A genuine QAnon nutcase on the Gold Coast

I was looking at a Twitter thread about Tom Hanks giving a typewriter to a boy when I saw this:

Unusually, for a nutter, he appears to put his face to his account, which is good in that it gives all of us who live close enough to the Gold Coast to step to the other side of the street if we think we spot him.

Here's his twitter account.  He appears to be as big an un-ironic believer in the most lurid, religiously tinged, American based conspiracy theories as it is possible to be.   I wonder if he is American? 

Jerks worried about bias against uber jerk

Honestly, the cesspit for obnoxious commentators, ageing crank climate change denialists and Trump cult membership has become the most risible joke on the Australian internet.   I offer as proof a post by uber Catholic CL in which he expresses concern about bias in The Australian for the biggest and most obnoxious jerk to come to the nation's attention in at least a decade.  And nearly every comment following agrees with him.   Many are willing to suggest blame on the police, even though the full details of how the deaths happened are not yet 100% clear.  (As far as I can tell, though, the police and stopped vehicle were in the emergency lane, and the truck that killed then did veer from a normal lane into the emergency lane, suggesting the "medical episode" of the driver may well be behind his actions.)

The Daily Mail, from which CL routinely gets his news, gives a lengthy history of Richard Pusey's history of awful, sometimes criminal, behaviour; yet this is the guy they decide to go all "hey, let's be fair" about?

I think there are two threads of motivation here:   first, lots of people at that place, from Sinclair Davidson down, hate the Victorian Police in particular with a passion, so of course they are inclined to look for a way to blame the police themselves.     Second, just as it has long been clear that a lot of wingnut enthusiasm for Trump is because he gives jerks a thrill when they hear someone at the top of political power talk openly like they wish they could, jerks just feel drawn to defend other jerks.

Update:  there's a comment in the thread by a guy who's avatar is a MAGA cap, who claims to be ex police, which includes this line:

At best, they had a guy in a Porsche turbo doing 140 which isn’t that fast on a quiet freeway

The accident happened late afternoon, not at freaking 3 am.  There's more from MAGA man:

Sure: morally he’s bereft. But legally, and barrister worth his salt will have this guy walking and he will get bail. What threat to the community does he represent?

I note on the ABC, after Pusey's court appearance this morning:

Mr Pusey has been remanded in custody and is expected to reappear in July.

The cap is the label of an idiot.

Tweets worth noting

Making an exception

I'm not generally one to suggest that an opinion writer warrants being dragged out of his office and beaten up on the street by a mob of Leftists, but a tweet like this motivates me strongly to make an exception:

The argument put by this IPA wanker is not new - it's the routine, conspiracy heavy, argument that has been deployed against climate change action and environment protecting regulation generally.  Namely, that you can't believe warnings of danger and harm to human life and nature - because it's really just all a front for enforcing socialism.   

And I am also curious about this paragraph from the article:

It is not surprising then that, far from recommending revolution, the pandemic has reinforced the value of traditional goods. Stay-at-home orders, for example, might not be quite so harsh were more people homeowners than renters of small apartments. The alienation of social distancing might not be so severe were more adults married with children. Expert rule might be more effective had the academy and media class not been engaged in generations-long ideological mission creep. Perhaps borders and self-sufficiency might also have renewed credibility now that globalism has gone viral.

This seems quaintly dogmatically conservative for someone from the IPA:  he seems to be against relaxing planning laws to build whatever developers want;  thinks more people should be married with children; and is dubious about globalism?    Has he run this past Gina Rinehart, given that she doesn't have much of a business left if she can't ship away gigantic chunks of Australian dirt to other parts of the globe.

John Oliver is right

Lots of sites are noting John Oliver's critique of the appalling Fox News/conservative media - Trump feedback loop.   It's particularly sickening to see the patent money-hungry hypocrisy of running one line on the screen and a completely different one within the corporation:

Fox News underestimated the danger of the coronavirus early on but as the death toll mounted, they were behind the scenes suspending non-essential business travel and had their employees cancel in-person meetings and summits. They also encouraged them to conduct business via Skype. According to Oliver, they did this because “they only tend to believe these things on television for money.”

This is what happens under cult authoritarian leadership

And this:

Update:  more Fox News back-pedalling,before the law suits come in, I presume:

Parisian poo points the way forward

I refer to this, from Science:

By sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region, where a lockdown is now suppressing spread of the disease. Although several research groups have reported detecting coronavirus in wastewater, the researchers say the new study is the first to show that the technique can pick up a sharp rise in viral concentrations in sewage before cases explode in the clinic. That points to its potential as a cheap, noninvasive tool to warn against outbreaks, they say.

I wonder if it is sensitive enough a test if there is a flu catching on as well?  This method of testing for community spread of illness is better established than I knew, however:

 Another advantage of wastewater sampling is that it picks up virus associated with the vast number of people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 but do not present symptoms for the disease, says Paul Bertsch, science director of land and water at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia. Although viral shedding varies among individuals and over the course of their infection, he says, a sewage system blends these variations into an average that represents the wider community. And depending on the sewage system, the warnings can come quickly. He points out that wastewater monitoring in Israel, for example, picked up a polio outbreak before any clinical cases appeared at all, according to a 2018 study.

Brisbane gets a mention in the next paragraph:

Building on similar studies in the Netherlands and the United States, Bertsch’s group last week reported the first detection of coronavirus in Australian sewage. He and his colleagues sampled wastewater in Brisbane representing 600,000 people, in March and April. In contrast to the study in Paris, they found a peak of viral shedding that corresponded to the peak detected through direct human testing. The difference might be explained by more prevalent human testing in Australia, he says.

Bertsch says he hopes to “tap into” Australia’s existing systems for monitoring wastewater for illegal drugs to develop a national COVID-19 monitoring system that could be in place within 1 month. Later, it might even be feasible to “go up-pipe” with specialized sampling portals allowing finer-scale community sampling. “We could test by postal code, for example,” he says.

Fascinating...

Things that are attracting little attention due to COVID-19

*  that Canadian mass shooting, which sounds to have some pretty unusual details:

Police say the hunt for the gunman was hampered by the fact he was driving a vehicle that looked like a police cruiser and was wearing a police uniform. How he procured both is part of the investigation.

The search ended around midday on Sunday when the suspected shooter was located by police at a service station in Enfield, north of the provincial capital of Halifax. He was shot and later died.

Police have faced criticism for failing to issue a province-wide emergency alert to warn residents of the danger during the rampage.

*  the US Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bi-partisan report, acknowledges that Trump won with the help of Russia's "unprecedented interference", which was approved by Putin.   Trump wingnut denialism will continue, regardless.  The Axios summary:

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the fourth volume of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which focused on a December 2016 intelligence community assessment provided to President Obama.

Why it matters: The bipartisan report affirms the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, noting that the assessment "reflects proper analytic tradecraft despite being tasked and completed within a compressed timeframe."

The big picture: The highly redacted report breaks with an investigation by the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee in 2018, which disagreed with the intelligence agencies' assessment and concluded that the Russian government did not explicitly intend to help Trump win the election.

• The Senate committee found "specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump," and that Putin "approved and directed" aspects of the interference.
• The Senate committee also disagreed with the House's claim that the intelligence agencies did not comply with analytical standards, noting: "The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election."
• "The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA."

Worth noting: The report finds that U.S. intelligence agencies did not use information from the infamous Steele dossier to support its findings. The dossier was included in a highly classified annex to the assessment, which was in line with President Obama's directive.

*  There has been news about ocean temperatures being high around the globe, with the Gulf of Mexico causing Florida to have a very warm spring.   Indicates some big, wet hurricanes to come, which is just what the US needs after an economic slow down.   And the whole planet is still hot:

This year is on track to be Earth’s warmest on record, beating 2016, NOAA says

 

On Malcolm (and Peta and Tony)

I don't have much sympathy for Malcolm Turnbull, but this quote about Abbott and Credlin is pretty amusing:

“Peta has always strongly denied that she and Tony were lovers. But if they were, that would have been the most unremarkable aspect of their friendship.”

For a couple not having an affair, it is pretty hilarious that so many people - on their own side of politics - found it hard to believe that they were not lovers.  Remember this?:

According to an extract published in The Australian, Senator Fierravanti-Wells went to Mr Abbott the night before the failed first attempt to unseat him last February.

She told the then-prime minister he had to remove Ms Credlin, arguing colleagues considered her responsible for many of the government's problems, and they were prepared to take out their frustrations on him.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells is quoted in the book as telling Mr Abbott "politics is about perceptions".

"Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that you are sleeping with your chief of staff. That's the perception, and you need to deal with it.

"I am here because I care about you, and I care about your family, and I feel I need to tell you the truth, the brutal truth. This is what your colleagues really think."

According to the book, Mr Abbott responded calmly and said the rumours were not true.

This must make Credlin's list of Liberal politicians she dislikes pretty long.

Even other people within the party hated her style:

Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, has been described as a “horsewoman of the apocalypse” as further leaks emerge from within the Liberal party executive.

ABC’s Four Corners program has obtained a text message sent from federal Liberal party treasurer Philip Higginson to a senior party figure, in which he describes Credlin as the “horsewoman of the apocalypse” with “black robes flowing”.

The text message continues: “I do hope you can negotiate the removal of Credlin. That would be a huge win in itself,” the ABC reports.

Everyone can see that there have been, shall we say, less than laudatory aspects of Turnbull's personality over the years; but the condemnation of Peta's has many more vouching for it.   And poor old Tony ended up its political victim.   Funny old world...

Pretty sure this is a lesson called " How to 'shade' "

Didn't see this coming

So, it appears that a liberal trying to stop Right wing astroturfing was mistaken for a Right wing astroturfer?   And he was an old guy prepared to spend $4,000 doing that?   What a strange story.

It should be said that people, Left or Right, who do social media doxing and pile ons really need to stop.  

Surely there are people in the White House trying to tell him these are hurting him now?

The very nasty cornavirus

This article at Science should make anyone really, really want to avoid catching this coronavirus:

How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.

“[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to gather clinical data on COVID-19. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”

Understanding the rampage could help the doctors on the front lines treat the fraction of infected people who become desperately and sometimes mysteriously ill. Does a dangerous, newly observed tendency to blood clotting transform some mild cases into life-threatening emergencies? Is an overzealous immune response behind the worst cases, suggesting treatment with immune-suppressing drugs could help? What explains the startlingly low blood oxygen that some physicians are reporting in patients who nonetheless are not gasping for breath? “Taking a systems approach may be beneficial as we start thinking about therapies,” says Nilam Mangalmurti, a pulmonary intensivist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP).
 

Been said before, but worth repeating

As seen on Twitter:

and some answers that follow:

Revenge of the chickens

I think Tim T might like this story.

I was looking around for stories of Buddhist near death experiences (as you do) and found this one on a website, as extracted from a book by a Thai (I think) monk.  I thought it most remarkable for the role chickens play in it.  [My bold if you want to get straight to the chicken parts]:

I, Phra Tanasiri Sirisumphan, a Buddhist Monk, was accompanying my cousin as he traveled to another province. I was thirteen years old at the time. While we were traveling, I came down with a toothache. I went to a dentist, who took the offending tooth out. I felt much better, but I still had some pain. I went to a hotel to sleep. But instead of falling asleep, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I found two Yamatoots. One of them was standing at the head of my bed, and the other at the foot. Both of them were holding torches. They looked about thirty years old, and had very dark skin. They said only “let’s go”. I asked them “where are you taking me?” They answered: “don’t ask”. I stood up and followed them. One of them said to the other: ” He is too young, so I’m not going to help you. You do it alone, I have another job to attend to”. Eventually, the remaining Yamatoot forced me to go with him. I followed him until we came to a crossroad. I became afraid at that point because I had lost my bearings, and would not be able to find my way back. Finally I came to a temple wall. The Yamatoot took me to a large gate Where I saw a monk giving a sermon to a group of elderly men and women. I made the formal gesture of respect to the Monk, and as I did so, I realized that the truth and highest form of help was to be found in The Lord Buddha, His Teachings, and those who ordain to follow his way (The Buddha, The Dharma, and the Sangha – also known as the “triple gem’).

I walked to a classical style pavilion (Sala). The Yamatoot told me to wait for someone who was coming to meet us. A very large Yamatoot arrived who was wearing ancient armor, and carrying a spear. He was accompanied by a group of normal-sized Yamatoots, all of whom were carrying weapons. I felt that the situation was becoming very bad.

They took me to the house of Yama, the Lord of the Dead. Yama told me that I had committed many sins, especially in having butchered a number of chickens. I denied it, I said that I had not done that, not even once. Yama was surprised, and asked his records keeper.”How old is he?” “Thirteen years, Lord”, came the answer. “What’s his name?” My name was read out. Yama said: “You’ve taken the wrong man. Take him back. Quickly. You’ve made a mistake”. I said that, before I returned, I wanted to see hell. Yama answered: “No. The last thing I have to say to you is that you will die when you are 27 years old. Be ready”

Yama assigned a Yamatoot to accompany me back. He took me back to the crossroad where he said that I must go on from there alone. I was afraid, and asked him to take me all the way back. He said that I must go on alone. I walked on alone, and tripped on a tree root. I then revived.

When I was 27, I was ill with a stomach ache that lingered on for a year. My doctor advised surgery. I went in to the hospital, and the procedure began with anesthesia. As soon as I was under anesthesia, I saw the same Yamatoot. I remembered from the last time I had died and been revived. As he led me to hell’s gate, I walked past a torture chamber. The first thing I saw was a big copper pot full of boiling water. It was full of people who cried out from fear. A Yamatoot stood by guarding the people who were being tortured in this way. I walked away from this scene and came to a stand of barren tamarind trees. Their normal bark was replaced by thousands of sharp spikes. Yamatoots at the foot of the tree forced people to climb these trees by prodding them with spears. I didn’t ask why these people were being tortured in this way. I already knew. They were being punished (for sexual wrongdoing). I continued down the same road and cams to some stairs. At the top of the stairs was a flock of birds. I climbed these stairs and found myself in the judgment hall of Yama’s palace. I knew that they were ready to judge me for my sins. A giant rooster appeared who told Yama that I had killed him. He emphasized that I had tried to kill him again and again. The rooster said that he remembered me exactly. An entire flock of roosters also appeared and testified that I had killed them, as well. I remembered my actions, and I had to admit that the roosters had told the truth. Yama said that I had committed many sins, and sentenced me to many rebirths both as a chicken, and many other kinds of birds. After these births, I would then be reborn as an angelic being (Thevada) due to my having performed meritorious actions many times. After Yama was finished reading my sentence, he commanded a Yamatoot to take me to the place were I was to receive additional punishments. But, quite suddenly, an enormous turtle appeared. It screamed at Yama, saying “don’t take him; he Is a good human, and he should be allowed to live.” Yama asked the turtle ” what did he do to help you?” The turtle answered. “Long ago, I almost died because another of these humans wanted to eat me. This man prevented him, and so, I was able to live out my life.” Yama asked the turtle if he had any evidence. The turtle asked to be turned upside down, and told Yama to look at his underside where he would see where the man had carved his name so many years ago.

Yama saw the man’s name was there, just as the turtle had said, and believed the turtle’s story. Yama announced that he was canceling the sentence, and told me that when I revived, I was to take a vow not to kill any living thing. He said that it was especially bad to kill animals because they had to live through so many lives in order to be reborn as humans. “Love the animals”, he said, “as you love yourself”.

A COVID-19 victim with a Spielberg connection

One of the best features of Spielberg's early 1980's movies ET, Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple was the pleasing cinematography.   I've noted before that movies at that time often had a warm, glowing look in the cinematography which I think is quite distinctive in retrospect, and still a pleasure to behold.  Cinematography, perhaps because it is mostly digital now*, has a colder, cooler look about it, usually. 

The cinematographer of those 3 films, Alan Daviau, has died aged 77 from COVID complications.

Sad.

* just found this graph from January 2016 that illustrates the change:

Boris not beloved by all

Isn't it a little odd that, at a time when his catching the virus and apparently coming close to death could be enhancing his popularity as (at least in one respect) a "man of the people" who shares their suffering, it is the Sunday Times that gave voice to internal critics of his early low interest in the looming problem of COVID-19?  

Well, I think it odd.  Doesn't bode all that well for his future, too...

Astroturfing for Covid-19

People noticed how protest groups around the country all used printed out signs with the same fonts.  It is an astroturfed movement.

Explanation of astroturfing:

And of course the poisonous, dangerous Fox News would be part of it:

Product endorsement

Send me money, Seahs!  I like your sachet of spices that makes for a super quick meal-in-one if you add some diced capsicum, shallots and chopped up bok choy (eat with rice, of course):

I recommend the gif...

https://twitter.com/TreyCallaway/status/1251273373922897920?s=09

See if I can make that easier...link here.