About those Shellenberger claims

Michael Tobis, who has always been worth reading on climate change, has a detailed assessment at Real Climate of the highly dubious "facts few people know" by Shellenberger.  

Good stuff.

May help explain the 21st century becoming the Asian century

Over in Korea:

But in the USA:

Update:  the hypothesis - Americans' love of individualism and liberty to believe anything is ill-equipped to deal with the paranoid conspiracy and disinformation spreading effect of the communication-system-on-steroids that is the internet;  so Asian communitarianism just has to sit it out while the USA weakens itself with self-seeded stupidity.  

What a surprise...

Such a complicated virus

Of course, I can safely predict this will not influence Adam Creighton or Sky News at all:

Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.

Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.

The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.

A dozen patients had inflammation of the central nervous system, 10 had brain disease with delirium or psychosis, eight had strokes and a further eight had peripheral nerve problems, mostly diagnosed as Guillain-Barré syndrome, an immune reaction that attacks the nerves and causes paralysis. It is fatal in 5% of cases.

“We’re seeing things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we haven’t seen before with other viruses,” said Michael Zandi, a senior author on the study and a consultant at the institute and University College London Hospitals NHS foundation trust.

“What we’ve seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is you can have severe neurology, you can be quite sick, but actually have trivial lung disease,” he added.

 Update:  yes, here's Adam:

He's talking a UK report that the number of total deaths in the last couple of weeks there are below the 5 year average for the time of year - almost certainly because COVID "brought forward" the deaths of a lot of elderly people.   Has he ever read anything about the uncertainty of ongoing ill health for a number of people who didn't die from it? 

If anyone is interested...

....in comments in moderation which I won't release, Graeme is really going off like (as they say) a frog in a sock about criticism of Joe McCarthy, because (of course) Jews. 

Praising Rosehaven

Yeah, I watched the first episode of the fourth season last night and thought it was still really good.  It felt very psychologically true - the way Daniel does not feel bad about his "mutual decoupling" from his girlfriend until he finds out she is moving onto to a likely new boyfriend.   I don't find Luke McGregor all that funny when doing "bits" on The Weekly, but as a comedic actor, he's fine.  [Also, was it just my TV, but last night he seemed paler than ever.  I almost feel the need to put sunglasses on, he is so white.]  Celia Pacquola is just perfect in her role.

I see that Luke Buckmaster at the Guardian likes the show too, and he has written a lengthy explanation of why it works which I think is about right.   It's funny to see in comments following that there are people who cannot stand it - including one guy who says it's terrible because its paints a false good picture of Tasmanians!  

COVID 19 infections and deaths

An article at Vox looks at the question of why American infection rate is way up, but deaths are down.   Seems a good explanation.

Just too stupid and paranoid to engage with

I see the latest polemic sweetheart over at Catallaxy is Tucker Carlson - they swoon over his editorials which are encouraging the paranoid view of the Left (with barely concealed racism) at a close to McCarthy-ite level.

In fact, I had cause recently to look again at the famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and it quotes Joe McCarthy talking in 1951:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.

And let's compare that to a post by crackpot wannabe historian CL at Catallaxy today, wherein he compares efforts to remove Thomas Beckett's name from some manuscript:

I know. Comparing Donald Trump to St Thomas Becket might be a stretch comparable to that asked of one of the portly President’s Mar-a-Lago polos but the parallel that interests me is Henry II’s quartet of assassins and Barack Obama’s equally say-no-more-savvy knights. “Make sure you look over things and have the right people on it.” They knew what he meant. It was remarkable enough that a pandemic came along to cover up the biggest political scandal in US history. The Russia Hoax is now even more hazy following a nationwide race war incited by the media on behalf of the Democrats. Will the swordsmen get away with it? Ignore the distractions – riots and virus – because that is still the real test of whether the United States goes on as originally constituted.

Actually, defending Joe McCarthy is another favourite past time at Catallaxy.  Steve Kates had a whole post about that recently, but CL has done it too.  

 As with all of the Trump endorsing Right, they prefer to believe luminaries such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of self serving Republican politicians over the actual multiple intelligence services knowledge that Russia did interfere in the last election, and the public knowledge that Trump and his minions were rushing to them hoping to get their help.  

Interestingly, I don't think I have seen a single reference at Catallaxy to the intelligence services reporting that they believe Putin's minions are paying Afghanis to kill US troops.   If it's Russia, and if it hurts Trump, they have no interest at all.

They are too dumb, and too far into the culture war conspiracy rabbit hole, to bother engaging with.  

Update:  over at NPR, some interesting bits by the author of a new biography of McCarthy:

His crusade was launched one night in February 1950, in an out-of-the-way community, Wheeling, W.Va., and Joe McCarthy was there to deliver the famous Republican speech on the night of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. ... Joe McCarthy went there that night with the briefcase that contained two speeches and he wasn't sure which one to give until the last minute. One was a snoozer of a speech on national housing policy, and had he delivered that speech that night, you and I wouldn't be here 70 years talking about him.

Instead, he pulled the other speech out of his briefcase and it was a barn burner on anti-communism and it was the speech that launched his crusade. ... I think it was a matter of opportunism when he started out this crusade. He was looking for any issue that would give him the limelight. He wasn't sure until the last second which issue that might be, only when he got the response that he did that night, which was within two days, every newspaper in America put Joe McCarthy and his charges of 205 spies in the State Department, they put those stories on Page 1. Joe McCarthy was off and running and he never turned back....

At the beginning McCarthy ... clearly didn't believe what he was saying. And he had fun with it, waving around the sheets, saying he had this list in his hand when he knew he didn't have a list in his hand. Calling up everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to friends in the media after he created this firestorm, saying, "You've got to help me come up with some evidence to prove the things that I've said." He was the cynic. He was an opportunist, and he knew that he was embellishing, if not outright lying. But by the end, I am convinced that Joe McCarthy actually believed his own rhetoric. If you say often enough that there are spies in the State Department or that refugees coming across the border are ruining America, if you say it often enough, you might actually begin to believe it. And I'm convinced by the end Joe McCarthy was a true believer in his own opportunistically created cause.

Yeah, someone really deserving of being a Right wing hero...

The problem with herd immunity

A safe prediction:  this will have no effect on Adam Creighton, Andrew Bolt, David Leyonhjelm or any other number of "no lockdown" advocates:

A Spanish study has cast doubt on the feasibility of herd immunity as a way of tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

The study of more than 60,000 people estimates that around just 5% of the Spanish population has developed antibodies, the medical journal the Lancet reported.

Herd immunity is achieved when enough people become immune to a virus to stop its spread.

Around 70% to 90% of a population needs to be immune to protect the uninfected.

And it would seem that the reason why herd immunity may be such a problem for this weird virus:

Herd immunity can be reached either by widespread vaccination or if enough of the population is exposed to an infection and recovers. If enough people are immune to a disease, it is unlikely to keep spreading from person to person. Letting the coronavirus infection run and risking lots of people getting very sick with it is not an option - it would put too many lives in danger.

And currently, there is no vaccine for coronavirus - even though hundreds are in development. The challenge is to make a jab that provides enough protection. It needs to train the body's immune system to learn and remember how to make antibodies that can fight off coronavirus.

Scientists are concerned that this "memory" might be too short-lived though, given the nature of the disease. While some people who catch coronavirus develop protective antibodies, experts do not yet know how long these last.

Common colds are caused by similar viruses and the body's immune response fades quickly to those.

The "too stupid to brief" President

If you can get to it, have a read of this WAPO piece:  Donald Trump, the unbriefable President.

Some parts:

But Trump does not read the PDB. Or much of anything else, a former senior White House official told me. As his presidency began, it was an open question: Would Trump even bother to sit for CIA briefings? He didn’t, at first, and did so only after Mike Pompeo, then his CIA director, agreed to be there. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence services was stoked by their conclusion that Russia had intervened in the election on his behalf. Given his hostility toward the intelligence community, and his Twitter-sized attention span, Trump would be a challenge for any briefer.

Trump’s first briefer was Ted Gistaro, a widely respected career CIA officer on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), where he oversaw the PDB. Gistaro, who has a calm demeanor and a healthy sense of humor, got almost nowhere — so the briefing team devised a show and tell. Pictures of New York City landmarks, agency briefers thought, might help Trump grasp threats. In an effort to explain the scale of North Korea’s nuclear program, the CIA built a model of the Hermit Kingdom’s underground weapons facility and put a miniature Statue of Liberty inside it.

But Trump preferred his own sources. In July 2017, he batted away the CIA’s conclusion that the North Koreans had developed an intercontinental missile that might soon be capable of reaching U.S. soil. How could the president be certain the agency was wrong? Because, he said, Vladimir Putin told him so.

And this:

Trump’s current briefer, Beth Sanner, a highly regarded, 30-year CIA veteran, has endured a bumpier ride than Gistaro. When news broke that the alleged Russian bounties were included in the PDB, the Trump administration issued its usual denials and obfuscations. First, the president claimed the so-called reports were fake news. Then, he told Fox News that the intelligence was not credible enough to be in the PDB. Then the story changed again: If the intelligence was in the PDB, the White House said, his briefer didn’t bring it to Trump’s attention. 

It wasn’t the first time the White House had thrown Sanner under the bus. (In an early May tweet, Trump blamed his briefer for not sounding alarmed when she first spoke to him about the novel coronavirus in January.) But if Sanner had been routinely derelict in her duties, why hadn’t Haspel removed or replaced her? And why hadn’t national security adviser Robert O’Brien — who, along with other top aides, receives the PDB daily and presumably reads it — gone into the Oval Office, shut the door and briefed the president himself?

The answer is simple. The president is unbriefable. He will not listen to anything he does not want to hear.

Huawei out

The SMH reports:

Huawei has lost the anglosphere. The telecommunications giant that came to symbolise China's economic rise and the risks of its unique brand of state-linked corporations will no longer have a role in building Britain's 5G network or that of any Five Eyes partner.

The sudden backflip by Britain's security services on Monday over national security concerns is part of a much broader geopolitical play involving the US and Australia. Canada has effectively locked out the Shenzen-based company through its major carriers signing contracts with Nordic firms Ericsson and Nokia. New Zealand's former national carrier, now known as Spark, opted for Samsung over Huawei for critical components in March.

I didn't know this:

The cost of the British decision is likely to surge into the billions. 5G sits on top of 4G, rather than replaces it. Huawei was a key builder of its 4G network and no two providers are compatible. Excluding them from 5G will mean replacing the old technology with the product of another company.

I suppose China only has itself to blame, given its treatment of Hong Kong. 

But, you know, I still wonder if 5G  in its entirety is an upgrade that does not really have a market.    

Approaching peak Guardian

I am pretty sure there would be many amusing, derisive comments about this article at The Guardian with a very click-baity title:

'Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky' – do cities have to be so sexist?

 if comments were allowed.  But they don't seem to be.  Pity.   (By the way, I can imagine Coalition politicians, with some justification, using this as an example of why the government is justified in increasing the cost of Humanities courses.) 

Author war

This article in The Atlantic about why "Millennials" are upset with JK Rowling not slavishly sharing their endorsement of transsexual activism is pretty good, actually. 

I think it fair to say that it suggests that Harry Potter fandom into adulthood is a bit immature, as is being horrified that a member of an older generation does not share your outlook on an issue with complete affinity. 

It is clear that many transsexuals upset with her do not do nuance.   It's full of hyperbolic "why does she want to hurt me so much?  This is devastating."    They have a huge tendency to generalise from their own experience in ways which allow for (being generous here!) little in the way of contradiction, or the consideration of other evidence.   For example,  comments on Twitter along the lines "I knew I was a man/woman at age X, how dare she suggest some trans teens seem to 'suddenly' realise they are trans. They probably knew for years, like me, but just never told anyone."

At least I see that there is considerable push back on Twitter now about this in support of Rowling.    

Oh look - record rainfall causes death and destruction in Japan - again

For the last 5 years or so, during the Japanese summer, I've been posting news about record rainfall there, the resultant floods, landslides and deaths.  (My search bar will find the posts for you.)   Here's the latest entry:

Luckily, Michael Shellenberger has written that book which can reassure the victims that natural disasters like this are not increasing.   This must all be in the imagination of Japanese residents:

An average of almost 1,500 landslides rocked Japan every year during the past decade, marking an increase of almost 50 percent on the previous 10 years, according to a government report endorsed by the Cabinet on Friday.

The trend reflected the rise in torrential rainfall due to global warming, said the white paper on land, infrastructure and transport, which called for restrictions on the use of at-risk land and relocating residents to safer areas.

The average number of landslides per year was 1,006 between 2000 and 2009, but jumped 46.7 percent to 1,476 between 2010 and 2019. This compares with 1,027 between 1990 and 1999.

Downpours of 50 millimeters or more per hour in the past decade were recorded 1.4 times more frequently than between 1976 and 1985.

I never really did trust Shellenberger, and his turn to the Lomborg/Pielke style of environmental half truth advocacy, all stoked by a "if you don't agree with me as to what should be done, I'd prefer to create political doubt that anything need be done at all" attitude, has given me some retrospective justification for never taking him very seriously.

His reaction to the questions posed to him by The Guardian really does seem a bit nutty, if you ask me.  Ketan Joshi's post about his odd behaviour is good.

She could be right

Uh-oh for universities

At The Conversation:

Only 40% of students in China who previously intended to study overseas still plan to, while just under 50% of those who had studied overseas plan to return to their study after the borders reopen.

These are results from our unpublished survey of 1,012 students we conducted in China between June 5 and 15. We asked them whether they would continue with their plan to study abroad post COVID-19.

These findings are not surprising. Due to growing tensions between China and the West – even before COVID-19 – middle-class parents in China had become increasingly concerned about the safety of, and possible discrimination against, their children abroad, including in the US and Australia.

Doesn't everyone reasonable have conflicted feelings about this?:  while big fee paying Chinese students in our tertiary system helps keep Universities pumping (and I do like healthy universities), it is obviously potentially(/actually?) corrupting of academic standards.  But in the longer term, one would hope that their exposure to democratic countries and the relative freedoms within them is in our interest, if it makes our system look more appealing - and less worthy of being the target of drastic geo-political conflict.

And I really don't get Scott Morrison's bout of sabre rattling, just as I didn't get his wannabe Trumpism about blaming China for COVID-19.   Why go out of your way to annoy China right at this time - it's hardly going to help kickstart the economic recovery that he'll be desperate to show before the next election. It was always on the cards that the USA would have a harder time containing COVID 19 compared to Australia, and Trump and his cult followers should be of much greater discrimination concern to parents of students than what could happen in the streets of Australia.   Hence, I would have thought, Morrison could have made his angle "China - see how good we are at containing illness and providing a safe space for both students and trade".

Instead we get "look at me, mini-Trump of the South Pacific".

Wagner and Tolkien and the Ring connection

Given that I care little for Tolkien, and gave even less thought to Wagner until his Cycle was coming to my city and I was convinced by someone on the radio that to see it is "a life changing experience", I never really pondered the question of how derivative one Ring was of the other.

So, I am happy to have just read a discussion of this from The New Yorker in 2003.   Some quotes, but you should go read the whole thing:

Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of “Die Walküre” not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it possesses no executive powers. In the “Nibelungenlied” saga, there is a magic rod that could be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring.” Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien’s disavowals. Admit it, J.R.R., you used to run around brandishing a walking stick and singing “Nothung! Nothung!” like every other besotted Oxford lad.

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner’s time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them. 

 Now here is a crucial take on what I might now take to calling "the real Ring" to annoy Tolkien fans:

There is a widespread conception of Wagner’s cycle as a bombastic nationalistic saga in which blond-haired heroes triumph over dwarfish, vaguely Jewish enemies. Wagner unquestionably left himself open to this interpretation, but the “Ring” is not at all what it seems. It is in fact a prolonged assault on the very idea of worldly power, the cult of the monumental—everything that we think of as “Wagnerian.” At the beginning, the god Wotan is looking to expand his realm. But every step he takes to assert himself over the affairs of others, to make his will reality, leads inexorably to his downfall. He is marked from the outset, and the ring becomes a symbol of the corruption of his authority. Tolkien believes in the forces of good, in might for right. Wagner dismisses all that—he had an anarchist streak early on—and sees redemption only in love.

When Tolkien stole Wagner’s ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien’s saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron’s bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.

This is fantastic!  It's giving me a whole new explanation as to why I didn't respond to Lord of the Rings - because it makes no, um, meta-emotional sense, to coin a phrase.  Back to what the real Ring - heh - is about:

Wagner, by contrast, uses the ring to shine a light on various intense, confused, all-too-human relationships. Alberich forges the ring only after the Rhine maidens turn away his advances. Wotan becomes obsessed with it as a consequence of his loveless marriage; he buries himself in his work. Even after he sees through his delusions, and achieves a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of his powerlessness, he has nothing else to lean on, not even his Gandalfian staff, and wanders off into the night. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, lost in their love for each other, succeed in remaking the ring as an ordinary trinket, a symbol of their devotion. They assert their earthbound passion against Wotan’s godly world, and thus bring it down. The apparatus of myth itself—the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders—crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.

Cool.

Studying up on the Ring

Well, seeing I am on my way to 15 odd hours of Wagnerian opera in a few months time, I should probably start getting a better idea of what its about and how it's been interpreted over the years, and why it seems particularly appealing (according to this very interesting article) to politicians (and not just Nazi ones.)   I didn't know GBS was a fan, for example:

...the first point to make is that Wagner’s music has inspired political interpretation since it was first performed. The 35-year-old anarchist who befriended Bakunin and took part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849 was 63 when the Ring cycle was first performed. By then, Marx felt able to mock the former firebrand as a “musician of state”, a court composer remote from the social realities of the age; deaf to the first whispers of modernity. Yet the notion that the Ring is essentially a critique of capitalism has always had its adherents – most obviously George Bernard Shaw, whose The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) declares the Ring to be a dramatised allegory of “shareholders, tall hats, white-lead factories and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view”. In this scheme of equivalence, Alberich is the wicked capitalist and Nibelheim his industrial Hades. Siegfried shimmers into being as an avatar of Bakunin, the great rebel whose struggle for freedom ends in defeat.

Well, given it went on to become a Nazi favourite, it's a wonder they haven't been duels in the street over conflicting interpretations.  (Actually, I suspect there may have been.)

On the perhaps more mundane matter of staging, the production I am (hopefully) going to see is said to be a "digital" production:  

Towering, moving digital panels create an immersive virtual world. Astonishing costumes and props imagine an unknown future.  

Given that the QPAC performance space is not the largest on the planet, perhaps that will work well, but I would be curious to see a more traditional production, too.  This article goes into detail about the history of its staging, with this amusing bit:

From 1896 on (when Bayreuth finally mounted its second Ring ), critics took issue with the fixed, semaphoric style of acting Cosima imposed there, which many thought more forced and unnatural than what her late husband's actors had done twenty years before. In 1889 Shaw wrote, "Bayreuth has chosen the law of death. Its boast is that it alone knows what was done last time, therefore it alone has the pure and complete tradition, or, as I prefer to put it, that it alone is in a position to strangle Wagner's lyric dramas note by note, bar by bar, nuance by nuance ." In 1896, he judged the Bayreuth style of acting to be an amateurish display of tableau-vivant attitudes, the striking of stupid poses by singers who were often little more than "animated beer casks." (From earliest days, Ring tourists mocked the girth of "youthful" Siegfrieds and "enchanting" Brünnhildes. Romain Rolland, at Bayreuth in 1896, described "the vast padded bulk" of a Sieglinde: "From bust to backside she is as wide as a city wall.")

Forget your downtrodden Humanities degrees

Instead, Australia should introduce something like this:

Japan university awards first-ever ninja studies degree 

Japan has produced its first ninja studies graduate after Genichi Mitsuhashi spent two years honing his martial arts skills and absorbing the finer traditions of the feudal martial arts agents.

The 45-year-old completed the master’s course at Mie University in central Japan, the region considered the home of the ninja.

In addition to researching historical documents, Mitsuhashi said he took the practical aspect of being a ninja to heart.

“I read that ninjas worked as farmers in the morning and trained in martial arts in the afternoon,” he said.

So Mitsuhashi grew vegetables and worked on his martial arts techniques, in addition to copious ninja study in the classroom.

As far as our government's policy to fiddle with the cost of going to University, I was surprised to see that the two most cost reduced courses are maths and agriculture.  I can understand the need for more maths teachers, but there is a problem with not enough tertiary qualified farmers?

As for the other changes:  I am not really bothered by the fee increase for some areas of oversupply (we could do with a lot less law graduates who have little hope of finding a job - not to mention every university under the sun setting up a law school because it is relatively cheap to do), but I am bit annoyed at the way all possible Humanities studies have been lumped together. 

Why pro-mask now?

I would still bet money on the reason Fox News has started to promote mask wearing is because of concern about being the target of litigation.

This article argues that such litigation has low chance of success - but I would not put it past litigious America to try it, and still it would risk costing the network in legal fees and embarrassing publicity.