Amusing...

It's a parody account, so don't go thinking Gerard himself came up with this:

Tells a tale of current society

These are some very sad, topical circumstances ripe for discussion by social critics - or perhaps by a novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety, if there are any of those left: 

An Uber driver has died from Covid-19 after trying to hide his illness for fear that he would be evicted if his landlord found out, a friend has revealed.

Rajesh Jayaseelan, a married father of two who came to London from India about a decade ago, died alone in Northwick Park hospital in Harrow on 11 April, according to Sunil Kumar, a friend of his.

The 44-year-old driver had “starved” for several days in his rented lodgings, telling his wife by phone that he did not want to leave his room because other residents might realise he had Covid-19 and he would be thrown out.

Kumar, 38, an NHS IT worker, said the fear was founded in an experience in March when a previous landlord allegedly ordered him to leave because he thought Jayaseelan, as a minicab driver, would spread the disease to him and his family. Jayaseelan had to sleep in his car for several nights.

By the time he drove himself to hospital earlier this month, his condition was becoming critical and he was placed on a ventilator. He died shortly after his wife and mother in Bangalore saw him unconscious in a final video call arranged by Kumar.

Jayaseelan is the third Uber driver confirmed to have died from Covid-19 in the capital, but there have been reports of several more.

Flippancy as the marker of foolishness

Tim Blair has it in spades; so does James Morrow.  Andrew Bolt tends less to flippancy but more to bloviating outrage - it is truly corrupting to pay a person to have a strong opinion on everything for a living.   They are too "culture war" to call out dangerous, foolish and stupid statements by Trump because (surely this is their true sentiment) "of course he's an offensive idiot, but he's our offensive idiot; and isn't it funny how he upsets the libs!"

Latest example:

Yet here's Gray Connolly's take on the afternoon briefings by Trump which (according to polling) are in fact doing him no favours at all in terms of approval:

Too sealed into their own bubble of foolishness to laugh at

Long the home for aged right wing cranks who are often so unpleasant they boast about how their comments to even Murdoch media (or calls to talk back radio) are banned, I mostly post about Catallaxy with at least some degree of amusement at their obliviousness to reality and wild exaggeration.

But you know, their commentary on COVID-19 has put me off visiting the site for more than the briefest look.   The intensity of the Dunning Kruger effect on this issue there is just so high that it doesn't seem the slightest bit funny.  Perhaps I find it more disturbing than usual because, with an obvious problem that is unfolding over a short time frame (much faster than the time scale of climate change), it becomes just plain offensive that they do not let their bubble of insouciance be interrupted by something even as plain as dead bodies accumulating in foreign countries, foreign leaders skirting close to death, or the extremely worrying death rate amongst doctors and nurses trying to tend to the ill.

There comes a point where stupidity stops being funny and becomes offensive.  That site has reached it.
  
[To clarify:  as would be plain, I have felt disgusted with the site many times before, with its misogyny and racism that has often been let slide through, not to mention its active campaign against political action on climate change.  But on this issue, it feels more directly offensive because of the immediacy of the life or death choices involved.]

So he's always been an idiot. Got it.

Update:  more wisdom from Erin:

She also re-tweeted this:

More fun comments on Gideon:

Update 2:

Gideon rejoins:

Lol - Daisy Cousens?  She's proof that conservatism is the new cos-play for flippant twerps like you, Gideon.

Update 3: 

Top marks for creativity in policing, I suppose

Spotted at the Jakarta Post:

Not sure what the implications of this might be...

...but it sounds an important finding:

Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.

The possibility that the coronavirus spreads in a mostly stealthy mode among a population of largely young, healthy people showing no symptoms could have major implications for U.S. policy-makers, who are considering how and when to reopen the economy.

It also renews questions about the extent to which U.S. testing of just the people suspected of being infected is actually capturing the spread of the virus in the United States and around the world.

The Navy’s testing of the entire 4,800-member crew of the aircraft carrier - which is about 94% complete - was an extraordinary move in a headline-grabbing case that has already led to the firing of the carrier’s captain and the resignation of the Navy’s top civilian official.

Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.

“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.

More tweets of note

Here:

And in response:

Not sure about season 3...

...of Babylon Berlin.  It's still very watchable, but the storyline just seems much more about a few murders than about the hotbed of politics around them, which was what made the first two seasons so intriguing.  And the crimes themselves (and now the occult connection, not to mention how Rath didn't recognise his brother was his, what?,  psychoanalyst/hypnotist?) all seem a tad implausibly theatrical.  

Overall, the first two seasons seemed to have a grander scale, both thematically and visually, and a greater sense of realism.  

Does anyone disagree?

As they say - "wut??"

From the network that spent years denying Russian interference.   Will the breakfast team try to walk back from this slip of the truthful tongue, or just hope Dear Leader didn't notice?

Seems true

Back to COVID-19

*  The SMH/Age European correspondent, the normally fit 34 Bevan Shields, has written a compelling account of how unpleasantly ill he was with (what was almost certainly) COVID-19 in London earlier this month.

Remarkably, he wasn't tested for it, as they are only testing those admitted to hospital.   He came very close to that, but the nearest hospital (the one where Boris Johnson was treated) was at capacity.

If only someone with this disease could have a coughing fit in the offices of the IPA so we could see if a similar experience would make any of its spivs change their minds about re-opening everything quickly...

*  Singapore's early success has not been able to be sustained all that well, with a surge in new cases, mostly from the foreign worker hostels:

SINGAPORE: Singapore reported a record 447 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday (Apr 15), taking the national total to 3,699.

Of the new cases, 68 per cent are linked to previously identified clusters, while contact tracing is ongoing for the remaining cases, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) in its daily update.

A total of 404 new cases are from foreign worker dormitories. Five are work permit holders living outside the dormitories.

As for local cases in the community, 38 cases were reported on Wednesday, and there were no new imported cases.

* Japan is also getting very panicky, and is about to go with a nationwide state of emergency (going towards a more strenuous lockdown, by the sounds of it.)   If Toyko goes for a New York style lockdown, it would make for a once in a lifetime experience of empty streets.

*  It's hard to imagine international travel and tourism getting back to anywhere near "normal" within a year with all of these problems.   It will be interesting to see just how big an economic impact it will have - a real life test for the type of ball park guesstimates you sometimes hear about how a certain tourist friendly event with bring X amount of dollars to a city or region.  

Legal pot in trouble in California

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.

Bee promotes Superdeterminism

In the recent swirl of pandemic news, I had missed a post by Sabine Hossenfelder last month linking to a co-authored essay in Nautilus in which she argues that Superdeterminism needs to be properly investigated as an explanation for the quantum measurement problem.  

I think the argument is set out in a relatively comprehensible matter, and is rather interesting...

It's a mystery

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?

Naval hobbies of the 18th century (Part 2)

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.”

 The world has changed, quite dramatically.

Naval hobbies of the 18th century (part 1)

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.

From the Onion, a Boris joke..

Seems just a tad inappropriately opportunistic

Well, this would have to be one of the weirder news stories to come out of COVID-19:

Mental health organisations in Australia are groaning under the latest wave of stress and anxiety triggered by COVID-19, a surge which was already compounded by the recent bushfires and drought.

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...

A night of madness

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.