A joke that was waiting to be made

 

There's some kind of deep irony going here...

...when its Right wing places like the Wall Street Journal and Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy decrying the effect of Left wing "woke" ideology on education standards, while it's the very same outlets which are full of readers who think they got a proper education before modern teachers ruined everything, but are also anti-Covid vaxxers and climate change deniers (or "do nothing" proponents.)   

Which is not to say that there isn't a valid argument to be made over the way education seems particularly prone to certain fads and fashions and ideologically motivated arguments.   But, seriously, look in your own backyard first, critics.

 

Some local pushback on the Big Lie

Allahpundit's post about the Republican election officials who have had enough of the "audit" in Arizona is a good read.

No, it's not really a bus, either...

Lots and lots of people on Twitter have said this in response to a tweet which seemed a little too excited about a Chinese thing:

But honestly, and at risk of being labelled a Tankie, I don't think it's right to call it an articulated bus.

The technology was discussed in an article at The Conversation a few years ago:

Trackless trams are neither a tram nor a bus, though they have rubber wheels and run on streets. The high-speed rail innovations have transformed a bus into something with all the best features of light rail and none of its worst features.

It replaces the noise and emissions of buses with electric traction from batteries recharged at stations in 30 seconds or at the end of the line in 10 minutes. That could just be an electric bus, but the ART is much more than that. It has all the speed (70kph), capacity and ride quality of light rail with its autonomous optical guidance system, train-like bogies with double axles and special hydraulics and tyres. 

It can slide into the station with millimetre accuracy and enable smooth disability access. It passed the ride quality test when I saw kids running up and down while it was going at 70kph – you never see this on a bus due to the sway.  

The autonomous features mean it is programmed, optically guided with GPS and LIDAR technologies, into moving very precisely along an invisible track. If an accident happens in the right of way a “driver” can override the steering and go around. It can also be driven to a normal bus depot for overnight storage and deep battery recharge.

As the article notes, Sydney might have been a lot better off with this system running down George Street (although I didn't realise how extensive the light rail in Sydney was until my last visit.)
 

Libertarian derp plus technobabble..heh

That unpleasant disease

This seems rather surprising:

Doctors are reporting a twenty-fold increase in people presenting with syphilis-related eye infections, as Melbourne grapples with a surge in cases of the sexually transmitted infection.

In the early 2000s the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital was recording approximately two cases per year of ocular syphilis.

A team of doctors at the hospital in East Melbourne then researched the condition from 2006 to 2019.

In 2018, 17 cases of ocular syphilis were recorded with infections increasing to 21 in 2019, seven of whom were women.

I would assume that this indicates that there are more women (and men) than before who are unaware of having caught it (because I would have thought this is not one of the likely first signs of infection.)  Then again, the CDC says:

Like neurosyphilis, ocular syphilis can occur at any stage of infection. Ocular syphilis can involve almost any eye structure, but posterior uveitis and panuveitis are the most common. Symptoms include vision changes, decreased visual acuity, and permanent blindness.

News stories of increasing rates of the disease usually talk about it in the context of gay men (or "men who have sex with men"), especially in light of reduced condom use due to reduced fear of HIV (and that PrEP medication gaining popularity.)   But this report seems to make a point of emphasising the number of women who are catching it.   A fair enough warning, I guess...

Eyewitness accounts can be the most compelling

I have said it before, but I will repeat - there may well be good explanations for the US Navy "UFO" videos, because it is hard to understand properly what you are looking at, and the aircraft and camera movement effects can be deceiving.   I'm also pretty sure that new radar systems can give bogus targets, so if there is any talk of new sophisticated radar systems seeing new stuff, I don't assume it is real.

Also, maybe it's just his physical appearance, but this dude does not sound or look like the sharpest person to be making intelligence assessments on UFO incidents:

He in fact gives me the impression of being an attention seeker.  

However, that Navy pilot David Fravor's account of his 2004 visual sighting of a "tic tac" object above the water, which then zoomed up towards him as he moved down towards it, has always sounded to me to be pretty convincing evidence of something completely novel and inexplicable as known technology.

But - I did wonder if he might just turn out to be a self promoting fantacist.   I mean, he seems smart and sincere and sensible, but you never know.

Well, that idea seems to be dealt with adequately by last weekend's 60 Minutes episode which for the first time showed us a second (female) pilot who was on the same sortie (in a second F 18) and backs up everything Fravor says on the many interviews he has been on.  She also appears smart and credible.  

   

It is very hard to see how their sighting could be a case of mistaken identity:  the most obvious "tic tac" shaped thing in the skies would have to be a balloon, but they both seem to say that it moved in complelely un-balloon like fashion, including departing the scene at incredible, almost instantaneous, speed. 

It's pretty fascinating that they also say that the whole ship knew within an hour or so that they had seen something that was commonly called a UFO, and everyone thought it was just a big joke.   Pretty amazing that it took so long for the story about it to actually come out.  

You know the other multi witness, high weirdness, case that this reminds me of - the O'Hare airport sighting of 2006.   The object sounds as if it was about the same size, and zoomed off at the same incredible speed.   I have never (to my recollection) seen interviews with the witnesses to that case, though.

 

Reason to live in high income country

New Scientist reported recently:

Piping an oxygen-rich liquid through the anus could be a life-saver. A new treatment for failing lungs that involves such a process has been successfully tested in pigs....

The researchers anaesthetised four pigs and put them on a ventilator that gave them a lower breathing rate than normal, so their blood oxygen levels fell. When they gave two of the pigs enemas of the oxygenated fluid, replaced once an hour, their blood oxygen levels rose significantly after each infusion. The same effect happened when the fluid was delivered by a tube surgically inserted into the rectums of the other two pigs.

If there is a similar-sized effect in people, it would be enough to provide a medical benefit, says Takebe. He thinks the approach could be especially useful in low-income countries that have fewer intensive care facilities. “Ventilators are super-expensive and need a number of medical staff to manage,” he says. “This is just a simple enema.”

One problem is that gut function may be impaired in people sick enough to need intensive care, which can cause diarrhoea, says Stephen Brett at Imperial College London. “It’s too early to say if this has got any legs,” he says.

Yes, interesting point about the enema aspect.  I wouldn't know for sure, but I didn't think it took all that much liquid insertion via enema for the intestines to want to shoot it out again.   How's that supposed to be stopped?

A worrying age related sign

I wore a black lambswool cardigan to work today.  And a white singlet under my shirt.  I was comfortable.

In my defence, the cardigan was from Uniqlo, which tries to make them cool: 

Yes, that's just what I look like in  my cardie.  (Actually, more like this dweeb from another page on their website:

I'm the one on the right.  Ha ha.)

 

Climate contrarianism raises its stupid head again

Of course, the Wall Street Journal would give high publicity to a new book by a guy who has been well identified as a climate change contrarian - a "do nothing" advocate, it's too expensive - and people like "Stagflation!" and "leave the tobacco companies alone!" expert Sinclair Davidson are impressed and his blog is covering the book like it's finally vindication.  

Ken Rice has a useful post showing how Koonin's arguments have been looked at and dismissed for a number of years.  Just because he has a new book repeating his past bad arguments doesn't change that.

UFOs, politics, and changes in world views

UFOs are in the news, particularly the Right wing news, again:

 

Ezra Klein did an interesting column last week in the NYT about what it might mean if there is about to be a disclosure of proof of alien intelligences operating on Earth.  I think this view is probably right:

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

Leave the bears alone

I watched the 2020 Japanese movie Ainu Morir on Netflix on the weekend, and I recommend it at least as an educational exercise, despite some misgivings.

It's set in what I take to be a real Hokkaido village* where the old native folk from that part of Japan make a living from tourism.  The credits at the end would seem to indicate that a lot of people were playing themselves.

I have never read much about the Ainu - as far as I know, they are largely ignored by Japanese society.  The film might well be an attempt to remedy that.  As such, it is a pretty sympathetic treatment of them and their (barely holding on) culture.

The film's key plot is about their bear sacrifice ritual, which made it particularly relevant to me, given  my musing recently about the ubiquity of sacrifice in old human societies.   However, I am not sure it satisfactorily walks the fine line between respect for cultures facing modernity and the unwarranted romanticism of their tribal beliefs.  

To explain more, you would have had to have seen it.   Anyone who has, feel free to comment below.

 

*  Yes, here it is.   

Update:    Apart from the lengthy Wikipedia entry on the Ainu, there is this Smithsonian Magazine article which is a good read.

On worshipping bears generally, there's a short history here of different groups that have done it.  

I kept wondering while watching whether there might be an ancestral connection between Ainu people and native Americans, especially those in Alaska.  But no, genetic investigations indicate that's not the case.  They were just both really into bears. 

Well, actually, it would seem that according to that article, any native peoples living in bear country thought bears were worth worshipping.  Not to mention eating, but in a very ritual fashion: 

Erk.

Flaky Tony and the numbers

So, Tony Blair is in the news having a panic attack about "wokeness" killing the Left.  

While I don't doubt they are some culture war issues on which the Left looks a bit nuts, gullible, and sometimes illiberal, I wish Blair and this type of commentary would bear in mind that total Left wing vote is not as bad as that for Labour (or Labor) alone.

Look at the 2019 vote:

I assume you can call the Liberal Democrats centre Left?  Labour, them and the Greens make up 46.5%.  True, if you add Brexit Party to the Cons, their vote is up to 45.6%.  But my point still stands.

Blair might spend his time better arguing for preferential voting than sounding like Mark Latham lite.

 

Update:   see this article in Quartz looking at the terrible results that they get from their first past the post system.  It obviously stinks.   And I didn't realise that they had attempted to introduce a preferential system of sorts in 2011.   Then PM Cameron opposed it - another way in which he helped damage the country, I see.

My point about Blair is stronger than I realised - he would be better campaigning for another go at electoral reform, perhaps using a simpler preferential system

That's a lot of rabbits

It would seem, according to this article, that a lot of American backyards could raise a lot of protein for the household: 

People eat a lot of protein in the U.S. and the average person needs 51 grams of protein every day, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI). That comes to 18,615 grams each year or, for an average household of 2.6 people, 48,399 grams per year. Americans love burgers, but few people have room to raise a steer next to the garage -- and most city ordinances quake at the mere thought of a rogue cowpie. But small animals are more efficient protein producers and are often allowed within city limits. The average backyard provides plenty of space, typically 800 to 1,000 square meters or about 8,600 to 10,700 square feet. ...

They found that using only backyard resources to raise chickens or rabbits offset protein consumption up to 50%. To reach full protein demand with animals and eggs required buying grain and raising 52 chickens or 107 rabbits. That's more than most city ordinances allow, of course, and raising a critter is not as simple as plopping down a planter box. While pasture-raised rabbits mow the lawn for you, Pearce says the "real winner is soy." Consuming plant protein directly instead of feeding it to animals first is far more efficient. The plant-based protein can provide 80% to 160% of household demand and when prepared as edamame, soy is like a "high-protein popcorn." The team's economic analyses show that savings are possible -- more so when food prices rise -- but savings depend on how people value food quality and personal effort.  

I find it hard to believe an average backyard can produce enough soy to meet a family's protein needs, but that seems to be what they are saying. And as much as I like edamame as a snack, there are only so many ways you can imagine cooking it in meals.

A worry

Story in the Washington Post:     

A mysterious, devastating brain disorder is afflicting dozens in one Canadian province

Marrero and scientists and doctors from Canada and around the world are playing detective in a medical whodunit, racing to untangle the cause of the brain disorder that has afflicted 48 people, six of whom have died, in the Moncton area and New Brunswick’s Acadian peninsula.

Those afflicted with the condition — called the New Brunswick Cluster of Neurological Syndrome of Unknown Cause, for now — have ranged in age from 18 to 85. Symptoms began in 2018 and onward for many of them, but one case in 2015 was identified retrospectively last year....

Patients experience a constellation of symptoms, Marrero said, usually beginning with atypical anxiety, depression and muscle aches or spasms. They develop sleep disorders, including insomnia so severe that they sleep only a few nights a week or not at all, even with medication. Their brains are atrophied.

Many experience blurred vision, memory problems, teeth chattering, hair loss and trouble with balance. Some, including those in palliative care being administered strong medications, suffer from uncontrollable muscle jerks. Others have rapid and unexplained weight loss and muscle atrophy.

Some have hallucinations, including what Marrero said are “terrifying hallucinatory dreams” that leave them afraid to go to sleep, and tactile hallucinations in which they feel as if insects are crawling on them. One symptom, particularly devastating for loved ones, is Capgras delusion, a belief that family members have been replaced by impostors.

They suspected a prion disease, but that does not seem to be it.  

If an environmental toxin (one from blue green algae has been suspected), you would hope it could be identified quickly.

 

Netflix movie reviewed

The recent Netflix movie Run is pretty damn good - and is exactly the sort of inexpensive looking, small cast, thriller drama which makes me think "why can't Australian screenwriters do something similar?  It doesn't have to have a big budget to work."   

I can't really comment further without spoiling the plot, except to say that it is the first movie treatment of a real syndrome that occasionally makes the news that I can recall seeing, and as such, it has a really good idea for a screenplay.  

 

Peace in our time

Of course, no one sensible thought that the minor realignments of some Middle Eastern nations in relation to Israel under Trump meant that peace had broken out forever more;  particularly with the "my way or the highway" attitude of Netanyahu.

But people who are not sensible, or just wingnut trolls, like Ben Shapiro, are looking for a way to say it's Biden's fault: 

I really shouldn't have posted this, as it is just rewarding a troll:   but he is such an obnoxious twerp.

Unseasonal

I'm typing this in the midst of a big storm that has made it look like night outside, even though it is still 4.30pm.  The weather radar looks like this:

Actually, the storm outside is worse than that looks.

The last two nights, we have had storms starting about 1am - the first one had a lot of lightning and wind.

As a long term resident of Brisbane, I can honestly say this is unusual and unseasonal weather for May.  The odd autumn/winter storm in Brisbane can happen,  but they are not usually so strong, and you don't usually get a run of them over 3 days.   This is basically a summer storm pattern that's happening in May. 

Weather weirdening, I say.

 

Ancient China considered

This article in the Washington Post is rather interesting:

It’s a golden age for Chinese archaeology — and the West is ignoring it

It also gives a (very short) summary of ancient Chinese civilisations, including this (my bold):

The dominant narrative has presented the origins of Chinese civilization as rooted in a singular source — what is known as the Three Dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou), situated in the Central Plains of the Yellow River valley in contemporary Henan Province, Shaanxi Province and surrounding areas. These dynasties lasted from roughly 2,000 B.C. to the unification of China, in 221 B.C.

In the late 1920s, Chinese archaeologists began to unearth what turned out to be the last capital of the Shang Dynasty (dating to circa 1250 to 1050 B.C.) near Anyang, in Henan province, right in the heart of the Central Plains. These excavations revealed a city with a large population fed by millet agriculture and domesticated animals; there were palace foundations, massive royal tombs, evidence of large-scale human sacrifice and perhaps most importantly, cattle and turtle bones used in divination rituals and inscribed with the earliest Chinese texts. The sophistication of the society that was revealed in these digs helped to solidify belief that there was a single main source of subsequent Chinese culture: This was its epicenter.

As I have said before, what was it with civilisations at that time and sacrifice (especially human sacrifice)?   

Anyway, the current excitement the article talks about is about further archaeological finds from a completely different site:

But finds at Sanxingdui and other sites since the 1980s have upended this monolithic notion of Chinese cultural development. The Sanxingdui discoveries, which are contemporary with the Shang remains, are located in Sichuan, hundreds of miles southwest of the Central Plains, and separated from them by the Qinling Mountain Range. The site is similarly spectacular. At Sanxingdui, we see monumental bronzes, palace foundations and remnants of public works like city walls — as well as the recently discovered, ivory, anthropomorphic bronze sculptures and other objects. Crafts reveal extensive use of gold, which is not much used in the Central Plains, and the agriculture is different too: Rice, not millet, was the foundation of the cuisine. In short, it seems clear that Chinese civilization did not simply emerge from the Central Plains and grow to subsume and assimilate the cultures of surrounding regions.  Instead, it is the result of a process whereby various traditions, people, languages, cultures and ethnicities have been woven together in a tapestry that is historically complex and multifaceted.

I suspected that CGTN would have coverage of the Sanxingdui site, and it does.   This travel show from a couple of years ago shows that it has a pretty flash museum which looks well worth visiting:

  

As the very first comment on Youtube says, the artefacts look rather Mayan-ish.  Or at least, one of the Mesoamerican cultures?    (The large scale human sacrifice is another similarity, of course.)

So yeah, I agree with the guy who wrote the WAPO article - Chinese archaeology is remarkable. 

Smoking through the lesions, at least it kept his hands busy

There's an article in the journal Pastoral Psychology from 2003 with an unusual (and to my mind, improbable) theory: 

I argue that the decline in moral disapproval of masturbation in the American religious culture over the last half-century is directly responsible for increased moral disapproval of homosexuality. Moral disapproval previously directed toward masturbators is being redirected instead toward homosexuals. 

Yet it's still interesting to read because to bolster his case, the author spends a lot of time showing how intense (and medicalised) the disapproval of masturbation had been in the couple of centuries before the mid 20th.   He talks about Kant's completely over-the-top condemnation, which I already knew about;  but there were things new to me too.   Sigmund Freud, for example:

As Menninger notes, Freud considered masturbation “the primary addiction,” and suggested that other addictions (alcohol, tobacco, morphine, etc.) are a substitute for and means of withdrawal from masturbation (p. 34). His physician-biographer, Max Shur, noted that Freud viewed his compulsive addiction to smoking, which he could not relinquish in spite of near-cancerous lesions in his mouth for which he submitted to many painful operations the last 14 years of his life, as a substitute for the primary addiction of masturbation (p. 34).

Hence the title of this post.

One might have expected that he would be calmer about the practice, but not really:  his condemnation is pretty much the same as used in religions (and Kant), and he had little sympathy for a son worried about it:

As Szasz shows, Freud did not view masturbation as a cause of mental insanity, but he did contend that neurasthenia (a condition whose symptoms include lack of motivation, feelings of inadequacy, and psychosomatic symptoms) may be traced back to a condition of the nervous system caused by excessive masturbation or frequent emissions (1984, p 349). Freud also considered masturbation “perverse” because “it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it” (p. 349). Thus, masturbation is problematic on moral grounds because it departs from conventional, genital, heterosexual intercourse aimed at procreation. Menninger notes that when one of Freud’s own sons came to him with worries about masturbation, he issued a strong parental warning against engaging in the practice, and this, according to another of Freud’s sons, led to an estranged relationship between them (p. 34). Szasz notes the absurdity of Gay Talese’s use of the term “this Freudian age” in a book published in 1980 that promoted “a therapeutic ideology of sexual salvation through masturbation” (1984, p. 336).

As for the medical approach to the activity, it remains bizarrely funny to read that cause and effect could be so ridiculously mixed up:

...in a recent article, “Remembering Masturbatory Insanity” (2000), he returns to the subject, noting that, from the very beginning of scientific medicine, masturbation (or “self-abuse”) was a handy scapegoat when medical practitioners could not identify the cause of a particular disease: “By the end of the 1700s, it was medical dogma that masturbation causes blindness, epilepsy, gonorrhea, tabes dorsalis, priapism, constipation, conjunctivitis, acne, painful menstruation, nymphomania, impotence, consumption, anemia, and of course insanity, melancholia, and suicide” (p. 2). 

As with witchcraft a couple of centuries before that, it sure made for easy diagnosis of a problem:  

 R. H. Allnott reported in 1843 that when one of his patients “entered the room with a timid and suspicious air and appeared to quail like an irresolute maniac when the eye was fixed steadily on him,” there was no doubt of the cause of the patient’s problems (p. 32). When Allnott “directly charged” the patient with masturbatory behavior, he would usually admit it.

And the attempts to help included surgery, which sounds very similar to a modern vasectomy, which I did not think had any particular influence on libido:

The medical journals of the late 19th century were replete with articles describing surgical and other procedures designed to eradicate masturbation. Writing in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1883, Dr. Timothy Haynes described a surgical procedure that he had developed for curing “hopeless cases of masturbation and nocturnal emissions.” Indicating that he has frequently been called upon to care for victims of self-abuse, his normal procedure is to help the “perverted” state of mind of the victims by counseling marriage and even, at times, the immorality of a mistress. But some cases are so utterly desperate, the individual so destroyed mentally and physically, that he began to wonder whether some help could be provided even at the expense of the procreative powers. Judging the scar of castration to be an intolerable stigma, he developed a less extreme surgical procedure, which involved removing parts of the spermatic duct. He would make an incision midway between the external inguinal ring and the testis. This incision provided access to the duct, from which a half inch was cut off, and the “slight” wound was then closed with a suture.

He claimed it worked in some cases - but one would have to guess it might be more an elaborate placebo effect.

As I have speculated before, it's hard to believe that all of the public was ever completely convinced of the harmfulness of the practice, despite an apparent uniformity of medicalised condemnation.  

This led me to another article, and a fairly esoteric one, about the cryptic mentions of masturbation (well, probably) in the diary of a 17th century Scotsman.   The more interesting part of it is the description of the legal and religious condemnation of the practice, which apparently technically carried the death penalty for a time, but no actual application of that law is known.   (Phew).   The writer points out that when Europeans started reading more, the educated could look at Greek and Roman literature as painting it as nothing remarkable, and...:

However, one snippet indicates Scottish tradition took bestiality very seriously:

It's not the death sentence I am so surprised about - it's the idea of someone being tried in secret at night and drowned "discretely" before (say) the parents knew why their son hadn't come home the day before.  Of course, it is unclear (given there were no records to be kept!) as to how often that may have happened.

That's a dark note to end on, but it's hard to know how to end a post like this.   Not a happy ending. (Ha ha.)

Update:   well, through the wonders of Sci Hub, I have now read an enlightening 1997 article about how Freud's Vienna Circle of psychoanalyists, meeting around 1907 - 1912, got into arguments about masturbation, with Freud having a major falling out with Stekel over his (Stekel's) take that it was basically harmless.    There's even a Freudian explanation for why Freud couldn't accept Stekel's views!:

The debate with Stekel continued in Freud’s mind: his conscience ordercd him to fight the temptation to resort to the bclief in the harmlessness of masturbation, because of the danger of “neurasthenia.” He was unable to free himself from this theory, which was in this respect, however, nothing but a justification of a taboo installcd in his childhood, by his father Jacob Freud, who had discovercd his son’s “self-abuse” and will have threatened him with castration if he did ever play with his genitals, according to Kriill (1986, IlOff, 142; cf. Oerlemans 1949, 44). Stekel had come close to the mainspring of Freud’s “onanism leads to neurasthenia” theory. Freud, however, in attempting to honor his fathcr, prevented himself from this insight by silencing his rebellious son” Stekel (cf. Kriill 1986, 1890.

Despite Freud's refusal to change his mind, the articles notes that by the late 1920's, most psychoanalysts had adopted Stekel's "meh, it's harmless" views.    I see that Freud didn't die until 1939, so I wonder if that irked him.