Pollution in Indonesia

Seeing I am in the mood for South East Asian talk, I watched this recent document from Germany on a very polluted river in Indonesia:



Most of the chemical pollution is from the textile industry, which seems to have dozens of factories lining this river.

I missed a few minutes, but my son said that one factory guy's attitude was that as long as the waste water didn't make your hand feel itchy, it was OK to release into the river!  And then there was the rice contamination.  All very bad, and rather unclear how much the government might be doing to make and enforce standards.

So, there's another thing to feel guilty about:  apparently, Uniqlo (my preferred place to buy casual shirts) sources a lot of its material from these Indonesian factories.  (Also H&M, but its clothes seem designed for 20 year old stick insects, so I don't buy from them.)

Rubbery figures

Yesterday's story about Top Glove in Malaysia making lots of money from the heightened demand for medical rubber gloves made me realise that I didn't really know where most of the world's rubber now comes from.   The perfect question for the internet!

World Atlas has this table:

I wouldn't have guessed that China now produces more rubber than Malaysia. 

Actually, those figures are just for 2013, and I see that other sites say that the top three are Thailand, Indonesia, then Malaysia (and the amount produced by countries 3 to 6 in the table above are pretty close - so maybe 2013 was just a bad year for Malaysian rubber plantations for some reason?)

Anyway, not sure I knew this bit of rubber trivia:

Although the Hevea tree is native to South America, cultivation there is limited due to the high prevalence of leaf blight diseases and other natural predators.

 See - globalisation is good.

I might have guessed that the rubber glove industry doing well would mean that the price of natural rubber would be holding up.   But I guess it only uses a tiny amount in the big picture.  Hence The Association of Natural Rubber Producing Countries has this bit of not so great news:

The key factor behind the abnormal fall in the prices of natural rubber (NR) since mid-January is the huge drop in the world demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The world consumption of NR dropped by 15.7% during H1 2020 (Jan-Jun 2020) as per the revised estimates. In China, the country accounting 40% of the world demand, the consumption fell by 20.1% during H1 2020.

It is relieving to observe that the worst is almost over as far as the world consumption of NR is concerned. The world consumption is now set to enter positive territory by increasing 1.4%, year-on-year, during Q3 2020 (Jul-Sep).  The consumption in China, in particular, is expected to increase by 0.8%, year-on-year, during the same quarter. Although the International Monitory Fund a week ago has further scaled down the global economic outlook for 2020, to -4.9% growth from -3.0% projected in April, the consumption sector of NR has almost returned to normal with the exception of a few countries. 

Now that I am on a rubber bender, so to speak, reading up on the history of the product, I see that Brazil was the victim of, well, if not industrial espionage, certainly undercover dirty business (there are a lot of similar examples from other products, over the centuries):  

From 1850 to 1920, businessmen were pushing entrepreneurs and traders to increase the amount of rubber extracted from Amazonian trees. During this period, the Brazilian Amazon was the only source of rubber and they controlled the price, making rubber expensive. At the same time, as more and more industry was developing in Europe and USA, more uses for rubber were being found [4]. Rubber was such an important material for Brazilians that they prohibited the export of rubber seeds or seedlings. However, in 1876, H. A. Wickham managed to smuggle 70,000 rubber seeds, hidden in banana leaves, and brought them to England. From those seeds, only 1,900 seedlings survived and were sent to Malaysia to start the first rubber plantations in Asia. This marked the beginning of the end for Brazil as the world’s main rubber producer. 

Monday, kind of depressing, stuff

*  So even the most corrupt Attorney General we've seen in a lifetime thought Trump's commutation of Stone would be corrupt?   Mitt Romney's reaction makes me like him, and Mormons, all the more.  There is just no debating this as corruption of historic proportions. 

*  Saw a tweet indicating the thickness of Arctic ice at the moment is pointing to a very low figure for ice extent by September.   Really looks like it may break the 2012 record - which in a way is not a bad thing, in terms of focussing the public's attention on global warming:

*  Remember I posted recently how I had started watching some off beat travel vlogs on Youtube by middle aged English guy "Bald and Bankrupt"?   On the weekend, he posted a short video explaining that he had, foolishly by his own admission, travelled to Serbia after the start of COVID 19 and caught it there.   Became very ill, was hospitalised, got to watch other patients dying around him, still feels very weak, and remarked how it seems to have even affected the, um, normal operation of his penis (!).   The guy is, I think, 45, so it's a cautionary tale of how ill it can make even the relatively young.   Oh - I see it seems he took down the video?  Or is it back up?  Dunno what's going on.  Also, it seems he has been popular for a long time - he seems very well known on Reddit.

*  If you want one, sort of, good thing that has come out of COVID-19:  if you had shares in the Malaysian company Top Glove, the biggest medical glove manufacturer in the world, you would be doing very well:



I'm sort of happy to see a Malaysian company doing well - at the political level, on the other hand, they're still jerks:

Six journalists including five Australians are being interrogated by Malaysian authorities who have accused them of sedition and defamation after the broadcast of a documentary about migrant workers in Kuala Lumpur during Covid-19.

Debating debates

So, Jazz Shaw at Hot Air thinks that it's Democrats who are fearful of Biden debating Trump:

It’s a highly uncomfortable subject for Democrats and their media allies, but it’s also a glaringly obvious truth. Nobody supporting Joe Biden wants to see him go into a debate with Donald Trump. Biden can barely manage reading a teleprompter in front of a camera in his own basement these days, even if he has multiple chances to get the words right. And his “aw, shucks” Uncle Joe routine probably won’t look very impressive when he has to answer a barbed attack. The fact is that Trump is just 100% Trump every minute he’s on camera. This has many liberals frightened of the prospect of a presidential debate between these two.

I think this is delusional.

As I have said before, in 2016 Trump got away with mouthing general motherhood statements about America and playing up to the Right's decades long vilification of Hillary Clinton.

He cannot take the same approach against Biden, a white male for whom polling is indicating Republican thrown mud is not sticking.  Trump has been showing increasing emotional fragility in his tweets, and there is a wealth of broken promises and lies made while in the job that can be listed against him.  Yes, he can and will say black is white, and his cult followers may believe him, but it will not likely work with those that he needs to swing back to him to win another election.

And, of course, people are exaggerating the significance of verbal stumbles make by Biden.

I had read that the Trump team had been asking for more debates, not fewer; and that this is normally a tactic taken by the underdog.   I think that this is just a sign of bravado on the part of team Trump, and that there will be people who are thinking the same way I am - that Trump's at risk of falling apart in debates against Biden, and they should be looking at a way of getting out of them.

Update:   someone wrote this in WAPO about Trump and debates on 26 June -

History also gives him reason to be wary. Sitting presidents — among them, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2012 — often stumble in their first debates because they arrived both overconfident and out of practice.

This year, the stakes for Trump could hardly be higher. His poll numbers are dropping, and there are signs that even Trump’s bluster-loving base is starting to have its doubts about him, now that it is seeing how he handles himself in a real crisis.

So as he looks ahead to the debates, the embattled president might want to focus on winning the old-fashioned way: by studying the issues, showing up prepared and commanding the facts.

That last paragraph is hilariously improbable.

A very obvious point

And surely their [White House press secretaries] salary is not high enough for this kind of credibility debasement?:

American failure

A good detailed piece in New York Magazine on the American failure to control COVID 19.

The only bit I am annoyed with is this:

With the exception, perhaps, of New Zealand, practically speaking, across the entire west, nobody has managed to properly and preemptively prepare for this pandemic.

I think Australia deserves some credit.

I more or less agree with this, though:

The first failure is one of hubris: Western nations looking on a disease outbreak in Asia and feeling protected by a sense of cultural superiority and wealth, and disregarding the emergency response in China and other nations as a reflection not of the seriousness of the disease but of an imagined, innate conformist authoritarianism. The second is a bit harder to name, but it does seem peculiarly American — a pattern of failure following failure, with each successive failure normalized by the last, which should have shaken us out of complacency.

Update:  more on the American problem.  Or should we just be calling it - the American problem caused by the American Right?: 

Ohio state Rep. Nino Vitale is urging his constituents not to get tested for the coronavirus, flouting advice from health officials — and from another Republican lawmaker, Gov. Mike DeWine.

"This is what happens when people go crazy and get tested," Vitale wrote on Facebook this week. "STOP GETTING TESTED!"

Vitale was evidently incensed by an order from DeWine and state health officials that people in seven Ohio counties with severe outbreaks must wear face coverings when out in public. That order took effect Wednesday.

Vitale shared an altered graphic about the order — in that version, there is an extra message at the bottom:

"!! NEVER GET TESTED !!"

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.