Against Buddhism

I'm pretty sure I have read this before, but it predates this blog and a quick search indicates I have not linked to it before.   (Or maybe I have - Google searching the blog is still rather hit or miss.)

It's a 2003 Slate piece by science writer John Horgan explaining why he gave up on meditation and his investigation of Buddhism. 

A good advertisement

They may still have witchcraft on the books, but at least they'll have flying cars too

I seem to have not previously noticed (or possibly, forgotten) that Saudi Arabia, under it's modernising Crown Prince (who's still, shall we say, old fashioned in the matter of how to deal with journalist critics), is planning a brand new, big, futuristic mega city/district on the Red Sea.  In The Guardian:

“The future has a new home,” proclaims the website.

“It’s a virgin area that has a lot of beauty,” says the voice over a string section soundtrack as the promotional video tracks colour-tinted panoramic shots of picturesque desert expanses, and deep azure lagoons.

“Better humans, better society,” it boasts extravagantly.

The brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the new city state of Neom, named from a combination of the Greek word for “new” and the Arabic term for “future”, is intended to cover an area the size of Belgium at the far north of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coastline.

There has been no shortage of outlandish promises for the $500bn (£400bn) city-state. According to strategy documents leaked last year, the project may include a huge artificial moon, glow-in-the-dark beaches, flying drone-powered taxis, robotic butlers to clean the homes of residents and a Jurassic Park-style attraction featuring animatronic lizards.

Advertising materials stressed Neom will be built on “virgin” land, ready to be conquered with futuristic technology. “In 10 years from now we will be looking back and we will say we were the first ones to come here,” declares a Neom staff member featured in the video.

I wonder if the planning includes how to deal with global warming that will probably make it deadly to be caught outside of airconditioning for more than 10 minutes.   (I might be exaggerating, but not by much...)

Optics

Who on Earth (apart from Trump himself?) thought this is a good look:

and who couldn't have guessed it would lead to this:

Bill Kristol is feeling glum:

Movie reviewed, and history considered

Watched The King on Netflix on the weekend - the reworking of the Shakespearean Henry V story which was itself a reworking of history.   I didn't really read any substantial reviews of it before watching; just enough to see that it seemed worth watching.

And it is.  It's a really great looking film, and quite engaging, even if not exactly emotionally involving. 

Of course, given my inclination to follow up after viewing historical films to see how true to life they are, and also that I am no huge fan of Shakespeare and keep little of the details of his stories in my head even if I have seen them, this was an obvious target to read up on. 

It would seem that the invasion of France and the key battle scene at Agincourt are more-or-less accurate, in the big picture anyway.  The key dramatic part, though, of the Dauphin meeting his end there is completely made up - he was no where near the battle.

There would seem to be a case for arguing the film is an even bigger fiction than the play, though, given that apparently the real Henry V was no peacenik, and really did want to fight the French.   But the other key dynamic, of young Henry being a lazy lay-about before he took on the Crown seems a dubious proposition for which there is contradictory evidence.   Here, for example, one writer seems completely skeptical about the "mis-spent youth" bit:

 With Henry IV’s ascension, the younger Henry became Prince of Wales and spent eight years leading armies against the rebellious Welsh ruler Owain Glyndwr. In 1403 Henry fought alongside his father against their former ally Henry “Hotspur” Percy in the Battle of Shrewsbury. During the battle, the younger Henry was hit in the face with an arrow but was saved by the daring surgical removal of the arrowhead.

 Stories of the rakish young “Prince Hal” (expanded upon in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”) are difficult to prove, though there may have been father-son tensions during the last years of Henry IV’s reign.

"Difficult to prove"?  Here's someone at the BBC site giving more highly sceptical commentary on the matter:

After Henry's death, English propaganda constructed an even more elaborate legend: of his self-transformation, after a reckless youth, into a model of responsibility. For the conversion of royal sinner into royal saint - the tale of how 'Madcap Prince Hal' became 'Harry the Great' - there is no scrap of contemporary evidence. Yet the English love it as an antidote to the despair their royal heirs generally provoke....

 Henry's spell of alleged laddishness was a short episode when he was a de-mobbed soldier, twenty years old, with wild oats to sow. Supposedly, he spent time and money in taverns and brothels, in drunken brawls and sordid liaisons, with unsuitable playmates. 'He exercised meanly,' said a late but influential chronicle, ' the feats of Venus and Mars and other pastimes of youth.' The stories are plausible but untrue - part of an imaginative reconstruction of Henry's life which his brother later paid a hack to write up. The models are saintly conversion-narratives: St Augustine's, from an unchaste life, or St Paul's, from wickedness to apostleship, or St Thomas Becket's, from a wastrel 'suddenly changed into a new man'. Adolescent excess was an excusable background against which a born-again do-gooder could shine more effulgently with - in the words Shakespeare put into Hal's mouth - a 'reformation glittering o'er my fault'.

Yet if you go to another website (The Smithsonian magazine), they cite a historian who seems to think the accounts are probably more-or-less true:

Anne Curry notes that “Henry the prince was a far cry from Henry the king.” The salacious antics detailed in Shakespeare’s verses may be dramatized, the historian explains, but near-contemporary accounts validated by ties with the king’s intimate circles echo the play’s description of a “misspent youth and late change of heart.”

According to Vita Henrici Quinti, a biography penned by humanist scholar Tito Livio Frulovisi during the late 1430s, the prince “was a fervent soldier of Venus as well as of Mars; youthlike, he was fired with her torches.” After the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, Henry spent five years in Wales quelling a rebellion. Here, Frulovisi writes, “in the midst of the worthy works of war, [he] found leisure for the excesses common to ungoverned age.”

Back to the BBC guy, he indicates that the film is more true to the spirit of the final relationship Henry V had with his Dad than the play:

Equally legendary is the story of Henry's reconciliation with his father, which the propagandists crafted to resemble the edifying biblical tale of the Prodigal Son. Henry is supposed to have abased himself before his father in a cloak full of needles to signify thrifty intentions and to have earned, in return, a touching benediction. The real scene was much less edifying. Henry's quarrel with his father was not about the alleged youthful peccadilloes on which the propaganda concentrated, but about the usual political agenda: money and power. At a deeper level, Henry had every reason to hate his father, who had neglected him in childhood and slaughtered the father-substitutes to whom the child turned.

 The immediate circumstances surrounding the old king's deathbed were too urgent for sentiment. Factions were manoeuvring for power like buzzards around bones. As the king's health crumbled, Henry and his friends were out of office and excluded from patronage. This was a serious matter for the prince, who had an expensive household of toughs, lackeys, sycophants and freeloaders to keep up. He staged a coup, bursting into the king's presence with a dagger in his hand and an army at his back. What followed was not a reconciliation, but a negotiation. The king got peace. Henry got power.

Shakespeare had this:

The king angrily rebukes Hal for being so quick to seize the crown. He condemns him for his careless, violent, freewheeling life, and he paints a vivid picture of the horrors he thinks England can expect when Hal becomes king. Hal kneels before his father, weeping, and swears that he loves his father and was full of grief when he thought him dead; he says that he views the crown as an enemy to fight with, not as a treasure. King Henry, moved by the speech, lets Hal sit next to him. With his dying breath, he tells Hal that he hopes he will find more peace as king than Henry did.

Anyway, just goes to show, once again, that real life virtually never has the right timing or details to satisfy dramatists, and perhaps the rest of us?

Park life

"Let's go":

Ready for her close up:

What's going on in Aussie wingnut land?

Why has Catallaxy stopped taking comments?   It still has wrong and useless posts, but no more comments.   Overall, that's an improvement. 

Now just get rid of 95% of the posts, and it might gain a skerrick of credibility as a "centre right" blog again.

Update:  all back to it's now standard role - a Facebook substitute for a cluster of Australian conservatives to say obnoxious things they won't or can't say in front of their relatives or workplace.   It was just Sinclair having a dummy spit that the group was being too nasty to each other, whereas he thinks they should only be nasty to their "enemies", who haven't bothered showing up there for a decade or so anyway. 

The Buddhists head West - far West

The other night, SBS showed the Buddhist action/comedy movie Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back.  (I didn't stay up for all of it, but it's a sequel to what I think was the much better Stephen Chow movie Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons.)

The journey the movies (and novel, and TV series Monkey) references is from China to India.  But I didn't realise that Buddhists from India had been heading quite far West, even before the time of Christ.

Indian emperor Ashoka apparently sent Buddhist missionaries West in the 3rd century BC, and it appears possible that there were some in Alexandria in Egypt.   This Ashoka guy sounds pretty interesting, and he is the subject of a lengthy Wikipedia entry.  I've heard the name before, probably, but us Westerners don't pay much heed to anything that was going on in India if it didn't involve Europeans there, do we?

He apparently had a reputation for violence, but converted to Buddhism after getting the guilts over a particularly big war of conquest.  From his Wikipedia entry:

Ashoka waged a destructive war against the state of Kalinga (modern Odisha),^[7] which he conquered in about 260 BCE.^[8] He converted to Buddhism^[7] after witnessing the mass deaths of the Kalinga War, which he had waged out of a desire for conquest and which reportedly directly resulted in more than 100,000 deaths and 150,000 deportations.^[9] He is remembered for the Ashoka pillars and edicts, for sending Buddhist monks to Sri Lanka and Central Asia, and for establishing monuments marking several significant sites in the life of Gautama Buddha.^[10] 

Now, it would seem that the idea that Ashoka's monks set up shop near Alexandria in Egypt has some pretty slender evidence.   I haven't read all of this paper, but it's an interesting one about the identity of a particular religious community.  It all seems very up in the air, even though everyone agrees that the occasional Indian is likely to have been in Alexandria at the time, and it wouldn't be completely surprising if at least the odd monk was amongst them.

Anyway, getting closer to the time of Christ, there was the "Pandion embassy"incident which is well attested:

Roman historical accounts describe an embassy sent by the "Indian king Porus (Pandion (?) Pandya (?) or Pandita (?)^{[citation needed]}) to Caesar Augustus sometime between 22 BC and 13 AD. The embassy was travelling with a diplomatic letter on a skin in Greek, and one of its members was a sramana who burned himself alive in Athens to demonstrate his faith. The event made a sensation and was described by Nicolaus of Damascus, who met the embassy at Antioch (near present day Antakya in Turkey) and related by Strabo (XV,1,73 ^[2]) and Dio Cassius (liv, 9).

The problem is, it seems no one is 100% sure if this guy was like your average Indian, Hindu holy man, or a Buddhist.

I find it blackly amusing that it seems Indians had a habit of travelling to the West and burning themselves alive to impress the locals:

Plutarch (died 120 AD) in his Life of Alexander, after discussing the self-immolation of Calanus of India (Kalanos) writes:

The same thing was done long after by another Indian who came with Caesar to Athens, where they still show you "the Indian's Monument."^[16]

We all know of modern cases of Buddhist self immolation as a form of protest.   These ancient cases seem to be more about how impressing people with how seriously they take their religion.   On this topic, I see there is a 2015 paper in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies about the matter:

The Self-immolation of Kalanos and other Luminous Encounters Among Greeks and Indian Buddhists in the Hellenistic World

Is he trying to be a bit witty by use of the word "luminous" like that.  (I haven't read it yet.)

Anyway, I'll end by noting that it's been an improbable (probably Theosophical?) idea for a century or so that Jesus headed East before his public ministry and got some ideas from Indian religions.

As it turns out, though, it was the other way around:  the East really came to him, or his region, before his time. 

Update:

I see that in the Wikipedia entry on the self immolating Kalanos, he is said to be Hindu, rather than Buddhist:

Kalanos, also spelled Calanus (Ancient Greek: Καλανὸς)^[1] (c. 398 – 323 BCE), was a gymnosophist, a Hindu Brahmin^[2][3][4][5] and philosopher from Taxila^[6] who accompanied Alexander the Great to Persis and later self-immolated himself by entering into a Holy Pyre, in front of Alexander and his army. Diodorus Siculus called him Caranus (Ancient Greek: Κάρανος).^[7] He did not flinch while his body was burning. He bode goodbye to the soldiers but not to Alexander. He communicated to Alexander that he would meet him in Babylon. Alexander died exactly a year later in Babylon. ^[8] It was from Kalanos that Alexander came to know of Dandamis, the leader of their group, whom Alexander later went to meet in the forest.^[9]

 And the reason for his suicide?  Just old and tired, it seems:

He was seventy-three years of age at time of his death.^[18] When the Persian weather and travel had weakened him, he informed Alexander that he would prefer to die rather than live as an invalid. He decided to take his life by self-immolation.^[19] Although Alexander tried to dissuade him from this course of action, upon Kalanos' insistence the job of building a pyre was entrusted to Ptolemy.^[18] Kalanos is mentioned also by Alexander's admirals, Nearchus and Chares of Mytilene.^[20] The city where this immolation took place was Susa in the year 323 BC.^[13] Kalanos distributed all the costly gifts he got from the king to the people and wore just a garland of flowers and chanted vedic hymns.^[21][22][3] He presented his horse to one of his Greek pupils named Lysimachus.^[23] He did not flinch as he burnt to the astonishment of those who watched.^[14][24][25]

 Couldn't he just sneak off and drink some hemlock or something?   Seems a bit of an attention seeker.

Pretty accurate prediction

Remember how I wrote a month ago that the RMIT economists' urgent book on how to "unfreeze" the economy would say this:

It will be 200 pages devoted to the urgent need for the Australian governments to:

a.  deregulate everything, as fast as possible;
b.  start using blockchain technologies, they're terrific;
c.  urgently reduce all government spending on things other than the temporary workforce support, with public broadcasting getting special mention;
d.  reduce taxes.

Done and dusted.

Sinclair Davidson posts today the book cover, with this:

My point a is their point 1.

Their point 2 and 4 is part of my point 1.

I would bet that blockchain turns up in their points 3 and 4.

My point d is bound to be part of their 3.

The only thing I missed is perhaps the point 5 - but it's an old small government trope that decentralising power our of federal government hands always works best.   Just like Kansas showed with their failed experiment with Laffernomics, hey?

I think I was close enough to claim vindication.  And I did save everyone the time.

PS:   I am also reminded of that bit in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wherein Zapod proposes replacing Arthur's brain with a microchip that just says "What?" "I don't understand" and "Where's the tea?"  and no one would know the difference.  The three catchphrases for Sinclair would be "Lower Taxes!" "Blockchain!"  "Deregulate!" (and an occasional "Free Speech!")

Counting the flu

I found a useful discussion of the complexity of assigning cause of death to things like the flu or COVID-19 at an Allahpundit post at Hot Air.  Interestingly, he pointed to a post by an American doctor at Scientific American, who pointed out that the number of cases the CDC assigns to the fly is a very rubbery figure itself:

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts. 

That really blows up the comparisons made by those on the Right who try to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19 by comparing it to (say) 60,000 a year allegedly dying of the flu ("and we don't close down the economy", yells Creighton.)

I think it should be clear that the true way of assessing the seriousness of a pandemic has to be looking at "excess deaths" compared to same period, and those figures are not looking good.  The Financial Times has been doing good work in that regard.

Adam has a fixation

As someone in the thread notes:

More rigourously:

 And:

I have my doubts

Just saw this on Twitter:

and while there are not many comments following it yet, I really have my doubts about the accuracy of that figure for renting in Tokyo.

Why?  Because I like to watch the ever cheerful Paolo from Tokyo on Youtube (and his other channel Tokyo Zebra) , and he talked a lot about renting (or buying) an apartment in Tokyo recently, and I am pretty sure it was no where near as cheap as this guy claims.   (There are a lot of extra costs that you don't get in Australia, as well.) 

I don't have time to watch and check now, but I'm pretty I am right about this...

Update:  yeah, I just checked on this video, where he and his wife are looking for a new 2 bedroom rental, and the cost seems to be around $2700 - $2900USD a month.  This site indicates you can do much cheaper, but I still suspect that as an average, $1000 a month is just not right, at all.

Speaking of Right wing cranks...

...don't you love the way they like to proclaim they live in a bubble world of narrow Right Wing information as if that's a good thing.

Steve Kates notes:

His final line is “Television, like most things, seems to be more fun when it’s Australian”. Since the only television I watch is Bolt and The Outsiders, from that perhaps small sample I could not agree more.

And, as I have said a million times before - you basically can blame Rupert Murdoch for this, because he found creating a bubble world of "only trust us" was a good way to make money.   

Right wing hyperbolic whiner of the day award...

...goes to Andrew Bolt, who wins it probably every second day:

And amongst other Right wing twittery, James Morrow is just so dumb, stupid and transparent here.   After obviously advocating for this drug only because he has to defend Trump at every opportunity, he tries to pretend that he wasn't the one politically motivated to talk up an unverified treatment: 

Yeah, sure.

That's a lot of oil floating on the oceans

Apparently, this is the complete picture (generated from where, I don't know):

Putin has problems

According to this Vox article, the COVID-19 outbreak is getting worse in Russia and Putin acknowledges it.

And in other "so you thought you could do better than America in sorting this out?" news:

President Vladimir Putin is letting his impatience show with Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad, who isn’t proving as grateful for being kept in power by Russian intervention in his country’s brutal civil war as the Kremlin leader needs him to be.

Consumed at home by the twin shocks of collapsing oil prices and the coronavirus epidemic, and eager to wrap up his Syrian military adventure by declaring victory, Putin is insisting that Assad show more flexibility in talks with the Syrian opposition on a political settlement to end the nearly decade-long conflict, said four people familiar with Kremlin deliberations on the matter.

Assad’s refusal to concede any power in return for greater international recognition and potentially billions of dollars in reconstruction aid prompted rare public outbursts against the Syrian president this month in Russian publications with links to Putin.

“The Kremlin needs to get rid of the Syrian headache,” said Alexander Shumilin, a former Russian diplomat who runs the state-financed Europe-Middle East Center in Moscow. “The problem is with one person -- Assad -- and his entourage.”

The things you learn

Well, as readers would know, I have been looking at various Buddhist related stuff recently, which is how I found the (not actually Buddhist, but Indian) Spiritual Science Research Foundation.

Some of things I have learnt there are pretty remarkable:

That's handy to know.   Next:

Huh.

And as for the spiritual realm and its effect on us all, the pie graphs makes it all very scientific and convincing:

There you go.

Explains a lot

Just putting it out there

In my experience, the most arrogant, reluctant to help anyone with a genuine enquiry about something they know about, businesses in Australia are body corporate management companies.  

They seem to rely on having fixed, multi-year contracts to the body corporate as meaning they don't have to take calls or provide a skerrick of information to anyone (including the residents of the building) other than the current Chairman of the body corporate.  

They are terrible.

COVID-19 depressing news

Noted this morning:

Singapore reported 528 new COVID-19 cases as of noon on Tuesday (Apr 28), bringing the national total to 14,951.

The vast majority of the new cases are work permit holders residing in foreign worker dormitories, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said in its preliminary update.

In a later update, MOH said there were 10 cases in the community, of which seven were Singapore citizens or permanent residents; there were also two work pass holders and one visit pass holder who were infected.

And also on the CNA website:

Rome:  Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 382 on Tuesday (Apr 28), against 333 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the total of people infected since the start of the outbreak topped 200,000.

The daily tally of new infections stood at 2,091, higher than the 1,739 recorded on Monday.

Over in Indonesia, no one really knows what is going on, it seems:

The actual number of COVID-19 deaths in Indonesia may be substantially higher than officially reported as several regions have recorded hundreds of fatalities among patients under surveillance (PDPs), who are suspected of having contracted the highly contagious coronavirus.

Patients under surveillance refer to people with COVID-19 symptoms who have not been confirmed as having the disease, meaning that they are waiting either to be tested or for their test results to come back.

The central government's daily count of fatalities, at 773 as of Tuesday, does not include all PDPs who have died.

No one seems to understand why the UK has done so badly, too.  Now they are worried about kids getting a dangerous condition possibly related to the virus:

More than a dozen children have fallen ill with a new and potentially fatal combination of symptoms apparently linked to Covid-19, including a sore stomach and heart problems.

The children affected appear to have been struck by a form of toxic shock syndrome. All have been left so seriously unwell that they have had to be treated in intensive care.

At least one has received extra corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) treatment, which is used when someone’s life is at risk because they can no longer breathe for themselves.

NHS bosses are so concerned that they have written to doctors alerting them to the emergence of these cases and asked them to urgently refer any children with similar symptoms to hospital.

On the upside:  it's good to live in Australia, which does not seem to be getting the international attention it deserves for having apparently taken effective action that looks likely to all but eliminate it.

Update:   why are Iranians so prone to the spread of crank rumours?:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — The false belief that toxic methanol cures the coronavirus has seen over 700 people killed in Iran, an official said Monday.

That represents a higher death toll than so far released by the Iranian Health Ministry.

An adviser to the ministry, Hossein Hassanian, said that the difference in death tallies is because some alcohol poisoning victims died outside of hospital.

“Some 200 people died outside of hospitals”, Hassanian told The Associated Press.

Alcohol poisoning has skyrocketed by ten times over in Iran in the past year, according to a government report released earlier in April, amid the coronavirus pandemic.