I'm pleased to see that the nearly all reporting on the terrible Singapore Airlines turbulence injury story has included reference to studies that said climate change has already increased turbulence and it will get worse. I had wondered if this might be overlooked, but no:
Here's a Nature article about it.
From the Washington Post, the predictable but still appalling retreat:
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who suspended her run for the Republican nomination for president in early March, announced she will vote for Donald Trump but reiterated that he should not assume that her supporters will back him.
“I will be voting for Trump. Having said that, I stand by what I said in my suspension speech,” Haley said Wednesday. “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they’re just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does.”
From the comments that follow:
If the bootlickers had any sense they would realize that they could stop having to lick boots if they simply joined forces. But they don’t.And:
There's a lot of history about, so can I forgiven for not knowing this until it turned up in a Twitter thread recently?:
Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.
The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.
Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.
After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.
As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”
That's from his New York Times obituary, and it goes on to note some controversy over his claims, and this is explained in lengthy detail at Wikipedia.
The main reason I am inclined to post about it is because I didn't know the KKK was mocked in the Superman radio show. According to this site's account, the show really was influential in the decline of the outfit:
The Superman writers created a thinly disguised version of the Ku Klux Klan for "The Clan of the Fiery Cross". A newly revived Klan had emerged in the aftermath of WWII and was making plans to expand recruitment into the Industrial Belt and the West. Folklorist Stetson Kennedy had infiltrated the Florida branch of the revised Klan to learn their secrets and became understandably frightened by what he had learned. Even more frightening, when Kennedy presented his discoveries to local authorities, the police were either frightened to move against the Klan or were already under Klan control. However, Kennedy was able to share his information with the Superman writers.
"The Clan of the Fiery Cross" story arc was developed and broadcast in June of 1946. The story begins with Jimmy Olsen managing the Unity House baseball club and excited over their prospects with new pitcher Tommy Lee whose family recently moved to the neighborhood. Naturally, this upsets the team's former pitcher, Chuck Riggs, who crowds the plate during batting practice and accidentally gets beaned. Riggs' uncle Matt, the Grand Scorpion of the Clan of the Fiery Cross, decides that Tommy Lee and his family are not "real Americans" (it is not revealed until the third episode that Lee's family are Chinese and his father was appointed to the city medical department over one of Riggs' friends).
Through most of the sixteen episodes of the "Fiery Cross" story arc, the Clan and its Grand Scorpion manage to stay one step ahead of the Man of Steel until they try to execute Jimmy Olsen and Daily Planet editor Perry White. Superman steps in with seconds to spare, but the Grand Scorpion escapes to confer with the Clan's national leader, the Grand Imperial Mogul. The Mogul berates the Grand Scorpion for actually believing the Clan's racist propaganda, stating that it was simply a device to get new members and that the Clan's hierarchy was taking a cut on the sale of robes. The real KKK found nothing amusing about the story arc and tried to start a boycott against the sponsor, Kellogg's PEP Cereal. By this point, the Klan had been made to look foolish, the boycott went nowhere, and Mutual reported an increase in Superman's ratings.
Interestingly, the Fiery Cross story arc kept the actual Ku Klux Klan thinly disguised, but the real damage to the Klan came in the fourteenth episode when Matt Riggs visits the national leader, The Grand Imperial Mogul of the Fiery Cross. The Mogul cannot believe that Riggs believes the hatred hokum the group uses to attract "the suckers". Had the Klan simply ignored Superman's accusations, the revelations of their ceremonies and codes probably would have dismissed or forgotten. Instead, the Klan began calling for a boycott against the program's sponsor, Kellogg's PEP Cereal. To Kellogg's credit, the folks in Battle Creek stood by the Man of Steel. The Klan's reputation and power depended upon their mystique. With their ceremonies and secrets revealed and made to look ridiculous, the Klan's mystique and power evaporated. Recruitment dried up in the months after "The Clan of the Fiery Cross". The Klan resurfaced briefly in the late 50's and early 60's, but they were recognized as being little more than a white supremacist terrorist group with little or no political power. The most important lesson of The Clan of the Fiery Cross is that the power of hate groups evaporates when the light is shone on them and their tactics.
Yay for Superman, I guess...
The Tokyo Olympics should have been a fun time in what is now a wildly popular international tourist destination. But instead, Covid meant it was an empty audience affair that was pretty much devoid of memorable highlights.
Now, Paris is getting close to its hosting role, and could the international climate possibly get any worse for the expectation of violent, possibly murderous, protest, especially given the city's high Muslim population? The gendarmes heading into New Caledonia will probably end up killing a few Kanaks too, and I can imagine South Pacific Islanders wanting to protest colonialism. I also wouldn't be entirely comfortable if I were a Russian competitor or supporter either - even though they are attending under a neutral flag.
It all puts the case for locating the games permanently in Greece all the stronger. Maybe Brisbane should offer to help fund a relocation of its Olympics to Athens, too. Would save a lot of the hassle and indecision we're seeing here...
Here's an article suggesting that artificial superintelligences going rogue is what prevents civilisations ever spreading beyond their home planet:
I believe the emergence of ASI could be such a filter. AI’s rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilization’s development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multi-planetary one.Interesting bit of speculation.
This is where many civilizations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.
The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.
The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilizations before they ever get the chance to become multi-planetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilization, including the AI systems themselves.
In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years. That’s roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960) and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years.
And here, at the New York Times, an article explaining that it seems we are getting a better understanding of how Large Language Models "think", which is a good thing if you want to be able to control them:
The team summarized its findings in a blog post called “Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model.”
The researchers looked inside one of Anthropic’s A.I. models — Claude 3 Sonnet, a version of the company’s Claude 3 language model — and used a technique known as “dictionary learning” to uncover patterns in how combinations of neurons, the mathematical units inside the A.I. model, were activated when Claude was prompted to talk about certain topics. They identified roughly 10 million of these patterns, which they call “features.”
They found that one feature, for example, was active whenever Claude was asked to talk about San Francisco. Other features were active whenever topics like immunology or specific scientific terms, such as the chemical element lithium, were mentioned. And some features were linked to more abstract concepts, like deception or gender bias.
They also found that manually turning certain features on or off could change how the A.I. system behaved, or could get the system to even break its own rules.
For example, they discovered that if they forced a feature linked to the concept of sycophancy to activate more strongly, Claude would respond with flowery, over-the-top praise for the user, including in situations where flattery was inappropriate.
Chris Olah, who led the Anthropic interpretability research team, said in an interview that these findings could allow A.I. companies to control their models more effectively.
Neat. I mean, if Dr Smith managed to reprogram the Jupiter 2's robot so easily, LLM's should be equally susceptible to controlling manipulation!
Oh dear. I had been thinking it was time for a phone upgrade, even though the almost completely unknown Vivo model I bought in 2020 was still showing great battery life and had been very reliable (as I said to my daughter only last week, prompting her warning "Don't say that - it will stop working now!"). Yes, it has today developed a troublesome major problem. My daughter, the soothsayer. (I did drop it on a hard floor recently - but I've done that before, so I don't know if there is any connection with its current problem.)
Sadly Vivo, a brand name which festoons many a shop in Singapore and Malaysia, has apparently abandoned the Australian market, and the only models to be found here seem to be the very cheap ones probably left over from bulk buys a couple of years ago.
In fact, I like the look of a new Vivo model (mid range - I am still unconvinced of the benefits of expensive models) just released in Asia. But short of buying it from an Ebay seller based in Malaysia, or another trip to Singapore, I am unable to get it here.
I am very unsure of what to buy in its place. I am been tempted to go with Xiaomi - I like to keep with Chinese brands as I figure they will help me when forced to welcome My New Asia Overlords on the streets sometime in the next decade. "Look!" I will exclaim while waving my phone at them "I've been using your nation's phones for years! And I have the CGTN app."
But the mid range Google Pixels get very strong reviews. They just look a little bland to me.
I know Oppo is made by the same company that does Vivo, but when I see their screens in the stores, they just don't seem as good as on my lovely, apparently dying, Vivo.
I was pretty happy with my Motorola cheapo - in fact, I can't remember why I stopped using it. I think it was just the battery? Motorola has kept strong in the market and has a good range of phones now, but I'm just not sure how they are in the camera game, which really has become the important thing for me.
I've even considered going back to a Samsung mid ranger - quite a lot of people seem to like the A55 which is pretty new, but gee, you don't even get a charger in a Samsung box now.
I see that the Xiaomi Redmi phones have eSim - something I think will save a lot of fuss when travelling overseas. That and a camera with a whopping 200MP sensor probably means it's a done deal.
We'll see....
I finally caught up with the 2020 science fiction movie on Amazon "The Vast of Night" on the weekend. As it got good reviews, and I'm generally a sucker for a decent UFO movie (not that there are that many around), I had reasonably high hopes.
Unfortunately, they weren't exactly met. Sure, the film looks good and is technically accomplished (with its long tracking shots, primarily) and is very atmospheric in its 1950's remote small town America at night setting; but there are a couple of choices by the writer/director that are very odd and just jarring:
a. the whole framing devise as if we are watching a remade Twilight Zone style show. Why?? This made no sense to me. I had the feeling it was going to be explained by the end in some meta context, but no.
b. the pace of dialogue - I'm not sure who can most be blamed amongst modern directors for thinking it makes a film realistic if you have the characters always talking at (and often over) each other at a furious rate, but this film certainly has it to excess. It just did not feel authentic to the way people you would expect small town Americans in that era to interact.
On a more depressing note, this film did make me realise - gee, it seems a good few years now since I felt really blown away by a film - or even just "pleasantly surprised that this is so much better than I was expecting." I mean, I've seen films which were OK, or enjoyable enough, or interesting in their way, but I would have to search to find the last one I just really thought blew me away and that I had no issues with.
And this also made me think - weren't my parents, in their 50's and early 60's, similarly dismissive of films coming out at that time? Am I just suffering the age related "films/music/culture generally? was/ were so much better back when I was younger" effect.
Somehow, I don't think it's a case of age related disappointment - there seems to be enough general unhappiness with the state of Hollywood to soothe my concerns.
But gee, it's hard to feel certain...
Who would want to live there?:
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas issued a full pardon on Thursday to a former US army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.
Abbott announced the pardon just minutes after the Texas board of pardons and paroles disclosed it had made a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored. Perry has been held in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his conviction in 2023....
Court records released in April showed that in the weeks leading up to the murder, Perry sent racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating outside his house. In a 76-page filing containing Perry’s private and public communications, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit”.
Abbott’s demand for a review of Perry’s case followed pressure from the far-right former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who on national television had urged the Republican governor to intervene after the former sergeant was convicted at trial in April 2022. While Carlson was still a top-rated host at the network, he dedicated a segment to directly challenging Abbott to appear on the show and discuss pardoning Perry – calling the case a “legal atrocity” that he blamed on progressive prosecutors. Abbott announced he was directing a review of Perry’s conviction the next day.
It would seem that the jury thought the guy was not acting in self defence, but the board of pardons just decided "we don't care what the jury thought":
Prosecutors argued at trial that Perry could have driven away without opening fire and witnesses testified that they never saw Foster raise his gun. The sergeant’s defense attorneys argued Foster, who was white, did raise the rifle and that Perry had no choice but to shoot. Perry, who is also white, did not take the witness stand and jurors deliberated for two days before finding him guilty.More appalling Republican stuff:
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I can't for the life of me understand the critical approval George Miller gets for movies set in a dystopian world with (as far as I know) no particular explanation as to how it got that way, characters for whom there is nothing to emotional invest in, and no real thematic coherence: just an excuse for car chases combined with circus acts and a general heavy metal vibe. I mean, if the only approval it got was from recreational drug taking revheads and heavy metal freaks, I could understand it - they might think it a kind of world they would enjoy living in. But no, lots and lots of otherwise credible, mature age critics thought Fury Road was the bee's knees, including Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian, whose byline photo makes him look like the last person on Earth who would be caught owning a V8.
I mean, I don't "get" Tolkien either - but I can kind of see why some might take enjoyment from him. I just put it down to "a difference in genre tastes". But with Mad Max, I am at a complete loss as to understand why it doesn't have the smallest audience, and (perhaps more importantly) why more proper critics don't agree with me!
Anyway, that's by way of background to noting that (thank God) the new Mad Max film which is soon in cinemas is getting "not quite as good as Fury Road" reviews, but still reviews that are (no doubt) far too good. (Again, see Peter Bradshaw).
I hope it is a box office disappointment, but it will probably be me who is upset.
Update: I just went back and re-read my 2016 opinion of Fury Road. It was even more savage than I remembered.:)
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The underfunding of psychiatric care in virtually all Western countries seems just standard practice nowadays, but it's depressing to read about its effects in your own locality:
Three people have taken their own lives inside a locked mental health unit at The Prince Charles Hospital in the past 16 months, triggering an independent review.Further down, look at these figures:
Two other patients were able to severely self-harm inside the 60-bed unit during the same period, the last one being in April.
Families of the patients and unit staff have this week been advised of the review, which will begin later this month and is expected to be finished by late July.
Mental health support organisation SANE said families "have an expectation" that their loved ones were "going to be safe" when they were in hospital.
"Families and carers often express significant relief having gotten someone to hospital, that's often a very difficult thing to do to actually get someone admitted," chief executive Rachel Green said.
Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed 18 people died by suicide in an acute psychiatric unit in 2020-21, up from 15 the year before.
Adjunct Professor Hancock said the five incidents inside The Prince Charles Hospital mental health unit involved both men and women across different age ranges and under the care of different psychiatrists.
Incidents had occurred inside both wards of the mental health unit....
Professor Emmerson, a member of the Queensland Mental Health Commission advisory council, said the state was about 3000 mental health staff and 370 beds short of what was needed in the public sector.
"Our mental health units are full all the time," Professor Emmerson said.
"Psychiatrists are faced every day with having to make decisions of discharging people early who should be in hospital, but because you've got sicker people, and riskier people, sitting in the emergency department, we're forced to discharge people from hospital prematurely.
"We don't yet have the capacity in the community mental health teams to provide the follow up these people need."
"High colonics" must have started as an American, middle-class-to-rich person's health fad in the late 1980's, I would say, given that it was well known enough to feature as a joke in Steve Martin's amusing 1991 movie LA Story.
You don't hear much about them anymore, and I see from this article in the New York Times that the new thing for the person with too much money is IV drip therapy. (Maybe its been around for a while and it's just me who hasn't noticed.) From the article:
IV drip therapy was first popularized about a decade ago as a novelty reserved for vacations and bachelorette parties, but it has since become embedded in the wellness sphere. The 30-to-45-minute treatments cost anywhere from $100 to $1,000, depending on the concoction and provider, and have been embraced by the Hollywood elite — Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen and Harry Styles have all partaken. Today, IV drip therapy is a staple at medical spas, resort hotels and strip malls. Some companies even make house calls.
And over the last several months, a handful of high-end residential buildings in Los Angeles, Miami and Manhattan began offering the treatments in house, allowing tenants to make them a core feature of their personal wellness routine.
At the Park, which started offering the service at the end of 2023, tenants can schedule an IV drip in their apartment or in a treatment room where they can also book massages, Botox or fillers.
“If you are a healthy person, you really can’t do it too often, unless you’re doing it three or four times a day,” said Danielle Remington, director of events and partnerships at Drip Hydration, the service provider for the Park.
Drip Hydration and other providers market their formulas as elixirs that can improve sleep and mental clarity, brighten your skin and boost your athletic performance. However, there is scant scientific research to bolster these claims. Critics argue that at best, IV drips are a wildly overpriced alternative to drinking a glass of water, and at worst, they could harm people with underlying health conditions like kidney disease or hypertension. In 2018, Kendall Jenner was hospitalized after a bad reaction to an IV drip. And last year, a woman died after receiving IV drip therapy at Luxe Med Spa in Wortham, Texas; its medical director’s license was later temporarily restricted by the state’s medical board.
Not good.
In The Guardian:
So Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames, and all his sins were washed away. Cheaper than a lawyer, I supposeAnd Bear Grills, who I have also disliked for a long time, was part of the show.
As some paragraphs at the end explain:
Both are prone to emanating a certain sense that the rules that apply to lesser mortals are an affront to themselves. Discussing his financial affairs, Grylls once told an interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” Mm. Can’t help feeling he should toughen up a bit.
There’s not a whole lot less appealing than someone now worth an estimated £20m whining about paying his fair share like everyone else from nurses to teachers. That said, I’m a huge fan of people who talk about making extremely lucrative TV shows like it’s a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Appallingly, Bear’s only got an OBE. Where’s his George Cross for taking down Una from the Saturdays in the Central American jungle?
Concluding with Brand, his spiritual journey has been what you might expect of a bog-standard sex-case-turned-wingnut. He was previously a Buddhist, then earlier this year began endorsing a Roman Catholic prayer app called Hallow, and seems to have settled for now on whichever branch of the Anglican faith permits telly survivalists to rebirth you. “Week one as a Christian has been amazing,” Brand said the other day, adding that he felt “changed, transitioned”. Onlookers are unlikely to spot the difference. He still has a conspiracist TV portal in which viewers are treated to material on the deep state/Bill Gates/the plandemic – in short, all the usual suspects of the usual suspects. It’s hard to know how long his conversion will last. But you can’t help thinking there will only be room for one messiah in that relationship – and unfortunately, it won’t be Jesus.
Just when I was contemplating a possible trip to Noumea later this year, this news:
New Caledonia has announced a curfew from 6pm to 6am following overnight riots that saw vehicles torched and roads blocked in the South Pacific French territory, following proposed constitutional reforms.
In addition, the country's main airport, La Tontouta International, has been closed.
Protests and violence broke out ahead of a vote in the French National Assembly on changes to the New Caledonian constitution.
The French High Commission in New Caledonia said in a statement overnight on Monday that there had been further significant and ongoing disturbances in the capital, Noumea and surrounding townships.
It added that security forces had been mobilised.
All gatherings had been banned in the greater Noumea area, and a curfew and liquor ban had been put in place.
The place has a personal significance, as it's where I met my wife...
Interesting interview with that Hilary Cass about her report on transgender youth treatment in the UK, and comparing it to attitudes in the US.
(At one point she makes the obvious point that the aggressive political response by Republicans probably means you get the medical groups being overly defensive in reaction.)
So, lots of people I follow on Twitter are feeling a bit panicky about the latest NYT poll which shows Trump winning in most of the six "key swing states".
Here, Aaron Blake at the Washington Post looks at the figures more closely, and it does indicate some really odd dynamics currently playing out in US politics. For example:
Particularly remarkable is how much better the Democratic brand does than Biden.
While Biden trails by six points in the six states combined, a generic Democratic Senate candidate leads by four points among likely voters — a 10-point gap, on the margins.
While Biden is close to tied among young and Hispanic voters, that Democratic Senate candidate leads among them by 19 and 16 points, respectively. That generic Democrat also leads by 59 points among Black voters, compared to Biden’s 40-point edge.
As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, the biggest gulf in performance between Biden and other Democrats is in Nevada, where Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) takes 28 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of young voters who are otherwise voting for Trump.
All of which suggests that many of these voters aren’t balking at Democrats — just Biden.
Overall, I would say the strength of Trump in Arizona doesn't make much sense - I had the impression that his permanently soft focus, chronic Trump suck up Kari Lake was floundering quite a lot.
And it seems wildly strange that primary voting Republicans are still registering protest votes against Trump in pretty substantial numbers, yet this doesn't seem to show up in polls.
(I also find it hard to believe that Trump is gaining popularity from his court room appearances. His recent rallies are playing as duds, too.)
It's a very weird situation. Given all of the factors (including reports of Republicans far behind in getting organised for the election), I still don't think the polling can be an accurate prediction of what will happen in November.
Update: Sure, I agree that the nutty Left is very nutty at the moment - the ones who say they will punish Biden for not being tough on Israel by helping ensure a rabid pro-Israel supporter like Trump gets the job instead. And this is bad optics for Biden. But as many have been saying, it's not exactly like the same crisis as the anti-Vietnamese war era, and I doubt it will be as electorally important come November as it now seems.
I don't know how many people use these, as I only use one because my (now getting old) Samsung TV's operating system would not allow the app for one of the newer streaming services to be added, but I use a Google Chromecast dongle plugged into the TV.
So now I have the choice to watch Youtube either on the old app already on the Samsung (which works fine), or to watch it using the version of the app that came loaded already on the Chromecast. I usually use the Chromecast version, as the Chromecast provides quick access to Netflix as well.
Within Youtube, I have two accounts - but I mainly use one.
For some reason, on the weekend, videos watched through the usual account started playing in really low quality. It was obvious, and I knew something was wrong.
I initially suspected a very low internet speed, as on one recent check, it had been abnormally slow. But the speed wasn't too bad (by Australia's low standards), so I checked for fault within the TV, and spent much time checking settings, rebooting it, etc. Then I tried rebooting the Chromecast, checking its settings, and considered re-setting the app.
I then realised that videos watched via the Samsung Youtube app (using the same account as on the Chromecast) worked fine. And then I discovered that videos on my second Youtube account on the Chromecast app were normal resolution too. Why would that be? It was making little sense.
I finally discovered that within the main account, on the Chromecast Youtube app, if I went to the information screen for an individual video, I could check resolution, and found it was set as 720p.
Changing the resolution on just one video (from the access to settings within the video info screen) to 1080p changed it for all videos on the main Youtube account.
This is pretty odd - I have no idea how the resolution setting from that part of the app would have got changed to 720p - I never have normal cause to be looking at Youtube settings at all.
And why such a settings change, if it arose spontaneously within the app, would affect only one account, and not the secondary account, I have no idea.
This may be a boring post, but it just serves as an example of weird things that can happen with Google apps, and take a long time to resolve. (I Googled the issue asking in many different ways, but it was such an odd problem to explain to get useful suggestions.)
I've been very work busy lately. Still am.
Here's a catch up of things that have caught my attention:
American infrastructure really does sound crap:
From the Washington Post, a description of the very decrepit sounding courthouse where Trump is being tried in Manhattan:
When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”
He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.
The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.
Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.
Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.
Jealous that I'm not in Tasmania:
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More about Buddhist influence only Greeks and others
Remember how three four years ago I posted about my surprise that Buddhists had probably travelled as far West as Egypt well before the time of Christ, and how Greeks had seemingly had some interaction with them? No? Well, you just don't pay enough attention.
Anyhow, instead of reading, you can now view a video from the wonderful Religion for Breakfast pretty much on the same topic. (Lots of people in the comments that follow say things like "yeah, this really is not common knowledge, and perhaps it should be." So it's not just me.)
Climate change and extreme weather
It seems that every few days lately there is another extreme flood from some part of the world, as well as temperature records being broken. (South East Asia has been dangerously hot for the last couple of months.)
It's kind of interesting how people who decided a decade or two ago that climate change was all an imaginary crock (not that they will admit it, but their implicit view is that it's a grand conspiracy theory by thousands of scientists) can look at the news and just think "meh, the weather hasn't been too exceptional outside my front door lately, so there's still nothing to it."
The old cranks at the remnants of Catallaxy blog will never change their mind - there's too much face to lose by admitting they picked the "crank" side of the debate long ago. I wonder if Sinclair Davidson has recanted? We don't hear much from him anywhere any more.
Since I recently posted that we don't hear enough from criminologists, I should post here about the article that appeared a couple of days ago at the ABC:
There are fresh calls to put more domestic violence offenders in prison. But mounting evidence suggests that 'jailing is failing'With articles like this, I tend not to have trouble with the analysis of the problem (broadly, how our current implementation of custodial punishment is not working well from a rehabilitation point of view), but have more concerns about the vagueness of how alternative programs could be expected to work on a large enough scale.
To be fair, I don't have this attitude from an extensive reading on the topic - but it just seems an obvious problem that there seem to be so few successful example of programs that they can point to within Australia, and that overseas examples are often specific to those countries settings and may not be easily translatable to here.
For example, in this article:
In fact, alternatives to incarceration have been shown to be radically more effective at reducing reoffending rates. Instead of one-in-two going back to jail, a recidivism rate of as low as 13.6 per cent has been achieved in Spain by emphasising and supporting healthy lifestyle choices, connections with family and emotional development.
The Productivity Commission recommended Australia pursue policies like those in Norway by paying more attention to "the underlying causes of offending" to achieve "better long-term recidivism outcomes" and lowering the cost of crime to the community. Doing so, it said, "would move Australian prison systems towards a stronger emphasis on rehabilitation and have the potential for better long-term outcomes".
OK, because I have trouble imagining that the social environment from which criminality arise in Norway translates at all well to that from which a large part of ours comes (indigenous population, often in rural and remote areas), let's look at the link to the Spanish story.
Hmmm. It reads rather like strong self promotion by an organisation (Diagrama Foundation) that claims large success in Spain, but these are the groups they are largely helping there:
We work with some of the most disadvantaged children in society. In our centres we work
with boys and girls aged 14-23 3 , typically convicted for violent offences. They face a full range of challenges – disengagement from education, from different types of family background, and with a wide range of health, social and other challenges, including learning difficulties, substance misuse and mental health issues. Many of our centres include therapeutic units for those with significant mental health conditions and we also run specific centres solely for young people in the justice system who have mental health issues.
When our centres were first established, more than 85% of those we worked with came from Roma communities, marginalised by society. We continue to work with children and young people from diverse backgrounds across all our services. We run over 75 residential shelters for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as well as integration programmes to address the challenges faced by people socially excluded by race or religion. We also manage medical and educational programmes for vulnerable communities in Senegal and Kenya.
We are commissioned by 15 of the 17 counties in Spain to run either custodial or non-
secure facilities. Each region of Spain is different in terms of culture, language, climate and
geography. We run centres in the middle of cities, and in distant parts of the countryside.
While I don't doubt that Roma communities are far from ideal for children being raised within them, I also find it hard to believe that the social background is anything much like the social dysfunction in the Northern Territory towns the report is looking at.
Also - I'm a tad sceptical about the section of the report which says they achieve this in Spain with about half the staffing of current detention facilities in the NT.
And here's the thing - many of the facilities in Spain are in towns and cities, where it is surely going to be much, much easier to attract the type of worker you need in the very "hands on" rehabilitation centres, compared to trying to fill such jobs in places like Katherine or Alice Springs:
Social educators - Qualified to degree level and guided by the Technical Team, they support young people throughout every aspect of their day, from getting up in the morning to when they go to bed and including in classes, vocational training and leisure activities. They are at the heart of our approach and genuinely care about the young people they work with.
Technical Team - formed of qualified psychologists, social workers and reintegration workers (who support planning for release - housing, education, jobs), working alongside healthcare staff. They plan and deliver assessments, integrated case management, interventions and reintegration programmes.
Security staff – who act as a last resort in incident management.
So yeah, I am far from convinced about how readily you can make that work here.
Not that I know what the alternative is, really....
