The Big Questions

Why do country people think Barnaby Joyce is great?   What do they see in him that I don't?

Remembering that I used to see some appealing self deprecation in him, his personal image deserves to be strongly hit by a few things:

* he seems increasingly bitter, despite having had the benefit of a media covering up his infidelity during an election;
* apart from the relationship with a former staffer, there was the allegation of apparently serious level, drunken sexual harassment for which the National Party returned "no verdict";
* he gives the impression of drinking more now;
* at a time when he has just established a second family, and (if I recall correctly) having previously given the usual "it's so hard for a marriage, being a politician who has to be away from family so often" comments before he left his family, he is now deciding to increase his time on the job with his second set of kids;
* he gives the impression of doubling down on the "climate change and drought and bushfires - no connection" meme, at a time one would like to think that at least some country people might be starting to have doubts.

On the last point though - how many rural people are stupid?   Quite a lot, seems to be the increasing lesson of election results.

China and speed building

My first reaction when seeing, merely days ago, a field full of excavators preparing the grounds for a new Wuhan hospital was that it looked like a con: there were so many and they didn't look particularly well organised.   They seemed as if they were just pretending to be busy.  And besides - were they even the right bit of gear with which to be preparing the ground?  

But reporting from the BBC seems to indicate that the building has gone up in 6 days.  I didn't even think the concrete would be set solidly enough in that time.  Apparently, a similar "instant hospital" project was done in Beijing in 2003, taking 7 days.  Slackers.

It's hard to tell, but from some photos at the last link it looks like it might be a modular style construction.  Is that the only way it could be done?  Modular buildings can be assembled very quickly. 

Of course, getting a building up is one thing - having it properly plumbed and wired and safely finished is another.

I would like to see a walk through of the place in another couple of weeks time, just to see how it looks on the inside. 

Trump chastised - as if

There have been a few Republicans saying that things like "yeah, we know what Trump did was concerning, but it was not the sort of thing you remove a President for, and I like to think he will feel he has learnt something from the experience."

The "Trump will learn from this" aspect is a complete and utter, evidence free, crock of a take, and I would say there is an extremely high chance that Trump will utterly ruin their fantasy in his State of the Union address.

After all, Trump views everything in the most narcissistic way possible, and he knows his "base", with their self induced blindness and cult membership, thinks he did absolutely nothing wrong and that Joe Biden is the one who is shown to be corrupt.  They (encouraged now by most of the Republican Senate) are simply impervious to the objective reporting that there is no evidence that Biden was pushing to have Shokin sacked in order to help his son.   


Here's Axios reporting:

Trump's sense of invincibility 

President Trump often says he's the smartest person in the room on virtually every topic. Now, after taking several risks on what he privately calls "big shit" and avoiding catastrophe, Trump and his entire inner circle convey supreme self-confidence, bordering on a sense of invincibility.

The state of play: Three years into Trump's presidency, their view is the naysayers are always wrong. They point to Iran, impeachment, Middle East peace. Every day, Trump grows more confident in his gut and less deterrable. Over the last month, 10 senior administration officials have described this sentiment to me. Most of them share it....

Between the lines: Over the past month, Trumpworld's sense of being unbeatable has only grown. This is partly because the president sometimes defines victory in narrow terms, like pleasing the base and juicing the markets.

FDR re-considered

Noah Smith had some tweets over the weekend in which he discusses the comparisons that people like to imagine there would be between FDR and a Bernie Sanders presidency.  This included linking to an article in The Atlantic earlier this year that explained how FDR's policies were, in many cases, not "big government" ideologically driven, but combined pragmatic ways to get both government and the private sector involved.

I thought it very interesting:   

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

 It's worth clearing your browsing history to read!

A Soviet mountain mystery, and the conspiracy worlds shared by Russians and the American Right

The Atlantic has an article about a Russian mystery from 1959 that has sparked many conspiracy theories:

Precisely 61 years ago, a band of skiers trekking through the Ural Mountains stashed food, extra skis, and a well-worn mandolin in a valley to pick up on the way back from their expedition. In a moment of lightheartedness, one drew up a fake newspaper with headlines about their trip: “According to the latest information, abominable snowmen live in the northern Urals.” Their excess equipment stored away, the group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened.

Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.

Today, the “Dyatlov Pass incident,” named after one of the students on the trek, Igor Dyatlov, has become Russia's biggest unsolved mystery, a font of endless conspiracy theories. Aliens, government agents, “Arctic dwarves”—and yes, even abominable snowmen—have at various points been blamed for the deaths. One state-television show regularly puts self-appointed experts through a theatrical lie-detector test to check their outlandish explanations.

The article notes that Russian has a very, very long history of conspiracy theories coming from the top down, going back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and makes this surprising claim about how widespread belief in conspiracies remain:

An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.

Which is interesting - the Trump supporting, Wingnut Right in America now has moved to a similar world of conspiracy belief,  with the conspiracies not so much originating from the top, but created or vigorously promoted for profit (see Rupert Murdoch, and the alt Right corporate and private media universe) and then being adopted by the top for cynical political benefit.    But they have both ended up in the same place regarding a post-truth world of politics.

Communists in the kitchen

This NPR story is from 2014, but I saw someone tweet about it yesterday, suggesting he would like to see communism and the return of apartment blocks with shared kitchens. (It was not serious, I think, but nonetheless scores of comments followed expressing horror at the suggestion, based on their experiences with multi-person shared kitchens). It's pretty interesting, anyway:

How Russia's Shared Kitchens Helped Shape Soviet Politics 

Some (lengthy) highlights:

In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, most people in Moscow lived in communal apartments; seven or more families crammed together where there had been one, sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. They were crowded; stove space and food were limited. Clotheslines were strewn across the kitchen, the laundry of one family dripping into the omelet of another.

As the Soviet Union industrialized from the 1920s to the 1950s, and millions poured into Moscow from the countryside, one of the goals of the new government was to provide housing for the workers. It started putting people into apartments that had been occupied by the rich or by aristocrats who had been driven out by the new regime.

"The communal apartment was like a microcosm of Soviet society," says Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. "People from all walks of life, sometimes absolute class enemies, living next to each other. The expression was 'densed up.' The allotment was 9 square meters per person."

 Gregory (Grisha) Freidin, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University, grew up in a communal apartment of 10 families about five blocks from the Kremlin in the 1940s. "On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses at the local morgue. There were two rooms where the mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was the woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked."

In Freidin's kitchen, every family had a small kitchen table that housed a few pots and pans. There were two four-burner stoves. Everyone cooked their own food — cabbage soup, borscht with beets, potatoes, buckwheat groats, boiled chicken.

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict....

But there was apparently some very Orwellian motivation for the shared kitchens:

"Communal kitchen was a war zone," says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. "During the Stalin era [1928-1953] it was the most dangerous place to be — in the kitchen."

Shenderovich agrees: "Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting."
But Anya von Bremzen remembers there was camaraderie as well. "There was always a grandmother to take care of the kids, and share a bit of cutletta or salat Olivier. And when they began to disband the communal apartments, the communal kitchen was an institution that many people actually began to miss."

The reason Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

"The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time was they would like to have houses without kitchens," says Genis. "Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property."

The article then goes on to note that there was an early idea that communism would set up cafeterias where most people would eat most meals, freeing Soviet women from the tyranny of cooking, so they could concentrate on self fulfilment.   Of course, it never happened, and the country soon faced mass starvation instead.  

And I guess I had not realised how thoroughly you could blame Communism for the poor reputation of Russian food:

"Bolsheviks were not into food. [Vladimir] Lenin was not a foodie," says von Bremzen. "They saw it as fuel; they had to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy. And private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized."

Following the civil war, the shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. Stalin's industrialization program included the industrialization of food. Completely new, mass-produced food appeared — foods like canned and processed soup, fish, meat and mayonnaise.

"The whole of the Soviet Union, all 120 different ethnic groups were suddenly being served exactly the same stuff," says Grisha Freidin. "Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the politburo level. The kinds of candies that were being produced was decided in a special meeting with Stalin and [Vyacheslav] Molotov."

Fascinating.   

Ian McEwan looks back at Brexit

The take in this op-ed in The Guardian by Ian McEwan sounds entirely right to me.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

It’s done. A triumph of dogged negotiation by May then, briefly, Johnson, has fulfilled the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands. The rest of the world, presidents Putin and Trump excepted, have watched on in astonishment and dismay. A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause. We must pack up our tents, perhaps to the sound of church bells, and hope to begin the 15-year trudge, back towards some semblance of where we were yesterday with our multiple trade deals, security, health and scientific co-operation and a thousand other useful arrangements.

The only certainty is that we’ll be asking ourselves questions for a very long time. Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion”. How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.

Yes, this last aspect makes a mockery of the stupid arguments put by conservative and libertarian Right alike (and, for reasons I could never follow, also endorsed here in comments by Homer!) that not going ahead with Brexit after the referendum would be some sort of heinous travesty of democracy.   

While I am attacking my readers, I should add that I don't think I have ever seen Jason point to any analysis (outside of the self-serving pro Brexit campaigners, who we know were lying about numbers) to show that it would actually be a benefit in the long run for England.   I sometimes look at Helen Dales's tweets too, and read some of her commentary.  Same thing can be said about her.

So basically,  the people who would like to think of themselves as moderate Right, whether as classic liberals, or those with a stronger libertarian bent like Sinclair Davidson, simply supported it for the simplistic, ideological, belief that a multinational organisation means more "red tape", which = bad, regardless of any actual or serious analysis of the efficiencies the organisation achieves.

Not sure who to blame for this one

I like to attack traditional Chinese (or Asian) medicine ideas that lead to endangered animals being killed or mistreated for their imaginary health benefits; but I have another Eastern mystical idea that deserves rubbishing - that men holding back from ejaculation during sex is fantastic for their health.  (Not sure whether to blame the Chinese or Indians though - it appears to be endorsed both in yoga and in Taoist ideas.  It also appears to have had the famous Zen Buddhist Alan Watts on side.)

I'm talking about this because of this article at AEON, which takes a somewhat cynical, but still  open minded, attitude to the topic.

I just think it's very silly.   Oooh - semen is magic and holding onto it makes dudes live almost forever.   I mean, really.   Sure, if some couples want to have stationary sex and if it makes them feel good, go right ahead, don't let me stop you.   But this mystical overlay...

Besides, given the nature of the prostate and studies about ejaculation and prostate problems, it's hard to believe that it is healthier than normal sex.  

Here's an amusing part of the article, where the author describes a conference in Thailand he went to (with his wife) in 2015:

To be frank, my first impression of the Tao Garden’s conference was that it could have made a delicious subject for another Huxley satire, à la Brave New World. The clinic offered every kind of New Age therapy imaginable, including blood irradiation with strange blue light, Ayurvedic massage, colonic irrigation, full-body cupping, and a very painful treatment where so-called granules in the blood vessels of your anal canal and testicles are squeezed flat by muscular Thai grandmothers. The ecstatic screams of Tantra’s female acolytes were so loud at night that nearby condo owners threatened to call the police. My wife sensibly spent most of her time sunning herself by the swimming pool, sipping pineapple drinks, and watching the well-muscled tantrikas do laps in their G-string briefs, while I attended lectures and demonstrations in such subjects as ‘Preserving the Yang Element’, ‘Nine Sexual Secrets’ and ‘Awakening the Goddess’.  

The next section gets explicit:

The highpoint of the conference was a public demonstration of ejaculation control training for which a young man among Muir’s followers had volunteered. (At lunch that day, the same young man had told my wife and me that he was torn between dedicating himself to Tantra and becoming a dentist as his parents fervently wished.) The demonstration took place in a large room whose only furnishings were floor mats. As the young man disrobed and lay down, Leah Alchin Piper, Muir’s former lover and now business partner, opened her shirt and began ....

 Interested readers can go to the article to finish reading the description.  :)  It does have its amusing aspects.

What does Andrew say?

Two observations from looking at Andrew Bolt's blog:

*  Here's how he talks about the Morrison government's "sports rort":

MCKENZIE'S SPORTS RORT IS AN INSULT TO AUSTRALIA'S VOLUNTEERS

When Morrison's blathering attempts at excuse making are not convincing Andrew Bolt, it's time for Scotty from Marketing to give up and sack someone.

*  He's downplaying the seriousness of the coronovirus outbreak.   ("Hasn't killed anyone outside of China yet".)  

Given he doesn't have a clue about sound judgements on risk (see climate change), this probably means we should really start to panic now.

A mental problem to avoid

I didn't know that OCD could manifest as intrusive and unwanted sexual thoughts:

My doctor mistook my OCD for paedophilia 

but yeah, seems this can be a thing.   And I can understand how uncomfortable it must make other people feel (and how uncertain as to how to react) when they know someone is suffering from this.   

You know it's a stupid idea...

....when both my rather apolitical wife (like all sensible people, though, she thinks Trump is a joke and complete embarrassment) and someone at Catallaxy says word to the effect "this idea of putting Australians flown out from China into quarantine on Christmas Island seems unnecessary and over the top".

And the reasons are that it is just ridiculously expensive to use Christmas Island, and is surely likely to put the Australians at unnecessary risk of not being able to get the best treatment and drugs should they be needed.

I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea of quarantine per se - but is the government seriously suggesting there is no where suitable on mainland Australia near a capital city (or large rural centre with a major hospital) where the quarantining can be done?

Update:  The Chaser take on it probably has an element of truth behind it - the government is probably itching to get more people into a facility it is already spending money on unnecessarily:

Update:  and here's some support for my take:

Christmas Island is ill-prepared to receive a planeload of Australians from the coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan, with its medical facilities inadequate if somebody falls seriously ill, Australia’s peak medical body says.

Head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Tony Bartone, said Australia was ranked among the most capable countries in the world at containing the spread of infectious diseases, but that Christmas Island, chosen for its remoteness and because it has a detention centre, was ill-conceived as a health quarantine location.

But I see that Labor has decided to not rock the boat - which seems ridiculous.   I just do not believe that this could not be done cheaper and more effectively on Australian soil:

The Federal Opposition is backing the decision to use Christmas Island to quarantine Australians returning from Wuhan.

Plans are underway to evacuate as many as 600 Australians from the epicentre of the Coronavirus outbreak in Hubei Province.

  

Not something you really want to read at the airport

Boeing Dreamliner production problems threaten the aircraft's safety, former quality manager warns

The very strange case of Bettina Arndt

With the completely ridiculous Right wing trolling that was Bettina Arndt getting an Australia Day award for helping gender equity, there has been a surge of renewed interest in her dubious career.

New Matilda.com reported on the way she has, for decades now, never corrected any publication, interviewer or media outlet which gave her credentials as "psychologist" or "clinical psychologist".  (Or even "Dr", apparently.)    It had actually been my understanding that anyone could call themselves a psychologist anyway, but it appears more complicated than that.  And she does have a Masters of Psychology from way back.

But certainly, to me, "clinical psychologist" suggests experience with with face to face counselling to those in need of psychological care and aid.   And it would seem she has never done that.   Doing an interview with a convicted sex offending teacher who bragged about how good the sexual encounters were with his 15 year old student?  Yes - oh, and good call, Bettina.    

You see, until reading another NewMatilda article from 2007, I had forgotten how long she has been someone who really is best ignored, with her repeated opinion pieces from that period arguing that some sex offenders are not doing as much harm that people think they are.   Most fondled girls or boys will be fine, she argues (with no actual clinical psychology experience, mind you.)   Rape as a social problem is being exaggerated is a long standing theme - although we still have a society in which I have to fret about my teenage daughter not walking too far at night, even in my relatively safe, middle class suburb.

Bettina hates people embracing victim-hood too strongly - and to be honest, there are cases where that's a reasonable response.   (That discrimination case against QUT students brought by the aboriginal staffer, for example.)

But in the matter of sexual offending against children - the Royal Commission into it gave some stark evidence of the commonly occurring, dire long term effects of it.   It's really a topic on which her past assertions have been made to look like a really inappropriate call.  

The puzzling thing about Arndt is that her media work in the 1970's on promoting an open attitude towards sex and sex education made her seem a Left wing, pro-feminist, character, as supporters of sexual revolution of the prior decade invariably were.    Yet she is now aligned with the Men's Rights movement, which is as Right wing and anti-feminist as it gets.

I see from Wikipedia that, after her years editing Forum and getting her head on TV to titillate women watching the Mike Walsh Show about how they could have better sex lives, her first husband died and she remarried to an American lawyer.  Did he turn her into a Right winger, either of conservative or libertarian persuasion*?   It would hardly be surprising if his family was very  conservative, as her NYT wedding notice read:

The bridegroom is the son of Lieut. Gen. Willard W. Scott Jr, Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and Mrs. Scott of West Point, N.Y. The Rev. Edmund Campion, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony at the Australian Naval Memorial Chapel in Watson's Bay, Sydney.

So did she even become an obnoxious Right wing Catholic, of the kind that blights Catallaxy?   Perhaps.  It would help explain the later path of her career.

In one other article, I see that one of her other jobs was this:

Next Bettina spent five years working as an online dating coach, giving advice to men and women on online dating, helping with writing their profiles and increasing their chances of meeting the right match. See more about her coaching experiences here.

Gee.  She also has been very interested in the topic of erectile dysfunction (my bold):

The diarists recorded the interaction between the couples when men use the new drugs such as Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and Caverject. These can be miraculous treatments yet there’s a mystery – almost a half of all men who start taking these drugs give up on them.How much of the problem is women’s indifference to the rejuvenated penis? Bettina’s earlier research showed many men flying high on their new lease of sexual life are brought swiftly to earth by sexually disinterested partners.  There are many women who are delighted that their men are being forced to hang up their spurs – women who are not at all happy about this miraculous rejuvenated penis.  Bettina’s book, What Men Want, includes five chapters on erectile dysfunction.

No wonder the male dominated, somewhat ageing, members (ha!, a pun) of the Coalition government gave her a gong.

But it seems clear that Bettina has become increasingly annoyed at women not playing the role she thinks women should.   She's now aged 70, I see.   Surely has made enough money, can't she just retire?

 

*  Are we sure she has never been a member of the libertarian friendly IPA?  She appears on the podcasts, I see.  She certainly has had a touch of nutty ageing Robert Heinlein about her - wanting women to be strong, but not like feminist strong; knowing-when-they-need-to-service-their-men type strong.

The culinary Maginot line of Europe

So I saw a Rick Stein show on SBS Food last night, from 2015 I think, in which he made a trip into Germany with the stated intention of showing that their national cuisine was interesting and didn't deserve the low regard in which most of his English friends seem to hold it.

Well, it was pleasant watching as travelogue (as his shows always are - there is not a more likeable chef on television), but it completely failed in his stated aim of improving the image of German food.

The meals he highlighted were (with one exception) your usual stodgy, meat heavy examples of simple cooking with little flair.  The near liquefied  corned beef turned into gloop with potato and butter looked particularly unappealing.   (Apparently, it's a famous dish, but I hadn't heard of it before.  And I have nothing against corned beef, but not done like that.)

Yes, he highlighted their fondness for white asparagus with hollandaise, but that's hardly interesting cooking per se.   One young cook showed his herring salad dish which featured mango - so it was like an international fusion more than anything traditionally German.

And this brings me back to my strong opinion that in Europe there is something like a culinary Maginot line between the nations with interesting cuisine and those with bland, uninteresting or otherwise dubious cuisine.    Sure, even those on the Eastern dark side of the line might do one or two things well - everyone likes a good bratwurst, for example - but overall, they are failures at interesting flavours and interesting food histories.

Did I do a map like this once before?  I think I might have, but perhaps I didn't include Morocco.   Leaving out Greece may be considered controversial by some, but as I have explained before, it's recipes are too simple to be too interesting, although if last night's show is any guide, it ranks better than Germany:

Poland is a worry

Wow, there is some really worryingly Right wing authoritarian stuff going on in Poland at the moment regarding the judiciary, according to Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic.

Too much to post about...

Hey, work is busy, and the appalling state of politics has so much to complain about at the moment.  Such as:

*  what absolute pieces of work and jerks are those still willing to work for Trump, particularly Pompeo and Barr.   With Pompeo, the NPR reporter was completely vindicated in the emails released showing her intentions were clear, and the obvious problem was Pompeo's staff not passing on what they knew she wanted to cover.   Yet here is Trump and his bunch of obnoxious cult followers giving him congratulations:

With Barr, it looks like Bolton will say he also worried about Trump, but cult loyalty overcomes everything.

*  The impeachment looks like it might get Bolton as a witness after all.   That will be real popcorn eating viewing, for sure.   Of course nearly all of the cult followers won't budge in their view regardless of what Bolton says - because as always predicted, they have changed their position  from "of course it would be concerning if the President did that, but he didn't do it"  to "the President 100% did the right thing".  And they will maintain that even when someone they formally thought was a great appointment well matched to the Trump priorities says "no, you can't run foreign relations like that. It's wrong and corrupt."

Any and all Trump supporters have self-gaslite themselves into not being able to recognise truth from fiction.   It's what cults do.   One feels this cannot go on forever - but it is distressing that it has gone on for as long as it already has.   (And really, it is a pre-Trump phenomena that has been building over more than a decade.)

*  In Australia, is it a case of the Morrison government thinking it can bluster its way out of an obvious scandal, following Trump's lead?    There is a case for saying Ministerial standards used to be too tough, back in the day;  but it is ridiculous that Morrison is trying to bluff his way through this sports grant scandal.   

Bats and racism

A few points about China, coronavirus, and racism:

*   does Sinclair Davidson not mind at all that his blog for old fools is crammed with comments using "chinks" for Chinese since the outbreak of the coronavirus.   He certainly doesn't care enough to insert his own objection into threads or posts - not that I can see.  Update:   doesn't he teach at a tertiary institution that has lots of high fee paying Chinese students?    Wouldn't RMIT find this lack of control over his own blog concerning (remembering that commenters are forever complaining that certain words are on a "ban" filter that stops their whole comment ever being published.)  In other words, he could stop the casual and repeated use of a word almost universally regarded as offensive/racist if he wanted, but he doesn't.  Why?  

*  I had missed this about the "bat video":

As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China.

There was just one problem. The video wasn’t set in Wuhan at all, where bat isn’t a delicacy. It wasn’t even from China. Instead it showed Wang Mengyun, the host of an online travel show, eating a dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation. Sampling the bat was simply an addition to the well-trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

That's from a Foreign Policy opinion piece, that needs a subscription to read the rest of the article, which goes on to talk about how the idea of Chinese being dirty disease carriers has a long racist history.  Unfortunately, though I cannot read the whole article.

*  I have made comments over the last couple of years about how I wish that the Chinese (and other nearby Asian cultures) could get over the traditional medicine ideas that eating certain animals carries certain specific health benefits, usually (I think) based on the perceived spirit characteristic of the animal.   The harm I referred to, though, is to the endangered wild animals caught up in this quasi magical belief system.  I don't really care if people eat something wild that is not endangered (insects or rats, for example), although I guess I have a general bias towards the idea that eating farmed animals generally is a safer thing to do from a "risk of catching exotic disease" point of view.  (Even then, a lot depends on the hygiene in the farms too, I guess.)

In any event, I don't see an objection to the eating of endangered animals for a fanciful health benefit is a racist thing:  just in case anyone was going to throw that at me.

An interview worth listening to?

I missed this on Radio National this morning, and they don't do transcripts of interviews, but I have to listen to the audio at the link.  Can't do that now, but perhaps later:

A lightweight start to the week - what I've been watching on Netflix

For one reason or another, I still haven't managed to get to the cinema this summer.

But on Netflix, been enjoying the following:

Sacred Games - quality crime, corruption (and mysticism?) in Mumbai.   I only found this via a recommendation in some newspaper article, but it's really good, and I see from online review sites that it is well regarded by critics and viewers.  And the Indians are still doing the thing that amazed me so much in the much sillier Typewriter series - moving in and out of English (sometimes mid-sentence) so easily that it hurts and embarrasses my pathetic monolingual brain.

Dracula - the short series just released by the Moffat/Gattis team that brought us Sherlock.  Only saw the first episode last night, but it was very witty, and certainly interesting enough to continue watching.   I am not sure I am completely convinced by the wisecracking Dracula lead actor, and also questioned the deliberate use of very retro looking special effects sometimes; but as I say, a pretty high hit rate with amusing lines.   I did wonder early on whether vampirism was being played as an allegory for AIDS, which would be unusual given the very gay-friendly writers (Gattis is actually gay, I see), and I wonder if anyone else got that impression.

The Meg - yes, the 2018 megashark movie is indeed like a B or C Grade monster movie with hammy acting and script (and D grade science),  but done with an A grade budget and production design.  Gee, I enjoyed it, though.   The perfect movie to watch at home instead of the cinema so that you can make jokes out loud about who might be eaten next,  and the silliness of many of the decisions the characters are making.   I loved the mini "glider" subs; I would have killed for a toy version of one of them as a 9 year old:

Perhaps I liked it a lot because I could sense how even more intensely I would have liked it as a 10 year old?   Anyone, a lot of fun, very competently made.

Not enough environmental disaster for you yet?

In the SMH today:

The threat of mass fish kills is emerging across the Murray-Darling Basin as low river flows and the influx of soil and ash from bushfires reduce water quality.

In recent days, fish deaths have been reported in the Macquarie River near Dubbo and the Macleay River east of the Dividing Range in NSW, while a "wall of mud and ash" is moving down the Upper Murray.

"Fish are just rolling over dead everywhere, it's a double-pronged disaster," said Lee Baumgartner, a fisheries expert at Charles Sturt University.

Professor Baumgartner said a NSW Fisheries team arrived near Tumbarumba in southern NSW to rescue endangered perch, only to witness sludge moving down the river "with the consistency of cake mix".

"They didn't rescue a single fish," he said. "It's just horrible."

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority revealed the scale of the threats to the health of freshwater ecosystems on Wednesday, with the release of a map showing almost all the major river valleys faced problems.

These ranged from "almost certain" algal blooms and low dissolved oxygen levels to high salinity and bushfire contamination.