From the "Can't they just put this dangerous jerk in jail?" files

 

Hard to keep up with what's going on in China

I saw a link to this article last week - it would seem that, perhaps after toying with softening official attitudes to gay relationships (I had posted not so long ago about the surprisingly sympathetic treatment given to the issue on some CGTN Youtube stories from 3 years ago), the government that thinks it can control everything is now trying to dissuade public discussion of it, and actually did place media control over its depiction from 2016:

Earlier this month, China's do-everything app (which is also a leading social media platform) WeChat permanently suspended the official accounts of more than a dozen LGBTQ+ campus advocacy groups. The move was part of the Chinese state's tightening grip over civil society, but also indicative of a rising backlash toward LGBTQ+ rights within the general population.

And further in the article:

In February 2016, the Chinese gay series Heroin (known in Chinese as Addicted, 上瘾 shàngyǐn) was banned from broadcasting online. In 2018, Sina Weibo declared a ban on all LGBT-related issues — though the state-owned Party newspaper People’s Daily came to the defense of individual citizens, offering a glimpse into the inconsistent and contradictory stances on the matter within the state apparatus. State censors also barred the Beijing International Film Festival from screening Call Me by Your Name, the Oscar-winning movie revolving around a same-sex couple....

One may be tempted to view the backlash toward LGBTQ+ content and viewpoints as entirely state-driven, yet this would be an oversimplification. Several prominent Weibo influencers took to gloating over the government’s recent censure of campus LGBTQ+ groups, with blogger Zǐwǔxiáshì 子午侠士 declaring that they were “so glad that the government is finally taking some action on the LGBT organizations.” Elsewhere, conservative, reactionary voices have celebrated the elimination of what they deem to be the perversion and distortion of established sexual norms and family values.

Many more have come to associate the movement with perceived foreign interference and Western meddling in China’s “domestic affairs” — a motif oft-recycled by official sources and leading media figures alike in castigating ideals deemed to be “Western” or “anti-Chinese.”

So, their new wave of nationalism may well be behind the new "let's never talk about this again" attitude.

Yet the article indicates public sympathy has already taken a very Western path:   

According to sociologist and LGBT+ advocate Pān Suímíng’s 潘绥铭 research, in 2006, 52.2% of surveyed respondents disagreed with the statement, “Homosexuals should be completely equal to other people,” a percentage that declined to 28.3% by 2015. The percentage of individuals reporting a “strong desire to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex” increased from 1.3% in 2000 to 5.1% in 2015.

Those last figures sound a bit dubious, but still.

And meanwhile, someone has posted this about the new online games restrictions:

The trouble with genetic studies on homosexuality

Over at Nature, there's a story about a study of the genetic profile of a large number of people which tentatively finds:

....genetic patterns that could be associated with homosexual behaviour, and showed how these might also help people to find different-sex mates, and reproduce.

But the limitations of the study are really more interesting that their results.  I'll extract some parts, first explaining what they did:

Evolutionary geneticist Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues used data from the UK Biobank, the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the company 23andMe, based in Sunnyvale, California, which sequence genomes and use questionnaires to collect information from their participants. The team analysed the genomes of 477,522 people who said they had had sex at least once with someone of the same sex, then compared these genomes with those of 358,426 people who said they’d only had heterosexual sex.  ....

Zietsch and his team decided to test whether these genetic patterns might provide an evolutionary edge by increasing a person’s number of sexual partners. They sorted the participants who had only had heterosexual sex by the number of partners they said they had had, and found that those with numerous partners tended to share some of the markers that the team had found in people who had had a same-sex partner.

The researchers also found that people who’d had same-sex encounters shared genetic markers with people who described themselves as risk-taking and open to new experiences. And there was a small overlap between heterosexual people who had genes linked to same-sex behaviour and those whom interviewers rated as physically attractive. Zietsch suggests that traits such as charisma and sex drive could also share genes that overlap with same-sex behaviour, but he says that those traits were not included in the data, so “we’re just guessing”.

Doesn't take much to think of problems with this study:

All of the participants lived in the United Kingdom or United States, and were of European descent. And the databases’ questionnaires asked about sexual behaviour, not sexual attraction. Most of the participants were born during a time when homosexuality was either illegal or culturally taboo in their countries, so many people who were attracted to others of the same sex might never have actually acted on their attraction, and could therefore have ended up in the wrong group in the study.....

Julia Monk, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, thinks that these caveats are so important that the paper can’t draw any real conclusions about genetics and sexual orientation. Sexual behaviour and reproduction, she says, occupy a different place in modern societies than they did for human ancestors, so it’s difficult to infer their role in our evolution. For instance, people might engage with more sexual partners now that sexually transmitted diseases can be cured. And the existence of birth control and fertility treatments negates many of the reproductive advantages that genes might provide. “It’s clear that people’s behaviour when it comes to sex and reproduction is highly culturally informed, and maybe digging into genetics is next to impossible,” Monk says....

 Dean Hamer, a retired geneticist in Haleiwa, Hawaii, who published some of the first studies on the genetics of sexual orientation, is disappointed with the study. Defining sexual orientation on the basis of a single same-sex encounter is not a useful way of categorizing people, he says, because many people who identify as heterosexual have experimented with a same-sex partner. “You’re not even asking the right people the right question,” Hamer says. Instead, he thinks the researchers have found genetic markers associated with openness to new experiences, which could explain the overlap between people who have had a homosexual partner and heterosexual people who have had many partners.

 Yes, I can see how hugely complicated it must be to draw any firm conclusions from such studies.

More from the "consistency is an evil socialist conspiracy" files

 

American COVID

Also:

Milo Yiannopoulos says he’s caught COVID-19 and is injecting himself with livestock medication.

And:

A conservative Florida radio host who spoke out against Covid-19 vaccines died after a weekslong fight with the virus, marking the third radio personality to die from coronavirus who publicly rejected vaccines.

Biggest gaming news EVER

Either this will lead to the downfall of Communist Party rule in China, or secure its future in eclipsing the USA as the dominant global power for the next 500 years:

SHANGHAI, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Chinese regulators on Monday slashed the amount of time players under the age of 18 can spend on online games to an hour of gameplay on Fridays, weekends and holidays, in response to growing concern over gaming addiction, state media reported.
The rules, published by the National Press and Publication Administration, said users under the age of 18 will only be able to play games from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time on those days, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Online gaming companies will be barred from providing gaming services to them in any form outside those hours and need to ensure they have put real name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market.
Previously, China limited the total length of time minors could access online games to three hours on holiday or 1.5 hours on other days.

Siegfried's done

Here's the complete opera newbie's review of No 3 in the Ring Cycle - Siegfried.

 Plot summary:   for reasons not entirely clear to me (apart from Wagner wanting to show up a Jewish stereotype as annoying, as well as greedy and incompetent), young Siegfried, the result of twin incest (and actually, it kinda shows - more below), spends a lot of time complaining about how he hates his dwarf "uncle" who raised him since he was a baby.  This seems ungracious, given I don't think there was any scheming motive at the time he found said blond baby just after birth.  (Although it certainly does come later.)  The dwarf, Mime, spends all his time trying to recreate the magic sword from its broken pieces, but his blacksmith skills aren't up to it.   Siegfried, as one who doesn't understand what fear is (reminder: incest), of course is able to remould it and will soon be off to slay a dragon.  End of Act one.

Act Two:  dragon slaying.  Said dragon was formerly a giant who had grabbed the all powerful ring and a bunch of other loot (hello, Hobbit), but I think he chose to convert to dragon, all the better to protect the ring.   (I would have to pay closer attention to the first opera about this, as I was cooking and missed some explanation.)  Anyway, following said dragon slaying with his magical sword (and which, it seemed to me, was dealt with in very perfunctory manner), Siegfried starts understanding birds, one of which tells him there's a sleeping woman (or human?  I would have to double check) on a rock he should probably go visit.   This is, of course, Brunnhilde, left at the end of the last opera sleeping in a circle of fire on top of a mountain as punishment for disobeying Dad Wotan.  This sounds like a good idea to young Siegfried, so it's off to find her, taking the cursed ring with him.

Act Three:   of course, Siegfried is brave enough to walk through the ring of fire to get to the sleeping person in helmet and fake Norse horns, I presume.  Amusingly (well, I thought so), he can see the face  through the helmet and first thinks it's a very handsome man (!).   Who knew this gender diversity/androgynous stuff was in Wagner?  A man ahead of his time.  Or, it could be the incest induced lack of smarts again.  Anyway, as you can guess,  deals with the armour which was presumably preventing him seeing it was a buxom woman, wakes her up, and in classic over-the-top opera fashion, falls immediately madly in love with her.   And she with him, even though she knows (I don't think he does at the end?) she is his aunt.   But hey, it's another case of "love is love" a long time before conservatives decided that "woke is broke".   And by the way, Wotan turned up at the start and confesses that he's had it, he doesn't care if the Gods lose their power any more.   He just seems sick of the power plays, or whatever.   Foreshadowing of the last opera, there.   Anyway, opera ends with Siegfried and his aunt embracing.

My opinion and random thoughts:  Wagner is really good at opening and ending an Act.   In this one, Act One was good, although I started missing the presence of female contribution.   Thrilling musical climate at the end though.   Act Two was really a bit tedious, I thought.   Again, little female contribution and I miss it.

Act 3 though - wow, it's musically fantastic, and makes up a lot for the unexpected tedium of Act Two.   

I wonder if any critics out there don't care for Act Two.

I want to talk more about the character of Mime:   it really seemed to me that he is written like the modern caricature of a Jewish mother.   I see that there have been many words spilt on the question of  the degree to which we should see these dwarf characters as being lightly disguised Jews - but after seeing this, I don't have any doubt at all.   I will read some of the articles that have been written about it, and write more.

There is also something to be said - but I don't really understand what yet - about the psychological aspect of Siegfried wanting to understand what fear is.   Seems facing a dragon didn't do it, but falling in love with an inert buxom woman did, and that makes him ecstatic.  Maybe it was hormonal, or something.   Anyway, I would not be surprised if psychoanalysts have written screeds about this.

As I wrote last week - this is a large part of the appeal of the Cycle:  a weird story that nonetheless makes you think, and you have plenty of time to do it while actually watching the opera.

Anyway, next weekend, it's the End of the World in flames.   Cool. 

Update:  an observation (my bold) from a funny summary of the plot in an article in The Independent:

The love interest is provided by twins who have an incestuous affair, and whose son is fated to marry his aunt. All male members of the cast are notably stupid (especially Siegfried, a dumb hillbilly along the lines of L'il Abner), while the females are nearly all strong and terrifying. The characters' names tend towards the absurd: Wellgunde? Mime? The Gibichungs? You wonder what exactly Richard Wagner was on for the 26 years he took to write it.

Update 2:  Gosh, it's easy to find stuff these days.  From a book The Hard Facts about the Grimm Fairy Tales, I get this:

 

So, the Germans had long been into dumb, naive heroes, and Wagner didn't realise he was continuing it?  How odd, on both counts?  Doesn't exactly fit in with Hitler's fondness for Wagner, either, does it?  

Update 3:   and here's a couple of forum pages of people going back and forth about Siegfried and whether people really assess his character fairly.   Oh, and the whole "free will" thing gets a going over too - a key theme of the Cycle story.

Update 4:   hey, I find support for my problems with Acts 1 and 2, in a recent review:

The problems with “Siegfried” are manifold. The first two acts are unnecessarily long and stubborn and tirelessly dominated by men – it takes more than two hours of the opera’s entire playing time before a female voice can be heard. The portrait of Mime teems with Wagner’s anti-Semitism (while Wagner was resuming work on “Siegfried”, he decided to republish his infamous book “Judentum in der Musik”, this time in his own name, proud of his hatred). And the title character is a person who is difficult to love. Not only can he not feel fear, he also cannot feel compassion, respect, and gratitude, and he barely develops during the trip. Throughout the opera he talks about wanting to learn fear – he can finally experience it for a moment, then he quickly forgets that feeling and returns to be a stupid macho guy.

At the same time, “Siegfried” is interesting in several ways. The opera is a variant of the Oedipus myth: a young hero attacks his grandfather and takes all his strength away, then he gets together with his aunt without knowing the relationship. Fate is cruel and nobody escapes it, just like with Sophocles – but since the tragedy only strikes in the next part, “Ragnarök”, “Siegfried” ends happily in an uncomfortable way.

Pretty brave

So the police officer who shot the loopy woman at the front of the mob which was, quite literally, calling outside for Mike Pence to be found and hung, has revealed himself in an interview and made some salient points:

The far-right has characterized Babbitt as a martyr, with former President Donald Trump himself saying in a statement that she was "murdered at the hands of someone who should never have pulled the trigger of his gun."

Byrd told Holt that Trump's statement was "disheartening."

He said of Trump: "If he was in the room or anywhere and I'm responsible for him, I was prepared to do the same thing for him and his family."

Exactly.    The gun happy, Trump loving wingnuts are into shooting for self defence in all circumstances except when its them who are doing the threatening.   

Its absurd and somewhat nauseating to hear them approve of no action against scores of police officers who have shot black men stopped on the street, but when its a black man who shot at a white mad woman at the front of a violent mob, it's all meant to be so unfair and unjust.

More from the article:

The interview was released three days after the police force announced that Byrd acted within department policy on Jan. 6 and would not face disciplinary action. The department allows officers to "use deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes that action is in the defense of human life, including the officer's own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury." 

That followed an April decision from the Justice Department that said it would not seek charges against Byrd. 

I see that David Roberts thinks it's a bad idea, this guy going public.

I think it's pretty brave, and will perhaps help bring to a head some of the absurdity within the Republican Party.  If they want to continue attacking him now, they can't use his non appearance as suggesting he knows he's guilty and won't defend himself.

Update:   just appalling:

Lots of people in comments urging Byrd to sue for defamation.   I agree:  Carlson's and Murdoch's pockets are deep.  

Faith in hype punished

 

For more detail on why Brexit is a fishing industry disaster:

Analysing the fortunes of the industry six months after the UK left the EU single market, Deas said the deal negotiated by Lord David Frost had broken “very, very solid assurances” by the prime minister and senior cabinet members that the UK would win extra quota share and take back control of UK waters. 

“We didn’t even secure exclusivity over our coastal waters, which is something that every other coastal state takes for granted. We thought that was a red line but we didn’t manage to secure that,” he said. 

Under the terms of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the EU’s fishing quota in UK waters will be reduced by 25 per cent over the next five years, with the UK theoretically able to exclude EU boats from coastal waters after 2026.

However, Deas complained that, in practice, the agreement had created an “exploitative and asymmetric” relationship that would give the EU leverage to retain access to UK waters well beyond 2026. “It’s clear that the EU is quietly confident that it has sufficient dissuasive powers to prevent the UK asserting its rights in terms of access and quota shares as an independent coastal state,” he said.

On a more positive note, the NFFO said that delays in sending fish for sale in Europe had now eased after a disastrous January and February, although market access bans for some fishing sectors, such as mussels and scallops, remained unresolved. 

Rare blood clots discussed

Nature has an article about that rare, but sometimes deadly, AstraZeneca blood clotting side effect I still have to have a tiny concern about for another couple of weeks:    

Something in the vaccine or the body’s response to it must be binding to PF4 — but what? VITT has been linked to two COVID-19 vaccines, both of which use disabled adenoviruses as a ‘vector’ to shuttle a gene encoding a coronavirus protein, called spike, into human cells. Once there, the gene is expressed and the protein is made. The immune system detects spike and generates antibodies against it that are crucial for protection against coronavirus infection.

Some researchers have proposed that impurities in the vaccines left over from the manufacturing process — such as snippets of DNA floating around in the solution, or proteins in the broth used to grow the virus — are interacting with PF4 to generate the clumps that are then targeted by antibodies⁶.

Others think the culprit could be the adenovirus itself. Previous work has shown that adenoviruses can bind to platelets and trigger their depletion in mice⁷. It’s conceivable that those mice might also have developed clots if they had been followed for longer, says Maha Othman, who studies blood clotting at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and was lead author of the study.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, adenovirus-based vaccines were being developed against infections such as HIV and Ebola, but had not yet been used in large populations. There have been no reports that these vaccines produced a VITT-like condition; however, they were not tested in nearly as many people as have received the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

 Haematologist Mitesh Borad at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, and his colleagues have analysed the structure of the chimpanzee adenovirus used in the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine and determined that it has a strong negative charge. Molecular simulations suggest that this charge, combined with aspects of the virus’s shape, could allow it to bind to the positively charged PF4 protein⁸. If so, it could then set off a cascade much like the rare reaction to heparin, says Borad, although it remains to be seen whether this happens.

Even if the adenovirus is to blame, Borad says he would not advocate that vaccine developers stop using adenoviruses in vaccines. Some adenoviruses could be engineered to reduce their negative charge, he says, and some are less negatively charged than others; the Ad26 adenovirus used in the J&J COVID-19 vaccine does not have as much of a charge as the chimpanzee virus, which might explain why VITT seems to be less common in recipients of the J&J vaccine. And so far, no link to VITT has been reported for the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, which uses both Ad26 and another adenovirus called Ad5 that has still less negative charge, he adds.

There are other theories, explained in the article, but I have probably copied as much as I should.

 

 

From the Creighton case notes

An extraordinary effort by Adam, for which the words "putting lipstick on a pig" is an understatement:

He gets, shall we say, some well deserved pushback:
 

Look, I like to take credit for disliking him and his takes for years before this.

Food fights

Today, it's this:

 Last week, it was a Twitter war over an Asian woman claiming a white woman who wrote a cook book was culturally appropriating - noodles.   Well, it wasn't really a war.  As far as I could see, the women whining about cultural appropriation - Roslyn Talusan - received overwhelming ridicule from both Left and Right.  Her tweets and now protected.  She had ended up asking for money for therapy, though, given she was traumatised by the number of attacks she received.

In fact, people who worry about "wokeness" ruining the world should feel some comfort that there was virtually no support for her.

Ring interrupted

This COVID problem is getting serious:  the Brisbane production of the Ring Cycle, which had been postponed a year, now seems to be postponed indefinitely (but not actually cancelled.)   I think they had got a fair bit of pre-production worked out by mid 2020, so I guess they will not want that to go to waste.

So, this is by of background to explaining that I made my way through the second in the series, Die Walkure, on Youtube on the weekend.  It's the Opera North production still - which is more a sung version on stage than a full production, but the story is there in clear subtitles, and it's easy to follow.

I'm happy to say I'm enjoying it.   The music is often very impressive, and while I don't really know enough about opera style singing to know how objectively good the artists are, they seem pretty impressive in this production.  

I'm also continuing to enjoy trying to summarise it to my son, and annoying him by explaining how much more substantial in themes it is than Tolkien.   (I also re-read the posts I wrote last year on that comparison, and must point them out to him as well.)  

Anyway, Die Walkure is where the internal family squabbles of the Wotan clan really start to ramp up.   And, to again put a modern spin on things, Wotan's first response to his wife's complaint that it's really creepy that the separated twins he had fathered meet up as adults and become lovers (very quickly - it only took a cup of mead) is pretty much "love is love".   He changes his mind though, and decides to keep his wife happy by killing Siegmund (or perhaps, by letting him be killed) after all, getting his daughter Brunnhilde (a Valkyrie) into the plot, but she changes her mind too and decides to try to protect Siegmund, but fails.   Which leads to Wotan punishing her by stripping her of immortal status, and putting her to sleep so she can be woken by the first dude who finds her, and become a mere housewife.   She begs her Dad to make it hard for anyone to do that, otherwise she might have to marry the first weakling who decides to take advantage of a woman sleeping on a rock.  Wotan does, by circling it in flames.   Dramatic music rises, and curtain down.

That's the very short version.  There's also another unhappy marriage; a wife drugging her husband so she can have sex with her twin (well, the sex is only implied - she is pregnant by the end); the magical sword in the tree; Wotan wandering around in disguise; the sword not being as useful as Siegmund might have hoped; and the Valkyries not sure whether they are really up to protecting their sister from their Dad, or not.

The other fun of these operas is working out which lines would have been pricking the ears of young Adolph.  I wonder if he watched them with a notebook.

Next week - hopefully I get through Number 3.    

Update:   hey look, someone from Brisbane has written a very lengthy article explaining Wagner's  evolving ideas about the father/son story that is Wotan and Siegmund.   More information than you knew you needed!

Also - I can now agree with what this person said in his witty take on watching the Ring Cycle :  How Crazy Do You Have to Be to Sit Through 15 Hours of Opera?:

It contains numerous prolonged sections of inner monologue and narration, redundant to an exasperating degree.....[I've deleted some of the funny notes he apparently wrote during some of the more protracted sequence.]

But yes, this benefits the soul. These stretches, however maddening, are not mind-numbing.   The Ring is so long that it lulls one's brain into a state of semi-hypnosis, resting but active. This is where the magic happens. Your mind floats above the story, free to think upon its greater themes, to weave them into your own life and your flashes of memory.

Yes.   I mean, what other work brings up so many issues and gives you so much time to think about them?

 

A recent thread about butter and Europe

I forgot to post these tweets which appeared in a thread last week.  Both somewhat amusing and somewhat educational:

Didn't see that coming

Well, this news seems to have caught everyone by surprise:

OnlyFans, the subscriber-only website synonymous with pornography, has announced it will ban adult material from the site after pressure from its payment processors.

The company will continue to allow some posts containing nudity but “any content containing sexually-explicit conduct” will be banned, with the site instead focusing on more mainstream content.

Not that I have ever used it, but it is pretty remarkable, I think, to watch the way that people have realised there is more than one way to skin a cat (a phrase which, incidentally, feels deserving of replacement in this animal friendly era) when it comes to online porn reduction:

Payment processing companies increasingly control what material pornography sites are able to host. Last December, Visa and Mastercard briefly banned payments to websites owned by online pornography giant MindGeek, following reports it was hosting “revenge porn” uploaded without the consent of those involved. The financial businesses only backtracked when MindGeek deleted tens of millions of unverified videos from its sites such as PornHub.

OnlyFans has enabled tens of thousands of sex workers to earn substantial incomes in return for handing over 20% of their earnings to the company, with many creators saying it has given them financial freedom. Internal figures obtained by Axios suggest about 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 (£36,000) annually from the site.

However, it has also faced growing political and regulatory scrutiny over its ability to remove illegal and exploitative material. Earlier this month more than a hundred US congressmen and women demanded a department of justice investigation into OnlyFans, relating to the alleged presence of underage material on the site.

Comedy tastes change

I see that relatively well known British comedian Sean Lock has died.   I barely know of his work, as it seems to me he has mostly appeared on panel shows which I have not found amusing, largely because I have an aversion to (the far too ubiquitous) Jimmy Carr.   My general impression is that I used to find him harmless - but not especially funny.  [Update:  I have watched some "best of" compilations of him on Youtube since his passing - and yeah, I just didn't find him particularly funny.]

But, once again I have to observe, there are few British comedians - or at least, few shows featuring them - that I have any time for now.

I still find Would I Lie to You to be by far the best, with consistently likeable and funny performances by the three regulars (David Mitchell, Lee Mack and Rob Brydon).   And I do particularly enjoy episodes with guest appearances by Bob Mortimer.  He was on one last night, as it happens, featuring a wildly improbable story about giving a scotch egg to a formula 1 driver in the 1990's as a sort of good luck charm before a race.   It was hilariously told, and I laughed again during it, even though I think this is the third time I have seen it.  (I saw it on Youtube originally, last year - it is from a quite recent episode.)

But so, so many other British panel shows leave me cold.   I positively dislike so many of their comedians now, and really, I don't quite understand why.   As I have long thought, at some point during my life, I switched from liking a lot of British comedy to feeling that most of it kind of repulsed me.

Speaking of comedy panel shows, last night on the ABC also featured a new one with Wil Anderson and Jan Fran, Question Everything.   Anderson can be very funny, I think, and Fran has a pleasing style of delivery too.  But man, did the panel amuse themselves too much last night, or what?   They seemed to find each other absolutely hilarious - and it really wasn't warranted.  It was like the studio had been filled with laughing gas:  that was what the giggly, excessive laughing at slightly amusing quips reminded me of.

Someone needs to get a grip on this aspect of the show - and get better guest panelists.  I had heard of none of them last night, and none struck me as worthy of exposure. 

 

The cheery world of the Taliban

Back to the pessimistic takes:  the Washington Post has an article on How Life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan has changed.   A taste:

Over two decades of conflict and politicking, Taliban control in Afghanistan has become a patchwork of edicts and codes, with some areas seeing modest reform. But overall, fear and intimidation remain at the heart of the militant group’s command.

In one district, elders successfully lobbied Taliban fighters to open a high school for girls. In other provinces, clinics funded by international aid groups are now allowed to function. But in those same places, harsh, often public punishments remain common. Torture and imprisonment are widely used for infringements as minor as possessing the wrong SIM card....

Public beatings and executions are routine inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And women are almost entirely absent from public life, largely denied equal access to education and employment. Access to health care and some education has expanded under the Taliban, but that is largely a result of work by select international aid groups the militants have allowed to operate.

“All their changes are only for their own benefit,” said a 22-year-old university student from Helmand province who has lived in Taliban-controlled territory on and off his entire life. Like others in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the Taliban.

“If you start criticizing the Taliban, you are their enemy,” he said. “Nothing has ever changed with that.”

 And yet, to answer the question "why does anyone support this mob", we get this brief observation:

Other civilians said they prefer the Taliban’s justice system to that of the government. A taxi driver who lives in Mazar-e Sharif said he repeatedly traveled into Taliban territory to obtain a ruling on a family property dispute after government courts proved ineffective.

“The Taliban’s process is faster than the government,” said the driver, Mubaraksha Zafar, 38, “and there is no corruption.”

Huh.

 

Thoughts of a non expert on Islamic terrorism

At the ABC, there's a very pessimistic take on the future course of Islamic terrorism in light of the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan.   A couple of experts in the field are quoted:

There are two main ways the Taliban's control of Afghanistan increases the threat of terrorism, according to experts. 

Firstly, there will be considerable opportunity for Al Qaeda to bring foreigners into Afghanistan to train and equip them as fighters, according to counter-terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton. 

"When we think of Taliban today in control of Afghanistan, there is no evidence the Taliban has changed their view and lots of evidence of close association with Al Qaeda, through marriage, shared leadership and shared world view," he said.   

Secondly, the Taliban's success may prove to be inspirational. 

"The idea that you can win. The idea that the Americans can be pushed back," Professor of International Security and Intelligence John Blaxland said.  

"That is reverberating around the world, that is right across the Middle East, north Africa, South-East Asia, southern Philippines, parts of Indonesia and southern Thailand — that's adding spring to the step of those who are railing against the infidels, the non-Muslim world."

Professor Barton said it was now very hard to counter that narrative because "everything suggests it's right".

Now, I freely admit to no expertise on the subject, so I may be totally wrong.    But my gut feeling is that this take is too pessimistic for the following reasons:

*    It ignores the defeat of Islamic State as a public relations black eye for jihadist rule, generally speaking.   In fact, although the Taliban helped fight against IS (this article usefully tries to explain the differences between the Taliban, IS and Al-Qaeda), is it partly because of the failure of IS that the Taliban is trying to sell itself as the new, improved, don't-be-scared-of-us-we-are-much-less-into-killing-our-citizens-now version of radical Islam rule?

*  Saudi Arabia itself is still on a slow path of social reform in favour of women and being more open to the West.  Isn't it?

*  Where exactly does radical Islam look like an actual success, in terms of running a country or region?    And large scale terrorist acts lead to some pretty fierce push back in countries like France and Sri Lanka - 

On March 13, Sarath Weerasekara, Sri Lanka’s minister of public security, announced that the government will ban wearing of the burqa and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools in the country. The minister was quoted as saying that “the burqa” was a “sign of religious extremism” and has a “direct impact on national security”.

and 

PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron is redrawing the line that separates religion and state, in a battle to force Islamic organizations into the mold of French secularism.

In recent months, his administration has ousted the leadership of a mosque after temporarily closing it and poring over its finances. Another mosque gave up millions in subsidies after the government pressured local officials over the funding. A dozen other mosques have faced orders to close temporarily for safety or fire-code violations.

The government has taken these actions as a precursor to a much broader push to rein in the independence of mosques and other religious organizations across France. Mr. Macron has submitted a bill to Parliament, called the Law Reinforcing Respect of the Principles of the Republic, that would empower the government to permanently close houses of worship and dissolve religious organizations, without court order, if it finds that any of their members are provoking violence or inciting hatred.

*  Indonesia still has a radical Islam problem, but a government pretty actively policing against it, too. 

Sure, Islamic inspired terrorist attacks are  not going to disappear - but isn't the obvious lesson of recent year, even to radical Islamists, that big attacks invite big and long lasting pushback?  The return of the Taliban doesn't do much to change that, it seems to me. 

So, I don't know, but maybe Taliban Rule Mk 2 is less of a terrorism inspiration than the experts think - especially if they become a "success" in governing by courting foreign money by selling themselves as the "no longer really into terrorism" government.   

I hope this completely non-expert, gut feeling assessment has something going for it.

We shall see.

   

Dyson spheres still a thing

Oh, we have scientists still wondering about what super high energy use civilisations might be using, and it might be...wait for it...a Dyson Sphere-y thing around a black hole.  Let Science magazine explain:

But astronomer Tiger Hsiao of National Tsing Hua University says we might be looking for the wrong thing. In a new study, he and colleagues set out to calculate whether it would also be possible to use a Dyson sphere around a black hole. They analyzed black holes of three different sizes: those five, 20, and 4 million times the mass of our Sun. These, respectively, reflect the lower and upper limits of black holes known to have formed from the collapse of massive stars—and the even more enormous mass of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive massive black hole thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way.

Black holes are typically thought of as consumers rather than producers of energy. Yet their huge gravitational fields can generate power through several theoretical processes. These include the radiation emitted from the accumulation of gas around the hole, the spinning “accretion” disk of matter slowly falling toward the event horizon, the relativistic jets of matter and energy that shoot out along the hole’s axis of rotation, and Hawking radiation—a theoretical way that black holes can lose mass, releasing energy in the process.

From their calculations, Hsiao and colleagues concluded that the accretion disk, surrounding gas, and jets of black holes can all serve as viable energy sources. In fact, the energy from the accretion disk alone of a stellar black hole of 20 solar masses could provide the same amount of power as Dyson spheres around 100,000 stars, the team will report next month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Were a supermassive black hole harnessed, the energy it could provide might be 1 million times larger still.

If such technology is at work, there may be a way to spot it. According to the researchers, the waste heat signal from a so-called “hot” Dyson sphere—one somehow capable of surviving temperatures in excess of 3000 kelvin, above the melting point of known metals—around a stellar mass black hole in the Milky Way would be detectible at ultraviolet wavelengths. Such signals might be found in the data from various telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer, Hsiao says.

Meanwhile, a “solid” Dyson sphere—operating below 3000 kelvin—could be picked up in the infrared by, for example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The latter is no stranger to looking for the infrared signals of traditional, star-based Dyson spheres. But, like all other such searches, it has yet to find anything conclusive.

Opatrný says using the radiation from accretion disks would be particularly clever, because the disks convert energy more efficiently than the thermonuclear reaction in conventional stars. Aliens concerned with the sustainability of their power supply, he suggests, might be better off encapsulating small stars that burn their fuel slowly. However, he continued, “The fast-living civilizations feeding on black hole accretion disks would be easier to spot from the huge amount of waste heat they produce.”

It is kind of hard imagining what this type of civilisation would even look like, though.  Here's the amusing last paragraph:

As for what the aliens might use this energy for, Opatrný has some thoughts. “Mining cryptocurrency, playing computer games, or just feeding the ever-growing bureaucracy?” he jokingly muses.

 

 

Some Tweets of note

 And I tend to agree with David Roberts: