Who is this woman, and why does she seem to make so much sense:
(I feel like those are impliedly sexist questions - but this video has been very popular and I have never heard of her before. Seems she's an American living in Germany now, and her channel is mainly about less than flattering takes on America in light of her European experience?)
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Jordan Peterson makes the news again over his peculiar health issues:
Controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is expected to take time off from “everything” after being exposed to a “particularly moldy environment,” his daughter says.
Mikhaila Peterson took to X on Wednesday afternoon to reveal the 63-year-old influencer-academic has been forced to postpone his podcasts and move his European tour after a “severe” flare-up of symptoms she said is connected with chronic inflammatory response syndrome.
The elder Peterson has openly discussed his experience with CIRS, a condition allegedly linked to mold exposure and immune system dysfunction, and claimed he was diagnosed in 2018. It is not an officially recognized medical diagnosis or considered a distinct disease by any significant public health agency.
I read the daughter's tweet about it, where she went on about the carnivore diet even not being enough to defeat the mould!
I guess its not impossible for some people to have serious reactions to mould: its probably next to impossible to tell which are really suffering from it, and which are psychosomatic.
I also saw a brief bit of Jordan going off on Joe Rogan's show about climate change being a grand Leftist conspiracy to control all people who are Right and Good in the world. It was this (pretty great!) video, which proves that Rogan is a dangerously ignorant influencer who is so dumb he can't be bothered reading an article to understand a graph it contains. He is truly awful.
As someone in comments says:
I'm so tired of the dumbest people on earth having the most popular shows
Another interesting NYT piece - this time about 75 year Republican Rick Perry going all in for a new hallucinogenic I hadn't even heard of before.
As usual, I remain deeply skeptical that the positive experiences of the few who become evangelical is a sound guide to its more widespread use. (And this one sounds particularly dangerous, not to mention unpleasant):
Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. “Satan, get behind me,” he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.
Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.
But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, “I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.”......
But the powerful drug, which is illegal in the United States, comes with risks. Because ibogaine lengthens the time between heartbeats, a user who gets the wrong dosage, is taking other drugs, or whose heart rate is not being monitored during treatment, can go into cardiac arrest. Even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as “the opposite of a pleasant experience.”
It is because of the drug’s potency that Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and other ibogaine advocates have adopted a baby-steps approach. Rather than promote wholesale decriminalization, or even widespread availability, they are seeking public funding for the development of an ibogaine compound in the United States, with the initial aim of treating military veterans.
Probably because it is a conservative promoting it, there are a large number of skeptical comments after it:
To have credibility with me, this article should explain the actual mechanisms( even if not completely known), the actual treatment process (does the dose of the substance magically transform specific memories in one sitting or is there a therapeutic conversation with a real therapist , or 12 weeks of therapy or just exactly what) and how is improvement measured, validated, followed up . How long does the identified benefit last? And how is that defined and measured— hours of improved sleep, fewer arrests or car accidents , less domestic abuse phone calls or more steady employment, less drug and alcohol and other self medication abuse. Only quoting some people who say they are better is as meaningless as if they were describing the therapeutic benefits of shopping, ice cream or racing fast cars, what about all the people who have not had a positive effect- they will never be assessed in an anecdotal narrative. Show me the facts , the mechanisms, the double blinded assessments—not just because Kirsten Syenema says so.
Also, funny how its often the military veterans lining up for something to cure their mental ills and PTSD.
A simpler solution might be: stop putting your military into pointless conflicts with no real moral justification. Maybe then the relived horror of the killing they have implemented will not happen in the first place.
A New York Times background piece on "stablecoins" is well worth reading.
Sounds like a whole lot of trouble brewing, if you ask me:
Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.
Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.
That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.
Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.
One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said.
Trump, of course, would understand none of this. He just seems crypto bros throwing him money, and he's all in.
I was reminded this morning that Singapore's name allegedly comes from an apparent misidentification of a tiger as lion. (See Wikipedia for a full explanation.)
Now, while lions were never native to Singapore or neighbouring regions, tigers certainly were. Which led me to think "when was the last wild tiger seen in Singapore?" I knew of the story of a tiger being shot in Raffles Hotel, but now that I check it, it wasn't a wild one, and it was in 1902.
This website tells the real story of how big a problem wild tigers were in the 19th century:
The earliest newspaper report about the existence of tigers was published on 8 September 1831 in the Singapore Chronicle. It was reported that a male Chinese national had been killed by a tiger, and that the same tiger probably had also killed a local shortly after.5 In 1835, colonial architect G. D. Coleman and some convict labourers were attacked while they were laying a new road through a swamp in the jungle near town, but no one was killed.6 In May 1839, The Singapore Free Press reported that two Chinese had been carried off by tigers near a newly built road called Rangong Road (today’s Serangoon Road).7
When the cultivation of gambier and pepper took off in Singapore in the 1840s, plantations extended beyond town and encroached on jungle areas. By the late 1840s, the number of plantations had peaked at 600.8 Chinese plantation coolies became easy targets for tigers. Reports of encounters with tigers increased in the 1830s and 1840s.9
Tiger attacks grew so intense that, by the middle of the 19th century, tigers were rumoured to claim one life every day.10 Governor of the Straits Settlements William Butterworth, upon being questioned in the House of Commons about the tiger problem, stated that the figure was probably 200 deaths a year due to tiger killings – which was nonetheless alarming in a population of 50,000 people.11 In 1859, one village near Bukit Timah was abandoned due to overwhelming tiger attacks.12
It was believed that tigers in Singapore killed 300 humans in 1857, but only seven deaths were reported to the police. The actual figure could be higher as many tiger attacks were unreported. Plantation bosses often did not report the deaths as they did not want to scare away potential workers.13 During the 1860s, more than 350 lives were lost because of tigers.14
They would swim across from peninsula, apparently. I wonder how big a problem they were over there (the Malay peninsula). Presumably, pretty big!
Anyway, the government set a bounty on hunting tigers, and their numbers diminished.
The last one was apparently in 1930. Here's how the Straits Times reported it:
Well, they got a beer named after them. So not completely forgotten...
Apart from the egregious open corruption that was Tim Cook's suck up visit at the White House, one thing I noted from the video:
was that I reckon there is no way the "24 carat" gold base is solid gold - it does not have the weight in Cook's hands that a lump of gold that size should, I reckon. (Even the weight of the box with it inside looks light.)
In theory, as I understand it, you can gold plate in 24 carat, but it's soft and not often done because of that. But I reckon Cook wanted to give the impression Trump was getting a lump of gold, when he wasn't. Which would be a little amusing to know, if I am right...
Singapore's National Day Parade was (as acknowledged by most Singaporeans on Reddit too) really good this year. As I said to my son who (rather dutifully, but I appreciate it) watched the whole thing with me, Brisbane ought to just subcontract the Olympics opening ceremony to Singaporean creatives - they do these stadium style shows fantastically well.
I wonder if I can convince anyone reading to watch the whole 3 hours!
OK, well if you don't want to watch the military parade and flyovers , the entertainment show starts at 1 hour 53 min.
But you should watch the military bits, because it shows how absolutely pathetic Trump's little Army anniversary march was!
And if you don't have the time to watch this, I was even impressed with the "pre parade" segment - singing, dancing, some jokes, and cameo appearance by their Prime Minister.
All so good...
Much to my surprise, I see that Blogger has greeted me this morning with a new beta feature, which will add links to terms in a post that it thinks might be useful for readers who want to dig deeper, so to speak.
Given that people have been saying for years that they would not be surprised if Google suddenly said it was going to stop supporting this free blogging platform, it's surprising to see they are actually still making changes to it.
How useful this one is, though, remains to be seen! I'll hit the button and see what it does with this post. Any links will be put in by some AI in a dessert somewhere, presumably!
Oh, it seems to not want to insert any links now. It did before, but I deleted the text and now it's not reappearing. Odd.
If I wasn't so busy at work lately, and the plane seats were a bit more certain, I would have headed off to Singapore to be there on its 60th anniversary National Day this Saturday.
Instead, I will just watch the National Day Parade live on CNA via Youtube - and I would encourage anyone with a curiosity about the way nationalism and social unity can be "done right" to do the same. I mean, I am generally leery of patriotism; but in the case of Singapore, it had to make a big effort from the start to ensure the multicultural society would work, and tying it to a patriotic appeal to take pride in making a poor tiny country rich, secure and safe has really worked.
So, the National Day Parade (which I have watched in previous years) has elements of pure self soothing propaganda, about which I sometimes have a bit of a cringe laugh because it can be so unsubtle. But mostly, I find myself deeply impressed, and quite often somewhat touched, by the intensity of the effort towards promoting unity, especially in the slickly produced songs and dance, which can feature a multicultural cast of scores of people, if not hundreds. Perhaps you have to watch to understand. Technically, my almost sentimental admiration for the country can't be because I was a Singaporean in a past live - I was here before it existed!
The day ends with a very "you will be patriotic!" kind of thing:
SINGAPORE - The public warning system will sound at 8.19pm on Aug 9, as a signal for Singaporeans to recite the pledge and sing the National Anthem, wherever they may be on National Day.
The “all clear” signal will sound for 10 seconds, said the Singapore Civil Defence Force on Aug 6.
This marks the Majulah Moment at the end of the National Day Parade,which will take place at the Padang and Marina Bay
Again, I find that a little bit funny, and a little bit impressive.
Such a shame I won't make it...
It was at the very top of The Guardians website this morning, but has since moved down the page. It's still given a very large space, though:
It ends with these examples of grievance mongering:
James Fitzgerald, a legal consultant for the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said companies had an obligation to confront the “evils of the past”.
“Just creeping along as though nothing happened is moral cowardice, particularly when it’s an enterprise that’s making money off dispossession,” he said.
“The more a company’s wealth is built on that sort of dispossession, I would have thought, the greater its obligation to take account of that as a decent corporate citizen in 2025.”....
The AACo spokesperson said the company had built “trusted relationships” with many traditional custodians across the properties managed. “We recognise their culture and deep connection to Country and work with them to ensure we engage respectfully,” they said....
Fitzgerald said the 1992 Mabo verdict, which recognised Indigenous peoples’ rights to their land, raised complex questions for Australian companies that had built their wealth on land taken from and cleared of Aboriginal people.
“If you keep pulling at the thread long enough, it implicates the entire basis of our sovereign state and economy,” he said. “We are all the beneficiaries of these actions in one way or another, whether as real property owners, shareholders or super fund members.”
So, let's see - the company hasn't hidden anything, is respectful of the current "cultural custodians", and there are some academics and lawyer types making a living out of keeping the grievance alive...
As I have complained recently, such intense concentration on victim status in aboriginal advocacy is not a good way to move forward - and it irks me that The Guardian spends so much time promoting it.
It's fascinating, and makes me feel somewhat emotional, to read the first hand accounts of what it was like being on the Enola Gay when it bombed Hiroshima, 80 years ago. The Washington Post provides a good service by publishing this.
I'm sure I have mentioned this before, but the short explainer videos that the Wall Street Journal puts out now, often as a corrective to Trump and MAGA views, are actually pretty good (and non-partisan). The latest one is about how it is an utter nonsense to blame the head of the bureau for jobs numbers that Trump didn't like:
An interesting idea here: check if there is any correlation between pre-space age "transients" caught on astronomical sky survey plates from Palomar observatory (in the period from 1949 to 1957), and nuclear tests and/or UFO sightings.
Seems there is, although I don't understand the statistical significance bits of the paper. (Really, it would be good if researchers always explained that aspect in a clearer way for those of us who never studied statistics.)
An article summarising the paper is here.
I note that the transients are star like points of light; not streaks like satellites in low Earth orbit would make.
I also note that other research thinks the transients are just faults in the emulsion. But a secret government organisation that doesn't want us to know the truth would tell us that, wouldn't they...!
It seems that the people who wrote the current paper have been out to prove something is odd about the transients for quite a while. Mick West is very skeptical.
I am too. I have a dim memory from a UFO book - probably one of Hynek's - about a 50's or 60's sighting which started as apparently two star like satellites moving together, but then doing a very un-satelitte thing of starting to spin around each other. I've always been curious if there were more sightings like that which went unrecorded...
From the New York Times:
Hamas has consistently rejected Israel’s terms for ending the war throughout the negotiations. On Saturday, the group said in a statement that it would not disarm unless a Palestinian state was established, despite a call from Arab states last week for the group to do so.
The Israeli government opposes Palestinian statehood. On Sunday, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, visited the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which Jews revere as the Temple Mount, long a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Arab leaders denounced Mr. Ben-Gvir’s ascent to the site — during which he openly prayed — as a provocation.
“It’s important to convey from this place that we should immediately conquer Gaza, exercise our sovereignty there, and eliminate every last Hamas member,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said from the site, in a video shared by his office.
Doesn't the Hamas position on disarmament show that (well intentioned) Western nations calling for a recognition of the Palestinian state at this time are not helping? While I understand the impulse to think that it helps show Israel does not have endorsement to do what it wants, it's hard to see the optics from Hamas's view as being other than "at last, the tide is turning in our favour, and we must hold out longer."
I finally got around to watching Steven Spielberg's last film - the critically well received semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans.
I thought it was really good, and deserved a wider audience. Clearly, it was intended a respectful take on the influence he came under from two very different parents, each with their own flaws. (Both of them had died before this movie was made.)
I had known enough about him to know before seeing it that most of the key parts of the film were true to life - he grew up mostly in Arizona, and was a precociously gifted child/teenage film maker, encouraged by both parents, but with the more artistic urges (by far!) coming from his eccentric mother, who is really the key character in the film. I thought Michelle Williams was really outstanding in the role - playing it as pixie-ish but vulnerable and very flawed.
I presume, though, that the film makes a case for Spielberg getting technical prowess, and perhaps stamina, in moviemaking from his intelligent father, who apparently was a bit of a workaholic.
The danger with such a film is that the Spielberg character could have been portrayed in too self serving a fashion - but I think it manages to avoid that. Sure, he's likeable throughout the film, but it didn't feel fake or "too good to be true" in any respect.
This article is a good one for showing how true to life most of the film is - including the obvious care Spielberg took to make the actors look like the real-life counterparts.
There was one funny part of the film (his first teenage girlfriend, with a sub-sexual infatuation with the image of Jesus) that I thought seemed so eccentric that it must be true. But unfortunately, this is one aspect that has not been confirmed as such.
Anyway, as a family drama that is not too heavy going, well acted, well made and overall very likeable, I do recommend it.
You know, I have had a bit of a look around the MAGA infected parts of the internet, and seen very little attempt to defend his immediate reaction to sack the woman in charge of the department providing the jobs numbers, because he saw conspiracy to hurt him simply because she was appointed under Biden.
I actually think that this reaction is so much like that of a tin pot dictator that even many of his diehard supporters working in Right wing media think it's not a good look. (Although, of course, there are no doubt thousands of conspiracy addled MAGA brains who will jump on any and all explanations given by their cult leader.)
Seems to me that two things can be true about Gaza:
* there is genuine starvation happening on a widespread scale, as is evidenced by the hordes shown scrambling over each other on our TVs each night to get hold of food aid, and the reports of gangs hijacking some trucks and killing to control food. (I was interested to hear an ABC journalist saying that Israel has admitted supporting some of the food raiding gangs, as they are seen as a competitor to Hamas. I hadn't heard of that before, and truly it shows what an agent of chaos Israel has become.) It just seems wildly improbable, and contrary to what all aid organisations are saying, for Israel's claim (that there is plenty of food, it's just not being distributed right by Hamas) to be true.
* some of the evidence promulgated from within Gaza as proof of children starving to death is misleading. Israel is complaining about this, but even before we heard from them, some of the images I had seen made me think "that degree of emaciation looks more like some other horrible form of illness, and why would a non starving looking adult standing next to the child not create the question 'what, have you not been passing on some of your food to that kid for the last 3 months or something?' "
Hence, I think any sensible person should not get carried away with indignation about the cases of misleading photos - stuff like that is going to happen in PR wars, and it in no way counteracts the scenes of utter despair on a broader scale. Have a look at this awful photo, for example:
It wouldn't look out of place in one of the climatic battles from the Lord of the Rings.
The photo, by the way, is at the top of an opinion piece at the Washington Post which argues for something radical, but I think is the kind of radical thinking sorely needed: that Egypt be effectively put in charge of reconstructing and controlling Gaza.
I mean, the wannabe state looks so utterly devastated, and the cost of rebuilding must be so horrendous, that I really can't see any point in reconstruction unless there is iron clad guarantee that it won't end up being destroyed again, ever, by the stupid terrorist adventurism of the likes of Hamas that led to the extreme punishment by Israel. If no other Muslim countries are going to offer an alternative home to Palestinians (and, you know, sometimes I have wondered if Indonesia couldn't gift them a nice tropical island - they have thousands of them - that might end up twice as fertile as the unpleasant looking landscape of Gaza), then I don't see any point in anyone bearing the cost of rebuilding if it is not going to be permanent.
Here are extracts from the WAPO piece:
The only viable path to saving Gazans and stabilizing the Israeli-Palestinian arena is handing Egypt trusteeship over the Gaza Strip.
This is both a moral and a strategic necessity. Egypt is the only actor with the legitimacy, proximity and capacity to rescue Gaza from its current spiral and offer its people a life outside siege, war and despair. It is also the only party trusted enough by both Israel and large segments of the Palestinian population to serve as a custodial power.Two parallel agreements could create the foundation for such an arrangement: one among Egypt, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and another between Egypt and Israel. These would secure the release of all hostages and establish a permanent ceasefire.
The Egyptian-Palestinian agreement would grant Egypt full administrative and security control over Gaza. Hamas would hand over its weapons to the Egyptian army and register all of its members with Egyptian security services. Egypt, in turn, would build a new Palestinian administration for Gaza, with a civil service and police force under Egyptian command. The Egyptian army would deploy throughout the territory to ensure security, end lawlessness and prevent the reconstitution of militant groups.
Simultaneously, a bilateral agreement between Egypt and Israel would formalize Israeli withdrawal and establish appropriate security arrangements, including a border coordination mechanism modeled on the existing Egyptian-Israeli arrangements in Sinai. The blockade would be lifted as security cooperation took shape and stability returned.
This framework would offer all parties a chance to win much while conceding little. It would enable Israel to restore security and eliminate the military threat posed by Hamas. Though transferring control of Gaza to Egypt might run counter to the ambitions of Israel’s most extreme factions, the majority of Israelis have no interest in Gaza beyond ensuring their own security. Egypt’s nearly five decades of security cooperation with Israel should provide sufficient reassurance for them.
For Hamas, this arrangement would allow disarmament without surrender. By handing its weapons to Egypt and not to its enemy, Hamas could claim it liberated Gaza from Israeli occupation, accepting a face-saving exit from its self-destructive cycle of resistance and reprisal.
Sound fairly convincing to me...
You know, I would have a bit more confidence in his predictions if it wasn't actually all about the money supposedly to be made by him:
Meta has spent billions of dollars to revamp its artificial intelligence strategy in recent months, including on a new team of researchers dedicated to creating a “superintelligent” A.I.
On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors why the team would be worth its return on investment.
Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve “nearly every aspect of what we do,” he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create “a new era of individual empowerment,” he added.
The main way people will interact with superintelligence will be through Meta’s smart glasses, which have cameras and software that can shoot and process videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
It's a little weird, isn't it, that we have one arm of AI researchers and advocates warning everyone that a disaster is coming; and another arm (the one that stands to make lots and lots of money from it) telling us that it's going to mean we can all retire to the Bahamas (or Mars), or something, while superintelligent AI runs the world for us.
Isn't it hilarious that the Zuck also makes this claim:
“I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other, and lead more fulfilling lives,” he said.
Is he just rehashing what he wrote for the Metaverse investors meeting all of (what?) 5 or 6 years ago?
