England, flooding and Conservatives

So, large parts of England are under water again.

Attributing any particular flood to climate change is a tricky thing, given the range of factors that help contribute to flooding generally.   (Look, even an opinion piece at The Guardian complains that a lot of current flooding is causing by poor infrastructure decisions.)   But the more floods that appear the more it's fair to assume that the attribution studies will confirm the connection with increased flooding generally.    

Fortunately, for England, their brand of conservatism is not tied to culture war denial of climate change:

The warnings came as George Eustice, the new environment secretary, admitted that the “nature of climate change” means the government cannot protect every household from extreme weather, such as recent storms which have brought flooding to parts of the UK.

“We’ll never be able to protect every single household just because of the nature of climate change and the fact that these weather events are becoming more extreme,” Mr Eustice told Sky News.

Why did Australian conservatism decide to follow the line of American conservative denialism, instead of the European path?   Probably the IPA I would say - and at heart, the American and Australian conservative path was likely formed by mining interest funding to "think tanks".  I would assume that limited mining (at least on land) in England means they have never been targeted in the same way.   

Fornication soon

For those disappointed that there is no new post yet - all 3 of you - things are busy at work and personally.

But I am working on a post about how early Stoics were not very "stoic" at all about sex, and how odd it seems that a pornographic painting of Zeus and Hera played a role in justifying their views.

This is what happens when you have an hour to kill at St Lucia, as I did last Saturday, and you go to the University library and notice a book on the shelf entitled: The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity.

More to come...

Update:  it just occurred to me that story of the sexual grooming of a young student by an old sports coach of St Kevin's College which featured on last night's 4 Corners (and it was a very sordid case) was the sort of stuff which [some] Greek philosophers would have thought was actually appropriate; almost noble.   Ancient Greece was a very different place, and one that it's hard to get your head around.

Update 2:  OK, my update should be qualified, as I reminded myself about the massive contradictions in ancient Greek writings about how homosexuality was viewed - including those around the nature of the teacher/mentor and student relationships.  I am sure I read this article many years ago, and linked to it in a post.  

A simple question

With all the fuss about Huawei and the 5G network, is it possible for Western governments with concerns to just keep using 4G network and make all government related work use phones which are only 4G capable?  And recommend all businesses with security concerns, or just Joe Public, to do the same if they want to?

I mean, I've never really understood what the appeal of 5G is meant to be.  Isn't 4G plenty good enough for nearly all use these days?  5G capable phones are just becoming available (as is the network itself, which needs a heap more antennas across a city) but is there any real demand for 5G phones?

So why would it be such a big deal to keep using the 4G network and 4G only phones?

Probably there is a technical reason, but I would like to know....
  

Uncut trash

I had to abandon watching Uncut Gems, the movie slavered over by nearly all critics in one of those cases where their enthusiasm looks more like a group dynamic than anything the mere audience can understand, after 30 (maybe 40?) minutes.

Three things about the film were rendering it unwatchable:

1.    has there ever been a movie with a worse sound mix?   It had to be intentional, and I presume designed to make situations seem more stressful; but to me it's a complete artist failure, and doesn't feel like real life at all.   If you have seen it, you would surely have to know what I mean - the way dialogue is surrounded by a soup of other noise (mostly, other people voices).  Here's how I think real life works:  even if you are in a room where everyone is talking but you are concentrating on one speaker, you either have to both shout to be heard over the din, or you are able to mentally focus on the one voice and don't notice so much the other murmur.  And in film, unless you have characters shouting at other over noise, that is why you can reduce the other ambient noise to a level (and a kind of blur) where the audience doesn't find it distracting.   This movie ignores that completely.

I don't know how they did the sound in this film - maybe they did just put mikes all over the place and let the extras talk and not bother mixing it at all.    But it really, really, drove me nuts, because my mind refused to accept that this is how sound in film should work.

2.   Has there ever been such a praised film with such a God-awful, weirdly anachronistic musical soundtrack?   It reminded me a bit of John Carpenter's cheap-as electronic soundtracks.  But he was working in the 80's - this film is set in 2012.   I have no idea why they thought this was appropriate, and it kept intruding too.

3.   As I have always said, it doesn't matter what the swear word de jour is, and I don't care if it reflects how certain people in New York speak - its intense overuse in a screenplay renders dialogue into a tedium of listening to what is effectively just a verbal tic.   (Don't teenagers who get into the trap of using "like" once or twice n every single sentence start driving you nuts?  Why am I supposed to find one verbal tic irritating, but not another?)    I see that it's in the top ten movies for "f count" - looking at the list there is only one other I have seen (Casino - and I remember feeling it was OK-ish but not particularly great).   


Of course, movies about seedy characters and a quasi criminal underworld are not generally my thing, and I have repeated asked what does someone like Scorsese want to forever keep returning to it.  (He has, by the way, an executive producer credit on this film.)     But even so, I just couldn't stay with the film, which didn't seem to setting up a "first act" that held any dramatic interest anyway.

I have looked at reviews for any negative ones.  At least Dana Stevens in Slate seemed to be nearly as bothered by the sound mix as me:

...most conversations in Howard’s world are operatic screaming matches, conducted over the competing noise of overlapping background dialogue, the incessant buzzing of the locked bulletproof glass door that leads into the shop, and an ambient—perhaps too ambient, as in omnipresent—electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, who composes under the name Oneohtrix Point Never. 

And her conclusion:

...I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground. 

Very glad I gave up on it when I did!

And finally, there is pretty good reason to suspect that the critical reception is not being met with the same response from audiences:  Variety asks Uncut Gems’: The Startling Indie Smash That Audiences…Don’t Like?

The appalling Fox News

This is transparently setting up an excuse for Trump to pardon Stone.

I would support any Democrat candidate who had a policy "Fox News to be made illegal as a threat to democracy".

Update:  conservative Australian pundits commentary:  "Democrats just don't understand how on the nose they are with the broader public because of their embrace of identity politics. They're going to lose.  Ha ha ha ha."

Gold speculation

Noticed this on Twitter:

Now, I may have a mere "man in the [relatively well educated] street" knowledge of economics, but I thought one of the things that modern economists were virtually all certain about is that returning to a gold standard would be a foolish idea.  (I mean, I don't think even Steve Kates - the most highly self- regarding Trump cultist economist on the planet - even advocates for it?)   

Yet the WSJ has a London editor who argues that economists are fearful that this Judy Shelton is right on this?

OK, I see from a Marketwatch article that her ideas about gold and money are more complicated - and actually (if I understand it correctly) kind of globalist-friendly.   Which means Trump probably doesn't understand her ideas at all.   And no one seems to think her ideas are at all practical.  She has also done a huge flip flop on low interest rates.

I always feel I should understand economics more on a theoretical level:  but when you see a field with the supposed life long experts on the subject holding such divergent views, it more-or-less dis-incentivises me from spending too much time on the subject.  

Muslim Valentine's Day panic

Indonesia is a strange place - most are normal folk, I'm sure, but they have to live with more assertive Muslims who have an extreme view of relationship development:

A nationwide movement known as “Indonesia Tanpa Pacaran” (Indonesia Without Dating) is also calling for February 14 to be nationally recognised as an anti-dating holiday. The group, which has over 1 million followers on Instagram, advocates the idea that dating goes against Islamic teachings, and is an unnecessary step before marriage.

At a rally on February 9, supporters of the movement carried signs reading, "We support February 14 as Indonesia Without Dating Day," and "Erase dating from Indonesia."

Earlier in the same article, we read about one area's heads of Eduction ordering schools not to celebrate Valentine's Day:

In a letter circulated throughout schools in Bandung, Indonesia’s second-largest city, Hikmat Ginanjar, head of the Department of Education, issued a formal ban on any form of Valentine’s Day celebration.

“[Valentine’s Day] has no place in our culture. It’s incompatible with our religious values. We have sent out letters reminding primary and secondary students of this fact,” Cucu Saputra, Secretary of Bandung’s Department of Education, told local media.

Missing an opportunity to use Valentine’s Day to instead provide students with ample sex education, Saputra mentioned that the youth often celebrate the holiday by hosting alcohol-fueled sex parties. He then declared that Valentine’s Day need not be celebrated in Indonesia, because love should be celebrated every day.

Saputra also delegated the task of enforcing the Valentine’s Day ban to individual schools, leaving much open to interpretation.

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.

The State of the Union is on...

Supermarket announcement voice:  "Box of tissues to Catallaxy.  Box of tissues to Catallaxy." 

Update:   True:

Trump "learning a lesson" re-visited

I've already derided this in a previous post, but some tweets backing me up:

My very reasonable assessment of the Iowa caucus

*  Of course, the optics of a party not being able to tally its own results quickly due to technical problems is not ideal.

*  Of course, for Trump supporters or excusers to claim that this shows the Democrats "can't run the county if they can't a caucus" is ludicrously ignoring the extreme and obvious dysfunction that has been the rapid and continuous turnover of Trump staff in the White House and the leaking of examples of incompetence of Trump from insiders that has happened from the start.  It is clearly the most shambolic White House we have ever seen in the modern era;

* That Republicans would immediately start with conspiracy theory about what happened is typical - it is all part of the alternative, post-truth reality which they have built for themselves.  (Of course, it doesn't help if some Democrats mutter darkly about dirty tricks, as well.  But the Republicans truly own the title of post-truth party.)

*  I have no problem with Biden looking like the clear loser in the results - he is looking old with no fresh ideas and his popularity with centrist type Democrats is very puzzling to me.   I have, though, no idea whether it is possible that Americans get past a massive "Socialist!  Communist!" scare campaign against Sanders, should he win.   I mean, the polling showing he does reasonably well with the general electorate seems a bit surprising to me too, given his history, age and use of the "S" word.   (Let's be honest, it's a word politicians of the Left avoid in Australia, too.)

* That said, I don't know that a combined Sanders/Warren ticket would be a bad thing.   I tend to think they will be better at attacking and ridiculing Trump than Hillary was.  (She had decades of conspiracy theories to overcome.   The Republicans don't really have the same imaginary dirt on Sanders/Warren to play with.)

* I don't know that anyone knows what to make of Buttigieg doing well, if not winning.   (Full results are  not out as I write this.)   As I have said before, it seems that many of the American political tweeters who I like find him very annoying, but I don't spend time watching Democrat debates so I am not sure why.   On the other hand, I think it would be interesting watching how Trump and his deplorables would deal with the homosexuality issue - surely they could not resist offensive jokes, signs and takes on that.  But given where American culture is at the moment*, I think that would carry a very real risk of backfiring.   It amuses me to think of Trump advisers realising that and trying to continually convince him that he really, really shouldn't try to make a joke about his sexuality.

Update:  I should have mentioned, I am somewhat convinced by the reasoning in Paul Krugman's recent op-ed:

Does It Matter Who the Democrats Choose? In terms of actual policy, probably not very much.
 

*  support for gay marriage polls is at least as 63% - has been as high as 67%.

If I ruled the world...

I noticed, once again via Twitter, this story which escaped my attention last year:

Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found.

In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatonnes of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined.

And yesterday, Vice really put the boot into SUVs, arguing that even electric ones are a waste and, basically, that people who buy cars bigger than they need are jerks:

The Hummer, in all its militaristic aggressiveness, is the very embodiment of the wasteful excess that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. Cars are inherently about projecting a self-image, and hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to project one of profound, pathological selfishness. The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an asshole. 

I have to say, when driving around the city I routinely have very similar condemnatory thoughts about SUVs and (sorry to say) their owners; especially when in a car park.  

I can't fathom why, as an important part of climate change policy, it isn't obvious that they should be taxed into something that only people who really need them will buy.  

Countries like the US and Australia need to get the average car size much smaller.   And fewer cars overall.  

Time to attack a different culture

I'm giving China/East Asia a break from cultural criticism, and going to one of the last countries on Earth I am ever likely willing to find myself:

In Pakistan, keeping lions or tigers at home is a growing trend, flouting rules and safety regulations. The wild animals are seen as a status symbol in the country. Politics and lions often go hand in hand, with politicians buying big cats to symbolise their power. But now, even ordinary citizens are latching onto the craze for keeping wild lions as pets, often putting the animals in cages.

That's just ridiculous.

But, to be fair, is it worse than this example of wannabe powerful men (or at least, entitled men) using a big cat to bolster their masculinity?:

Pathetic.

Timbo has an attack of the vapours

Has Tim Wilson been watching too much Sean Hannity?  There's very much a Trumpian tone to this reaction to Adam Bandt's rise in the Greens:

Update: 

Some pleasingly direct words from the "Marxist!" are going to be hitting the right spot with everyone who can't stand Tim and his shonky government:

A depressing line of work

As reported at Science, another large scale vaccine failure for HIV:

The failure-ridden search for a vaccine that can stop the AIDS virus has delivered yet another frustrating defeat. The HIV vaccine that had moved furthest along in human testing does not work, and the $104 million trial in South Africa evaluating it has been stopped early. “There’s absolutely no evidence of efficacy,” says Glenda Gray, who heads the study and is president of the South African Medical Research Council (MRC). “Years of work went into this. It’s a huge disappointment.”

The efficacy study, which began in October 2016, is known as HVTN 702. It enrolled 5407 sexually active, HIV-uninfected men and women between 18 and 35 years of age at 14 sites across the country. Researchers randomly assigned half of the participants to receive a pair of HIV vaccines used in a one-two punch called a prime boost, whereas the other half received placebo shots. The trial was supposed to last until July 2022. But on 23 January, an independent monitoring board that takes scheduled, sneak peaks at the data to evaluate safety and efficacy, informed Gray and the other leaders of the study that it was “futile” to continue. There were 129 infections in the vaccinated group and 123 in those who received the placebo. “I was catatonic,” Gray says.

No evidence exists that the vaccine caused harm, as happened in a different large HIV vaccine study that was abruptly halted in 2007. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired that earlier sobering study, congratulates her colleagues in South Africa for conducting a scientifically rigorous, complex trial. “The trial was incredibly well done and we got a definitive answer, and that’s what science is about,” says Buchbinder, who is the chair of a multicountry trial, Mosaico, that now is the most advanced large-scale HIV vaccine study underway.

It's sort of hard to imagine a more depressing end to years of research work on making a new vaccine (or drug) only to find it's completely ineffective.

I also note this:

In the halted trial, funded by MRC, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the “prime” was a harmless canarypox virus that carries genes for HIV’s surface protein and two of its other structural proteins. 

Not that I am saying that Bill Gates wasn't good to fund this attempt, but it goes to show that his Foundation doesn't always back winners.   His devotion to advanced nuclear might face a similar outcome.  

Fortune telling history

Interesting article at The Conversation on the rise of fortune telling as a popular, if technically illegal, pursuit in the first couple of decades of the 20th century in Australia. 

I thought spiritualism was supposed to have received a popularity boost due to the First World War (perhaps more in England than here), but did not appreciate that more generic fortune telling was popular in the same period.

Bad habit

How good is chewing betel nut?  Presumably, it must make for quite a good feeling, because of the obvious awful side effects people put up with to keep using it:

Betel nut black market boom in Australia has experts warning of devastating health impacts 

The tropical nut is chewed widely across South-East Asia and the Pacific and often mixed with lime powder (calcium hydroxide) to produce an addictive paste that stains the teeth and mouth a vibrant red.

It can also cause bad breath, tooth wear, gum recession, bleeding gums, and mouth cancer in regular users.

Ms Groves stopped selling betel nut when authorities cracked down on the product in Cairns, but said regulations had resulted in a booming black market for the product.

"[People] now just sell it at home," she said.

The Queensland Police Service said one person had been charged for possessing betel nut in 2019.
Australian Dental Association oral medicine specialist Professor Michael McCullough said the product was readily available in Melbourne where dentists are reporting a large increase in the number of concerning presentations associated with the product.

Have a look at two of the photos in the story:

The Big Questions

Why do country people think Barnaby Joyce is great?   What do they see in him that I don't?

Remembering that I used to see some appealing self deprecation in him, his personal image deserves to be strongly hit by a few things:

* he seems increasingly bitter, despite having had the benefit of a media covering up his infidelity during an election;
* apart from the relationship with a former staffer, there was the allegation of apparently serious level, drunken sexual harassment for which the National Party returned "no verdict";
* he gives the impression of drinking more now;
* at a time when he has just established a second family, and (if I recall correctly) having previously given the usual "it's so hard for a marriage, being a politician who has to be away from family so often" comments before he left his family, he is now deciding to increase his time on the job with his second set of kids;
* he gives the impression of doubling down on the "climate change and drought and bushfires - no connection" meme, at a time one would like to think that at least some country people might be starting to have doubts.

On the last point though - how many rural people are stupid?   Quite a lot, seems to be the increasing lesson of election results.

China and speed building

My first reaction when seeing, merely days ago, a field full of excavators preparing the grounds for a new Wuhan hospital was that it looked like a con: there were so many and they didn't look particularly well organised.   They seemed as if they were just pretending to be busy.  And besides - were they even the right bit of gear with which to be preparing the ground?  

But reporting from the BBC seems to indicate that the building has gone up in 6 days.  I didn't even think the concrete would be set solidly enough in that time.  Apparently, a similar "instant hospital" project was done in Beijing in 2003, taking 7 days.  Slackers.

It's hard to tell, but from some photos at the last link it looks like it might be a modular style construction.  Is that the only way it could be done?  Modular buildings can be assembled very quickly. 

Of course, getting a building up is one thing - having it properly plumbed and wired and safely finished is another.

I would like to see a walk through of the place in another couple of weeks time, just to see how it looks on the inside. 

Trump chastised - as if

There have been a few Republicans saying that things like "yeah, we know what Trump did was concerning, but it was not the sort of thing you remove a President for, and I like to think he will feel he has learnt something from the experience."

The "Trump will learn from this" aspect is a complete and utter, evidence free, crock of a take, and I would say there is an extremely high chance that Trump will utterly ruin their fantasy in his State of the Union address.

After all, Trump views everything in the most narcissistic way possible, and he knows his "base", with their self induced blindness and cult membership, thinks he did absolutely nothing wrong and that Joe Biden is the one who is shown to be corrupt.  They (encouraged now by most of the Republican Senate) are simply impervious to the objective reporting that there is no evidence that Biden was pushing to have Shokin sacked in order to help his son.   


Here's Axios reporting:

Trump's sense of invincibility 

President Trump often says he's the smartest person in the room on virtually every topic. Now, after taking several risks on what he privately calls "big shit" and avoiding catastrophe, Trump and his entire inner circle convey supreme self-confidence, bordering on a sense of invincibility.

The state of play: Three years into Trump's presidency, their view is the naysayers are always wrong. They point to Iran, impeachment, Middle East peace. Every day, Trump grows more confident in his gut and less deterrable. Over the last month, 10 senior administration officials have described this sentiment to me. Most of them share it....

Between the lines: Over the past month, Trumpworld's sense of being unbeatable has only grown. This is partly because the president sometimes defines victory in narrow terms, like pleasing the base and juicing the markets.

FDR re-considered

Noah Smith had some tweets over the weekend in which he discusses the comparisons that people like to imagine there would be between FDR and a Bernie Sanders presidency.  This included linking to an article in The Atlantic earlier this year that explained how FDR's policies were, in many cases, not "big government" ideologically driven, but combined pragmatic ways to get both government and the private sector involved.

I thought it very interesting:   

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

 It's worth clearing your browsing history to read!

A Soviet mountain mystery, and the conspiracy worlds shared by Russians and the American Right

The Atlantic has an article about a Russian mystery from 1959 that has sparked many conspiracy theories:

Precisely 61 years ago, a band of skiers trekking through the Ural Mountains stashed food, extra skis, and a well-worn mandolin in a valley to pick up on the way back from their expedition. In a moment of lightheartedness, one drew up a fake newspaper with headlines about their trip: “According to the latest information, abominable snowmen live in the northern Urals.” Their excess equipment stored away, the group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened.

Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.

Today, the “Dyatlov Pass incident,” named after one of the students on the trek, Igor Dyatlov, has become Russia's biggest unsolved mystery, a font of endless conspiracy theories. Aliens, government agents, “Arctic dwarves”—and yes, even abominable snowmen—have at various points been blamed for the deaths. One state-television show regularly puts self-appointed experts through a theatrical lie-detector test to check their outlandish explanations.

The article notes that Russian has a very, very long history of conspiracy theories coming from the top down, going back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and makes this surprising claim about how widespread belief in conspiracies remain:

An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.

Which is interesting - the Trump supporting, Wingnut Right in America now has moved to a similar world of conspiracy belief,  with the conspiracies not so much originating from the top, but created or vigorously promoted for profit (see Rupert Murdoch, and the alt Right corporate and private media universe) and then being adopted by the top for cynical political benefit.    But they have both ended up in the same place regarding a post-truth world of politics.

Communists in the kitchen

This NPR story is from 2014, but I saw someone tweet about it yesterday, suggesting he would like to see communism and the return of apartment blocks with shared kitchens. (It was not serious, I think, but nonetheless scores of comments followed expressing horror at the suggestion, based on their experiences with multi-person shared kitchens). It's pretty interesting, anyway:

How Russia's Shared Kitchens Helped Shape Soviet Politics 

Some (lengthy) highlights:

In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, most people in Moscow lived in communal apartments; seven or more families crammed together where there had been one, sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. They were crowded; stove space and food were limited. Clotheslines were strewn across the kitchen, the laundry of one family dripping into the omelet of another.

As the Soviet Union industrialized from the 1920s to the 1950s, and millions poured into Moscow from the countryside, one of the goals of the new government was to provide housing for the workers. It started putting people into apartments that had been occupied by the rich or by aristocrats who had been driven out by the new regime.

"The communal apartment was like a microcosm of Soviet society," says Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. "People from all walks of life, sometimes absolute class enemies, living next to each other. The expression was 'densed up.' The allotment was 9 square meters per person."

 Gregory (Grisha) Freidin, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University, grew up in a communal apartment of 10 families about five blocks from the Kremlin in the 1940s. "On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses at the local morgue. There were two rooms where the mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was the woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked."

In Freidin's kitchen, every family had a small kitchen table that housed a few pots and pans. There were two four-burner stoves. Everyone cooked their own food — cabbage soup, borscht with beets, potatoes, buckwheat groats, boiled chicken.

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict....

But there was apparently some very Orwellian motivation for the shared kitchens:

"Communal kitchen was a war zone," says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. "During the Stalin era [1928-1953] it was the most dangerous place to be — in the kitchen."

Shenderovich agrees: "Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting."
But Anya von Bremzen remembers there was camaraderie as well. "There was always a grandmother to take care of the kids, and share a bit of cutletta or salat Olivier. And when they began to disband the communal apartments, the communal kitchen was an institution that many people actually began to miss."

The reason Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

"The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time was they would like to have houses without kitchens," says Genis. "Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property."

The article then goes on to note that there was an early idea that communism would set up cafeterias where most people would eat most meals, freeing Soviet women from the tyranny of cooking, so they could concentrate on self fulfilment.   Of course, it never happened, and the country soon faced mass starvation instead.  

And I guess I had not realised how thoroughly you could blame Communism for the poor reputation of Russian food:

"Bolsheviks were not into food. [Vladimir] Lenin was not a foodie," says von Bremzen. "They saw it as fuel; they had to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy. And private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized."

Following the civil war, the shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. Stalin's industrialization program included the industrialization of food. Completely new, mass-produced food appeared — foods like canned and processed soup, fish, meat and mayonnaise.

"The whole of the Soviet Union, all 120 different ethnic groups were suddenly being served exactly the same stuff," says Grisha Freidin. "Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the politburo level. The kinds of candies that were being produced was decided in a special meeting with Stalin and [Vyacheslav] Molotov."

Fascinating.   

Ian McEwan looks back at Brexit

The take in this op-ed in The Guardian by Ian McEwan sounds entirely right to me.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

It’s done. A triumph of dogged negotiation by May then, briefly, Johnson, has fulfilled the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands. The rest of the world, presidents Putin and Trump excepted, have watched on in astonishment and dismay. A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause. We must pack up our tents, perhaps to the sound of church bells, and hope to begin the 15-year trudge, back towards some semblance of where we were yesterday with our multiple trade deals, security, health and scientific co-operation and a thousand other useful arrangements.

The only certainty is that we’ll be asking ourselves questions for a very long time. Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion”. How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.

Yes, this last aspect makes a mockery of the stupid arguments put by conservative and libertarian Right alike (and, for reasons I could never follow, also endorsed here in comments by Homer!) that not going ahead with Brexit after the referendum would be some sort of heinous travesty of democracy.   

While I am attacking my readers, I should add that I don't think I have ever seen Jason point to any analysis (outside of the self-serving pro Brexit campaigners, who we know were lying about numbers) to show that it would actually be a benefit in the long run for England.   I sometimes look at Helen Dales's tweets too, and read some of her commentary.  Same thing can be said about her.

So basically,  the people who would like to think of themselves as moderate Right, whether as classic liberals, or those with a stronger libertarian bent like Sinclair Davidson, simply supported it for the simplistic, ideological, belief that a multinational organisation means more "red tape", which = bad, regardless of any actual or serious analysis of the efficiencies the organisation achieves.