Something to be thankful for

I just found the pair of reading glasses I keep at home, after misplacing them for about a month.

I might write a post soon about the annoying stage my eyes are currently at...

A remarkably cold winter

I've been meaning to post this for weeks now, but this is easily that coldest Brisbane winter that I can recall, probably for decades.

A week or two ago it was waking up to 3 degrees on a Saturday and Sunday, and although it was sunny and clear it still seemed to take to midday to start feeling warmth from it.  Yesterday and today it's like living in a Melbourne (or Tasmanian) winter:  grey, wet and while the minimums are not as bad as under clear skies, never warming up more than 2 or 3 degrees all day.  14 degrees yesterday, and my weather app says that now (1.40pm) it's 12 degrees.  

Remarkable.

American pessimism and optimism

It's pretty remarkable, isn't it, that a mass shooting at a 4 July parade in a well off part of the US comes in at news story number 5 or 6 in Australia this morning (and only a short time devoted to it), because we are so used to such news.  (Yeah, there are local floods crowding it out, but still, it does seem a case of "oh, another outrageously violent event in a nation that is too stupidly in love with guns.  Meh.")    

By the way, I see that the prime suspect sounds like a disturbed young man who has imagined the crime for a long time - just the sort of person who doesn't get to live out his violent fantasies in other countries where it is much, much harder to get the tool necessary to make it a reality.

Yes despite this, I am in a general sense still on side with Noah Smith's overall take on being (kinda) optimistic that the USA will get over its current problems, and the most dire predictions not come to pass.   He sums it well in this free post at his Substack.

 

Filipino style beef empanadas

Inspired about 6 weeks ago by a delicious Filipino style beef empanada bought at West End markets, I tried making them myself this weekend.

There are a lot of difference versions of how to make the dough in particular, and very often with non metric measurements.   For my future reference, this worked fine for a fried empanada (don't know how they would go baked, but frying does make for a more interesting texture, I reckon.  Basically, it's this recipe, although it took a bit more water:

3 cups plain flour

115 g unsalted butter (cold and cubed)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoon sugar (although I only used one)

1 egg

3 (maybe more?) tablespoon ice water 

You can guess how this is made:  mix the dry ingredients, rub in the butter, beat the egg with water and add to made a pretty firm dough.  Wrap in cling wrap and put in fridge for 15 min before using.

As for the filling:  I just followed an amalgam of a few recipes, but yeah, using 500 g of mince makes more than you can use with that much pastry.   Fried one medium onion, about 4 or 5 garlic cloves, in with the small cubed potato and carrot, then mince.  A substantial amount of tomato paste.  Add raisins (I thought I was overdoing it with 1/3 cup, but no), about half a cup of beef stock, lots of pepper, a half cup of peas, let it simmer and liquid reduce, check seasoning.  Oh, I used a couple of tablespoons of soy too, and maybe a tablespoon of worcestershire sauce too. Sounds a lot of saltiness, if you included the tomato paste, but it was 500 g of mince.

I also put a baton of cheese in the middle of the filing in the empanadas, which doesn't appear in any recipe, but was in the ones I bought at the markets.

They were nice, but not as nice as the market ones.   I have to have another and examine its contents more carefully.

A joke as a sign of sentience?

He perhaps should be spending a bit more time walking rather than sitting and chatting to his ambiguously sentient AI buddy, but nonetheless, this interview with the Google guy who went public with his AI claims is really quite interesting, and makes me feel like we are at least close to living in a science fiction movie:

 

I particularly liked how it was an apparent AI joke that influenced his thinking.   And one about Jedi!

The guy does appear genuinely thoughtful, and not a complete nut.   

Big power project apparently can work

When I first heard about it, I thought that this project sounded fanciful, because I didn't imagine the power transmission over that long a distance (and via undersea cable) would be efficient enough.  But it would seem I was wrong:

SINGAPORE: The company behind a megaproject to deliver up to 15 per cent of Singapore’s energy requirements via a 4,200km undersea cable from northern Australia aims to start construction in 2024.

The project took a step closer to being realised last week, after being deemed investment-ready by Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body that advises the country’s government on key projects of national significance.

This potentially opens the US$20.7 billion intercontinental cable operation - called the Australia-Asia PowerLink - to investment that could include public funds.

Before construction can begin, all financing documents will need to be signed and prior conditions for the availability of financing will have to be fulfilled.

Sun Cable wants to build the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in the world in Australia’s Northern Territory and send clean power to the regional city of Darwin as well as Singapore.

Singapore is currently a gas burning nation, so it must be feeling the pinch at the moment:

It comes as Singapore looks to expand its renewable energy options and moves to import power as a solution to lowering its carbon emissions footprint - it currently generates about 95 per cent of its energy from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

Anyway, the undersea cable is HVDC, which is maybe the only way it could work?:

“We need that ability to transmit electricity on an intercontinental basis to get from where that resource is abundant to where those large loads are and where they're growing fast. And that's what the evolution of high-voltage direct current submarine cable technology allows,” he added.

This article talks about HVDC undersea cables.  Seems there are only relatively short ones around, so I hope the challenges of 4,000 km of such cable are not too much to overcome.  

Message to Monty

Monty, Monty, Monty.

I see you tried to engage dover beach with your "defending institutions" argument.   

It has gotten you no where, of course, because all he is interested in is institutions defending (or rather, forcing on the citizens as a whole) his conservative Catholic values on abortion, marriage, etc.  

Here's the thing:  people like him who can watch the violent riot and death calls at the Capitol, and all of the evidence from the Congressional hearing, and still think Trump was the one unfairly treated, are just plainly too stupid to bother arguing with.   They are willfully blind and are more sympathetic to Christian flavoured fascism than anything else, because it gets them the laws they want forced on everyone.    

They love you dropping in because it gives them a thrill that you think they are worth engaging with. 

They aren't.  

The only thing I think you should ever say to them is just "you are too stupid to argue with."

To Trumpist idiots, this makes him sound like a hero in an action movie

I noticed on Twitter some people saying that Trump lunging from his seat to try to stop the driver of his vehicle taking him to the White House instead of the Capitol would not be possible, because of a screen between the back and the driver.

The Washington Post is onto that already, and it appears this is not going to work as a defence.   

The most depressing and stupid thing to realise from that article, however, is that Trump getting physical with his staff probably appeals to a significant section of his nutjob base, as to them it makes him sound like an action hero who nearly thwarted his kidnapping:

On that message board, some conceded that her testimony actually showed another way in which Trump had faced unfair treatment. One poster said the story showed that “the Deep State coup plotters” of the Secret Service had “effectively kidnapped the President of the United States of America against his wishes” as part of a “C.I.AMilitary Industrial Complex coup d'etat.”

Some there argued she should be “locked up for lying under oath,” while another poster there suggested her wild testimony was just Washington as usual.

“Even if she’s telling the truth,” the anonymous patriots.win poster said, “where’s the f---ing problem?”

Allahpundit points out, by the way, that it would be unlikely the committee would let Hutchinson give this evidence if it didn't know it was going to be backed up by one of the first hand witnesses.    

The other bit of evidence, not being given enough attention, I think, is that not only did Hutchinson talk about the aftermath of one plate throwing incident, she said he did something similar several times.

Update:  Allahpundit is now going on about how damaging it will look if the secret service isn't backing her up, as some leaks are now suggesting.   Meh.   It was never going to be evidence at a Trump trial, anyway.  

An entertaining dream

Before I start forgetting the details completely, I seemed to have a long, but basically enjoyable, dream last night which went something like this.

I was a younger version of myself, returning at night to the house I grew up in (I think my parents were still alive) only to find that the suburban block it was on was the subject of some sort of military action.  I ran away, but eventually decided to give myself in, finding that the new rulers (of uncertain origin) were putting local residents in trains for re-location elsewhere.  I was worried about how this felt like the Holocaust, but the trains were quite OK.   

We were then on a cruise ship, again quite OK standard, and being shipped to Germany.

The thing was, no one knew exactly who the aggressors were, in what appeared to be a global wide conflict of some type.

Scott Morrison appeared in one scene, and I asked him, in public, that when he was PM he must have had some idea where this threat may come from, so couldn't he tell us who the aggressors likely were?  He said "nope", he had no idea at all, there was no warning of this conflict.

Sinclair Davidson (!) then featured amongst a group of others in front of which I declared I had worked it out:  the orders for this were probably coming from the sentient global AI that the internet had become.   I mean, people were just following orders given via emails on screens - the global AI could easily be producing those.   

I did spend a bit of time asking what the best term for our new AI overlord was, as I thought some science fiction writer had come up with one, but I couldn't remember it.  No one else could either.

The relocations, by the way, were more about balancing where the best places for humans to live for efficient use of resources - there was no evil intent about it as such.

And that's about it...

What a country

A story from the Washington Post, and what an appalling one:

A man fatally shot an employee and injured another at an Atlanta Subway restaurant over the weekend because he had “too much mayo on his sandwich,” police said Monday morning.

The shooter fired a handgun at two workers, a 26-year-old woman who died of her wounds and a 24-year-old woman who was in critical condition, Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. told reporters. The injured woman’s 5-year-old child was in the restaurant at the time.

As the top comment says, in the context of the Supreme Court last week deciding people carrying handguns was cool:

This is precisely the consequence of last Thursday's dreadful SCOTUS decision - apparently their "appetizer" for all the dreadful decisions they had lined up for us - and of all the hypocrisy for a right wing that supposedly believes in states' rights and didn't allow New York to protect its citizens from exactly this kind of impulsive fatal violence ... These 'carry' laws are all an unmitigated outrage and yet instead its the protective laws that SCOTUS goes after. The founding fathers would be appalled. This is not remotely what the 2nd amendment was ever intended to allow. And the pretzel illogic that is used by every single Justice appointed by a GOP President on the current court is the most transparent bunk covering their actual Trojan horse cabal to overthrow American democracy, not just from the inside but from the ultimate tribunal of the inside. Two Bushes and a Trump managed to find and plant the most anti-democracy, anti-sanity Justices imagineable for this systematic dismantling of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the majority of us at least.

 

The problem with multiverse movies (or perhaps I should say, stories)

Just a quick note, based on having watched a Youtube video that explained that the Marvel cinematic "Universe" (now really a cable TV plus cinema universe - not to everyone's satisfaction) is doubtlessly heading towards a series of stories (already in comic book form) in which the multiverse plays a key role:

The storyline involves the destruction of the Marvel Universe and various other alternate universes (including those seen in the Ultimate Marvel and Marvel 2099 imprints, the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, the Marvel 1602 universe, and the "House of M" storyline), with each universe's respective Earth combining with each other into Battleworld, a planet that exhibits the aspects of the various universes. The planet itself is divided in many territories that are mostly self-contained and where a "pocket universe" composed of a specific storyline or universe reside and evolve. Various versions of individual Marvel characters can be present multiple times on the Battleworld. For example, there is a Tony Stark present in many of the territories where the Kingdom of Manhattan has both the Earth-1610 and the Earth-616 versions, and many versions of Thor serve as a peace-keeping force. The stories depicted in the miniseries about each domain's characters' powers and personal histories vastly differ from the ones portrayed in the main Marvel universe(s).  

Now, I'm already not the biggest fan of superhero movies, and my enjoyment is very dependent on them not taking themselves too seriously.   (The next Thor movie looks to be a continuation of the rather comedic last one, so I'll still see it if it has good reviews.)

But even so, isn't it obvious that the problem with multiverse storylines is that when anything is possible, it quickly starts to become boring?    There are too many options.   You might get away with dealing with the multiverse in one movie, or maybe two, but if you keep on going, how can you really keep it dramatically (or creatively?) interesting.  

And is it possible that audiences are already starting to sense that, despite the box office success of the last Dr Strange movie?

 

Great calls

Someone on Twitter noted these today:

 

More from the Douthat column:

....the scenarios that have been spun out in reputable publications — where Trump induces Republican state legislatures to overrule the clear outcome in their states or militia violence intimidates the Supreme Court into vacating a Biden victory — bear no relationship to the Trump presidency we’ve actually experienced. Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup, because a term like “plotting” implies capabilities that he conspicuously lacks.

 What a specious argument it was...

James Blunt is very amusing

 

Asia and motorbikes (soon to be electric, hopefully)

The BBC asks Will electric motorbike sales take off across Asia, and gives some interesting figures:

Asia accounts for more than half of all global motorbike sales, and in some countries it is unusual for a family to not own one.

Take Thailand, the nation with the highest per person use of motorcycles. There 87% of households own at least one motorbike. These are typically the scooter variety, whereby the rider sits with his or her feet directly in front.

Thailand is closely followed by Vietnam (86%), Indonesia (85%), and Malaysia (83%) for households with motorbikes. The figures then drop to 60% and 47% respectively, in giant markets China and India, but that still dwarfs the UK's 7%.

The vast majority of Asia's motorbikes currently run on petrol, but transport experts say that a big switch to electric versions is now gathering pace.

I like this innovation:

While the big Japanese motorbike manufacturers like Yamaha and Honda are now making electric models, the Asian market has been led by newer companies.

Taiwan's Gogoro is one such firm. In addition to a range of electric motorbikes, it has come up with a solution to the problem of a rider having to stand around while their bikes charge.

Instead of charging points, Gogoro's users in Taiwan simply need to drive to one of more than 2,200 battery stations, and swap their batteries for free. The outdoor stations run 24-hours a day, and are said to be able to withstand the typhoons and searing heat of Taiwanese summers.

Gogoro is now planning to make this battery-swapping hardware and technology available to partner companies across Asia. These include Hero in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and DCJ and Yadea in China. Gogoro is also working on a partnership with Yamaha.

Horace Luke, Gogoro's chief executive, says the company is trying to become the "Android" of the electric motorbike world, providing the invisible scaffolding for other brands He likens it to the mobile phone system which encourages innovation by giving device makers more freedom to customise phones. In this spirit, Gogoro also intends to share its battery-management software, which helps to extend the life of the batteries.

Cool.

About that Roe decision

One of the most interesting articles about it was this one in the New York Times (it's a gift link so you'll be able to read it) about Justice Alito's life long determination to see it overruled.  

His statements at confirmation fitted the usual deceptive pattern that all conservative judges follow:

Later that year [1985], Mr. Alito applied for another position in the Justice Department, proudly citing his role in devising a strategy for those cases. “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Years later, when those documents were disclosed during his Supreme Court confirmation, he assured senators that while that statement reflected his views in 1985, he would approach abortion cases with an open mind as a justice, with due respect for precedent and with no ideological agenda.

“When someone becomes a judge,” he said, “you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”

Amongst other things of note I only learnt since the decision - about 50% of American abortions are via medication now.   How States expect to stop the inter State movement of the few pills that are needed remains to be seen.   But there will probably be States that seek to punish a woman for taking them, despite (I think) most (or all?) States saying they will criminalise abortion providers, not the women seeking an abortion.   Anyway, I still suspect that this method (not around at the time of Roe) is going to reduce the effect of this court decision in preventing access to abortion.

Also - there has been talk around how how American abortion rights were (under Roe) more liberal than those in many European countries.   (Noah Smith was going on about it.)   As many people were pointing out to him, and others, this can be very deceptive, as anyone who has experience of Australian laws would know.   Women might have the right to an abortion for any reason up to a certain time, but if they retain the right after that to have an abortion for their health, and this is broadly interpreted to include their mental health, then you can have de facto liberal access anyway.   

And I am pretty sure that it was long established that, within Australian states, having access to abortion as of right, and having it only by claiming it will hurt your mental health, resulted in virtually the same rate of abortion in each jurisdiction.   

Pro-lifers like to go on about the apparent depravity of having a right to abortion up to birth, without recognising the difficulty of getting doctors to actually agree to a late procedure.   As someone I saw on Twitter said, with rare exception, very late term abortions are about wanted pregnancies in which a serious medical problem with the baby has been discovered very late.   

Update:  Allahpundit notes this:

Once red states ban abortion entirely, forcing local pregnant women to find providers out of state, demand will quickly overwhelm supply and create long waits that will lead to women getting abortions later in their pregnancies. A 15-week national ban would prevent those abortions — but as I say, that won’t pass until 2025 at the soonest. In the short term, the perverse outcome of today’s decision is likely to mean more abortions getting pushed off into the second and even third trimesters, when babies are viable.

That is from a post about Republicans now talking about a Federal 15 week limit on abortion.  He starts:

In December I predicted that the traditional conservative rationale for overturning Roe, that the 50 states rather than the Court are the proper venue for regulating abortion, would expire five minutes after the Dobbs decision dropped. At which point it would shift instantly to “national restrictions!”

I was wrong. It took about two hours after the ruling for that decades-old federalist credo to be dumped in a ditch by House Republicans.

Here’s something I rarely say about these chuckleheads, though. The idea of a national 15-week ban is … good politics.

I think?

He's the only conservative commenter who does nuance well.

This is nuts, too!

Never seen this before:

 A video about the place:

This is kinda nuts

On the up side, I guess, it's a benefit to other Western countries that we  get to see the effects of slack regulation in the US and hence avoid problems before they can happen here.

 I mean, this is just kinda nuts, isn't it:

Although recreational cannabis is illegal in the United States for those under 21, it has become more accessible as many states have legalized it. But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

Marijuana is not as dangerous as a drug like fentanyl, but it can have potentially harmful effects — especially for young people, whose brains are still developing. In addition to uncontrollable vomiting and addiction, adolescents who frequently use high doses of cannabis may also experience psychosis that could possibly lead to a lifelong psychiatric disorder, an increased likelihood of developing depression and suicidal ideation, changes in brain anatomy and connectivity and poor memory.

But despite these dangers, the potency of the products currently on the market is largely unregulated.

In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By 2017, it was 17 percent. And now cannabis manufacturers are extracting THC to make oils; edibles; wax; sugar-size crystals; and glass-like products called shatter that advertise high THC levels in some cases exceeding 95 percent.

Meanwhile, the average level of CBD — the nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant tied to relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation — has been on the decline in cannabis plants. Studies suggest that lower levels of CBD can potentially make cannabis more addictive.

THC concentrates “are as close to the cannabis plant as strawberries are to frosted strawberry pop tarts,” Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, wrote in a report on the health risks of highly concentrated cannabis.

Although cannabis is legal for recreational use in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 37 states and D.C., only Vermont and Connecticut have imposed caps on THC concentration. Both ban concentrates above 60 percent, with the exception of pre-filled cartridges, and do not permit cannabis plant material to exceed 30 percent THC. But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels are somehow safer.

I have been saying for a while:  if you're going to legalise cannabis based products, why wouldn't you set regulations about the apparently protective part of it - the CBD levels?   

And really, why would you let such a plethora of cannabis containing products exist in the first place - like candies and cookies, with their obvious potential risk of being eaten by little kids?

 

 

Break out the pre-nup

How did she manage to stay with him for this long, if this is true:

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, a former top model, are reportedly set to divorce....

Before the wedding, a friend of the couple told the Guardian: “They are very sweet together, in a little couple bubble. They act like a married couple already, talking over each other, holding hands.

“She puts her feet up on his legs, they disagree on things like any married couple. She hates Trump, he understands Trump, it’s been like that from the beginning.”

 

French speakers like big animated things

Not sure if I had seen the giant Minotaur of Toulouse before, but it's pretty impressive (and reminds me a lot of something that could be in a Miyazaki film - especially Howl's Moving Castle.)

 

 It also reminded me of some giant puppets from somewhere - turns out it was probably Montreal: 

Drag panic

Even though I doubt I will ever fully understand the appeal of watching drag artists, I agree with Yglesias that we are in the midst of a full blown conservative panic:

Their most prominent target is, of course, the "drag queen story hour" events that are aimed at children.

The history of that movement is relatively short, and set out in this Wikipedia article.  (It started in San Francisco - no surprise there.)

The events that are held in libraries are no doubt attended by children with parents who are already highly motivated to expose to children to "diversity" - and the relatively small number of families involved should be of no great concern to anyone.   

On the other hand, I do think it a bit odd that schools should partake of these shows (as they have in New York).   

But where ever these events are held, I have strong doubts that any but a relatively small proportion of the children in attendance would find them especially entertaining or of particular interest.   In fact, an article in the Wall Street Journal "What I saw at Drag Queen Story Hour" made this point way back in 2019:

The adults present loved Drag Queen Story Hour. They laughed at Venus’s jokes, and they sang the children’s songs along with her, rolling their hands and shaking their fingers Hokey Pokey-style as she did. When she stuck out her tongue during a ditty about a frog, so did the mothers and fathers. It was the children who . . . didn’t react at all. They either stared transfixed at Venus, squirmed restlessly, or crawled and toddled off to find their own entertainments. After the reading a mother brought her little daughter up to meet Venus, who offered to let the girl try on one of the massive rhinestone bracelets she wore on both wrists. The mother, delighted, slipped a bracelet onto her own wrist; the little girl shrank back and turned her head away.

I couldn’t tell what was going on inside those small heads, of course. Perhaps they were shy, or bored. Perhaps some of them were too young. Or perhaps Venus and her 6-inch eyelashes terrified them. Heavy stage makeup can look flattering under stage lights, but in ordinary indoor daylight the effect can be more Medusa than goddess of love. Spike heels and glitter viewed up close might seem scary to a small child whose mother’s fashion inspirations are New Balance and Lululemon.

Still, drag is a time-honored form of comic entertainment, from the Greek stage to RuPaul. Perhaps if the drag queens toned it down and positioned themselves less as “queer role models” and more as comedians in the Milton Berle tradition, they’d be less off-putting. Also if they ditched the propagandistic reading lists: How many kids really want to hear one more tiresome lesson about “individuality,” much less same-sex marriage?

The last paragraph makes a valid enough point - it's not that I can't find some drag funny if part of a comedy act; it's just that I don't get the point of gay glamour drag, like Ru Paul, with its over the top visuals that are often more a parody of feminine glamour.  (I guess some of the more ridiculous looking drag artists use it with ribald humour in shows with a primarily gay audience - so I suppose I "get" that aspect of drag show - but I still don't understand the appeal of the "serious" side of song or dance performance as a drag queen.  And I seriously doubt that most children can understand the vibe of most drag playing to them, either.) 

Anyway, while I find all gay drag rather strange and unappealing, I also know that conservative panic about it is  ridiculous in its own way.   I mean, seriously:

And in a San Francisco suburb, men invade Panda Dulce’s reading at a library’s Drag Queen Story Hour, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs.

After focusing on transgender athletes and youths, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is now targeting drag storytimes — conceived as a way to educate and entertain children by appealing to their imaginations — with interruptions and other protests reported across the country in the past two weeks, since Pride Month began.

I think drag is perhaps at a peak of cultural attention at the moment, and I can understand parents thinking it is a dubious use of school funds.   But if I am right, and most kids don't really respond that well to the shows, the movement might never gain widespread footholds in schools.   Or perhaps continue just as a thing you might see once during all of primary school - big deal.

Anyway, regardless of the degree of cultural visibility of drag, I very much doubt that it's ever going to be an evil influence over children who would otherwise not become gay.   I mean, just common sense based on our childhood feelings tells us that, doesn't it?   If a 6 year old boy gets a thrill that he doesn't quite understand from realising the "woman" is a man, it would seem a fair bet that he might not be destined for a purely straight life in future in any event.  Isn't that sort of obvious to conservatives?  Apparently not....

Update:   Ha!  Dover Beach at his New Catallaxy is still fanboying Ed Feser, the only Catholic philosopher in the world who still thinks the existence of (Catholic version) God is a lay down misere by force of logic alone, and has a completely over the top reaction to the issue: