An interesting development

Barr: Trump's Roger Stone tweets "make it impossible for me to do my job" 

Someone so important to Trump telling him to stop tweeting because it's improper and deeply embarrassing?   What will be the Trump response??

The only "good" thing about Trump's tweeting is that it makes his corrupt intentions plain for the world to see.   But he is so dumb, or self involved, he just doesn't realise how harmful it is to his credibility. 

Corruption in plain sight update:

Conservative pundits reaction:

"Ha ha ha - look at those Democrats in disarray about who to choose as their candidate."   

Update 2:   don't misread my posting about this to mean that I think Barr has just discovered "principles" and a backbone.  I'm on side with those who think this is more likely cynical signalling to Trump that he is making it hard for Barr to do his bidding:

In brain related news...

*  Being born blind protects people from getting schizophrenia.   Didn't know this, even though scientists have for quite a while:

Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They've analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case.

As time goes on, larger data sets have emerged: In 2018, a study led by a researcher named Vera Morgan at the University of Western Australia looked at nearly half a million children born between 1980 and 2001 and strengthened this negative association. Pollak, a psychiatrist and researcher at King's College London, remembered checking in the mental health facility where he works after learning about it; he too was unable to find a single patient with congenital blindness who had schizophrenia. 

*  The readiness potential in the brain, the thing which led Libet to suggest its measurement proves there is no free will, is actually closely connected to breathing:

Scientists at EPFL in Switzerland have shown that you are more likely to initiate a voluntary decision as you exhale. Published in today's issue of Nature Communications, these findings propose a new angle on an almost 60-year-old neuroscientific debate about free will and the involvement of the human brain.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it maybe means something....

*   Microdoses of lithium may prove to be protective for Alzheimer's disease:

There remains a controversy in scientific circles today regarding the value of lithium therapy in treating Alzheimer's disease. Much of this stems from the fact that because the information gathered to date has been obtained using a multitude of differential approaches, conditions, formulations, timing and dosages of treatment, results are difficult to compare. In addition, continued treatments with high dosage of lithium render a number of serious adverse effects making this approach impracticable for long term treatments especially in the elderly.

In a new study, however, a team of researchers at McGill University led by Dr. Claudio Cuello of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, has shown that, when given in a formulation that facilitates passage to the brain, lithium in doses up to 400 times lower than what is currently being prescribed for mood disorders is capable of both halting signs of advanced Alzheimer's pathology such as amyloid plaques and of recovering lost cognitive abilities. The findings are published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease....

"Microdoses of lithium at concentrations hundreds of times lower than applied in the clinic for mood disorders were administered at early amyloid pathology stages in the Alzheimer's-like transgenic rat. These results were remarkably positive and were published in 2017 in Translational Psychiatry and they stimulated us to continue working with this approach on a more advanced pathology," notes Dr. Cuello.

Encouraged by these earlier results, the researchers set out to apply the same lithium formulation at later stages of the disease to their transgenic rat modelling neuropathological aspects of Alzheimer's disease. This study found that beneficial outcomes in diminishing pathology and improving cognition can also be achieved at more advanced stages, akin to late preclinical stages of the disease, when amyloid plaques are already present in the brain and when cognition starts to decline.

Update:  I had a feeling lithium as a possible preventative for dementia had a mention before at this blog.  It was back in 2014, referencing a NYT article that was very interesting.

I like it when I re-read old posts and still find them fascinating.

The current wet weather

Well, less than a month ago I did some amateur speculation based on looking at sea surface temperatures, and wondered if we were about to get some heavy rain once the monsoon kicked in.

Seems my speculation might have been right - there has been widespread rain, but most is associated with storm-like systems, resulting in very high intensity falls but uneven distribution.

The weather bureau has been pointing out that because of this uneven distribution, it is exactly "drought breaking" rainfall, and I wondered Toowoomba's dam levels to see how they are doing:

Yeah, there's a long way to go to get to full dams up that way.

I was also surprised to see how poorly those dams have done in the last 4 or so years:

Psychological problems noted

*   Did you read Christopher Eccleston's interview in The Guardian about his bout of serious mental health issues?:

His book focuses heavily on his previously undisclosed struggle with anorexia and a mental breakdown so intense that the Priory psychiatrist Justin Haslam described it as one of the worst cases of clinical depression he had ever seen.

That may have been prompted by a divorce, but it's surprising to read that he's had issues with his body image for a long time:

His doctors told him that there was a severe imbalance in his brain chemistry and he was put on high doses of medication. The trigger might have been the split from his wife, and the guilt around not seeing his children, but Eccleston’s problems had been brewing for years. Since childhood, he had suffered from body image problems. He wanted to be androgynous – “Still do, because I feel like a prop forward” – but he knew his mum and dad wouldn’t have tolerated their kid dabbling in eye liner on the streets of working-class Salford, where he grew up.

“I could do all the male stuff – I was captain of the sports team and I’d get very physical on the field,” he says, “but I also had this interest in femininity. When I did my first play at Eccles college, Lock Up Your Daughters, I wore mascara and I was like: ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ I was expressing on the outside what I felt on the inside.”

He was never confused about his sexuality, although he says he has always appreciated male beauty. His relationship with his male friends had always been especially intimate, too: “It’s a terrible word, but there were suspicions,” he says, “because of how we were together.”

I don't mean to sound rude, but he seems to be disturbed enough to have become a comedian instead of an actor.   (It also would not be a complete surprise if he later decides he is transgender.)

*  How bad is it for Lefties to giggle at Jordan Peterson's personal woes?   Some will obviously go too far; but really, as if Right wing people don't do the same when it turns out a Left wing figure is shown to have personal problems of the kind they have warned others to avoid.   And besides, the schadenfreude should probably be more directed to those on the Right who thought he was genuinely a worthwhile guru, when the evidence has long been there that he (and his daughter) have some crank health ideas that should have served as a warning as to his general reliability for life advice.  

I always thought he was a waffle merchant not worth paying attention to.  More people are likely to share that view now.

I liked this tweet on the topic:

Even Hot Air has a problem with this...

Allahpundit writes on the Stone prosecution matter:

The right thing to do. No one can stop Trump from handing out corrupt pardons to his sleazy cronies but a prosecutor can and should refuse to revisit what he believes is the proper sentencing recommendation just because it gave the president the sads. People should keep resigning until Bill Barr himself has to go into court and inform the judge personally that he’s been notified by a tweet that the original sentence was too harsh.

The rest of his commentary is pretty interesting too.  (He basically doesn't believe the DOJ explanation as to why they intervened, unless they produce the evidence.)

As I have said before:  I can't believe the quality of conservative commentary in Australia that will just say with amusement "Ha, Trump again owning the Democrats, who can't even organise a candidate vote.  And the US economy.   He's going to win."   They are fundamentally non-serious jokers too blinded by tribal political point scoring to acknowledge obvious corruption and authoritarianism.   

Psychoanalysing conservatives and liberals

The Washington Post has an interview with the author of a book:

“Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” is all about how conservatives and liberals not only are drawn to different kinds of media, but tend to have different kinds of psychological makeup.

Here's what she says:

Waldman: What are the key differences in psychological profiles that correlate with whether you’re a liberal or a conservative?

Young: The traits that we’re talking about relate to how individuals engage with threats in their world, meaning how much are you monitoring your environment for threats and how much are you cognizant of your own mortality?

So that's where this trait “need for cognition” comes into play: that you enjoy thinking. The other one at the center of this is a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. If you don't perceive your world to be scary and dangerous, you are not going to be as motivated to process things efficiently because you're not always worried about your survival. And you would not be uncomfortable with situations or texts that are ambiguous.

Need for cognition is something that we find is significantly lower amongst social and cultural conservatives. They are more likely to seek order, predictability and routine in their lives. This also translates into how they think about ambiguous texts.

And it’s quite intuitive that people who are drawn to abstract art, wild jazz music and stories in literature that are absurd or that don’t resolve — like the plot doesn’t tie up in the end — the kinds of people who are drawn to those things and who enjoy those things are higher in tolerance for ambiguity and they’re higher in need for cognition. They also tend to be liberal.

Waldman: So Fox News or conservative talk radio isn’t just about being angry, it’s also about threats.

Young: It’s about identifying people, institutions, parties and policies that pose a threat. It’s also about the aesthetic package of that genre, which is didactic and clear. You are never confused about where Sean Hannity stands on an issue. You’re never like, “Oh, that was rather layered. What could he actually mean?”

Waldman: “Getting” the joke is also important to people who like satire. Explain what that’s about.

Young: The kind of satire that really exemplifies this processing is irony, because irony is saying the opposite of what you intend. This is what humor scholars call incongruity, because there are two competing elements, and it’s the audience who makes sense of them and brings them together.

This is something that is really taxing cognitively. Not only are some people not good at it, some people just don’t enjoy it. It’s like riddle solving, where you as the audience are adding something to be able to then understand it.

I have mixed feelings about this:   I think it seems to describe the psychological state of conservatives now - especially American conservatives; but it seems to me it was not always as pronounced as this. I tend to be more interested in the question - how did conservatives go so nuts?

Early emotional scars, and future sexual behaviour

Over at AEON there's an autobiographical essay by an English woman prompted by her strong reaction when a new friend says he is in a polyamorous relationship (she reacts strongly against the idea because she had a father who cheated on her mother on an apparently massive scale):  

My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car.

After he finally left his wife and 2 children, he made a return with a surprising proposal:

He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people.

On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said.

 But the main reason I thought it worth posting about the  essay is this part of it:  

‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow.

In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein.

From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right.

I have always thought that boarding school from a young age would be emotionally harmful, but I have never felt sure whether I was just projecting from what I am sure would have been my own poor reaction if ever it had been proposed that I had to leave home for schooling.  I wonder if it has been more broadly studied, or if that book is the only one on the topic?
 

Most controversial comment about Parasite

Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones wrote:

First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.

This sounds, of course, like he's saying that he prefers dubbing to subtitles.

And that is a controversial opinion, with this Tweet, which (shall we say) succinctly expressing disbelief that a writer (let alone one from a liberal publication) could say that, now having 9,000 retweets and 46,000 likes.

Even my teenage kids agree that dubbing is awful (in live action movies at least - it passes adequately in animation) and they always turn on subtitles for foreign content on Netflix, even if I am not watching it with them.

Kevin Drum needs re-education camp, or something...

Rule of Federal law optional in Trump's America

As someone down further in the thread says, with intended sarcasm I assume:

Revenge of the pangolin?

Pangolins only came to my attention back in 2014, although there has since been a David Attenborough narrated documentary which publicised their plight as victims of Chinese traditional medicine.

If the current coronovirus problem leads to Chinese not eating any, or as many, endangered wild animals for imaginary health benefits, that will at least be something good to come of it.  See this:

Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?

Movie reviewed: Parasite

I missed Parasite at the cinema, where it was still on at some arthouse places only a few weeks ago, it seems; but found on the weekend (to my surprise) that it was already available as a $7 rental on Google Play.  Cool.  I feel a bit sorry for the cinema owners, though.   Mind you, it would cost at least $30 for just me and my son to go see it at a cinema.   But I digress.

I think it's a good to very good movie, but perhaps didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I might.   I think it made me feel too anxious from too early in the movie as to how the whole scenario was going to unravel, as it was clear that it couldn't last.

I am also a little surprised as to how widely praised it has been, not because it deserves criticism as such, but because it seems so Korean-centric in its social commentary.   I mean, it is a very peculiar country - its susceptibility to cults; its torment at having a madman leader with brainwashed public support just to their north;  the crushing school system with students bearing a pressure like no other nation I know of.   (Yet, the movie indicated, overqualified university graduates abound.)   Even the enormously successful entertainment industry that is K Pop is notorious for its "dark and tragic underbelly".  Recently it was in the news that 75% of young Koreans would love to leave the country.   This article on the survey actually makes the case that things are not as bad in terms of inequality as the youth seem to think.   Maybe it's another Korean speciality - to complain that things are worse than they are?

The movie made me want to read up more on the social problems of the country, but I have had no time so far.   I also want to now read in detail reviews about the movie, as I resisted doing that because I didn't want too much in the way of spoilers to be accidentally revealed.

My son, by the way, said he loved it;  but then he, like many young people, thought Joker was great too.  (He went by himself - I have no interest in it.)   I am a little worried about what it says about the world when dark movies are so popular, but at least Parasite has a veneer of plausibility and isn't one that you have to worry about incels feeling endorsement.

I will probably update this later when I have read more about it...

Update:   did the movie remind anyone else of the Morlocks and Eloi from HG Wells' The Time Machine?

Update 2:  it has won best picture, best director and 2 other awards?   Seems a bit excessive, if you ask me.  Mind you, I haven't seen seen 1917 yet, so I don't know how it compares...  

Update 3:  I see that it's in fact the first foreign language film to win Best Picture.   Just occurred to me that I would have preferred Roma, which I found a mesmerising pleasure to watch, to be able to claim that title.   

The disinformation campaign

Oh look, another detailed, serious article on the appalling use of social media as the most effective propaganda/disinformation tool we've ever seen.

It's a good and important read.

As someone on Twitter said, in response to this article, and as a summary of how the Republicans got to where they are today:

The Republican Senators who said "he will have learnt a lesson" should be ridiculed until election day

When psychiatrists go nuts

Oh, so this is why "QAnon" is trending in Australia:

A Sydney psychiatrist who posted “bizarre” alt-right conspiracy theories he claimed were the directives of US President Donald Trump to his practice’s official website has been struck off the medical register.

The Dee Why doctor Russell Everard McGregor claimed Trump had taped evidence of a global Satanist paedophile network, that 9/11 was faked, and that the ABC was part of an international deep state network covering up the crimes of the elite.

Many of the 300-plus posts from 2018 onwards related to the debunked QAnon conspiracy that suggests Trump is leading a crusade against “deep state” forces who protect satanic paedophile rings.
“Fight with your keyboard, knowledge and pen,” McGregor wrote in one post in January 2018.

“Follow Q breadcrumbs on 8chan.

“The evil truth will be hard for most to bear. Be brave. Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.”

Minister completely uninterested in who invented figures in his office

It is basically ridiculous that Taylor will not admit that the evidence clearly points to an invention of figures by someone in his office.

Taylor has “unreservedly” apologised to Moore for relying on the falsified figures but has denied consistently that either he, or anyone in his office, altered the City of Sydney document to inflate travel expenditure. Taylor has said the document with the incorrect numbers was obtained from the council website.

But the council has produced evidence showing that its publicly available annual reports has only ever contained accurate figures. Metadata and screenshots from the council’s content management system showed the annual reports on its website had not been changed since they were originally uploaded.

As I said last week, Ministers used to be forced to resign for mere accidents that they were still held responsible for;  now, they think they can ride out actual fraudulent behaviour within their office if they say "sorry about that".

The Chaser has a funny tweet about this:

Killing animals not a great way to make a living

I had wondered about the psychological effects of working in an abattoir.  An article in The Conversation confirms a suspicion that it is not great for mental health:

The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers

view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.

There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.

Another study noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....

Surprisingly, Flinders University research has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender differences.

The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes

the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced, shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once again, finally coming to a close.

Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

If you ask me...

....political commentators who are centrists (or outright sympathetic to Democrats) are hyperventilating way too much about how much of a "disaster" the intra party tabulation of votes in one State really is.

It is very reminiscent of the media's intense concentration on how much of a political problem Hillary's emails were going to be.   Don't they realise their role in making these things self-fulfilling prophecies?

Yay Mitt

A few key paragraphs in Mitt Romney's speech:

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did....

The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The president’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect." No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values.

Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the ugly conservative

The fact that he has lung cancer should be no excuse for not observing that Rush Limbaugh has been a pig of a broadcaster for decades, and a major player in corroding the tone of mainstream conservatism in its American (and to some extent, Australian) incarnation to one which is every bit as obnoxious as any extremism in language and tone to be found on the Left.   It's worse for the Right, though, as it is meant to be part of a Christian landscape where they are supposedly taught to be better than their political enemy. 

It should be an embarrassment to the Republicans that he was endorsed so early on (I had forgotten that his fandom goes right back to Ronald Reagan), and nothing he did - no name calling, no factually wrong claims, no false rumour endorsed, no racist or misogynistic "jokes", ever caused serious estrangement from their circle. 

Should he be cut some slack for some rhetorical hyperbole if he is an "entertainer"?   No - you can only hide before the clowning for a limited time:  everyone knows there is genuine sentiment behind (say) racist tinged jokes if they are repeated often enough.

I see that he has been married four times and has no kids.   (Why are so many prominent American conservatives so bad at keeping spouses, I wonder as a half rhetorical question.)   He should be swimming in money, though - the internet says a net worth of half a billion dollars.     I hope he leaves a lot of it to charities, and not just political ones.   

But overall, politics will only benefit from the ending of his continued corrosive influence.  

The 18th century rabbit hoax

Can't say I knew of this (rather unpleasant) 18th century hoax, as explained in a book review at Literary Review:

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of rabbits – a number of them, over a period of several weeks. None of the rabbits, not even a ‘perfect’ one, survived their birth, but the surgeon bottled them up and declared his intention to present them as specimens to the Royal Society. A report in the British Gazeteer furnished readers with the woman’s explanation. Some months earlier she and other women working in a field had chased a rabbit and failed to catch it. She was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she pined to eat rabbit and had been unable to avoid thinking of rabbits.

The story was a sensation. It was not only the poor who believed a pregnant woman’s thoughts could affect the workings of her body – hence the arrival of the eminent surgeon at Toft’s bedside (the truly strange news would have been that an agricultural labourer had such care at all). More serious scientific men followed. Local people came in droves to stare. Excitement grew. King George I himself took an interest in the case. Could it be that something marvellous was about to be revealed? Toft was moved to London to be closer to the king and his doctors. Once lodged in a bagnio in Leicester Square, Toft found the delivery of rabbits – for, spoiler alert, the whole thing was a hoax – more problematic. The bagnio porter eventually admitted he had been told to go out and buy rabbits. Cut, skinned, only occasionally whole, rabbits had been introduced into Toft via her vagina in order to be found. Local women – a knife grinder’s wife, her own mother-in-law – seem to have masterminded the hoax, with the collusion of her husband. They promised her that she would ‘get so good a living’ from it that ‘I should never want as long as I lived’.

By December, a justice of the peace had been called in and Toft was arrested. She spent four months imprisoned in the Bridewell, doing hard labour. But no crime could be fastened on her and she was released.