The Washington Post explains that the legal marijuana business was struggling in California already, and the COVID-19 situation is making it worse.
I'm not sure what State in the US is considered to have got this right, because as this report notes, State regulations and taxes on the business mean that the black market doesn't just disappear:
With the drug legalized, underground dealers felt emboldened to expand
their operations, setting up expansive delivery networks, undercutting
the prices of legal pot and depriving the state of marijuana revenue.
California initially expected about $1 billion in new tax revenue in
2018. It took in $342 million. Untaxed and unpoliced, black-market pot
is estimated to be much larger than the legal trade in California.
I'm hardly a person with extensive experience of the Australian outback, but I am wrong to think that just about every image I see from Mystery Road seems kinda fake - like an ersatz version of what people look like there?
An article over that Notches blog which I recently posted about notes that Jane Austen in Mansfield Park made a joke referencing sexual misbehaviour in the Navy, and explains that she likely knew a lot about these matters due to having two brothers with successful naval careers who sat on several courts martial for sodomy offences. It was a serious matter:
In practice, Royal Navy courts martial rarely tried any sexual crimes
except for male homoerotic offenses. At this time all same-sex erotic
contact was, in theory, illegal. Penetrative anal sex was a felony
carrying a mandatory capital punishment. Any other contact constituted a
misdemeanor, and could result in corporal punishment and other harsh
sanctions.
The main point of the article is to explain just how common these trials were, and how they were followed with salacious interest by the public:
These naval sodomy trials were far more common and publicly visible
than modern observers have realized. Between 1690 and 1900, the force
prosecuted over 490 cases, many involving more than one defendant. The
Regency era was the historical high point for cases in both absolute and
per capita terms. Between 1795 to 1837 the navy held over 180 trials
for same-sex contact.
The navy’s relative rate of prosecution was also high. At periods
through the eighteenth century it tried more men for same-sex crimes
than did the London criminal courts. The navy was one of the most active
sites for the legal repression of sodomy not only in the
English-speaking world, but also in western Europe....
Britons back on land took an avid interest in these cases as well.
They could follow them in the periodical press, which turned out
thousands of items on maritime sodomy. The press covered the 1807
prosecution of Lieutenant William Berry of the Hazard sloop, for instance, in close detail, with dozens of pieces tracking events from allegation to execution.
A defendant in one of the cases Charles Austen tried referred
explicitly to the frequency of such coverage, lamenting in his defense
that “officers in the Navy are too frequently accused of acts tending to
the commission of unnatural offenses… [H]ow frequent are the reports we
are doomed at the present day, with grief, to peruse in the public
prints.”
There's a review at the Spectator of a book about Lord Byron's nutty ancestors. Apart from the incest and all round excess, I thought this particular hobby (noted in the second paragraph) sounds particularly eccentric:
When
the Wicked Lord inherited Newstead in 1743 he returned it to its former
decay, building a creepy gun tower and a stone battery with
crenellations and parapets. Lazy, cowardly and incompetent, he was
described by Gertrude Savile as having a ‘sad caricter in everything’,
and by Horace Walpole as ‘an obscure lord’ and a ‘worthless man’. Having
stalked and abducted an Irish actress called George Anne Bellamy, he
ran a sword through the stomach of his neighbour, the much loved William
Chaworth, over a row about estate boundaries. After incarceration in
the Tower of London, he was found guilty of manslaughter and given a
small fine.
By
now he had dismantled his wife’s considerable estates and spent his way
through her fortune, buying whatever he felt like: Titians, Raphaels,
Holbeins and a model navy for his lakes. It’s hard to imagine what this
navy must have looked like, but it appears to have been life-size. Twenty-five-ton
ships were pulled up to Newstead by armies of horses, and a sailor and
his boy were hired to maintain and crew the vessels. No Byron marriage
lasted for long, and after parting from his wife the Wicked Lord made
ends meet by pawning Newstead’s brass locks and floorboards.
Beyond
Blue reported an all-time high in activity on its online forums with
its "Coping during the coronavirus outbreak" chatroom attracting seven
times the amount of conversation than its bushfire forum did earlier
this year.
While Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt last week established coronavirus mental wellbeing support services, including a new digital and phone support services, a former colleague of his was pushing for medicinal use of psychedelics.
Former
Coalition MP Andrew Robb, now a board member of Mind Medicine Australia
(MMA), is driving a fresh campaign to introduce drugs such as MDMA and
psilocybin — found in magic mushrooms — as a treatment option.
Andrew Robb!! The depressed politician who arose from his sickbed especially to defeat Malcolm Turnbull because he didn't like his support of climate change action?? I do not trust this man's judgement, to put it mildly.
Back to the story:
The not-for-profit, which aims to "establish safe and effective
psychedelics treatments", is urging the Government to establish a mental
health taskforce for COVID-19 and wants these treatments to be on the
table when it happens.
Mr Robb did not advocate for it to be used recreationally, but said
psychedelic-assisted therapy should be available as a medical treatment
in the same way cannabis is.
Yeah, yeah.
What I would like politicians and commentators to stop doing is talking about how likely it is that people will be getting depressed and suicidal due to social isolation. It carries with it too much of a touch of self fulfilling prophecy about it...
There's a very interesting story up at AEON about the writer recalling one day of psychosis he experienced as a young adult, many years ago. Fortunately, it was a one off episode, perhaps caused by exhaustion and a mild illness, and the discussion which follows with a psychiatrist is good too.
So, I've been reading a bit about Buddhism and science lately, and on the off chance something interesting would pop up, did a search for the religion on the arXiv pre-print site.
This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov
chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in
teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from
long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying
and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their
associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the
folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either
Confucianism or Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a
character (\b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23; \b{eta}C_and_Lie_O= 1.47;
\b{eta}T_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions
results in a happy ending for the committer (\b{eta}B_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What
is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and
practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached,
whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in
Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal
vices-violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings
contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human
behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in
belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument.
I think this group of Vietnamese researchers might have too much time on their hands, but it's still a bit interesting. Here is a peculiar Vietnames folktale which they discuss in the introduction:
Folklore materials offer one of the most imaginative windows into the livelihood and psychology of people from different walks of life at a certain time. These colorful narratives bring to life the identities, practices, values, and norms of a culture from a bygone era that may provide insights on speech play and tongue-twisters (Nikolić & Bakarić, 2016), habitat quality of farmers (Møller, Morelli, & Tryjanowski, 2017), treatments for jaundice (Thenmozhi et al., 2018), and contemporary attitudes and beliefs (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2019). While the stories tend to honor the value of hard work, honesty, benevolence, and many other desirable virtues, many of such messages are undercut by actions that seem outlandish, morally questionable, or brutally violent (Alcantud-Diaz, 2010, 2014; Chima & Helen, 2015; Haar, 2005; Meehan, 1994; Victor, 1990). In a popular Vietnamese folktale known as “Story of a bird named bìm bịp (coucal),” a robber who repents on his killing and cuts open his chest to offer his heart to the Buddha gets a better ending than a Buddhist monk who has been religiously chaste for his whole life but fails to honor his promise to the robber—i.e. bringing the robber’s heart to the Buddha. In his quest for the robber’s missing heart, not only does the monk never reach enlightenment, but he also turns into a coucal, a bird in the cuckoo family (Figure 1)
On the one hand, the gory details of this story likely serve to highlight the literal determination and commitment of the robber to repentance, which is in line with the Buddhist teaching of turning around regardless of whichever wrong directions one has taken. On the other hand, it is puzzling how oral storytelling and later handwriting traditions have kept alive the graphic details—the images of the robber killing himself in the name of Buddhism, a religion largely known for its non-violence and compassion. Aiming to make sense of these apparent contradictions, this study looks at the behavior of Vietnamese folk characters as influenced by long-standing cultural and religious factors. The focus on the folkloristic realm facilitates the discovery of behavioral patterns that may otherwise escape our usual intuitions.
The next part of the paper - about a literature review of studies of the effect of religion on behaviour (usually in a Christian context) is pretty interesting, though:
To make sense of the relationship between religiosity and deviant behaviors, scholars from as far back as the 1960s have sought to measure how church membership or religious commitment could deter delinquent activities, though pieces of empirical evidence over the years remain inconclusive (Albrecht, Chadwick, & Alcorn, 1977; Hirschi & Stark, 1969; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 1975; Tittle & Welch, 1983). In their influential study, Hirschi and Stark (1969) ask if the Christian punishment of hellfire for sinners can deter delinquent acts among the firm believers, and surprisingly find no connection between religiosity and juvenile delinquency. Subsequent studies tend to fall along two lines, either confirming the irrelevance of religion and deviance (Cochran & Akers, 1989; Tittle & Welch, 1983; Welch, Tittle, & Grasmick, 2006), or pointing out certain inhibiting effect of religiosity depending on the types of religious contexts (Benda, 2002; Corcoran, Pettinicchio, & Robbins, 2012; Evans, Cullen, Dunaway, & Burton Jr, 1995; Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 2017). Additional studies have looked at religious contexts beyond the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries such as in South Korea and China but also reached inconsistent results on the religiosity–deviance relationship (Wang & Jang, 2018; Yun & Lee, 2016).
I've been bagging Adam Creighton as an unreliable commentator on matters economic for years now - and in a column at The Australian today (which I presume will be making Jason Soon grind his teeth) Adam has gone into bat for the "this has all been an over-reaction" crowd.
In fact, Jason: you seem to be having an all out crisis of confidence as to who on the conservative-ish side of commentary you can possibly trust now. You hate "glibertarians" (fair enough) now but conservatives keep coming up short.
I think you should just give up and just accept my lines: the soft (and harder) Left may be annoying on identity politics, but they don't jeopardise entire planetary populations' safety by denying/downplaying climate change or pandemics because of culture wars and conspiracy ideation. They may (if you can count Democrats as "soft Left" at all) try to play at Middle East interventions in a way that does not always work out, but the entire Muslim world there is a a geo-political nightmare and you can't expect great outcomes. International co-operation on trade and all matters is way, way better than populist nationalism: the fact that a cynical dictator thug like Putin is encouraging the West to break up into nationalist enclaves shows it is obviously the wrong path. And Trump is an absolute idiot of a damaged man and any commentator who defends him in any respect at all deserves to be completely ignored.
A long weekend with nice, warm sunny weather, and no where to go for a drink, or a meal. Even the dog parks are chained up. We did a bit of yard work, and washed a ceiling to get rid of some yellow spotiness that doesn't look like mould, exactly. It's a good question as to what it is - it hasn't appeared in any bathroom, and is worst in the dining room where we sometimes do cooking at the table, but has started to spread into the adjacent living room. Yet I don't think it is happening in the kitchen, which should have the biggest effect from cooking steam or fumes. The spots can be washed off the cornices very well, but not so well off the flat ceiling, although they can be made much fainter. Actually, I see from the internet that you can get yellow mould. It's an annoying problem.
Some other observations:
* Brisbane is feeling as if it has gone into winter dryness already. After a relatively dry summer, this is not a good thing;
* this COVID virus seems to work in really complicated ways, doesn't it? Lots of different effects on the body, and lots of collaboration and note comparing needed still to understand how it usually works. I was reading an ICU doctor's comments about this on twitter yesterday, but didn't save it.
* I continue to think that doctors and nurses who work in hospitals in the US must be the most ropeable people on the planet when they hear conservative scepticism of the seriousness of the issue from the likes of Fox News. If the New York ones could organise a posse to firebomb the Fox News studios, they would only be doing the world a favour.
* I think low rates of new cases in at least Brisbane is starting to make people feel very careless about social distancing at the supermarket. I wore a mask at one on the weekend or the first time, though, but as I was a Vietnamese heavy suburb, lots of other people were too. I didn't find it much of an issue, although not scratching an itchy nose through the outside surface was a challenge.
I don't normally pay any attention to Spike Lee films, but his recent comedy/drama BlacKkKlansman, now on Netflix, is really good.
Based on a true story, I see that it adds one key plot element for drama. (Look it up after you have watched it: there are several articles on the net discussing what's true and what is invented.) But I forgive that: it's just really well made, and I liked the mix of tension as well as humour; and the serious message at the end too.
So, the connection: the Heart Sutra in English translation has a lot of emphasis on "emptiness", with this key part -
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form. So is the same for feeling, perception, mental formation, and consciousness.
In the afterword to the Suzuki book, by David Loy (who I see is a pretty widely know author on Buddhism), I thought this commentary on "emptiness" was interesting:
OK That clears up everything.*
I see that Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on Nagarjuna (the philosopher, not the Bollywood star), and it talks about how a lot of his philosophising was on "emptiness". This, apparently, is a key saying:
All is possible when emptiness is possible. Nothing is possible when emptiness is impossible.
Which does, a Loy indicates, sound like it is putting a more positive spin on "emptiness" than one's initial reaction.
In another interesting bit from Wikipedia, Nagarjuna is considered by some to be neo-Kantian:
Nāgārjuna was also instrumental in the development of the two truths doctrine, which claims that there are two levels of truth in Buddhist teaching, the ultimate truth (paramārtha satya) and the conventional or superficial truth (saṃvṛtisatya). The ultimate truth to Nāgārjuna is the truth that everything is empty of essence,[43]
this includes emptiness itself ('the emptiness of emptiness'). While
some (Murti, 1955) have interpreted this by positing Nāgārjuna as a neo-Kantian and thus making ultimate truth a metaphysical noumenon or an "ineffable ultimate that transcends the capacities of discursive reason",[44] others such as Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield
have argued that Nāgārjuna's view is that "the ultimate truth is that
there is no ultimate truth" (Siderits) and that Nāgārjuna is a "semantic
anti-dualist" who posits that there are only conventional truths.[44]
As I am fond of Kant, I think it's pretty cool to find debate about whether a Buddhist philosopher from 150CE got to his ideas before Immanuel did. (That's Kant, not Swedenborg).
The other thing that the Swedenborg book has got me thinking about is Buddhism and non-locality in modern quantum physics. I keep getting the feeling that these might be pretty compatible.
First, a reminder about nonlocality can be found in this pretty good 12 minute explanation of quantum physics, which Youtube conveniently suggested I should watch:
So, how's this tie in with Buddhism? I don't know yet, but there is a very lengthy discussion of it on this page (The Physics of Peace: Quantum Nonlocality and Emptiness) from what looks like a very lengthy website called the Chinese Encyclopaedia of Buddhism. That website seems to be a project started by an Estonian Buddhist who has connections with Australia. How odd.
Anyhow, I'll read it and report back.
Maybe I can factor the emptiness of the tomb and Easter eggs into the story, too. I seem to be turning all EM Foster - "Only connect!"
From Atlas Obscura, a tale from Japan newly relevant to current circumstances:
In the first half of 1846, a kawaraban,
or cheaply printed broadside, recorded a strange account in Japan’s old
Higo Province on Kyūshū island. A local government official had spotted
a curious creature in the water one evening: a scaly, three-legged
figure with long hair and a beak. Even more curious, it had warned him
of a forthcoming illness and instructed him to draw and distribute its
image for protection. A sketch was printed next to this account, and as
the kawaraban spread, so did tales of this mysterious half-merperson,
half-bird, from Kyūshū all the way to Edo.
Known as Amabie, this yōkai,
or spirit, has become associated with refuge from epidemics. It makes
sense, then, that it has resurfaced during the global COVID-19 pandemic,
only this time on social media. Illustrations of Amabie are circulating
on Twitter and Instagram under the hashtags #amabie and #アマビエ; artists
around the world are drawing and sharing Amabie in hopes of repelling
disease, or at the very least honing their talents and finding community
while social distancing....
Scholars believe that Amabie is a local variation of Amabiko, a similar
Japanese creature that appears from the sea and prophesies good harvests
and outbreaks of disease. “In accounts of Amabiko, it is sometimes said
that the image itself can ward off the epidemic,” says Jack Stoneman, a
professor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young
University. “This is not unusual in Japanese cultural history—images as
talismans.”
Here's an old school version of the critter, indicating that Japanese art is not always that impressive (Wikipedia says this is a woodblock print from the Edo era. Really?)
Here's another version, which I think is modern but looking more "old-school vibe":
And here's a recent government poster using that old woodblock image, it seems:
Jack the Insider has a very interesting take on the matter of the George Pell prosecution, which seems not to be behind the paywall, for now. He points out a long standing history of the police force in that State turning a blind eye, or actively protecting, sex offending priests. Jack wonders if the prosecution of Pell was undertaken with view towards diverting attention from the history of their previous protection.
Sinclair Davidson likes to believe that Pell was targeted purely for being a conservative figure hated by the Left. I have never felt it likely that the Police were especially sympathetic to carrying out the wishes of political Left in such matters. Jack's view adds some greater nuance to the matter.
[I should add - I am not in a position to argue the details of what various figures within the Victorian police have done in the Pell matter. I have not followed it in that close a detail. So sue me. I do know, however, that the conservatives and culture war warriors at Catallaxy do not do nuance. Their take that it is the greatest scandal in Victorian prosecution history is therefore virtually guaranteed to be wrong.]
The TLS does a quick survey of some recent books on Einstein, some of which deal with his visits to England. He quite liked the place, apparently.
This episode, of which we have a photo, sounds like a event you could perhaps write a fanciful movie around:
On September 9, 1933, something spooked Einstein, who was by then living
in exile in Belgium. Apparently fearing for his life, he travelled
alone to England at short notice. Einstein turned to Oliver
Locker-Lampson, whom he had met on an earlier visit, for protection. A
Conservative Member of Parliament and decorated former soldier,
Locker-Lampson was “an impulsive romantic” and, according to Robinson,
Einstein clearly liked the “commander’s can-do, gung-ho personality”.
Locker-Lampson took Einstein to his thatched holiday hut in Norfolk. In what sounds like an episode of Dad’s Army,
he armed locals with shotguns to protect Einstein from Nazi assassins.
Einstein used the “admirable solitude” of the countryside to continue
working on his unified field theory, a project which would occupy him
for the rest of his life. The sculptor Jacob Epstein came to model him
and recalled his “wild hair floating in the wind”, like “the ageing Rembrandt”. His wonderful bronze bust of the scientist is in the Tate Gallery.
Before Einstein departed for America on October 7, he said “no matter
how long I live I shall never forget the kindness which I have received
from the people of England”. Once ensconced in the Institute of
Advanced Study at Princeton, Einstein never returned to Britain.
And here's a staged photo from that time. Not sure if that is part of the actual accommodation - it looks a bit like a hut, but a very rough one!:
A month or two ago, I stumbled across a blogspot blog by some older guy who just put up quotes from old books. It seemed a rather esoteric exercise, with little readership (a familiar feeling), but some of the quotes were interesting. Do you think I can find the blog again? I think Google used to make it easy to search their own hosted blogs, but it seems harder now, even though there are probably fewer blogspot blogs around than ever before. I think it might have had a latin name? Anyway, I will keep looking.
Amongst other interesting sites recently found, try this one: Res Obsura (a catalogue of obscure things). It's run by an assistant professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, and although he posts infrequently, they are high quality and interesting posts on a range of unusual topics that seems to align closely with my interests.
Come on, who doesn't like considering the history of sexuality? I think it's particularly interesting because of the remarkable changes anyone aged, say, 40 or over, has witnessed in their own lifetime.
Here's from the "About" section:
NOTCHES is a peer-reviewed,
collaborative and international history of sexuality blog that aims to
get people inside and outside the academy thinking about sexuality in
the past and in the present. Since its launch in January 2014,
NOTCHES has attracted over 200,000 views, been profiled on About.com’s Sexuality site, the History News Network, and Freshly Pressed three times by WordPress. NOTCHES is sponsored by the Raphael Samuel History Centre,
and we are committed to the centre’s mission of “encouraging the widest
possible participation in historical research and debate.” Our goal is
to create a collaborative and open-access blog that is intellectually
rigorous and accessible, historical and timely, political and playful.
I see from the posts linked on the main page that there is a bias towards towards gay and queer topics, which is probably what you would expect, but a lot of it is to do with heterosexual behaviour, and particularly across different cultures. Also abortion.
I haven't read a single post yet, but there is a lot that sounds interesting.
I suspect it will be providing grist for the mill for several future posts here.
And it’s also got a population that has tuberculosis and respiratory
issues and pneumonia and high rates of smoking and air pollution. So,
the trajectory of the disease in this population is going to be unclear.
The other thing is that India also has a lot of hypertensives. About a
third of the country’s adults are hypertensive, and about one-tenth of
them are diabetic. And, so, all of this is likely to compound the
problem. Of course, we don’t know anything for sure until the numbers
actually start going up. But these are all the reasons why people of
India are worried.
But then I Googled the figures for diabetes and hypertension in America, and the figures are pretty much the same!
