About that excessive movie about excess

With reluctance, as I considered there was an excellent chance I would not like it, I watched Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday (on Netflix).   

And (surprise!), I didn't care for it.

That was pretty much going to be a certainty when Matthew McConaughey turned up unexpectedly in the first 10 minutes.   Actually, while this segment was pretty funny for its bizarre aspects, he still lived up to being my personal talisman for warning that the movie will be, at the very least, badly flawed.

My main problems with the movie?:

a.    it's excessively about crass excess - in such a way that it hurt the sense of realism.  I would say it  very often seemed more cartoonish than realistic.  Even apart from the scenes of carnal excess, which (as I expected) were extreme and many, I thought the whole trading floor atmosphere seemed over the top and fake.  Too many people in too small a place; too much noise; too much adoring love for their boss when they thought he was going.   The day after watching the movie, I did see on Youtube some video showing the real lead character (Jordan Belfort), both when the movie came out, and back in the 1990's.   These reinforced my impression that the artistic licence taken in showing this world went too far.  I appreciate that some people would have wanted to see the movie to see how outrageous the life of the rich and crass could be - but to me, it looked too unrealistic too often.

b.  It is way too long - both in so many individual scenes, and overall.   I read David Edelstein's review after watching it, and fully agree with this part:

In interviews, Scorsese’s brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker has said it was hard to cut the film down from four hours. Four hours?! As I watched, I kept thinking that every scene could be snipped at the halfway point, before yet another hot-dog monologue or leering shot of Belfort’s second wife, the startlingly pretty but soulless ­Naomi, the “Duchess of Bay Ridge,” played by Margot Robbie. I figured Leo must have been sitting in the editing room saying, “No, no, don’t cut here — my favorite line is coming up — 30 more seconds — okay, a minute — wait, let it run! It’s my Oscars scene!” But no, this was Scorsese’s design. Overkill is the ruling aesthetic.

c.  While I don't say it had to be more of a morality play, as it does fit into Scorsese's love of stories about corrupt men who think they have it made and then things start falling apart, there is one key scene which is problematic:  the one where the FBI agent (the best played character in the film, if you ask me, and I did think his scene on the yacht - invented for the movie - was well written and acted) is on the subway after seeing Belfort face justice at last.  As Edelstein writes:

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible. But you’re supposed to envy them anyway, because the alternative is working at McDonald’s and riding the subway alongside wage slaves. What are a few years in a minimum-security prison — practically a country club — when you can have the best of everything?

I think Edelstein is going too far in saying Scorsese wants the audience to envy the characters on screen, but it is hard to interpret the subway scene as anything other than invitation to share a moment of doubt that maybe it's sad that more people don't get to live life to a drug addled, VD infected, lobster eating, full.   As I say, problematic.

d.  A dated gratuitousness to the display of female nudity.   I hesitate to raise this, because I can see an argument that it suits the movies and pop culture of the era in which it was set.   But I just couldn't avoid thinking about it after the scene near the end where the Swiss banker waits for his young lover under his bed sheets, but when she makes her appearance, it's like a deliberate pause for a bit of full frontal nudity before getting under the sheets, which then start flying about in a Benny Hill style caricature of sex.   That just struck me as the way it would have been done in a 1980's flick, but not these days.   Sure, earlier there was Leonardo's butt side on during a (again) pointlessly protracted sex scene, and there was a comedy flash of a (presumably) prosthetic penis; but in retrospect, I think it is fair to say that the whole movie looked dated in the way the flesh displayed was primarily female.   (Although - now that I think of it - was trying to get more gender balance in skin on display the reason for the odd scene in which the college band came into the workplace floor but with the guys wearing no shirts?   That just looked weird in its own way to me - I can't see the uber macho male brokers being impressed, and there were few females working there anyway.)  

So there you go.  My thoughts, in too much detail, probably.

  

 

He's back

Barnaby Joyce isn't smart enough to use a condom while having an affair with a staff member, yet thinks he knows better than scientists about climate change and the environment.   The only people his return will impress is the still substantial climate change denial camp in the National Party. 

And now he's back, to try to drag the Coalition away from doing anything too fast on CO2.   

I don't think Morrison's very sharp either - but perhaps just sharp enough to know that there is no future in being the government of climate change inaction.

Sure, Labor has its own problems in keeping everyone on board re this issue - but it really is the Coalition that deserves to fall apart over it.  Turnbull should have outright called for party schism over this while he was still leader ("if you want to argue the reality of climate change, get out of the Coalition").   While he  (Turnbull) seems a nice enough man, his lack of bravery on the issue at the time he could have forced it into some form of resolution means he was a failed PM.  Sorry.

China in space

I was watching a couple of videos about the first astronauts from China going to their new (partly built) space station.

The odd thing, it seems to me, is that the videos give the distinct impression that the astronauts really have nothing to do - it looks as if a couple are napping during the launch:

 

 And have a look at this short clip of the docking:   the astronaut capsule looks as if it is designed in such a way that they can't reach the control panel without using (what looks like) a walking stick: 

 

That's an odd look inside a modern spaceship, isn't it? 

 

 

Sounds fair

That's sarcasm.

This is extraordinarily ridiculous:

Magistrate Rodney Higgins, who created controversy in 2019 by embarking on a relationship with a court clerk 45 years his junior, has successfully claimed her $180,000 superannuation death benefit even though it was bequeathed to her struggling mother.

Mr Higgins, who earns $324,000 a year as a magistrate in Bendigo, made the successful claim on the death benefits of his late fiance Ashleigh Petrie after the fund, Rest Super, agreed with his argument that he was her de facto partner and therefore her “dependent”.

But the payout has been delayed because lawyers for Ms Petrie’s mother, whom The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have chosen not to name to protect her privacy, have been fighting the decision for 15 months. They have appealed the super fund’s position to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.

The multi-decade age gap between Mr Higgins and court clerk Ms Petrie sparked frenzied media coverage in October 2019. Ms Petrie, 23, was hit by a car in the early hours of Monday, October 28, 2019, less than three weeks after the first story of her relationship was published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun.

Mr Higgins, then 68, and Ms Petrie were a couple for seven months and lived together for about four months prior to her death. They were engaged in September 2019. During her relationship with Mr Higgins, Ms Petrie nominated her mother as the beneficiary of her superannuation and life insurance.

But Mr Higgins has refused the mother’s pleas to share the money, citing his hurt that he was not given a portion of Ms Petrie’s ashes. Within months of the young woman’s death, Mr Higgins returned to his partner of 18 years, Lurline Le Neuf, whom he’d left earlier that year to be with Ms Petrie. They share a riverfront home in Shepparton.

Don't stand between Higgins a wallet you've spotted on the ground:  clearly, he'll bowl you over in the attempt to get it.

 

 

Yet more Tucker led conspiracy

Ah yeah, so the FBI organised the attempt to capture politicians and make them vote in Trump.   

Seriously, America is not going to be right in the head until the Murdoch empire decides to rein in its nutball, conspiracy promoting, evening line up.   

The Washington Post (link above) has the explanation as to why it's (of course) a complete crock.

A disappointing turn by Jon Stewart

Yeah, count me as disappointed that Jon Stewart should have turned up on Colbert's show to do a silly bit about it's obvious that the Wuhan virus lab must have been the source of the COVID virus.

His delivery was funny enough that the audience laughed, but Stephen Colbert's pointing out that he wasn't being all that logical - he should consider that maybe scientists do research at labs near where the viruses they are interested in occur naturally - was the bit of reasoning that needed to be said and the Right will ignore.

Stewart's bit has made him a hero to the wingnut right.  (Oh, now he's funny, that he's said something they can agree with.  Note that the Lefty Colbert audience still was laughing - showing perhaps that the reason Right wing comedians don't get laughs is because they are just not good at humour delivery, regardless of content.)

As Allahpundit tweeted:

And someone had a theory that, in retrospect, made some sense:

In expert commentary:

American neurophysiologist and radio host Dr. Kiki Sanford tweeted: “I saw the clip and am concerned to see Stewart promoting the conspiracy... even if it's just for laughs.” Sanford noted that she sees the joke Stewart was trying to make but said “it is at the expense of people who know a LOT about this kind of thing working really hard to figure out where the virus DID come from. The ‘well it must be’ narrative isn't science.” Others responded to Sanford’s tweet noting that Stewart’s segment was both “disappointing and tragic.”

I wouldn't be surprised if Stewart ends up doing a "it was just a bit, sorry" appearance about it, actually.  

Update:  the Washington Post's The Fix column has a good look at this, including noting journals and papers which had already detailed the Colbert retort.

So that's what's going on with avocados

So I'm not the only person wondering why we seem to have a huge supply of cheap, great quality, avocados at the moment.  The Guardian, favoured paper of those who love their avocado and crumbled feta on sourdough toast, tells me more about avocados than I thought I needed to know:

...this winter, Australians can afford to eat all the avo on toast they like, with the savoury green fruit selling for just $1 (55p, or 77c) each.

The eye-watering drop in price is due to a bumper crop – the result of good weather and new trees. Australia is home to three million avocado trees; half of those were planted in the last five years alone. The trees can take just three or four years to start bearing fruit.

“Avocado production is 65% higher this year since last year,” said John Tyas, CEO of Avocados Australia. “The planets have aligned and its phenomenal.”

For avocado lovers the good news just keeps coming. New technology developed this year by the University of Queensland could see 500 new trees produced from a one-millimetre cutting in future, compared to the single tree per cutting growers get now, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

“Like many people in the developed world, Australians didn’t really eat avocado 20 years ago,” said Tyas. [*]

He credits the local appetite for the spreadable fresh produce – technically a berry – with the fact that avocados can be grown year-round. Australians also eat avocados for breakfast – with the beloved and now ubiquitous “smashed avocado” – minced with a fork, seasoned and served toast – made world famous by Sydney chef Bill Granger.

 The country’s per capita avo consumption is 4kg a year – higher than the US at 3.6kg and way ahead of the UK’s 1.4kg.

Speaking of Americans and avocados, I think they get most of their's from Mexico, and there have been stories for a few years about Mexican drug cartels pushing into its avocado industry.  That's still a problem, according to this recent Al Jazeera report:

 

Pretty incredible: having to take up arms to guard your avocado orchard.  

Anyway, back to The Guardian:

Australian avocado production has more than doubled in ten years, from 40,000 tonnes in 2009/10 to nearly 90,000 in 2019/20 – at a value of almost half a billion dollars (A$493m). Of these, 80% were Hass avocados – with the much-maligned Shepard variety making up 17%. Just 5% of this is exported.

It is likely to double again in the next ten years, said Tyas.

The rest of the article says that we're trying to grow an export industry into Asia.  But fruit fly.

Anyway, looks like now I'll have to worry about not only carrots being too cheap in future.

*   This is an exaggeration, I think.  I have a clear memory of a discussion with someone where I worked in my late 20's about how much I liked avocado on toast for a quick lunch.   He said he liked that too.  Regretfully, this is now more than 30 years ago!

A good French film

Purely by accident (I searched Netflix for "90 minute movies" on Saturday night), I came across the French (Netflix produced) film from 2020 Lost Bullet.  It's very good.

It's a car action/corrupt cop film which is lean but moves along at a nice and engaging pace, with just the right number of narrative surprises; and is pretty impressive for the quality of some of the mini-Mad Max style road action too.  (I am completely uninterested in the post apocalyptic silly world of George Miller, and the obviously CGI nature of the Fast and Furious leaves me cold too;  but put some [relatively] realistic looking, small scale car action on the screen and it can still be entertaining.)

It's well worth a look.   Once again, it has a level of complexity and realistic enough characters, but on a modest budget, which makes me wonder why Australian films can't duplicate this.

 

On China and education

An opinion piece in the Washington Post argues that America, and the West generally I suppose, shouldn't be getting into a panic over a recent claims that Chinese high school education is beating the world:

As pointed out by several experts, such as Rob J. Gruiters, university lecturer at the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge, the China ranking is a sham. The 2018 PISA tests were given to 15-year-olds only in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, four of the most urbanized and affluent areas of the country. All 79 nations and political entities participating in PISA are asked to submit results that accurately represent their schools. China has not done that, but the people running PISA do little about it.

Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on international school assessments, summed up the situation after the 2018 PISA results were released:

“There is not one but two Chinas: one urbanized, mainly on the east coast, and rapidly growing in wealth; the other rural, in the interior of China or on the move as migrants, and mired in poverty. As a rough proxy, recent population numbers put the Chinese rural share at 41 percent. PISA assesses achievement of the first China and ignores the second.”

And the education standards in the poorer parts of the country sound pretty low:

Scholars rarely get a chance to look closely at rural Chinese education, but the available information is depressing. Loveless cited studies conducted from 2007 to 2013 showing cumulative dropout rates in rural areas between 17 and 31 percent in junior high schools. Only half of rural Chinese children went to high school and only 37 percent of that age group graduated.  A 2017 study revealed that in 27 provinces the average high school classroom had more than 45 students. In 12 provinces the average was more than 55. Loveless said the government’s official goal is no more than 56 students per classroom.

 

Because it worked so well in Hong Kong, I suppose...

Maybe this proposal has been around before, I'm not sure.  But it's being pushed on CGTN now:

At last: the Left wing academic criticism of Dark Emu

In 2019 I noted that there seemed to be a clear lack of detailed academic commentary on Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, with the only criticism coming from Right wing polemicists who obviously have some culture war axes to grind.  Nonetheless, I suspected they were correct - and my theory was that the Lefty world of academia was remaining silent rather than being seen as aligned with the world of Andrew Bolt and Quadrant.

Well, at last, it appears that the world of professional academic anthropology has finally broken their silence.  See this article in Good Weekend today, about a new book by two long established anthropologists. 

Perhaps I was unfair in thinking the academics were being silent because of political correctness - it would seem that they just didn't think a book by an amateur historical revisionist was worth looking into with much urgency - which is unfortunate, give that the cultural fashion world of educationalist academia was rushing to endorse it and see it promoted within classrooms.  Some extracts:

It was not until 2019, when Dark Emu had taken on a celebrated status, that Sutton gave it his full attention. He was deeply unimpressed, as he was when he read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, the 1987 bestseller combining fiction and non-fiction which popularised the notion of Aboriginal people singing the stories of the land, without much understanding of Aboriginal culture. Nothing in Sutton’s 50 years of research with senior Aboriginal people suggested to him that Pascoe was right. He was “disturbed” that Pascoe’s descriptions of Aboriginal life were based on – and to his mind, took liberties with – “the journals of blow-through European explorers, men who were ignorant of the languages and cultures of those they met”, rather than Aboriginal people, whose knowledge has been recorded for the past hundred years at least.

He was “disappointed” that in attempting to describe Aboriginal land use, Pascoe ignored the importance of spiritual tradition and ritual. He was “stunned” that the book was “riddled with errors of fact, selective quotations, selective use of evidence, and exaggeration of weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years. And he was “outraged” that school curricula were being changed to conform with the Dark Emu narrative, embracing Pascoe’s descriptions of an early agricultural society.

And clearly, this criticism is from a Left perspective - that Pascoe, by trying to re-classify aboriginal society as an agricultural one, was actually buying into conservative views: 

More than anything, he felt that Pascoe had done the Old People – as Sutton refers to them – a monumental disservice, resurrecting long-discredited ideas of social evolutionism that placed hunter-gatherers lower on the evolutionary scale than farmers. To Sutton, it was a rebirthing of the colonial philosophy used to justify Aboriginal dispossession in the first place: that people who lived lightly on the land had no claim to it, that farmers were more deserving of dignity and respect than hunter-gatherers.

More important to me is the specific criticisms of misleading dishonestly in the book, many of which had been raised by those Right wing polemicists, and are confirmed as correct.  (I always suspected they would be, because no one was coming out and showing the factual errors in the Right wing attacks.)

Pascoe records Mitchell’s astonishment on coming upon a large, deserted village during his Australia Felix expedition, which he estimated housed “over 1000” people. This, says Sutton, is “pure fiction”. “All Mitchell says is that his party ‘noticed some of their huts’; there is no mention of anyone counting anything.” Pascoe then quotes a member of Mitchell’s party, Granville Stapylton, as saying that the buildings “were of very large dimensions, one capable of containing at least 40 persons and of very superior construction”. But he omits Stapylton’s speculation that this was “the work of a white man”, probably the runaway convict William Buckley, who lived with the Wathaurong people for three decades.

Elsewhere, Pascoe cites Charles Sturt’s discovery of a large well and village somewhere north of Lake Torrens in South Australia, but neglects to say that Sturt saw no signs of recent occupation. When Sturt finds grass set out to dry and ripen, Pascoe guesses this was because of surplus grain, which suggested “sedentary agriculture”. Sutton ridicules the idea. “The suggestion, if that is what Pascoe intends, that anyone could practise ‘sedentary agriculture’ in that blasted desert environment is simply ill-informed,” he writes.....

Over 300 pages, Sutton and Walshe pick apart Dark Emu. Where Pascoe writes that permanent housing was “a feature of the pre-contact Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance”, Sutton dismisses this absolutely. “The recurring pattern, all over Australia, was one of seasonal and other variation in lengths of stays in one place,” Sutton writes. “No group is ever described, at the moment of colonisation, as living year in, year out, in one single place.” Where Dark Emu featured the use of stone for housing, Sutton answers that it was “the rarest in the Aboriginal record”, a “last resort” in the stoniest of environments.

And so on.

I expect that there are a dozen or so broadcasters from the ABC who will need the smelling salts after reading about this this book - Patricia Karvelas and Jonathan Green especially. They have shown a complete lack of interest in checking whether any form of criticism of Pascoe and his books had some truth or validity.

The Labor Party needs to be particularly careful about this.   I reckon there is a political price to be paid for showing too much credulity to pro-indigenous claims and politics.  The lesson of the Hindmarsh Island scandal seems to have faded too quickly from their consciousness.  

Update:  The Conversation features as positive review of the new book.

Add him to the list of "people unexpectedly still alive"

Michael Parkinson  makes an appearance in The Guardian.  No doubt due to already crinkled face appearance as a younger man in his television heyday, my mind assumed he must be about 125 years old by now.   In fact, he is (checks Wikipedia) 86 - which is still getting up there, really.

I wonder what my CGTN app will have to say about this

The BBC:

China has created a dystopian hellscape in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says

Seems a bit...harsh.   Xinjiang looks all fine to me on any CGTN report I see.  

And I did put the CGTN app on  my Vivo phone recently.   It works pretty well, although doesn't seem to have a search function beyond being to "Ask Panda" for some news from certain categories.  The live feed of the TV network is fine, though.  So anytime I need to watch a panel show about how great things are going in China, and how the West is not coping with its own problems, I can do so on my phone.  (I was somewhat amused to find the app asked for permission to access my media files when I installed it.  I declined that kind invitation, but it still works.  Now it just keeps asking to access cache, or something.  I'm still declining.)

I told my son that I downloaded the app so that in 10 years time, when we are stopped on the street by our  new Han overlords, I will be able to flash my phone and show then I have been following CGTN for years, so obviously I am trustworthy and should be allowed on my way.   As my son is taken to a re-education camp, I will say "told you so". 

[Sounds like I'm making light of a serious situation re Xinjiang.   I actually have been thinking for a long time, though, that the true situation is likely somewhere between the extremes of the reporting on this problem.]   

Lost saint

An odd story at a Catholic news site:

ROME — The remains of St. Peter may have been and possibly still could be buried in catacombs under the Mausoleum of St. Helena after being moved from the Vatican hillside during anti-Christian persecutions in the third century, according to a paper published recently by three Italian researchers.

Labeling their conclusions as “conjecture,” the researchers suggested archaeologists could “validate” their findings with “excavation campaigns”; however, a leading expert in Christian archaeology and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology told Vatican News that the researchers’ hypothesis was “unacceptable.”

Emperor Constantine would never have gone through so much logistical trouble building St. Peter’s Basilica in the early fourth century “if it had not been contingent upon the presence of the venerated remains” below, where the saint’s tomb had been venerated since early Christian times, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai told Vatican News May 30.

“It is clear,” he said, “that Peter’s remains were found in the place of the original burial site on the Vatican hill when the formidable Constantinian basilica was built, the biggest basilica ever established in the city,” he said, adding that if later the remains had been moved “ad catacumbasto,” then that refers to a cemetery on the Appian Way, later called, the catacombs of St. Sebastian.

A previous Pope thought the saint's bones had already been discovered, but the means of identification sounds dubious:

While scholars are certain St. Peter’s ancient tomb was located on the Vatican hill where he had died a martyr and where Constantine ordered a basilica be built, his remains have been a source of much controversy and mystery.

St. Paul VI announced in 1968 that the “relics” of St. Peter had been “identified in a way which we can hold to be convincing,” after bones were discovered following excavations of the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, which began in the 1940s near a monument erected in the fourth century to honor St. Peter.

The pope had cases of the relics placed beneath the basilica’s main altar and in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. Scientists have confirmed the remains are those of a 60- to 70-year-old robust male, according to Vatican News.

 

The giggling cure

I am surprised to read this:

A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.  ...

Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.

In a prior study, the investigators tested the effects of a one-hour inhalation session with 50% nitrous oxide gas in 20 patients, finding that it led to rapid improvements in patient's depressive symptoms that lasted for at least 24 hours when compared to placebo. However, several patients experienced negative side effects, including nausea, vomiting and headaches....

In the new study, the investigators repeated a similar protocol with 20 patients, this time adding an additional inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide. They found that even with only half the concentration of nitrous oxide, the treatment was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide, but this time with just one quarter of the negative side effects.

Furthermore, the investigators looked at patients' clinical depression scores after treatment over a longer time course; while the last study only evaluated depression symptoms up to 24 hours after treatment, this new study conducted additional evaluations over two weeks. To their surprise, after just a single administration, some patients' improvements in their depression symptoms lasted for the entire evaluation period. 

Many years ago, a friendly dentist offered to give me nitrous oxide when I didn't really need it, just to see what it was like.   I did, indeed, giggle a lot at anything said.

Foucault the neo-liberal

I don't know that it's worth dwelling as much on Foucault as some academics like to do, but I was nonetheless interested to learn that there is a stream of criticism that he was too much of a neo-liberal.  That's news to me:

More recently, leftist thinkers have cast Foucault as a neoliberal, arguing that the kind of politics incipient in his thought paved the way to the hollowing out of the welfare state that took place under the signs of Reaganomics and Third Way liberalism. This counterintuitive assertion is the principal argument of The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. The collaborative work of Mitchell Dean, a scholar at Copenhagen Business School, and Daniel Zamora, a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a version of the book was first published in French in 2019 before being adapted into English this year.

Appearing with the radical publisher Verso, it offers a generous consideration of Foucault’s dalliance with neoliberal thought, coming to the conclusion that the French philosopher used the work of the so-called “New Philosophers” and American neoliberal thinkers in order to question what he perceived as the sclerotic totems of the welfare state. In so doing, they bring together a growing scholarship on the topic, including Foucault and Neoliberalism, a 2016 volume coedited by Zamora to which Dean contributed. Ultimately, though, The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault’s work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.

Stupid, stupid blowhard watch

 He's such a lightweight, wingnut troll now...

Feeling vindicated

David Roberts notes:

 Here's a link to the study, and here is the abstract:

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed. Research has focused on beliefs about narrow sets of claims never intended to capture the richness of the political information environment. Furthermore, factors contributing to this performance gap remain unclear. We generated an unique longitudinal dataset combining social media engagement data and a 12-wave panel study of Americans’ political knowledge about high-profile news over 6 months. Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals. The problem is exacerbated by liberals’ tendency to experience bigger improvements in sensitivity than conservatives as the proportion of partisan news increases. These results underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.

Psychiatric reversals noted

In a journal article about transgenderism* which I don't particularly recommend, I was nonetheless surprised to find this account of how the psychiatric establishment, over the course of a mere 30 years, swung from one extreme to another in its classifications regarding homosexuality:

The story of how disorders are first classified and reclassified within, and then eventually expunged from, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is telling. Homosexuality, for example, was included in the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, as a sexual deviation classified under the rubric “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance.”2 In the second edition (DSM-II) published in 1968 it became a sexual deviation classified as a nonpsychotic mental disorder along with pedophilia and exhibitionism.3 It was then declassified as a disorder altogether when DSM-II was revised in 1973. The DSM-III, published in 1980, was such a strong reversal of position from its predecessor that it actually classified any homosexual who wanted to be heterosexual as having a psychosexual disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality.”4 This was then dropped when the DSM-III was revised in 1987 (DSM-III-R).5

Why was I reading about transgenderism?  Because of this tweet yesterday, which told (to my mind) an improbable story:

Jessica's twitter feed is full of photos of herself, many with the needy "don't you agree I'm looking hot" kind of vibe that young transgender male to female folk seem to often yearn for.  It's not enough that they change their bodies to suit their own mental state - they insist that others join in giving positive comments on their new looks.   Which can be a rather, um, reality challenging call and a significant part of why transgenderism can be such a socially awkward thing for the rest of us.  

As one person on Twitter said:

 
 

*   Here it is.

Against the lab leak theory

There's quite a strong push back against the "the liberal media got the lab leak theory all wrong" in a column in the LA Times, which I got to via Twitter (and not paywalled.)   Some parts:

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.  ...

No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway.

That’s why the virological community believes that it’s vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans.

That was the conclusion reached in a seminal paper on COVID-19’s origins published in Nature in February 2020 by American, British and Australian virologists. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” they wrote.

“We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak,” the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. 

“However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely,” Andersen said. “Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence.”

Coauthor Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: “Our conclusion that it didn’t leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper.”

As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, “the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal.”

What remains of the lab-leak theory is half-truths, misrepresentations, and tendentious conjecture. ...

 

Let’s take a look at the science underlying the search for COVID’s origins. One important fact is that we may never get a definitive answer. The animal source of the Ebola virus, which was first identified 45 years ago, is still unknown, Maxmen reported in Nature.

Maxmen noted that it took researchers 14 years to trace the 2002-2004 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to a virus that leapt from bats to humans. ...

 

The lab-leak theory gains from a superficial plausibility — especially to laypersons. The Wuhan lab had a collection of bat viruses, including some that appear to be similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But some virologists say they’re not similar enough to mutate into SARS-CoV-2, even through deliberate manipulation, Garry says. “That’s a point that’s not going to resonate very strongly with people who haven’t studied viruses for a long, long time.”