Can't we just rent some nuclear submarines and return them when due for servicing?

I haven't had time to read much about what today's defence announcement really means, but I thought nuclear subs didn't need much re-fuelling, and boy, I was right:

The Navy hopes to have the first replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine on duty by 2031. When that vessel is launched, the onboard nuclear power plant is expected to last its entire 40-year service life.

That is seven years longer than the current reactors aboard U.S. submarines.

“Our goal for the new submarines is to have a life-of-the-ship reactor,” said Frank G. Klotz, National Nuclear Security Administration administrator and the Department of Energy’s undersecretary of nuclear security. NNSA is responsible for developing government-owned nuclear power plants...

There are two primary reasons the NNSA is undertaking the new core design, he told reporters in November.

“It is extraordinarily important on cost because one of the largest elements of the total operational cost of a submarine over its life has been replacing the core when that has come due. It is very expensive,” he said.

“The other aspect is that when you go into the deep overhaul that is necessary to replace the core, you’re taking a submarine out of service for a long time. So if you have a life of the sub or a life of the ship core, then you avoid both cost, and you avoid both extensive downtime as you refuel the reactor,” Klotz said.

The savings could be substantial.

Olivia Volkoff, a spokeswoman for the program, said: “Eliminating the refueling through insertion of a life-of-the-ship core allows the Navy to meet the strategic deterrent mission with two fewer SSBNs and saves about $40 billion in ship acquisition and lifecycle costs over the life of the program.”

The Virginia-class attack submarines were the first to have a core reactor designed to last the life of the vessel, which for it, is about 33 years.

So, it's surely not an issue that we need to have a nuclear fuel processing facilities here.   Just pick up a second hand attack sub (or 10) from "Subs R Us" at San Diego, or wherever, tootle around the Pacific for 20 years, and return for every major service.   Routine minor services (the equivalent of a grease and oil change) could, I presume, be done here.

I am not entirely sure how we are meant to find enough people to crew these, though.  Don't we struggle crewing the 2 or 3 that are operational at any one time?

But then again - there's a hell of a lot of Filipino seamen (and ship's stewards) out of work at the moment, due to COVID devastating the cruise line industry.    Just contract them out for 5 years at a time, and problem solved.

Defence problems all solved...

What the General said to who, and when

Well, the General Milley calling up the Chinese and telling them his President was nuts and they shouldn't worry about being attacked by surprise is an entertaining story sending the wingnut Right nuts.

A big part of the problem of knowing what to make of it, though, is the question of whether the reporting of the details of the call is accurate.  In that regard, I thought this post by Allahpundit, considering the possible variations on a theme, covered it well.

One thing seems clear:   there were lots of people listening to the call, and therefore, if there was anything really damaging to the General's credibility, we will eventually know about it.   I strongly suspect that it will turn out that the Woodward account is eventually shown to be an exaggeration in some details. 

Nonetheless, it is a sign of the extraordinary times that such calls were being made.  

Update:  and, I should add, that the real concern should be that Trump was presenting as unstable enough to make another superpower suspect a surprise nuclear attack.   But no, Republicans have become so stupid and tribal as to excuse an unstable nutjob because he was their unstable nutjob. 

 

Suddenly, the vaccines flow...

This was a bit of a Queensland surprise yesterday:   from Saturday, over 60's can get Pfizer if they want.  My wife, who has been a longer hold out for Pfizer than me, is pleased.   She (aged 60) actually asked for it at a hub two weekends ago, and they said "no, we need a doctor's letter saying they recommend it for you, otherwise we'll get into trouble."   We were given the impression, though, that some GPs were happy to write a letter for anyone who was AZ hesitant, without even an appointment!  My wife had an appointment to see her GP this week anyway, but now she doesn't have to test her doctor's attitude towards the AZ resistant.  

My daughter has also been told that there are a lot of "walk in" openings at the South Brisbane vaccination hub in recent days.   She had made an appointment in a couple of weeks time, but now she is just going to try her luck at an earlier walk in.

All of this would indicate that Queensland has a sudden increase in our supply of Pfizer, and it hasn't been all pilfered by those southern cities which aren't as good at controlling outbreaks as dumb old Queenslanders.   I hope Morrison is not getting any credit for this, though.   He deserves none.

 

 

Historian stories

This is interesting, although it's a pity there isn't a detailed explanation of every item:

I asked historians what find made them go ‘wait, wut?’ Here’s a taste of the hundreds of replies

The first part of the "quirky" sounds interesting enough:

Many of those who responded told stories of bizarre (and sometimes amusing) finds in the archives. Some were actual objects, such as Robert Cribb finding “17 tubes of processed opium, ready for smoking, in the Dutch archives from 1946 Indonesia”, Daniel McKay coming across “negatives of an early Australian prime minister naked on holiday”, and “300 love letters from woman to woman around 1760, partly written in blood”, located by Susanne Wosnitzka. 

Come on, we need more details about the nude PM on holidays.  

The Catallaxy diaspora

The end of the Sinclair Davidson Catallaxy blog, and the break up of people who used to regularly comment or contribute there into 3 or 4 separate online spaces (depending on how and what you count) has had the salutary effect of really highlighting what a sad sack of culture war losers and conspiracists the blog had long become home to.

One new incarnation is run by a guy who has little time for moderation of comments, meaning it has been regularly overrun by Graeme Bird, with the usual consequences of it likely becoming of interest to the Human Rights Commission for his ratbag and obsessive brand of anti-Semitism.  No one wants him there, but the blog controller takes days (so it seems - I am not following it closely) to ban him and delete comments, making many (I think) inclined to abandon participation.

The other main competitor (as monty's alternative - the only one I have linked to in the blog roll - already seems to have given up any hope of becoming the heir apparent) is the one run by conservative Catholic dover beach, who I attacked strongly at monty's blog for being a terrible ambassador for the Church, and who promptly moderated me for insulting his depressive contributor Arky, while still letting regulars post comments about "faggots", as all good conservative Catholics are wont to do.  Anyway,  it has become a hive of anti COVID vax sentiment, and conspiracy mongering about e-vil government control of people, as well as general culture war complaint.  It also welcomes contribution by Trump cultist Steve Kates.   The number of people commenting regularly seems a pretty small pool, though.   And it's dull.

Currency Lad, meanwhile (you can link via monty's blog) has started blogging again.   His themes now seem so tired and repetitive, though; and again, resistance to taking COVID seriously is a common subject.  I have said elsewhere that his style of writing has deteriorated over the years;  it's now overworked to such an extent that I can't always see clearly the point trying to be made.  He's become too performative - like a slightly softer version in blog form of that incredibly annoying Paul Joseph Watson.  He needs new ideas and material. 

I said for years that the problem with old Catallaxy was that it gave the regulars a false sense of the extent of like minded support for their increasingly Right wing/wingnutty views - and Sinclair Davidson devoted just enough time in things like weeding out Bird strikes (and those who needed a break for their mental health) to stop it collapsing completely into madness.    It was still extremely disreputable, but having a known public figure performing some gatekeeping role still gave the participants some false sheen of credibility.  

But now, by being cast amongst these smaller enterprises, that has been dissolved, and they just look like somewhat sad but angry (always angry) conspiracy minded losers, complaining in their small groups about lack of influence.

This is a Very Good Thing.  

Monkey problem

In a short NPR article about a book about when animals cause trouble, this anecdote is noteworthy:

Macaques have been known to sneak into swimming pools, courts and even the halls of India's Parliament. One attorney told Roach about a macaque that infiltrated a medical institute and began pulling out patient IVs.

"If somebody was getting, you know, a glucose drip, [the monkey would] suck on the needle like it was a Popsicle," she says.

Eek.

Bernard goes off (and rightly so)

Writing in Crikey today, Bernard Keane goes off:

That Christian Porter thinks it’s appropriate to remain a cabinet minister in the absence of an independent inquiry into much-denied allegations of sexual assault is bad enough, but there can be no doubt he has now spat in the face of any Australian who thinks there should be basic level of transparency and integrity in government.

His declaration of being the beneficiary of an anonymous windfall for his legal costs in his withdrawn legal action against the ABC — where the story revealing allegations of rape by a cabinet minister remains up, intact — is an act of gross contempt for political integrity.

In a way, such arrogant behaviour by this privileged man-child has done us a favour in revealing just how piss weak federal standards of accountability are — standards fit for a tinpot dictatorship rather than a country that feels entitled to lecture others about democracy.

 Pretty much what Malcolm Turnbull said on Radio National, too.

I am curious as to what old Porter pal and (semi?) defender Peter van Onselen thinks about it.  Oh, his tweets are "protected".

The Nazi search for the lost Aryans

I'm pretty sure I have heard of this before, but here's a short account at the BBC about it:

In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of Germany's Nazi party and a key architect of the Holocaust, sent a five-member team to Tibet to search for the origins of the supposed Aryan race. Author Vaibhav Purandare recounts the fascinating story of this expedition, which passed through India.

...

Adolf Hitler believed that "Aryan" Nordic people had entered India from the north some 1,500 years earlier, and that the Aryans had committed the "crime" of mixing with the local "un-Aryan" people, losing the attributes that had made them racially superior to all other people on earth.

Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy for the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, articulating his sentiments in his speeches, writings and debates. 

Yet, according to Himmler, one of Hitler's top lieutenants and the head of the SS, the Indian subcontinent was still worth a close look.  

This is where Tibet came into the picture.

Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt. 

All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world".

In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage - to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.

In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation".

 You can read more at the link above.

Update:  I thought it worth showing the photo in the article of the 5 guys on the hunt for Aryan roots in Tibet (so to speak):

 The pants are a bit baggy, but still:  pretty snappy dressers for Nazi scientists.   (And you really do expect Indiana Jones to be lurking somewhere in the background.)

Big floods more often

Some German researchers conclude about climate change and floods:

New research by Brunner and her colleagues shows the occurrence and intensity of extreme flood events will increase, but smaller and more moderate floods will probably decline.

“There is extensive evidence that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events around the world, but much less evidence that flood events have increased over the same period,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California at Los Angeles and a co-author of the paper.

“This new research demonstrates how climate change could actually have divergent effects for very large but rare floods versus smaller but more common floods,” he said.

Swain said additional work would be needed to confirm that this flooding behavior applies more broadly around the world but suspects it probably does....

In line with previous research, the team found that precipitation will increase and intensify in a warming climate. The largest increases in precipitation occurred in the most extreme and rare events.

By the end of this century, the authors found, intense precipitation events that would typically occur two times per century would occur twice as often. Events that would occur once every 200 years would become four times as frequent.

Flooding trends were more nuanced.

In general, they found that moderate flooding events depended on land-surface processes, such as soil moisture or the amount of snow in the watershed.

For instance, if soil moisture was high, perhaps from previous recent rains, then even a small amount of additional precipitation could cause the area to flood. Brunner also said that water falling over impermeable surfaces, such as concrete sidewalks in cities, could cause flooding even from relatively small amounts of rain. Both of these were contributing factors to the disastrous flooding in New York in early September.

All sounds pretty plausible.  And as I keep saying - actually a very expensive and difficult thing to deal with in infrastructure terms - re-engineering storm water drainage for an entire city to expand its capacity by a substantial amount must be very pricey.

 

 

It's a cult

This is such strong evidence of Trumpism being a cult, I wondered if it might turn out to be faked.  Doesn't look it:

 

The end of the Ring

Well, time for my final "I don't really know what I am talking about" review of the Ring Cycle - because I managed to get through Acts 2 and 3 of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, Wiki informs me) on the weekend.

Act 2:  the plot here is fairly confusing - although I think now that I read the explanation on Wiki, it was probably because I wasn't paying close enough attention at the end of Act 1.   So, going back there for a moment:  under the spell of a potion by bad guy Hagen, and the use of a magic helmet called the Tarnhelm, Siegfried took on the shape of Hagen's half brother Gunther and walked through the ring of fire to get to Brunnhilde, snatched the ring (yes, that ring) off her finger and putting it on his [that is, fake Gunther's] hand, making her his [fake Gunther's] instantly, apparently.

In Act 2, Siegfried teleports [uh, Tarnhelm - it's a bit like a Tardis that fits on the head, apparently] back to Hagen to claim the woman he wants - Gunther's sister Gutrune.   (See, he's forgotten all about how he had fallen for Brunnhilde.)  Real Gunther then arrives back with Brunnhilde in tow, with the plan to have a double wedding.   

Things then get all very high conflict, when Brunnhilde realises (by seeing the ring on Siegfried's finger - not Gunther's) that she's been conned, somehow, and as Siegfried still doesn't understand that he's been played by Hagen, he goes off to marry Gutrune anyway. 

[If there is one key feature of the Ring Cycle, it's that falling insanely in love and getting hitched takes place in phenomenally short timeframes!  Maybe all opera is like that - I really wouldn't know.]

While Siegfried and Gutrune are tying the knot off stage, Hagen, Gunther and Brunnhilde all decide that to restore everyone's honour, Siegfried needs to die.   Brunnhilde, obviously, is not a woman lightly crossed.

The best thing about Act 2: a chorus, hurrah - comprising the Gibichung army!   And it's used in (what seemed to me) an unusual way - it talks back and forth with Hagen.  Like: "hey, why did you summons us, Hagen?"  "To come to a wedding."   "Oh, cool.  Whose wedding?"  And so on.  That's not the way chorus's usually work in opera, is it?   I found it a bit amusing.   But I did like hearing a big chorus after after listening to mostly solo voices for the previous 14 hours.     

Anyway, onto the climax:   Act 3.  Spoilers ahead!

Well,  there's not much to tell, really:   Siegfried has gone out hunting and got separated from Hagen and Gunther, unaware they have plans for him.   The Rhinemaidens make a re-appearance, and warn Siegfried that the ring is cursed and if he'll end up dead that day unless he gives it back to the Rhine.   Dumb old (well, young, but usually played by old singers it seems) Siegfried scoffs, and is shortly thereafter shafted - literally - by Hagen.   

Hagen gets him carried home on his shield, to a fantastic bit of music, and lies to Gutrune that her husband of less than 24 hours has been killed by a wild boar.

The truth comes out soon enough, to everyone, including Brunnhilde.  She decides to re-join Siegfried by jumping into his funeral pyre, together with her horse,  and takes the opportunity to torch the Gods in Valhalla pretty much at the same time, in revenge for mucking her around.  (We had been told by someone - I forget who - that Wotan has been moping around in Valhalla, stacking it with a wood pile from the former World Tree, just waiting for someone to light a match, if I understood the implication correctly.)    

Somehow, the ring gets flung back into the Rhine, and Hagen tries to get it but is drowned by a couple of Rhinemaidens. ("Don't cross women" seems to be a major lesson of this opera.}

And, thus (don't ask me how, exactly) the world is redeemed.   I've actually got to go read how this is meant to work - I suppose it might have something to do with the Gods in this universe not being benevolent and wise and all powerful, but instead meddling nuisances who don't really know what they want.  Except a good house:  remember, waaaay back at the start, a lot of Wotan's troubles began as a tradesman dispute over how they were going to get paid for building Valhalla.   But then again, the Rhinemaidens, who seem to have escaped all this destruction, probably shouldn't have taunted ugly dwarf Alberich, causing him to turn all incel and steal the gold (and make the ring) in the first place.    I think there is a fair bit of blame to spread around, here...

So, did this climax live up to my expectations?   Pretty much - the end music is pretty overwhelming.  I don't know why, but my heart rate was up for a while after it finished, and I was just watching and listening on my phone.  (Imagine Wagner knowing this is how someone would be viewing his work a century and a half after he wrote it! He'd be mortified.)

I am satisfied that I will enjoy the live production, whenever it may get to be staged in Brisbane, and now that I know the story, I won't have to concentrate quite so much if my cheap seat doesn't have a good view.

I may have to write more about this, after I read more....

Wingnuttery

Update:. More in this vein:

Lunch

It was like a tasting paddle of food and wine.  I didn't take a photo of the dessert, but it was great.

The threats of the Right inadequately acknowledged

You know what sickens me - when you have Australian apologists for Trump pretending that his (often heavily armed) wingnut supporters are not into threats of violence.   It's all "we all know the true source of violence in America..it's the Left".  

They only get away with thinking this because, (apart from being brainwashed idiots), there is far too little reporting of the types of threats routinely made in America by Trump wingnuts.   Take this, for example - the appalling level of threat against another Republican for not swinging fully behind the "election was stolen":

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) felt queasy last December after dodging a reporter’s question about whether Joe Biden was president-elect. He said he’d seen no evidence of fraud but added that the process needed to fully play out. This was a standard GOP talking point, but Duncan understood how such vacillation gave oxygen to President Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the election.

The lieutenant governor decided he had a duty to acknowledge reality: The president he’d campaigned for had lost. Duncan knew this bit of truth-telling might cost him reelection. “My breathing suddenly became quick and shallow,” he recalls.

Just as Duncan feared, telling the truth about the "big lie" derailed a promising political career. He announced this spring he won’t seek a second term, averting probable defeat in a primary. That’s liberated the former professional baseball player to release a book this week, “GOP 2.0,” that recounts “the six nightmarish months” he spent in a “bizarre Twilight Zone” after the November election.

Trump called him “corrupt” — and threats poured in, via voicemail, email and social media. A website appeared with his face centered in crosshairs, alongside his address and a picture of his home. FBI agents told him Iran was behind that page, according to his book, as part of a broader effort to amplify election disinformation.

When his teenage son Bayler tweeted a family motto, “Doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing,” the lieutenant governor liked and retweeted the post. His wife, Brooke, was “furious” with him because she feared he had just exposed their son to attack, Duncan writes, “and she was right.” State troopers stood guard as he played catch with his three boys in their yard. “Imagine explaining that to your children,” he writes.

Legislators privately told him they admired his courage. Then they publicly attacked. “I found myself on an island — one that was getting pounded by bombs and artillery,” Duncan writes. “Lie by lie, the former president sapped the trustworthiness of every single Republican official.” 

 I would bet my last dollar that there were also many ordinary election workers (those who were seen on video and the subject of invented claims of fraudulent handling of votes) who received threats for months afterwards - but we hear nothing about that.

And hey - now that I Google the topic - yes: here is a special report that turned up on Reuters only yesterday detailing how :hundreds" of threats against election workers has only resulted in a handful of arrests.  Some of the reasons why are just astounding:

The death threats brought Staci McElyea to tears. The caller said that McElyea and other workers in the Nevada Secretary of State’s office were "going to f------ die.” She documented the threats and alerted police, who identified and interviewed the caller. But in the end, detectives said there was nothing they could do – that the man had committed no crime.

The first call came at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 7, hours after Congress certified Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential vote. The caller accused McElyea of “stealing” the election, echoing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. “I hope you all go to jail for treason. I hope your children get molested. You’re all going to f------ die,” he told her.

He called back three times over the next 15 minutes, each time telling her she was “going to die.”

McElyea, 53, a former U.S. Marine, called the Nevada Capitol Patrol and sent the state police agency a transcript of the calls, according to emails Reuters obtained through a public-records request. An officer contacted the man – who police would later identify as Gjurgi Juncaj of Las Vegas – and reported back to McElyea that their inquiry “might have pissed him off even further,” the emails showed.

A week later, state police concluded that Juncaj’s threats were not criminal, characterizing them as “protected” political speech, according to a summary of the case. Juncaj was never arrested or charged. Asked about the calls, Juncaj told Reuters he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong. “Like I explained to the police, I didn’t threaten anybody,” he said.

The case illustrates the glaring gaps in the protection that U.S. law enforcement provides the administrators of American democracy amid a sustained campaign of intimidation against election officials and staff. The unprecedented torrent of terroristic threats began in the weeks before the November election, as Trump was predicting widespread voter fraud, and continues today as the former president carries on with false claims that he was cheated out of victory.

What a country.

 

The dog that caught the car

I thought this Slate column on why the Republicans (and Australian Right wingnuts) have been fairly muted in their excitement over the Texas effective ban on abortion was pretty good.  Key parts:

Despite the Republican Party’s decades long crusade against Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of GOP politicians declined to celebrate, or even note, Roe’s functional demise. Why?

The most obvious answer is that Republicans are now the dog that caught the car, fearful of the political ramifications of their own victory. Indeed, it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts. After all, hundreds of similar laws were blocked by the courts for years. Their decision to downplay this victory should upend the conventional wisdom about Roe not just politically, but also from a constitutional perspective.

For years, conservative lawyers have argued that the Supreme Court should not uphold pro-choice precedent because it is unsettled, unstable, and unworkable. As evidence, they cite the fact that red states continue passing all manner of abortion restrictions to contest the legitimacy of Roe as settled precedent. But the GOP’s reaction to the Texas law suggests that this analysis has it backward. What if Republicans only continued to pass abortion restrictions because they knew the laws would get struck down? What if the passage of these laws proves that Roe is such a settled, stable, and workable precedent that legislators think they can pretend to defy it without worrying about the consequences?

The rest of it, talking about the history of Republican tactics, was interesting, too.

Feminism and pornography

There's an interesting review in The Atlantic of three feminist themed books on the current (Western) attitudes to sex, and there are some interesting passages:

Porn consumption is now such a fixture of modern life—there is no chance the American government will take your smut away—that space has opened up to question its effects without being dismissed as a wannabe censor. Which isn’t to say that admitting to reservations about current sexual trends is easy. For Clark-Flory’s 30-something generation (which is also my generation), being Cool About Sex is a mark of our impeccable social liberalism. If two or more adults consent to it, whatever it is, no one else is entitled to an opinion.

Yet here is the conundrum facing feminist writers: Our enlightened values—less stigma regarding unwed mothers, the acceptance of homosexuality, greater economic freedom for women, the availability of contraception, and the embrace of consent culture—haven’t translated into anything like a paradise of guilt-free fun. The sexual double standard still exists, and girls who say no are still “frigid” while those who say yes are still “sluts.” Some men still act with entitlement, while others feel that, no matter what they do, they are inescapably positioned as the “bad guys” by the new sexual rules. Half a century after the sexual revolution and the start of second-wave feminism, why are the politics of sex still so messy, fraught, and contested?

More specifically on pornography:

In The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan confesses her reluctance to cover second-wave criticisms of porn in the feminist-theory course she teaches at Oxford. She is Cool About Sex, after all, and assumed that her students would be bored by the question of whether porn oppresses women. She also assumed that the reputation of “anti-porn feminists,” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had been fatally damaged by their alliance with the religious right to pass laws restricting access to pornography. What self-respecting member of Generation Z would want to line up alongside Jerry Falwell Sr. and Phyllis Schlafly, particularly when the other side is selling a fantasy of libertine pleasure?

Yet her class was “riveted,” she observes in “Talking to My Students About Porn,” the longest essay in her collection. Their enthusiasm was so great that it made her reconsider her own diffidence. The exchange is worth quoting at length:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically … My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission.

Well, it's good to see such things being admitted;  I guess it's also something of a sign of the scale of the sexual revolution that you can have a class of (presumably) young adults in Oxford so keen to share with their teacher their views of their own sexual experiences.   Not exactly a scene you'd expect in CS Lewis and Tolkien's day!

There is also this aspect of pornography, which I guess I hadn't thought much about before:

But how much do culture and politics shape those wants? Porn-aggregator sites, to take one example, use algorithms, just like the rest of the internet. Pornhub pushes featured videos and recommendations, optimized to build user loyalty and increase revenue, which carry the implicit message that this is what everyone else finds arousing—that this is the norm. Compare porn with polarized journalism, or even fast food: How can we untangle what people “really want” from what they are offered, over and over, and from what everyone else is being offered too? No one’s sexual desires exist in a vacuum, immune to outside pressures driven by capitalism. (Call it the invisible hand job of the market.)

Ha ha.

I think it's good to see serious, non religious, discussion of the downside of ubiquitous easy access to pornography;  but it is difficult how you can ever see a solution without in some way being censorious.  Let's not shy away from that, I say:   people should feel OK with saying "I really think pornography that depicts practice X, Y or Z really ought not be available." 

 

Still not 100% sure

Another study indicating that the warming Arctic region is helping cause freak cold winter spells in North America, due to the polar vortex breaking down and causing cold air to spread south:

In their study, published this week in Science¹, Cohen and his colleagues compared 40 years of satellite observations of atmospheric conditions over the Arctic with experiments based on computational climate models. The models probed how a decline in Arctic sea ice and snow cover would affect airstreams in the region. Since ice and snow reflect a large fraction of incoming sunlight back into space, whereas the darker ocean and land surface absorb more radiation, this decline is known to drive Arctic warming.

The researchers found that episodes of polar-vortex stretching have markedly increased in the past few decades, and that their models reproduced this behaviour well when they included the effects of Arctic warming.

But some climate scientists are still not sure:

...the idea that Arctic warming might be responsible for cold spells in mid-latitude regions is still hotly debated among climate scientists. At first glance, it might seem obvious that winters will generally tend to get milder in a warming world. But climate models that are commonly used to study complex links between the different components of the climate system diverge on the issue of how strongly Arctic warming might influence mid-latitude winters, and state-of-the-art models do not accurately replicate observed trends in the behaviour of the polar vortex. It remains to be seen whether the models are missing something, or whether the observations of polar-vortex stretching merely reflect natural climate variability, says Daniela Matei, a climate modeller at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

I don't know:  seems a bit of an odd co-incidence for it to be "natural climate variability" at a time of clear and rapid Arctic warming...

A voter fraud conspiracy for every election

It seems that the Democrat concern that California's governor will lose the recall election is much reduced.    Hence this:

Tweets on life extension

Was waiting for a tweet like this...

...but Jason spotted it first:

Agreed.  I mean, the guy looks like he should be retired, too.
 

Update:  I posted that before I even watched the video.  Now that I have seen half of it - I definitely do not want this guy as my pilot.  Not only that, it sounds like he has been barely psychologically stable enough to be a pilot for much of his career - he recites a litany of personal problems he's experienced.  

Pilots can be nuts, too.