A pretty stunning examination of oddball psychology

As it happens, I heard this Background Briefing radio documentary yesterday about a stunningly unprofessional approach taken by a psychologist doing "family therapy".   I was appalled at what it revealed.

What's worse, she is one of the scores of psychologists around Australia who write key reports for the Family Court in child disputes. 

I can safely predict that there will be scores of lawyers, too, who will feel that their doubts about the whole system being so swayed by (allegedly) objective psychologists now has some well publicised  vindication.  (Not that all psychologists are as bad as this one, of course; and really, it is hard to say what alternative system could be implemented.   Perhaps a panel of "experts", with a broader range of life experience than  psychologists?)

On rabbits and morals

I quite like Noah Smith's essay on rabbits and how he's worked out that his fondness for them fits in with his general view of morality.  Here's a key part:

A number of my blog readers have been asking me to lay out my broad moral framework. Usually I resist this impulse. As David Hume wrote, humans decide on right and wrong based on a confusing and often mutually contradictory jumble of moral instincts, and attempts to fit those instincts into a rigid, internally consistent moral code are generally an exercise in futility. But if I do have one consistent, bedrock principle about the way the world ought to work, it’s this — the strong should protect and uplift the weak.

Nature endows some people with strength — sharp claws, size and musculature, resistance to disease. Human society endows us with other forms of strength that are often far more potent — guns, money, social status, police forces and armies at our backs. Everywhere there is the temptation for those with power to crush those without it, to enslave them, to extract labor and fealty and fawning flattery. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” wrote Thucydides; this is as concise a statement as you’ll ever find of the law of the jungle, both the real jungle and the artificial jungles humans create for ourselves. A hierarchy of power and brutality is a high-entropy state, an easy equilibrium toward which social interactions naturally flow. 

I believe that it is incumbent upon us as thinking, feeling beings — it is our moral purpose and our mission in this world — to resist this natural flow, to stand against it, to reverse it where possible. In addition to our natural endowments of power, we must gather to ourselves what additional power we can, and use it to protect and uplift those who have less of it. To some, that means helping the poor; to others, fighting for democracy or civil rights; to others, it simply means taking good care of their kids, or of a pet rabbit. But always, it means rolling the stone uphill, opposing the natural hierarchies of the world, fighting to reify an imaginary world where the strong exercise no dominion over the weak.

We will never fully realize that world, of course. And my morality is easier to declare than to put into practice; on the way we will make many missteps. We will make mistakes about who is strong and who is weak, punching down when we self-righteously tell ourselves we’re punching up. Like the communists of the 20th century, we will sometimes invert one unjust hierarchy only to put another in its place. And we will be corrupted by the power we gather, mouthing high principle while exploiting some of those we claim to protect; we will tell ourselves that we’re knights while acting like barbarians (just as actually existing knights often did). 

All these things will happen, and yet it is incumbent upon us to do the best we can, to keep fighting the good fight for a gentler, more equal world.

 

 

Fusion scepticism, too

Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed to an article in Scientific American about the huge cost overruns, technical manufacturing issues, and delays in start up, in the ITER fusion project.

My hunches about fusion never being a practical source of energy seem to be getting more justified.

Oh, and there was another story that has now come to my attention about some sillier fusion deal:

Private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy will provide Microsoft (MSFT.O) with electricity in about five years, the companies said on Wednesday, in the first such deal for the power source that fuels the sun but has been elusive on Earth. 

I would bet my house on this being pure PR that means nothing.  In fact, it almost sounds close to fraud to attract investors.

Multiverse scepticism

The Guardian has an article that accurately describes how the current thing of cinematic superhero franchises diving into the idea of multiverses to generate character crossover stories already seems boring and doomed to failure.

I wonder just how quickly the studios will abandon it? 

Owns squillions, can't afford a tailor?

I guess I should apologise for what might be said to be bitchiness, but here goes.

Buying off the rack pants or suits is fine, no matter your wealth:  but really, have a look at George Lucas's pants in this photo from today's US premier of the latest Indiana Jones movie:

 Don't they look both extremely baggy, and way too long?   And the check shirt looks like ones I wear, from Uniqlo.

Lift your game, George.  

 

Doubts all around

Some quick thoughts on Lidia Thorpe's extraordinary use of Parliament to complain of harassment and "sexual assault":

*  her behaviour can frequently be fairly called "attention seeking"; this and her generally aggressive demeanour (actually, obnoxiousness in my opinion) makes me judge her as one of the least likely targets of sexual harassment in Parliament;

*  that said, I don't doubt that there would still be some men in Parliament who show obnoxious attitudes to women, and it seems a little peculiar that a fellow Senator would move office after an unfounded complaint.  (On the other hand, if he thought she was just too nutty to reason with, it might have been a good idea to just keep away from her as far as possible.)  Does Dutton's reaction today indicate there are other, perhaps more serious, complaints from women about Van?  (He did mention "other allegations" - so presumably there is more.   But for all we know, it may be low level stuff.  That's the problem with sexual harassment - it can range from the merely irritatingly inappropriate that should be capable of apology and reform, to the wildly psychologically disturbing, for which people should lose their jobs.) 

* someone on Twitter pointed to an article in the Canberra Times in 2021 in which she talked of harassment.  But really, it's pretty weak tea:

In one example, Victorian Senator Lidia Thorpe said a male MP, standing outside her office, had looked her up and down and said "I want to take you out for dinner".

She said the man, who she declined to name, subsequently called her office repeatedly to ask her why she hadn't accepted the invitation. 

Senator Thorpe has not ruled out naming the men under parliamentary privilege, although she admitted the thought of it made her feel sick....

Speaking from inside her office on Tuesday morning, Senator Thorpe revealed she had been harassed by four parliamentarians - two senators and two MPs - since she entered parliament in September.

She said the harassment included "suggestive" remarks, comments about how she dressed or "what she had in her mouth". In one example, a fellow senator had put his arm around her while walking into the chamber for question time. 

There was one senator, she said, who would deliberately walk behind her in the corridors.

Senator Thorpe said she was so afraid of being alone after estimates hearings ended late on Monday night that she phoned her partner back in Melbourne so he could help "walk me to my office".

Describing the various acts as "brazen", Senator Thorpe said some parliamentarians "believe they have so much power that they are above the law and they can do whatever they like".

"It is just about power," she said.

Van, for his part, denies today he has ever touched her.   

 *  Given that she is so reticent to give specific details of the number of "suggestive" remarks she had to put up with, it does sound as if a large proportion might be more in her imagination.   On the other hand, it's also not unknown for some men to play a game of being suggestive in a manner that retains "plausible deniability" that it had a sexual meaning.   (All men should be well and truly past any form of uninvited touching of someone from the workplace though - that's been asking for trouble for the last 40 years.)

*  I still find it implausible that someone like Lidia, who presents so aggressively on so many issues, couldn't deal with unwanted attention by simply telling off the blokes that she considered it harassing.  

*  Labor would be well advised to stay away from this issue, I reckon.   

Update:   Well, maybe I should have kept away from the topic, too!

Look, additional allegations against Van make it sound like he is what you might call an "old school" sex pest - a groper who hopes he might get lucky if he pinches the right woman.  He might do worse, who knows?  

Of course that's completely unacceptable, and the fact that it is only been dealt with now does indeed confirm the Liberal Party's "women problem".

On the other hand, Lidia Thorpe's version of her time in Parliament makes it sound like she felt under continual threat of actual rape or sexual assault.   Apart from the recent high profile litigated allegation of that from within the Liberal Party, and it being pretty much in the category of [alleged] "date rape", there doesn't seem much evidence that any of the other hundreds of women who work there view this workplace the same way.   

Two things can be true:   sexual harassment, and perhaps worse, at the hands of men in Parliament House is (surprisingly) still a serious issue, especially on the Liberal side;  and Lidia Thorpe's perception of how she is a victim of it sounds, well, kind of neurotic.

Yeah, sure

Has there ever been a mind so spectacularly enfeebled by Trumpism?

He is getting a lot of ridicule in the following tweets:

A quantum computer did something (kinda) useful?

There's a pretty readily understandable report in the New York Times about a development in the use of quantum computing.   The most interesting part is how they deliberately introduced "noise" so they work out how to reject it's influence (I think that's right):

On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable — fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors — but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Indeed, for many of the calculations, additional noise was deliberately added, making the answers even more unreliable. But by varying the amount of noise, the researchers could tease out the specific characteristics of the noise and its effects at each step of the calculation.

“We can amplify the noise very precisely, and then we can rerun that same circuit,” said Abhinav Kandala, the manager of quantum capabilities and demonstrations at IBM Quantum and an author of the Nature paper. “And once we have results of these different noise levels, we can extrapolate back to what the result would have been in the absence of noise.”

In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations, a process they call error mitigation.

“You have to bypass that by inventing very clever ways to mitigate the noise,” Dr. Aharonov said. “And this is what they do.”

Altogether, the computer performed the calculation 600,000 times, converging on an answer for the overall magnetization produced by the 127 bar magnets.

And it seems that the answer they got was better than old "classical" methods:

Certain configurations of the Ising model can be solved exactly, and both the classical and quantum algorithms agreed on the simpler examples. For more complex but solvable instances, the quantum and classical algorithms produced different answers, and it was the quantum one that was correct.

Thus, for other cases where the quantum and classical calculations diverged and no exact solutions are known, “there is reason to believe that the quantum result is more accurate,” said Sajant Anand, a graduate student at Berkeley who did much of the work on the classical approximations.

There is still uncertainty about it all, though, in that error correction added to the classical method in future might mean that there is no long lasting "quantum supremacy".

Still, a cool story.

 

 

How to tell that a man's a gullible fool

I've said it before:  the only useful thing Trump has ever done is made it somewhat easier to understand how the rise of Hitler happened - he shows in a modern setting how (some) people love being told that they are victims (escalated, for self serving purposes, with invented and imagined tropes) and are happy to let any dork who aggressively preaches this message to them become their cult leader.  

CNN, by the way, provides a very lengthy list of the number of false claims made in the speech.

And in a similar vein, there was a column at Wapo reminding us of why Clinton was never prosecuted:

It’s been a long seven years, so let’s review the Clinton case, and tick through the critical differences. I have no brief for Clinton’s behavior in setting up a private, insecure email server to get around the State Department’s clunky, antiquated email system. It was sloppy, and Clinton made matters worse when she had her lawyers unilaterally erase 30,000 emails they deemed personal.

But: Clinton didn’t keep classified documents or transmit them on the server. Rather, the emails sent on the server referred to classified information; they did not, with the exception of three email chains that had a paragraph or two marked “(C),” for confidential — contain other flags that the material was classified.

If anything, there was “evidence of a conscious effort to avoid sending classified information by writing around the most sensitive material,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a June 2018 report on the Clinton investigation. And to the extent that classified information was discussed on the private system, investigators found, that was done with other government employees, for official purposes.

In addition, prosecutors did not find indications of any intent to obstruct in the Clinton lawyers’ deletion of the emails they decided were personal. They “concluded that there was no evidence that emails intentionally were deleted by former Secretary Clinton’s lawyers to conceal the presence of classified information on former Secretary Clinton’s server,” Horowitz reported.

FBI and Justice Department employees were unanimous in recommending against charges, the report said.

As then-FBI Director James B. Comey put it at the time, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring such a case. “In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” Comey said. “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

But Republicans and their media lackeys have built an alternative fact imaginary universe in which they are the victims, and are determined to live in it.  

The rural health care problem

I've been hearing a few discussions recently on ABC radio about the seemingly never ending problem of getting enough health care workers to practice outside of capital cities and their adjacent areas.  This morning I heard that they can't get anything like the staffing they need even in Shepparton - a town only a couple of hours drive outside of Melbourne.  

One person suggested that the key used to be getting young doctors or nurses to work in remoter areas and hopefully they would find a spouse there - giving them an incentive to settle down in that town or region.   Sounds plausible, except it seems that younger folk are coupling at a slower rate than ever before.

Maybe we need media effort into this:  none of this "Farmer wants a Wife" malarky; more "Country Bumpkin wants a Doctor Spouse".   (Might you, I suppose the doctors might have to be persuaded at gun point to participate.)

One thing seems pretty clear:  increased money and allowances is not really at the heart of the problem.  It seems to be more about convenience, and a preference for living in places with a wide variety of things to do.   Hence, I have other suggestions:

a.    free drone air taxis for doctors and specialists who can't be bothered driving 2 or 3 hours for a day's work, but might put up with a fun 30 minute flight from their local park or footy field;

b.   government commandeering of penthouse apartments in prime holiday locations for free use by medical staff who work any more than 4 hours drive from a city or region with no medical staff shortages.  Sure, that might mean taking every penthouse apartment on the Gold Coast, for example, but times are tough;

c.   while we are talking the Gold Coast:  ban doctors and nurses doing cosmetic surgery.  OK, OK, I'm not totally against the free market - just that for every month they work in a cosmetic surgery practice, they have to work too weeks in a remote area dealing with real problems. 

d.   I suspect that relatively few doctors, or at least young doctors, are not Lefty inclined on most issues, and part of the problem may be that regional Australia remains the main hold out for conservative parties.  (Although, there is the Gold Coast and it's Florida-lite reputation too.)   Not sure how we solve that problem.  Even my  "reverse Pol Pot" policy might not help with that, if the handful of people left to manage the robot farms are still voting National and pining for an Australian version of Donald Trump.  Oh, that's right:  my plan was to have right to vote eliminated if you wanted to stay in the regional areas.  Well, there will be an exception made for medical staff.  Fair's fair.

Sounds like B Ark material to me....

Despite watching a lot of Youtube content on the big TV, I've never watched much of the Youtube star Mr Beast (nor that PewDiePie) - from what little I have seen, their content or personality did not strike me as engaging.   I suspect nearly all of their audience would be under 30, and my general impression is that there is something, shall we say, youthfully shallow?, about both these guys.   Maybe I'm being mean, or just old?  

Anyhoo, I'm writing about someone I'm not interested in because of the lengthy article about Mr Beast at the NYT, talking about why some people have taken to promoting positive dislike and distrust of him, despite much of his channel being about random acts of altruism.   I'll gift the article here.

A few things leaping out at me about it:

a.    how incredibly bad is the American health care system if a poor family can't get their kid a cataract operation without the intervention of charity?  

b.    the explanation of how Mr Beast built a Youtube empire is a bit of a worry:

For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year. After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”

 You know what I think of when I read that? - "Straight to the B Ark with you, young man!"   

c.    the article makes a point that is probably is at the core of the older person's reaction to him:

I’ll admit that I agree with some of those critics, at least to the extent that I think it would be nice if a person with Donaldson’s platform and resources (and evident desire to help people) cast a closer eye on structural problems with the American health care system and on the everyday injustices visited on disabled people. But I can also see how this kind of criticism misunderstands what the MrBeast channel is and how it works. Having kicked his flywheel into action, Donaldson from here can only really keep it spinning. Any deviation might threaten the perpetual motion of his growth machine. (Imagine being 12 years old: Do you want to watch an explainer on private-equity roll-ups of primary-care practices?)

Yep:  he may be doing good charitable work (while making many, many millions himself), but it's a bit fiddling around the edges of what really does the most people good.  

 

Robot church

The article linked in the tweet makes it clear that this was a bit of a novelty act, not a serious attempt at a permanent AI led church:

HUNDREDS OF GERMAN Protestants attended a church service in Bavaria that was generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.

The ChatGPT chatbot led more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.

“Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.

The service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna.

“I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine,” the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press....

The reviews were not overwhelmingly good:

The entire service was “led” by four different avatars on the screen, two young women, and two young men.

At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly”.

Some people enthusiastically videotaped the event with their mobile phones, while others looked on more critically and refused to speak along loudly during The Lord’s Prayer.

Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old who works in IT, said she was excited and curious when the service started but found it increasingly off-putting as it went along.

“There was no heart and no soul,” she said. “The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.”

“But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this,” Schmidt added.

I did like this comment following:

 I am also reminded of Futurama:

Noted on the weekend

Ha!

Thought these tweets were funny:

 

Here's the breaking story, as noted in the Washington Post.

I wonder:  at what point are leadership level Republicans going to come out and say - "Look, Trumpists:  it's just not realistic to think a Presidential candidate with these trials hanging over their head has any chance of successful election."

Still with the odd political re-alignment with UFOs

I noted this back in February 2021, but I still find it remarkable how it's mainly the Right which is now showing gullibility on UFO matters.   It's all of a piece with the MAGA Right becoming generally paranoid about the "Deep State", and swallowing whole conspiracies about Big Science on climate change and COVID, when back in the 60's, 70's and (possibly?) 80's, anti-establishment paranoia was mainly a thing of the Left.    

Anyhow, now on Twitter publicity is being give to a curious, month old case of a Las Vegas family appearing to have been scared by (what they thought was) large, bug eyed aliens appearing in their backyard (after a meteor or something appeared in the sky.)

Lots and lots of scepticism is deserved, and being expressed, about the lack of photos or video by the family of what was spooking them in the yard.   But even more than that, the police arrive, go in the backyard, and apparently say nothing else significant about what was there, and what was on their bodycam.  

But the son put up another video from his bedroom, summarising what happened.  Can't find a link to it now.

Why wouldn't there be journalists crawling over glass to get an interview with the parents?   Why wouldn't the family be open to showing others the ring on the ground that the son claims as evidence that something landed there?   Why aren't there more videos of the apparent bright meteor type light over Las Vegas that night??

None of this makes any sense whatsoever.  

That's what makes it sort of intriguing - although chances are, of course, that it will turn out to be a whole set of mis-perceptions running riot within fervid imaginations.   [I'm kind of leaning against outright fraud - because it would be unusual for all four family members to participate in it.  If it was fraud, it would more likely be from just one or two, who managed to draw their parents into panicking without seeing anything.]

Shouldn't this be a bigger story in the American media?

On Tucker Carlson's little rinky dink home made media show, which Right wing types are falling over themselves to call the end of mainstream media (due to dubious view counts), he apparently said this:

 This was widely noted on Twitter, and certainly in some foreign press, such as The Independent:

Tucker Carlson calls Ukraine’s Jewish leader ‘rat-like’ as he launches new Twitter show with pro-Kremlin rant

And Haaretz:

Tucker Carlson Trafficks in Antisemitic Tropes About Ukraine's Zelenskyy on Twitter Show Debut

But when it comes to the New York Times, you have to get 7 paragraphs in to get to this, which seemingly takes the attitude "meh, this is just what he does":

Carlson also called Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, “a persecutor of Christians” and described him as “shifty, dead-eyed” and “sweaty and ratlike.” For years, Carlson laundered far-right fringe rhetoric and bigotry on Fox, and there is no sign that, in the anything-goes regime of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the laundry is shutting down.

And the Washington Post?  They seem to have at least 3 pieces on the Twitter show, none of them saying anything in detail about the obvious "let's dogwhistle to anti-Semites" aspect.  (Actually, I reckon it's more than a dog whistle - there is no other way to interpret it.)  All we seem to get is this:

Carlson picked up some of his usual conspiracy-theory-tinged topics and sympathies to the Russian government in the video, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “sweaty and ratlike” and suggesting without evidence that Ukraine was responsible for the destruction of a major dam on its territory. He also accused mainstream media outlets of suppressing a claim from a former military officer that the U.S. government has secret knowledge of alien spacecraft.

To its credit, another piece at WAPO did point this out:

“Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew [the dam] up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline, last fall,” Carlson said. “And in fact, Ukrainians did do that, as we now know.”

Carlson quickly moved on, and for good reason: Despite now saying Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, he spent months on his Fox News show saying something very different. Without any real evidence, he repeatedly claimed it was the United States who blew up Nord Stream.

Anyway, I find it odd that the mainstream American media is not blasting him more directly about this.  

And as for Elon Musk, this tweet sums it up pretty well:

Elon Musk hosts Russian asset

 

It's all in the eyes

I watched a video about the remarkable technological improvements in VR that are built into the Apple Vision Pro.   It does sound impressive - but I still have my doubts that this type of technology will ever be as widespread as Apple (or Meta) hopes.

Why?  Because I strongly suspect this is never going to be good for the eyes.   

I could be wrong about this, as now that I look it up, one short study done with a basic VR headset for 40 minute sessions in 2017 didn't come up with evidence that it would cause myopia - but it acknowledges that more study needs to be done.  

The problem is not only the risk of increasing myopia, especially in young people, but also the fact that once you need reading glasses, you have to get lens done that will allow you to use the VR headset clearly.  This is already a bit of an issue with me with using the cheapo phone headsets - because my eyes are different, although I could read clearly from one eye, the brain was still working overtime to deal with VR.   (It might be better now that I have had both eyes done for cataracts, and with the lens to allow for reading, rather than distance, without glasses; but one eye still is not quite as clear as the other.  It's fine for reading in bed, and even using my laptop, but with VR and the incredibly close distance the screen is to the eyes, I dunno...) 

Even apart from the issue of getting perfectly clear vision, I still doubt that using them for protracted periods, like all day at work, will ever not come without eyestrain.

I can imagine something like Google Glass being able to be used all day, as you are swapping all the time between near vision, and real distance vision (not the simulation of distance vision that Vision Pro will provide.)   (And also, glasses are just more comfortable in the way something bound to the face  like a ski mask isn't.)

So, I really have strong doubts about this...    

Update:  you can read a sceptical take on them by a journalist who tried them for half an hour, here.

As he says:

Over dinner, I talked to my wife about the Vision Pro. The Apple goggles, I said, looked and felt better than the competing headsets. But I wasn’t sure that mattered.

Other headsets from Meta and Sony PlayStation were much cheaper and already quite powerful and entertaining, especially for playing video games. But whenever we had guests over for dinner and they tried the goggles on, they lost interest after less than half an hour because the experience was exhausting and they felt socially disconnected from the group.

Would it matter if they could twist the dial on the front of the headset to see into the real world while wearing it? I suspect it would still feel isolating, because they would probably be the only person in a room wearing one.

Which is the bigger story today?

1.  The Institute of Family Studies confirms that, yeah, young people like to say they are bi.   But, funnily enough, they still prefer to have straight sex:

 

The term "lesbian until graduation" has been a joke for a very long time (I remember the first time I heard it was Libbi Gorr on one of her shows);  I think it is just more embraced than ever now...

2.   Some dude who used to have security clearance says the US, and other countries, have proof of exotic craft via at least recovered materials (and captured craft?).  But, it's just what he's been told.  He's never seen it.

I have two words for anybody getting too excited by this:  Michael Flynn.   By which I mean - of course being in the military with a high security clearance is no guarantee of not talking nonsense.

I find it all very hard to believe, in this digital world where leaks of documents and photos and video has become easier than ever.

Coward considered

There's a biographical article about Noel Coward up at the BBC.   I knew little of his background, and did not realise how incredibly successful he became at a young age, after having an early nervous breakdown that kept him out of World War 1:

From the age of 14, he had some sort of relationship with 36-year-old artist, Philip Streatfeild – possibly sexual – before Streatfeild died of trench fever in World War One. Coward's other close friend, John Ekins, also died in the war. In 1918, at the age of 18, Coward had a nervous breakdown in an army training camp before seeing any action, and was hospitalised for six weeks.  

"Coward is of the generation that came out of the First World War and the global pandemic of the Spanish Flu, and thought that the future was deeply bleak, with another war on the horizon," says Soden. 

How to deal with this bleakness? Sing and dance and laugh through it. Make-believe had always been Coward's escape: he'd been acting professionally from the age of 10, and even as a teenager was churning out plays and songs and novels. Boundless ambition was matched by determined graft. 

"He's spat out into the 1920s with this hole at the centre of his life which only fame and success can adequately fill," says Soden. "It's as if there can never be too much of it." And soon, there really was silly amounts. By 25, Coward was "more famous than the prime minister," says Soden, with four plays on in London in June 1925. He stormed the US, opening three plays on Broadway by the end of the year: The Vortex, Hay Fever, and Easy Virtue – the latter featuring another woman frank about her enjoyment of sex, and stifled by the disapproving and hypocritical upper-classes. 

By 1926, 3,000 productions of Coward's plays had been staged worldwide, and his annual income was estimated to be at least £50,000 (£15 million today). He had become the highest paid writer in the world, but the relentless schedule soon took its toll. In autumn 1926, Coward found himself unable to stop crying during a performance and collapsed in his dressing room afterwards.

While wary of offering posthumous diagnoses, Soden tentatively suggests that Coward may have had bipolar disorder. What is clear is that his life was marked by periods of "astonishingly manic activity, rehearsing nine to five, a show an evening, partying till 2am… and then he crumbles." 

He then did try to help the war effort in World War 2:

He ended up with several [war jobs]: spying for an underground new secret service, running a propaganda department in France, attempting to stealthily influence important Americans to support Britain and enter the war, even holding meetings in President Roosevelt's bedroom. 

It may have been his greatest role – all that mask wearing proving excellent practice for going undercover. The fact that no-one took him seriously was his "best qualification for being a spy," says Soden. But Coward was, arguably, too convincing: the press disparaged him for apparently jollying about in America while everyone else suffered, while his international playboy status was frequently seen as a liability by politicians. Both reactions deeply hurt Coward; war service was one area of life where he desperately wanted to be taken seriously.

So, he was certainly in the Bright Young Thing crowd in the 1920's.  Did Evelyn Waugh ever meet him, I wonder?   Ah - yes, he did:

He had lunch with Noel Coward (‘He has a simple, friendly nature. No brains’)

Ha.  

By the way, this article gives more (autobiographical) detail of Coward's near entry into the military in 1918.   It was not a simple case of "nervous breakdown" - and it was also at the very tail end of the war.    

More potted biography of Coward's war time efforts can be found in this article at The Guardian.  Surprisingly, there is an Australian connection, too, despite it being somewhat hard to fathom that a somewhat camp-ish demeanour would go over well in that era here:

He was immediately sent to Bletchley and seconded to D section, but was swiftly moved to Paris as head of the bureau of propaganda, a job that seemed to entail nothing more strenuous than dining with the beau monde. All this was viewed in Britain with understandable mystification; there were questions in the Commons about the usefulness of his activities. He persuaded Stuart to send him to the US, where, astonishingly, he had two meetings with Roosevelt. What appeared to be his triumphal progress through America caused a huge furore in England. He was seconded to British War Relief, but by now the US press was attacking him too, not least because of his first world war record.

He then went to Australia, where he received a gratifyingly ecstatic response; but was told that his wartime mission was suspended. This command can only have come from the highest level. His return to London was greeted by a hostile press, which seemed all of a piece with the requisitioning of his magnificent country house, Goldenhurst, and the bombing of his London home. He moved to the Savoy Hotel; there he found other similarly dispossessed chums such as Margot Asquith. The blitz was in full swing; he was now right at the centre of the British people's experience of war, though of course, in a very Noël Coward sort of way. Supping at the Savoy on a Saturday night in April 1941, he noted: "Had a few drinks. Pretty bad blitz, but not as bad as Wednesday. A couple of bombs fell very near during dinner. Wall bulged a bit and door blew in. Orchestra went on playing, no one stopped eating or talking. Blitz continued. Carroll Gibbons played the piano, I sang, so did Judy Campbell and a couple of drunken Scots Canadians. On the whole a strange and very amusing evening. People's behaviour absolutely magnificent. Much better than gallant. Wish the whole of America could really see and understand it. Thankful to God that I came back. Would not have missed this experience for anything."

 And finally, I guess a summary of his extremely active and often scandalous gay love/sex life is in order, and which outlet is better at that than the Daily Mail?   

Update:  Oh look!  The State Library of Queensland has a post about Coward's visit to Brisbane at the start of WW2.

I suppose I was being a bit facetious when I said above that it is hard imagining him being popular with Australian "diggers" given his camp reputation - the article seemingly confirms he was mobbed by women, and I do recall an anecdote in which he said he never wanted to "come out" because he had convinced so many middle aged women that he was worthy of being their heartthrob.   

The oddest line in the article is perhaps this:

The following day (21 November 1940) was also extremely busy for Coward . He was due to visit a Brisbane abattoir in the morning, however he decided to cancel this in favour of rehearsing for his afternoon concert. Coward politely told The Telegraph newspaper that "It was not because he particularly disliked abattoirs. He had seen lots of them in his time".