see the writing on the wall that the war is already lost.

b.   It's not just me who can see that - it's the rest of the world.   Thus, I am feeling reasonably confident that there is insufficient political support in any other important country to pull out, just because the most obviously intellectually challenged US President we have seen in decades and his coterie of ageing fundamentalist supporters (either in religion or ideology) have decided they can pretend the problem doesn't exist.   I suspect they will wait out the passing of this presidency and old guard Republican leadership.

c.   Trump has personal reasons for hedging on this decision - he wants to keep Ivanka and her husband on side.  (And there are other advisers around him who would just as soon stay in anyway.)   Thus, the suspicion already is that if he confirms withdrawal, he will do so in such a way as to not offend his daughter and those other advisers - more than likely, I would guess, by claiming that he is happy to see CO2 reductions, but he just doesn't believe the Paris accord is relevant to achieving that.  And, as we know with the example of Texas, where the Republican leadership would make you suspect it would be a bad place for renewable energy, yet wind power has done very well, sometimes the outcomes in clean energy don't match the political rhetorical in the way you might expect.  In other words, it's not out of the question that actions by corporations  and State governments in the US will continue to make reasonable progress towards green energy regardless of the Federal government saying "we don't care".

d.   There are some (well, at least one!) suggesting that it's actually better for the world for the US to pull out of the agreement rather than stay in and pretend it is following it.  See the argument put up by Luke Kemp, which appeared at The Conversation, and also got noted at the Washington Post.

Anyway, we shall see...

Update:  it's worth looking at the graph in this piece by David Roberts, showing that the US had a tough road to meet its commitments anyway.  The uncertainty is, I guess,  the degree to which Trumpian loosening of regulations (happening even without leaving Paris) will be taken advantage of by industry to maintain current emissions (or increase them).

No news from Laika :(

I'm a bit worried about Laika Studios, as there is still no announcement of its next release.

Kubo and the Two Strings badly underperformed for them at the box office despite (the somewhat too ecstatic) reviews.  (I blame using Matthew McConaughey for a voice.  He can ruin anything.)  But just as it was opened, company owner Travis Knight announced that it was the last of their "kids" films anyway.  He said the next film was going to be very different, still intended for families, but tonally a break from their first four films.  

Well, that makes me very curious, but despite his saying that they would probably announce it last year, a visit to the company website is still silent on the matter.

I still think that Paranorman, closely followed by Coraline, were the studio's best films.   But the artwork and craftmanship in all of them is something to behold.

No, doctors weren't amazed

I suspected as much:

Why This Viral Video of a Newborn Baby 'Walking' Is Totally Normal

Roger Moore's ghost

No, no:  I've had no spectral visitors offering Bondian double entendres.  But I just noticed this story, apparently told by Moore a long time ago, about a ghost he had visit him twice when staying at a hotel early in his career.

The story is interesting (if not a tall tale) for a couple of reasons.  First, it initially sounds like it might be a case of sleep paralysis, which often does involve the perception of a phantom figure in the room, sometimes near or on the bed, causing the paralysis.  But then he says he was sitting "bolt upright" in bed - and I don't think that's consistent with your normal "woke up and couldn't move" case of sleep paralysis.

Secondly, it is surely pretty rare to see the same apparition twice.

So, I wonder if it was true...

(And, by the way, isn't that a terribly designed website the story is on.)

Blockchain, cryptocurrency and unintended consequences

Yes, I think I count as an intuitive skeptic of Bitcoin and blockchain generally.  (If something's beloved of techno libertarians, it should be automatically suspect, in my books.)

But here's the sort of article that puts some justification into my intuition:

Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism

Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power. It could consolidate their control instead.

Of personal interest

I've been noticing certain unwanted age related changes to my skin in the last couple of years:  I'm getting small lumps and brownish patches that never used to be there and would just as soon do without.  So, who knows, a good all purpose aged skin repairing chemical might tempt me to use it:

New work from the University of Maryland suggests that a common, inexpensive and safe chemical could slow the aging of human skin. The researchers found evidence that the chemical—an antioxidant called methylene blue—could slow or reverse several well-known signs of aging when tested in cultured human skin cells and simulated skin tissue.

The study was published online in the journal Scientific Reports on May 30, 2017. "Our work suggests that methylene blue could be a powerful antioxidant for use in skin care products," said Kan Cao, senior author on the study and an associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD. "The effects we are seeing are not temporary. Methylene blue appears to make fundamental, long-term changes to skin cells."

The Trumpian path

Matthew Yglesias, one of the most trenchant critics of Trump, has written a lengthy piece at Vox about Trump as "bullshitter" - an analysis that is not exactly news (to put it mildly), but he does go into it at more depth.  In particular, he notes how it fits in with how authoritarianism  works, and ends with this:

The upshot is a conservative movement and a Republican Party that, if Trump persists in office, will be remade along Trumpian lines with integrity deprecated and bullshit running rampant. It’s clear that the owners and top talent at commercial conservative media are perfectly content with that outcome, and the question facing the party’s politicians is whether they are, too. 

The common thread of the Trumposphere is that there doesn’t need to be any common thread. One day Comey went soft on Clinton; the next day he was fired for being too hard on her; the day after that, it wasn’t about Clinton at all. The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is. 

This is the authoritarian spirit in miniature, assembling a party and a movement that is bound to no principles and not even committed to following its own rhetoric from one day to the next. A “terrific” health plan that will “cover everyone” can transform into a bill to slash the Medicaid rolls by 14 million in the blink of an eye and nobody is supposed to notice or care. Anything could happen at any moment, all of it powered by bullshit.

Quite right, I think.   And funnily enough, we have people claiming to be libertarians who are excuse makers in chief for Trump, despite this creepy and obvious "truth means nothing" approach to governing.   The effects of the silly, post modernism movement (which similarly eroded the utility of "truth" in science and policy) still causes them offence,  but when it comes to Trump, it seems to be a case of "meh".

Update:  see this Salon article on libertarians and Trump, too.

Public transport and land value

There's an article up at The Conversation looking at the question of what effect the Gold Coast light rail had on land values.   It seems it's a tricky issue to work out and there could be quite a lot of "rubbery figures" involved.

The idea that public transport could be part paid for by greater taxes on surrounding land that benefits from it just strikes me as an idea too difficult to implement with enough certainty and fairness.  

As for whether people actually like the Gold Coast light rail system or not - some of the comments indicate that some are still dead set against it for more-or-less aesthetic reasons.   I find that rather odd.  I thought it looked modern and efficient last I saw it:  public transport just annoys some people, I reckon. 

Lab meat delayed

I've always been a skeptic of lab grown meat, and this update from Discover indicates that the idea of growing muscle cells into something resembling meat is in fact making slow progress.

I say that the enthusiastic reception of the (apparently) very meat like "impossible burger" (because it contains a blood taste resembling compound, but derived from plants) is going to do away with the interest in lab grown mince anyway.  And as for slabs of fake steak grown in a lab - I don't think they have any idea how to get it texturally like meat, yet.

The Lindt Cafe seige

I watched some of the Four Corners report on the outcome of the Lindt seige inquest last night, and have a few observations:

*  it is clear that there were some inexcusable mistakes made by the police in terms of lines of communication.  I found it gobsmacking that a hostage could ring the negotiator direct number and have it ring out 4 times, because of  a slow changeover happening, for example, or that a text message passed on by a relative did not make it to the upper level of the police operation.

*  the police inability to get things done quickly - getting lights turned out in the mall, which was agitating Monis - seemed kind of incompetent of either the police, or the Council.

* the reason Manis executed the manager remained unclear.  It seemed Manis was reassuring the remaining hostages that they would be OK if they just co-operated, but he made Troy kneel in an "execution" position anyway, then waited and shot him anyway.  Did he want to precipitate the police finally storming the cafe?

*  that said, and not taking away any of the grief of the families of the victims, it is still surely the case that a very early police storming of the cafe would probably have resulted in more accidental deaths from stray bullet fragments than what occurred (one.)   In a broad sense, waiting was responsible.  Once he fired a shot towards escaping hostages, it probably wasn't, and the police seem to accept that now.   But it remains quite on the cards that even entry then might have accidentally killed more.  

Australian Right wing civility crisis, continues

Now that Roger Franklin's long term incivility problem in his job at Quadrant has been opened up for wider public scrutiny by not only the ABC, but also (apparently) The Australian, and Right wing commentators (Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Nick Cater) are putting a lot of distance between themselves and him, that long term exemplar of Right wing incivility, the Catallaxy blog, continues to be in uproar in defence of Franklin, save for about 1% of commenters.  

Sinclair Davidson, who seems to be a close friend of Franklin (and people at Catallaxy sometimes comment on the incestuous world of Labor politics!) is making a (pretty typical for him) hash of the defence of Franklin's comment:

Roger asked, what I thought, a perfectly good question:

What if that blast had detonated in an Ultimo TV studio? Unlike those young girls in Manchester, their lives snuffed out before they could begin, none of the panel’s likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity’s intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty.

True – an early version, quickly retracted, was a bit more intemperate but the question remains valid.

This is just an inane line to take on the matter:   there was no "valid question" - it was a rhetorical device which Franklin answers himself - by saying explicitly that the world would have been better for it. 

Look, the simple fact of the matter is that Davidson is just about the last person to show sensible judgement when it comes to matters of civility, as he has been at the very forefront of providing for Australian Right wing reactionary "conservatives" a outlet for their voice, and he doesn't care what offence they cause, even on a blog in which he can delete offensiveness.

He rarely exercises that power, plays favourites, and is willing to continually ignore plainly defamatory or offensive material - with the Left being its main target.   

I complained about this here, back in early 2013, and stopped my commenting there because of his ridiculous and partisan tolerance of incivility, defamation*, and outright plagiarism (for which he accepted the poster's apology, and then left the patently plagiarised post - from an American site - up on the blog.)

In the current kerfuffle, he has noted that people have (I don't know how recently) tried to get him into trouble at RMIT because of the blog.   That wasn't me, but I do find it pretty remarkable that RMIT would not be concerned about their reputation when one of its key staff has the power to police defamation and offensiveness on a blog, and routinely chooses not to exercise it. 

It would not concern me at all if there were media exposure to the blog and its threads - he used to get his head on the ABC as an economic and quasi political commentator quite often, I think viewers deserve to know that he runs a blog that positively hurts the cause of civil political debate in the country.

It's an echo chamber of the worst kind, reinforcing culture warriors and climate change deniers that they are not alone and can be as obnoxious as they like, thus coarsening public political discourse.   You can actually see the place dumbing down and coarsening thread participants over the years, as those who expect civility in argument and would put up counter views have all abandoned the place.   

Franklin deserves to lose his job at Quadrant;  I reckon more might be achieved if Catallaxy enforced civility on its own pages, but that would require a change of its hopeless leadership.

* unless it's a friend

Blasphemy and Islam

Hey, if you can get past the "please register to read" pester screen (I did, eventually), there's a really good article up at Foreign Policy "The Islamic World Has a Blasphemy Problem". 

As the article notes (various extracts follow):

Blasphemy charges have steadily risen in the last decade in Indonesia and have a near 100 percent conviction rate. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, there has been an uptick in blasphemy charges and prosecutions in recent years. Blasphemy has been spiritedly revived in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. In 2001, there was only one blasphemy trial in Pakistan, but now there are dozens each year. There has been a steady drip of attacks and murders of bloggers and writers in Bangladesh in the last five years, along with a deadly mass protest in 2013 demanding the death penalty for blasphemy....

The use of the charge ranges from the nominal to the horrifying. Since 2016, the Egyptian poet Fatima Naoot has been serving a three-year prison sentence for criticizing the slaughter of animals during Eid al-Fitr on Facebook. A Malaysian man was charged with blasphemy for posing questions to his religion teachers. Even the mere accusation of blasphemy poses the threat of violence: In 2015, an Afghan woman was beaten and murdered by a mob in Kabul after arguing with a mullah, and last month, a Pakistani university student was killed by a mob over allegations, later discredited, of posting blasphemous content on social media....

“As far back as the 1750s, the Saudi polity really was based on religion and specifically Wahhabism [the puritanical, literalist strain of Islam founded in 18th-century Arabia],” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Due to a pact between the Saudi royal family and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1744, Wahhabism is effectively the state religion of Saudi Arabia. “Wahhabism is, truly, all about blasphemy. What is true Islam and what is not,” Bokhari said. “Really, to them, most Muslims who don’t subscribe to their exacting views are committing blasphemy in some way or another.”

Modern Islamic countries, meanwhile, have accrued their blasphemy laws not as a medieval inheritance but through one of two major routes: as leftovers of European colonialism or as products of the 20th-century “Arabization” of the Muslim world in the model of the Gulf states.

It goes on to point out that, ironically, British colonialism introduced blasphemy laws in India and Malaysia to help with interfaith stability. 

Anyway, it's a good read, if somewhat depressing for the lack of any grounds for optimism that its political use will not stop in Muslim countries any time soon.