That troublesome Chinese belief

I complained once before that one of the worst things to come out of China (or Asia more generally?) is the belief that certain animal parts carry certain health benefits.   (I keep thinking there must be a single word for that, but what is it?)  Nature reports:

The jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize City, Belize, on the day after Christmas last year. Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs. On 10 January, a second cat — this time, an ocelot that may have been mistaken for a young jaguar — turned up headless in the same channel.

The killings point to a growing illicit trade in jaguars (Panthera onca) that disturbs wildlife experts. The cats’ fangs, skulls and hides have long been trophies for Latin American collectors who flout international prohibitions against trading in jaguar parts. But in recent years, a trafficking route has emerged to China, where the market for jaguars could be increasing because of crackdowns on the smuggling of tiger parts used in Chinese traditional medicine.

Wildlife trafficking often follows Chinese construction projects in other countries, because Chinese workers can send or take objects home, says ecologist Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. “If there’s a demand [in China] for large-cat parts, and that demand can be fulfilled by people living in parts of Africa, other parts of Asia or South America, then someone will step in to fill that demand,” he says. “It’s often Chinese-to-Chinese trade, but it’s turning global.”

Does no one at the top of Chinese government (hello, dictator elect Xi) think that it might be useful to have a government backed campaign to stop the population believing in quasi magical "traditional medicine", at least if it involves animal parts?

Not just piety on their mind

Well, at least it's good to see it's not just Catholics with problems about how the apparently pious carry on sexually:

#MosqueMeToo Gives Muslim Women A Voice About Sexual Misconduct At Mecca

Dressed in a hijab and covered from head to toe, she felt something. Someone — a man — had grabbed onto her butt and would not let go.

The Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, called hajj, was supposed to be the holiest moment of Mona Eltahawy's life. When she was 15, she journeyed there with her family. The magnificence of the Great Mosque had taken her breath away. But that man turned the trip into a nightmare.

If I ruled the world....

....I would  ban the internet advertising companies "Taboola" and "Outbrain" and any other that fills up websites with crappy photo links to fake news and stupid ads.  

I'm thoroughly sick of them.

A bad look

Just what the Church needs right now - monsignors in Rome with child porn and on the prowl in the public squares:

A judge on a top Vatican tribunal was given a 14-month suspended sentence by an Italian court for possessing child pornography and sexual molestation. He then resigned his position on the Roman Rota, the tribunal.

According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Mgr Pietro Amenta, a judge on the Rota, a court that deals mainly with marriage cases, accepted the terms of plea bargain on February 14....

Mgr Amenta was detained by police in March 2017 after he was accused of fondling an 18-year-old man in a public square in Rome. The young man followed him and called the police, who subsequently took Mgr Amenta into custody, Italian newspapers reported.

And there's another one under investigation:

The other is presumed to be that of Mgr Carlo Capella, a former Vatican diplomat recalled from service in Washington in 2017 shortly after the Vatican was notified by the U.S. Department of State “of a possible violation of laws relating to child pornography images by a member of the diplomatic corps of the Holy See accredited to Washington.”

An arrest warrant was also issued in Canada for Mgr Capella one month later for accessing, possessing and distributing child pornography.

Modern "conservatism"

I see that Max Boot is divorcing himself from the description "conservative", and with excellent reason:

Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. Now, as the Daily Beast notes, he has become a conspiratorial crank who has suggested that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was staged by liberals, that Barack Obama is a “gay Muslim” and Michelle Obama is a man and that Adolf Hitler, who sent 50,000 homosexuals to prison, “was NOT anti-gay.” He managed to sink even lower last week by mocking stunned Parkland school-shooting survivors after the Florida legislature defeated a bill to ban assault weapons: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

It is hard to imagine anything more cruel and heartless, but for a bottom-feeder like D’Souza it’s all in a day’s work. As he wrote in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative,” “One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.” (Thanks to Windsor Mann for the quote.) That, in a nutshell, is the credo of today’s high-profile conservatives: Say anything to “trigger” the “libtards” and “snowflakes.” The dumber and more offensive, the better. Whatever it takes to get on (and stay on) Fox News and land the next book contract!

Naturally, just as drug addicts need bigger doses over time, these outrage artists must be ever more transgressive to get the attention they crave. Coulter’s book titles have gone from accusing Bill Clinton of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” to accusing all liberals of “Treason,” of being “Godless” and even “Demonic.” Her latest assault on the public’s intelligence was called “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!”

That's a pretty good explanation of the situation.

Violence re-visited

Trump recently mentioned violent media after the Florida shooting (yes, I know, more as a diversion from taking action on gun control), but the topic did cross my mind again this weekend when I tried watching two things on Netflix. 

First, the (generally) critically well received Mindhunter.   [Spoiler follows].   The first episode starts with a hostage situation, and a very sudden and violent gun suicide.   It is quick, but done in a way you would never have envisaged as acceptable for TV violence, say, 20 years ago.    (Head pretty much blown off like a watermelon.)   The rest of the episode was, I thought, strangely bad in other ways.   The acting and dialogue seemed remarkably stilted and unnatural - no one seemed quite real.   I won't be watching it again.

Then my son was watching The Punisher - first episode perhaps?   I came in late, and was skeptical - I am finding I don't like any Marvel TV or streaming shows that I have sampled.

Well, near the end, the hero goes berserk with a construction hammer, killing or maiming I don't know who (baddies, generically, I assume).   The scene was graphic and unpleasantly violent in a way that, again, I think media representation just would not have contemplated a relatively short time ago.   I see that some people on Reddit and elsewhere have raised questions about the amount of physical violence in the show, so I know I am not alone.   There's something about the idea of a hammer to the head, or watching legs being broken,  that I find particularly grotesque. 

Now, I know - you can carry on about squeamishness about media depiction of violence in many different ways,  pointing to a myriad of psychological studies on its effects and their uncertain results, and get into bigger discussions about how civilised society used to consider actual violence (public executions) as public spectacle.

But I just cannot get over the feeling that certain things make common sense:

a.    if military training had to evolve to overcome the ordinary soldier's reluctance to kill, surely it's not unreasonable to think that modern, graphic first person shooter games are doing the same job on the minds of at least the mentally unstable, aggressive male who has thoughts about shooting up his school or workplace.   (In fact, I would be curious to know whether modern military training finds it's a lot easier to get their new recruits into no guilt shooting these days, given gaming and media depictions of blood and gore.)

b.   psychology has hit a crisis of experimental credibility, yet it would seem that it certainly hasn't spread to skepticism about some of the experiments to do with media violence.    And when you read what some of the studies do (for example, look at whether players of Grand Theft Auto are just as likely to pick up someone's dropped pen), you really do have to wonder about their value.

c.   the relationship between media and gaming violence and real life violence is obviously not simple, otherwise the rate of crime generally would be going up in the US and Australia, rather than downwards as it has been in the last couple of decades.   But does that mean there is no relationship between its increase and potential for negative effects on society or individuals?   No, I don't think.

d.  the depiction of graphic violence is undoubtedly desensitising to the viewing of violence, and how can that be a good thing?    To the contrary, isn't it a positive thing that we now find the idea of watching someone's neck being broken in an hanging as a somewhat grotesque interest in watching death; and if so, why shouldn't I be disturbed that some people have no reservation from watching a realistic depiction of a head being blown off by a shot gun?   Surely the desensitising to the viewing of a violent act make it easier for a person of the "right" mind frame to imagine carrying it out themselves?   The effect may be so marginal as to not reflect in general crime rates, but gee, there are lot of mass shootings happening in the US at the moment.

My negative feelings are intuitive but impossible to shake; and it is so obvious that the graphic depiction of violence is completely unnecessary for a scene to have emotional impact.    And emotional impact is different from desensitising.   Why risk desensitising someone who should not be desensitised to an act they can contemplate doing themselves, be it a shooting, stabbing or hammer blow to the head?    

Why has it become a non issue to Hollywood, gaming and media producers to contemplate the potential effect of their depiction of violence?    It is a strangely non-political issue, too - the Left used to deride movies from (say) the 1980's that seemed to espouse Right wing viewpoints as being too violent;  but then with the likes of Tarantino and the generally liberal bias of 95% of Hollywood and movie reviewers, and  you would have to say that the Left has given up having any moral concerns at all about violence of any kind.  

I think reasonable people should be debating why graphic violence is portrayed so readily and frequently these days, and urging creative types to think seriously about it.

Update:  I think my last lengthy post about movie violence was this one, from 2012, and I stand by what I said then.   I am bothered that the same things now need to be said about Marvel associated Netflix content.

Blame the "therapists"

I've always thought that allowing an "emotional support animal" on a plane is a peculiarly American fad, and one that's so silly that it was going to stop soon of its own accord.  Hence I haven't really paid it much attention.

I didn't realise that it's become a money making internet thing, too:

How is it legal to bring your duck on the plane? Under the federal Air Carrier Access Act, passengers are allowed to bring animals aboard by showing a letter from a mental health clinician or doctor asserting that the pet is part of their therapy. But the law is surprisingly vague about which species can come on board and gives airlines significant discretion. “You are never required to accommodate certain unusual service animals (e.g., snakes, other reptiles, ferrets, rodents, and spiders) as service animals in the cabin,” it reads.

Yet as a quick Google search will show, it’s possible to obtain these letters online for a small fee. Some passengers may very well be exploiting the law to bring pets on planes. And stories about peacocks and ducks in booties on planes are increasingly leading ESAs (and their handlers) to be treated as a punchline. In the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt called the animals a “scam” and “one of the downsides of a modern culture that too often fetishizes individual preference and expression over communal well-being.”

The rest of the article is an interview with a psychology researcher who says its not even well established that they are good idea.   

Barely beating not a good sign?

Not sure if I had heard of this before.  From a BBC article on body conditions  and how they may relate to personality:

Meanwhile, although a low-resting heartbeat is usually considered a sign of good physical health, when it comes to personality, the implications are darker. Several studies have found that a lower resting heart rate correlates with higher psychopathy scores. People who match this description show superficial charm, fearlessness and impulsivity. This is not too surprising considering studies already link low-resting heart rate with aggressive and criminal behaviour. The two main explanations are that low heart rate is a sign of fearlessness and that it can reflect an unpleasant state of being “under aroused”, prompting some psychopathic people to seek relief through violence and conflict. As ever, more research is needed to test these ideas.

I'm guessing that there might be a difference between those who have a very low heart rate through dedication to an exercise regime, and those who just have a low rate regardless of exercise.

For example, I thought Donald Trump's reported heart rate for his age (and with no exercise to speak of) was pretty low:  68bpm.   But apparently Obama and (especially) George W Bush had much lower heart rates:   56 and 43 respectively.    See this link for the comparisons between them.

Tim Blair, get a life, and grow up

This might seem an odd thing for me to lose my temper over,  but Tim Blair has become a snide gormless twerp whose shtick is now almost entirely restricted to name calling and attempted take downs of anyone to the Left of him, just for being to the Left of him.

Why should he care that there's an art exhibition of paintings by an executed heroin trafficker?   The guy's dead;  he sounded (unlike Blair) to have become morally serious before he died.   As for his mother:

 The mother of executed Bali Nine drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran wants her son's artwork to travel the world as a powerful anti-death penalty message.

Speaking to 7.30 for the first time since Sukumaran's death in Indonesia in 2015, Raji Sukumaran said her once staunch-faith in God had been shaken by the execution of her son.

She recalled trying to enjoy her time with him as she watched him painting in prison, first in Bali then on the execution island of Nusakambangan.

Seems a bizarrely inappropriate thing for art critic Blair to be paying any heed to.

Or was it just to bring in another (I'm sure he would have referenced this before) snide attack on a Labor politician for being married to a reformed heroin offender?  Well, given its Tanya Plibersek's face plastered on the post, with the "hilarious" (sarc) title "An Injection of Culture", yes, that seems to be what this post is about. 

What it the Tim Blair take on this?   Once a heroin dealer/user, you deserve to either be shot or never employed ever again?   Is that the Right line to take on the matter of redemption, or rehabilitation?  That it's impossible?   And that a woman who marries one, well after his rehabilitation, and goes on to have a family with him, is to be derided for that?    Derided for what, for God's sake?  

I actually see that he's getting some blowback in comments.  And so he should.  He should take the post down, the creep.

Update:   Just how thoroughly the Plibersek story has been told before is well illustrated in this article from 2015, when she made (I had forgotten) a speech in Parliament decrying the execution of Sukumaran.  

That Plibersek, given her life story, should make such a speech is entirely understandable.

That she should still be supporting the cause of the anti-death penalty is entirely understandable.

That Blair should be continuing to deride a drugs rehabilitation success story and his wife is completely absurd, offensive and stupid. 

Netflix perhaps needs more control?

There's a really savage review at The Guardian about Duncan Jones's latest movie, which is one in a recent string of really poorly reviewed Netflix science fiction/fantasy films (Bright, Cloverfield Paradox, and this one - Mute).    I guess I can't blame Netflix for Cloverfield Paradox, which they picked up from another studio that finally decided they didn't want to risk a cinema release, but this review of Mute indicates that the Netflix system seems to be to give director/writers a cheque and hope that they will produce the goods.

If that's correct, it seems that such a system, while sounding like a way to get more interesting and less "cookie cutter" films made, may instead be showing the advantages of more top down intervention by studios - at least if you have people with the right sensibilities at the top.

The trouble with white rice

How come I had never heard of the story of the Japanese struggling with beriberi, caused by white rice having thiamine removed from it, right through to the 20th century?    Sure, we all know of the British Navy and scurvy, but this story is really much bigger, and one I was unfamiliar with.

Some extracts:

In 1877, Japan’s Meiji Emperor watched his aunt, the princess Kazu, die of a common malady: kakke. If her condition was typical, her legs would have swollen, and her speech slowed. Numbness and paralysis might have come next, along with twitching and vomiting. Death often resulted from heart failure.

The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice.

Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.

This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown....

By 1877, Japan’s beriberi problem was getting really serious. When the princess Kazu died of kakke at 31, it was only a decade after her former husband, Japan’s shogun, had died, almost certainly from the mysterious disease. Machine-milling made polished rice available to the masses, and as the government invested in an army and navy, it fed soldiers with white rice. (White rice, as it happened, was less bulky and lasted longer than brown rice, which could go rancid in warm weather.) Inevitably, soldiers and sailors got beriberi.

No longer was this just a problem for the upper class, or even Japan. In his article British India and the “Beriberi Problem,” 1798–1942, David Arnold writes that by the time the emperor was funding research, beriberi was ravaging South and East Asia, especially “soldiers, sailors, plantation labourers, prisoners, and asylum inmates.”

Go read the whole article, at Atlas Obscura, to read about the experiments that found a solution.

One act wonder

A ridiculous, repetitive, zero gravitas narcissistic clown with authoritarian inclinations:

President Trump took full advantage of a boisterous, supportive crowd during his morning speech at CPAC. He chose to return to his campaign trail rhetoric — including a full reading of his favorite immigration allegory, "The Snake" — and prompted the room to break into familiar chants of "lock her up!" and "build the wall!" He clearly relished the environment, asking the crowd at one point if he could "go off script a bit" because the text in his teleprompter was "boring."

And now, the end is near, and so he'll face, the final tea-towel

That heading will make no sense at all in 20 year's time, unless this link still works.

Anyway, Barnaby is giving a press conference in an hour or so's time, and although everyone expects it's to announce his resignation as deputy PM, it would be hilarious if instead he says he's not going anywhere.   (Prediction - if the latter, another tale of harassment or affair will emerge within a fortnight.)

Just about sums it up...

As seen on twitter:

Update:  it occurs to me, if the example of the miserable teacher Arky, who comments regularly at Catallaxy, is anything to go by, you would have to be careful about the mental well being of the teachers being issued guns.

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, given the American Right friends that he has, I see that Tim Blair thinks teachers having a 9mm pistol is a good idea.    Which leads me to suspect that he has little or no experience with pistol use and no idea about their accuracy, range and lethality in comparison to a dude with an AR15 blasting away.   (I'm no expert, either, but you only need to try them a couple of times to realise their limitations.)  

While it is not inconceivable that a future shooter might be taken down by a pistol shot (most probably, from behind and at close range) - you would think that mass shooting at  military bases might give a hint to gun lovers that more guns in the general vicinity of a shooter's target is no disincentive to the start of mass shootings.    That "Gun Free Zones" encourage shooters is one of the stupidest arguments that the Right grabs.

The nutter not having a gun in the first place is a much more reliable way to prevent shootings.

Beetroot to the rescue

Beetroot juice supplements may help enhance exercise capacity in patients with heart failure, according to a new proof-of-concept study. Exercise capacity is a key factor linked to these patients' quality of life and even survival.

Here's the link.   I do like juices with a large component of beetroot in them.   I like fresh, roasted beetroot in salad.   I like using the leaves in salad too.   That makes it a very versatile vegetable.   However, my wife is not so keen, although she does like borscht, which I don't find all that interesting.  

However, if the main friction in a family kitchen is over the appropriate use of beetroot, you're not doing too bad.

Who owns guns

Interesting Pew Research Centre report on the demographics of gun ownership in the US.    It's quite the while male thing:

White men are especially likely to be gun owners: About half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women.

which probably helps explain why so many at Catallaxy blog own guns too:  I don't think it could be any whiter in both posters and commenters.

It would be good to see an Australian demographic breakup of gun ownership.

Sucking lead

E-cigarettes seem pretty popular with the libertarian crowd, so it is with some degree of schadenfreude that I read they may be dumbing themselves down* by using them:

Significant amounts of toxic metals, including lead, leak from some e-cigarette heating coils and are present in the aerosols inhaled by users, according to a study from scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

In the study, published online in Environmental Health Perspectives on February 21, the scientists examined e-cigarette devices owned by a sample of 56 users. They found that significant numbers of the devices generated aerosols with potentially unsafe levels of lead, chromium, manganese and/or nickel. Chronic inhalation of these metals has been linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular and brain damage, and even cancers.

The Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate e-cigarettes but is still considering how to do so. The finding that e-cigarettes expose users—known as vapers—to what may be harmful levels of toxic metals could make this issue a focus of future FDA rules.

So,  the people who dislike government regulation may have spent the last couple of years sucking down unsafe levels of lead due to lack of regulation.    Huh.


*  One effect of lead: Lead displaces calcium in the reactions that transmit electrical impulses in the brain, which is another way of saying it diminishes your ability to think or recall information, or makes you stupid.

The mental universe

A short, interesting take here on the matter of quantum theory interpretations, and whether the "mental" is at the bottom of it all.  The last paragraph:

The hypothesis here, which I have elaborated upon in detail elsewhere, is that thought—whose characteristic ambiguities may in fact be what quantum superposition states ultimately represent—underlies all nature and isn’t restricted to living organisms. The physical world of an observing organism may arise from an interaction—an interference pattern—between the organism’s thoughts and the thoughts underlying the inanimate universe that surrounds it. Although each organism—in accordance with RQM—may indeed inhabit its own private world of perceptions, all organisms may be surrounded by a common environment of thoughts, which avoids solipsism at least in spirit.

A funny Rowe

I thought this David Rowe cartoon today was a particularly funny one:

Yet more Black Panther skepticism

First:   I call on Jason Soon to tell us what you thought of the movie.  [Please].

And then read the skeptical analysis of the race politics of the movie (not so dissimilar from the take on it in Boston Review I posted about before) which has appeared in Esquire.    Some bits:

When it comes to Killmonger, Black Panther’s politics are not especially liberatory, especially since the film’s title (not to mention its Oakland bookends) evoke the revolutionary politics of Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, and the Black Panther Party. While often hilariously anti-colonial in characters’ laugh lines, Black Panther’s major plot wants the audience to root for T’Challa largely because as the legitimate male son; he has a respectable blood claim to Wakanda’s throne—and what is a more colonialist ideology than upholding the divine right of kings?....

Killmonger wants to use Wakanda’s weapons to stop the suffering of Black people globally, and we, the audience, are manipulated into rooting against this because we live in an ideology in which nonviolence is always expected of Black people no matter what. As James Baldwin wrote, “The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes… is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.” I could not bring myself to root against Killmonger’s desire to help the Black diaspora any more than I could begrudge him wanting to take the throne of his child of the man who’d killed his father. 

But most disappointing was how Killmonger was morally positioned in contrast to the white CIA agent, Everett Ross (Martin Freeman). Coogler sets up the audience to dislike Killmonger because he was made to kill many people by the U.S. military; meanwhile, after saving a Wakanda woman’s life, Ross was turned into your friendly neighborhood CIA agent. Every scar on Killmonger's hot, shirtless torso is for someone he’s taken out—including many Black people. It is Ross (while using Shuri’s technology) who actually stops Killmonger’s crew from exporting weapons from Wakanda to help Black people....

While the audience was positioned not to forgive American-bred violence in Killmonger, we were positioned to forgive it in Agent Ross.

 The rehabilitation is also a kind of absolution of American imperialism, granting cover to how the CIA (in our Wakanda-less world) has been arming African countries and playing them against each other for decades. Meanwhile, when Killmonger chooses death over help from T’Challa and talks about the middle passage, he doesn’t speak of becoming enslaved in terms of America—but as something the African nation of Wakanda might do to him. It was painful to see Africa and an African American pitted against each other this way, while a CIA agent was redeemed.