Sleep paralysis at home and abroad

I don't think I have mentioned this before - my teenage daughter has, over the last year or so, began to experience episodes of sleep paralysis.   All the classic stuff:  waking up and unable to move, and a dark entity moving towards her bed.  Tries to call out but can't.  She recognises that it most likely would happen when very tired before bed, and sleeping on her back instead of her side.  She said that in successive events, the dark entity was getting closer and closer to her bed. 

Fortunately, I think I had told her about this before she had her first episode.  (Seems to me it's probably a good idea to warn all children that this is a not so rare occurrence that they might experience, and they should not read too much into it.)   The point is, my daughter finds the experiences disturbing, but also understood what was going on from the first time.  (I think she realises what it is during the event, even though she can't stop it.)

Anyway, I'm talking about this now for two reasons:  there is an article at NPR summarising the phenomena, and a couple of weeks ago I was reading a Reddit thread about it, where someone commented that they thought it likely that this was the likely explanation for widespread belief in demons, witches and/or malevolent spirits across all old societies.

Oddly enough, that latter thought had not really occurred to me before - it may be a key element in the widespread belief in a supernatural realm generally.  

Here is some interesting information along those lines from the NPR article:

About 75% of the time, those experiencing sleep paralysis will hallucinate. "Most of the time, we'll hear that it's something frightening," Kushida says. "But there have been instances where a person will report that one of their loved ones was there."

In fact, the hallucinations typical of sleep paralysis are frequently influenced by a person's culture and described in terms of "paranormal activity." There are descriptions from Newfoundland of an "Old Hag," or witch sitting on the person's body. In Japanese folklore, the same phenomenon is called kanashibari, which means "bound in metal." Some researchers think sleep paralysis is to blame for reports of alien abductions.

This prevalence across cultures makes sense in light of Pennsylvania researchers' systematic review of scientific studies across a 50-year period. The review estimates that 8% of the general population has one episode of sleep paralysis in the course of their lifetime. The study found that this number is variable within populations. For example, more than 30% of psychiatric patients had an episode of sleep paralysis, and the disorder is most common in adolescents.

This is not to say that I don't believe in supernatural events at all - but it does seem a very plausible argument that people believe in devils and demons in particular because of this natural, medical phenomena. 

The most miserable country

I saw some of the documentary series on SBS last night "Russia to Iran: Across the Wild Frontier" and it was pretty interesting.

The thing that always strikes me about shows which travel through the lesser known parts of Russia is how miserable the country and its inhabitants routinely seem.   Sure, they drink and sing a lot, but the average Russian on the street always seems to look tense and miserable.  Not to mention the extreme level of police and secret service scrutiny that they still have to put up with. 

Last night, there was a large, largely abandoned, former mining town of the Soviet Union, set in a very spectacular looking valley.  There was an old guy who was paid to caretake something - it wasn't entirely clear what.  It was like meeting a character in a dystopian computer game.   Even his dog looked depressed.

I find it perversely interesting - how miserable a country can be.

I agree with the sentiment

b-boy is wrong to suggest that no one tweets about these Right wing armed "we will fight socialism on the streets" conspiracy freaks;  but he's right that it makes the hyperventilating by Right winger  about things like colleges students being rude to conservative speakers on campus and trying to shout over them look like trivia.

Food and racism

So I see that blanket dismissal of Indian and Chinese food as generically bad now causes cries of "racism".  

Seems a tad over the top, both the opinion and the most accusatory responses.  While the criticism of what foreigners eat can be closely aligned with racism,  it's not much fun if you can't go over the top in your dismissal of an entire cuisine once in a while.

I get into trouble routinely by dismissing Greek food with some acquaintances who have invited me to a local restaurant that they say is good.

I respond with:  it's the least interesting national food that I know of, although more than likely Russian cooking is even worse.  It's just that Russian restaurants don't really exist here, and so I can't compare.

There is nothing sophisticated about the seemingly very limited range of recipes that come out of Greece, and while it is certainly edible, it's also so uniform that all Greek restaurants or cafes seem to me to be virtually interchangeable in their bland-ish quality.   I may have mentioned before, I was pleased to hear Rick Stein say, when he did a series through that country, that his friends back in England said they thought it was a dull food destination.  He tried his best to talk it up, but the recipes he cooked or watched being cooked all looked just like pretty standard, pretty basic, Greek food to me.  And their desserts - just sweetness overload.

So there...

At least they're not very good at it?

Not sure whether I agree entirely with this "what's the big deal?" take on the story of an (alleged) direct attempt by China to have a government spy in Parliament:

but I at least take some comfort in the fact (assuming its true), they don't seem to be real good at  keeping the process a secret.   If your target runs to ASIO and then ends up dead, you haven't done it right.

And for all those who are going to say "of course the sell-out Left isn't as upset about this as they should be" (hi Jason) - yeah, I do find it ironic that they were not upset at all with the blatant, bad faith spying on East Timor by Australia.  (Someone notes that in Bruce Haigh's tweet thread, too.) 

Another failure for libertarian/small government economists

Along with their failed predictions of high inflation due to government spending to help deal with recession, economists on the American Right (and at Catallaxy) have warned about minimum wage increases being a disaster for employment.

Axios says (in a pretty detailed post for that site) that it hasn't happened:

Eighteen states rang in 2019 with minimum wage increases — some that will ultimately rise as high as $15 an hour — and so far, opponents' dire predictions of job losses have not come true. 

What it means: The data paint a clear picture: Higher minimum wage requirements haven't reduced hiring in low-wage industries or overall.

Tuesday philosophy

*   You know it's my blog keeping contract that I have to diss on Nietzsche at least once every 6 months?   Well, here's a good one, from Philosophy Now;  a review of a book very aligned with my scepticism of modern sympathetic revisionism of him: Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, & the Return of the Far Right.

Here's the first part:

Searching for ‘Nietzsche’ on YouTube will summon up a slick, insightful clip that has been viewed more than three million times. That’s impressive for a nineteenth century philosopher: Mill is lucky to reach six figures. As well as demonstrating his popularity, the clip tells you how Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is perceived, closing with praise for “our endearing, fascinating, often lovable” guide.

This is precisely the sort of fawning, soft-pedalling whitewash that Ronald Beiner wants to torpedo. The central message of Dangerous Minds is that there is no reading of Nietzsche that can make him morally acceptable to the political centre or left. Any interpretation that portrays him so is wishful, immature, and dangerous.

I agree with Beiner, and I also think that this is the most urgent discussion we could have about Nietzsche. We live at a time when the far right, sometimes inspired by Nietzsche, is resurgent; where he is revered by influential commentators such as Jordan Peterson; and where populist authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte have in a Nietzschean manner downplayed the importance of rules and truth in favour of heroic visions of strength and destiny. As for Trump, his post-truth, ‘alternative fact’ reality is such a spooky echo of Nietzsche’s idea that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ that it prompted headlines asking whether the German could be blamed for Trump’s rise or whether he merely predicted it. [A question asked by this magazine too, in Issue 122, Ed.]

Beiner cannot get over how Nietzsche, so explicit in his attacks on liberalism and egalitarianism, has become such an influential philosopher to the left. It is not as if Nietzsche tried to conceal his dismissive views about liberal morality or about the general populace. He shouts them from the rooftops. To set up the argument against leftish interpretations of Nietzsche, Beiner simply has to repeat some of Nietzsche’s most repugnant expressions: here is Nietzsche advocating slavery; there an incitement to genocide; and everywhere the contemptuous repudiation of equal human dignity.

Some Nietzsche scholars excuse these extreme outbursts by reading them as metaphorical, rhetorical, or comical, rather than literal, action-guiding imperatives. Although Nietzsche does often leave himself open to interpretation, I can’t see a shred of evidence that Nietzsche was anything but deadly serious about these issues.

There are two key parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are unambiguous: he finds egalitarianism disgustingly decadent, and he wants humanity to grow out of the idea of universal morality. Each individual must decide their own moral code. The concepts of good and evil are to be scrapped.

Go read the rest of the review - seems a pretty good and succinct summary of the problems with Nietzche's ideas.

*  And here's a take on John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice I had to read in university (and I thought it was pretty good.)    It's a review of a book on Rawls, looking at his work from the perspective of the old Catholic fight between Augustinian grace and the Pelagian views that lost out. 

First, a bit of history of Rawls, about whom I knew little, and the key part of one author's argument:

Nelson opens his book by placing Rawls’s recently discovered Princeton University senior thesis, written in 1942, in the long Augustinian tradition of Christianity that denied that sinful humans could save themselves. For Augustine and his followers, Pelagianism—named after a late-antique theologian who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church—overstated the extent to which human beings can earn their salvation. Such a belief verged on an ideology of self-redemption of individual sinners or of humanity itself that (as Rawls put it at age twenty) “rendered the Cross of Christ to no effect.” For Rawls, at the time a committed Christian who planned a career in the Episcopal priesthood before World War II service in the Pacific caused him to lose his faith, it followed that “no man can claim good deeds as his own.” To contend otherwise inflated human capacity and courted sacrilegious idolatry of humanity itself.

Nelson contends that this Augustinian response to Pelagianism lurked in Rawls’s defense of fair distributional justice long after he had moved on to secular philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls remarked that “no one deserves” their social ascendancy and the natural gifts—intelligence or industriousness—with which they achieved it. The fact that one person was endowed with them and another not was “morally arbitrary.” A theory of justice aiming at fairness rather than fortune would reject any sense that people deserved their class position. Some redistribution from the rich to the rest was therefore just.

Then soon follows an argument that I am not sure is convincing:

“Liberalism,” writes Nelson, “began as a theodicy.” By this he means that for the major liberal thinkers in the early-modern period, the attempt to justify the ways of God to men almost always included the belief that God is unfailingly good. It is their own autonomy that leads humans, if they choose not to conform to God’s plan, to introduce evil into the world on their own. What made for the correlation of Pelagianism with liberalism is that the theological defense of human freedom—including freedom to err—implied that individuals should be allowed politically to seek perfection on their own, without the interference of states or sects. Liberalism was born out of the insistence that, since agents were free enough to save themselves, they had to be left alone enough to have a chance to do it.

Observing that early liberals embraced the very theology that Rawls rejected, Nelson thinks Rawls’s followers are left with a big problem. Liberalism originated in the Pelagian heresy that refuses to saddle human beings with original sin, or to make them utterly dependent on the divine, but instead grants them autonomy, dignity, and (at least potential) self-made perfection. How, then, can Rawls and his followers reject Pelagianism without also rejecting liberalism?

Nelson’s answer: they can’t. Either you adopt the Augustinian line that, while no one earns their gifts and talents, any seemingly unfair distribution is part of God’s mysterious design, whose meaning is to be revealed only at the end of time; or you adopt the Pelagian view that you do earn them—that greater wealth really might reflect greater merit. You can’t have it both ways, as Rawls and his followers want.

I am feeling pretty sure there is some muddled thinking here, and I think it is in seeing too much influence of Augustinian thought on Rawl's post faith philosophising.  Surely Pelagianism leaves open that humans can engage in Rawls's thought experiment to come with a fairer way to view justice;  Augustinian thought, with its sense of human salvation being (to a degree, at least) outside of human control can leave too great a sense of helplessness to change social justice. 

In any case, kinda interesting.

The early bird considered

What annoys me most is that it is so loud for the first hour, and then it stops to acceptable daytime levels.  In Brisbane at this time of year, it means being woken up, often, at between 4.30 and 5 am.

So, why do they do it?  See this - Why do birds sing in the morning?

But why choose the hours around sunrise to sing? There are a number of theories, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

One idea is that in the early morning, light levels are too dim for birds to do much foraging. Since light levels don't affect social interactions as much, it's a great opportunity to sing, instead.

Another idea is that early morning singing signals to other birds about the strength and vitality of the singer. Singing is an essential part of bird life, but it's costly in terms of time and energy. Singing loud and proud first thing in the morning tells everyone within hearing distance that you were strong and healthy enough to survive the night. This is attractive to potential mates, and lets your competitors know you're still around and in charge of your territory.

For many years, scientists theorized that the atmospheric conditions in the early morning — typically cooler and drier than later in the day — might allow birdsong to travel further through the air. However, recent research shows this isn't the case. Birdsong travels just as far, if not farther, at noon as at dawn.

A somewhat negative review

So, The Guardian gives UK comedian Jack Whitehall a rather bad review that starts:

It’s not an auspicious start to Jack Whitehall’s show when he opens with a crude mime about hard, soft and “thumbing it in” Brexit. Of course, no one’s here for political insight: notwithstanding that he has always come across as the Conservative party in standup form, the state of the world has never been Whitehall’s concern. But even by his own flimsy standards, Stood Up is thin gruel from the 31-year-old, with one flouncing routine after another about diarrhoea, wanking, farting and photographs of his inflamed anus.

Two hours of exposure to that photograph could scarcely be more dispiriting than Whitehall’s touring set, which combines puerility, hack joke-writing and rampant inauthenticity in equal measure. The latter doesn’t concern his poshness, that is as complacently upfront a feature as ever.

And ends:

No 3D personality arises from these by-numbers jokes, nor any sense of an interest in people or the world. Environmentalism is lightly mocked; there’s a chirpy Auschwitz punchline and a routine about how to speak to people with a lazy eye. And then there’s all those jokes about pooing in the swimming pool, pooing at Chernobyl, farting in front of his ex, farting in a urinal. That Whitehall’s show is full of crap becomes, by the end, less matter of opinion than statement of irrefutable fact.

Even allowing for the reviewer obviously having a political objection to Whitehall, it does appear that it may be just another case of a comedian I can find OK in some contexts, but put them on stage in stand up, and I don't like much at all.

(I see that The Telegraph reviewer gave the same show 4/5 stars -  but I can't read the whole thing.)

As for his Netflix series Travels with My Father - even my son has lost interest with the latest series (set in America), and he has a higher tolerance for crude humour than me.    The show quickly developed far too many scripted bits pretending to be real.

Stiglitz complains - again - about GDP as a metric

In The Guardian:

In Europe, the impact of 2008 was more severe, especially in countries most affected by the euro crisis. But even there, apart from high unemployment numbers, standard metrics do not fully reflect the adverse impacts of the austerity measures, either the magnitude of people’s suffering or the impacts on long-term standards of living.

Nor do our standard GDP measures provide us with the guidance we need to address the inequality crisis. So what if GDP goes up, if most citizens are worse off? In the first three years of the so-called recovery from the financial crisis, about 91% of the gains went to the top 1%. No wonder that many people doubted the claims of politicians who were then saying the economy was well on the way to a robust recovery.

For a long time I have been concerned with this problem – the gap between what our metrics show and what they need to show. During the Clinton administration, when I served as a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, I grew increasingly worried about how our main economic measures failed to take into account environmental degradation and resource depletion. If our economy seems to be growing but that growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources, our statistics should warn us. But because GDP didn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation, we typically get an excessively rosy picture.

These concerns have now been brought to the fore with the climate crisis.

Waiting for me to say the words "dog park?"

Go for the history, if nothing else

I ended up going to see the stage version of Chicago at QPAC last night.  I had declined the original invitation of my wife when she bought tickets, as the plan was she would go with my daughter, who pulled out due to, well, generic teenage malaise and/or a recent period of mother/teen daughter tension, so I ended up there instead.

It was...interesting.   Somehow, I had managed to avoid knowing anything about this show apart from the vague understanding that it was something to do with a woman in jail for murder in the jazz era.  (Obviously, this means I didn't see the movie version.)   I didn't realise that it was entirely about women in jail for murder.

Which struck me as an odd thing to write a musical around.  So I was interested to read after the show how this came to be, and Wikipedia, as usual, has a handy summary:

The musical Chicago is based on a play of the same name by reporter and playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was assigned to cover the 1924 trials of accused murderers Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner for the Chicago Tribune. In the early 1920s, Chicago's press and public became riveted by the subject of homicides committed by women. Several high-profile cases arose, which generally involved women killing their lovers or husbands. These cases were tried against a backdrop of changing views of women in the Jazz age, and a long string of acquittals by Cook County juries of female murderers (jurors at the time were all male, and convicted murderers generally faced death by hanging). A lore arose that, in Chicago, feminine or attractive women could not be convicted. The Chicago Tribune generally favoured the prosecution's case, while still presenting the details of these women's lives. Its rivals at the Hearst papers were more pro-defendant, and employed what were derisively called "sob-sisters" – women reporters who focused on the plight, attractiveness, redemption, or grace of the female defendants. Regardless of stance, the press covered several of these women as celebrities.^[3]
 
Annan, the model for the character of Roxie Hart, was 23 when she was accused of the April 3, 1924,^[4] murder of Harry Kalstedt, who served as the basis for the Fred Casely character. The Tribune reported that Annan played the foxtrot record "Hula Lou" over and over for two hours before calling her husband to say she killed a man who "tried to make love to her". Her husband Albert Annan inspired the character, Amos Hart. Albert was an auto mechanic who bankrupted himself to defend his wife, only for her to publicly dump him the day after she was acquitted. Velma Kelly is based on Gaertner, who was a cabaret singer, and society divorcée. The body of Walter Law was discovered slumped over the steering wheel of Gaertner's abandoned car on March 12, 1924. Two police officers testified that they had seen a woman getting into the car and shortly thereafter heard gunshots. A bottle of gin and an automatic pistol were found on the floor of the car. Lawyers William Scott Stewart and W. W. O'Brien were models for a composite character in Chicago, Billy Flynn. Just days apart, separate juries acquitted both women.^[5]
 
Watkins' sensational columns documenting these trials proved so popular that she wrote a play based on them. The show received both good box-office sales and newspaper notices and was mounted on Broadway in 1926, running 172 performances. Cecil B. DeMille produced a silent film version, Chicago (1927), starring former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart. It was later remade as Roxie Hart (1942) starring Ginger Rogers, but in this version, Roxie was accused of murder without having really committed it.

In the 1960s, Gwen Verdon read the play and asked her husband, Bob Fosse, about the possibility of creating a musical adaptation. Fosse approached playwright Watkins numerous times to buy the rights, but she repeatedly declined; by this point she may have regretted that Annan and Gaertner had been allowed to walk free, and that her treatment of them should not be glamorized.^[4] Nonetheless, upon her death in 1969, her estate sold the rights to producer Richard Fryer, Verdon, and Fosse.^[4] John Kander and Fred Ebb began work on the musical score, modeling each number on a traditional vaudeville number or a vaudeville performer. This format made explicit the show's comparison between "justice", "show-business", and contemporary society. Ebb and Fosse penned the book of the musical, and Fosse also directed and choreographed.

So there you go - as with Anything Goes, and its strange storyline of a female evangelist who was big in 1920's America but of whom I had never heard before, I learnt some interesting social history by having seen a stage musical.

What did I think of the show, apart from its educational value?   It's not bad, and I think the three female leads in particular were very good.   (It's quite a demanding show, physically, for the two main leads.)

But it does suffer worse than your average musical from the second act problem - wherein most shows struggle to match the high at which the first act usually ends.  In particular, the dance and musical ending of this show, after the trial, feels quite underwhelming.   My wife said that the movie ended differently, and that sounds like a good idea.

My other main reservation about the show is that I'm not sure if every production has to (contractly?) look as if it was still choreographed and costumed to be a 70's Bob Fosse production clone, but this version certainly does.  And, well, I have always thought this style looked cheesy:

That photo is from a review of a 2018 production in American, but the styles in last night's show were very, very similar.  Not sure it makes sense in any respect other than wanting to make 70's era homo and hetero sleeze styles look nostalgic.

Anyway, I also got to scope out a possible second balcony seat for next year's Ring Cycle - which I still haven't booked for myself.   Soon, soon. 

Quick casting call

If ever they are going to make a movie about the Trump impeachment, surely they would have to go with Laurie Metcalf to play Fiona Hill:

The regretable rise of conspiracy belief in the GOP noted by current prime conspiracy monger in the GOP

The problem with pretending something, as I have noted before, is that if you do it long enough, you start to believe it.   Hence it seems to me quite possible at least some portion of the American Right have gaslight themselves into genuinely believing conspiracies that they initially only pretended to believe to suck up to Trump.

It is such a disturbing thing to watch.
 

Thinking out loud

Various things going through my mind:

*   conservatives and their pro-nuclear for Australia attitudes:   I've always had the feeling that countries with snowy, freezing winters were ones where going completely renewable was going to be the biggest challenge, because they have weak and not many hours of sunshine in winter, and it's not always windy when it snows.  I therefore completely understand a strong "nuclear must be in the mix" approach there (in, say, Britain and parts of North America.)   

But Australia?   We've got enormous amounts of marginally useful (or useless) land in the centre of the county, and a climate whereby huge parts of it are sunny during winter, and with still fairly lengthy daylight hours as well.   Who freaking cares if there were a solar farm a 100km by 100 km near Birdsville?   If transmission issues are solved, my  hunch is that we're about the most suited nation in the world for gigantic scale solar - with a friendlier geography for building it than places like the Sahara, I would guess too.  (Too much hilly, moving sand there.)  

Yes, there are energy storage issues, but with nuclear there are huge costs and slow construction, decommissioning costs, and few people who want to live next door to one.   Why?:  because events like Fukushima show us that when they go wrong, they go really wrong and completely upend the lives of tens of thousands of people.   53,000 people are still displaced by Fukushima.   And this:

Along with cleaning the nuclear residues and enabling those displaced to return to their homes, the Japanese government aims to dismantle the Fukushima plant, a process that is expected to take at least 30 years and the cost for which could reach 20 trillion yen ($180.2 billion).

Extraordinary.

Renewables just do not carry anything like that financial and humanitarian risk - especially when you have a country where virtually no one is going to freeze to death if power fails in the depths of winter.  And let's face it - the technology for useful amounts of household energy creation and storage already exists.  I would prefer to see every new house built mandated to have either solar power and/or a fuel cell and a Tesla battery before I would want a nuclear power station within 50km of me.


*  This November in Brisbane is far, far from normal.  So many bushes and plants in my yard are dropping leaves massively to try to cope with the dry and heat:   it's really unclear how many are going to survive.   The rainwater tank is nearly dry, and given the cost of tap water now, most residents prefer to hope for the best instead of spending hundreds of dollars on keeping a green lawn or a bush alive.

We should have had heavy rain with storms throughout SE Queensland by now: instead it has been extremely patchy, and everyone is fearing a really dry summer that is going to kill off gardens in much the same way the last drought started to.

I must admit, though, that native plants are showing the hardiest resolve in getting through this.

We need rain, badly.

Climate change, drought, and bushfires

Interesting article at The Guardian, talking about the question of the Indian Ocean "dipole", which is linked to Australia's current drought, is increasing under global warming:

Recent research suggests ocean heat has risen dramatically over the past decade, leading to the potential for warming water in the Indian Ocean to affect the Indian monsoon, one of the most important climate patterns in the world.

“There has been research suggesting that Indian Ocean dipole events have become more common with the warming in the last 50 years, with climate models suggesting a tendency for such events to become more frequent and becoming stronger,” Ummenhofer said.

She said warming appeared to be “supercharging” mechanisms already existing in the background. “The Indian Ocean is particularly sensitive to a warming world. It is the canary in the coalmine seeing big changes before others come to other tropical ocean areas.”

Australian climatologists have pointed to this year’s dipole as at least one of the contributing factors in the bushfires. Jonathan Pollock, of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said this dipole was “up there as one of the strongest” on record.

The article goes onto note that the dipole has been causing flood problems in East Africa - something getting scant attention in the rest of the world, it seems:

Gemma Connell, of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, raised concern over the impact of stronger and more regular Indian Ocean dipole events on Africa.

“What we are seeing from the current record events is large-scale flooding across the region. Entire swathes are under water, affecting 2.5 million people,” she said.

“And putting it in the broader picture of the climate crisis, this flooding is coming on the back of two droughts. What we are seeing, and what we are going to see more of, is more frequent climatic shocks coming. And all that is on top of the violence and conflict that has already displaced many of the people involved.

What's that?  Increased global warming leading to both big droughts and big floods?    Stoopid people like Andrew Bolt have not been able to get their tribal brains around that prediction for decades.

Mind you, as always, prediction of the exact effects on average local rainfall under climate change is much harder than predicting average global temperature rises:

Another concern for Connell and other humanitarian officials is that although climate scientists are racing to try to develop predictive modelling, there is disagreement over whether stronger Indian Ocean dipole events will lead to a wetter climate for Africa or a drier one.

 And if some reader comes here and says "so that means anything will "confirm" global warming?" - don't be an idiot:  global warming/climate change is settled science on one level, but they've always been open that changes to rainfall patterns on a regional level are hard to predict.

When rich nuts meet and plan the future...

By the way - does anyone in the world really think that any of those three made their billions/millions by really praiseworthy contributions to the betterment of humanity?  

Oh, please...

Just as sincere as his "this is the most humble day of my life" claim to the Parliamentary enquiry into his paper's phone hacking.

In pictures

Australia, November 2019:

 

 

 Australian conservative commentary, November 2019:

 

Former thoroughbred racehorse gets into the Christmas spirit

Too soon?  I mean, don't get me wrong - I'd either ban or at least halve the horse race industry, if it was up to me as benevolent dictator.