How to be a berserker

Wired has a recent article that starts:

The legendary Viking warriors known as berserkers were renowned for their ferocity in battle, purportedly fighting in a trancelike state of blind rage (berserkergang), howling like wild animals, biting their shields, and often unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the heat of battle. But historians know very little about the berserkers apart from scattered Old Norse myths and epic sagas. One intriguing hypothesis as to the source of their behavior is that the berserkers ingested a specific kind of mushroom with psychoactive properties. Now an ethnobotanist is challenging that hypothesis, suggesting in a recent paper in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that henbane is a more likely candidate.

Henbane is a flowering weed that grows in Scandinavia, that had been used for some time:

It's been around since ancient Greece and has been used in various cultures throughout history as a narcotic, painkiller, cure for insomnia, and anesthetic. It's a common treatment for motion sickness and can produce short-term memory loss. It can knock out someone for 24 hours, and in rare cases henbane can lead to respiratory failure. It's also been investigated as a possible truth serum. Henbane even found its way into early European beers, gradually being replaced with hops after the passage of the Bavarian Purity Law in 1516.

Those characteristics don't sound rage inducing, but who knows:

Fatur argues that while both the mushrooms and henbane could account for increases in strength, altered consciousness, delirium, jerking and twitching, and red face commonly associated with the berserkers, aggressive rage is not common with the mushroom. Fatur cites several cases involving angry behavior associated with plants related to henbane, containing the same alkaloids.

All rather speculative. 

Speaking of vikings, I am close to booking a ticket for next year's Ring cycle in Brisbane.   My "best" choice, for the cheap tickets left, is either to be sitting on the top balcony in the back row;  the top row down the side and near the front but with some form of view restriction; or in the stalls right near the stage with a restricted view that means I may not see all the words on the surtitle.  

I can't work out if it will be better to be near the front and being fully immersed in the music, but not knowing what they are singing; or up in the stratospheric second balcony and being able to see everything, at least if I use opera glasses.  

Either way, perhaps if I take henbane before the performance, it will be particularly memorable.

   
 

It's the vibe

I don't talk about Scott Morrison much lately, because he strikes me as a shallow flim flam man of no substance or significant ideas who is not worth talking about.   The only positive thing I can say about him is that he has been annoying me a tad less than Tony Abbott, who was more "in your face" with ridiculous culture war decisions - Bronwyn Bishop as speaker, a knighthood to Prince Philip, for God's sake, as well as his rhetorical nastiness to Julia Gillard.  It's going to take some effort by Morrison to make himself a more ignoble PM than Abbott.

But, he may be working himself up to it, if he's going to continue the "mini-Trump" lines:

 
I think Trump's speech to the UN was just obviously retrograde and a mish-mash of wrong and muddled thoughts (as if nations retreating into what their "patriots" think is right is anything other than an invitation for selfish and unethical behaviour towards other nations - and their own citizens - to thrive), and perhaps the only reason it didn't get more critique along those lines is because the world knows it was delivered by an absurd figure.   Sure, the UN has lots of faults - but Trump's prescription is more likely to exacerbate than fix them.

If you want to see an impressive example of the polar opposite of Trump and his speech (that is, a strong defence of nations all pulling together for mutual benefit delivered by a smart and sophisticated sounding politician) have a look at the speech given by Singaporean PM Lee Hsien Loong:



So why does Morrison make a mini Trump (and mini Brexit) speech now?   There is no obvious reason that I can detect.   I don't think Morrison is the sort of man to dwell on these sort of issues much, so is there some figure in the background trying to tell him how to sound like a deep thinker? 

Or is he just an opportunistic twit who has decided to jump on at least part of the "vibe" of the most retrograde parts of Conservative thought going around at the moment? 

It would be good to know.

Republican conspiracy belief considered

Peter Beinart has a good piece in The Atlantic looking at the somewhat puzzling question as to why the American Right, despite holding the Presidency and a lot of power elsewhere, are still believing so many conspiracies.   How much can I extract?:

...over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. Stephen Miller, Breitbart, and Fox News have all called the whistle-blower an agent of the “deep state”—a phrase, popularized by Alex Jones, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once likened this notion to believing in the tooth fairy.)

On its face, this descent into self-delusion isn’t surprising. In the Trump era, Republican conspiracy theorizing has grown omnipresent. Trump himself has suggested that Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Clintons may bear responsibility for the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and wind turbines cause cancer. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Trump supporters said Barack Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.”

But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.

That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.

In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you.  ...

Beinart goes on to explain that if a party is in control, its members generally start believing less in conspiracies.  But it hasn't worked that way with Republicans, and the question is why.

The best explanation is that even though a white male Christian Republican holds the presidency, many white Christian Republican men still feel persecuted by those in power. Trump and other top Republicans fan this belief constantly.

Beinart goes on to argue that the white male Christian loss of power is largely fantasy, but:

...white male income has stagnated in recent decades, the country has grown more racially and religiously diverse, and gender norms have changed. And this has helped Republicans convince their supporters that they are America’s real victims. Republicans, according to polling this year by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to say that men face a lot of discrimination than they are to say women face a lot of discrimination. They’re more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination than to say blacks or Hispanics do. And they’re more likely to say evangelical Christians experience discrimination than Muslims do.

This itself reflects a detachment from reality. And it has made many Republicans susceptible to the conspiratorial thinking that, in the past, was reserved for groups that really were on society’s margins. 

 All very interesting and all very plausible.  Makes no mention of how the internet has (inadvertently) ramped up the ability of conspiracy belief to spread and be maintained.   That is a huge part of the story.

The worst aspect, though, is that the key global problem of climate change has had action from America (and Australia) stymied because of (parts of) the Right's persistent conspiracy belief about it in the face of well grounded scientific evidence.   

Interesting

The Guardian reports:

Another major insurer, Axis Capital, has shunned the Adani Carmichael coal project and withdrawn a bid to underwrite the construction of the mine’s rail line.

The withdrawal, first reported by Reuters, follows announcements from 15 of the world’s leading insurers which say they either won’t support the Carmichael mine, or won’t insure thermal coal projects.

It also presents a clear opportunity to activist groups seeking to stop the construction of Carmichael. Those efforts have targeted companies – on their front pavement and in the boardroom – who might provide logistical or financial support to Adani...

John Quiggin, a professor of economics at the University of Queensland, has said the Carmichael project “can’t proceed” without insurance.

So activists may not have to superglue themselves to the track, after all?  Or read up on rail line demolition for amateurs.   (I'm scared to Google the topic myself, just in case some it sets off some cyber alert in ASIO.)

Sounds about right

From The Onion:

From the article:

“It’s really not that complicated: Eat a sensible amount of plain, ordinary food each day, and then we won’t have to do all these confusing studies and you won’t have to worry anymore,” said Blair Amundsen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who explained that Americans continually eat such large quantities of bad food—drinking 24-ounce mocha lattes in the morning, ordering pizza for lunch, making hot dogs for dinner—that it’s almost impossible to determine which bad things are hurting them the most. “We wouldn’t have to churn out all this goddamn research on red meat if you didn’t eat it three meals a day, okay? So maybe just try something normal like a sandwich—not the huge kind with so much meat you have to cut it into pieces before you can fit it into your mouth, but a regular, standard-sized sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and stuff on it. And don’t try to correct your weird, bad eating habits with a diet of nothing but salad for a month, because that’s weird and bad too. Please stop whatever you’re doing now and, for like a week, just eat normal. We’re every bit as exhausted as you are with all this food study shit.”

Yeah, I have to say, some of those American deli sandwiches, with like 4 cm of sliced meats in them, are just over the top.   Seinfeld was eating one of them in a recent episode, even though I doubt from his slim figure that it's not a regular part of his diet.

American candidates

So, it would seem Bernie's health rules him out, and the Democratic candidate for President will be Biden or Warren.

I really don't follow American politics in the same level of detail that other people do, so I haven't paid much attention to Warren.  But Biden does seem too old and past it, and while Warren herself is 70, she looks younger and pretty fit.  She seems a lot younger than Trump, even though he is only 3 years older.    

Lots of people I trust on twitter say she's good at explaining stuff, and Zuckerberg has it in for her, so she probably should be the next President.   She is said to have Wall Street in a panic because she wants a wealth tax (but only kicks in at $50 million)  Surely Democrats can stand up to the rich who think that will be a disaster?

Americans can be a bit weird in their view of tax though.  They fantasise about upward mobility so much that they can imagine how annoyed they would be if facing a wealth tax, even if they're personally forever stuck on a barely living wage and have so few assets that urgent health care could send them bankrupt. 

I know the feeling

Before the internet broke my attention span I read books compulsively. Now, it takes willpower

More reason to impeach him

It's one (dangerous) thing for wingnuts to talk about Democrats trying to stage a coup;  a much, much worse thing when their cult leader makes the same claim.

Some well deserved mocking

On the story about Trump and his ideas as to how to bolster the border:

And this:

So much for that (already long debunked) theory

A report on a new planetary carbon audit that came up with these key findings:

• CO₂ out-gassed to the atmosphere and oceans today from volcanoes and other magmatically active regions is estimated at 280 to 360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) per year, including that released into the oceans from mid-ocean ridges
• Humanity's annual carbon emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and forests, etc., are 40 to 100 times greater than all volcanic emissions

Telling each other conspiracy theories has killed the Right

Jonathan Chait explains how The Federalist started a false and conspiracy laden claim about the whistleblower rules changing, which was taken up with enthusiasm by Trump and his cult followers, but the Intelligence Inspector General has denied it completely.  Does the Federalist retract?  No, it  claims some element of vindication to gloss over the fact they were completely wrong and have mislead and dumbed down the Trump base, again.

And how about this for a complete disgrace - a key Trump adviser using language bound to fire up the lurid conspiracy of the dangerous armed wingnut Trump base:

Of course he does

Hey, just dropped into Mark Latham's twitter feed, to see that now he's devoting time to defending Trump, including re-tweeing Trump's "you can't impeach me, I'm too great at being President" tweets:

How pathetic.

Latham, with his obsession with testosterone fuelled Right wing takes on matters, truly belongs with the losers at Catallaxy.  Maybe he is already commenting there?

Today's Trump madness

Even Ed Morrissey, one of the more conservative columnists at Hot Air, is embarrassed with Trump's use of "treason":

It’s incredible that we have to explain this to adults, but what Trump describes here bears absolutely no resemblance to treason — not even in a moral sense, let alone the legal sense over which Trump rants. Article III Section 3 of the Constitution establishes the only legal definition of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

In other words, it requires a declaration of war (which we haven’t had since World War II) and explicit aid to the enemy named by it. Bzzzzt! Thank you for playing! Nor is what Schiff did treason in a moral sense; he’s attacking Trump, not the United States of America. We do not have lese majeste laws in the US; one is allowed to criticize the president, even unfairly, even dishonestly, without it being a case of treason....

If Barack Obama had accused Republicans pushing the birther conspiracy theory of treason and called for their arrest, his critics would have screamed for Obama’s impeachment. If Trump wants to make a case that Schiff’s dishonest about him abusing his office, then just stick to that. It would be a lot easier to defend Trump against allegations of abusing the powers of his office if Trump wasn’t going all Red Queen in demanding Schiff’s arrest for a non-existent crime. Just sayin’. 

The New York Times notes this:

WASHINGTON — President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

And in Australia, of course our jellyback and sycophantic PM would say this in response to a phone call from Trump:

"The Australian Government has always been ready to assist and cooperate with efforts that help shed further light on the matters under investigation," a Federal Government spokesperson told the ABC.

"The PM confirmed this readiness once again in conversation with the President."

 And of course, lots of Australians would be thinking "so that's why the reception in Washington looked rather over the top."

I'd love to know the questions Barr will put to our government:  "So, this Alexander Downer - come on, level with us, is he some sort of spy?"

In further examples of Barr debasing the role of AG:

Finally, I was amused by the sarcasm in this:

Sounds cool

The Guardian notes:

Sweden’s navy HQ is returning to a vast underground cold war fortress designed to withstand a nuclear attack, in what has been seen as a defensive move against a resurgent Russia.

After a 25-year absence, the navy will once again be commanded from beneath billions of tonnes of granite as the country strives to build up its defences in response to the perceived threat from Moscow.

The top secret naval base on Muskö, about 25 miles (40km) from Stockholm, resembles a cross between Tracy Island from Thunderbirds and the film set of You Only Live Twice, where James Bond grappled with arch villain Ernst Blofeld in his headquarters beneath a volcano.

Completed in 1969, it boasts cavernous underground docks that can shelter warships, with miles of tunnels, offices and a hospital.

Yes, he is panicking

I find it pretty telling that the Trump cultists are still running with "nothing to see here" regarding impeachment, despite the fact that the Trump tweet rate is at "panic stations" levels, indicating that even their Dear Leader knows he is in trouble. 

I haven't checked for myself, but someone on Twitter said a short time ago that he's re-tweeted 50 or 60 times today or yesterday, including the one that mentions "civil war" - always a great look in a President!

I wonder - maybe one way of knowing something is truly "up" would be by news of a meeting between some high level Republicans and Lachlan or Rupert Murdoch.   Because their whole problem is the bind of how they dump Trump without losing all of his cult followers, and the key to his cult is to be found at Fox News.

Update:   I keep feeling a bit torn about whether to describe Trump cultists as incredibly dumb, incredibly blind, or both.  I mean, a lot of these people hold down jobs - academics or professionals some of them - so is it a case of cult blindness just makes you seem dumb?   Were Germans who hated Hitler having this discussion amongst themselves in the 1930's?

Update 2:  For Steve Kates, there is no reason to expend charity, given his routine, hyperbolic condemnations of all of those who do not agree with him:  

What does get me down is that there is not more disgust in America such that not only will PDT with certainty win the election, but the Republicans will also sweep the House and pick up another half dozen in the Senate. If the Dems represent somewhere near the middle of where political sentiment now is, the West is truly lost and we will all in good time end up with political controls on our lives similar to those in China.

As for our diseased and addled media, anyone at the ABC, to take just one example, who thinks there is a case for any Democrat candidate to win against PDT is a terrifying example of political inanity, with zero morality and less judgement.

Dumb and nasty. 

Update 3:  David Von Drehle writes on the importance of Fox News in any move on Trump:

With impeachment gathering steam, the fate of President Trump is in the hands of a single institution. Not the Senate, though that’s the body established by the Constitution to make the ultimate decision to remove a president. I’m thinking of Fox News....

As it happens, Trump’s crisis finds Fox News at a turning point. With the sale of his company’s movie arm to Disney, founder Rupert Murdoch has cashed out a large part of his empire while anointing his eldest son, Lachlan, the chief executive of the media business. The death of Roger Ailes, accused sexual harasser and Fox News visionary, opens the way to fresh thinking — which the channel sorely needs, given its median audience age of about 65 .

Amid this flux, it is intriguing that Fox News added a veteran politician to its rather compact board of directors earlier this year and placed him in charge of nominating future board members. Paul D. Ryan, former House speaker, has as much reason as any conservative Republican in America to nurse a gigantic grudge against the president. To have him advising the new Fox News leadership on strategy and future directions cannot bode well for the aging star of the Donald Trump Show.

Von Drehle goes on to argue that Paul Ryan has every reason to seek revenge on Trump, and as such, his role at Fox is bad news (for the President.)

Not exactly "corruption"

Lots of writers who think Trump is good for impeachment for his dealings with Ukraine nonetheless admit that the Hunter Biden "jobs for the boys" story is not a great one for Joe Biden either.

This article at The Atlantic:   Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption talks about how this is happening all the time on both sides of politics probably takes it too far with using "corruption" in the headline, though.

I guess that one of the problems of dealing with it, though, is that there is also a legitimate case for saying that the children of political figures should not be unduly punished by having certain jobs that they may legitimately be well qualified to hold off limits only because of what their parent does.  (Not that I am saying Hunter fits into that category.)   I don't know how you could stop the children of politicians benefiting from the perception that they are influential with their parent.

The internal Fox wars still hot

An interesting post at Hot Air by Allahpundit - Chris Wallace from Fox has thrown petrol on the fire between between the two camps at his network. Here's the key part of it:

According to Wallace, diGenova is working with Giuliani on the Biden business with Ukraine. The guy whom Tucker invited on as some sort of dispassionate legal analyst to counter Napolitano turns out to be a secret participant in the matter that’s being analyzed, Trump’s interactions with Zelensky and his government. I didn’t see the first Tucker segment with diGenova but you can watch the second here. He’s introduced merely as a former U.S. Attorney, and Carlson prefaces their conversation by noting that legal opinion is split on the point about a “thing of value” that Napolitano had made. In other words, diGenova was presented to the audience as nothing more or less than a seasoned lawyer whose acumen led him to a different opinion than Judge Nap’s. Tucker even laughed at one point at Shep’s claim that diGenova is a “partisan.”

Now here comes Wallace to imply that the entire segment was basically a fraud, with diGenova concealing a glaring conflict of interest....

Did Tucker know and conceal the information? Presumably he was in the dark, but he’s a buddy of Trump’s and has been known to talk foreign policy with him by phone. Did Trump ever idly mention to him that Rudy *and Joe diGenova* are working on the Ukraine thing? Also: Did Fox executives know of diGenova’s role? If so, why did they conceal the conflict of interest? If not, will there be any sanction against diGenova for not disclosing his involvement in the Ukraine stuff before appearing on a segment to comment on it?

Relatedly, who greenlit this on-air revelation by Wallace? It’s to Fox’s credit that they allowed it to be reported knowing the questions it would raise about diGenova’s segments this week and his role on the network going forward, but I’m surprised that they allowed it to be done in such a showy way. They could have relegated it to a story on the Fox News website and then quietly warned Tucker not to have him back on, or at least to be forthright about disclosing his role in the Ukraine matter next time.
 

Late movie review - Spotlight

It's on Netflix, and I've been meaning to watch it for a while.

It's very competently made, and I think Mark Ruffalo is the stand out actor in it.

But I was surprised that the story did not have more examples of actual obstructionism from the Catholic establishment.  My son said he was expecting thugs for the church to come around and threaten one of the journalists.  I didn't trust the white haired editor (or whatever he was) - I thought it would turn out he had actively suppressed previous stories.  But even that theory came to naught.   As Peter Bradshaw said in his review:

We keep hearing about how the church is going to come after reporters who dare to challenge its authority – but this never really happens, and there is none of the paranoia of a picture like Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) or Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999).

So, yes, worth watching, interesting and competent, but a bit lacking in the level of intrigue and emotional impact.  So I would put it down as over-praised (93% on Metacritic.)   

An interesting idea has more credibility than I expected

From Gizmodo:

What If Planet Nine Is A Bowling Ball-Size Black Hole?

“Primordial black holes” are a class of proposed objects that formed as a result of the chaotic early days of the universe. Like any other black hole, they would be incredibly dense regions where gravity warps space so much that light cannot escape.

But these would weigh far less than stars, since they weren’t formed out of stars like the black holes we’ve actually observed — they would have formed out of places of leftover extra density in the rapidly expanding early universe. (And no, they wouldn’t contribute significantly to dark matter, the mysterious stuff that seems to comprise the lion’s share of the universe’s mass.)

Unwin and his collaborator Jakub Scholtz, a junior research fellow at the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham University, proposed that perhaps a primordial black hole whizzed by, interacted with the solar system’s other members, and became trapped in an orbit.

I asked Uniwn and Scholtz whether such an object would evaporate from tiny physical effects called Hawking radiation; they said that no, even a five-Earth-mass black hole would last for a very long time, far longer than the age of the universe.

If the planet really were a primordial black hole, rather than a planet-sized mass of regular matter, then it would be no use trying to find it with typical planet-searching means.

A figure in the paper, shared above, demonstrates that a five-Earth-mass black hole could fit in the palm of your hand (yes, this encounter would kill you), and a 10-Earth-mass black hole would be the size of a bowling ball.

 I didn't realise Hawking radiation would work so slowly.

More Boris Johnson

Um, wouldn't this be enough to sink most politicians, let alone Prime Ministers?:

The woman allegedly granted thousands of pounds in public funding by Boris Johnson reportedly told friends they were having an affair at the time.

Former model turned technology entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri allegedly received £126,000 in public money and had privileged access to three foreign trade missions led by the prime minister during his time as London mayor.

The Sunday Times has now reported that Ms Acuri confided to four friends that they had been having an affair during his time in City Hall. The paper said that David Enrich, now finance editor of The New York Times, claimed he had been told of the affair by two of her friends when he was working for another newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, in 2013.

His account was said by the Sunday Times to corroborate that of other sources who had spoken to Ms Arcuri.