Not sure I would want to visit the US right now...

Washington: A Jamaican national was detained for nearly three months in the United States after bringing in bottles of honey from the Caribbean island that customs agents mistakenly believed to be liquid methamphetamine.

Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs and immigration bureaucracy.

Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.

Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.

According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.

Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive: they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was wrong.

The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.

Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with the US immigration service.

His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.

The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

Here's a link to the story at Gulf News.

Excessive recipe excessively funny

The recipe video at this tweet has just about the funniest comments thread that I can ever recall on Twitter.  

I liked the hamburger with pickles clip in the comments thread too...

Channel News Asia, for good and not quite so good

As I have explained before, I really like watching the weekly highlights from Channel News Asia, in part for its stories about the rest of Asia, but also because of the upbeat, optimistic tone of stories about Singapore.

I'm not cynical about how, it being government owned, it's not as if the positive spin is coming from a completely independent viewpoint.  For example, I like the way it continually runs stories that encourages the multicultural tolerance that the nation island depends on.  In propaganda terms, I've realised it's like the polar opposite of Fox News:  a news and current affairs service devoted to national unity and optimism - the type of channel a benevolent dictator might desire - rather than the cynical, money grubbing operation of an ageing husk of a media billionaire designed to enrich him further by sowing division and rabid partisanship.

That said, I was a little taken about by a recent story which seemed to display a much more cynical line.   While I have seen sympathetic stories about migrant workers there before, this one about a Bangladeshi guy who got some fame for a book of poetry, and then (pretty much) let it go to his head, seems to be designed to carry the message "migrant workers - you are here to do hard labour, and don't forget it".

(Mind you, the guy does come across as having a somewhat overinflated view of his artist talents.  I have my doubts that he would have known the spin the CNA story would take, though, when he was co-operating with them.  And the comments that follow the video on Youtube show that I am not the only one who thought this video was unusually mean-spirited and seemed like a warning to migrant workers.)

The only other thing I don't like about CNA is that I can't embed their Youtube videos.

Update:  I was wrong - I can embed their videos, just my old computer at home (Vista powered) won't let me.  Here's the story I was talking about:

A devil of a Sunday

An interesting story at the Catholic Herald, about the head Jesuit upsetting Catholic exorcists:

An international organization of Catholic exorcists said Thursday that the existence of Satan as a real and personal being is a truth of Christin doctrine.

“The real existence of the devil, as a personal subject who thinks and acts and has made the choice of rebellion against God, is a truth of faith that has always been part of Christian doctrine,” the International Association of Exorcists said in an August 22 press release.

The organization’s release came in response to recent remarks on the devil from Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, which the organization called “grave and confusing.”

The exorcists said they released their statement to provide “doctrinal clarification.”

Sosa made headlines earlier this week when he told Italian magazine Tempi that “the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”

The devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Sosa said.

Citing a long history of Church teaching on the nature of Satan, including several citations from Pope Francis and his recent predecessors, the exorcists’ organization said that Catholics are bound to believe that Satan is a real and personal being, a fallen angel.

The beginning of the end?

Allahpundit's take on Trump's "hereby order" tweets (and continuing trade war, as well as his attacks on his own appiontees) seems pretty accurate to me.  For example:

Like a Twitter pal said, imagine throwing a fit because Denmark refused to sell Greenland to you and touting the fact that an ally said Israelis love you like you’re the second coming and having those things *not* be your most alarming statements of the week....

He’s never going to accept that the Fed is independent from partisan politics by design, but he could at least restrain his scapegoating of Powell by not comparing him unfavorably to communist China’s supremo, a guy who operates actual concentration camps. Trump’s willingness to speak warmly about the world’s worst bad guys while excoriating domestic politicians in the most acidic ways has lost most of its power to shock after his bromances with Putin and Kim Jong Un, but not all of it.

But wait. He was saving the Big Crazy for his response to China’s new retaliatory tariffs on American imports

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered.” Every day brings new material for a game of “What if Obama said it?” but purporting to order U.S. companies not to do business with China is championship-round stuff. I wonder which White House advisor got stuck explaining to him that he doesn’t actually have the power to do that. Just like I wonder when we’re going to start hearing about sanctions on China, which would be like dropping an atomic bomb on the economy....

This past week is going to get its own chapter in all of the self-serving post-Trump “I never really liked him” memoirs written by his cronies eager to rehabilitate their image once he’s gone. 

Look, the Trump cultists are never going to abandon him - you can see that on Twitter and comments rubbishing Allahpundit's take - but there is surely a substantial number of GOP congress people who can be pushed past their support of convenience for him into actually starting to talk about a replacement less obviously profoundly ignorant and flighty (I'm being very restrained with my descriptions) with someone like Pence, perhaps?

About conspiracy theories

The TLS looks at the rise of modern conspiracy theory belief:

Much of the work of modernity involved escaping the conspiracy of history itself, in which people are damned and doomed from the start. What they strove to become, instead, were people with a future; persons, bearers of rights, of sovereignty, with control over their destinies; citizens in secular nation states. They also understood themselves as objects and organisms, subject to natural laws. Nineteenth-century intellectuals offered all manner of secular explanations for misfortune in the realm of the physical and biological sciences, from the modelling of the weather to the germ theory of disease, and in the realm of the emerging social sciences, from economics to eugenics. This change coincided with rising rates of literacy and the growth of public schooling: the democratization of knowledge. By 1881, when Guiteau shot Garfield, rules of evidence – ideas about the relationship between facts and arguments, ideas once confined to courts of law and chemical laboratories – had spilled out to the new profession of journalism and the new popular genre of detective fiction. Suddenly, everyone had a theory, about almost everything. The misery of humanity became a crime everyone could solve.

The most popular scapegoat, it turns out, is other people. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a period during which emerging nation states sorted the world’s peoples into “nationalities”, most conspiracy theories in the US and Western Europe involved threats to the nation by people who weren’t so easily sorted. The most notorious of these theories concerned an alleged international conspiracy of Jews, people with ties across national borders. “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe”, claimed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in Russia in 1903, was distributed throughout the US by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and assigned as a textbook in German schools from 1933. Much the same claim appeared in The Jewish Peril, a pamphlet issued by the British government in 1920 and written, in part, by Nesta Webster, who tied the Jewish conspiracy to the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth century.

Arguably, there is just this one conspiracy theory, an endlessly recycled version of antisemitism, as the political scientist Thomas Milan Konda suggests in Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How delusions have overrun America. The Jewish conspiracy theory served as the template for nearly all that followed, from anti-communist and anti-homosexual panics and purges to race-based nationalism and xenophobia of every stripe, down to Islamophobia, the demonization of refugees, and the detention of immigrants. In the 1930s, the American fascist and disciple of Nesta Webster, Elizabeth Dilling – the founder of the Patriotic Research Bureau and author of the Red Network (which branded even the YMCA a communist front) – delighted audiences with her fake Yiddish accent, at a time when critics of FDR denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”. By way of a mysterious “hidden hand”, the theory alleges, Illuminati or Jews or Bolsheviks or communists or gay people, or whoever, secretly run most national governments and aspire to world domination. “There are 200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country”, the housewife and America Firster Agnes Waters announced in 1942. “If they are admitted they will rape every woman that is left unprotected.”

 I have comments moderation on, and its wildly unlikely that any of Graeme's ones will get through.

Everyone liked Tim, except...

Tim Fischer was a genuinely likeable politician, as all the kind words from everyone following his death show.

I was amused to read at Catallaxy how the only regular left wing participant there, the Vietnamese war conscript veteran often referred to as "Numbers", noted how veterans suffered more blood cancer than  the rest of their population cohort, only to have others in thread pooh-pooh the suggestion.  Then on TV I saw that Tim himself said he had been told by a specialist that exposure to war time chemicals had probably stuffed up his immune system.   So much for the collective smarts of Catallaxy.

And I also was reminded, by clown rodeo leader Sinclair Davidson himself, that he considered Fischer an anti-Semite, no doubt for his criticisms of Israel's treatment of Palestine, and his general friendliness with Arab countries in the region.  

Just add that to the list of SD's views which are so eccentric that mainstream commentators just go "uhuh" and move on.  It probably doesn't top his all time "seriously?" comment re Adam Goodes:

But is it racist? Many individuals are having a go at me on twitter for questioning whether calling an Indigenous man an “ape” is actually racist and not just rude. For many people it seems self-evident that is is racist. But nobody can say how or why. The “best” story I’ve heard is that Social Darwinism ranks “people of colour” below animals.

but comes pretty close.

Green finance success?

I take it from this report that the Gillard established Clean Energy Finance Corporation might be sold into private hands means that it has been a success:

Private investment funds are circling Australia's Clean Energy Finance Corporation hoping for a sale of the $10 billion government-owned organisation, as its head flags a major shift in how taxpayer funds are used to support the booming industry.

In an interview that will spark debate over whether the fund should be privatised like its counterpart in Britain, CEFC chief executive Ian Learmonth said he would shift his focus to strengthening the grid's reliability because banks had become more comfortable financing large-scale wind and solar projects....

The CEFC was established under the Gillard government in 2012 to spur investment in the sector while it introduced a carbon pricing scheme. Touting Australia's clean-energy credentials to Pacific leaders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week called it "the world's most successful green bank"....

Mr Learmonth said as the utility solar and wind-power renewables market had matured, more private capital had flowed in. The CEFC earned $350 million last year from maturing loans, which have been written on a commercial basis allowing for a transfer to private entities if required.

I bet that Liberals were not predicting a success when it was established.  

Composer more modern than I knew

Last night I learned (because my daughter was doing an assignment on him) that Richard Strauss (not Johann) lived from 1864 to 1949;  I didn't realise he was a 20th century figure.   

And this weekend, I get to listen to his An Alpine Symphony, a "tone poem" which my daughter actually likes.   (She plays a lot of different composers in her youth orchestra, but seems to not care much for a lot of the pieces selected.  She has a particular dislike of Mozart, for some reason.)

I also didn't realise that the 2001: A Space Odyssey piece from Also sprach Zarathustra was just the opening fanfare to a piece that goes 30 minutes.

There is much I do not know...

Twin beds more common than I knew?

Someone in England has written "A Cultural History of Twin Beds", which indicates that they were not that uncommon in the earlier part of the 20th century.   Here are the highlights:

Her key findings reveal that twin beds:

• Were initially adopted as a health precaution in the late nineteenth century to stop couples passing on germs through exhaled breath.
• Were seen, by the 1920s, as a desirable, modern and fashionable choice, particularly among the middle classes.
• Featured as integral elements of the architectural and design visions of avant-garde Modernists such as Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens and Wells Coates.
• Were (in the early decades of the 20th century) indicative of forward-thinking married couples, balancing nocturnal 'togetherness' with a continuing commitment to separateness and autonomy.
• Never entirely replaced double beds in the households of middle-class couples but, by the 1930s and 1940s, were sufficiently commonplace to be unremarkable.
• Enjoyed a century-long moment of prominence in British society and, as such, are invaluable indicators of social customs and cultural values relating to health, modernity and marriage.

The backlash against twin beds as indicative of a distant or failing marriage partnership intensified in the 1950s and by the late 1960s few married couples saw them as a desirable choice for the bedroom.

Innovation in Malaysia

Noted at CNA:

One Condoms has introduced the limited-edition “super sensitive” rendang-flavoured condoms to commemorate Malaysia’s upcoming independence day on Aug 31.

This is the fourth release in the company’s quirky Malaysian series, which began in 2016 and includes flavours such as nasi lemak, teh tarik and durians.

According to the Malay Mail, the condoms will only be available on the market for a limited period. The site quoted a statement released by One Condoms manufacturer Karex that the idea behind the local flavours is to break the stigma and get people comfortable to talk about sex.

“The end game is simple — pleasurable sex in a safe holistic way which is the ultimate objective of our iconic Malaysian series, now proudly in our fourth year.”

I perceive certain practical issues with the whole flavoured condom thing - especially if it is on the spicy side.   But the readers can contemplate that without my assistance.

Yeah, sure

Once again, there is no conservative hyperbole too far for Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy blog - which seems to escape attention for things like action under the Racial Discrimination Act, defamation or (I wonder?) contempt of court only because people think ratbags are not worth pursuing.   Real clever strategy, Sinclair [sarcasm]:  let the entire blog be a joke so that conservatives can say anything offensive and you can shrug your shoulders.

The latest example, by a "guest post/rant" by the Pell obsessed uber-conservative Catholic CL, in a lengthy diatribe against an ABC journalist, is this comment about the need for the High Court to fix the Pell conviction:

If ever there was a case in need of High Court correction, this is it. The future of the Commonwealth depends on it.

Um, yeah.  I'd like to hear how. 

And this:

....a second jury of dupable vigilantes eager to convict the self-same but, by then, notorious George Pell and an appeals court which this morning raised preposterous hearsay to the level of DNA and CCTV.

Hearsay?   I don't think this scintillating dissector of judicial wrongs even knows the first thing about the legal terminology.

Isn't it also simply offensive to describe the jury - any jury - that way?

Mind you, this is the same character who has been outright claiming for months since Pell's conviction that the accuser is an outright liar and fabricator.    While I have no problem with people doubting that a conviction is reasonable, common decency alone would suggest that someone who  have no direct experience of hearing a witness (or knowledge of a jury) should not start publicly attacking their character and motivation simply because the outcome was not what they thought it should be. 

In the bigger picture, I also note that Sinclair and his nutty crew spend much of their time rubbishing the low ratings and national importance of the ABC in order to argue for its defunding, but when it comes to Pell, the story switches to writing as if every juror has obviously been watching and reading the ABC's spin on the matter.

But put on the "I just run a clown show in my spare time" defence, Sinclair, and it'll be OK. 

 

Religious, cow related, lynchings in India

I've posted on the topic before, but this article at NPR seems a good summary of the situation in India, with Hindu nationalism, and its belief in sacred status of cows, leading to lynchings against (mainly) Muslims.  Some highlights:

Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won power in India five years ago, lynchings of the country's minorities have surged. In February, Human Rights Watch reported at least 44 such murders between May 2015 and December 2018. Hundreds more people have been injured in religiously motivated attacks.

Most of the victims are Muslims, members of the country's largest religious minority. They comprise about 15% of India's 1.3 billion people. Other victims include lower-caste Hindus and Christians.

Most of the attackers are devout Hindu men, known as "cow vigilantes," who take it upon themselves to enforce beef bans. Some of them claim ties to the BJP. Last year, a BJP minister met with a group of men convicted of a lynching and draped them in flower garlands.

....

Article 15 of India's constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion. Human rights groups are lobbying for the creation of a specific hate crimes law, but none exists in India yet.

....

Before he died, Khan was able to describe his attackers to police. Six men were arrested. Charges against them were dropped, then reinstated, and the case remained in limbo for two years — until last week, when a court acquitted all of them, citing lack of evidence.

Instead, Khan was charged posthumously with cow smuggling. Police say he didn't have a permit to transport cows across state lines. Khan's two sons, who were with him that day, await trial — and if convicted, face the possibility of up to five years in prison.

"It's like they are trying to erase us — erase all of my people," Jaibuna says in the muddy courtyard of their family farm.

....

Some Indian analysts say the situation in India is comparable to the post-Civil War period in the United States, when many white people looked on as black people were lynched.

"The similarities with the American lynchings of the late 19th century are striking," says Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil, a business professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay who has studied corporate India's lack of response to hate crimes.

"Most of the upper-middle class that populate[s] the corporate classes, they're also upper-caste Hindus," Poruthiyil explains. "Even if they don't agree with the lynching itself, they might be OK with the idea of stopping cow slaughter. It's a slippery slope."

As a child in Mumbai, Ayyub survived Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992 and 1993, which killed several hundred people. But she says what's happening now feels worse, because it's not a "spur of the moment" outpouring of anger. There are very specific targets.

"Now lynchings are organized on social media," Ayyub says. "People send messages to each other, saying, 'Hey, this household has beef in their fridge, let's go attack them."

More about high rise building insurance

I noted earlier this week that people (including me) were generally unaware that the compulsory insurance against structural defects that is taken out by builders constructing houses did not apply to strata structures over 3 levels high.  

I see some history of this is in an article at the ABC, which also indicates that high rise apartments are very profitable for developers (at least, if they can sell them all):

Prior to 2002, this insurance was a mandatory feature of all domestic building contracts.
HIH Insurance Limited, a major provider of Home Warranty Insurance, was placed into administration in March 2001 and left the insurance market.

In 2002, in response to a failure from other insurers to fill the gap left by HIH, State Governments agreed to exempt builders from providing this type of insurance in buildings above three stories.

For high-rise builders, who don't need to qualify for this insurance and also had the incentive of rising land prices, speculative apartment developments started to look like attractive investments as they didn't need to qualify for this kind of insurance.

Take the now infamous Opal Tower.

Publicly available documents put the cost of this development at around $215 million. If all 392 apartments were sold at their advertised price of between $800,000 and $2.5 million each, the developers have potential to make a profit on this project of around $165 million dollars, or a 77 per cent return on their investment.

Or take the Prima Pearl skyscraper in Melbourne.

The builder was paid $230 million, to build 680 "designer" apartments. Labour and materials worth $338,000 was used per home and each sold for an average cost of $1,000,000.

Quite the tidy profit for its developer. Shame about the creaking.

He really, really wanted to buy Greenland.

It is truly a presidency impossible to parody.

President Trump responded to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen‘s message to the United States that Greenland is not for sale by tweeting Tuesday evening that he's postponing their scheduled meeting. A White House spokesman later clarified that the president's entire trip to Denmark had been canceled, per AP.

Economic genius and cult member Steve Kates was fully on board.  Of course.

The Pell decision

Sinclair Davidson's Sheltered Home for Obnoxious Old Conservatives is, of course, going off about the Victorian Appeal Court upholding George Pell's conviction by a 2 to 1 majority.  

I would have thought that anyone, on the Left or the Right, would be wise* to be cautious about this whole affair.   It seems clear that the witness must have been pretty convincing in his evidence; but also everyone knows juries have made mistakes and (obviously) different lawyers and judges can disagree about whether there is a clear enough mistake to overturn the decision. 

In short, the judicial system is imperfect, but it is what it is and there is no way of being absolutely certain here as to whether its findings accord perfectly with what really happened.  

If, by some extraordinary circumstance, it later became perfectly clear that the convictions were wrong (I think the only likelihood of that would be a confession of the victim that he invented it), it's not going to be the biggest injustice in the nation's history.   Pell will serve about the same time in jail as Lindy Chamberlain, and I think the lack of evidence and outright carelessness of the investigation and expert witnesses and prosecution collectively in that case would still stand as a worse case of injustice.  


*  That excludes the dumb, culture war blinded people of Catallaxy, naturally.

Bigger than the Pell verdict

It actually is, on Twitter, at the moment:

Many of the despairing thread comments and memes cursing Sony are funny.  I like this one, which I have seen before:

But I see on other threads that some are saying that Disney was being too greedy in the cut it wanted.  Also, that they still might reach a deal yet.

Worrying times indeed.   :)

Get Happy

Another Netflix recommendation - and this one is new and really good.

Happy Jail - a short documentary series about the jail on Cebu, in the Philippines, which became famous for the dancing prisoners a decade or so ago.

The jail - which is actually a remand jail, apparently, but people (of both sexes, and quite a few gays) can be there for many years at a time - still thrives on dancing, and is bizarrely now run by an ex-convict who is friends with the new local governor.  (He didn't start the dancing stuff - that was by a previous prison boss who spends much time rubbishing the new regime.)

It doesn't dwell on the dancing per se - although, given that they practice virtually continuously, there are lots of shots of that.   What makes is so fascinating is the way the whole place runs:  the facilities are appallingly crowded and ramshackle, and the prison is to an extraordinary extent sort of self managed.  I doubt there will ever be another documentary where the prisoners seem so happy to be being filmed.

It's extremely well made, and at half an hour per episode, doesn't wear out its welcome.

It continually makes me feel how oddball the Philippines is - fervently religious, full of terrible poverty, in-fighting, corruption, drugs; and people who really like to sing and dance through it all.  It manages to make the place look both attractive and repulsive at the same time.

Highly recommended.

In which I get to talk about syphilis again

It's been a while since I've re-visited the topic of syphilis (recent visitors can see how fascinating I find the topic by searching the blog in the sidebar), but a book review in Nature gives me an excuse to marvel at its historic devastation again.   The book is How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness.   Sounds fun.  

Here are some extracts from the review, looking more at the syphilis side:

In the nineteenth century, neurosyphilis was one of the most ubiquitous and fatal forms of degenerative mental illness known to psychiatry. Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude. That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis. At the time, as many as one-third of patients in mental hospitals had symptoms that could now be clearly traced back to syphilis (A. M. Brandt Science 239, 375–380; 1988).

(I had remarked in an earlier post that it seems surprising that it took so long for medicine to confirm syphilis led to madness.)  Back to the general effects on psychiatry after this:

...the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists. They embarked on a quest, still largely unfulfilled, to find biological foundations for other mental disorders, especially grave conditions such as schizophrenia. Only later would it become clear, as the authors point out, that neurosyphilis is “an unsuitable model for anything clearly unrelated to infection or inflammation in the frontal and temporal lobe regions”....

The age of Freud was also the age of syphilis. Freud, and psychoanalysis more generally, focused on suppressed sexual fantasies and traumas because, for patients then, the shameful and terrifying spectre of syphilis hung over every sexual encounter like “the sword of Damocles” ....

The history of neurosyphilis bequeathed a tendency to indulge in excessive reductionism. That of hysteria encouraged a tendency to indulge in excessive psychologism. And both psychiatry and neurology were left the poorer. As the authors argue, the majority of patients seen by practitioners in both fields are afflicted with what they call “in-between states” — forms of distress informed by both biology and biography. The book is in this sense a plea for neurology and psychiatry to repair ruptures, join forces and do justice to the experiences of their patients.

Just a joke? [insert nervous laugh]

Fake Chinese police cars spotted in Perth and Adelaide amid pro-Hong Kong rallies

Authorities are investigating after fake Chinese police cars were spotted in Adelaide and Perth amid pro-Hong Kong demonstrations across Australia, but the owner of one of the cars has told police it was a "joke".

Some joke...