No meat Saturday

Had these for lunch:

They were good.  Made in Malaysia.   

 

Made this for dinner:

That's my latest attempt to make a vegetarian/vegan burger patty that sticks together well.  It worked better in that regard, but I still was not completely happy with its texture.  

 

For my future reference, this time I sort of followed the Youtube recipe that appears at the previous post I linked above, but with some variation:

 

1 can black beans

1 can lentils

1/2 can of chick peas

1/2 cup or so of grated raw beetroot

1/4 cup of rolled oats

1/4 cup of nutritional yeast (that stuff's not cheap, by the way)

Some re-hydrated dried shitake mushrooms (probably barely 1/4 cup by the time I squeezed the liquid out - next time I would add much more)

2 tablespoons of coconut oil 

2 teaspoons of tapioca starch (for binding effect - I think it worked, but could still go with more next time)

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

salt (I forget - I think 1/2 teaspoon)

pepper (I ran out - was intended to be 1/2 teaspoon) 

 

Of course, the ingredients were blitzed (with a hand blender this time) to a rough consistency - you don't want a smooth paste, of course.

Next time, I propose dropping the lentils, perhaps just going with a full can of beans and chick peas, more shitake mushrooms, a bit more tapioca starch, and add some crushed walnuts at the end for more texture.  I am perhaps inclined to put in a bit less smoked paprika and add some other herb too, but I am not sure what.

Speaking of Carlson

I agree wholeheartedly with Max Boot's recent column: 

In office, Trump was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy. Now it may be Tucker Carlson.

The Right and UFOs

Hey, here's a enjoyable article at Slate:

What UFOs and Joe McCarthy Have to Do With the Assault on the Capitol

which covers some stuff I hadn't read about before - the Right Wing interest in UFOs and their representation in 1950's science fiction, and then moving forward into Right Wing interest today in paranormal stuff and (in particular) Tucker Carlson's interest in running UFO content too.

This is a bit of a worry, given my own interest in UFOs - although I don't really follow the topic closely now.  I was more on board when it was a liberal interest:  I mean, Close Encounters of the Third Kind paints the aliens as merely misunderstood and somewhat child-like.   (As was ET a few years later.)

I guess there were plenty of Right wing style aliens to be feared in the late 70's, early 80's too (I suppose Alien could readily have been seen as a communist analogue if it had been made in the 1950's).   But interest in UFOs in the 60's and 70's was more a liberal, alternative lifestyle, alternative religion sort of thing.   Perhaps it was in the 1990's (with X Files and the whole alien's are into anal probe or changing our DNA stuff) that it started taking on the more paranoid Right wing character. 

 

Republican Party fractures

Yeah, yeah, so Trump was acquitted; but followed by a very clear denunciation of his  behaviour by McConnell, which had been preceded by former Trump suck up Nikki Haley also making a clean break from Trumpism.   Then Lindsay Graham, the southern weirdo who seems to be playing a continual game of "I love him, I love him not" with Trump, makes it clear that he will try to convince Trump to continue supporting the party, and harrumphing about the impeachment being ridiculous, etc etc.

This points to some serious disunity issues down the track.

The best overall take on the impeachment that I read was by David Frum in The Atlantic, basically arguing that despite acquittal, Trump still lost.  

Perhaps the "put Trump behind us" side is just hoping that Donald will soon be too busy defending himself in various courts over various actions to be bothered thinking about trying to control the party from Florida, and in that way they won't have to deal with his nutjob base and the state based GOP branches which are, it would seem, still fervently pro-Trump.

On the pessimistic side of the question, though, is this piece on CNN:  Is the GOP's extremist wing now too big to fail?

I have said it before, but I still think it's true:  if there is going to be a clear case of a Right Wing anti government terrorism attack in the USA, as the security services obviously fear may happen, it would be better for the country for it to happen in the near future rather than in (say) a couple of years time, in order to send a message to the Republican base that this is where Trumpish coddling of violence takes them.

A terrible "best picture"

So, my son likes crime and gangster films and has been keen to watch Scorsese content on Netflix over the last year or so.   I can be cooler on the genre and Scorsese in particular, considering him over-rated and always feeling that his commercially successful movies have a very limited range of thematic interests.  

Which leads us to The Departed, viewed last night.

As it happens, I had watched (with my son) the original Hong Kong movie it was based on - Infernal Affairs - sometime probably last year.   I did so on the basis of its very good reviews, but as it turned out, I didn't think much of the film at all.   Little of it has stuck in my mind, and I think I didn't even bother giving it a mention here.   I didn't understand why it was so well regarded.

Well, I have to say - The Departed struck me as a terrible adaptation of the same story - although, truth be told, I had decided that after 20 minutes and only half watched bits of the rest of it.

Nothing about the movie, transplanted to Boston, felt realistic to me.  Everything felt hyped up to the point of incredulity - it is chock full of top notch actors with hyped up dialogue that didn't feel credible; acting that felt hammy, and (of course) much more violence than the original movie.   

The direction and/or editing was deliberately different to, and much worse than, his best films.   It has some very short takes and fast editing that seemed pretty pointless.  I don't know what he was trying for, but it did occur to me (and I see now that there was some commentary to this effect) that he was perhaps trying to emulate the style of Tarantino - who you may remember I regard as a trash director of B or C material that remains so despite the added gloss.

And - I am happy to say - that although my son derided me for my early dismissal of its quality, by the end of the movie he actually said "unfortunately, it kept all of the bad qualities of the original movie."   He wasn't prepared to say that this meant it was a bad movie - that would be going too far to agreeing with my early assessment - but close enough.

I had completely forgotten how well regarded this film was when it came out in 2006, and that it had won best picture at the Oscars.  The Wikipedia article notes that some have said it was a bit of a consolation prize for Marty for having lost so many previous nominations for better movies, and apparently even he said he won because: "This is the first movie I've done with a plot".   (An exaggeration, of course, but I didn't realise he acknowledged the relative plotlessness of the likes of Good Fellas and - in particular, I say - Casino.) 

Anyway, a terrible movie all around.

Friday esoteria - bay leaves

I assume everyone with the slightest interest in cooking would agree - if you live in a climate where they are easy to grow, you should have a bay leaf shrub.  They are used in so many recipes, after all.  

But I was thinking the other day that I didn't know much the history of this odd leaf.   A bit like the oyster, it's funny to think about how someone, sometime in the past, was the very first person to chow down on something that does not obviously seem like food, and discovered it was worthwhile eating after all. 

I didn't realise that it is the same leaf that:

... constituted the wreaths of laurel that crowned victorious athletes in ancient Greece.

Here's more on why it was considered such an honourable leaf (and yes, as is typical in silly Greek myth, rape plays a part):

According to legend the Delphi oracle chewed bay leaves, or sniffed the smoke of burning leaves to promote her visionary trances. Bay, or laurel, was famed in ancient Greece and Rome. Emperors, heroes and poets wore wreaths of laurel leaves.

The Greek word for laurel is dhafni, named for the myth of the nymph Daphne, who was changed into a laurel tree by Gaea, who transformed her to help her escape Apollo’s attempted rape. Apollo made the tree sacred and thus it became a symbol of honour. The association with honour and glory continue today; we have poet laureates (Apollo was the God of poets), and bacca-laureate means “laurel berries” which signifies the completion of a bachelor degree. Doctors were also crowned with laurel, which was considered a cure-all. Triumphant athletes of ancient Greece were awarded laurel garlands and was given to winners at Olympic games since 776 BC Today, grand prix winners are bedecked with laurel wreaths. It was also believed that the laurel provided safety from the deities responsible for thunder and lightning. The Emperor Tiberius always wore a laurel wreath during thunderstorms.

 And from another source, yet more on the leaf's ritualistic importance:

The Temple of Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, used many bay leaves. The roof was made of bay leaves, and priestesses would have to eat bay before giving their oracles. This may have been aided by bay's slightly narcotic qualities. Thus bay leaves are said to aid with psychic powers, particularly prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, protection, healing, purification, strength, wishes, magic, exorcism, divination, visions, inspiration, wisdom, meditation, defense, and accessing the creative world. Israelite society consider the bay leaf as a symbol of victory over misfortune; they were very impressed by this tree. Ancient Mediterraneans said this tree radiates protective power and prevents them from misfortune, so it is planted near houses to keep lightning away. 

It's starting to sound like the minor league magic mushroom of the pantry.

I see you can make a tea from the leaves - perhaps I should give that a try. 

Speaking of which, this article points out that if you want an idea of what flavour you are adding to a stew by including it, try it as a tea.   I know the flavour it imparts to food seems subtle, and I do wonder sometimes if in a blind taste test I could which version of the same dish had used bay leaf in it;  but I am pretty sure that it gives off a nice aroma while cooking, and I think there is a flavour left in the dish. 

So, there you have it.

I have some esoteric educational material with which torment my (young adult) children over the dinner table the next time I use them.

The problem with daughters

I hadn't heard of this before:  from the start of an article at The Economist, before it slips behind the paywall:

 DAUGHTERS HAVE long been linked with divorce. Several studies conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a couple’s first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers involved speculated that this was an expression of “son preference”, a phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring.

Work published in the Economic Journal, however, debunks that particular idea. In “Daughters and Divorce”, Jan Kabatek of the University of Melbourne and David Ribar of Georgia State University, in Atlanta, confirm that having a female first-born does indeed increase the risk of that child’s parents divorcing, in both America and the Netherlands. But, unlike previous work, their study also looked at the effect of the girl’s age. It found that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no more linked to couples splitting up than sons are. “If fathers were really more likely to take off because they preferred sons, surely they wouldn’t wait 13 years to do so,” reasons Dr Kabatek. Instead, he argues, the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.

And, sorry to blame daughters in my post title...

A Jim Holt review that considers future lives

Oh!  I haven't read anything by Jim Holt for ages - he was a favourite writer on science matters for a long time.

But on a whim I checked New York Review today, and he has an interesting review entitled The Power of Catastrophic Thinking.    Actually it's a review of a cheery sounding book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by one Toby Ord.

The basic question the book and review addresses is the extent to which we should value future lives, and at what cost to our current lives if some sacrifice is needed.  All very relevant to the question of climate change, which does get a mention, with this somewhat surprising statement:

Could global warming cause unrecoverable collapse or even human extinction? Here too, Ord’s prognosis, though dire, is not so dire as you might expect. On our present course, climate change will wreak global havoc for generations and drive many nonhuman species to extinction. But it is unlikely to wipe out humanity entirely. Even in the extreme case where global temperatures rise by as much as 20 degrees centigrade, there will still be enough habitable land mass, fresh water, and agricultural output to sustain at least a miserable remnant of us. 

Gee.  I would not have thought global average of 20 degrees would barely be survivable unless you were living in a airconditioned dome anywhere on the planet - but I really don't know what the daily temperature at the poles in summer or winter would be like under those conditions.    

He does point out the runaway global warming idea next:

There is, however, at least one scenario in which climate change might indeed spell the end of human life and civilization. Called the “runaway greenhouse effect,” this could arise—in theory—from an amplifying feedback loop in which heat generates water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas) and water vapor in turn traps heat. Such a feedback loop might raise the earth’s temperature by hundreds of degrees, boiling off all the oceans. (“Something like this probably happened on Venus,” Ord tells us.) The runaway greenhouse effect would be fatal to most life on earth, including humans. But is it likely? Evidence from past geological eras, when the carbon content of the atmosphere was much higher than it is today, suggests not. In Ord’s summation, “It is probably physically impossible for our actions to produce the catastrophe—but we aren’t sure.”

Anyway, the rest of the review goes into the more philosophical and analytical issues with thinking about the value of future lives, and Holt points out some of the flaws in certain ways of thinking about it.

It's a bit too complicated to do it justice here, but here is a key section:

Ord cites both kinds of reasons for valuing humanity’s future. He acknowledges that there are difficulties with the utilitarian account, particularly when considerations of the quantity of future people are balanced against the quality of their lives. But he seems more comfortable when he doffs his utilitarian hat and puts on a Platonic one instead. What really moves him is humanity’s promise for achievement—for exploring the entire cosmos and suffusing it with value. If we and our potential descendants are the only rational beings in the universe—a distinct possibility, so far as we know—then, he writes, “responsibility for the history of the universe is entirely on us.” Once we have reduced our existential risks enough to back off from the acute danger we’re currently in—the Precipice—he encourages us to undertake what he calls “the Long Reflection” on what is the best kind of future for humanity: a reflection that, he hopes, will “deliver a verdict that stands the test of eternity.”

I guess I have always felt a similar way:  and if you are keen on an Omega Point idea, it makes it particularly important that humanity doesn't stupidly kill itself, just in case it's the only way it can be reached.

But if this is the sort of thing that interests you - just go read the whole review article (set up an account to be able to read it for free).

Good fat news

Big news for a weight loss drug:

One third (35%) of people who took a new drug for treating obesity lost more than one-fifth (greater than or equal to 20%) of their total body weight, according to a major global study involving UCL researchers.  ...

Professor Batterham (UCL Medicine) said: "The findings of this study represent a major breakthrough for improving the health of people with obesity. Three quarters (75%) of people who received semaglutide 2.4mg lost more than 10% of their body weight and more than one-third lost more than 20%. No other drug has come close to producing this level of weight loss—this really is a gamechanger. For the first time, people can achieve through drugs what was only possible through weight-loss surgery."

I wonder if it has side effects that mean it won't be used as a general diet pill.

Good anti-Trump news

Axios reports:

Prosecutors in Georgia have launched an investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, including a phone call with the state's top elections official in which the former president asked to "find" enough votes to declare he won Georgia.

Driving the news: The Fulton County District Attorney's office on Wednesday sent letters to a number of state officials — including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the other end of the call — asking them to preserve any documents related to Trump's efforts, DA spokesperson Jeff DiSantis confirmed.

Also good news:

Donald Trump’s ban from the social media platform Twitter is going to stick even if he runs for the White House again – and even if he won again, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

Reason for optimism, reason for pessimism

First, the Washington Post notes that the (presumably) soon to leave this world Rush Limbaugh has a really ageing audience anyway: 

Rush Limbaugh, the most successful talk-radio host in history, is ailing. And so is the medium he helped revolutionize over the past 30 years.

Faced with aging and shrinking audiences, competition from newer technologies and financial problems for the biggest station owners, talk radio is in decline — both as a business and a political force. Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media.....

But conservative talk radio’s foremost problem isn’t so much how many people are listening as who.

The audience that grew up with Limbaugh is now quite gray, largely people 65 and older. Fewer than 8 percent of those who regularly listen to talk radio (including public radio) are 25 to 54, according Nielsen’s research.

But, on a more pessimistic note, it looks like Fox News had a strategy meeting and decided that the way to grab back the pro-Trumpers from Newsmax and OANN is to run hard on one of the worst bits of Trump popularism - encouraging rabid fear of illegal immigration: 

 

It's really dispicable the way they try to personalise all politics in such a nasty, fear based, fashion.  It's not just "policy X will be bad for the country in this way"; it's always "the Left hates you and despises you and wants to punish you and you should be scared."

Yes, the greatest Zoom meeting accident in history

It's perfection - like it was scripted for one of those mockumentary style TV shows (like The Office) where the reaction to stupid things happening is just deadpan and no one laughs. 

Texas lawyer trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a cat

 

And maybe that's how the problems with China end?

Pandemics aren't great for birth rates, it would seem:

The number of newborn babies in China registered with the police fell by double digits last year, a sign that the birthrate is continuing to decline and worsening demographic pressures in the rapidly aging nation.

There were a total of 10.04 million babies registered with the government in 2020, 14.8% lower than in 2019, according to data released by the Ministry of Public Security on Monday.

Haven't I read that birth rates in Western countries have dropped off last year as well, even though some early thoughts were that bored couples in lockdown would resort to sex to pass the time?   Yes -  I have read that.  Perhaps they didn't take into account the dis-incentivising effect of being in lockdown with children you already have?    

Back to China:  how big is the expected demographic decline, even without COVID assistance?  Very big:

The population of China is projected to decline from 1.4 billion in 2017 to 732 million by 2100, a drop of 48%, according to a new report published in the medical journal The Lancet and authored by University of Washington School of Medicine Professor Stein Emil Vollset and 23 coauthors. The number of people of working age in China is expected to plummet. The report forecasts a decline of 64% for China's population aged 20–24 years. That is the prime age for a country’s military, the authors note.

Prison watching

I'm late to the party (it's up to season 5, I see), but I have started watching Inside the World's Toughest Prisons on Netflix.    

I've only watched a few episodes, and so far I have learned:

*  Columbian prisoners may be tough thugs, but they take very good care of their hair grooming;

*  Greenland is trying the "college group house" style of prison running which seems popular in Scandinavia, and it seems every prisoner is in there for some offence related to hashish.  

*  Papua New Guinea treats its remand prisoners to accommodation worse than my local RSPCA gives to its stray dogs.   

Each episode is pretty formulaic, I suppose, and there is something of a "meta" fascination with how the prisoners (and guards) seem to ignore the cameraman, and don't seem to "act up" to being filmed.  (OK, maybe sometimes they do.  But it is sort of hard to tell.)

I still say that the best extended documentary series about an exotic prison, and how it is run, is Happy Jail, about the (formerly) all singing and dancing prison in Cebu.   I strongly recommended it here at the time, and have told people about it in person, but have yet to meet someone else who has actually watched it. My powers of persuasion are obviously low.

A seasonal produce observation

The white nectarines this year are exceptionally sweet and cheap.

I read someone somewhere saying that all stone fruit was better this year because the farmers had to pick later, and riper, fruit due to labour shortages.  I wonder if that's true.

The insightful rabbit man

For a young guy with an obsession with rabbits, that Noah Smith sure writes well and insightfully on a variety of topics.   Here's the latest example:  The End of the War on Islam. 

An extract:

Some of America’s 16-year panic over Islam was due to terror attacks, but some was due to the fact that the American Right simply panics about stuff. It is what they do. Communism, crime, rap lyrics, the War on Christmas, Dungeons and Dragons, video games — always just one thing after another. Some of the panics are much more justifiable than others, but the supply of panic is roughly fixed.

Readers on the Right are not going to like hearing this, but some portion of the panic over Islam was not really about terror attacks, but a displaced fear of the demographic and cultural changes that were taking place in America in the 2000s and early 2010s. The conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a Muslim was obviously just a stand-in for the fact that he was part African. The fear of Sharia Law probably had something to do with the decline of Christianity in the U.S. The years of 2001-2016 were years of high immigration and rapid demographic change, and many people on the Right were afraid of that, and it was easy to associate those things with a “foreign”-feeling religion like Islam, especially given the backdrop of the War on Terror.

But the Trump Era changed this in two ways. First of all, it gave people on the Right permission to express explicit worries about one of the things they were really scared of — immigration. Instead of using the foreign-seeming-ness of Islam as a proxy, conservatives were free to point the finger at actual foreigners. Second, the Trump Era saw the reignition of America’s biggest and most fundamental and most divisive social conflict — the Black-White Conflict. Given a choice to fight about the Black-White Conflict vs. anything else, Americans will choose the former. With Antifa and BLM to worry about, who needs ISIS?

This change will be durable, I think. The GOP has decisively shifted away from the party of Bush to the party of Trump, and Trumpism has decisively shifted away from attacking Islam to attacking BLM, wokeness, Antifa, anarchism, rioters, etc. etc.

He doesn't actually mention it, but surely much of the Right's panic supply has moved onto China generically as its target.  (Which is not to say that China is not a cause for concern in many respects, of course.)  

 

Phrenology noted

I don't even know the details of the "Quillette supports phrenology" controversy, but I still found this funny:

 

Timbo in love

Martian origins

There's a paper at arXiv talking about how there is reason to suspect Mars may have actually been more hospitable to the creation of life than Earth.  (I assumed that life originating on Mars was more of a long shot theory.)   The abstract:

An origin of Earth life on Mars would resolve significant inconsistencies between the inferred history of life and Earth's geologic history. Life as we know it utilizes amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids for the metabolic, informational, and compartment-forming subsystems of a cell. Such building blocks may have formed simultaneously from cyanosulfidic chemical precursors in a planetary surface scenario involving ultraviolet light, wet-dry cycling, and volcanism. However, early Earth was a water world, and the timing of the rise of oxygen on Earth is inconsistent with final fixation of the genetic code in response to oxidative stress. A cyanosulfidic origin of life could have taken place on Mars via photoredox chemistry, facilitated by orders of magnitude more sub-aerial crust than early Earth, and an earlier transition to oxidative conditions. Meteoritic bombardment may have generated transient habitable environments and ejected and transferred life to Earth. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover offers an unprecedented opportunity to confirm or refute evidence consistent with a cyanosulfidic origin of life on Mars, search for evidence of ancient life, and constrain the evolution of Mars' oxidation state over time. We should seek to prove or refute a Martian origin for life on Earth alongside other possibilities.

You can download the paper from here.

Only joking

The conservative Rights sympathy for Putin continues its merry way, no matter how many of his enemies end up poisoned or in jail.