Revenge of the pangolin?

Pangolins only came to my attention back in 2014, although there has since been a David Attenborough narrated documentary which publicised their plight as victims of Chinese traditional medicine.

If the current coronovirus problem leads to Chinese not eating any, or as many, endangered wild animals for imaginary health benefits, that will at least be something good to come of it.  See this:

Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?

Movie reviewed: Parasite

I missed Parasite at the cinema, where it was still on at some arthouse places only a few weeks ago, it seems; but found on the weekend (to my surprise) that it was already available as a $7 rental on Google Play.  Cool.  I feel a bit sorry for the cinema owners, though.   Mind you, it would cost at least $30 for just me and my son to go see it at a cinema.   But I digress.

I think it's a good to very good movie, but perhaps didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I might.   I think it made me feel too anxious from too early in the movie as to how the whole scenario was going to unravel, as it was clear that it couldn't last.

I am also a little surprised as to how widely praised it has been, not because it deserves criticism as such, but because it seems so Korean-centric in its social commentary.   I mean, it is a very peculiar country - its susceptibility to cults; its torment at having a madman leader with brainwashed public support just to their north;  the crushing school system with students bearing a pressure like no other nation I know of.   (Yet, the movie indicated, overqualified university graduates abound.)   Even the enormously successful entertainment industry that is K Pop is notorious for its "dark and tragic underbelly".  Recently it was in the news that 75% of young Koreans would love to leave the country.   This article on the survey actually makes the case that things are not as bad in terms of inequality as the youth seem to think.   Maybe it's another Korean speciality - to complain that things are worse than they are?

The movie made me want to read up more on the social problems of the country, but I have had no time so far.   I also want to now read in detail reviews about the movie, as I resisted doing that because I didn't want too much in the way of spoilers to be accidentally revealed.

My son, by the way, said he loved it;  but then he, like many young people, thought Joker was great too.  (He went by himself - I have no interest in it.)   I am a little worried about what it says about the world when dark movies are so popular, but at least Parasite has a veneer of plausibility and isn't one that you have to worry about incels feeling endorsement.

I will probably update this later when I have read more about it...

Update:   did the movie remind anyone else of the Morlocks and Eloi from HG Wells' The Time Machine?

Update 2:  it has won best picture, best director and 2 other awards?   Seems a bit excessive, if you ask me.  Mind you, I haven't seen seen 1917 yet, so I don't know how it compares...  

Update 3:  I see that it's in fact the first foreign language film to win Best Picture.   Just occurred to me that I would have preferred Roma, which I found a mesmerising pleasure to watch, to be able to claim that title.   

The disinformation campaign

Oh look, another detailed, serious article on the appalling use of social media as the most effective propaganda/disinformation tool we've ever seen.

It's a good and important read.

As someone on Twitter said, in response to this article, and as a summary of how the Republicans got to where they are today:

The Republican Senators who said "he will have learnt a lesson" should be ridiculed until election day

When psychiatrists go nuts

Oh, so this is why "QAnon" is trending in Australia:

A Sydney psychiatrist who posted “bizarre” alt-right conspiracy theories he claimed were the directives of US President Donald Trump to his practice’s official website has been struck off the medical register.

The Dee Why doctor Russell Everard McGregor claimed Trump had taped evidence of a global Satanist paedophile network, that 9/11 was faked, and that the ABC was part of an international deep state network covering up the crimes of the elite.

Many of the 300-plus posts from 2018 onwards related to the debunked QAnon conspiracy that suggests Trump is leading a crusade against “deep state” forces who protect satanic paedophile rings.
“Fight with your keyboard, knowledge and pen,” McGregor wrote in one post in January 2018.

“Follow Q breadcrumbs on 8chan.

“The evil truth will be hard for most to bear. Be brave. Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.”

Minister completely uninterested in who invented figures in his office

It is basically ridiculous that Taylor will not admit that the evidence clearly points to an invention of figures by someone in his office.

Taylor has “unreservedly” apologised to Moore for relying on the falsified figures but has denied consistently that either he, or anyone in his office, altered the City of Sydney document to inflate travel expenditure. Taylor has said the document with the incorrect numbers was obtained from the council website.

But the council has produced evidence showing that its publicly available annual reports has only ever contained accurate figures. Metadata and screenshots from the council’s content management system showed the annual reports on its website had not been changed since they were originally uploaded.

As I said last week, Ministers used to be forced to resign for mere accidents that they were still held responsible for;  now, they think they can ride out actual fraudulent behaviour within their office if they say "sorry about that".

The Chaser has a funny tweet about this:

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: