Leakers of government secrets tend to be, well, weirdos

*   I have no sympathy for Julian Assange - a deeply eccentric and narcissistic man who played politics* as he thought they should be played with gathering and releasing hacked secrets and information.   As I recall, he had massive fallings out with those who were initially on side in his organisation, and was, at the very least, recklessly careless of the ruin or danger his releases could cause to the lives of those who had tried to help Western governments.   I guess his life has been ruined enough by the steps he took to avoid going to prison in the US.   But I'm never going to think he was really hard done by.   Hack and leak State and other secrets knowing it's wildly illegal, and take the punishment like a man (or woman - see below), is my view.

*  Similarly, I was amazed at the eccentricity and strangeness of Australia whistleblower David McBride as shown on the recent-ish Four Corners show about him.   The allegation, the truth of which I am uncertain, is that his initial reaction to events in Afghanistan was to complain about SAS being treated too harshly for their dubious tactics in the field.   Only later, it seems, did his leaks feed into the investigations that - for reasons no one seems to be able to explain - have led to the huge cloud over the SAS members for having likely committed serious war crimes, yet still not being prosecuted for it.   

I have no doubt that the Australian Army and its legal service has been making bad management decisions for many decades - I have some peripheral knowledge of them.  And seeing McBride just confirmed all my prejudices about this.   

* Let's not forget Chelsea Manning, who (I see from Wikipedia) came from a very, very troubled family background (as did Assange - you pretty much couldn't have a more unsettled upbringing if you tried), should never have joined the military, and ended up transexual.   Not all transexuals are crazy, I guess, but it's not a great sign of mental stability.   Anyway, I'm not sure why Obama commuted the sentence.

 

* He helped feed MAGA conspiracy mongering and was clearly a Putin apologist and effectively a Trump supporter.   As someone said, he more like a self-involved political anarchist than someone with well thought out principles.   There are those saying "yeah, he's a jerk, but I still think he was hounded too far."   I have trouble accepting that, or having sympathy, since a lot of his self imposed confinement was far from the same conditions as a prison sentence.     

Update:  

I know, I know:  complete idiots can sometimes be right on some issues, but geez, if you find yourself on side with MTG on any issue:

as well the Australian Greens, surely you've got to have some doubts.   (I'm thinking Bernard Keane, and the [long absent from the internet] Jason Soon.)

    

Will he or won't he?

There is a fair bit of speculation on Twitter along these lines:

 

I agree with those who say that Trump and his Right wing media supporters seem to be laying the groundwork for it.

And I can well imagine that his rich business supporters may be watching his recent rally performances and making some phone calls...

Why nuclear power dreams cling on

Gee, doing some searches of this blog for posts on renewable energy, I see that I used to put a fair bit of effort into understanding the change to renewable energy and its challenges.  Some old posts are full of details. 

I guess I gradually lost interest in the finer details of energy generation economics because it became wildly complicated, in large part (I think!) because of the interplay of privatisation of energy generation,  government policy, market forces, spot pricing, transmission line complications, interstate sharing of power, and God knows what else.   (See John Quiggin's 2018 article for some details.)

I'm still interested in the technological challenges of going to completely carbon free energy - it's the economics of the best way to get there is so daunting.  

Anyway, I also get the impression in casting my eyes over early posts that renewable growth has been much better than initially predicted.

But, with the revival of the nuclear dream, almost certainly for cynical political/culture war reasons rather than well considered ones, I just wanted to comment that I think the reason nuclear in Australia can take on a sheen of plausibility with the voters is because of what I noted in this post in 2021:  governments are unable to explain the details of how the transition to fully renewable energy will work.  

I suspect there are two reasons for this - the role of the private sector in building electricity generation, and the always evolving technology of renewables.  On that latter point, we've seen lots of ideas for clean energy come and go in the 20 odd years of this blog.   For example, I used to like the potential of solar farms using multiple small scale stirling engine generators.  (They just look cool, if you ask me!)  But all the start ups that were hoping to go somewhere with that have vanished.  Similarly for pebble bed nuclear reactors - South Africa was going to try it, and now I think there is only one or two in China.   It seems they can have issues that can be difficult to overcome (probably in the difficulty of making sure the pebbles never crack open, I suspect), despite early promise of a an inherently safe form of nuclear power. 

I saw from a headline that old private sector loving economist Judith Sloan endorsed in the Australian the Coalition's policy that government will build and own the nuclear reactors.   Quite a turn around for Judith, but should I be too harsh, given that I reckon it would help a lot with the public's impression of non-nuclear renewables transition if government were completely in control of that.

Anyway, I feel like renewing my call, or wish, that governments be more specific about the nuts and bolts of how rapid increase in renewables without nuclear will happen.   I had lots of suggestions for practical ideas that seemed sensible to me in 2021, but I don't think any of them have been taken up by government...

 

   

   

Death by pilgrimage

The New York Times says that most of the heat exhaustion deaths in Mecca this year were unregistered pilgrims.  The report is quite interesting (gift linked for you):

The deaths of more than a thousand pilgrims in Saudi Arabia for the hajj have put a spotlight on an underworld of illicit tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who profit off Muslims desperate to meet their religious duty to travel to Mecca.

While registered pilgrims are transported around the shrines in air-conditioned buses and rest in air-conditioned tents, undocumented ones are often exposed to the elements, making them more vulnerable to extreme heat. Some pilgrims this year described watching people faint and passing bodies in the street as temperatures hit 120 degrees or higher.

On Sunday, in an interview on state television, the Saudi health minister, Fahd al-Jalajel, said that 83 percent of the more than 1,300 deaths occurred among pilgrims who had not had official permits.

“The rise in temperatures during the hajj season represented a big challenge this year,” he said. “Unfortunately — and this is painful for all of us — those who didn’t have hajj permits walked long distances under the sun.”

I didn't realise so many had died in other recent years:

With nearly two million pilgrims participating each year, many of them elderly or ailing, it is not unusual for people to die from heat stress, illness or chronic disease, and Saudi Arabia does not regularly report those statistics. So it is unclear if the number of deaths this year was unusual. Last year, 774 pilgrims died from Indonesia alone, and in 1985, more than 1,700 people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress, a study at the time found.

But because so many of the pilgrims who died this year were performing the pilgrimage without official documentation, their deaths exposed the underworld of unlicensed tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who take advantage of pilgrims desperate to perform the hajj, helping them evade the regulations.

Further down:

In interviews with The New York Times, hajj tour operators, pilgrims and relatives of the dead said the number of undocumented pilgrims appeared to have been driven up by rising economic desperation in countries like Egypt and Jordan. An official hajj package can cost more than $5,000 or $10,000, depending on a pilgrim’s country of origin — far beyond the means of many hoping to make the trip.

But they also described easily exploited loopholes in Saudi Arabia’s regulations that allowed undocumented pilgrims to travel to the kingdom with a tourist or visitor visa several weeks ahead of hajj. Once they arrive, they find a network of illegal brokers and smugglers who offer their services, take their money and sometimes abandon them to fend for themselves, they said.

I would be very worried if I had an elderly parent attending.  Or any relative, actually.  On news reports, I've seen people say that it wasn't just the old dying on the street (and then their body being left there for some time.)

 

A hunch about the state of the Presidential campaign

It's been in the news that there has been a sudden surge in Trump campaign donations.  

It's also clear that Trump's performances at his MAGA rallies lately are more rambling than ever, with much smaller crowds, many of which seem to leave even before he finishes.   He also goes over his weird obsessions (water strength in showers, and not having enough water to use a dishwasher) again and again; so much so that it impossible to believe that his crowd isn't thinking "I've heard this before and I wish he would stop talking about it."

There's also the ridiculous attempt by him and his media team at Fox News and elsewhere to pre-empt a decent performance by Biden at this week's debate by claiming it will only be because he will be drugged up beforehand. ("A shot in the ass" being the additional detail he has now added.)

The other big news has been an increase in Biden's polling (which I always expected).

I suspect that there is a direct relationship between Trump's repetitive and poor public performances at his recent rallies and a surge in money from certain billionaires to try to prop up his campaign.

They're very worried, I think.

As for Elon Musk and his continual support of MAGA conspiracies - I find it hard to believe that he is supporting Trump and his minions when that group is completely against electric vehicles.   Surely he is arguing against his company's interest.    

 

A very funny interaction

I find it a bit hard putting my finger on why I can find Ronny Chieng very funny:  I think a lot may be just down to what I call "Chinese deadpan" delivery?   It amuses me, even if a joke doesn't land as well as it should.

Anyway, this interview he did on The Daily Show is genuinely delightful - a very funny interaction between him and an old friend, made funnier by the presence of a third person to whom the guest can gossip about Ronny in front of him.   (A lot of comments following the video show I wasn't alone in laughing a lot throughout it.)     

Obvious thing that we've all been wondering about

 From the New York Times:

Israel cannot defeat Hamas without installing a new administration in Gaza, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman said on Wednesday, reflecting frustration among the country’s security brass over the Israeli government’s failure to advance a postwar alternative to Hamas’s rule in Gaza.

“The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish — that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a broadcast interview with Israel’s Channel 13. “If we do not bring something else to Gaza, at the end of the day, we will get Hamas.”

His comments seem to signal a rare, open dispute between the military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly promised the Israeli public “absolute victory” over the Palestinian armed group, vowing that the war would not end until Israel destroys Hamas’s military and government.

It's this frustrating aspect of the Gaza situation that is really dismaying.   

I mean, it's hard to see any solution to the never-ending conflict without a major change in attitude on the Gazan side of the fence.  And Israel's large scale obliteration of the place is hardly conducive to that.

Hence, Gaza will probably end up have billions spent on making it liveable again, because humanitarian needs, etc.  The population will continue to massively resent Israel for at least another generation or two, and probably war will break out again, even if the current Right wing element in Israel diminishes.    

Really, when I think about it, I wonder whether it's ever possible to make Gaza "work".   Even allowing for a two state solution (hypothetically), I don't know that it really has much going for it in terms of economic development.  The coastline looks very ordinary, and it really just seems a never ending stretch of pretty dull looking urbanisation with little space for large industry or farming.   And with Hamas, it's been particularly hamstrung:

Several military conflicts have seriously damaged the Gazan economy since Hamas took political control in 2005: Gaza War (2008–2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Gaza–Israel clashes (November 2018), 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, and the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. In June 2005, there were 3,900 factories in the city employing 35,000 people, and in December 2007, 195 factories were remaining, employing 1,700 people. The construction industry was also affected, with tens of thousands of employees out of work. The blockade damaged the agriculture sector and 40,000 workers dependent on cash crops were left without income. Unemployment was compounded when Israel ended its reliance on cheap labor from the Gaza Strip in 2005.^[10]

I assume it survives just by a continual influx of funds from other countries, which is well intentioned; but really, it was always asking for trouble to support a government that didn't want a resolution with Israel.  An article from 2010 in the Wall Street Journal starts:

It is easy to understand why many Westerners are bewildered by the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Confrontations like the springtime flotilla crisis make it easy for people to see the situation as too complex, ugly, and hopeless, and they switch off. But we can't ignore what goes on in Israel and the Palestinian territories, if for no reason other than we're affecting it: Our money is supporting indoctrination in the territories that is sowing the seeds of future conflict for decades to come. We have a responsibility to take that incredibly seriously.

Of course, there's also some support from those Muslim countries that encourage them to never give up the dream of taking back Israel, despite the obvious history of how that is just not going to happen.

While it seems clear that some Arab countries are sick of the problem, none of them are brave enough to say "time to give up, just come here and start afresh".

Now that I think of it - Saudi Arabia hopes to get hundreds of thousands to live in a lengthy high tech glass box building in the middle of the desert (the stupid Neom project) with no indication that anyone really wants to move there.   Maybe they should be offering that to any Gazan who has at least finished high school!

The party for the very, very easily convinced

That graphic is...really embarrassingly amateur! 

The first comments currently following the post:

So that's what it's like working for a narcissistic sociopath

From the New York Times (gift link), looking at a book Dr Fauci has written:

Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cellphone to President Donald J. Trump screaming at him in an expletive-laden rant. He had incurred the president’s wrath by remarking that the vaccines under development might not provide long-lasting immunity.

That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the brunt of the president’s rage,” Dr. Fauci writes in his forthcoming autobiography.

Dr. Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Mr. Trump. But in the book, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he writes with candor about their relationship, which he describes as “complicated.”

In a chapter entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Dr. Fauci described how Mr. Trump repeatedly told him he “loved” him while at the same time excoriating him with tirades flecked with four-letter words.

“The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Dr. Fauci wrote. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive.).....

 “I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”

Further down, evidence of how creepy and cultish the White House was:

“Vice presidents,” Dr. Fauci wrote, “are almost always publicly loyal to the president. That is part of the job. But in my opinion, Vice President Pence sometimes overdid it. During task force meetings, he often said some version of, ‘There are a lot of smart people around here, but we all know that the smartest person is upstairs.’”

The last paragraph is a doozy:

He painted the president as consumed with television ratings and the economy; after one coronavirus briefing in March 2020, Mr. Trump summoned Dr. Fauci into the Oval Office and called the Fox News personality Sean Hannity. Dr. Fauci recalled the moment: “‘Hey, Sean,’ he said on speakerphone. ‘You should see the ratings we have!’”

 

 

To even things up after the last post - what a bore Tim Blair has become

First, some snark:   according to the Daily Telegraph site, Tim Blair looks like this:

 In fact, I see from accidentally watching some Sky News that he now looks like this:

He has had two health crises that he has written about (major bowel cancer and a heart attack), so it's not just being a right wing hack who has never changed an opinion in light of accumulated evidence that has aged him.

Of course, I don't subscribe to the Murdoch media, so I don't get to read his columns, which (as far as I can tell) are virtually identical to those written 15 years ago, but I do sometimes see bits of them elsewhere.  Hence I know that he wrote this today:  

We were promised rising oceans. The seas would consume our coastlines, they said. Waves would crush our capital cities, they said. Fancy coastal dwellers would be forced inland to Brewarrina or Cobar, we hoped.

Tragically, sea levels seem not to have budged at all despite decades of anguished saline panic. But this year might turn things around.

This year could deliver the ocean-boosting downpours we’ve all been desperately waiting for.

And they’ll likely be thanks not to climate change, which comes up short every single time, but to left-wing election defeats – and the fountains of commie tears that could follow, drenching ABC newsrooms and loading waterways to overflowing.

The distress is already under way in Queensland, although their election isn’t due until October 26.

Labor types are wailing over the latest Pauline Hanson “Please explain” video, which mockingly depicts Robert Irwin and children’s cartoon favourite Bluey attempting to promote the complete shambles that is modern Queensland. 

So yeah, Blair now defends a political party using a non-political media figure and business man and a copyrighted cartoon character in a party partisan advertisement?   How pathetic.   

As for sea level rise:

Yeah, nothing to see there, you blind culture war bore.  

You'd think he knows some Right wing buddy who lives in Florida, where the sea level rise is grudgingly half-admitted by even the Republican government:

"Presently, sea level is tracking in the intermediate-high to high, the two fastest," said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist with Florida International University. "The other three scenarios, you might not even think about because we're already rising faster than that."

Those are the same predictions used by South Florida governments when deciding how high to build new developments. But after a new bill signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year, local governments hoping for state money for sea rise projects have to only consider the intermediate-low and intermediate scenarios, a downgrade from previous legislation that asked them to consider intermediate-low and intermediate-high scenarios.

Two feet of sea rise by 2060, compared to present-day levels, would be a shock to the system for Miami, where the average elevation is three feet. That's why local governments—and the state—are spending billions to keep streets dry.

He still drones on and on about the ABC needing to be closed down too - my old theory is that he has never gotten over being dropped from a trial run of a late night radio show there in 2001. 

Anyway, drone on, Tim.  You've painted yourself into close minded irrelevancy.

Update:  I searched the blog for previous commentary on Blair, and had forgotten that in 2018 I really got stuck into him a lot.  

And yes, at the start of the blog, when I thought that the right leaning blogosphere often made appropriate fun of many on the Left for their over-reactions to some pretty centrist Liberal stuff, I liked a lot of his content.

The trouble is, the Right went increasingly nuts and anti-science and far into the culture war undergrowth, and Blair kept going right along with them, refusing to ever re-consider positions in light of evidence and reality.  

True, parts of the Left have also gone nuttier than ever (around identity politics primairily) too, but you can't be centrist and still endorse Blair and his ilk. 

Uh oh, Native Title is in the news...

I'm going to count myself as still being in my early 60's rather than my mid 60's, but I'm still feeling like an elder who is remembering things that those young'uns in politics seem to have forgotten about: the danger to Labor of looking too gullible on matters of indigenous policy. 

Have people forgotten about Bob Hawke and his attitude to the issue of sacred sites:

In 1991 BHP was pushing to mine a hill in Kakadu that was sacred to the local Indigenous Jawoyn people.

According to Mr Hawke he was angered at the way some members of cabinet cavalierly dismissed those beliefs while accepting the “mysteries” of their own Christian faith.

“I was annoyed beyond measure by the attitude of many of my colleagues and their cynical dismissal of the beliefs of the Jawoyn people and I think I made one of the strongest and bitterest attacks I ever made on my colleagues in the cabinet when I was addressing this issue.

“There is no doubt this was one element in my loss of leadership as there was a great deal of antagonism amongst my colleagues as to the intensity of the remarks I made. But this was something I felt very deeply about.”

And then how the Hindmarsh Island scandal a few years later made non-questioning of claims by all indigenous look like gullibility?

I mention this because the news of a successful native title claim over a large part of the Sunshine Coast is (almost irrespective of its practical effects - which might be minimal, but see my concerns below)  bound to hurt the Labor government in Queensland, which negotiated a settlement.  

Here's an article from The Guardian explaining what this claim has gained:

Unlike other types of land tenure, native title only grants a specific, discrete set of prescribed rights, typically called a “bundle of rights”. Those rights don’t include the right to sell, though the state must compensate the claimant if it extinguishes them. It might do that if it wants to turn part of the area into a coal mine or a housing estate, for instance.

The Kabi Kabi people were granted the following rights:

1. Access, be present on, move about on and travel over the area.

2. Camp on the area, and for that purpose, erect temporary shelters on the area.

3. Take resources of the area for any purpose.

4. Take and use the water of the area for personal, domestic and non-commercial communal purposes (including cultural and spiritual purposes).

5. Participate in cultural activities on the area.

6. Be buried and bury native title holders within the area.

7. Maintain places of importance and areas of significance to the native title holders under their laws and customs and protect those places and areas from physical harm.

8. Teach on the area the physical and spiritual attributes of the area.

9. Hold meetings on the area.

10. Light fires on the area for domestic purposes including cooking, but not for the purpose of hunting or clearing vegetation.

    In order to win these rights, the Kabi Kabi had to prove that their ancestors occupied the area under a set of laws and customs, which had continued ever since.

I reckon if this claim was granted to a group of long term residents of an isolated area (like how the first native title claim was covering Thursday Island),  with modest intentions, no one would worry.

But the danger is that people perceive (correctly!) that indigenous activism has taken a very aggressive form now, and concessions keep being made to the "flexes" of indigenous activists and (let's be honest) their increasingly dilute aboriginal blood.  (God, I feel dangerously Hanson-ite for saying that, but the fact of the matter is that genetics should count for something in claims of indigenous heritage.   And it's still considered a valid thing by many actual American tribes - a point rarely mentioned in Australia.) 

People might recall some push by some indigenous to get people to stop climbing the Glasshouse Mountains - I wouldn't be surprised if that push is renewed after this claim.

And I suspect that there will be even more controversial things pushed under this claim - all pretty much more as a political "flex" than anything else.    

The thing is, people (like Bob Hawke) who argued that indigenous claims to exclusive access to certain natural sites for religious or cultural reasons is the equivalent of the major religions' idea of a scared site were pretty obviously making a false comparison.   You don't have to be a believer to have access to St Peter's in Rome, or most mosques, or Buddhist or Hindu temples.   You might be expected to observe certain modest restrictions in dress and behaviour, but that's about it.   And being able to name any bit of the natural landscape as sacred based on unwritten lore is obviously open to abuse and "flexes".  

In other words, people are right to be sceptical of the claims and the religious reasons given for them.  If any bit of ground can be declared scared, it dilutes the idea of sacred to something pretty meaningless, really.   Let's declare the whole planet sacred, but we all have access to it, OK?

But apart from the issue of climbing mountains, I can see lots of other rights in that list that certainly could be abused and cause conflict.  Is the right to light a campfire in Crown land going to cause issues in fire restriction times?   Will collecting shell fish be done in a way that is commercial and not really about daily sustenance?  (This already causes conflict in other parts of Australia.)

Labor is going to lose the Queensland election big time for a variety of reasons, with one significant issue already related to aboriginality - the rise in youth crime, especially in in regional areas.   Add to the electoral ill will that issue has generated a vaguely defined set of Native Title rights in a prime tourist area of the State and it's going to go over like a lead balloon. 

Paging Dr Musk

 

Musk's wrong headed and obnoxiously stated views on this (which I had forgotten he has been spreading for years) were very thoroughly fact checked here.  

Yet, of course, on Twitter, thousands of Covid conspiracists have flooded in to support their cult leader.

Honestly, I can't wait for Musk to lead his cult followers to the promised land of Mars (or even the Moon - I don't care.)   He'd be dead within the year, either from internal rebellion, or something he thought he knew the answer to better than anyone else.   

A difficult problem

From an article at The Conversation:

It’s relatively common for perpetrators of family violence to threaten suicide to control a victim-survivor’s actions. A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology suggests 39% of women who experience coercive control are subject to perpetrators’ threats of self-harm.

Suicide threats can be related to mental health issues, a tactic of family violence, or sometimes both. As a result, victim-survivors may feel pressured to remain in an abusive relationship.

Men who kill their partners are 2,000 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than the general population. For example, the man who killed Hannah Clarke and her children had threatened suicide multiple times in the lead-up to their murders.

It can then be tricky for police responding to these situations. Victoria Police officers who participated in my recently published research were concerned that when they prioritise suicide prevention over responding to family violence, victim-survivors are sometimes left without protection.

I really do feel sorry for the police, who are expected to make a "nuanced" decision:

All ten police officers who participated in my study specialised in family violence. They all indicated suicide threats were a commonly-used tactic of coercive control.

Most participants said when they attend a family violence incident where a perpetrator has threatened suicide, they are likely to address the perpetrator’s mental health as their priority. The perpetrator often then goes to hospital for assessment and treatment, when required.

When a person is under the care of a hospital, police cannot issue a family violence safety notice. Police can request notification from a hospital of when a person is released if they are a risk to others. However, this does not always happen, according to police.....

 

Some police stations are developing processes to change the way they address perpetrator suicide threats. One of the participants suggested family violence safety notices should be issued first, before hospitalising a perpetrator.

Improvements within policing could prevent further violence from occurring. A nuanced approach is needed to train police to balance the mental health needs of perpetrators, as well as the safety of victim-survivors and the community at large.

 

 

Can't quite work out how creepy this is...

He has cancer — so he made an AI version of himself for his wife after he dies 

Michael Bommer likely only has a few weeks left to live.

A couple of years ago, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. The doctors told him it was terminal.

"A year ago, I sat with my wife in one of these more teary-eyed exercises, talking about what comes. And my wife said, 'Hey, one of the things I will miss most is being able to come to you, ask you a question, and you will sit there and calmly explain the world to me,'" he said. 

He posted online, telling his friends it was time to say goodbye. Then his friend called him up, saying he had an opportunity at his company Eternos.Life for Bommer to build an interactive AI version of himself.

Bommer immediately said yes, and his wife, Anett, was all in, too. They shared with Consider This host Mary Louise Kelly the journey they went on with this project.

This reminds me a bit of the thing I only learned from watching the Pixar movie Coco - that the Mexicans (carrying on an Aztec belief) say you die twice, the last time being when no one remembers you anymore.   (Some accounts seem to say 3 times - the first being when you learn you are mortal.)  

Well, in future, I guess it may be when no bothers activating your AI version - or wipes it from the hard drive, I guess!

In popular entertainment news

This Netflix movie seems to be attracting a lot of commentary along these lines:

Many, many people seem to be completely puzzled by the glowing professional reviews, and even suspect some sort of chicanery.

Similarly, the new Disney Star Wars series The Acolyte is attracting truck loads of amusing ridicule from former Star Wars fans (and in particular, those "bro" type reviewers who have been complaining - not without some justification - about its obvious feminisation ever since the last 3 movies).   This latest show apparently features a coven of lesbian witches who use the Force to procreate without the need of men, which genuinely does sound like some sort of extreme lesbian fever dream.  And apart from that bit of weirdness, is said to have terrible dialogue, charmless leads, and generally makes no sense.  

I have not cared for the Star Wars universe in any great depth for decades - it peaked at The Empire Strikes Back, after all - although I did keep seeing the movies, except for the last one which it seemed absolutely no one liked much.   None of the Disney TV content based in the universe has impressed me enough to keep watching it after a few of episodes. 

Anyway, the point is that the professional reviewers have generally been praising The Acolyte - and the disparity with audience reactions is pretty huge.  Once again, it seems lots of people don't understand why.  

The only thing that will resolve this will a diminishing audience, I guess.    

 

Trump and the normalisation of his BS

An opinion piece in the Washington Post:

It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality. Biden, who is old, at least makes sense. Trump, who also is old, rants like someone you’d cross the street to avoid.

We in the media have failed by becoming inured to Trump’s verbal incontinence — not just the rapid-fire lies and revenge-seeking threats, but also the frightening glimpses into a mind that is, evidently, unwell. In 2016, Trump said outrageous things at his campaign rallies to be entertaining. In 2024, his tangents raise serious questions about his mental fitness.

His rally on Sunday in Las Vegas offered a grim smorgasbord of examples, but the obvious standout (and not in a good way) is the story he told about being aboard a hypothetical electric-powered boat. He posits that the battery would be so heavy that it would cause the craft to sink, and he relates his purported conversation with a knowledgeable mariner about this scenario.

You can go to the link to read the whole transcript of this part of his rally.  The article continues:

The White House press corps would be in wolf pack mode if Biden were in the middle of a speech and suddenly veered into gibberish about boats and sharks. There would be front-page stories questioning whether the president, at 81, was suffering from dementia; and the op-ed pages would be filled with thumb-suckers about whether Vice President Harris and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment. House Republicans would already have scheduled hearings on Biden’s mental condition and demanded he take a cognitive test.

The tendency with Trump, at 77, is to say he’s “just being Trump.” But he’s like this all the time.

Also during the Las Vegas speech, Trump tried to deny the allegation by one of his White House chiefs of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, that he refused in 2018 to visit an American military cemetery in France, saying it was filled with “suckers” and “losers.” Trump told the crowd on Sunday that “only a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person” would say such a thing while “I’m standing there with generals and military people in a cemetery.”

But he wasn’t “standing there” with anybody. He never went to the cemetery.

As someone in comments (there are over 9,000 of them) says:

Trump is always posing as the sharpest mind around who asks a critical question that nobody thought about it. Remember bleach as a treatment for COVID? He heard that bleach kills the COVID virus and proposed bleach as a cure without thinking for even a second that doctors and microbiologists are perfectly capable of making that connection. And, without even thinking that if bleach wasn't actually used to treat humans there may be reason --a reason that he never bothered to find out.

He says lots of things about everything but he never has time to check whether he has made an stupid claim because he is to busy making the next stupid claim.

 

 

My own conspiracy theory

An article at the BBC talks about the rapid rise in Chinese manufactured electric vehicles:

With China accused of selling electric cars at artificially low prices, the European Union is widely expected to hit them with tariffs this week.

The BYD Seagull is a tiny, cheap, neatly styled electric vehicle (EV). An urban runabout that won’t break any speed records, but nor will it break the bank.

In China, it has a starting price of 69,800 yuan ($9,600; £7,500). If it comes to Europe, it is expected to cost at least double that figure due to safety regulations. But that would still be, by electric car standards, very cheap.

For European manufacturers that is a worrying prospect. They fear the little Seagull will become an invasive species, one of a number of Chinese-built models poised to colonise their own markets at the expense of indigenous vehicles.

China’s domestic auto industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades. Its development, along with that of the battery sector, was a major component of the “Made In China 2025” strategy, a 10-year industrial policy launched by the Communist Party in Beijing in 2015.

The result has been the breakneck development of companies like BYD, now vying with Tesla for the title of the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles. Established giants such as SAIC, the owner of the MG brand, and Volvo’s owner Geely, have also become big players in the EV market.

Last year, more than eight million electric vehicles were sold in China – about 60% of the global total, according to the International Energy Agency’s annual Global EV Outlook.

Here's a conspiracy theory I have been thinking about for months:   maybe the Chinese government requires all electric vehicles made there (and especially those destined for foreign markets) to have a software kill switch - so that once they have flooded the Western market with reasonably priced electric vehicles and they want to do something controversial (*cough* invade Taiwan), they can punish the West (if it fights back) by remotely killing all electric vehicles in a software update.   (And they will be clever - the update won't be an immediate kill - otherwise those who first lose their vehicle could warn others not to update.  No, it could just be set so that they all stop working on a certain date.   Perhaps an anniversary important to the Chinese.)   Or, now that I think of it - could the update make the explode-y batteries actually explode?  

So, if they have (say) 20% of the total American vehicle market, that's potentially an awful lot of disruption for a country so reliant on vehicles.   

I wouldn't be surprised if someone else has come up with this idea, but I haven't read it elsewhere - yet.   So, for now, I'm claiming it as a original conspiracy theory.

Romanticising the avoidance of reality

I think it was last week that 7.30 on the ABC ran a story about a 68 year old woman who, while obviously having had a hard life, was also pretty patently nuts on the matter of thinking she could ignore legal actions and (well) reality.

The story is set out at length here, but to cut it short, she had lived in a low cost social housing house in Melbourne for many years when it was part of a managing co-op on which she was a member.  After it got transferred to a different co-op, a move which she didn't agree with, she stopped paying rent to the new owner (claims she kept paying it to the old co-op?), got into arrears for nearly $10,000, got evicted, lost on appeal, got evicted a second time.  After the new co-op sold off the house to a private owner, the house was half demolished, and she still returned to an obviously dangerous house with no utilities and slept in it.  When it was being fully demolished, she was running into the yard and putting herself in danger in front of the machinery until the police intervened.

She had a hard life by the sounds, but it was also clear that she had been given alternative social housing to live in (a one bedroom unit), although it was shown as so crammed full of her furnishings and stuff from the old house that she has made it virtually unliveable.   "Downsizing" is a concept she apparently is unfamiliar with - or rather, which she has obviously avoided "on principle".  

Look, I find this type of journalism that tries to play on heartstrings when it's a person with obvious  "issues" quite irritating, especially when they paint it from one side only.  (There was not a single attempt to have anyone talk about the institutional perspective of running a social housing system when someone refuses to pay the reduced rent, even after losing repeatedly in court, because of "feels", or something.)   It is an example of (dare I say it) the type of Left-ist idealism that is so extreme it becomes divorced from reality - like the posters you will see at any indigenous rally that talk about "Australia" as an invalid concept and suggest you can just hand the country over to the indigenous.  

Let's try to keep it real, hey?

 

Now I'm definitely not going to the Greek Islands

The death of Michael Moseley, who always came across on TV as very likeable and reasonable, was sadly premature.   

But one other thing that came out of that coverage:  am I the only person to think that Greek island didn't look the least bit attractive?  And I have to say that, apart from the startlingly geography of the likes of Santorini, whenever I've watched travel vloggers in the Greek Islands I'm rarely impressed.  Rocky, dry islands with so-so beaches and some scrubby bushes here and there (OK, and the occasional olive tree), just don't do much for me.   

And the food - it's ok once in a while, but it's basically too dull.  I joked to someone recently that it has about 5 national dishes and that's it.    (And they are basically all the same at every cafe or restaurant that makes them.)

The most repulsive billionaire?

So the very week that Fauci testifies about real and continual death threats against him and his family, the ketamine addled brain of a top contender for "most repulsive billionaire" decided to throw his support publically behind the MAGA idiots.