Killing animals not a great way to make a living

I had wondered about the psychological effects of working in an abattoir.  An article in The Conversation confirms a suspicion that it is not great for mental health:

The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers

view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.

There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.

Another study noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....

Surprisingly, Flinders University research has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender differences.

The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes

the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced, shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once again, finally coming to a close.

Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

If you ask me...

....political commentators who are centrists (or outright sympathetic to Democrats) are hyperventilating way too much about how much of a "disaster" the intra party tabulation of votes in one State really is.

It is very reminiscent of the media's intense concentration on how much of a political problem Hillary's emails were going to be.   Don't they realise their role in making these things self-fulfilling prophecies?

Yay Mitt

A few key paragraphs in Mitt Romney's speech:

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did....

The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The president’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect." No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values.

Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the ugly conservative

The fact that he has lung cancer should be no excuse for not observing that Rush Limbaugh has been a pig of a broadcaster for decades, and a major player in corroding the tone of mainstream conservatism in its American (and to some extent, Australian) incarnation to one which is every bit as obnoxious as any extremism in language and tone to be found on the Left.   It's worse for the Right, though, as it is meant to be part of a Christian landscape where they are supposedly taught to be better than their political enemy. 

It should be an embarrassment to the Republicans that he was endorsed so early on (I had forgotten that his fandom goes right back to Ronald Reagan), and nothing he did - no name calling, no factually wrong claims, no false rumour endorsed, no racist or misogynistic "jokes", ever caused serious estrangement from their circle. 

Should he be cut some slack for some rhetorical hyperbole if he is an "entertainer"?   No - you can only hide before the clowning for a limited time:  everyone knows there is genuine sentiment behind (say) racist tinged jokes if they are repeated often enough.

I see that he has been married four times and has no kids.   (Why are so many prominent American conservatives so bad at keeping spouses, I wonder as a half rhetorical question.)   He should be swimming in money, though - the internet says a net worth of half a billion dollars.     I hope he leaves a lot of it to charities, and not just political ones.   

But overall, politics will only benefit from the ending of his continued corrosive influence.  

The 18th century rabbit hoax

Can't say I knew of this (rather unpleasant) 18th century hoax, as explained in a book review at Literary Review:

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of rabbits – a number of them, over a period of several weeks. None of the rabbits, not even a ‘perfect’ one, survived their birth, but the surgeon bottled them up and declared his intention to present them as specimens to the Royal Society. A report in the British Gazeteer furnished readers with the woman’s explanation. Some months earlier she and other women working in a field had chased a rabbit and failed to catch it. She was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she pined to eat rabbit and had been unable to avoid thinking of rabbits.

The story was a sensation. It was not only the poor who believed a pregnant woman’s thoughts could affect the workings of her body – hence the arrival of the eminent surgeon at Toft’s bedside (the truly strange news would have been that an agricultural labourer had such care at all). More serious scientific men followed. Local people came in droves to stare. Excitement grew. King George I himself took an interest in the case. Could it be that something marvellous was about to be revealed? Toft was moved to London to be closer to the king and his doctors. Once lodged in a bagnio in Leicester Square, Toft found the delivery of rabbits – for, spoiler alert, the whole thing was a hoax – more problematic. The bagnio porter eventually admitted he had been told to go out and buy rabbits. Cut, skinned, only occasionally whole, rabbits had been introduced into Toft via her vagina in order to be found. Local women – a knife grinder’s wife, her own mother-in-law – seem to have masterminded the hoax, with the collusion of her husband. They promised her that she would ‘get so good a living’ from it that ‘I should never want as long as I lived’.

By December, a justice of the peace had been called in and Toft was arrested. She spent four months imprisoned in the Bridewell, doing hard labour. But no crime could be fastened on her and she was released.

The State of the Union is on...

Supermarket announcement voice:  "Box of tissues to Catallaxy.  Box of tissues to Catallaxy." 

Update:   True:

Trump "learning a lesson" re-visited

I've already derided this in a previous post, but some tweets backing me up:

My very reasonable assessment of the Iowa caucus

*  Of course, the optics of a party not being able to tally its own results quickly due to technical problems is not ideal.

*  Of course, for Trump supporters or excusers to claim that this shows the Democrats "can't run the county if they can't a caucus" is ludicrously ignoring the extreme and obvious dysfunction that has been the rapid and continuous turnover of Trump staff in the White House and the leaking of examples of incompetence of Trump from insiders that has happened from the start.  It is clearly the most shambolic White House we have ever seen in the modern era;

* That Republicans would immediately start with conspiracy theory about what happened is typical - it is all part of the alternative, post-truth reality which they have built for themselves.  (Of course, it doesn't help if some Democrats mutter darkly about dirty tricks, as well.  But the Republicans truly own the title of post-truth party.)

*  I have no problem with Biden looking like the clear loser in the results - he is looking old with no fresh ideas and his popularity with centrist type Democrats is very puzzling to me.   I have, though, no idea whether it is possible that Americans get past a massive "Socialist!  Communist!" scare campaign against Sanders, should he win.   I mean, the polling showing he does reasonably well with the general electorate seems a bit surprising to me too, given his history, age and use of the "S" word.   (Let's be honest, it's a word politicians of the Left avoid in Australia, too.)

* That said, I don't know that a combined Sanders/Warren ticket would be a bad thing.   I tend to think they will be better at attacking and ridiculing Trump than Hillary was.  (She had decades of conspiracy theories to overcome.   The Republicans don't really have the same imaginary dirt on Sanders/Warren to play with.)

* I don't know that anyone knows what to make of Buttigieg doing well, if not winning.   (Full results are  not out as I write this.)   As I have said before, it seems that many of the American political tweeters who I like find him very annoying, but I don't spend time watching Democrat debates so I am not sure why.   On the other hand, I think it would be interesting watching how Trump and his deplorables would deal with the homosexuality issue - surely they could not resist offensive jokes, signs and takes on that.  But given where American culture is at the moment*, I think that would carry a very real risk of backfiring.   It amuses me to think of Trump advisers realising that and trying to continually convince him that he really, really shouldn't try to make a joke about his sexuality.

Update:  I should have mentioned, I am somewhat convinced by the reasoning in Paul Krugman's recent op-ed:

Does It Matter Who the Democrats Choose? In terms of actual policy, probably not very much.
 

*  support for gay marriage polls is at least as 63% - has been as high as 67%.

If I ruled the world...

I noticed, once again via Twitter, this story which escaped my attention last year:

Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found.

In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatonnes of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined.

And yesterday, Vice really put the boot into SUVs, arguing that even electric ones are a waste and, basically, that people who buy cars bigger than they need are jerks:

The Hummer, in all its militaristic aggressiveness, is the very embodiment of the wasteful excess that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. Cars are inherently about projecting a self-image, and hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to project one of profound, pathological selfishness. The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an asshole. 

I have to say, when driving around the city I routinely have very similar condemnatory thoughts about SUVs and (sorry to say) their owners; especially when in a car park.  

I can't fathom why, as an important part of climate change policy, it isn't obvious that they should be taxed into something that only people who really need them will buy.  

Countries like the US and Australia need to get the average car size much smaller.   And fewer cars overall.  

Time to attack a different culture

I'm giving China/East Asia a break from cultural criticism, and going to one of the last countries on Earth I am ever likely willing to find myself:

In Pakistan, keeping lions or tigers at home is a growing trend, flouting rules and safety regulations. The wild animals are seen as a status symbol in the country. Politics and lions often go hand in hand, with politicians buying big cats to symbolise their power. But now, even ordinary citizens are latching onto the craze for keeping wild lions as pets, often putting the animals in cages.

That's just ridiculous.

But, to be fair, is it worse than this example of wannabe powerful men (or at least, entitled men) using a big cat to bolster their masculinity?:

Pathetic.

Timbo has an attack of the vapours

Has Tim Wilson been watching too much Sean Hannity?  There's very much a Trumpian tone to this reaction to Adam Bandt's rise in the Greens:

Update: 

Some pleasingly direct words from the "Marxist!" are going to be hitting the right spot with everyone who can't stand Tim and his shonky government:

A depressing line of work

As reported at Science, another large scale vaccine failure for HIV:

The failure-ridden search for a vaccine that can stop the AIDS virus has delivered yet another frustrating defeat. The HIV vaccine that had moved furthest along in human testing does not work, and the $104 million trial in South Africa evaluating it has been stopped early. “There’s absolutely no evidence of efficacy,” says Glenda Gray, who heads the study and is president of the South African Medical Research Council (MRC). “Years of work went into this. It’s a huge disappointment.”

The efficacy study, which began in October 2016, is known as HVTN 702. It enrolled 5407 sexually active, HIV-uninfected men and women between 18 and 35 years of age at 14 sites across the country. Researchers randomly assigned half of the participants to receive a pair of HIV vaccines used in a one-two punch called a prime boost, whereas the other half received placebo shots. The trial was supposed to last until July 2022. But on 23 January, an independent monitoring board that takes scheduled, sneak peaks at the data to evaluate safety and efficacy, informed Gray and the other leaders of the study that it was “futile” to continue. There were 129 infections in the vaccinated group and 123 in those who received the placebo. “I was catatonic,” Gray says.

No evidence exists that the vaccine caused harm, as happened in a different large HIV vaccine study that was abruptly halted in 2007. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired that earlier sobering study, congratulates her colleagues in South Africa for conducting a scientifically rigorous, complex trial. “The trial was incredibly well done and we got a definitive answer, and that’s what science is about,” says Buchbinder, who is the chair of a multicountry trial, Mosaico, that now is the most advanced large-scale HIV vaccine study underway.

It's sort of hard to imagine a more depressing end to years of research work on making a new vaccine (or drug) only to find it's completely ineffective.

I also note this:

In the halted trial, funded by MRC, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the “prime” was a harmless canarypox virus that carries genes for HIV’s surface protein and two of its other structural proteins. 

Not that I am saying that Bill Gates wasn't good to fund this attempt, but it goes to show that his Foundation doesn't always back winners.   His devotion to advanced nuclear might face a similar outcome.  

Fortune telling history

Interesting article at The Conversation on the rise of fortune telling as a popular, if technically illegal, pursuit in the first couple of decades of the 20th century in Australia. 

I thought spiritualism was supposed to have received a popularity boost due to the First World War (perhaps more in England than here), but did not appreciate that more generic fortune telling was popular in the same period.

Bad habit

How good is chewing betel nut?  Presumably, it must make for quite a good feeling, because of the obvious awful side effects people put up with to keep using it:

Betel nut black market boom in Australia has experts warning of devastating health impacts 

The tropical nut is chewed widely across South-East Asia and the Pacific and often mixed with lime powder (calcium hydroxide) to produce an addictive paste that stains the teeth and mouth a vibrant red.

It can also cause bad breath, tooth wear, gum recession, bleeding gums, and mouth cancer in regular users.

Ms Groves stopped selling betel nut when authorities cracked down on the product in Cairns, but said regulations had resulted in a booming black market for the product.

"[People] now just sell it at home," she said.

The Queensland Police Service said one person had been charged for possessing betel nut in 2019.
Australian Dental Association oral medicine specialist Professor Michael McCullough said the product was readily available in Melbourne where dentists are reporting a large increase in the number of concerning presentations associated with the product.

Have a look at two of the photos in the story:

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.