About Mormons in Mexico

I was waiting to read more about why there are a bunch of Mormons (breakaway ones at that, which usually means polygamy) in Mexico, and ABC Australia (Blessed Be this Broadcaster) is where I found it:

In the late 19th century, many high-profile Mormon families fled Utah's anti-polygamy laws and headed to the north of Mexico.

By the time of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, there were thousands of Mormons in colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora.

There have been major setbacks — many Mormons had fled back to the United States amid the violence of that revolution — but today there are estimated to be more than a million members of the Latter-Day Saints in Mexico.

According to Jason H Dormady, writing in Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands, the farming and ranching town of Colonia LeBaron remains a place where "fundamentalist Mormon polygynists continue to thrive and struggle against the narcotics violence surrounding them in the 21st century".

The article explains more about the history of the LeBaron family.  

I did not know anything about this until now....

Back soon

A bit busy with this and that, including having a swollen thing that shouldn't normally be swollen checked out.  Should be OK, he says hopefully...

I have more Melbourne Cup thoughts...

People claim that you just can't ban horse racing - there are too many people making a living out of raising, training, riding, and shooting horses to do that.

Ending an industry by government fiat is always tricky, hence I make the following transitional suggestions:

*  the ultimate goal:   a racing industry based on human ridden, robotic horses, powered by rechargeable batteries (to be charged from solar farms on former horse stud land)

*  transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

About Islam and dogs

Well, I didn't know the details given in this article about how nuttily upset with dogs some parts of Islam can be:

Followers of the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, mainly found in East Africa and South-East Asia, are taught that dogs are unclean and impure.

If they touch a dog they must wash the area of contact seven times — the first time with dirt and the remaining six times with water.

This ruling is based on a hadith — a second‑hand account of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which states:

"Cleanse your vase which the dog licked by washing it seven times and the first is with earth (soil)."

If the person fails to do so, their prayers are rendered invalid.

These rules also extend to clothes, dishes and other items with which dogs have contact.

This arduous purification process deters Shafi'i Muslims from having any encounters with dogs, which they have come to view as unclean, aggressive and dangerous.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, stray dogs that roam the streets, and even dogs kept domestically by non-Muslim neighbours, are avoided by Muslims at all costs.

What is the sense in the "first wash with earth" rule??

The rest of the article goes on to explain the controversy that some rather pro-dog Muslims have faced in Malaysia:

Syed Azmi Alhabshi, a Muslim-Malaysian pharmacist, is among the people encouraging more compassion towards dogs.

In 2014, he decided to organise an event called "I Want to Touch a Dog".

Held at a large shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, it attracted more than 800 people, 200 volunteers and dogs of different breed including poodles, golden retrievers and German shepherds.

It was designed to demystify dogs, but the event also exposed its organiser to criticism from doctrinaire Shafi'is and Malaysia's state-backed religious authorities, and even death threats.

Mr Alhabshi eventually spoke at a press conference apologising if he had offended Muslim sensibilities.

"With a sincere heart, my intention to organise this program was because of Allah and not to distort the faith, change religious laws, make fun of ulama (learned men) or encourage liberalism," he said.

The matter did not end there.

In 2017, the Department of Islamic Development of Malaysia (JAKIM) issued a religious ruling reprimanding a Muslim woman for uploading a Facebook post showing pictures of her pet dog Bubu.

JAKIM argued that keeping a pet dog violates the norms of the Shafi'i school and undermines Islam in Malaysia. 

Gawd.   Those parts of Islam with dog phobia need a reformation on the topic.

The new sweepstake

Which Melbourne Cup racehorse will be the first to be sent to a knackery?

By the way, I really dislike the word "knackery".  No explanation - it's just that it has an ugly sound about it.

Nations ruined by social media

Interesting opinion piece by an activist in the Philippines, who blames the incredible popularity of Facebook and other social media there as fuelling a corrupt but populist government:

Americans, look to The Philippines to see a dystopian future created by social media 

The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told me this month that the Philippines was used by that company as a “petri dish” for testing tactics used for behavior modification: among them, to disseminate propaganda and manipulate voter opinion. After all, Filipinos lead the world in spending the most time online (more than 10 hours a day) and on social media for the fourth year running. With Free Basics, Facebook is our internet.

Wylie said what Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, learned in the Philippines and other countries in the global south, that they could “port” to the West. The United States had the highest number of compromised Facebook accounts in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The country with the second largest number of compromised accounts? The Philippines.

In Australia, meanwhile, climate change propagandist Sinclair Davidson has no problem with Facebook allowing political ads that are outright lies.  What a surprise. 

(My take on the matter of Facebook and political ads - if it is too much trouble to fact check them, just don't allow political ads, as Twitter has decided.   Oh, and it should enforce its astroturf rules too.) 

Greatest salesman says he can't be that great

I've noted Steve Kates' astonishing lack of self awareness many times.   I see that it is a trait shared even with his cult leader:

You ought to read the comments following, like these:

Start the week with the eternal return of Nietzsche

Hey, this article in the New Yorker is one of the best overviews of Nietzsche that I have read - not overly biographical (although the parts about his relationship with Wagner is amusing, and pretty new to me), but talks a lot about his contradictions and reception amongst philosophers.

Perhaps it helps that I can find plenty in there to justify my prejudices against his work?  I see I have Bertrand Russell on my side!

But back to Wagner.    I still haven't booked a ticket to see the Ring Cycle next year - perhaps I will today.  In the meanwhile:

She begins with the pivotal event in Nietzsche’s life: his introduction, in 1868, to Wagner, the most consequential German cultural figure of the day. Nietzsche would soon assume a professorship in Basel, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-four, but he jumped at the chance to join the Wagner operation. For the next eight years, as Wagner completed his operatic cycle “The Ring of the Nibelung” and prepared for its première, Nietzsche served as a propagandist for the Wagnerian cause and as the Meister’s factotum. He then broke away, declaring his intellectual independence first with coded critiques and then with unabashed polemics. Accounts of this immensely complicated relationship are too often distorted by prejudice on one side or another. Nietzscheans and Wagnerians both tend to off-load ideological problems onto the rival camp; Prideaux succumbs to this temptation. She insists that Nietzsche’s talk of a superior brood of “blond beasts” has no modern racial connotation, and casts Wagner’s Siegfried as an Aryan hero who “rides to the redemption of the world.” In fact, Siegfried is a fallen hero who rides nowhere; the redeemer of the world is Brünnhilde.

Prideaux’s picture of the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship fails to explain either the intensity of their bond or the trauma of their break. Early on, Nietzsche was hopelessly infatuated with Wagner’s music and personality. He described the friendship as “my only love affair.” As with many infatuations, Nietzsche’s expectations were wildly exaggerated. He hoped that the “Ring” would revive the cultural paradise of ancient Greece, fusing Apollonian beauty and Dionysian savagery. He envisaged an audience of élite aesthetes who would carry a transfiguring message to the outer world. Wagner, too, revered Greek culture, but he was fundamentally a man of the theatre, and tailored his ideals to the realities of the stage. At the first Bayreuth Festival, in 1876, Nietzsche was crestfallen to discover that a viable theatre operation required the patronage of the nouveau riche and the fashionable.

Personal differences between the two men provide amusing anecdotes. Nietzsche made sporadic attempts at musical composition, one of which caused Wagner to have a laughing fit. (The music is not very good, but it is not as bad as all that.) Wagner also suggested to Nietzsche’s doctor that the young man’s medical issues were the result of excessive masturbation. But the disagreements went much deeper, revealing a rift between ideologies and epochs. Wagner embodied the nineteenth century, in all its grandeur and delusion; Nietzsche was the dynamic, destructive torchbearer of the twentieth.

There is more about the two of them, but perhaps I have copied enough.

Late movie review - Garden State

I thought Zach Braffs' Garden State from 2004 had received mostly good reviews, and checking back on Rottentomatoes, I see I was right.

This article at Vulture, however, says by 2013 it had became popular to dislike it (although the writer then goes on to defend it.)

I thought it started promising, but lost me at about two thirds of the way through.   I kept having a problem with the character Mark - he's a real loser, and criminal, yet the Zack Braff character keeps hanging around with him.  I think I was particularly lost with the visit to the peeping tom motel - it looked completely unrealistic, felt tonally wrong, and it was quickly followed by the waaay too obvious "screaming into the infinite abyss" scene at the giant hole in the ground.  By this point, the movie became not just quirky, but trying far too hard to be quirky for quirks sake. 

The disclosure of the source of the main character's problems with emotions did not have much emotional impact.  And the ending was OK (I was touched by Natalie Portman's acting, actually), but it still felt a bit underwhelming.

Nice try, Zach, but I thought it felt like a movie that hadn't received other writers' input that it needed.

Paella revised

Here's tonight's paella dinner.  Chicken, some salami in lieu of chorizo, prawns, capsicum and beans.

I've revised the process, which I record here for my future reference.

Season chicken and fry in pan, set aside.

Fry capsicum and beans, set aside.

Fry one diced onion, and as much garlic as you like, briefly.  Add three finely diced ripe tomatoes, some chilli flakes, and fry until liquid from tomatoes is reduced pretty much to a paste.   Add salami or chorizo and fry a bit.

Add two cups of rice, two teaspoons of smoked paprika, and stir around a bit.  Add one litre of chicken stock.  

Add capsicum and beans back in.

Simmer for ten or fifteen minutes.  Add chicken back in, push into the rice and liquid.

Fry prawns briefly in separate pan. (Update - no, I should have done them early on in the paella pan and put them aside.)

When most liquid absorbed in paella pan, throw prawns on top, cover in foiland put in hot oven for 15 or so minutes.

Check that rice is soft enough and rest on table for 10 mins.  Take photo and eat.

Yes, no saffron means it is missing a key ingredient, but this is still good.

Who would be funding the Institute for Paid Advocacy for this?

It's been noted on Twitter that the IPA is running a campaign arguing that "race has no place in the constitution".

I'm curious as to which person/companies with money to spare would be funding the IPA to do this.   Gina "it's a pity I can't pay my workers $2 a day" Rinehart?   (Whose company, incidentally, just made a $2.6 billion profit.  Gee, I guess paying workers more than a pittance still allow her to make a profit.  Who knew?)  

But I could be wrong.  It could another ageing, shadowy, rich conservative who doesn't like to make the case him or herself directly.  But it just seems to me an odd thing to want to spend money on.

Answer: none

Cult watch, continued

Like all cult members, Steve Kates continues to find perfection in its head, Herr Trump, and horrifying lack of understanding (or pure evil) in those outside the cult:

The Democrats are full-on totalitarian socialists, would appear willing to use any means they can find to overturn the democratic process. The most astonishing part of the past three years has been the revelation how corrupt the left in the United States is, having commenced their efforts to spy on the Republican candidate while Obama was still president, and then cobble together absolutely anything to find some, any, justification to overturn the election result. Impeachment does not of course mean that the president will leave office but that he will go to trial in the Senate where it requires a two-thirds majority vote to remove the President. That will never happen.

The left has descended into madness, but that is no excuse for any of it. Not an ounce of principle on the left, while the most astonishing part of all of it has been how unblemished Donald Trump is, both in what he has done and in his basic personal integrity.

Can't someone in his family or university stage an intervention?    He needs to be de-programmed, although what to do about his inherent stupidity I'm not so sure.

Late for Halloween

I enjoyed this article at the Washington Post about the scary stories told at Nosleep forum at Reddit.

It's not that I am a fan of such amateur attempts at horror, but I still liked reading about someone who tried to come up with a popular story (and succeeded - for the short time that counts as "success" on a Reddit forum).   It's also cool that a few people who submit there find real screenwriting work that way.

People to like / dislike

*  Prince Charles

*  Greta Thunberg

*  Jimmy Kimmel

On the dislike side

* Tulsi Gabbard

Blind fascism

I meant to post this tweet from (I think) last week, about a Federalist article:

Of course, the somewhat fascinating thing is that what we are watching is fascist supporters blind to their own support of fascist ideas.

Because they've spent a decade or two gaslighting themselves that they can see through the mega conspiracy of climate change (and "cultural Marxism"), they now also think they can see a Deep State conspiracy that is non-existent.

The books that are going to be written about this period in future....

Yet another thread of people questioning economic modeling of climate change

As I say, it's hard to keep track of useful links and discussion when discussion has moved off blog post comment threads and onto Twitter.  

But here's Ken Rice starting another thread on this topic.  What I don't understand is why the thread is different on my PC twitter feed to that I was reading on my phone at breakfast.

It's annoying...

Medical experiments of old

A Nature.com review of a book looking at the wildly varying results of studies of testosterone begins with this anecdote:

On 1 June 1889, renowned neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard shocked his colleagues. Speaking at the Paris Society of Biology, the 72-year-old announced that a slurry made from the ground testicles of guinea pigs and dogs (injected under his skin ten times in three weeks) made him stronger. He also noted that his “jet of urine” lengthened by 25%.

One of the things quack Dr Morell used to inject into Hitler was ground bulls testicles, I think.  So it's interesting to see that the allure of this form of medication had such a long history even by World War 2.

Oh, yes my memory is correct.  I don't recall the claim that it was given to Adolf specifically to help his performance with Eva Braun:

The report also states that Morell injected Hitler with extracts from the prostate glands or ground testicles of young bulls, to boost his nearly non-existent libido ahead of a night with Eva Braun, his lover, who was 23 years his junior.

"Morell gave Hitler a preparation called Testoviron, a kind of testosterone preparation, usually before Hitler was going to spend a night with Eva Braun," Cambridge University historian Richard Evans said.

"Eva Braun was young and much fitter. Hitler was much older, he was lazy, he didn't take much exercise and I'm sure he asked Doctor Morell to help him out before he went to bed with Braun."

Update:  it has occurred to me - wouldn't extra testosterone be more likely to worsen the "jet of urine" than increase it?  Because testosterone helps prostate cancer, and I would have assumed that any enlarged prostate problems would be worse with higher testosterone.

However, a medical article indicates that my guess is probably wrong, at least for benign prostatic hyperplasia:

Most studies, however, have shown no effect of exogenous androgens on PSA or prostate volume for older hypogonadal males.23 In an RCT of 44 late-onset hypogonadal men, Marks et al.14 found that those treated with TRT did not have a significant increase in prostate tissue levels of testosterone or DHT, despite having significantly increased levels of serum testosterone. More recent evidence from placebo-controlled studies of hypogonadal men receiving androgen therapy, indicate that the differences between those men receiving testosterone and those on placebo were insignificant in regards to prostate volume, PSA and BOO.24

These findings are echoed by Jin et al.25 who studied 71 aged matched hypogonadal patients. For younger hypogonadal patients, the zonal and total prostate volumes (TPVs) were significantly smaller than their aged matched eugonadal colleges whether they were treated with TRT or not. However, from mid-life, central, peripheral and TPV increased with age among healthy controls and men with androgen deficiency regardless of TRT. This demonstrated age is a more important determinant of prostate growth than ambient testosterone concentrations maintained in the physiological range for older men.

 ....

  Lower urinary tract symptoms in men are traditionally considered the ultimate clinical expression of BPH/BPE due to BOO. Nonetheless, LUTS are a set of subjective and objective symptoms, the causes of which are multifactorial and generally not disease specific. In fact, the natural history of LUTS is complex, and symptoms can wax and wane with time even without any treatment.32

Although there is no double-blinded RCTs to date, current studies seem to demonstrate that either TRT does not worsen LUTS or that it may, in fact, improve symptoms. This is not a new concept; as early as 1939, Walther and Willoughby33 used testosterone to treat 15 men with “BPH” with the improvement in their LUTS over 2 years; although this treatment seemed to have been dismissed or forgotten for some time.

Yet more way overdue climate economics scepticism

Further to yesterday's post:  there's been a good thread on Twitter about this, which I think you will find here.

And Ken Rice has tweeted a link to a paper from 2016 that appears to show (I only have time to scan it at the moment) that DICE models tested with 20th century growth show results nothing like what actually happened.

Interesting, but as I've been saying - why has it taken so long for people to question this whole field in the way that they finally are now?

Oh:  and someone on Twitter linked to an article on GDP effects of climate change that made some interesting points - but I am having trouble finding it now.   Keeping track of info via blogs used to be much easier than it is under Twitter.

Update:  Jason, do you have any idea what Graeme's story about you in the comment I have left is about?

Graeme - don't get optimistic.   99% of your comments are still going to be deleted, whatever they are about. 

Put in the "too good to be true" tray?

The story has been around for a week, but I should note it:

Erecting wind turbines on the world’s best offshore sites could provide more than enough clean energy to meet global electricity demand, according to a report.

A detailed study of the world’s coastlines has found that offshore windfarms alone could provide more electricity than the world needs – even if they are only built in windy regions in shallow waters near the shore.

Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours.