Yes, amusing

(A reminder: I did start, but didn't stick with, The Man in the High Castle.  Too bleak, and alternative history is generally not my thing.)

Cult watch continues

Just when you thought he couldn't get any nuttier, Steve Kates at Catallaxy gives Trump credit for catching COVID:

Trump has done everything possible, including catching the disease and then recovering from it, to demonstrate his bona fides in regard to the pandemic.

That has more than a touch of messianic imagining about it - He came and risked His life for us so that He could show us the pathway out of adversity.   

Hard to believe he has lost friendships over his cult membership, isn't it?  

[American] cooking discussed

First:  for future reference - I followed this American recipe for Mongolian beef stir fry on the weekend, and it worked out pretty good.   Just did it in the big, non stick skillet on the wok burner (not the wok), and the larger area of heated surface from the skillet did make it easier to sear both the beef and vegetables.  Woks on home stovetop gas wok burners only get hot in the tiny centre, and even then not really searingly hot like the jet burner powered woks at restaurants.  I'm going with the skillet from this point on.

Second:  that recipe came from an American site where I noticed a recipe for "home made sloppy joes".  I was never 100% sure what was in them, but now that I know, it's a really unappealing way to eat mince:

And once again I say - what is it with American cooking and onion and garlic powder.  It's like they invented the stuff (maybe they did?), but you would be hard pressed to find an American meat dish that does not use one or the other, or both.  They're obsessed with it.

Third:  OK, I am being mean to American cooking, because I did start recently watching Adam Ragusea, who I see has a million subscribers on Youtube.  I like the style of his videos - the concentrating on the food and the cooking, not his face; his rapid commentary; his sense of humour.  And when he's not showing how to cook something, but does a video about the history of some food or condiment, he's pretty interesting too.  I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know about vinegar by watching this one recently:

 

I see from the net that he doesn't have a professional background in food at all.  (He used to teach journalism and is also a musician.) I guess that makes him a little like our own Adam Liaw.

As with a lot of  home made Youtube content, I reckon it mostly depends on having a likeable personality come through in the videos.   I don't mind watching, for example, the former travel vloggers who have been doing a "watch us renovate our crappy RV home over the next 8 months" series.  They're just a likeable couple.  

She's officially now "positively annoying"

I'm talking Patricia Karvelas, who was never at risk of losing her presumably high paying job as a well known ABC broadcaster, but whined endlessly during the Melbourne lockdown about how hard it was not being able to send her kids to school. Anyway, here are recent tweets that I find annoying (these and her endless stupid studio dancing tweets): 

A fair assessment

On the topic of the Queensland election:  I think everyone expected Labor to win, so it was no surprise.  Queensland politics never seem to attract politicians who I find particularly impressive, which makes it harder for me to have an interest in following its intrigues closely.   

That said, the LNP current leader Deb Frecklington I find has a quite unappealing media presence and manner.   I was surprised she didn't just resign at the concession speech on Saturday.   Probably because the LNP has had particularly talentless and charmless politicians at the State level for such a long time now.

I was actually quite rude to some LNP "how to vote" poll booth people on Saturday.   Only because they looked university student age.  They gave me a cheery greeting, and I responded by asking what was wrong with them, that they were too young to be in such a stupid party.  They took it quite well, actually - I think one of them said "I don't really have a come back for that" (and no one else was within hearing distance, it wasn't like I was trying to make a scene.)  I have never done this before, but really, Young Liberals are just hard to put up with.

Update:  Oh, so she has resigned today.  Why not say on Saturday that she'll consider her future and make a decision in a few days' time?

Good luck, I say sarcastically...

I've mentioned this always coked-up sounding MAGA tradie from Melbourne who now comments all the time at Catallaxy:

There is much excitement generally at that blog as they grasp at all and any last minute figures that they think proves Trump is about to have not just a slim victory, but a glorious, vanquishing-his-enemies-forever type of victory.   

If Trump loses, and I expect he will, Catallaxy will be an interesting place to watch.   Steve Kates, at the very least, will require sedation for a month.

Monday quantum physics

I have been watching Youtube videos on quantum physics recently, and thought that these two were very good, from the point of view of explaining how the ideas evolved.  As the guy who made them says:

More in-depth than most presentations for laypersons, but without the mathematical rigour needed by a specialist in the field.

These are 5 years old now, and unfortunately, he seems to have stopped at two.  Although I haven't watched his other videos, it would seem he got into some huge fight with both creationists and post-modernists and stopped making videos.

Anyway, so I don't lose track of them in future:

 

and

Insulting commentary from both sides of the fence

No doubt France has a serious issue with Muslim extremism - as does Britain with the random terror attacks that have gone on there over the last few years.  It is an awful problem.

However, given that the latest attack happened inside of a Catholic church, this has sent the Catholic cranks of Catallaxy over the top:

Given that the Muslim population of France is apparently 5,670,000 or so, I wonder if CL thinks all of them should be rounded up and sent on a decade's long flotilla of ships over the Med to, where exactly?, just some random bit of desert where they can be quietly dumped?   Or only the "recalcitrant" Muslims - which I assume you can assess by asking them all to fill in a survey question "Are you for or against the beheading those who insult the Prophet?"   

Anyway, CL does actually do something useful later on the blog - he points to a Twitter commentary on the matter by ageing Mahathir Mohamad, in which he brings up the low standards of the West by noting that many women there wear g-strings and people go nude on some beaches.   That is, shall we say, unhelpful.   (I particularly dislike how his criticism which reads "The killing is not an act that as a Muslim I would approve" which leaves open the suggestion that he thinks other Muslims with sterner opinions than him might not be unreasonable in approving it.*)

Time for him to ride off into the sunset, I think.

*  Oh, I see know that he did also say that Muslims have "the right" to kill millions of French based on how many Muslims the French have killed in history, but I think that tweet has been deleted.   That's even worse, I suppose, but it is more along the lines of one of those rhetorical flourishes (equivalent to the CL one) where you know he would say if pressed  "I wasn't meaning that it should be done - of course that would be terrible in reality")

All the more reason not to like sport

I was surprised by this:  

I would have guessed more Democrat donations from the NBA.   And is baseball more Democrat because it has its biggest  fans in liberal, North East states?

Anyway, I'll take it as another piece of evidence in justification of my general rule of thumb that sport is basically all bad and a waste of time and money, except for when it leads to 24 hour bar openings. 

But Mum, I don't want to control monkey brains with light

 

I underestimated the stupidity of Trump supporters/cultists

I was opining earlier in the year that the problem for Trump would be the inability to hold campaign rallies due to COVID-19.  Little did I realise that not only the intense narcissism of Trump would mean that he would insist on them, but his dumb cult followers would attend, even in the freezing cold:

At least seven people were hospitalized and 30 had to receive medical attention during and after a Tuesday evening campaign rally with President Trump in Omaha, Nebraska.

You would have to suspect that campaign induced spread of COVID is going to be a significant factor in reduced Republican turn out.

Update:  just been amusing myself on a meme generator page -

 

That rare thing: stand up I like

You all know I am generally not a big fan of stand up comedy.   But no one probably recalls that I thought the (deliberately?) amateurish show Aaron Chen Tonight, which turned up on some obscure ABC secondary channel slot a couple of years ago, was likeable.

Well, superstardom seems to be escaping Mr Chen, but Youtube has thrown up at me some more recent short clips of his stand up (probably because I watch Uncle Roger videos), and I do find his whole comedy persona pretty funny:

Much worrying speculation

Maybe you've seen on Twitter this nightmarish scenario:   Trump loses, but not by enough of a margin to immediately concede, and in fact announces a bunch of lawfare to try to knock out enough votes to let him cling on.

At this time, perhaps midway through a couple of months of chronic uncertainty as to who the real winner is, China decides to make a move on Taiwan, confident that America doesn't know who speaks for them anyway (and while redneck militia take pot shots in the streets against Democrat protesters who think Trump must step down.)   

It has a worrying sort of plausibility about it, no?

The BBC wrote:

Is China preparing to invade Taiwan? It's a question being discussed with feverish intensity on many China forums right now. And what should be one of the top geopolitical concerns for the incoming US president.

The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

In response some newspapers ran headlines suggesting an invasion is imminent.

It almost certainly isn't. But there are good reasons for the urgency with which China experts are now discussing the future of Taiwan.

I don't know:  the main reason for doubting the scenario is that it would seem China would be buying itself a region full of bitter and unhappy citizens - more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.

 

 

Girls are weird

Sorry for the Bart Simpson-like analysis in the heading, but this does seem really odd to me:

Girls who do not live with both parents from birth to age two may be at higher risk of starting puberty at a younger age than girls living with both parents, research published in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests. The authors suggest that their findings support the hypothesis that stress in early life may influence puberty onset. The risk of early puberty onset could potentially be mitigated by interventions aiming to improve child wellbeing, according to the authors.  

A team of researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, U.S., found that girls who did not live with both parents from birth to age two were 38% more likely to begin their period before the age of 12 compared with girls who lived with both parents. Girls who did not live with both parents between the ages of two and six were 18% more likely than girls whose parents lived together to begin their period before the age of 12.

I am surprised that stress at such a young age can have such a specific biological effect 9 or 10 years later.

My quick assessment of Rogan as not worth paying attention to seems vindicated

 

Yes. Increase the court.

This woman is showing no good sense on anything:

 

Another worry

At the Washington Post:

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 coronavirus cases in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, even though the flight was only 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”...

Masks were utilized by nine of those 13 infected passengers, with one child not wearing a mask and three passengers’ mask use “unknown,” the report noted.

A full return to something like "normal" international air travel is likely some way off.

 

The writing process

I thought this interesting, because I have a story I would like to write (would prefer it as a screenplay, to be honest) but while I can imagine certain scenes very well, haven't got the overall thing to work in my mind yet:

 

If you want some really worrying reading today...

...try this abstract from a new paper in Nature Geoscience:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity above 5 °C plausible due to state-dependent cloud feedback

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of Earth is defined as the global mean surface air temperature increase that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For decades, global climate models have predicted it as between approximately 2 and 4.5 °C. However, a large subset of models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project predict values exceeding 5 °C. The difference has been attributed to the radiative effects of clouds, which are better captured in these models, but the underlying physical mechanism and thus how realistic such high climate sensitivities are remain unclear. Here we analyse Community Earth System Model simulations and find that, as the climate warms, the progressive reduction of ice content in clouds relative to liquid leads to increased reflectivity and a negative feedback that restrains climate warming, in particular over the Southern Ocean. However, once the clouds are predominantly liquid, this negative feedback vanishes. Thereafter, other positive cloud feedback mechanisms dominate, leading to a transition to a high-sensitivity climate state. Although the exact timing and magnitude of the transition may be model dependent, our findings suggest that the state dependence of the cloud-phase feedbacks is a crucial factor in the evolution of Earth’s climate sensitivity with warming.

What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.