Hard to tell who is most nuts here

I see the bizarre Canadian story about the mega fake boob wearing teacher is back in the news because (as hard to believe as this is) it seems he has been employed at a different school, which has warned parents they have to respect his rights to his "gender expression", and the school will take special security precautions (which sound inconvenient for the kids) because of the expected protests.

In any comments following articles about this, there are people who still suspect this is a massive troll by the teacher, who has at least once been photographed going about his normal life as a  male and without the ridiculous fake boobs.  (He has also, apparently, given all types of explanations as to them being "real".)

I guess, as a troll, it might be considered successful - the total apparent sincerity of the new school board showing that they have zero common sense and are complete ideological captives on such an issue is astounding.  

But even so, how nutty do you have to be to carry out such a troll for so long?

 

 

They would last less than 6 months

Axios notes:

Trump open to Vivek Ramaswamy as vice president 

I reckon that their working relationship would be lucky to last 6 months.  Look at the history of other nuts who have tried to be on Team Trump.

By the way - Vivek is so crazy I don't have any substantial fear of him every support much beyond the MAGA (plus nutty technocrat billionaire and their fanboys) crowd.   

I think Nikki Haley is capable of broader appeal - but as the last post notes, can she really get past changing her view of Trump every second week?

She is one of many, but that is no excuse

Here's a column by Frank Bruni at NYT pointing out the "pathetic" history of Nikki Haley's continual flip flopping on her support/condemnation of Donald Trump.

It's not just the intellectual dishonesty, it's the moral cowardice, and it applies to so, so many Republicans like her.

On our way to an AI Pope

At the Catholic Herald, a big claim in the first sentence here:

As an AI-based app currently in the beta phase, Magisterium AI “could be a game changer for the Church”, Sanders said.

The app is an AI that is trained by using a limited number of Church documents and which, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, can be used to generate human-like text on specific content that could be used by anyone from church scholars and academics, canon lawyers, students seeking well-sourced information to assist in studies, and anyone curious about church teaching.

According to Sanders, the difference between Magisterium AI and ChatGPT is that “our AI is trained on a private database of only Church documents”, and therefore there is less chance the AI will “hallucinate”, which is tech jargon for “make stuff up”.

Further down:

The app, launched earlier this year, currently has around 2,580 magisterial documents in its knowledge database, and the list is growing....

Magisterium AI is currently partnering with the Orientale, which contains the largest library on Eastern Christianity, to digitise the library’s contents and add the documents it contains to the app’s database so the AI can train on them and make them available to users across the world.

I look forward to hearing from the new, future AI PopeBot.

 

I get to amuse myself about Kant, again

First. please read the footnote to this blog entry back in 2010.

Then, I offer as further evidence in support of my proposed Kant fan fiction/screenplay:

I don't recall reading that before.

The billiards bit is at least confirmed here:

He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the frivolous activities common to university students.^[9] Yet Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of money to help defray the cost of living. 

And the card playing is mentioned here:

He would stay up late drinking wine and playing cards with his friends. He’d sleep late and eat too much and host big parties.

It wasn’t until he turned 40 that he dropped it all and developed the routine life he later made famous. He said that he developed this routine at 40 because he realized the moral implications of his actions and decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time or energy his consciousness had left.

I don't want to know that he dropped his time wasting ways at 40, though.  In my screenplay, that's when he hit the higher class gambling dens and pleasure houses of Europe, as a Prussian James Bond, before becoming the uber-prude we all know and love.  ;)

 

Krugman connects the dots

Paul Krugman writes:

Recently Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, expressed some puzzlement in a post on X, formerly Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”

OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.

If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.

I’ve written about some of these things before, in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in the light of Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the G.O.P. nomination but could conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they appeal to so many wealthy men.

The key thing is, success can easily lead to over-estimation of your ability to understand complicated stuff:

Success all too easily feeds the belief that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject without working hard to understand the issues or consulting people who have; this kind of arrogance may be especially rife among tech types who got rich by defying conventional wisdom. The wealthy also tend to surround themselves with people who tell them how brilliant they are or with other wealthy people who join them in mutual affirmation of their superiority to mere technical drones — what the tech writer Anil Dash calls “V.C. QAnon.”

So where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the generations-old system of fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that “hyperinflation will change everything. It’s happening.”

Now, I’m quite willing to admit that monetary economics isn’t as solid a science as epidemiology or climatology. And yes, even noncrank economists argue about some big issues much more than their hard-science counterparts.

But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, “a technical and difficult subject” — one on which you shouldn’t make pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history — although “no one will believe it.” Certainly people who think they understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than epidemiologists are also likely to think they understand money better than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them that the world doesn’t work the way they think it does are engaged in some kind of hoax or conspiracy.

He adds near the end:

Thanks to the tech boom, there are probably more wealthy cranks than there used to be, and they’re wealthier than ever, too. They also have a more receptive audience in the form of a Republican Party whose confidence in the scientific community has collapsed since the mid-2000s.

All sounds like a good enough explanation.

Literally, a brainworm

I guess this story will further cement Australia's reputation for all things dangerous: 

Woman complained of forgetfulness and depression before doctors pulled out an 8cm roundworm normally found in pythons

It's kind of interesting that her earlier symptoms were to do with digestion, though:

It was a fairly regular day on the ward for Canberra hospital infectious diseases physician Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, until a neurosurgeon colleague called him and said: “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.”

The neurosurgeon, Dr Hari Priya Bandi, had pulled an 8cm-long parasitic roundworm from her patient, prompting her to call on Senanayake and other hospital colleagues for advice about what to do next.

The patient, a 64-year-old woman from south-eastern New South Wales, was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.

By 2022, her symptoms also included forgetfulness and depression, prompting a referral to Canberra hospital. An MRI scan of her brain revealed abnormalities requiring surgery.

The urban doom loop is a worry everywhere

I'll gift a link to this Washington Post article talking about concerns as to whether commercial building values in inner cities are (due to Covid forcing us how to do remote working) going to drop so badly that it will stuff up the economy.

This was a worry I was muttering about early in the Covid pandemic - because it was pretty remarkable how quickly everything was able to keep ticking over despite the dramatic drop in the number of people who needed to be in the inner city.   And it's not as if turning office blocks into apartments or hotels is an easy thing to do in most cases.

It's a tricky thing, though, in the sense that if you're worried about transport's contribution to greenhouse gases, remote working is a great thing.  Is that why John Quiggin is (I think) not worried at all about this as a major problem?

But half empty city buildings - it still feels lonely, and wrong.

Update:  Anecdotal evidence, but still - 

By the way, as far as Brisbane is concerned:   seems to me that it might turn out to be a case of lucky timing that the inner city is having major transport and facility upgrades for the Olympics over the next decade.    They should make the inner city more appealing place to visit, if not work, I would have thought?

I guess "being swallowed by a whale" is not really a thing...

Slate has stepped away from it's first person "this is my weird sex life" stories (why does this magazine spend so much time on these often hard to believe, click baity advice columns?   I only occasionally click on them - honest) to print the account of one of the women who accidentally ended up in the mouth of a feeding humpback whale a couple of years ago.   I'm pretty sure I saw the video about it at the time. 

From the story, there is this fact, which I don't recall being in my brain before (my bold):

...if you slow it down just a little bit, you can see us sliding right into the whale’s mouth as he closes it and the only thing sticking out of the mouth is my right arm. I guess it happens to sea lions a lot and those kinds of animals because whales and sea lions are feeding on the same fish. The throat of a whale is about the size of a grapefruit. Anything that’s larger than that just kind of comes out. Thank goodness for that. We were in more danger of drowning or being squashed.

Has this been answered yet?

Who ordered or arranged the completely over the top police/security escort to Trump's arrest in Atlanta last week?

 Many people were commenting on Twitter about how ridiculously extreme it seemed.  And even if there had been early concerns about the number of pro (or anti) Trump protesters who might be outside the courthouse, you would deal with that with police on the ground, not on motorcycles and in SUVs.

I am amongst those who suspect it was arranged by the creepy MAGA element within the local police force, in a "we ride with him as a sign of support"type vibe.   

But has any journalist looked into that yet?

 

Two interesting videos on Chinese ghosts

The first is by Singaporean content creator Sneaky Sushii, who for some reason has done a series of videos with a supernatural theme, even though he presents himself as an all round skeptic.  (He's also not Buddhist or Taoist - I suspect based on his appearing dressed as a bishop in an old video that his family might be nominally Christian.)   

There are two interesting things about the video:

1.    that in a modern city like Singapore, they do brightly lit, drive in ghost concerts in their Chinese cemeteries;

2.    in the comments following the video, so many of his young fan base praise him for his great bravery in going into the cemetery at night and trying to find a ghost to communicate with (indicating how Singaporean young folk still firmly believe in the supernatural, even if otherwise not so religious.  Well, I doubt they are conventionally religious, anyway. A bit like the Japanese, I expect.)

Anyhow, the video:   

 

The second video is a useful educational background on the history of the Chinese ghost festival, from the great Religion for Breakfast Youtube channel. Not much to say about this, except that as always, he does a really good job. 

 

 

Oh, actually I do have something further to say. He points out in the video that the festival's most important date this year falls on 30 August. This does actually explain why at my work, a matter due to settle that day, involving a Chinese buyer, has been brought forward to 29 August. I guess every year I should keep track of the date, just in case it affects other Chinese I'm dealing with...

Aren't they pathetic?

On the one hand, the reaction to Trump's poseur mugshot from a bunch of delusional men for whom he (bizarrely) represents a strong man:

In the real world, as reflected on Reddit:

Update:  Another delusional culture war wannabe warrior who's won over by a criminal striking a pose.  

Another update, cos these made me laugh:

Assessing the flakey phony candidate

Well, a certain gullible, populist Trumpy type might find it mesmerising - the rest of us, not at all.

I even find him more annoying that De Santis and his faux "let me be Queen of Camelot, please" wife.

Update:  more twitter commentary:

Update 2:  this is probably true, given the sophistication of Trumpists:

Anyway, the Trumpiest of Trumpsters on line already don't trust him.  

Two has-beens having a chat

They are both awful and deserve each other:

 

This also puts me in mind of Jonestown - cult leaders are often into encouraging belief in their gullible followers that someone is out to kill them. 

The polypill for salvation

The idea of the cardio vascular system polypill for the general promotion of longevity doesn't seem to be in the news much lately,  although I still see there are fans.

In any case, I've been thinking comparative religion again, and strategies for making sure you stand the best chance of getting into Heaven (or something like it) from your death bed.

This has particularly been brought to mind by the simple formula offered in Pure Land Buddhism, which is from Amitabha's 18th vow:

If, when I attain Buddhahood, sentient beings in the lands of the ten directions who sincerely and joyfully entrust themselves to me, desire to be born in my land, and call my Name, even ten times, should not be born there, may I not attain perfect Enlightenment. Excluded, however, are those who commit the five gravest offences and abuse the right Dharma.

Just to be clear, let's check the list of the 5 greatest offences:

The first one is killing your father. The second is killing your mother. The third is killing someone who seeks the way of awakening. The fourth is physically injuring the Buddha. The fifth is disturbing the peace and harmony of the Sangha community. Any one of these is considered a serious offense in Buddhism, so in the 18^th Vow, Amida Buddha also admonishes us never to commit them.

 Well,  I think I can manage to avoid those.

So, to make it clear, Pure Land Buddhists believe that, for most people, being able to recite Amitabha's name 10 times is a guarantee to re-born into the Pure Land, which sounds a cool place:

Sukhavati is expressively described in the Pure Land sutras as being a joyous world, soft and glowing, filled with the music of birds and the tinkling of trees adorned with precious jewels and garlands of golden bells. Amitabha sits on a lotus in the midst of a terraced pond, attended by the bodhisattvas (“buddhas-to-be”) Avalokiteshvara and Mahasthamaprapta. The newly dead enter into lotus buds, which unfold when the occupants have become entirely purified and have attained enlightenment. Many are said to be reborn on Earth after leaving Sukhavati to become bodhisattvas working toward the liberation (moksha) of all sentient beings.

The exact way to recite Amitabha's name depends on which language you follow, as explained at this Wikipedia page (and also this page). 

I like the Sanskrit version which is easy to remember.  Form the last link:  " 'Namo Amitabha Buddha' which literally mans 'Homage to the Amitabha Buddha ' or 'I seek refuge in the Amitabha Buddha'."

Anyway, this is taking me a long time to get to the point:   for someone who remains open to the possibility of entry into an afterlife, but doesn't know which religion gets it right, what's the best practice on a death bed?

I would guess as follows:

a.    recite "Namo Amitabha Buddha" ten times;

b.    have a Catholic priest handy and make a confession; or if that's not possible, at least make your own mental confession, and recite ten Hail Mary's and the Lord's Prayer;

c.    to cover the evangelicals, cry out "I accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour!", I guess?

d.    I was thinking about now making a bad taste joke about doing something that would count as matyrdom for a Muslim, but that is hotly contested as a legitimate part of their religion.

e.    As for Hindu's, it seems they believe you'll be reincarnated one way or the other, and there is this  advice on an American website (the last surprising bit is my bold):

The condition of one’s consciousness at the moment of death is considered very important in determining the state of the next life. Because of this, it’s traditional for Hindus to die at home, where they can be more easily surrounded by family and friends who can help create a spiritual atmosphere conducive in helping a soul depart the body in an auspicious manner. Of course, as it’s become more and more common for people to die in hospitals — whether out of necessity or choice — loved ones strive to create a spiritual environment as best as possible. 

The goal of the departing is to die while concentrating on a preferred mantra that invokes the presence of the Divine. Because it’s common for the dying to lose control of their faculties, including the ability to focus, loved ones provide support by singing prayers and hymns, and also reading from scripture. As a person becomes fully unconscious and stops breathing, indicating death’s arrival, a family member will usually softly chant the preferred mantra in the person’s ear. 

Pouring a few spoons of water from the Ganges — a river in India considered to be sacred — into the mouth also brings auspiciousness. The personified deity of Ganga is worshipped as a Divine being, hence her presence at the time of death helps to ensure a soul’s transition to a spiritually favorable next life.

 So, I guess to be safe, you carry around a vial of Ganges water when you get to old age?

Anyhoo, that's my "polypill" procedures suggestions for guaranteed salvation.

Don't say I'm not a useful blog...

Pure Land and Christianity

I've been reading some interesting stuff about the origins of the story of Amitabha Buddha, the Sutras for which seem to date within the range of perhaps 150 - 400 CE.  

The story moved from India to China, and later to Japan, with the religious doctrine morphing along the way.  This is something I hadn't known before:

Karl Barth, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, does a wonderful comparison in Church Dogmatics between Reformed Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism as taught by Honen and Shinran.

He surveyed the religious traditions of the world in search of doctrinal parallels to Christianity and concluded that it was the Japanese Pure Land tradition that provided “the most exact, comprehensive, and plausible ‘pagan’ parallel to Christianity” (Barth 1961, 1,2: 342). He expresses some shock at the depth and specificity of resemblance, commenting that the Pure Land thought of Hōnen and Shinran, in particular, “parallels not so much Roman or Greek Catholicism but rather, of all things, the Christianity of the Reformation, and therefore confronts Christianity with the question of its truth precisely in its form as a consistent religion of grace” (2).

 Update:   Google has turned up an extract of a book with a chapter about the rise of Pure Land Buddhism, but I can't even see who the author is.  Nevertheless, this section about the various arguments for how it arose is of interest:

I have to say, it is interesting to note that a major evolution within Buddhism was going on at the same time as the various strains of Christian belief were also in competition.   And both end up with a (kind of) Trinity, as well.  

I mentioned once before that it is in fact quite likely that Indian Buddhists had travelled to the Middle East region before and around the time of Christ.

As for Christians heading East, I don't believe I have noted this before:

In A.D. 781, a Christian monk named Jingjing composed an inscription of roughly 1,800 Chinese characters on a large stone tablet, called a stela, which would become one of the richest sources of information ever discovered about early Christianity in China.

According to the stela, unearthed in the early 1600s, Christianity came to China in A.D. 635, when a Nestorian monk named Aluoben entered the ancient capital of Chang’an -- now modern-day Xi’an -- in central China. His arrival must have been the source of some excitement because the e mperor sent his minister of state to greet the guest and bring him to the palace. Although we do not know where Aluoben came from or why he visited China, some scholars believe that he arrived from Persia and was part of an important foreign delegation. Whatever the case, the Tang emperor issued an imperial edict three years later allowing Aluoben to build a monastery in Chang’an and to settle there with a handful of missionaries.  

By the time Aluoben’s story was commemorated in stone almost 150 years later, the Old and New Testaments had been translated into Chinese, and monasteries had been founded in several cities throughout China. But in 845, an imperial edict limited all foreign religion, including Christianity. The edict triggered a period of persecution, and, by the end of the Tang Dynasty in 907, Christianity had all but disappeared from China.

A significant presence did not reappear until the 13th century, when Mongols conquered China and founded the Yuan Dynasty.

 It would be neat to find some Christian influence on the development of Mahayana Buddhism in Indian in the second century, but seems like no one has found evidence of such visitors...

A likely story

Actually, I have liked the idea that "greys" are future evolved humans for quite a long time.  I don't know who first had that thought, though.

I know, I will ask Perplexity!

Oh damn, it claims not to know either.  It notes that there is some recent content along those lines on Youtube (and a whole book published about it in 2019), but I wonder if it goes back to some obscure science fiction writer.     

Update:   See, this is why I keep a blog: so I can search it to remind myself of things I already knew!

Back in 2013, I had a post noting that the Time Travellers from the Future theory seems to go back to the 1950s, and one (apparently real) guy in particular.  (Googling his name, I just came up with another page about it.)  

Mind you, this guy is supposed to have said Roswell was real (as in, involved aliens of some kind), which I don't believe at all.

So yeah, people with high gullibility seem to go for the "from the future" theory.   I still like it as a fun idea, though.

Yay for lush Singapore

This 15 minute PBS show about how Singapore deliberately chose to go green and lush in its urban environment is a good explanation of why I love visiting there.  It's basically like a techno/green, capitalist/socialist vision of how the future should look (and work):

 

I also gather from the enthusiastic comments following (mostly from Americans) that a lot of people hadn't realised that the place looks like this now.   And its nice to see that so many who have visited it are big fans of the place, like me.

And a final comment: it's a little amusing to watch the poor host start to show clear sweat on his shaved head during the interview with the Chinese woman architect/planner who looks cool and composed throughout.  I guess it has something to do with acclimatisation.   (He could also have taken his coat off.)

In which I dare readers to try and not be impressed with an AI product...

I was killing time yesterday when I looked at Google Play for any new apps to play with on my phone, when I saw one called Perplexity.   It had very high ratings, so I tried it.

What is it?:   

Perplexity AI is an answer engine that uses large language models to provide precise answers to questions.

Sure, I have fiddled with ChatGPT and marvelled at some of its imagined information.  But a search engine with an LLM that provides footnoted links to the sources of its information?   

I'm finding it very, very impressive.  I'm not saying it's guaranteed to be 100% accurate, but it's pretty much blowing my mind as to how quickly it gathers information from several sources, bundles together a summary from all of them, writes it up coherently, and presents a further series of questions that might be useful to go into the topic deeper.

I guess I used to be amazed at the speed of search engines generally when they first came out.   But now the systems work like someone scanning a half dozen websites related to a question asked in a normal human sentence, pulling bits of content from each of them, and writing a coherent summary, all in about 2 or 3 seconds.  

I see now that you can use it (free) on the web too, at https://www.perplexity.ai/  (But it doesn't save a history of your previous questions, like the app does, until you "clear history".)   

Go on, try it....

Appalling story of hospital mal-administration

It is truly shocking to read the BBC article that came out after Lucy Letby's conviction for murdering 7 babies (and trying to kill 6 others).   It starts:

Hospital bosses failed to investigate allegations against Lucy Letby and tried to silence doctors, the lead consultant at the neonatal unit where she worked has told the BBC.

The hospital also delayed calling the police despite months of warnings that the nurse may have been killing babies.

The unit's lead consultant Dr Stephen Brearey first raised concerns about Letby in October 2015.

No action was taken and she went on to attack five more babies, killing two.

Further down in the report (my bold):

We spoke to the lead consultant in the unit - who first raised concerns about Letby - and also examined hospital documents. The investigation reveals a catalogue of failures and raises serious questions about how the hospital responded to the deaths.

Dr Brearey says he demanded Letby be taken off duty in June 2016, after the final two murders. Hospital management initially refused.

The BBC investigation also found:

• The hospital's top manager demanded the doctors write an apology to Letby and told them to stop making allegations against her
• Two consultants were ordered to attend mediation with Letby, even though they suspected she was killing babies
• When she was finally moved, Letby was assigned to the risk and patient safety office, where she had access to sensitive documents from the neonatal unit and was in close proximity to senior managers whose job it was to investigate her
• Deaths were not reported appropriately, which meant the high fatality rate could not be picked up by the wider NHS system, a manager who took over after the deaths has told the BBC

 It just seems incredible that hospital management clung for so long to "it's just a coincidence" that the rate of death (and near death) of neonatal babies had soared in that unit, and all happened when Letby was on shift:

Before June 2015, there were about two or three baby deaths a year on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital. But in the summer of 2015, something unusual was happening.

In June alone, three babies died within the space of two weeks. The deaths were unexpected, so Dr Stephen Brearey, the lead consultant at the neonatal unit, called a meeting with the unit manager, Eirian Powell, and the hospital's director of nursing Alison Kelly....

...by October 2015, things had changed. Two more babies had died and Letby had been on shift for both of them. ...

And it wasn't just the unexpected deaths. Other babies were suffering non-fatal collapses, meaning they needed emergency resuscitation or help with breathing, with no apparent clinical explanation. Letby was always on duty.

I can't imagine how some of the families of babies who died late in her killing spree must feel...