Two (OK, sort of three) crazy things about how other countries do elections

*  I guess this current UK election has caused some discussion of change to their first past the post system, but I still can't see why it isn't the subject of a continual, large scale reform campaign.   (I saw that Antony Green was over there, saying that Britain insists on a result on the election night, and if they stick to that, they are never going to get reform to any sort of proportional/preference system.  Farage, of all people, is pressing for change, but really you need the 2 major parties to talk about it.)   Why don't (more of) the English see the unfairness in first past the post when you have more than 2 substantial parties??

* Why does any country hold elections on a work day?   Especially when voting is not compulsory and you have to depend on people finding the time to get to the ballot box?   Yeah, sure there is postal voting, and I think it is overused in Australia.  But countries that rely on people getting out to vote - then making as easy as possible is just an obvious thing to do.

* And let's not get into American electoral system craziness, with each State running their own systems for eligibility to vote in Federal elections.

Worst Attorney General in American history?

I don't know American history with much intricacy, but I reckon Bill Barr is looking good at going down as America's worst, most partisan, culture war motivated Attorney General ever.   Some extracts from a Vox article about his appalling comments on the IG report:

But the most unbelievable line came when Barr attempted to cast the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign staff in 2016 as “the greatest danger to our free system” — because in his mind, that constituted the government abusing its powers to influence an election. Yes, really:

From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.

This is just not an accurate description of what happened in 2016. There is no credible evidence that the FBI investigation was an attempt to intervene in the election, which is a conspiracy theory that doesn’t even pass the most basic smell test. The existence of the Trump-Russia investigation wasn’t officially confirmed until March 2017 — and the most prominent leak during the campaign was pro-Trump, resulting in an iconically false New York Times headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Why would the FBI keep its evidence against Trump secret until after the election, if it was trying to influence the outcome?

But setting aside the falsehoods, the sheer chutzpah of Barr’s comments is staggering. Again, according to Barr, “The greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state ... in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” 

What president might be doing something like that, right now, and getting impeached for it? 

In all seriousness, though, Barr’s move here is disturbingly Orwellian. He correctly identified the abuse of power to influence elections as a threat to American democracy, but then argued that the people who investigated Trump are the ones who are actually guilty of it. The criminal becomes the victim, the authoritarian the guarantor of our freedoms. You heard a similar refrain from Republicans during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing on Monday, when they repeatedly accused the Democrats of being the real threat to democracy.

Barr’s embrace of this kind of truth-annihilating strategy is particularly interesting. He’s an establishment Republican with long credentials in the party, but one who has emerged as one of the most capable and willing defenders of Trump and the ideology for which he stands. Barr’s reasons for this, as my colleague Ezra Klein explained, stem from a deep sense of persecution, a belief that conservatives and Christians are under siege from ruthless progressives, an existential battle that must be waged if America as we know it is to be preserved.

Under these circumstances, a lot becomes justifiable — even the kind of assaults on the idea of truth more commonly seen in various types of authoritarian regimes (North Korea’s formal name, for example, is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). It’s a way of emptying words of their content, of transmuting ideas like “democratic” to mean “in the interests of the ruling faction.”

 

All true and accurate, I reckon.

Update:

The peculiar fate of Catallaxy

Sinclair Davidson made a comment in a thread yesterday that both Leftists and conservatives have shown themselves to be "Statists".   Yet the blog, today featuring prominently:

*  a photo of a dead, drowned toddler by Trump cultist Steve Kates (and, by the way, endorsement of a thorough authoritarian and wannbe fascist like Trump is an endorsement of the purest form of Statism - the kind where the leader embodies the State and is above control and accountability); and

* Sean Hannity level hack commentary on American politics by the uber Catholic conservative (not that he wants the title) Currency Lad;

is yet again confirming itself as the most intensely conservative political website in Australia.

Don't pretend otherwise, Sinclair.  You now oversee a conservative blog that yearns for the special kind of Statism that comes with authoritarianism. 

Update:  I should have mentioned the reactionary hyperbole that Kates engages in about that drowned toddler photo:

This image allowed millions of “refugees” to enter Europe, changing Western Civilisation forever, and leading to its possible demise within a century.

Yeah, sure.  Idiot.

Thinking about sacrifice

Don't ask me why, but I started thinking in the shower last night about the ubiquity of sacrifice to the gods as a key religious impulse around the world.   What do academics think is the motivation for lots of people around the globe having started to believe that gods need or desire sacrificial offerings?

Which led me to review again what Freud thought about this, and I was reminded about his obsession with boys wanting to displace their fathers sexually.   (Seriously, has anyone ever psychoanalysed Freud as to why he would think this was a universal feeling?   I mean, really:  just how many men in this modern era of on-line, public, anonymous, confession ever said they felt this way.   Or would Freud say that it's an unconscious desire, of course most boys and young men don't recognise it?)

Anyway, I read an essay by someone who pointed out Freud being influenced by a contemporary writer, William Robertson Smith, who wondered a lot about the idea of sacrifice in early societies.  Here's a key part of the essay:

In “Totem and Taboo”, Freud followed Smith’s argument closely but focused more explicitly on the killing of the totem animal, interpreting this not only as the symbolic murder of the god but as the derivative of a primal group parricide motivated by the desire of the young males to gain sexual possession of the females of the clan, who all belonged to the father (as the dominant male) and who were necessarily their mothers. Freud was indeed reiterating a principle first articulated by Smith himself (albeit in a footnote) — that there existed a double taboo which was breached in the primal sacrificial act: not to kill one’s fellow clansman and not to commit incest. Smith had written:

“I believe that in early society (and not merely in the very earliest) we may safely affirm that every offence to which death or outlawry is attached was primarily viewed as a breach of holiness; e.g. [sic] murder within the kin, and incest, are breaches of the holiness of tribal blood, which would be supernaturally avenged if men overlooked them.” (15)

This principle was to lie at the heart of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. The abiding interest lies in its use as by Freud to explain the origins of morality, culture and religion. The totem meal was “perhaps mankind’s earliest festival” and was thus “a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginnings of so many things — of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion” (16). Ambivalence both motivated the killing of the father and induced remorse:

“…we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too… A sense of guilt made its experience, which in this case coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been… They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for the father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They this created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos became guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned itself.” (17)

I don't know, Freud may be almost nuttily wrong about the whole Oedipus complex, but before I read this essay (that is, while I was still in the shower), it did occur to me - is part of the unrealised motivation for animal sacrifice to gods an ambivalence about killing animals for food in the first place?

I mean, it would seem that the closer modern urban people get to seeing how the animals we eat are raised and killed, the more they sense guilt about the process.  In older societies, slaughter wasn't hidden in the way it is now, and people surely (like us) thought young animals in particular were cute and endearing.  Yet people gotta eat, and lamb tastes better than mutton, and so eat animals they did.

Is part of the unconscious motivation behind the idea of sacrificing animals to God or gods that it's a way to deal with the guilt of killing animals to survive?   If the gods take part in the meal as well, then who can blame humans for having to do this to survive?

It's an idea, anyway.  Perhaps an eccentric modern one, since I don't know that anyone has really detected an ancient sense of regret in killing animals for food.   The idea of respect for a wild animal killed, yes.  Or maybe people just haven't been looking for it.  And I can use the Freudian trump card - it's an unconscious thing, but it was still there!

Reading more broadly on sacrifice, it's interesting to see that anthropological and psychological consideration of this is still a pretty active field.   I found two broad surveys of the topic that were pretty good:  one, the Encyclopaedia Britannica  entry Theories of the Origin of Sacrifice;  and another is a good essay by a Jungian psychoanalyst:   The Psychology of Sacrifice.   (I don't find the Jungian comments all that helpful really, but the survey of what others have theorised is very succinct yet comprehensive.)

All grist for the mill for my forthcoming Guide to Life for Aimless Young Adults.

Update:   I feel I should give a shout out to Buddhism for being the big religion for which, from the start, animal sacrifice was criticised and banned.  According to one Buddhist website:

One of the central rites of Brahmanism during the Buddha's time was the sacrifice (yàga)  which sometimes included the slaughter of animals. The Vedas describe in detail how these sacrifices should be conducted if the gods were to find them acceptable.  Some of these rites could be very elaborate and very expensive. The Tipiñaka records one sacrifice conducted by a brahmin named Uggatasarãra during which `five hundred bulls, five hundred steers and numerous heifers, goats and rams were brought to the sacrificial post for slaughter' (A.IV,41). The Buddha criticized these bloody rituals as being cruel wasteful and ineffective (A.II,42). He maintained that those who conduct sacrifices make negative kamma for themselves even before they have set up the sacrificial post, ignited the sacred fire and given instructions for the animals to be slaughtered (A.IV,42). He repudiated the killing of the animals, the felling of trees to make the sacrificial posts and the threatening and beating of the slaves as they were driven to do the preparations `with tear-stained faces' (A.II,207-8). He also made a plea for such sacrifices to be replaced by charity towards virtuous ascetics and monks (D.I,144).

But I see that animal sacrifice still happens in Tibet, due to the co-existence of old Shamanism with Buddhism:

The issue of animal sacrifice – the “red offering” (dmar mchod) performed in some Buddhist communities across the Tibetan cultural area in the Himalaya – has received considerable critical attention. Surveys such as that conducted by Torri (2016) have shown that, according to common belief, local deities prefer red offerings such as blood and meat1. In Sikkim – a former Buddhist kingdom and now an Indian state in the southern foothills of the Himalaya – nearly every mountain, hilltop, lake and river is said to be populated with supernatural beings. They play an important role in daily life, and need to be worshipped. Some of these entities were tamed and converted to Buddhism by Tibetan masters (Balikci-Denjongpa 2002 and Balikci 2008, p. 85). However, of course the taming of supernatural entities has not only been a feature undertaken by Buddhist masters who came to this region, but is also an important task of village religion itself. Village people often consult a Buddhist master and a shamanic expert simultaneously. As Balikci notes: “The Sikkimese shamans are the ritual specialists in charge of keeping good relations with the households’ and the lineages’ ancestral gods”  

And it seems that one of most excessive animal sacrifice festivals (not counting Eid, I suppose) happens in Nepal, but as a Hindu thing:

Despite outcry from animal rights groups, a festival widely considered to be the largest mass-slaughter of animals on Earth happened in Nepal this week, according to the Guardian. The two-day Gadhimai festival has been held every five years for the last 260 years in the village of Bariyarpur, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Kathmandu, where it attracts  thousands of Hindu worshippers from Nepal and neighboring India. Amid tight security, the festival opened on Tuesday with the ritual slaughter of a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and a pigeon, as a local shaman also offered blood taken from five points on his body. After this initial killing, around 200 butchers brandishing sharpened swords and knives entered the festival arena, a walled area larger than a football field, leading in several thousand buffalo. In the days prior, Indian authorities and volunteers seized dozens of animals at the border from unlicensed traders and pilgrims, but this effort failed to stop the massive flow of animals to the festival.

 Update 2:  Maybe I read this before, and perhaps even posted a link to it?, but Haaretz in 2016 gave an explanation of how Judaism came to stop doing Passover animal sacrifice after the destruction of the Second Temple, which was the site for a lot of ritual killing:

Jewish families made their way to Jerusalem from throughout Judea and beyond. Once they arrived, they purchased their sacrifice from one of the city’s many baby goat/sheep vendors and waited for Passover. On Passover eve, a representative from each family took their purchase to the Temple. At the appointed time, the gates would open and the representatives – each with bleating sacrifice in hand – filed in and lined up in front of one of the many priests, who themselves were lined up in rows in the Temple courtyard. Once the courtyard was full, the gates were closed and the mass slaughter began.

Each representative handed his goat or sheep to a priest who killed the animal, carefully collecting its blood into a bowl. Once the bowl was full, it was transferred to the priest beside him. From him it went to the one beside him, until, like a conveyor belt, it reached another priest who doused the altar with its bloody contents. After the blood has been completely collected, the priest handed the now-dead animal to the representative, who took it and hung it on a hook. Levites came over and removed the skin and innards, which were taken to the altar and burned. Once this was done, the representatives each took their dead goat or sheep and left the Temple compound to find their families. Then each family roasted the meat on a pomegranate branch and ate it in a festive night barbecue.

Since the Temple compound – about the size of 15 football fields – wasn’t large enough to fit all the pilgrims in at once, this process was repeated three times....

The task of adapting Judaism to its new Temple-less reality fell to Rabban Gamaliel II, head of the Jewish Assembly – the Sanhedrin. With regard to the Passover sacrifice, Gamaliel decreed that the sacrifice should continue in family homes, with each family sacrificing its own goat or sheep. 

However, other rabbis believed that the Passover sacrifice, like all the other sacrifices, could only be conducted by the priests in the Temple and that, like the other sacrifices, should not be conducted until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt. 

Some Jews followed Gamaliel and continued to sacrifice goats and sheep in their homes on Passover; others didn’t and saw the practice as apostasy. 

Within about two generations, the practice ceased when the anti-sacrifice camp assumed control and threatened to excommunicate those who practiced it. So, sometime in the second century C.E., Jews stopped the practice of sacrificing baby goats and sheep on Passover. Until recently, that is. 

Don't worry, teenagers - it will all become (sorta) clear in 40 years time!

Further to my recent post about how to motivate aimless seeming teenagers, I noticed this (arguably) less-than-useful article last night:

Scientists pinpoint the age you're most likely to find meaning in life 

Guess what the answer is:

Interviews with 1,042 people aged 21 to more than 100 years old reveal that people tend to feel like their lives have meaning at around age 60. That’s the age at which the search for meaning is often at it’s lowest, and the “presence” of meaning is at it’s highest, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Clinical Psychiatry.

 

If you’re a twenty-something ruminating about your life’s purpose, that may seem like a long time to wait. But take heart: If this study tells us anything, it’s that the ennui-fueled search for meaning in your early life is normal, and, even after 60, it doesn’t actually ever end. Instead, people may readjust how they derive purpose as they age.

Well, I'm looking forward to next year now, when I peak in life meaningfulness...

Good tweet, Adam

The next Olympics could be...problematic

By the way, has Trump yet tweeted sympathy and support for Russia in light of their ban?

A "Guide to Life" for young adults?

Well that's a co-incidence:  I have been wondering lately the very question posed at Slate:  What to say to motivate your aimless teen.

I wouldn't be the first parent to wonder - why does my teenager seem to be feeling uncertain and not have any passionate interest in anything?   Even what's she's talented at doesn't really move her much.

Why doesn't she know more fundamental general knowledge about the history of the world?   At least my son read books for a while, before his phone took control; and he watched Horrible Histories and has some knowledge of the big wars and revolutions.   [As a (perhaps sexist) generalisation, do girls have less interest in history because they don't enjoy imagining themselves in the midst of dangerous adventure in the same way that boys do?]   And don't speak to me about religion or philosophy - of the latter she knows nothing, but she's had exposure to Christianity of both Catholic and Protestant hue, and even still sometimes accompanies a friend to one of the "let's put on a show!" brand of evangelical suburban church.  But she openly says at home that she suspects there's nothing behind the curtain, so to speak.

I suggested last night that she should try the ideas in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason:   she said I may as well have just said that in a foreign language, for all the sense it made.

So yeah, I'm feeling the need for a Guide for Life type book for this type of young adult.  Of course, this is what Jordan Peterson's recent career is made out of, but he's full of waffle and rubbish such as curing his depression by eating just meat - he's not someone I trust to be imparting information and common sense.

And it can't be long - it needs to be relatively succinct.

If I can't find one, and I doubt that something that would have my seal of approval exists, I should write it myself. Getting teenagers to read it would be the challenge.   It would have to come in multimedia format for a phone, too...

Climate change and fish

News from Alaska (and sorry the extract is long, but it's important to understand it is not an overfishing problem per se):

In an unprecedented response to historically low numbers of Pacific cod, the federal cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska is closing for the 2020 season.

The decision, announced Friday, came as little surprise, but it's the first time the fishery has closed due to concerns over low stock.

"We're on the knife's edge of this over-fished status," North Pacific Fishery Management Council member Nicole Kimball said during talks in Anchorage.

It's not over-fishing to blame for the die-off, but rather, climate change.

Warming ocean temperatures linked to climate change have wreaked havoc on a number of Alaska's fisheries in recent years, decimating stocks and jeopardizing the livelihoods of fishermen and locals alike who rely on the industry.

A stock assessment this fall put Gulf cod populations at a historic low, with "next to no" new eggs, according to Steven Barbeaux, a research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who authored the report. At their current numbers, cod are below the federal threshold that protects them as a food source for endangered steller sea lions. Once below that line, the total allowable catch goes to zero. In other words, the fishery shuts down.

Up until the emergence of a marine heatwave known as "the blob" in 2014, the stock of cod in the Gulf of Alaska was doing well. But the heat wave caused ocean temperatures to rise 4-5 degrees. Young cod started dying off, scientists said.

"A lot of the impact on the population was due to that first heat wave that we haven't recovered from," Barbeaux said during an interview last month. Following the first heat wave, cod numbers crashed by more than half, from 113,830 metric tons in 2014 to 46,080 metric tons in 2017.
The decline was steady from there.

Too close to Christmas...

I'm going to be really busy the next couple of weeks, which means I should post less, or at least at night rather than during the day.  But the world is such a hot mess at the moment (literally, and socio-politically), it's hard not to read and be appalled by the news. Such as this:

*  the warning about rapidly increasing, low oxygen dead zones in the oceans got a lot of publicity, which is good.   I think one report noted that some sea creatures do OK in naturally low oxygen waters, such as squid.  "Well", I thought "that's probably good news for sea turtles."  But then I remembered that their gender mix is being changed hugely by increased heat around the eggs, so maybe things aren't even great for them...

* I saw Insiders yesterday, and they spent a lot of time on how this Morrison government considers itself unaccountable - if they don't want to answer a question, they just refuse to answer and move on, and journalists pretty much give up and move on too. 

This is very true, and a part of the increased authoritarian bent of the Right - but it all started under Tony Abbott and the refusal to disclose anything about how boats on the high seas were being dealt with.  And that was Scott Morrison too, citing "operational matters."  

He got away with it then, and he's getting away with it now.   A Newspoll overnight at least shows he has a negative approval rating (48% disapprove to 45% approve), which is something to at least be grateful for; but the government overall is at 52%/48% TPP, in a period where I think it's looked pretty crook.  Mind you, I still think we are in a "let's ignore politics" period still after the last election.

Oh - and Labor is still looking internally terribly conflicted on climate change and coal.   It needs to get a grip on that issue fast.

*  Republicans continue to be disgusting alternative reality nutters  taking lines they are specifically told are false and dangerous by their own national intelligence services.

For one of my stupider readers

I bet it was JC who made an anonymous comment here recently that current models couldn't be accurate because models in the 1970's said there would be global cooling.

Obviously displaying the continual self-imposed ignorance of a "it'll all be OK" lukewarmer/denier, it would appear he has never read the 2008 paper in the American Meteorological Society which explained exactly what was going on in climate research at the time, a field which was in its absolute infancy.   It contains this graph:

There was, basically, exactly one year in the early 1970's in which "cooling" papers were dominant;  and some of the very same people who featured with cooling warnings quickly realised their mistake.

Stephen Schneider's explanation appeared in a autobiography he wrote, but this is it in a nutshell:

Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, recalls those stories well. "I was one of the ones who talked about global cooling," he says. "I was also the one who said what was wrong with that idea within three years."  Schneider coauthored a 1971 article in the journal Science about atmospheric aerosols—floating particles of soil dust, volcanic ash, and human-made pollutants. His research suggested that industrial aerosols could block sunlight and reduce global temperatures enough to overcome the effects of greenhouse gases, possibly triggering an ice age. But he soon realized that he had overestimated the amount of aerosols in the air and underestimated the role of greenhouse gases.  "Back then this science was so new, so theoretical, it was really hard to sort it out," he says. He and other early climate researchers say they did not predict a global cooling trend but simply suggested the possibility. Evidence suggests that average worldwide temperatures did decrease between the 1940s and the 1970s. Some climatologists partially attribute the temporary cooling trend to industrial smog, which has since been overcome by the effects of growing greenhouse emissions and, ironically, by clean-air laws that have reduced atmospheric particulates. "Science is a self-correcting institution," Schneider says. "The data change, so of course you change your position. Otherwise, you would be dishonest." 

Having said this, I do agree with the mainstream climate scientists who are concerned with the exaggerations of Extinction Rebellion and others.   Mind you, lukewarmer/deniers already claim a long list of "failed predictions" (including, of course, global cooling) which you have to be completely ignorant to claim as failure at all, so it's completely understandable that some don't want to give any quarter to denialists by siding with them against ER.  After all, exaggeration or not, climate scientists would nearly all want ER to be politically successful in their aim for urgent action.   But the reality is, if you are concerned with accuracy, you really do have to point out exaggerations when they appear. 

There was a good thread about this on Twitter, starting here:

A bit of floating solar boosterism

Grist has an article about a floating solar cell array on a retention pond in New Jersey, and talks about other places where floating solar is being used.

It is not that big an array, as it is a pretty small body of water, yet it is still said to be America's largest.

I presume America's great lakes are far to susceptible to wild ocean-wave like conditions to consider floating solar on them, but they must have lots of other smaller lakes and dams where it is possible.

I still say it is an obviously good idea.

Good catch

In news from Jakarta...

Not sure we're likely to hear a current Australian politician say such a thing anytime soon:

In a candid podcast, Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he liked watching porn and that there was nothing wrong with it.

"If I watch porn, what is wrong with that? I like it. I am an adult. I have a wife,” he said during an interview with YouTube personality Deddy Corbuzier published on Wednesday.

But it's still, you know, Indonesia: 

The politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said it would be wrong, however, if he shared pornographic videos. “What is not allowed is to share [the videos] because sharers can be charged under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE),” he said.
Watching porn is still generally frowned upon in Indonesia and the government has made it difficult for citizens to access pornographic content.

The Ministry of Communication has banned pornographic websites. It has also banned websites not principally concerned with erotic material, such as Tumblr and Vimeo, due to the presence of erotica on the platforms.

This does remind me, though, of Gough Whitlam and Margaret heading off to watch that Swedish sex movie at the cinema in the 1970's.  (The Language of Love?  It's proving surprisingly hard for me to turn up the photo of them outside of the cinema that I recall.)

Has anyone debunked this yet?

This study, it seems to me, should have already been debunked by now, if it contained genuine big flaws:

Offshore windfarms 'can provide more electricity than the world needs' 

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.

Asking for friend who thinks nuclear is the only thing possible to remove power emissions ...

Good reason he's not trusted

The moderate Democrat/centrist types who I follow on Twitter (like Will Wilkinson, and some others I can't recall now) have often said that they find Buttigieg's performance during the Democrat debates off putting and annoying.   He's now handed them some real clear grounds to say his take on things is way, way off:

I don't watch Democrat debates, of course, so I don't know how he comes across.  But this was a really ridiculous thing to say.

HIV still a big problem

Was surprised to read on France 24 that the HIV transmission and death problem in Kenya is still so big:

The Kenyan government is battling the spread of the HIV virus with a nationwide campaign, but infections remain rampant: In 2018, 46,000 people tested positive, including 8,000 children under 15 years old.

With 1.6 million Kenyans living with AIDS, the eastern African country is the third most affected nation in the world.

Transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from mother to child is still common and extremely difficult to contain, mainly in the capital Nairobi's low-income neighbourhoods, and babies are often infected during breastfeeding.

“Education, education, education for the young people is key on prevention of HIV to the children once they get pregnant,” says Faith Kungu, a nutritionist at the Lea Toto clinic in Nairobi.

Despite free healthcare, 4,000 minors died of HIV-related causes in 2018. An HIV positive status is still a taboo and can lead to exclusion from society. Some women opt out of taking medicine to avoid suspicion.

Sad news for a Friday...

Let's list some stupid people (in particular ways)

*  Elon Musk - why the hell would a man worth $20 billion (but not in cash, poor diddums) not settle a defamation action by the guy he called a "pedo"?   Would be a better look than the humiliating evidence that is coming out in court:

During his testimony Mr Musk also played down other tweets, which were also later deleted, including one where he replied "bet ya a signed dollar it's true" to a follower asking about the "pedo" comment.

Mr Musk also acknowledged in court that he paid $52,000 (£40,000) to a man posing as a private detective to dig up dirt about the British diver after it became clear he would be sued. The investigator turned out to be a conman, Mr Musk said.

Under questioning on Wednesday, Mr Musk estimated his net worth to be about $20bn but insisted most of his wealth was held in stock.

"Sometimes people think I have a lot of cash. I actually don't," he told the court.

*  Angus Taylor:  has been revealed as a complete bullshit artist, both in his completely inadequate response to him and/or his office's involvement in inventing figures for political gain (insisting against all evidence that the Council itself had put the figures on its website), and for having implicated Naomi Wolf in a culture war story that happened in Oxford when she was in fact living in another country.    (Sure, a lot of people don't care for Wolf, too, but I can understand her being peeved about being mentioned in Parliament this way.)

He needs to be dumped.  Soon. 

* Scott Morrison:   a flim flam PM, now trying to make a name for himself by re-inventing the wheel of Public Service arrangements.   As Bernard Keene wrote, this stupid cycle of rearranging departments and amalgamation and de-amalgamation just goes on and on and on:

and as people wrote following his tweet:

Yes, the amount of energy put by governments into rearranging the public service chairs is ridiculous and wasteful.

Waddayaknow? Climate models have been making accurate predictions all along (pretty much)

As explained at Real Climate, even some of the first climate models, when properly assessed (which means, taking into account when they got emissions and some other forcings wrong - which is not something you can blame them for)  they have been pretty accurate.

Actually, I find the lengthy Twitter thread explanation by co-author Zeke Hausfather, which starts here, is better than the Real Climate post at explaining what they did.

Quick takes

*   I think the new James Bond trailer looks good.   And I still think the new Q looks like they really had Richard Ayoade in mind, but the producers were worried that his fans would just fall about laughing for 5 minutes as soon as he appeared on screen.

*  Richard E Grant is in the new Star Wars film and says its fantastic.  All actors in these films say that, though, don't they?    Is it possible that they have made a Star Wars film that doesn't include a big, new supa-dupa planet killing version of the Death Star?  Will they have sorted out the unsatisfactory explanations of the nature of the Force?   Gee, I'm sounding like I'm over Star Wars;  but no, I will still likely see this one.

*  What the heck?  Just days after I say I might move to an OPPO phone because I like a pop up selfie cam, there's news that my current brand Motorola has just brought out a mid-range phone with the same feature (and same memory):