Alien humour

Things not going completely well in Portugal?

DW news has a short story up about a bit of a backlash apparently developing over the openness of drug use in Porto, Portugal:

 

 Of course, it's only a 5 minute report, so I can't claim it's very "in depth". But it's interesting nonetheless, given the amount of international fanboying (much of it superficial and inaccurate, I've always said) that has gone on for years about their approach to drug use.

He has form, as a rich jerk

For the full context, in case you haven't seen the news or social media in the last 24 hours:

I see that he is also interested in living until at least 100, using biohacks: 

The 41-year-old Gurner, valued at $929 million in The Australian Financial Review’s 2022 Rich List – and who billionaire Harry Triguboff has described as “the future” – has $10 billion worth of apartments under way, including on several sites across Collingwood.

He has grand plans for his $150 million, high-end health, wellness and anti-ageing brand Saint Haven. Another site is planned around Melbourne’s South Yarra before the end of the year and a third in Melbourne’s CBD, before plans for others in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, north shore and Sydney CBD...

Gurner says his clubs will be social and for networking, but put health and wellness at their core. That’s when he says that he wants to live to 100. It turns out Gurner has become increasingly obsessed about staying young, especially after his dad died from cancer and he came close to financial ruin in 2016...

Gurner says he is one of the guinea pigs for the club’s $250,000 biohacking, anti-ageing packages that include an annual full-body MRI, brain scans and monthly blood testing,

“I get about 250 different tests of my bloods which will say, ‘this month you’re deficient in [vitamin] D, your testosterone is up or down’. Then the physios, dieticians, doctors on call set my regime,” he says. “I take about 50 or 60 tablets a day. It’s always very specific to my latest results.”

I'm sensing some intense Peter Thiel vibes...

 

Floods noted

If you are on (stupid) X, it is worth looking at this tweet thread, as it contains some remarkable and dramatic video clips of recent floods around the world:

 Yeah, climate change is not something you can deal with by installing more airconditioning. 

Four Corners on the Voice

While there's no doubt at all that the ABC takes a very sympathetic approach to all indigenous issues, last night's Four Corners, which involved discussions with both pro and anti Voice referendum voices, was pleasingly balanced.     

Most surprising was the time given to regional local aboriginal activists who indicated that they were either going to vote no, or were sceptical of the whole idea, out of concerns that the Canberra based Voice  was going to work against local communities getting what they wanted.  In other words, they were saying exactly what I've been muttering here - the entire concept seems to about creating a new attempt at a bureaucratic filter to advice to government, which the local community organisations will need to convince on needs and issues, rather than their current ability to directly deal with government.    

These "no" voters were not, it seemed, on the radical Left, who are against it for being insultingly inadequate.  (One such person did feature, but was not given much air time.)

If anything (and I suspect that many Lefty journalists might have been grinding their teeth about this), the program really seemed to legitimatise a "no" vote for those who don't like the conservative "no" campaign, but just have objections to whole proposal on pragmatic grounds.   Like me...

Something good

Over the last week, I've been marvelling at how much bad/somewhat depressing news there seems to be around at the moment.   

So I will go out of my way to note that there is something that is cheering me up at least once a week - the new episodes of Futurama.  The revival of the show has been a clear success, and I find it hard to imagine anyone being disappointed with it.  [Update:  OK, I have checked some online reviews, and there are some people who are underwhelmed.  I would agree, it does sometimes feel a bit "fan-service-y", but I think in a good way.]

Last week's episode - a satire of the Covid pandemic - handled it very well, I thought, with good and clever jokes that both sides (the antivax conservatives, and the sane) could enjoy.  That's quite a fine line they managed to walk...

Excuse my scepticism...

....but seriously, doesn't this sound like an extremely bureaucratic arrangement, and one which I can readily imagine primed for internal fights and dissent?   From the Guardian, explaining in summary form how the Langton idea for the Voice is supposed to work:

• It will provide independent advice to parliament and government.

• It will be chosen by First Nations people based on the wishes of local communities.

• It will be representative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

• It will be empowering, community-led, inclusive, respectful, culturally informed and gender balanced. It will also include youth.

• It will be accountable and transparent.

The voice will work alongside existing organisations and traditional structures.

The Calma-Langton co-design report recommended the national voice have 24 members, with gender balance structurally guaranteed.

The base model proposes two members from each state, the Northern Territory, ACT and Torres Strait. A further five members would represent remote areas due to their unique needs – one member each from the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales. An additional member would represent the significant population of Torres Strait Islanders living on the mainland.

Members would serve four-year terms, with half the membership determined every two years. There would be a limit of two consecutive terms for each member.

Two co-chairs of a different gender to one another would be selected by the members of the voice every two years.

The Calma-Langton model proposed a national voice with two permanent advisory groups – one on youth and one on disability – and a small ethics council to advise on probity and governance.

How would local and regional voices feed in?

The co-design report proposed 35 regions, broken down by state and territory. Communities and governments in each state and territory would jointly determine these.

Local and regional voices would provide advice to all levels of government to influence policy and programs, and advise the non-government sector and business.

The report outlines their roles, how they would be constituted and the principles they would embody, like cultural leadership, community-led design and empowerment.

There would be “a clear, two-way flow of advice and communication” between them and the national voice, the report said.

 

 

 

The "love bomb" approach

As most of the comments following this Tweet indicate, this approach to arguing for "Yes" is very unlikely to be effective:

 

A neuroscientist on her cannabis research

Oh look:  another neuroscientist from America in Science magazine basically saying what I've been saying for a number of years:

Although Hurd opposes the criminalization of cannabis use and possession, she believes legalization has come with underappreciated downsides. She’s concerned it has fanned a permissive culture and a perception that the drug is generally safe. “I am worried about how cavalier we’re becoming and that there is a cannabis smoke shop now practically, in some places, on every other block,” she says...

...she favors regulations that limit potency and using tax revenues from the sale of cannabis to educate people about the risks, and for treatment and research to help those harmed by its use.

You can read what her research has been about - mainly the dangers to children and adolescents who are increasing exposed to THC. 

At the very end, though, there is a box talking about the "good" component of cannabis and it's possible use in reducing other drug addictions:

Yasmin Hurd has spent much of her career documenting the harms caused by the psychoactive compound in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Ironically, she believes another cannabis ingredient, cannabidiol (CBD), could help break cannabis dependence. Her initial focus, though, is on testing it to help heroin users.

In a seminal study published in 2009, she showed CBD could reduce drug-seeking behavior in rats previously exposed to heroin, perhaps by reducing craving triggered by cues they had associated with the drug. “CBD could actually do the opposite of THC,” says Hurd, who heads an addiction research lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In 2019, she and her clinical team reported that compared with a placebo, a CBD capsule taken once a day for 3 days reduced drug cravings and anxiety in 45 human heroin users.

Why's the Bible down on dogs?

As usual, an enlightening and entertaining video from Religion for Breakfast, looking at the reasons why dogs are not generally positively referenced in the Bible.   (Worth watching for the brief section on Hittite puppy magic, too):

Yet more "Consider the Ring"

It turns out that Brisbane is not the only place about to stage a Ring Cycle.  As I have explained before [just search "Ring Cycle" in the side bar - I like most of my past posts about this], I'll be there in December, to see if my "sink or swim in 15 hours of dense Germanic storytelling" introduction to the artform pays off.   

But in this lengthy article in The Guardian, I learn that the Royal Opera House in London is about to stage it as well, directed by Australian Barrie Kosky, whose style is most often described as "flamboyant".  That's not a descriptor in the arts world that has natural appeal to me, although I guess that some would say these particular operas are intrinsically flamboyant, so what am I on about?

Well, all I can say is that I consider it a good thing that the Brisbane production is being directed by a Chinese guy who, as this video indicates, has a pretty grounded approach: 

 

I am, by the way, a bit bothered by the lack of media attention being given to this forthcoming Brisbane production, which has been delayed years by Covid.   I hope it gets noticed soon.   

Anyhoo, back to The Guardian article that talks again about the Cycle generally:

Wagner has never felt more culturally marginal than today, even though, paradoxically, many leading cultural franchises, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Game of Thrones, are unthinkable without his influence. On the face of it, 2023 needs nothing so little as bombastic white-male-supremacist art composed by an antisemitic megalomaniac whom even one-time superfan Nietzsche came to see as a kind of cultural Covid. “Is Wagner a human being at all?” Nietzsche asked. “Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.”

Of course, such a paragraph means that it will be followed by several explaining why it is, in fact, still culturally relevant, including its constant re-interpretations:

Wagner at least thought he was issuing a deep, unified statement of cultural truths that could change how we live. “He felt there had to be some kind of drastic step taken in order to revolutionise the way people lived and their demands on life,” Wagner scholar Michael Tanner said. “Otherwise they would just sink to a level where they didn’t mind the fact that they were living so much less fully than they could do.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw interpreted the Ring cycle as an allegory of the collapse of capitalism. But it is endlessly interpretable. It can serve not just as Marxist tract but as a Third Reich allegory; a sado-masochistic indictment of the have-yachts in the posh seats, or a Buddhist-inflected music drama in which the high body count suggests the death of the ego that Wagner thought, in line with his beloved philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, was desirable.

Richard Jones, director of two-fourths of ENO’s current Ring, favours something like the last account: “Ultimately it’s about the idea of self-renunciation. It’s like great Greek drama. Since it was first performed in 1876, there has never been a period when it wasn’t germane to the contemporary world,” he told the Guardian when his cycle opened in 2021.

Certainly, Wagner supposed his music drama would offer quasi-religious experience in the ancient Greek manner. “His idea was that a sufficiently potent new art form, such as he was perhaps uniquely able to write, would, by being experienced, communally change people’s consciousness,” said Tanner. “You would emerge a different person.” Wagner even built a temple to this cult in the form of Bayreuth’s opera house.

Yes, the radio interview I heard when the Brisbane production was announced did note that many claim that  viewing a Cycle production is life changing.   One has one's doubts that this will be way I react, but I'm willing to go through the experiment.

 

Kayla calms down

There are more important stories in the world, but the bizarre one of the fake gigantic boob wearing Canadian teacher deserves an update.

According to the Daily Mail, he has turned up at his new school looking very conventionally male, which makes all of the warnings about it respecting his "gender expression", and taking a lot of security precautions, seem a bit odd.

It also further adds to the mystery as to whether he was on a massive troll at the other school.  But he did also go skydiving and walking down the street in his fake boobs, so who knows?

Or did a flurry of parental objections to the new school make them tell him that he just can't show up dressed like an idiot?

The tabloids also love to repeat that he had claimed his breasts were real - when does lying on something so obvious move from (what?) creative performance to a sign of clear instability you don't want in a profession like teaching?

 

Sharks and inflatables don't mix

I had never heard of inflatable catamarans before:

 Three people have been rescued in the Coral Sea off the coast of Cairns, after their catamaran was damaged during several shark attacks.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) coordinated the rescue early Wednesday morning roughly 835km off the coast of Cairns, after receiving a distress beacon.

In a post to social media, the crew, who were on a round-the-world expedition called Russian Ocean Way, which they were documenting online, said they were first attacked by sharks on 4 September, leaving the rear left “cylinder” of their nine-metre inflatable catamaran damaged.

I wonder what the sharks were thinking, though.  I mean, I give orcas some credit for intelligence when attacking sail boats - but I wouldn't have thought sharks would keep attacking a boat.  Well, unless the crew had been particularly slack about throwing food scraps overboard, I guess.

So, I'm using Ivermectin to fight face bugs

Here's a story of a personal nature.

Since about my early 40's I've had mild rosacea on my face from time to time.   For those who don't know, it presents as red spots or rashes, and it's sometimes described as an adult form of acne, but it doesn't look like your typical adolescent acne with pimples that have a definite life cycle.   Rosacea type acne is more like annoying red spots or small lumps that never fully come to a head, but just linger for a long time.   I should hasten to add, my case has always been pretty mild, never covering any substantial area, and I'm not sure whether anyone would really identify me as having a problem with it, as it has been well controlled by low dose antibiotics which I might take for a month or two, then wait to see how it goes, as well as a topical prescription cream called Rosex. 

I saw a doctor for a renewed script for the antibiotic (doxycycline) this week, and I explained that I recently had to keep taking it because it was only taking a week or so after finishing a 30 day course to find I was getting rosacea type red spots/lumps on my nose - one of the worst places to get them, as it can give a real WC Fields look.   Going back onto the antibiotic would clear it up again within a week or so, but I wasn't sure if it really was a good idea to be almost continually on any antibiotic.   (Doctors and pharmacists had told me before it is very well tolerated - and in fact it's recently been in the news as a potential wonder drug for helping stop the spread of STI's!)  

Anyhow, the GP said, after checking on line, that while it is thought to be very safe to be on long term, some think it is best to have breaks of a month or two to let your gut microbiome re-establish.  (It seems to have no effect on my digestion at all, but yes, given all the interest in recent years as to the effect of gut microbiome on our general health, this is the issue that I had been wondering about.)

I then went to another doctor at a skin clinic to have something else looked at, and we talked about the antibiotic issue too, but he suggested I could try another topical cream other than Rosex, which I had never found as good as being on a course of antibiotics.

He didn't tell me what the alternative cream was, so I was somewhat surprised to find at the chemist that it's the MAGA crowd's wonder drug - Ivermectin!

I had never heard of it as a treatment for rosacea - but it definitely is.  It's also been used, in lotion form, for head lice.

I had no idea it was used externally for parasites, as well as for internal ones, at least in animals.

So, why does it work for rosacea?   

The thing is, it seems the cause of rosacea is not well understood, but yes, I had read before that there was a suspected role, at least in some people, of that the ugly, ugly demodex mite that a lot of us have on our faces, especially as we age:

Newborns don’t have Demodex mites. In a study looking for them on adult humans, researchers could detect them visually in only 14% of people.

However, once they used DNA analysis, they found signs of Demodex on 100% of the adult humans they tested, a finding supported by previous cadaver examinations.

By the way, I also had never read up on the origins of Ivermectin before, either, but it is recent, and derives from a microorganism found in Japanese soil, or all places: 

Discovered in the late-1970s, the pioneering drug ivermectin, a dihydro derivative of avermectin—originating solely from a single microorganism isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan from Japanese soil—has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug, it kills a wide range of internal and external parasites in commercial livestock and companion animals. It was quickly discovered to be ideal in combating two of the world’s most devastating and disfiguring diseases which have plagued the world’s poor throughout the tropics for centuries. It is now being used free-of-charge as the sole tool in campaigns to eliminate both diseases globally. It has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases and new uses for it are continually being found. This paper looks in depth at the events surrounding ivermectin’s passage from being a huge success in Animal Health into its widespread use in humans, a development which has led many to describe it as a “wonder” drug.

So yeah, I'm fairly surprised to find that I'm now using a small amount of the Right wing ratbags' favourite drug, in cream form, on my nose every morning.   It seems to be helping (in that I am not taking doxycycline at the moment, and am pretty much keeping red spots off my nose) so far, but it's a bit too early to tell.  

Another way to burn money

I've always been skeptical of Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic joy ride space plane, and now I see that someone at The Spectator claims that it is wildly unlikely to ever be profitable, and will (economically, if not physically) crash and burn in the relatively near future.

 

A problem in Africa

Here's another gift link from the NYT, about how African countries find it difficult to raise the investment needed for solar power and other clean energy.

Political instability would have to have a lot to do with that.

And on that topic - does anyone really have good ideas as to how to deal with that, in the African context?  

A bottleneck, or not

The NYT version of the science story last week that maybe we (in the generic sense) barely made it through a population bottleneck:

Researchers in China have found evidence suggesting that 930,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans suffered a massive population crash. They point to a drastic change to the climate that occurred around that time as the cause.

Our ancestors remained at low numbers — fewer than 1,280 breeding individuals — during a period known as a bottleneck. It lasted for over 100,000 years before the population rebounded.

“About 98.7 percent of human ancestors were lost at the beginning of the bottleneck, thus threatening our ancestors with extinction,” the scientists wrote. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

If the research holds up, it will have provocative implications. It raises the possibility that a climate-driven bottleneck helped split early humans into two evolutionary lineages — one that eventually gave rise to Neanderthals, the other to modern humans.

But:

But outside experts said they were skeptical of the novel statistical methods that the researchers used for the study. “It is a bit like inferring the size of a stone that falls into the middle of the large lake from only the ripples that arrive at the shore some minutes later,” said Stephan Schiffels, a population geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Watch this space, I suppose.   I suspect it's an idea that won't hold up - but that's just an uninformed hunch.

 

Crabb on the Voice referendum (and my general bleat about the matter)

I quite liked Annabel Crabb's article on the Voice, as it does explain the difference with the 1967 referendum, and pretty much acknowledges that it's legitimate that the public is confused about the new referendum. 

I see on the increasingly trashy X (my God, I'm getting a lot of Right wing, MAGA guff thrown at me now, but the clear successor to it is still not apparent) that the Lefty pro-Voice folk whose tweets make it through to me are very impressed with the new advertisement featuring John Farnham's song and think it might just turn things around for them.   I'm way less convinced - I thought the ad featured some odd acting by the (I think) key male actor, who seems to stare in puzzlement at the TV while it features some key pro-aboriginal moments in history.  I would have to watch it again to fully understand the narrative it's trying to show in that actor.  

Personally, I'm still conflicted about it all.

On the one hand, I don't want to be on the side of Peter Dutton and the cynical No case which is playing this for party political advantage.   I also don't want to be seen as on the Lidia Thorpe radical side against it.

On the other hand, I am very cynical about many of the presumptions of the Yes case - primarily, that governments have not been listening for the last several decades to the myriad of aboriginal organisations; and that adding another layer of bureaucracy in terms of who the government needs to listen to is likely to achieve any significant change.  (It will, to be very cynical, probably increase the income of a class of aboriginal activist who are already firmly entrenched in the roles of advice to government.)   

Then there is "the vibe" - the Yes case is nominally painted as a racially unifying act, but the general "vibe" of aboriginal activism over the last 30 years seems to me to be moving in the opposite direction.  It has  included attempts at rehabilitating (really, romanticising) the pre-colonial lifestyle and conditions; increasingly common power flexes over matters such as access to national parks because of claims of sacred or special status (including over sites never previously the subject of such talk); increasing and sometimes opportunistic claims to aboriginality by persons with either little (or no provable) actual evidence of aboriginal ancestry; and (if you believe the signs held by young activists at any rally) a denial of the very legitimacy of the Australian government and land ownership in toto (it's "unceded land", after all.)   Similarly, the "welcome to country" fits right into a view that it's not really the land of everyone, but somehow still theirs.  

I reckon the general trajectory of aboriginal activism has moved away from something like a late 1960's multicultural view of everyone working together co-operatively, with opportunity being open to all, to an increasingly divisive attitude centred on a type of identity politics that concentrates on grievance rather than opportunity. 

As I have said before, Noel Pearson used to be an activist who leant towards the "must take responsibility for our advancement" attitude, and he occasionally still makes some noises along those lines, but I think it fair to say that such a conservative-ish attitude is far in the minority.       

To flip back again - to complain about the general attitude - the "vibe" - of recent decades of indigenous advocacy is not to deny that historical institutional racism casts a very, very long shadow, and deserves forms of compensation and assistance to those who are economically disadvantaged from it.

But I don't see that this means we have to pretend that all claims are true or useful:    I'm not of a postmodern view that terms are open to a change of meaning at a whim, such as I complained about in my recent post about the Dark Emu agenda.   And I do think that academia has played a gullible and often unhelpful role in this game of grievance amplification. 

So, I don't know what to do.

If I vote yes, it will be in the expectation that it will further entrench the inherent conflicts across indigenous advocacy, and result in a likely greater waste of money than under the present system, and be taken as a general support for a trajectory in advocacy that I do not support. 

If I vote no, it may be taken as support of the radicals who I really do not want to support.

I think just leaving the ballot blank is an option, but that feels a bit too much like sitting on the fence, too.

Suggestions, anyone? 

Update:   Noel Pearson is now arguing that if the Voice is established it would mean:

... Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would no longer be able to say, “it’s the government’s fault” for failing to improve educational outcomes, as well as housing and health policies for remote communities.

But how does that make sense when the government is not bound to follow the advice of the body, and (as I have said from the start), what is bound to happen is that on the most contentious issues, the Voice will make a recommendation and there will immediately be dispute about whether it is the right recommendation from within aboriginal activism.   

I mean, I can give credit for Pearson still pushing a line that it's important for the indigenous to take responsibility for some of the problems that befall them, but there is just no reason to believe the argument that the Voice is a way to end "blame the government".

Competing theories

I also saw someone on Twitter/X say "what if there's a Pentagon cabal that is worshipping the aliens?", and I have to admit, that could form a fun basis for a screenplay.  

What if that's only because they don't want us to know they are conscious?

 (I haven't read the paper yet - I'm not entirely serious...)