Brit Hume is a lost cause

I think he used to have a reputation as one of Fox News's moderates.  Now he's just a Trump defending moron:

Sinclair Davidson's moderation skills on display again

Sure, Clementine Ford is an annoying version of a feminist who thinks she can joke about men not dying fast enough while (presumably) being upset about men (like Alan Jones) making violence suggestive language about women. 

Personally, I have long thought she is best ignored, but it's fair enough that people complain about her getting grants to continue doing whatever she does. 

So, of course, the quality of Catallaxy comments about her is going to be great (that's sarcasm), and include argument over whether she is attractive or not.  Because that matters in a debate about what she said.  This comment struck me as particularly unpleasant, though:

Why has no journalist in the country ever challenged this academic for what he allows and doesn't allow at a blog he can moderate? 

Miranda Devine - expert on black America

What lulz.  Miranda Devine turns up in the New York Post, saying that Biden has lost blacks because of his "you ain't black" statement last week:

“Ain’t black” is Biden’s “deplorables” moment. Yet his supporters seem oblivious to the lethal blow it has delivered to his prospects, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t comprehend the catastrophe of her “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

Biden confirmed what Candace Owens’ “Blexit” movement is all about, the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted and traps them in a victim narrative.

Candace Owens!  The last time I clicked on something by her, a couple of weeks ago (via Twitter) she was arguing that people shouldn't get so hung up (pardon the pun) on the history of American lynchings.  There were "only" 3,500 blacks lynched over the entire American history, so yeah, it was bad, but let's not get carried away about its significance.  (I paraphrase ever so slightly.)

A sad story about the movie business

Of course, this would have happened thousands of time before, but it's still sad reading about how a guy who, at the age of 62, finally sold a script for a movie, but had the idea taken over by someone famous, who then made dubious claims about the lack of influence of the original work.

The quasi villain is Richard Curtis, who I personally would have liked to see retire from creative writing 30 years ago.  (I think that allows for his TV work, but kills off all of his movies - especially Love Actually.)

A close examination of COVID-19 spread

Interesting story at Science, about how a South African hospital was able to do a very careful trace of how COVID-19 spread through it:

On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time.

Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from ward to ward and between patients, doctors, and nurses, based on floor maps of the hospital, analyses of staff and patient movements, and viral genomes. Their 37-page analysis, posted on the university’s website on 22 May, is the most extensive study of any hospital outbreak of COVID-19 so far. It suggests all of the cases originated from a single introduction, and that patients rarely infected other patients. Instead, the virus was mostly carried around the hospital by staff and on the surfaces of medical equipment.....

The report, which reads like a detective novel, tracks the virus’s spread through five hospital wards, including neurology, surgery, and intensive care units (ICUs), as well as to a nearby nursing home and dialysis center. Remarkably, no staff infections seem to have taken place in the hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, arguably the riskiest area of the hospital. That may be because patients are less infectious by the time they are admitted to intensive care, or because staff there are more diligent about preventing infection, the authors note.

The first patient, who sought help for coronavirus symptoms, only spent a few hours at the hospital, but likely transmitted the virus to an elderly patient admitted the same day for a stroke. The pair were in the hospital’s emergency department at the same time; the first patient was kept separate in a triage area, but that room was reached through the main resuscitation bay, where the stroke patient occupied a bed. (The emergency department was closed in April and opened again this month with an altered layout to improve infection control.) The two were also seen by the same medical officer.

The stroke patient, who developed a fever on 13 March, probably infected the first staff case, a nurse caring for her who developed symptoms on 17 March. A further four patients may have caught the virus from the stroke patient, including a 46-year-old woman admitted for severe asthma who had a bed opposite hers. Both she and the stroke patient died.

But on the whole, patients infected few other patients directly. Instead staff members spread the disease from patient to patient and from department to department—perhaps sometimes without becoming infected themselves. “We think in the main it’s likely to have been from [staff] hands and shared patient care items like thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes,” says Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform and one of the study leaders. He and the other authors found no evidence that aerosol transmission contributed to the outbreak.

 There is more at the link above.

COVID-19 problems in India

I can't embed this, but there's a short video report on CNA about how the Right wing in India is using COVID-19 to spread ill will towards Muslims.   (Apparently, social media is being used to spread claims such as one that Muslims are spitting on food they sell so as to ensure the spread of the virus.) 

Once again, as example of the way social media can be a dangerous menace.

Word salad of the day

Stan Grant got to write a real word salady piece for The Conversation about the Uluru statement (regarding aboriginal representation in parliament or otherwise), and I am pleased to see that lots of comments are along the lines of this first one:

The problem I, and I believe many Australians have, with articles like this is that it is a word salad of vague concepts and ideas with precisely zero clear policy change proposals. As a normal working bloke who didn’t go to Uni I can honestly say I have no idea what a single part of this article means in the real world.

A voice to parliament? To say what? If you read this article out in parliament you’d put everyone to sleep.

Stan Grant is ponderous in a very Paul Kelly fashion.  So many words to so little effect.

Quick movie review - Jojo Rabbit

Watched it on Saturday.

It often made me laugh, but I can see why it had a limited box office take.  The tone changes are way, way too abrupt. There is one way I thought the film could go some way to redeem that - but it is sort of a spoiler so I will put it below in small print.*

Other than that, the film often looked a lot like a Wes Anderson one, and I see lots of critics noticed that in their reviews.  (I actually read little about this film before seeing it.)   That's not a bad thing, it's just an observation.

I think Taiki Waititi is very talented, and obviously likes to mix up humour with a bit of pathos or sentimentality (even What We Do in the Shadows had romance in it.)    But the broader the satire, the harder it is to pull that off satisfactorily, and a lot of this is pretty broad satire.  So the sudden switches to bleak seriousness are pretty disorientating.

Overall, nice try, well made and well acted.   But not a complete success.

PS:  I think the film shows how we often undervalue the great job that can be done by child actors.  The lead kid in this was really good, in a challenging role.  Yet we never seem to see kids seriously considered for acting awards.  I wonder why...


*  I thought it would have been a nice touch if the father had turned up at the end.  No such luck.

Fear of not social distancing

As I am sure others may have noticed, I get the impression that, at least as far as supermarkets are concerned, a lot of shoppers are no longer taking social distancing all that seriously.

I am finding that I now get the feeling, when people push past close to me with no obvious concern, that I am passing through the invisible cloud of their exhaled breath, containing God knows what.   The whole of a busy supermarket now feels like it could be an invisible viral soup.

Of course, what I should be doing is wearing a facemask to help counter this feeling of helplessness in the face of my fellow careless humans.  But I took a punt and didn't put one on today, and regretted it.

I wonder how many other people have developed this mild form of germophobia...

    

Obviously, yes

The Guardian, dealing with the important stories of the moment:

The Empire Strikes Back at 40: did the Star Wars saga peak too early?

The article notes what many seem to forget:  the movie did not open with uniformly great reviews.  But this helped boost the pleasure when I saw it, as it was one of those movies which I went into with no great expectations, and was delighted at how great it was.   (That also made The Return of the Jedi, which I seem to recall getting better reviews than it deserved, suffer a great deal in comparison.)

Friday porn

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If you think the Tara Read allegation has legs...

...I suggest you watch last night's Planet America, in which they uncover evidence that she (or someone acting for her) went back and amended an on line statement to make it foreshadow more details coming, when in fact it originally referred only to sexual harassment, not sexual assault.

This and the recent Politico story about how many people she has dealt who think she has a loose association with the truth, convince me that she is an oddball who has upped a story of leaving Biden's office for harassment (which the other office workers say was not the reason for her departure) into one of serious sexual assault.  

Planet America continues to be extremely good - very informed, and very balanced.  I would fault them for too much balance in favour of Trump and Republicans, actually;  but they are still well worth watching.

Putin's not having a good pandemic

Politico has an article that notes:

For most of the spring, the official line from state media was that Russia had nothing to worry about. The coronavirus was happening somewhere else, in Europe and Asia and the United States, but not here in Russia. The country had reacted promptly to potential danger, closing the border with China on January 30, then screening incoming passengers and finally halting all incoming air traffic to keep the invading viral army out. Hospitals were refitted, doctors retrained, and protective gear and equipment sent to every hospital in the country. No problem, said the Kremlin: We’ve got this.

That’s no longer believable. As of Monday, May 18, Russia was in second place after the United States in number of infections — 290,678. And those are just the official statistics. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said he believes about 2 percent of the population of Moscow is infected — that is, about 250,000 people. The death rate remains low, with only 2,722 deaths so far, although there are doubts about that number too: Recent media reports have shown how Russian methodology for assigning cause of death has lowered the Covid morbidity numbers, perhaps by more than 50 percent. (This was disputed by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova.) I don’t know anyone who thinks the statistics are accurate, if only because people were dying from Covid in Russia before anyone was testing for it.

This was supposed to be a triumphant spring for Putin. Under his stewardship, the country had amassed a huge reserve fund, had confidently started a price war with Saudi Arabia over oil and was arranging a spectacular international event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was planned to be a lavish celebration, where hundreds of foreign leaders and dignitaries, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and possibly Donald Trump would stand on the viewing platform above Lenin’s mausoleum and watch a military parade. Millions would march in “Immortal Regiment” parades, honoring relatives who fought in the war; the day would end with banquets, grand concerts and the best fireworks display of the decade. 

Putin had also carefully laid the groundwork for a series of political and constitutional moves that would allow him, effectively, to remain in power for the foreseeable future, maybe even for life. In March, the Russian Parliament approved an amendment to the constitution that would limit presidential terms but would also reset Putin’s presidential terms to zero, paving the way for him to stay head of state until 2036, the year he will turn 84. All that remained to seal the deal was a general vote on the constitutional amendments, which was supposed to be held in April.

 And in the Washington Post:

Stories of Russia’s powerful state capacity have long been central to Putin’s image as a strong leader. Since he first became president in 2000, Putin has promised to provide decisive individual leadership, not constrained by parliament, media, oligarchs or civil society, and to rebuild the Russian state, which had crumbled in the 1990s. At the beginning of his reign, Putin implicitly asked Russian citizens to accept a social pact. He would rebuild the state and grow the economy if Russians would agree to forgo their democratic institutions and human rights and allow him greater power. Putin also promised to return Russia to the international stage as a “great power.” The image of Putin as a strong leader and Russia as a strong state — both at home and abroad — has played a key role in Putin’s mystique. Putin is a “statist.” There is even a precise word in the Russian language for this ideological orientation: gosudarstvennik.

And that’s why Russia’s recent travails with containing the coronavirus threaten Putin and his autocracy. Globally, Russia now is second only to the United States in the number of citizens infected, and many suspect underreporting, especially regarding mortality rates, in official statistics.

The reality is that Putin has failed to build an efficient state in the service of Russian people over the past 20 years. He has put tremendous resources into modernizing Russia’s nuclear weapons, intelligence capabilities, conventional and police forces, and Olympic facilities, but invested far less into roads, schools or hospitals, especially outside of Moscow. Covid-19 is now exposing these lapses in state-building.

Putin also personally has not stepped forward during this crisis. He has been absent for days at a time, deferring to governors to make their own decisions. He has seemed disengaged and sometimes even uninterested in leading his government’s response to the pandemic. Moreover, Russia’s minister of culture and minister of housing have both tested positive, while Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin have even been hospitalized. That doesn’t look like strength.

Unusual drug effects

I have likely posted before about the drug DMT*, and how odd I find it that the very common effect of it is for users to have a "visit" from a entity perceived variously as an alien, spirit, god, angel, or something.   This means its users are inclined to believe more in the supernatural.  Vice has an article about a recent study:

A study has found that most people who regularly use the psychedelic drug DMT develop beliefs in a higher power such as God, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University.

An online survey of more than 2,500 people undertaken by researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine revealed that after taking DMT—nicknamed “the spirit molecule” for its ability to create deeply spiritual experiences—58 percent of respondents said tripping on DMT had triggered a belief in divine beings and powerful supernatural entities.

The study, published in the new issue of Journal of Psychopharmacology, aimed to better understand the weird experiences people have on DMT—called “entity encounter experiences”—and how they impacted their outlook. The survey was shared globally on websites such as VICE and is the largest questionnaire looking at DMT entity encounters to date. The results were published by some of the pioneers in modern psychedelic research: Alan K. Davis, Roland Griffiths, and Matthew Johnson, who run Hopkins’ new Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Respondents to the study, who had taken DMT on average 14 times, described bumping into an array of what they could best describe as aliens, spirits, angels, demons, gnomes and fairies. Most of these creatures, said respondents, were sentient and benevolent, with many described as “sacred.” Less than 15 percent reported “judgmental or malicious” creatures.

Now this may sound as if you have a good chance of enjoying the experience, but I'm not sure I would want to hear one of the messages noted here:

Almost 70 percent of people said they received some kind of message, task or insight from the entities they rubbed elbows with. Some were given predictions about the future or told the day they would die. Some were shown a way out of addiction. Others were told “love is the answer to everything" or “we are all connected, all one.” Some were even told they are God.

I don't want some bogus angel or alien worrying me about the date of my death.

The other thing I found surprising about this is how short the DMT trip is how chronologically short they can be:

Whatever, or whoever, people are meeting in the DMT zone, these life changing appointments, described by psychedelic ethnobotanist Terence McKenna as “machine elves from hyperspace”, are very short in real time. While a smoked DMT experience can feel like many lifetimes, curiously, the effects leave as quickly as they come, peaking in just a few minutes and evaporating in less than half an hour. For comparison, an LSD trip can last 12 hours or more.

All pretty interesting, even for someone like me who has never had an inclination to try anything more than alcohol.


*  Yes, I have, in 2011. 

Not feeling good about India

In an online article about Buddhism and free will (which I do not entirely "grok", and quite possibly never will!), I found this passage interesting:

Hindu scripture describes the saints as veritable supermen. For example, the Taittiriya Upanishad tells us that the yogi "attains . . . independent sovereignty,” and enjoys a bliss that is a billion times grea­ter than that of the highest gods (1.6; 2.8.).  In the Mait­ri Upanishad the ascetic surpasses Brahman, the Godhead, and "will go [yet further], he [will surpass] the gods in the realm of divinity. . . ." (4.4) In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad yogis gain in­credible pow­ers: they “shall roll up space as if it were a piece of leather" (6.20); and a yogi in the Taittiriya Upanishad boasts that "I am the first-born of the world-order, earlier than the gods, in the navel of immortality. . . . I have over­come the whole world" (3.5).  Such a view has been called “spiritual Titanism,” an extreme form of humanism in which humans take on divine attributes and prerogatives.5

 
            In the Pali texts the Buddha rejects these incredible claims of the Hindu and Jain yogis.  He was particularly critical of their claims to omniscience. 

Well, yes.  Almost certainly a good idea to reject anyone's claim, be they yogi or not, to omniscience.

This leads me to something I have been thinking about lately - I'm still slowly making my way through the Indian Netflix series Sacred Games, and the second series in particular is making a case for considering Indian mythology to be much, well, weirder than I had previously thought.   The show also seems to spending a lot of time on deriding the country's cult of the guru. 

Was the author of the book a cynic who thought religion in Indian and the Middle East (Muslim  terrorism features too) causes more harm than good, because the TV series is giving me that vibe?

Watching Foreign Correspondent last night also did nothing to improve my image of the nation, showing how so many of the poor "migrant workers" from within the country had been completely caught off guard by the sudden, COVID-19 closures:

Tens of millions of migrant workers, who'd moved to the cities to find work, lost their jobs, their wage and their shelter overnight. To find food and shelter, hundreds of thousands hit the road to head back to their villages.

In a bid to stop the exodus of people and the virus to the countryside, governments cancelled trains and buses, and closed state borders. Many kept walking anyway, often trekking hundreds of kilometres to get home.

While the government has tried to help those in need by providing food and financial aid, not everyone has benefitted.

I think that last sentence is an understatment, if ever there was one.

Not getting it

So Spotify is getting Joe Rogan all to themselves.   I've tried listening to Rogan a couple of times, I think, but I don't see the reason for his popularity.

Mind you, I am not a fan of podcasts generally speaking.  But I still don't see why people would listen to this one in particular.

He can't wait to be old and locked away for his own safety

And hasn't Warren Mundine become an extreme Right wing pinhead?  

Starting to feel this way

He is very likeable

Haven't we reached the point where "balance" is dangerous and nonsense?

Am I the only one who has developed the feeling that a sufficiently large section of the Right has turned so far against the interests of common humanity  that media owners of the Left/centrist variety are wrong to attempt anything like "balance" by incorporating opinion by anyone who supports Trump and/or denies climate change?

Look at the Washington Post, for example.  It's editorial opinion is:

The absurd cynicism of 'Obamagate'

yet it still makes room (to the outrage of every single reader, it seems) for the conservative, always Trump defending dimwit Hugh Hewitt to write:

I don’t know why they won’t confront the mountain of evidence of abuse of power. Much of Trump Derangement Syndrome (the disease that afflicts the left and the media and causes them to see evil in all that Trump does) manifests itself in “attributing motive” to opponents. It’s a cheap debating trick. They should know better, but I don’t know if they do or don’t.

But I know McCarthyism when I see it. To define anyone who uses Obamagate as either a racist or conspiracy theorist is outside the norms of acceptable American political dialogue. McCarthyism of the Left will not work outside of progressive cloisters. Obamagate is here to stay because the abuse of power is already obvious and cannot be erased.

We know Fox News has a trivial amount of "balance" in the form of Chris Wallace and (say) Neil Cavuto, and it enrages Trump to see even that, when 98% of the network's output has the same bias levels of North Korean state media.

You could say that WAPO making room for Hewitt or (equally dumb)  Marc Thiessen is the same thing - a mere token effort at being able to say they provide balance.

But it's absurd, isn't it?   There are certain topics which the media, almost at a uniform international level, agrees just do not warrant exposure in serious, mainstream outlets because to do so gives them a shine of credibility they just do not deserve - the anti vaxxer movement, for example, or Holocaust denial.    Surely the utter obvious narcissistic inanity and inability to listen to credible experts of Trump puts supporting him in the same category.  Not to mention his recent re-Tweeting some blood thirsty conspiracists of QAnon, who literally would get a thrill if it was announced that a 1,000 liberals (up to and including Trump's opponent at the last election) had been executed overnight for (imagined) child sex abuse.   

And why do people with clearly opposite opinions want to be part of the pretence of supplying "balance."    How bad does it have to get for someone like Chris Wallace to say "this is serious, I just can't stand to be in the same company as the extreme sycophants who dominate this network"?

Why can't we just say that people who want sense and decency and non-denial of science consider the Trump supporting Right has gone nuts and does not deserve a voice in sensible, mainstream media?   They can all congregate around their Fox News and Breitbart and other nonsense outlets that will pander to their dangerous lack of judgement, and those networks can kick out their token efforts at balance too.

I think things have just become too serious to continue pretending that balance is warranted.