Excuse me while I swoon over Julia pointing out something useful to know

I happened to see Julia Gillard on the ABC breakfast show today, speaking in her role as Chair of Beyond Blue.

She said that suicide figures for Victoria (of course, the worst affected Australian state with COVID) for 2020 up to August were now available and there had been no increase in numbers over the previous year.   Still, they are worried about the potential for an increase, and hence have produced a video with an suicide prevention message (8 people who once felt suicidal, but came out of it OK.)

This "no increase in suicide numbers despite COVID lockdowns for 7 months" message is not something I had heard of before.   Instead, we get Right wing hysterics like Creighton going on and on about how this is going to devastate people, sending the message that it's reasonable to feel desperate because everything's going to Hell and yes, if you have lost your job your life is ruined, and for no reason.   (Mind you, even that Ian Hickie and the AMA have been talking about increased suicide risk - which is fair enough as a warning to government to try to bring in an adequate response, but I would have thought does run the risk in its reporting of encouraging a sense of inevitability in the vulnerable.) 

So, the positive message of no increased suicides so far should be given more prominence, I reckon.

And, by the way:  OMG, Gillard plays the role of useful ex Prime Minister with such exquisite grace, humour and intelligence, doesn't she?   I sort of swoon over her reasonableness on all appearances she makes.   Compare her performance to a snippet of Tony Abbott last night on Mad as Hell, making a weird "joke" about virgins during a press appearance in England about the lost cause of Brexit - he is still making people like me grind their teeth over what a complete embarrassment he is.      

 Update:  I see that the "no increase" message did appear in the news (at least, on the ABC, the Guardian and The Age - all of which might still be considered Left leaning sites, although not sure about the Age anymore) at the end of August - not sure that I saw it given much prominence on TV news, though.   Certainly, at the start of August, there seems a flurry of "suicides will increase" stories on sites like 7 News. 

Thanks, social media

Another appalling story of malicious rumour mongering on social media in India:

Wild rumours about coronavirus are fuelling opposition to testing in the northern Indian state of Punjab, reports BBC Punjabi's Arvind Chhabra. 

 

"Human organs are being smuggled," Sonia Kaur, who lives in a village in Punjab's Sangrur district, tells the BBC. "Not just the villagers but the whole world is scared of this. Social media is full of such news."

 

Ms Kaur says she has heard of people's organs being harvested under the guise of diagnosing and treating coronavirus. She is echoing the fears of countless others in rural Punjab who are sceptical of the virus.

 

Rumours are flying fast in Punjab that the virus is a hoax, that people who don't have Covid-19 are being taken away to care centres, where they are being killed for their organs, and that bodies are being swapped to allay suspicion. 

 

A mix of fear, anxiety and easy access to social media, especially WhatsApp, has hastened the spread of these baseless rumours in the form of messages and doctored videos. 

 

This has led to protests and even attacks against health workers. Ms Kaur's village was one of several in Sangrur that did not allow health workers to collect samples for testing - crowds pelted them with stones, screaming "Go back, we don't want to be tested", until they left.

One would hope that the Indian government is running some sort of attempt at educating school kids, at least, not to believe rumours on the internet.   Educating old adults in rural areas may well be impossible, I guess...

 

Almost makes you wish bad problems were even worse

This may be kind of obvious, but I haven't noticed too many people saying it:  the problem in a social sense with both COVID 19 and climate change is that both problems work in ways which are very real and very disrupting, but leave a significant proportion of the population being able to claim no personal and immediate effect, despite what scientists and other experts tell them.

This enables the intense politicisation of the response, and a lack of social cohesion.

I mean, if you get a big enough problem - your country at risk of invasion during a war as a perfect example - people will put up with enormous privation and social disruption for years at a time.   Not only that, but some people find the social cohesion from a massive joint response can make the whole thing almost a positive experience.   (I think the ageing scientist James Lovelock says that about his World War 2 years.  By the way, he's 101 now.  Can't be with us much longer.)  

The social difficulty you get is when a problem is real and bad, but not quite bad or immediate enough to shut up the politically and ideologically motivated contrarians from engaging in arguments with cherry picked "evidence" and large slabs of denial of expert evidence. 

You want to feel depressed about the future of cheap overseas travel?

Then read this commentary at CNA:  

Does COVID-19 spell the end of long-haul budget airline flights?

American policing noted

Even by American policing standards, this is outstandingly nuts:

A 13-year-old boy with autism was shot several times by police officers who responded to his home in Salt Lake City after his mother called for help.

Linden Cameron was recovering in a Utah hospital, his mother said, after suffering injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, his intestines and his bladder.

Golda Barton told KUTV she called 911 to request a crisis intervention team because her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was having an episode caused by “bad separation anxiety” as his mother went to work for the first time in more than a year.

“I said, ‘He’s unarmed, he doesn’t have anything, he just gets mad and he starts yelling and screaming,’” she said. “He’s a kid, he’s trying to get attention, he doesn’t know how to regulate.”

She added: “They’re supposed to come out and be able to de-escalate a situation using the most minimal force possible.”

Instead, she said, two officers went through the front door of the home and in less than five minutes were yelling “get down on the ground” before firing several shots.

 

 

Count me "amused"

An ancient key to Tenet?

I hadn't heard about this before:  Nolan's film Tenet seems to have clear ties to an old palindrome square:

The ancient palindrome that explains Christopher Nolan’s Tenet

A puzzle dug up all over Europe holds the key to Tenet — and turns it into more than a movie.

I'm not sure if I should see the movie at the cinema.  It seems to universally be considered far too complicated and puzzling as to what is going on, but many reviewers think it is well worth the viewing anyway.

I'm a high scorer

If I admit that my score on this appears to be 11 or perhaps even a 12, can I reclaim status as a "conservative"?:

Mystery phone

I have gifted myself (but not yet opened) a new, low mid-range (as is my cheapskate wont) Android mobile phone, even though it is seemingly the most under reviewed phone on the planet.

It's the Vivo X50 Lite.  Now this is a major brand in Asia (I believe), and the X50 Pro got lots of review attention (at least within Asia) due to its internal gimbal camera, which is a pretty cool feature.   But I have never seen that model on sale here, and I don't spend a lot of time trying to walk and take videos, so I didn't see a need to track that down. 

JB Hi Fi and Officeworks do sell cheap end Vivo phones, and they seem pretty good value, with nice screens.   The X50 Lite came out not so long ago, originally at $499, but it has been on sale recently for $399.

The price drop might be because no professional reviewer is reviewing it.  Even on Youtube, where it seems hundreds and hundreds of Asian people try to make a living by posting video reviews of nearly every phone that is released by any company, I think all of the videos are just information or comparison ones where they list the features of the X50 Lite alone or against other similarly priced phones.

Why is no one interested in properly reviewing a (now) $400 phone with 8Gb ram, 128 internal storage, an AMOLED screen, and all of the sensors which should see me get through the apocalypse as long as I also have a solar powered re-charger??

Here are the full specs.  I suspect the processor is very mid range, but if you don't play games on your phone, I doubt it matters that much.  

This phone is so under the counter that when I went to Officeworks to buy it, it had not been put on display, ever.   They had 4 out the back, and it was on line, but they just never bothered displaying it.  (JB Hi Fi has had it on display, so I know what it looks like.  Lovely screen.)

Anyway, by next week I will have opened and used it.  As with all new mobile phones, I expect I will be impressed by the upgraded abilities in my hand.   And I will review it here.  Ha.

System failure of the worst kind

This guy (who stalked and shot his teenage kids in their house, following the daughter from her bus to find out where they lived) just sounds like he lived his entire life as a dangerous sociopath (but of the kind who could con women into having relationships with him):

Police records showed the man who shot and killed his two teenage children in a domestic assault in Sydney’s northern suburbs had been violent towards or stalked four prior domestic partners and one of his other children.

In 2010, John Edwards was refused a gun licence due to a prior AVO, the coronial inquest into the deaths heard on Monday.

But despite a long history of stalking and assault charges registered on the central police system known as the “COPS” database, Edwards was able to successfully apply in 2017 for a “Commissioners Permit” to undergo gun safety training at Hornsby and Ku-ring-gai gun clubs...

The inquest into the deaths of John, Jack and Jennifer Edwards has heard Edwards had an extraordinary relationship history, leaving behind six partners before Olga and 10 children in total.

Police interviewed all but one of the former partners, and found Edwards had a constant pattern of violence, control and stalking. Several former partners and one of his children had made police reports over decades.

Olga herself had reported two incidents to police, including an incident in February 2017, when she had been separated from Edwards for a year, and he stalked her in her "hot" yoga class....

Ms Richardson also told the inquest that Ku-ring-gai Pistol Club refused Edwards membership in 2016 after he was threatening to an officer of the club.

The Ku-ring-gai club informed the Hornsby Gun Club it had refused Edwards membership but did not let any authorities know. Edwards, who owned five firearms, completed his training at St Marys gun club, which had no knowledge of his history.

Doesn't this indicate that the system should be capable of being marked "guns to be surrendered and never to be obtained again"?

The singing tyrants

OK, so there's a reasonable chance you've seen it elsewhere, but I think it's only been out for less than a week, and I thought it was pretty interesting:



The most realistic looking thing about it (in my opinion) is the way their heads bob around.

I think I have linked to the original post of it, so it will presumably stay up, as I notice it is being taken down elsewhere.

People are suggesting that it shows what "deep fake" videos can do, and a lot of very serious people worry that politics is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with the poisonous effect of deep fake propaganda in future.

Call me too optimistic, perhaps; but if what fake videos can do is highlighted by examples such as this, doesn't it make it more likely that people will be more sceptical of  online propaganda using any form of video?   Not sure that I can convincingly make that case out when there are literally millions of Americans (nearly all Republicans) who at least partially believe in the ludicrous QAnon conspiracies - but perhaps with conspiracy and propaganda it's somewhat perversely the case that the lowest tech communication (simple text messages) promulgates the best?   All people have to believe is that such messages come from an insider - they don't have to speculate about whether the image, video or voice has been faked or manipulated on the way.       

Nick Cohen being sensible

I have been saying a similar thing for at few years now:

I once believed that you should fight the extreme right and extreme left “at the same time and for the same reasons”. The phrase had a fine sound to it, even if I say so myself, and it remains true enough. Anyone who has witnessed the public shaming of those who deviate from approved leftish ideology will find Boris Johnson’s attempts to purge the cabinet and civil service of all who disagree with him familiar. The politics may be different but the oppressive spirit is the same.

But in this terrible year, it is worth saying that moral equivalence is not the same as practical equivalence. As the world stands, the fight against the radical right is a fight for the preservation of liberal democracy. The fight against the far left is a fight for justice for the individual denied the freedom to express his or, and more frequently today, her opinions without post-Stalinist inquisitors demanding she confesses her ideological crimes or lose her job.

Both fights are essential but the difference in scale is so enormous it barely makes sense to put them in the same category.

He should also have mentioned climate change...

Reviews you didn't need

*  I've not finished it yet, but I can fully understand why the second season of Umbrella Academy has been so popular on Netflix.   It's terrifically directed, and the story is flowing with far fewer angsty relationship diversions than the first season, which did drag at times.   It's overall much wittier, too.    A very enjoyable bit of comic book based nonsense.  
*  How's this for a late review:  finally got around to watching Mulholland Drive on the weekend.   I thought I had read years ago that the movie was capable of making sense, but I didn't work it out for myself and had to go check on Reddit for the explanation.   It does have strong Twin Peaks vibes,  and I had forgotten that it had started out as another TV project that was converted into a movie.   Unfortunately, I have to say that the overall impression it gave me was that David Lynch was quite overrated - Twin Peaks was fun and enjoyable in its day, but his movie work doesn't really do much for me.   He really did make Los Angeles look like a physically unattractive dump in virtually every interior and exterior shot - perhaps that was revenge for his "creative differences" with the business at the time?  Another thing the movie made me realise (again) was how extraordinarily tame by modern standards R rated movies of even a couple of decades ago could be in pornographic and violent content.  We can all blame the internet and modern video games for that...

A good answer from Biden

Have a look at this short clip.   As someone on Twitter says about his answer:

Trump campaign taking on water

I get the impression there is probably panic developing inside the Trump campaign for the following reasons:

*  sufficient polling seems to be coming out now to conclude that the GOP convention did not lead to any substantial improvement for Trump;

*  Trump's popularity within what you would normally consider the natural ally of any "law and order" President - the military - seems to have taken a substantial hit from which it is unlikely to recover.

Remember I said when the RussianS paying for hits on American troops story came out that I thought it was going to important?   Although it did quickly disappear off the news radar, I still reckon it may have been important for hurting the military's regard for him, as was shown by the recent polling indicating that he had lost popularity there.  Now that credible reporting is out that he privately has the most ridiculously selfish view of military service [confirmed by a Fox News correspondent, no less!], I can't see his popularity with those who he was probably hoping would back him in a post election crisis over disputed election results will ever be returning.

Truth be told, the upper reaches of the Pentagon would have been privately grinding their teeth from day one about what a complete ignoramus he is, but it has taken some time for the dismissive view of him to filter down to lower ranks.  

Even the kerfuffle about whether Stars and Stripes would close looks bad for Trump.  He has said it will not close, but the timing of the suggestion it would close within weeks looks very peculiar.  

*  The Trump open encouragement for his supporters to vote twice smells of desperation. 

*  Trump's judgement in what to say about real or virtual dictators who kill their political enemies remains as "off" as ever.   I know it won't matter to his cult followers, who are blind and dumb, but surely Trump's campaigners don't think this is a useful line to be running in a week when another Russian poisoning of an opposition politician is confirmed:

At a small campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa., President Trump on Thursday praised himself for wanting to “get along” with Russia and said that when he hears people talking about Russia in the news he “turns it off.”

“They always say, ‘Trump is radical, he is off the — he is too radical, he will get us in wars,’” Mr. Trump said. “I kept you out of wars. What happened in North Korea? I got along with Kim Jong-un. They said that’s terrible. It’s good that I get along. If I get along with Russia, is that a good thing or bad thing? I think it’s a good thing.”

*  That said, it is a worry that the electoral college seems so skewed now that Biden may have to win the popular view by a really substantial margin to be sure of getting enough electoral college votes.

Family performance

Given that I lack any ability at all with musical instruments, and even the simplest sheet music may as well be hieroglyphics to me, I find it particularly remarkable that I have a daughter (rapidly approaching the end of Year 12) who can now play pieces like this on her violin (no visuals, just the audio):



There is one other piece she played recently that I might upload too.   

Otters as pets

Apparently, Youtube channels devoted to pet otters have become a thing in the last year or so.   They are very cute to watch, if this one is anything to go by:



A 2019 article in Nature Conservation discussed the trend:

In response to growing reports of otters in the pet trade, and suggestions that the popularity of pet otters on social media may be driving demand, we collated YouTube videos of pet otters to test for trends in the number of videos published, their exposure (number of views) and popularity. We used English-language search terms to provide a global overview, as well as local language search terms for four South East Asian countries identified as being of potential importance in the pet otter trade (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam), and Japan. We found that not only had the number of videos depicting pet otters increased in the last two to three years (2016–2018), but that their popularity and/or engagement had also increased. Notwithstanding some country-level differences in the details of effects observed, the greatest increases in both the number of videos produced and their popularity occurred in Indonesia and Japan. At a global-level, commercial “viral” video sites appeared to be influential in terms of posting highly popular pet otter videos. At a national level, potentially influential videos tended to be produced by four or five individual otter owners....

Our results show an increase in social media activity that may not only be driving the apparent increase in popularity, but also amplifying awareness of the availability of these animals as pets, as well as creating and perpetuating the (erroneous) perception of otters as a suitable companion animal. At a global level, there are welfare concerns associated with otters in the pet trade, and, in South East Asia specifically, there are serious conservation concerns.

 As cute as Aty the otter is in the video above, I would have thought the cost of feeding an otter fish would be enough disincentive from trying to have one as a pet.   (But then again, we know the huge cost of feeding lions and tigers hasn't stopped people keeping them as "pets" in all sorts of countries.) 

Worst Attorney General

Greg Sargent at Washington Post on why Barr is such a dangerous jerk (short version - he buys into the Right's decades' long, culture war inspired, escalation of anything to the left of them as the absolute evil enemy of everything good in the world) :

Barr gave a shocking interview to CNN late Wednesday that left zero doubt about his intentions. Barr refused to denounce Trump’s suggestion that people should try to illegally vote twice (by mail and in person), supposedly to test vote-by-mail’s validity. Trump brazenly repeated this on Thursday.

Barr also repeated his frequent claims that vote-by-mail elections have been riddled with fraud and that a foreign power could fabricate thousands of mail ballots. Both are utter nonsense. But in saying them, Barr is telegraphing his willingness to legitimize Trump’s eventual effort to try to invalidate untold numbers of mail ballots, which Trump has already told us is coming.

Meanwhile, Barr is party to another extraordinary move: Trump just approved a memo declaring the intention to restrict federal funding to Democratic-led cities designated as “anarchist jurisdictions.” Barr will determine which cities earn this label.

This is being widely denounced as illegal, and it may go nowhere. But let’s focus on its stated rationale: A city will be designated as such if it has “permitted violence and the destruction of property” and “forbids the police force from intervening to restore order.”

The idea that these officials have deliberately allowed violence and restrained police from restoring order is crucial. In reality, officials are working amid extremely complex, fast-moving conditions to balance the restoration of order and public safety with respect for civil liberties and peaceful assembly, while (ideally) avoiding abuse of the awesome powers of state violence....

Here's the more general point:

Trump’s reelection case is premised on not just on the idea that Joe Biden and Democrats are too weak to control leftist violence. It’s also that they are willingly allowing those forces to run rampant, in the full knowledge that they are out to destroy the very possibility of civil society itself.

Both Trump and Barr have delivered major speeches spelling out this worldview. Commemorating Independence Day, Trump likened his own struggle against “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists” to the struggle to defeat fascism in World War II.

Trump is at war with the left, to rescue civil society itself. He recently declared: “We’re saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.”

For his part, Barr, speaking to the Federalist Society last November, infamously declared that “it is the left” that poses the true threat to the “rule of law,” through a “scorched earth, no-holds barred” war against Trump.

Barr also voiced support for a strong executive, unshackled by oversight and legal nitpicking, declaring that it has delivered glory at moments of great national struggle against fascism, communism and “Islamic fascism,” which elevates the war on terror into an epic civilizational showdown. As Laura Field details, Barr belongs to a movement of “reocons,” or authoritarian reactionary conservatives.

Indeed, Barr is drawing on a long tradition of “anti-liberalism,” which is hostile to liberal democracy in part precisely because it doesn’t cast politics as a perpetual emergency struggle against an overarching enemy, and instead values proceduralism and compromise, which sap the moral will and decisiveness of the polity.

Barr did not explicitly declare the war against the left akin to the war with fascism. But Trump has. And by labeling the left an existential threat to the rule of law alongside a paean to the glory of the executive unfettered at times of crisis, he creeps right up to the precipice of this claim....

 Barr’s grotesque exaggerations of the leftist threat help give Trump justification for urging right-wing vigilantes to take matters into their own hands, lawlessly.

Good analysis.

Some COVID thoughts

*  the Victorian lockdown certainly seems to show, again, that strict lockdowns work;

*  there seems to be surprisingly infrequent polling on whether Dan Andrews and his government are suffering in popularity over this.   Polling back on 11 August indicated 70-something percent support for the current lockdown;  perhaps it has eroded a bit since then?  On the other hand, as case numbers come down, and it seems to work, I wouldn't be surprised if support is still pretty high.   We need to know, so (if public support is still high) we can gloat at the tiny fists being waved about in anger at Catallaxy about this is the worst civil rights crisis ever.  Sinclair just loves to go all civil/property rights on matters which kill and sicken people (in favour of the thing that will sicken them), just as he did with tobacco plain packaging. 

*  news about the possible long term effects of COVID infection on the heart is pretty worrying; except to the likes of Adam Creighton, for whom there is no hill high enough to die on over this.

*  Fauci is never coming back into Trump's (or his cult's) "good books".  No one sensible would ever want to be there, anyway.

The French method

I followed a link to an article in The Economist about a big new university in France, and read this  explanation as to rather different way they do tertiary education:

A HUGE MODERNIST university campus is emerging amid farmland on a plateau south of the French capital. The University of Paris-Saclay, officially launched this year, merges some 20 higher-education and research institutions. It has a teaching and research staff of 9,000, catering to 48,000 students—more than Harvard or Stanford. Specialised in science, it is France’s attempt to create, in President Emmanuel Macron’s words, an “MIT à la française”. Such ambition once seemed fanciful. Yet in August Paris-Saclay stormed into the Shanghai world university ranking, grabbing 14th place overall and 3rd in Europe after Cambridge and Oxford. It took the top international spot in maths.

France’s two-tier higher-education system baffles outsiders. Three-fifths of its 2.7m students are enrolled in universities. These are public. Until recently they did not select undergraduates at entry; they charge no tuition bar a small enrolment fee, and are often sneered at as second-rate. An elite minority, meanwhile, attend selective grandes écoles, for which entrance exams require at least two years of post-secondary-school cramming. To confuse matters further, research is traditionally not carried out in universities or grande ecoles but in specialised public institutions.

Over the years, this unusual structure has led to much French frustration about foreign perceptions. The country has world-class engineering schools, economics departments and mathematicians. After America, France has more Fields medal-winners for maths than any other country. Yet its fragmented system—partly down to the deliberate splitting of big universities after the 1968 student protests—has left it under-performing in world rankings and lacking global star appeal.

I had no idea the French were so into maths.   [At this point, I'm tempted to make a reference to menage a trois, but will leave that to actual comedians.]

Anyway, it looks like a successful merger.