America has some problems (part 1,000)

I keep saying that, like Noah Smith, I am basically optimist about America eventually getting over its current problems, but news like this makes you wonder:

And this:

Takeaways: Overdose rates were highest in areas with the most treatment options available, in 25 states and the District of Columbia, where data was available, the report found.

• "Just because there's availability of services doesn't meant they're necessarily accessible," Mbabazi Kariisa, a CDC health scientist, told reporters.
• Systemic racism, income inequality, and lack of reliable housing, transportation and health insurance all play a role in why drug overdoses are disproportionately affecting Black and Native American people, CDC officials said.

By the numbers: In 2020, there were 91,799 Americans who died of a drug overdose, according to HHS, and from 2019 to 2020 overdose rates increased the most among teens and young adults.

• Black youths and young adults ages 15 to 24 years old experienced the largest overdose death rate increase at 86%.
• Native American people ages 25 to 44 years old saw an increase of 49% in the rate of overdose deaths.
• White people ages 15 to 24 years old had a 34% increase in overdose death rate.

Foolish old people watch

areff says:

July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Daughter-in-law is pregnant and due in September. Just heard from my son that the baby, as revealed by sonogram, has an aortic stenosis. It’s apparently a mild case and, if surgery is needed, it’s a tried and true procedure.

So I ask the fruit of my lines when his wife got her COVID jabs.

Pause on the line, then this:

“Yeah, I thought of that and I figure she was jabbed around conception time.”

Another pause.

“And then she got another about three months later on doctor’s advice”

Jeez.

Which was followed by this supportive comment:

Old bloke says:

July 20, 2022 at 4:01 pm

areff says:
July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Serious question, why aren’t we seeing people hanging from the street lamps yet?

Meanwhile, neither of these geezers, I am sure, think anything is significant about England having its first 40 degree day yesterday. 

Yes I know, cranky old fools who think they know better have been with us always.   The problem is, the internet now lets them find each other and mutually reinforce their dangerous and obnoxious beliefs.  

And what's worse - people like Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson make a worldwide career out of pandering to them.    I honestly don't think there is enough daily outrage about this pathetic and dangerous man:

Update:  a bitter truth - 

 

The problems of cannibalism

From a story at Science, handily listing the main problems with cannibalism:

Eating your own kind is fairly common throughout the animal world, from single-celled amoebas to salamanders, he and his colleagues report in a new review in Ecology. But not as many species snack on their brethren as one might expect—and the team has detailed the reasons why.

First off, cannibalism is risky. If you’ve got dangerous claws and teeth, so do your comrades. Female praying mantises are notorious for biting the heads off of much smaller males during mating, for example, but they also occasionally go toe to toe with an evenly matched female. “I’ve seen one female chew the leg off another,” Rosenheim says, “and then the female who lost the leg somehow manages to kill the other one.”

Cannibalism is also dicey from a disease perspective. Many pathogens are host specific, so if a cannibal devours an infected companion, it risks picking up the same disease. Different populations of humans have found this out the hard way multiple times. One of the most famous examples is the spread of a rare and fatal brain disease called kuru that ravaged the Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s. Kuru raged across the Fore community through a cannibalistic funerary ritual in which families cooked and ate the flesh—including contaminated brain tissue—of deceased relatives. Once the Fore phased the ritual out, the spread of kuru was stopped in its tracks.

Finally, cannibalism is a terrible way to pass down one’s genes. “From an evolutionary perspective, the last thing you want to do is eat your offspring,” Rosenheim says. That’s a major reason big-eyed bugs limit their population sizes by snacking on their own offspring. If they grow too numerous—as happened with the aphid experiments—they deposit eggs all over the place. And because they can’t recognize their own eggs, they end up devouring their own brood.

Oh, so there's a cannibalism hormone?:

Although cannibalism is far from ideal, certain conditions appear to make the risky behavior worthwhile. Even if you’re eating a friend—or an heir—if you’re starving, you’ve got to protect your survival, says Erica Wildy, an ecologist at California State University, East Bay, who was not involved with the study. In her own work, Wildy has found that hunger makes long-toed salamander larvae more likely to nibble on—and occasionally eat—one another.

In their review, Rosenheim and his colleagues pinpoint specific hormones—octopamine in invertebrates and epinephrine in vertebrates—that appear to be linked to increasing rates of cannibalism. As conditions become crowded and food becomes scarce, the amounts of these hormones spike and “hangry” animals attack whatever they can snatch with jaws, legs, or pincers.

Huh.

Political comedy considered, again

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that Stephen Colbert ran with Biden age jokes (and attacked him for the Saudi visit) the other night.   He starts:

Has Joe Biden become so unpopular that late-night comics might actually move away from their clapter production and start being funny again? Bill Maher made this transition months ago, but the rest of the late-night comics have been as loathe to target Biden for pointed political jokes as they were with Barack Obama. Or so it has seemed, anyway; late-night TV comedy has been pointless for well over a decade as it went from being funny to being didactic.

Now, this raises something I refuse to believe - that comedians who move to support of the current American Right are actually capable of being funny.   I know, I know - I can readily be accused of suffering from the same problem as conservatives - letting political views influence what I allow myself to find funny.  But I'm certain any objective observer would have to agree with me - with my main evidence being the absolutely woeful "Gutfeld!" on Fox, which I have watched sometimes recently on Youtube.  

Despite getting some attention not so long ago for apparent ratings success (which I think has diminished again), he and the show is painfully unfunny.  And weirdly, I noticed, he seems in his monologues to often try to do self deprecation of the "maybe I'm gay" kind, only to have it fail utterly.  Why would he even try that with the type of audience he has? 

As for Bill Maher - I had been meaning to say that his segments (increasingly frequent) where he just wants to attack the Left for wokeness and political correctness, and not talk much about the Right turning the country into Christian fascism (because that doesn't annoy him as much), have also been poorly written and pretty painful to watch.   I was never a big fan, but he has become much, much worse.

It's not just a current thing - over my life, even when I voted Liberal, I knew that comedy sympathetic to Right wing politics has very, very rarely worked.   I mean, I don't like all Left wing comedy either - I was never a fan of Max Gillies, for example, and more recently, I couldn't stand Tom Ballard's shows.  But Left leaning comedy at least has the capacity (in a way Right wing comedy virtually doesn't) to be funny, even if it didn't always work for me.  Right wing comedy especially doesn't work now, when the worst of the Right (and that's a disturbingly large part of America) has developed clear sympathy to religious fascism.   

   

 

Not convinced

That's a co-incidence:  The Guardian has a very positive review up of Midnight Mass, the (sort of) horror series which has been out on Netflix for maybe 6 months, although I have only recently started watching it.

I'm 3 episodes in, and I'm not convinced.   It's way, way too talky, and the dialogue is often very "stagey" - it feels unnatural to me a lot of the time.  And now that I have seen the apparent explanation for the mysterious young priest appearing on the (admittedly interesting as a location) small island, I admit it wasn't exactly a normal supernatural trope, but it was so novel, I didn't know what to make of it.  I'm probably going to go with reading a synopsis of the rest of the show, rather than devoting time to finding out more about what is going on.  

It's a weird show, and I don't think it's very good. 

That's odd: having Covid has made me want to post really unimportant stuff

 

Back to Lost in Space

While I was convalescing at home with Covid, Youtube kept insisting I watch a series of interviews of the old Lost in Space stars Bill Mumy and Jonathan Harris (aka Will Robinson and Dr Smith).  

Mumy seems a particularly nice person, and a (seemingly unusual?) case of a child actor (he really did a lot of work I wasn't aware of) who grew up normal and not scarred by the experience.  Or maybe by the 1960's, there was enough care of child actors in the studio system - I mean, I guess Ron Howard turned out fine too.

Things I learned from watching these interviews:

*   Jonathan Harris was given carte blanche to re-write his lines.  This meant that Mumy would have to visit Harris's trailer to go over the re-written scripts and re-learn his cues from those in the original.  (I feared for a moment that there was going to be some shocking incident of abuse while alone with him, but no.  In fact, I checked Harris's Wikipedia page to check about his sexuality - I mean, it would hardly be surprising to learn he was gay.  But he was married and had a son, and there are quite a few websites noting that he counts high on the list of actors you thought could be gay, but apparently wasn't.)

* Mumy is an excellent voice mimic.

* Mumy worked for Alfred Hitchcock on a few episodes of his TV show, and really disliked him.

* He explained how he felt sorry for Guy Williams, his fictional father, who was given less and less to do in the show, while the Dr Smith character more or less took over.  And after the show, he went and retired in Argentina, where he was considered a hero because of his role in Zorro (!).

* His first serious girlfriend, when he was old enough to drive, was his co-star Angela Cartwright (Penny).  They remain good friends.

* I thought the anecdote in this clip was pretty funny:

*  Jonathan Harris paints a funny picture of Irwin Allen as a blustering, old style cranky Hollywood producer.

Not much charm

It might just be me - it's not like I watch sport to any significant degree (although last week's State of Origin was very good) to assess the degree of charm of individual sporting champions.  But after watching Cameron Smith's bit of media after winning the British Open, it occurred to me that golf seems to have trouble attracting champions who have any particular charm.   Perhaps people used to think that about Tiger Woods, but then his personal life became a mess and I don't think people like him much anymore?

I wondered if this is more the case with individual sports than team ones?  Maybe - but while there have always been jerk tennis champions, it seems a sport which has always had a reasonable number of seemingly likeable personalities.

Golf, though...

(People used to like Greg Norman, I guess, but he became increasingly weird as he aged.  He is perhaps a symbol of the Right wing character of the sport.  I mean, it is considered a rich person's game in many countries, I guess - although not as much in Australia, perhaps.)  

A familiar refrain, but this time it's deserved: waiting for the next new, cool thing to replace the stale old thing

I'm talking movies and TV.   And yeah, every year or two there's a journalistic burst of "Everything at the cinema/on the streaming service is a sequel and/or a superhero movie.  Where's the mature cinema/TV for adults we used to enjoy?  Why can't Hollywood give us more original stories? etc etc"  Perhaps the Covid break from cinema going cooled down that talk for a while, but now that we are out of that, I get the feeling we genuinely are in a particularly clear "stale idea" crisis.

I don't write this out of particular disappointment with current movies - I still haven't even seen the Top Gun movie, or the new Thor.   The latter is definitely suffering a bit of a Marvel fan backlash (it's too jokey for many, apparently, and feels more like a parody.)  

But more generally, based on watching quite a few Youtube reviewers, it's safe to say that:

a.   it's clear that Disney has milked the Star Wars universe dry. The critical reception to their series is just getting worse and worse, and as I didn't even care for the Mandalorian, it's not like I'm hanging out for anything new from that world.  The universe, as I have written before, has a fatal flaw:  no consistent view of the Force, which was the key appeal of the first couple of movies.  The TV shows are not fixing that.  It's incapable of retrospective correction, probably.

b.  Similarly, the same can be said of their Marvel content, with general dissatisfaction growing with the way the movies and series are messily dealing with a multiverse.   (I also watched a long Youtube video by someone very keen to explain that the Endgame movie, and subsequent stuff, has dealt with time travel inconsistently.  I never did like the Endgame explanation.)

c.  The Jurassic franchise is dead - there are so many terrible reviews for the current one.  

d.  Hard to believe the (not Spielberg directed) Indiana Jones movie will be good. Due out next summer.

e.  Honestly, who cares that there are at least two Avatar movies coming out.   Had no interest in the first movie, less in any sequel.

f.  People went to see (yet another) dark Batman.  But I don't get the feeling it re-started any particular new enthusiasm for the character.  DC based movies, few of which interest me, have a very high "miss" rate.

g.   Has their ever been more knives sharpened to attack a series than those waiting for the Amazon Tolkien prequel-ly show to start?   

It just truly feels that everything has been sucked dry, and everyone can see it.

Sure, there will always be a couple of exceptions such as the surprise quality, apparently, of the Top Gun sequel - although it is not like that is going to be a franchise as such.   There's a good chance the next Mission Impossible will still be good, too.  (Although I found the last one underwhelming.)

But overall, at no time have I have felt that the complaints about lack of creativity from Hollywood were ever more deserved.  

Is it the fault of the culture wars, perhaps?   It probably does have something to do with it, as even allowing for Disney and other studios being super keen to have "representation" of women and gay or trans, it is hard to imagine stories now that are unifyingly appealing to the extremes of politics now.  The world views have become so divergent.   

Heat waves and death in India, reconsidered

Here's a lengthy article looking at the question of why this year's pre-monsoonal heat waves in India and Pakistan did not seem to kill many at all - a bit contrary to expectations, actually.

I've always puzzled at how (many of) the poor in India manage to survive their incredible sounding heatwaves.  The answers are a bit complicated...

Makes Brisbane look cool

These Pub Choir videos, I'm talking about.  The latest is a version of Running Up That Hill, a song I don't particularly care for, but again, it's just the fact that it makes Brisbane look like its full of cool, community minded, and talented, people:

 

(I also believe that Camarata - the ensemble playing strings - is extremely good at what they do.)

The old folding handkerchief trick

Noticed this on Twitter not so long ago, with the handkerchiefs on display in some police museum or other in Malaysia:

 

I can tell you, Googling the topic "folding porn handkerchiefs" or "vintage porn on handkerchiefs Malaysia" has really thrown up a lot of results I didn't want, and nothing useful!

This reminded me of the old Mad Magazine fold in cartoons.   Wikipedia tells me they started in 1964, and were done by the same cartoonist - Al Jaffee - til 2020!  (Jaffee is now 101!  Talk about a long career.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that it took much imagination, looking at the drawings on those handkerchiefs, to see how the right fold could make it look like sex.   But I wonder how common this means of distribution was - just a South East Asia thing, or were they all over the West too?   Can't say I have heard of them before...

Wingnut regrets

Interesting story at the New York Times (gift link for you) about a Trump supporter who has had to go into hiding due to wingnut news sites, and Tucker Carlson, spreading a rumour that he was really at the Jan 6 riot as an FBI provocateur.  

He seems to have regrets, but the article avoids asking him if he still thinks the election was stolen...

When "being yourself" isn't all that it's cracked up to be

Of course, I am broadly sympathetic with the views expressed by Brian Rosner in his recent article

Is it good advice to “be yourself”? Why looking inward is not necessarily the answer 

Common wisdom today has it that there is only one place to look to find yourself, and that is inward. Personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. All forms of external authority are to be rejected, or at least questioned, and everyone’s quest for self-expression should be celebrated — personal happiness is the ultimate goal. Self-determination, once a principle for nations emerging from the First World War, is now the responsibility of every individual. A novelty in the history of ideas, this strategy of identity formation is sometimes labelled “expressive individualism”.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong with looking inward. There are many gains to living an examined life. And the alternative is far from attractive. As the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, the movement of expressive individualism is, in part, a reaction against a 1950s culture of conformity, which is believed to have “crushed individuality and creativity”.

Authenticity is also desirable. It is much better for a person to inhabit an identity that they own and can fully appropriate for themselves; there is something to be said for feeling comfortable in your own skin. Psychologists generally regard authenticity as a basic requirement of mental health.

So, are there any downsides to looking inward and being yourself? I can think of three pretty big ones: it seems to produce fragile selves; it’s failing in terms of outcomes for individuals and society; and it is faulty in its assumptions about human nature. Let me briefly discuss these in turn.

This is how it ends (and I think that second last paragraph needed some editing to make its meaning clearer, when it mention Nietzsche:

There is, in fact, a fourth direction to which you can look to find yourself — a direction that many believe offers a better story. They insist that personal identity requires looking up. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes: “Without the transcendent we shall find ourselves unable, sooner or later, to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness”. On the other side of the ledger, some have argued that Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes described as the first real atheist because of his fearless pursuit of the consequences of his antitheist stance, has no place for the notion of personal identity. Does looking up have a role to play in identity formation?

The key to an authentic, stable, and satisfying sense of self is to inhabit a narrative identity that is worth living. One that deals well with life’s joys and sorrows, triumphs, and disappointments, and responds well to injustice.

We can re-build him

I mentioned recently having listened to one of the episodes of the CBC podcast Brainwashed, about the CIA and psychiatrists' attempts to learn how to control peoples minds, in the 50's and 60's.

I went back to listen to another episode, and it was a very incredible reminder about how top psychiatrists got away with just ridiculously unethical experiments on the basis of fanciful theories of how they might work.

Those of us of a certain age (as the idea has been dead for quite a long time) might remember cheesy ads for pillow speakers that would play (say) a foreign language while you slept, and hey presto, it would help you learn with no effort at all.   I didn't know that this basis idea - which even as a child I thought sounded dubious - was in fact given a serious workout by at least one highly regarded psychiatrist working in Canada in the 1950's.  His name: Donald Ewen Cameron, and the experiments he did were called "psychic driving".  Wikipedia explains:

His "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting a subject into a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple statements. These experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the Institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postnatal depression; many suffered permanent debilitation after these treatments.^[27] Such consequences included incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.^[28] His work was inspired and paralleled by the psychiatrist William Sargant, who was also involved with the intelligence services and experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.^[29]

The Brainwashed episode indicated that the patients slept 23 hours a day, and although awoken to go to the toilet, the ideal result was considered a reversion to early childhood incontinence, as that indicated their mind had reverted to a childlike malleable state, into which positive messages on the tape would be absorbed by the subconscious, and replace those bad thoughts.

The podcast episode paints a much worse picture of how the experiments were done - if I recall correctly, Cameron first tried just playing the tape in the undrugged patient's bed 24 hours a day, which the patient found absolutely unbearable, so it was drugged sleep for weeks at a time, to get around that problem! 

There's a very good and lengthy article about Cameron here, which explains that for many people, Cameron exuded much charm, and his obituaries in 1967 were full of praise.  He apparently was very fond of gadgets and technology, and loved science fiction.   There is a detailed description of "psychic driving", although I would say inadequate attention given to this obvious problem (the failure of successful "rebuilds"):

Cameron reported that once the patient’s resistance had been conquered, the result was therapeutic. Depatterning then proceeded to a final level of “disorganzation” in which the patient experienced utter “loss of orientation as to space and time,” near-total amnesia for his or her identity, often double incontinence, and (relatedly) childlike dependency on care staff. 56 The goal now was to rebuild, to retrain the patient to pursue healthy behaviors and leave behind the unhealthy behavior patterns that had previously vexed him or her. Despite the labor-intensive tasks it generated for nursing staff, the method at its core served to put the whole process at a distance by automating it: “this method of activating psychotherapeutic mechanisms not only created a great deal of time saving for the therapist but also appears to operate much more rapidly than ordinary psychotherapeutic procedures and hence constitutes a time-saving for the patient,” Cameron and his assistant asserted.57 Cameron’s method was at heart an efficient device.

It all turned out after his death that money had flowed to him from the CIA, although it is not clear whether he knew that was the true source.  Somehow, it would seem, he managed to convince himself this was a genuinely successful treatment enough of the time to take the risk of ruining other patients who were permanently broken by it.  In fact, I haven't yet read about that aspect - I mean, it's kind of hard to be believe it was ever a clear success, in anyone.  

The article I linked to talks a lot about the connection of his ideas to behavourism, which has generally fallen from grace. I must admit, I have long found it frustrating that the present popular thoughts on psychology and personality are rarely seen in light of how previous "fashions" for how we think of ourselves have come and gone.   The idea that every person's true goal and only way to happiness is to be "true to yourself"* that now completely dominates much of the western world makes it is well worth reading about other ideas that have come and gone.

 

* What is the best term for that?  Personality - or identity - essentialism?  Someone has probably named it, I should go looking...

Cue Arnold "It's not a tumour"

So, how's my Covid going, asked no one.  Coming up to a week since I first thought I was coming down with something.  I'm still feeling like the tail end of a cold now - still a little bit of post nasal drip, but not much, but twinges of sinus pain, and an actually throbbing head if I have to cough (which I don't need to, often.)  I'm still putting down the head throbs to sinus pain, and I have actually had this at other times over perhaps the last year (periods where I have no blocked nose, but mild pains at various points around the face where I assume my sinuses are, but if I cough, forehead throbs badly.)

 I've actually looked up on the web recently, and I see that headache relating to coughing is described as follows:

Cough headaches are fairly uncommon. There are two types: primary cough headaches and secondary cough headaches. Primary cough headaches are usually harmless, are caused only by coughing and get better quickly without treatment. A primary cough headache is diagnosed only when a provider has ruled out possible causes other than coughing.

A secondary cough headache may be triggered by a cough, but it is caused by problems with the brain or structures near the brain and spine. Secondary cough headaches can be more serious and may require treatment with surgery.       

Primary cough headaches

The cause of primary cough headaches is unknown.

Secondary cough headaches

Secondary cough headaches may be caused by:

• A defect in the shape of the skull.
• A defect in the part of the brain that controls balance (cerebellum). This can happen when part of the brain is forced through the opening at the base of the skull (foramen magnum), where only the spinal cord should be. Some of these types of defects are called Chiari malformations.
• A weakness in one of the blood vessels in the brain (cerebral aneurysm).
• A brain tumor.
• A spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak.

So, this sounds like a condition ripe for hypochondria!  And one where a GP is likely to be uninterested, especially if the pain I am complaining about only lasts - I don't know, 30 to 60 seconds?

Sinuses (which I would say are still my most likely issue) are a real example of one of the body bits which are poorly designed and fixing them becomes guesswork.  Like backs when they go bad.

Anyway, all pretty minor, and I can't say I am feeling any "brain fog" from Covid, which is something I would find annoying.  Am sleeping very well at night, and kind of enjoying that aspect, actually.

 

 

Simple, but amusing

It's probably Covid...

 

Covid at home, continued

Yeah, I didn't even need to sleep during the day yesterday (Sunday).  Throat feels pretty normal again, but a bout this morning of serious cleaning of my bedroom (not physically demanding, just moving around a lot more than I have for several days) made me feel briefly unwell.  Still, the progress is generally in the right direction.   

I saw that Samantha Maiden tweeted yesterday:

and it was interesting to read the comments following, of some noting a similar very mild effect, and others how it was much worse for them, and some with lingering serious issues.   

As I have been saying virtually from the start, it seems a disease that's perfect for making life extremely complicated for public health officials and government:   the wide variety of responses mean that people will extrapolate from their own experience in a way that they shouldn't.  The unvaxed getting a mild response are particularly likely to feel vindicated, ignoring all detailed research on the benefits of vaccination at the community level.   And on the side of "panic", some people can point to legit studies indicating that even an apparently mild case might be causing lingering harm that is so not immediately apparent. But the seriousness of the harm is still up in the air.

It may not have made me very sick, but it's still a terrible disease...

Seems true, and yet...

....I didn't have the impression that Bertrand Russell himself was "full of doubt":

Oh, now that I check again, he actually labelled himself agnostic, not atheist.  Interesting article at The Guardian about the finer details of his thoughts on religion here.