I will have to check on the Cathollaxy blog later, but I trust that the anti-government COVID response protesters are getting frustrated that the media covered last Saturday's protests with a bit of a shrug, with images of the attendees being just outright anti-vaxxer nuts.
They might be learning that just because social media allows protest organising to be easy as pie amongst a minority, it can still be ineffective in actually achieving anything.
I can't even remember the last, pre-pandemic, movie I saw at the cinema. Maybe if I search my movie review posts I could work it out.
But, happily, yesterday I discovered that the new cinemas quite close to home are really well fitted out, and cheap, and I am happy to get back into this movie going thing, as soon as more good movies start coming out. (I'm in on the new Spiderman, but the way. The Tom Holland incarnation and Dr Strange: I can't resist.)
Anyway, yesterday it was No Time to Die, and I was pretty impressed. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to not make another Bond, the Daniel Craig era was just so good, everything is going to suffer in comparison*. (I'm even a quasi defender of Quantum of Solace: although just re-reading my review now, I see it may partly have been because I saw it before I saw Casino Royale, and so the effectiveness of Craig in the role sort of blew me away.)
What to say about it? The action was really well handled (although tending at times to the "too quickly edited, shaky cam" end of the spectrum in some of the up close fights); I think it could have been trimmed slightly, but I was never bored, and I didn't notice anyone leave the cinema for a toilet break during its long run time; I tend to agree with most reviewers that Skyfall is a smidge better, but they both have the sense of gravitas that made Bond feel real.
I do have something to say that I haven't read elsewhere, although it must have occurred to some reviewer, somewhere: the screenwriters (sort of) lucked out with COVID giving a metaphoric topicality to the evil, world threatening device in this story - a fast spreading, silent infectious agent of sorts, weaponised (as Right wingers love to fantasise is the case with our current pandemic.)
Finally: unfortunately, one of the two big plot surprises was ruined for me by Peter Van Onselen. I agree with all the hate and douche-calling that followed this on his twitter account, and I hope he lost a thousand followers. He's a jerk, honestly.
OK, really finally: given our tough COVID response in Australia, it's a surprise to realise that the rest of the world is back to the cinema - I see that it has made $758 million internationally, although Variety claims that "insiders" say it needs to make $900 million to break even. (What a joke Hollywood and accounting is.) Anyway, it looks like it should make that goal. Congratulations, everyone.
* I can advise, though, that the last thing on the screen at the end of the credits is "James Bond will return". I then confirmed with the handful of others remaining in the cinema that this was why we were still there.
In the history books, PM Morrison is going down as the shallow, hapless PM who thought he could PR his way to success, while not being bright enough to realise he's not good at PR. This line of attack yesterday was just so inane:
The Liberal Party seems to really be specialising in giving us living examples of the Peter Principle, this last decade. Abbott was perhaps the best example of that, as he arguably gave earlier indications of maybe being a good political operator, only to turn out as PM to be a weirdo with a "mummy" thing going on with his chief of staff. Turnbull's problem was not exactly one I would call a Peter Principle issue; more just a simple lack of courage against the climate change deniers in his own party. But the PP definitely applies to PM Smirko. It's just that it hit very early in his working life, and somehow didn't stop further promotion. Politics can be like that, given it's often a case of "least worst option".
Who's next to take the mantle of "risen to his level of incompetence"? Seems likely it will be Dutton, the potential PM with the weirdest looking head since Federation. The only problem is, you can see the media narrative now: even if he proves the slightest bit effective as a campaigner, journalists will not be able to resist a "surprise! the public is finding him likeable after all" take.
That's my theory behind this headline (and review):
Most people tweeting about it seem to strongly disagree - but then, they might have gone the full 8 hours yet.
(As for my own views - like everyone else, I was pretty stunned at the clarity of the film that was shown on the preview some months ago - as if it was made yesterday (subtle pun) instead of 50 years ago. And it was very pleasing to see them looking happier than we all had been led to believe. But I am not the world's biggest Beatle fan, so yeah, 8 hours might be pushing it for me.)
You would think she might be smart enough to hold off making this point for a case where it didn't take two months for the white men who shot a black unarmed man on the street (and videoed it) to be arrested.
A really bleak assessment in an opinion piece in the Washington Post: Republican authoritarianism is here to stay.
A taste:
What has happened in the United States over the past five years is, in many ways, a classic of the autocratic genre. A populist leader rose to power, attacked the press, politicized rule of law, threatened to jail his opponents, demonized minorities, praised dictators abroad, spread conspiracy theories and lies, and then sought to seize power despite losing an election. When such despotic figures emerge in democracies, their political party has two options: push back against the would-be despot while reasserting democratic principles, or remake the party in his image. Republicans have quite clearly chosen the latter path....
What’s left, then, is some distant hope that a profound national crisis could jolt Republicans away from their embrace of authoritarian politics. Just as the tragedy of Sept. 11 brought Democrats and Republicans together, perhaps a major national shock could cause Republicans to rally back toward democracy. But we’ve already had two major crises — Jan. 6 and a once-in-a-century pandemic — and they’ve made the GOP more extreme, not less. If a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol aimed at overturning an election and more than 770,000 dead Americans in the pandemic aren’t enough of a jolt, what would it take?
The conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the Republican Party is over. The Trumpian authoritarians have won — and they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime soon.
So, I learn from Cathollaxy that Breitbart has a story up about how George Pell spent part of his time in cells writing up his whiny, non-expert, and patently out of date thoughts on how climate change is not real.
We've long known he was the captive of ageing crank geologist (and atheist) Ian Plimer's utter nonsense of climate change denial - funny how a religious conservative let himself be conned by a non believer into thinking that it was all hysteria caused by modern folk having lost religion!
I'm referring to the accuracy of GPS, about which I will never stop feeling awe as a technological and scientific marvel. I didn't realise, until watching a youtube about its monitoring applications, that high end, scientific research versions of GPS receivers can be this accurate:
High-end users boost GPS accuracy with dual-frequency receivers and/or augmentation systems. These can enable real-time positioning within a few centimeters, and long-term measurements at the millimeter level.
I have the feeling I knew this before, but had forgotten.
Here's the video, by the way:
Someone in comments to the video notes this:
I frequently vacation in coastal Oregon, where earth movement is a big concern. GPS stations (the most accurate in the world) measure earth movement as small as one third of a millimetre and they discovered the study area oscillates east and west every two weeks. Japan uses the same accurate GPS equipment, and I believe Oregon got their equipment from Japan (the US military probably has more accurate stuff). Good post! Thanks for sharing it with us.Other people question the millimetre accuracy, but it seems not out of the question:
I'd assume it's not just GPS. I'm 99% sure GPS does not provide millimetre level resolution. They're probably using a combination of positioning systems.
Here's the short version:
New research has shed light on a sudden cooling event 34 million years ago, which contributed to formation of the Antarctic ice sheets.
High-resolution simulations of ocean circulations show that the tectonic opening of Southern Ocean seaways caused a fundamental reorganisation of ocean currents, heat transport and initiated a strong Antarctic surface water cooling of up to 5°C....
“A 600m change in the depth of an ocean gateway can cause a dramatic drop in coastal temperatures and, therefore, the fate of the Antarctic ice sheet.”
The last land bridges connecting Antarctica with its surrounding continents, Australia, and South America, broke off about 34 million years ago. This tectonic event did not only leave the polar continent isolated by other land masses; it also led to a major reorganisation of ocean currents in the Southern Ocean.
A circumpolar current started to flow, preventing subpolar gyres from transporting warm surface waters to the Antarctic coast. At the same time, ice sheets started to build on Antarctica and the Earth underwent one of its most fundamental climate change events, transitioning from warm Greenhouse to cold Icehouse conditions.
The role of the opening seaways in the formation of Antarctic ice sheets versus decreasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has always been strongly debated by scientists.
And here's the long version, in Nature Communications (open access).
There is much excitement over at dover beach's Cathollaxy, a pro-Christofascist blog, over the "success" of the large demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney last week over vaccination and mandates, etc.
The so called ‘governments’ are taking orders from above.
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
and
flyingduk says:
Unless the freedom fighters start proper full blooded violence, they wont win.
Quite, some people are afraid this will lead to all out war, the people v their governments – I am afraid it wont.
Which led to a severe dressing down by the blog controller:
dover0beach says:
Can we ease up on the rhetoric please.
Of course, they're paying attention:
struth says:
Hey, …..Hey, ……..they’re killing us.
But………Don’t be so uncivil and threaten violence back, FFS, says the forever submissive.
They are killing our children.
They’re imprisoning, enslaving us.
They have taken all our freedoms and separated families.
The army are now dragging people away to camps.
Write a strongly worded letter.
That should do it.
Well it didn’t work did it?
And peaceful rallies just increase the speed of their growing tyranny as they start to see the need for urgency.
What do they need to do before you suggest they’ve crossed a line , here?
At what point do you pick up a rock?
Dover beach was at the rally himself, and posted boring photos of it. He routinely notes dubious analysis of the Covid vaccines.
Catholic conservative wannabe Christo-fascism at its finest. [That's sarcasm, for any Federal domestic violence authorities who are reading.]
An article at The Conversation, about how Chinese school books are developing the personality cult around Xi Jinping.
I don't know - in the digital world, it feels it should be harder for a personality cult to be built up in children - or teenagers - especially when Grandpa won't let them play video games except for a few hours one night a week.
Not only that, but it seems to me that the wingnut Christofascim of Australia has a distinctly Catholic colour to it - unlike America where it's primarily Southern evangelical. I mean, last week it was a statue of Mary being paraded in front of the "hang Dan Andrews" rallies; on the weekend it was a long time nutter and Australia's own wannabe Michael Flynn starting his speech before the "Freedom rally" with the Lord's Prayer. (He is Catholic, and amusingly, I've noticed many people at dover beach's Cathollaxy think he's gone too nuts and Qanon-like.) Here's the video, if you can stomach it:
He called for a general strike until the country bends to his views - I am curious how many absentees there were today as a result of this call. I doubt it's many.
How much should we worry about the nutty Freedom rallies? They are scary in the way they illustrate the power of the internet to co-ordinate protest, internationally; but at the same time, the vaccination rate here (Australia) would indicate that their numbers over the entire population are not as large as they might think. I know - there would have been some vaccinated people in the crowd who were protesting for the rights of the un-vaccinated - but I suspect they would be in the small minority. So vaccination rates in the big states would tend to indicate the number of people whipping themselves into an anti-vaccination frenzy is probably under 10%, perhaps less than 5%? Yet the internet gives cranks the impression that their numbers are larger than they really are.
It must be driving many of them nuts that Dan Andrews is still polling strongly in Victoria.
Children of women who use marijuana during or soon after pregnancy are twice as likely as other kids to become anxious, aggressive or hyperactive, according to a new study. The findings add weight to a growing body of evidence linking cannabis use during pregnancy to psychiatric problems in children. The behavioral issues may be driven in part by changes in the activity of genes found in the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the growing fetus.
For pregnant women, cannabis isn’t just a means of getting high. Some women use it to ease severe morning sickness and anxiety, and they may not be aware that it can pose risks.
Women “tend to think smoking and drinking during pregnancy need to be avoided at all costs, but not cannabis,” said Yoko Nomura, a behavioral neuroscientist at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of the new study. “We have a long way to go to educate pregnant women, policymakers and even OB-GYN doctors on this issue.”
Research suggests that a growing number of women are using cannabis during pregnancy: One study found that in 2016, nearly twice as many women in California reported using cannabis while pregnant than in 2009.
Yet for more than 40 years, research has been raising concerns about the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy. A longitudinal study that began in 1978 linked maternal cannabis use with children’s behavioral problems as well as deficits in language comprehension, visual perception, attention and memory. More recent research has linked cannabis use in pregnancy to low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems, although some other studies have not identified such associations.
Of concern, too, is that cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of years past. Levels of THC, the compound responsible for most of marijuana’s psychological effects, have increased significantly in recent years. “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s,” said Dr. Darine El-Chaâr, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at The Ottawa Hospital in Canada who studies the health risks of marijuana use during pregnancy and was not involved in the new study.
That's quite some list of potential poor outcomes for the child!
I still suspect the US is going to regret the normalisation of marijuana use.
The topic: superdeterminism as a "solution" to the quantum measurement problem.
The reason I am writing it: possibly, because my future self is causing me to do so; but more clearly, because I see that everyone's favourite Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder appears as co-author on a paper up at Arxiv with the title The Quantum Eraser Paradox.
She made a recent Youtube video in which she downplayed the retro-causality interpretation of the experiment. Let me post it: here we go -
Now, she has previously come out as suggesting that superdeterminism is probably going to turn out to be the best explanation of quantum measurement issues, and she has also gone on about how free will in humans does not exist.
In this new Arxiv paper, if I understand it correctly (and I have only had a quick read), it would seem that she and her fellow authors propose a new quantum experiment the results of which may show a difference between retrocausation as the explanation, and superdeterminism.
Sounds like an important experiment to me!
But what does superdeterminism mean? The Wikipedia explanation seems not very good, but this essay by Tim Anderson on Medium Superdeterminism may have solved the quantum measurement problem is a pretty good read.
Interestingly, it seems there is some potential cross over between both explanations (the future causing the past, and the now being predetermined.) On the Wiki page, for example, it notes:
Some authors consider retrocausality in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition for distinguishing them exists.But is that what Sabine addressing in her proposed experiment: a way of distinguishing the two, empirically?
In Anderson's article, he writes:
Although there is no information transfer from future to past, so you can’t remember the future, there can be causal effects at the quantum level and relativity is not violated provided cause and effect are within light speed of one another. In that sense, you cannot know the future yet it can cause the present and the past. It can change reality itself, switching the electron spin orientation for example, or changing what reality was before you became aware of it.
This is why a better term for superdeterminism is “Future Input Dependency”. Thus, my actions in the future might, counter-intuitively, be determining my actions now rather than the reverse. Moreover, my future actions might even determine reality itself in the present. Thus, how I set up an experiment years in the future might determine the state of an electron emitted now.
Well, still count me as confused, then.
But, I don't know - if what I do in the future in some sense influences a decision I made in the past, is that a backdoor way to let a kind of free will in? Because if it's myself doing the retrocausation, it has at least a whiff of free will about it.
But how much I trust my future self to make the best retrocausative decisions? Being good now seems a sound way to ensure your future self is not a complete jerk - hence retrocausation might fit in well with your classic way of thinking about ethics. It's just that it's all circular (perhaps with a Mobius strip twist) instead of straight line running in one direction.
It's funny, too, isn't it, how we feel it's comforting to think our love relationships were meant to be - we give free will a hall pass to wander off when it comes to something like that, but want it back if it also means we're destined to die an early death (or end up in Hell forever.)
Anyway, I've written posts about retrocausation before on this blog. I find it appealing, and I'm just here trying to work out why.
This article at Philosophy Now about Buddhist metaphysics seems a nice, succinct overview. A couple of extracts:
Buddhism is often described as the philosophy of the ‘middle way’, in that the Buddha is alleged to have always urged his devotees to avoid ‘extremes’ in the quest for enlightenment – initially, the extremes of asceticism or self-indulgence.
Many scholars, like Sangharakshita, have emphasized that Buddhism is a form of ‘atheistic spirituality’ – a religion without a god – in that it attempts to steer a middle way between the theistic spirituality of the Hindu Vedanta tradition and the atheistic materialism of the Samkhya and Lokayata philosophies. But given the focal emphasis that Buddhism places upon the mind, its complete denial of a self, and the extreme idealist tendencies that developed within the Buddhist tradition, it is doubtful if Buddhism as a spiritual tradition ever took the middle way doctrinally. Indeed, many later Mahayana Buddhists, including such well-known figures as Daisetz Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa, may best be described as advocating not a middle way between spirituality and materialism, but a form of mystical idealism. ....
Aware of the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist concept of ‘no self’ (anatta), and the Buddha’s apparent ethical emphasis on the human subject as an embodied self with moral agency, some early Buddhists came out as phenomenalists. They had the notion of two realms of being, that of everyday life (laukika), and of a transcendental realm (lokuttara), which in turn was linked to the idea of two truths; the conventional truths of everyday life (our common-sense realism) (samvrti satya), and the absolute truths (paramartta satya). The latter truths are alleged to give us knowledge and experience of things ‘as they really are’. Under the latter perspective, not only are human beings in an absolute sense now alleged to be ‘unreal’ or as ultimately having no real (mind-independent) existence, so are all the material things and organisms that humans acknowledge and interact with in their everyday lives. We are thus informed by these Buddhists in accordance with this ‘phenomenalism’, that ultimately speaking, the substantive objects and enduring persons of everyday life do not exist: they are ‘fictions’ or ‘illusions’, or more specifically, merely constructs of the human mind. All material things are in this way mind-dependent, hence the label ‘phenomenalism’ (‘phenomena’ is Greek for ‘the things/experiences of the senses’). Buddhist phenomenalism is therefore a completely anti-realist metaphysic. What exists and has reality according to it are only fleeting mental events or moments of experience – described in the Abhidhamma as dhammas. This metaphysic is invariably linked by contemporary Western Buddhist scholars to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, or to the anti-realist subjectivism of postmodernist philosophy.And further down:
It is doubtful if the Buddha expressed any real interest in epistemology, nor was he really interested in understanding the material world and its rich diversity of life-forms in any sort of scientific sense. His concern – as he continually emphasized – was ethical: the understanding and alleviation of suffering.
It is however clear that the Buddha’s emphasis on ‘right views’ and on the cultivation of wisdom (prajna) has two very different interpretations. On the one hand it has an empirically-sourced meaning: wisdom is a result of understanding the impermanence of human life, and the fact that all things arise and cease to exist according to specific causes and conditions. For the Buddha, greed, hatred, and egoism invariably give rise to suffering. As with Aristotle, wisdom involves the application of empirical knowledge – about impermanence and conditionality – to ethics, thereby (for Aristotle) enhancing human flourishing and well-being, or (for the Buddha) enabling the alleviation of suffering with respect to sentient beings. There is, therefore, no alienation between empirical knowledge and practical wisdom. (It is also worth noting that what really ‘expands the mind’ is not the ingesting of psychedelic drugs, nor inducing some transcendental or mystical state through deep meditation, but empirical knowledge – contrary to even what most Buddhists think.) On the other hand, the ‘transcendental’ interpretation of wisdom has less to do with empirical knowledge and ethics than with the cultivation of a spiritual or mystical intuition, and the realization, through deep meditative states, that the world – reality – is pure empty consciousness or absolute all-mind.
I'm going to push my luck and extract more than I usually would, and press on:
It follows that both the experience and understanding of enlightenment within the Buddhist tradition has two very different kinds of meaning; either ethical (this-worldly) or metaphysical (other-worldly). Similarly, although Buddhist scholars invariably equate the concept of awareness or awakening (bodhi) with the experience of non-dual consciousness or emptiness (nirvana), awareness and emptiness imply two very different conceptions of enlightenment. Enlightenment as awareness suggests a common-sense realism. It posits that things in the world are transient and continually undergoing change, and that nothing is self-existent, in that all things are subject to specific causes and conditions. The human person as an ‘existing being’, to employ the Buddha’s own phrase, is no exception. The person as an embodied self is continually changing, and embedded in a complex web of relationships with both the natural world and with other people. Enlightenment as awareness thus entails a theory of knowledge that is historical, dialectical (that is, relational and dynamic) and this-worldly. Enlightenment in this sense occurs when an embodied self becomes fully aware of the truth that everything changes and that all things are subject to causes and conditions. Ethical conduct is here based on empirical knowledge, of the world as experienced in everyday life. It requires us to realize that suffering, along with sorrow and despair, arises from the three ‘poisons’, namely, greed, hatred and delusion – all egocentric strivings. And, as indicated, enlightenment as awareness also suggests a concept of wisdom akin to that of Aristotle; namely the application of empirical knowledge to the question of how to alleviate suffering, through the cultivation of wholesome mental states such as compassion, non-violence, generosity, and loving kindness.
In contrast, it appears that for many Buddhists – Daisetz Suzuki is a prime example – enlightenment as nibbana or emptiness implies a quite different worldview – that of mystical idealism. This involves the attainment of a state of mind that transcends the experiences of everyday life. This is a state of mind characterised as being unconditioned, eternal (or timeless), and empty (or disembodied). So here enlightenment is described as a form of non-dual consciousness that transcends both time and the material world of things. It leads to the understanding that ‘physical reality is created out of consciousness’ as one well-known scholar puts it (Bringing Home the Darma, Jack Cornfield, 2012, p.241). Enlightenment as nibbana therefore implies that ‘things as they really are’ are ‘mind-only’, as the ‘absolute all-mind’ or as the ‘cosmic consciousness’ beyond both the subjective mind and the body. For Suzuki, as for Nietzsche, it is a consciousness even beyond good and evil. This idea, however, appears to be completely at odds with the Buddha’s ethical philosophy.
And a point I haven't really heard made before:
Many contemporary Buddhists are dissatisfied with what they see as the overemphasis on meditation and the attainment of individual enlightenment. They have instead stressed the crucial need for a socially engaged Buddhism. This implies being directly involved in contemporary issues, specifically those relating to the ecological crisis and to social justice. It is also worth noting in passing that concepts of ‘no self’ and the ‘unconditioned’ were for the Buddha ethical concepts rather than metaphysical ones. They implied a rejection of egoism, not of the embodied self, and of seeking freedom from the unwholesome emotions of greed, hatred, and the craving for a permanent self.
I think it fair to say that the general approach taken by the writer aligns with a view of Buddhism taken by Karen Armstrong in her biography of Buddha which I am (very slowly) reading. She keeps emphasising that his approach was actually very pragmatic - working out by his own experience what "worked" to solve his spiritual concerns.
Update: I wanted to further add that this analysis provides some justification for my long held feeling that the religion is too concerned with the self - even though it also believes there's no self there! And I like religions that are heavily into charitable works, but one that has an "anti-realist metaphysic" is hardly likely to be motivated to do that. I am happy to read that there are some Buddhists who want it to be more socially engaged.
The New York Times has a lengthy version of a story in Science (which I also subscribe to - $66 US a year - bargain!) about a scientist who thinks the WHO made a mistake in attributing the first case of COVID in Wuhan. He thinks it was a woman from the wet market, as were most of the other early cases.
The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.
Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.
“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”
Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the W.H.O., said that Dr. Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor.
But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the market. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Dr. Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.
By the way, whatever happened to the story, which the Chinese media was keen to spread, that an Italian had COVID months before it showed up in Wuhan? Here's the story, at Reuters. But here's a much later report on why some suspect it wasn't an accurate study. All very complicated.
