Incident in France

I found this rather amusing:

 In the comments following, some further discussion of how things are done in France

I love their food, though.  And really thought they must be the most attractive Europeans on the street in all of Europe.

 

Stand over tactics

Allahpundit on lickspittle Lindsay Graham's weekend comments:

When it comes to making veiled threats dressed up as dispassionate observations, I see that this rodent has learned at the feet of the master.

In fact, Trump himself posted this video last night on Truth Social.

Graham isn’t wrong. If Trump is indicted, “riots in the streets” are plausible. But it’s one thing to say that as an analyst and another to say it on television as a well-known, influential Trump crony. Why, if I were a cynic, the clip below might look to me like a U.S. senator dangling the prospect of violence to try to influence a decision by the Justice Department on whether to charge someone. Imagine one of John Gotti’s goons musing in an interview about people getting hurt if the boss is charged. Then imagine electing that guy to the Senate.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Lindsey Graham has engaged in blatant civic malfeasance on Trump’s behalf either.

Graham is correct that Trump should be held to the same standard as Hillary Clinton. If he mishandled classified information no more recklessly than she did, he should walk. But we don’t know yet whether he did and neither do any of the would-be rioters. I understand why some were offended by Joe “The Uniter” Biden describing parts of Trump’s base as “semi-fascist” but if we’ve reached the point where a sitting senator is hinting at mass violence if his caudillo is charged and all of us look around at each other and think, “Yeah, that could definitely happen,” maybe we shouldn’t feel so offended.

He ends on a strong note:

It should not to be too much to ask cretins like Graham to accept moral responsibility for the worst excesses of the populism with which they’ve aligned themselves. If he wants a caudillo, let him make the case for having a caudillo. Blaming the Justice Department for riots on “look what you made me do” grounds is weak sauce even for a weakling like him.

 

 

This is what you do when you go to the North Pole via luxury French icebreaker

I wish they wouldn't do video thumbnails of Kara's skinny body, but still - it's interesting to see what a  luxury cruise to the North Pole does for entertainment when they get there:

 

One other thing:   I suppose I expected the ice to be a little thicker, even in summer.  I mean, yeah, submarines can break through it, so it can't be too thick.   But still, it seemed there was more open water around, and ice that was easily broken, than I expected.

Also, if you watch the video, you will probably understand why I find this couple cringey at times - they kiss and tell each other they are "so proud of you" in about every second video.

Amusing tweets noted

Lulz at that second one in particular...

Interesting comparison

Dark Brandon IS rising

The Dark Brandon meme continues to make for pretty amusing tweets:

Mexico needs better folk saints

Wow, this isn't the usual Axios fare:

Devotion to unsanctioned Catholic folk saints is one of the fastest growing religious movements in Latin America and is surging in the U.S., experts say.

The big picture: Some Latinos who feel alienated by Christian traditions are turning to saints not sanctioned by the struggling Catholic Church for spiritual guidance around love, crime and money.

• Catholic leaders worldwide have denounced unofficial "narco" saints as sinful, but makeshift shrines continue to pop up, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to New Orleans.

Details: Catholic canonization of saints often takes years of thorough reviews of miracles performed and of the figure's contributions. Believers say unsanctioned saints offer divine assistance to steal gas, move a drug shipment, cross a border, or bless an LGBTQ+ romance.

• They're gaining devotees in Mexico and the U.S., said Andrew Chesnut, the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan chairman in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The funniest unofficial saint would have to be this one:

Santo Niño Huachicolero, a perversion of the Roman Catholic image of Santo Niño, depicts the Christ child with a can of gasoline and a hose.

• He's the patron saint of gas thieves who ask for help to avoid arrest, prevent fires and protect their families from a different kind of flame

Here he is:

I feel the need for the eye roll emoji...

 

China peaks (in population, at least)

 Also on the Nature website:

When will China’s population, the world’s largest, peak? It’s a point that demographers say is fast approaching. The country’s health department announced this month that the population will peak and then begin to shrink in the next three years. Others think it could happen much sooner.

“The turning point is right around the corner,” says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “I won’t be surprised if population decline is reported at the end of this year.”

After years of falling birth rates, the National Health Commission wrote in an article published online in early August that China’s population growth has slowed significantly and will start to decline between 2023 and 2025. According to an estimate published last month in a peer-reviewed Chinese journal, Social Science Journal¹, Wei Chen, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing, concluded that, on the basis of national census data released in 2020, China’s population might have already peaked in 2021 (see ‘Projected peak’).

Here's the graph:

 

Waiting for my brain stimulation

I still think this research attracts less attention than it deserves:

People’s ability to remember fades with age — but one day, researchers might be able to use a simple, drug-free method to buck this trend.

In a study published on 22 August in Nature Neuroscience¹, Robert Reinhart, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues demonstrate that zapping the brains of adults aged over 65 with weak electrical currents repeatedly over several days led to memory improvements that persisted for up to a month.

Previous studies have suggested that long-term memory and ‘working’ memory, which allows the brain to store information temporarily, are controlled by distinct mechanisms and parts of the brain. Drawing on this research, the team showed that stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — a region near the front of the brain — with high-frequency electrical currents improved long-term memory, whereas stimulating the inferior parietal lobe, which is further back in the brain, with low-frequency electrical currents boosted working memory.

“Their results look very promising,” says Ines Violante, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. “They really took advantage of the cumulative knowledge within the field.”

Memory boost

Using a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain known as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), which delivers electrical currents through electrodes on the surface of the scalp, Reinhart’s team conducted a series of experiments on 150 people aged between 65 and 88. Participants carried out a memory task in which they were asked to recall lists of 20 words that were read aloud by an experimenter. The participants underwent tACS for the entire duration of the task, which took 20 minutes.

You can read the rest at Nature.

 

Floods continue

*  In Pakistan:

Record monsoon rains were causing a "catastrophe of epic scale", Pakistan's climate change minister said on Wednesday (Aug 24), announcing an international appeal for help in dealing with floods that have killed more than 800 people since June.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but each year it also brings a wave of destruction.

Heavy rain continued to pound much of Pakistan on Wednesday, with authorities reporting more than a dozen deaths - including nine children - in the last 24 hours.

"It has been raining for a month now. There is nothing left," a woman named Khanzadi told AFP in badly hit Jaffarabad, Balochistan province.

"We had only one goat, that too drowned in the flood ... Now we have nothing with us and we are lying along the road and facing hunger."...

Zaheer Ahmad Babar, a senior meteorologist office official, told AFP that this year's rains were the heaviest since 2010, when over 2,000 people died and more than 2 million were displaced by monsoon floods that covered nearly a fifth of the country.

Rainfall in Balochistan province was 430 per cent higher than normal, he said, while Sindh was nearing 500 per cent.

*  In the USA:

The summer of big flash floods strikes again.

Up to a foot of rain fell across parts of central Mississippi on Wednesday, leading to life-threatening situations and numerous rescues. The intense rain swept away portions of a highway, while floodwaters partially submerged cars and trees....

The highest totals seen in the past day or two are at least 1-in-200-year or 1-in-500-year rainfalls, rare events that have only a 0.5 to 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year.

A full analysis may show some locations end up with an even rarer rainfall. This flooding event could be the sixth 1-in-1,000-year rainfall in recent weeks in the United States. In other words, it has a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Increased moisture availability in a warming world is a factor in these events.

 

A gut reaction

I think the Biden student debt forgiveness decision is being very disproportionately attacked from the Left.  (See the Washington Post editorial on it, for example.)   I doubt it will have as dire an effect as some are claiming.    

I mean, I would like to see the Left get as agitated by Republican moves that are much worse.

Updating the membership of the B Ark

I think that Douglas Adams had the "B Ark" filled with the following:

"....the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants."

Updated to the present day, I sure know that this category would now be at the top of the list:

As I said to friends recently, and perhaps a bit meanly, because I actually do admire so much of their work on Youtube, it would also be full of crackshot video editors under the age of 30.   

Perhaps I should throw in drone operators too (again, despite my actually liking their contributions to travel vlogging - it's just that there is so much of it now I'm starting to feel the number needs culling.)

I also keep having an urge lately to tell the two travel vlogging couples that I like to watch (The Endless Adventure - a very likeable couple, and that Kara and Nate - the somewhat irritating pair into "personal challenges" but who are OK some of the time) something like this:   "Look, you're in your early 30's now, you've had a lot of fun travelling the world and getting paid for it, but unless you stop and have a child, you're going to miss out on the simpler, domestic pleasures of life.   Don't do that for the sake of 'the next big travel adventure'."   I mean, they both say "we're not sure if we are ready to have a child yet, or if we will", yet they seem to like their relatives' kids, and they are leaving the child bearing decision to that dangerous point in life at which many couples find they can't easily get pregnant even if they want to.

Speaking of drone shots, here's another ridiculously attractive one of yet another Chinese temple built where no sensible person would build:

Why 83?

Google kept trying to get me to watch a short Youtube about a Buddhist parable, so I did today, and quite liked it:

 

The only problem is: why so specific with 83 problems?  Reminds me a bit of the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything being 42. (Actually, in the parable, there are 84 problems, and half of that is 42.  A connection?)

I also can't see where the parable is supposed to have originated.  Quick Googling indicates in not in any old Buddhist material, and some say it sounds kind of Zen, but I wouldn't have thought it should be hard to track down a source, if it's relatively modern.   Maybe I try again later.  It's one of my current 83 problems...

As simple as that?

I was only criticising Matt Damon as an actor earlier this week, but now he has turned up on my Twitter feed with a simple, plausible explanation for why movie studios are so risk averse in the type of film they make now:

 

The example he gave was a movie that might cost $25 million to make (a very modest one, then) will have a publicity and distribution budget of another $25 million, so $50 million all up, and revenue has to be shared with the cinemas, so it needs to make more than $100 million to turn a profit.   

The only thing I continue to be puzzled about is that I thought that digital projection was going to save heaps of money in terms of physical distribution.   Why hasn't that translated into making smaller, riskier films worth trying?   

Anyway, I should add that Damon doesn't appear to be in any way dislikeable in real life:  my only problem with him is I don't find him a very convincing actor.

Google is a harsh mistress

As much as I admire the free services Google provides, I do think it's faceless approach to customer service is a real worry.  

I mean, I did try to contact it once with respect to a real, work related problem, and I was deemed not worthy of response.   

But this story from the New York Times, of people who have been cast into the darkness due to being inappropriately labelled as having saved child porn, is a bit of an eye opener about relying too much on everything Google.  

Long story short - a guy (with his wife's knowledge) takes a photo of his toddler boy's infected genitalia for a doctor's televideo consult, which does happen (and there is a record of that and the treatment provided.)  The photo, however, gets automatically backed up into Google's cloud, and an automated AI system tags it as child porn, and the father automatically loses access to his Google accounts.   Appeals have no success.

As the article notes:

...in 2018, when Google developed an artificially intelligent tool that could recognize never-before-seen exploitative images of children. That meant finding not just known images of abused children but images of unknown victims who could potentially be rescued by the authorities. Google made its technology available to other companies, including Facebook....

A human content moderator for Google would have reviewed the photos after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, it locks the user’s account, searches for other exploitative material and, as required by federal law, makes a report to the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The nonprofit organization has become the clearinghouse for abuse material; it received 29.3 million reports last year, or about 80,000 reports a day. Fallon McNulty, who manages the CyberTipline, said most of these are previously reported images, which remain in steady circulation on the internet. So her staff of 40 analysts focuses on potential new victims, so they can prioritize those cases for law enforcement....

In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.

The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.

Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.

“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.

Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.

“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted, Mark spoke with a lawyer about suing Google and how much it might cost.

“I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said.

 It's kind of nuts that Google doesn't listen to appeals about incidents like this.

Update:   I was thinking of this last night, and thinking how Google is like the Old Testament God - sort of a "take it or leave it, them's the rules" being that is inscrutable, as in the Book of Job.   (On the other hand, I know, there are parts where God does grant the appeal, so to speak.  We're still waiting for Google to reach that level.)

 

 

Chinese property problems noted

This seems a good and detailed explanation of the developing crisis in China's property market by someone who seems to know that they are talking about:

The property sector in the Chinese economy has always been something of a puzzle. At its peak, it accounted for a quarter of the nation’s economic output, broadly measured. And it sees people in Beijing and Shanghai paying house prices similar to those in San Francisco and New York, despite having just a quarter the income of American buyers.

Now many believe that we are about to see a violent contraction of the property market in China. The government wants to intervene to curb speculation, and rein in what it calls the “three high” problem: high prices, high debt and high financialisation. The approach has been nothing short of dramatic. Financing for property developers has tanked. Earlier this year, property sales declined by as much as 20-30%, in-progress developments are not being completed and people have taken to the streets, banding together to stop mortgage payments on such projects in protest.

Many of China’s largest property developers are failing to repay their debts. Even the survivors are cash-strapped and in a liquidity crisis. The risk is that the property market crisis will drag the broader economy down with it, hitting suppliers, small- and medium-sized companies in construction, as well as household consumption. And dangerously, the banking system has at least a quarter of its assets in property.

But, fortunately, there is this:

Nor is a full-blown financial crisis likely. Major banks are state owned, and will not be allowed to fail. There are no complex, opaque chains of intermediation that characterise the western banking system. Foreign creditors to Chinese property developers will have to take a massive haircut, but the ripple effect on the international economy is likely to be limited. Foreign players have limited exposure to Chinese assets in general: today, less than 5% of Chinese equities and bonds are held by foreigners. This is unlike mortgage-backed securities, where the whole world was exposed leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

And we don't want that

 

Odd residence noted

There was an article about Bryan Dawe, of Clarke and Dawe satire fame, in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, about how he fell for an online scam.

But the odd feature that struck me was this:

Dawe, who now lives in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, offered to forge an unlikely partnership with the Palestinian photographer and leverage his considerable public profile in Australia.

How did he end up living there??  His wiki entry sheds no light.  This ABC article says he went there after John Clarke died - still seems a really odd choice.

From the Onion

It does seem lately to be going better (for Ukraine) than many expected. 
 

Worrying tweets noted