A rubbery question

As one thought leads to another, and I've been reading about rubber lately, I've been wondering this:   why did Goodyear, who invented vulcanisation (and hence the modern era of rubber), even think to put sulphur into rubber?  Why sulphur?  Seems an odd substance to try mixing with indian rubber in the vague hope something good may come of it.

Of course the mega resource of the internet would help.

Turns out the sulphur idea was actually that of another inventor, Nathaniel Hayward, and his account of his involvement in the path towards vulcanisation seems to be set out in a statement at this obscure website:

Sometimes previous to the year 1834 there was a company formed at Boxbury, Mass., to manufacture India Rubber goods. The members of this company were John Haskins, Edwin M. Chaffee, and Luke Baldwin. They had in some way learned the art of dissolving rubber gum, which they tried to keep a profound secret. They soon, however, sold out their interest to a larger company called the Roxbury India Rubber Company, who continued the business in the same place. This company made large preparations to manufacture India rubber goods, and the interest got up with regard to this article in and around the city of Boston was very great. India rubber cloth for carriage tops, overcoats, and other articles to protect such as were obliged to be out in stormy weather, and it was thought would soon come into general use and create a great demand for this fabric.

In the year 1834 Gen. Jackson, then President of the United States, visited New England, and while at Boston was presented with a suit of clothes of this new manufacture, in which dress, on a day somewhat wet, he appeared in public on horseback, for the purpose of reviewing the troops on the Boston Common. This occurrence helped to inflate the bubble, and in a short time the stock of this company rose from one hundred to five or six hundred dollars a share, and every one owning stock in this concern, it was thought, was about to make his fortune.

My curiosity, with that of many others, was highly excited, and I went to the factory and bought rubber cloth for a carriage top. When using the carriage thus covered, I noticed that when two surfaces of this cloth came together, in a warm day, they adhered, in consequence of the softening of the gum. This struck me as quite an objection to the use of the article, and led me to try experiments to obviate it. For this purpose, in the month of August, 1834, among other experiments, I mixed and melted together rubber gum, sulphur, and lampblack; but this mixture, at that time, did not result in anything valuable. I continued, however, as I had leisure, experimenting with this article from August, 1834 till April 1835, showing from time to time small samples of my results to sundry persons engaged in the rubber business, for the purpose of carrying on which many companies were being formed in and around the city of Boston, where I then lived. I was assured, by persons to whom I showed my samples, if I could hit upon any method of preventing rubber cloth from becoming soft and sticky when it was exposed to the sun or otherwise warmed, I might depend on being well rewarded. These assurances from men in whom I had confidence, encouraged me to continue my efforts. I therefore sold out my livery establishment in Boston, that I might be able to devote all my time and attention to the business of experimenting with India rubber.

Still doesn't explain why he thought of adding sulphur at that time!  However, the determination he showed to continue experimenting is pretty admirable:

After closing up my affairs, and paying my debts, I had remaining about five hundred dollars, and a horse and buggy. With this property 1 went out to Easton, my native town, and hired a mill building of Cyrus Lathrop, called the Quaker Leonard Place, at a rent of one hundred and fifty dollars a year. This mill was situated in a retired spot about half a mile from the main road, and not far from Oliver Ames' shovel factory. Here, remote from observation, I shut myself up and entered upon a course of experiments with rubber, and continued it for two months without any satisfactory result.

At the end of this time I was on the point of giving up the whole concern, in utter despair; but finally concluded, before doing this, to make one more trial. For this purpose I put all my chemicals, with which I had been working, into a still of the capacity of fourteen or fifteen gallons, with spirits of turpentine, and drew off about four gallons, into which I put four pounds of rubber gum to be dissolved, and with this solution, I made twelve yards (three-fourths wide) rubber cloth, which looked finely, and which stood the weather perfectly, without melting when exposed to the sun for months. The chemicals I put into the still were white vitriol, blue vitriol, sugar of lead, sulphur and several others, indeed, all I had. This result gave me much encouragement, and I took my rubber cloth and went to Boston, thinking that now I had found out how to make rubber goods that would stand the test. I showed my cloth to a company recently formed called the Eagle India Rubber Company, and they at once offered to give me employment. But I declined entering into their service till I had ascertained, by further trial, that I could make more cloth like the piece I had been exhibiting. I therefore bought a  new supply of chemicals and returned to Easton to repeat the experiment which had proved so successful. To my great disappointment, after numerous trials, variously repeated, and continued for nearly four months, I utterly failed to make anything like the sample I showed to the company in Boston. I then went to work to examine my chemicals separately, with the view of ascertaining their purity. I found impurities in many of them, especially spirits of turpentine and lampblack. The turpentine I found I could purify by thoroughly agitating it with water, and the lampblack by exposure to heat, and thus clearing it of all oily matters with which it is usually connected. The spirits of turpentine thus purified, I found would dissolve the rubber, and purified lampblack being added, and the solution applied to cloth, produced an article which would stand the weather. Upon the strength of this discovery, I engaged to work for this company, on a salary of $1,000 a year.

Finally, we get to him working out that it was the sulphur that was important:

Soon after they began work at Woburn, they expressed the wish that I would make some white aprons, thinking they would sell well. This I attempted to do by using a compound of white lead, magnesia and whiting, with equal parts of virgin or white rubber, dissolved in spirits of turpentine. The aprons looked pretty well, but when warmed would soften and stick, and not being white enough to suit irie, I exposed them to the fumes of sulphur to make them whiter, taking the hint from having seen straw bonnets bleached in this manner. By this treatment the rubber cloth became very white, and made elegant aprons. But in addition to superior whiteness, I noticed that these aprons did not soften and adhere after being exposed to the fumes of sulphur as they had done before such exposure. This gave me the first intimation of the power of sulphur to prevent rubber from becoming soft and adherent when warmed. After this I tried exposing pieces of cloth to the sun that had been fumigated with sulphur, and others of the same kind which had not been thus treated, and found the former' would stand firm while the latter would melt and become sticky.

From this time I tried a great variety of experiments with these articles, in numerous and various combinations, and I found that only when sulphur was one of the ingredients of the mixture, there was no melting or sticking of the rubber cloth. All the time I was working for the Eagle Company, and afterwards while working for myself, I, as I had leisure, was experimenting with sulphur and rubber—and the results, and the way and manner they were brought about I kept entirely to myself. One of these discoveries was that rubber cloth which had been prepared without the use of sulphur, if sprinkled over with sulphur in powder and exposed to the sun, and afterwards washed clean, that this process would fix the gum and prevent it from melting.

After I discovered that it was sulphur, and nothing else, among the articles with which I had been experimenting in combination with rubber, which prevented it from melting and becoming adhesive when warmed, it occurred to me, that this was what made the piece of cloth shown to. the Eagle Company free from the usual objections to this article as then made. But during the four months I was laboring in vain to make a perfect piece of rubber cloth, it never entered my mind that sulphur was of any account in this business, and I did not use it.

The story goes on to explain that Charles Goodyear started sniffing around this factory, and Hayward finally told him that it was sulphur that was the secret to his non sticking rubber products.

And then, apparently, Goodyear accidentally discovered that heating it worked wonders:

He developed a nitric acid treatment and in 1837 contracted for the manufacture by this process of mailbags for the U.S. government, but the rubber fabric proved useless at high temperatures.


For the next few years he worked with Nathaniel M. Hayward (1808–65), a former employee of a rubber factory in Roxbury, Mass., who had discovered that rubber treated with sulfur was not sticky. Goodyear bought Hayward’s process. In 1839 he accidentally dropped some India rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and so discovered vulcanization. 

This discovery, and patenting it, did not lead to an easy ride for Goodyear, though:

Goodyear went on to perfect the modern process of curing rubber-acid mixture with heat, now known as vulcanisation. He received a patent for his process on June 15, 1844. Good years, however, weren’t ahead.

Patent wars, pirates employing his patented process without authorisation, increasing debts (for instance, money borrowed for extravagant displays in London and Paris) and a host of other factors meant that Goodyear never enjoyed the success of the rubber industry. His process would go on to make millions for others, but when he died in 1860, he was still in debt.

Anyway, after all of that:  was sulphur first being added to rubber just a case of Hayward throwing anything into the problem and seeing what (wouldn't!) stick?   Seems so...

Update:  I was just reading a bit about the history of sulphur more generally, and have found the next historical thing I must look up:

The element itself was not isolated until 1809, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry, when French chemists Louis-Josef Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thénard created a pure sample. (Gay-Lussac was known for his research on gases, which involved him flying in hydrogen-filled balloons more than 22,900 feet (7,000 meters) above sea level, according to the Chemical Heritage Foundation.)

 Gay-Lussac sounds well worth reading about!

Most satisfying household chore

I'm been meaning to say this out loud for some time:  I reckon clothes washing and outdoor drying of same is the most satisfying household chore.

Many years ago, a flatmate made a confession that she said she knew she should keep to herself -  she actually enjoyed cleaning the bathroom.  The restoration of cleanliness and whiteness in sinks and toilets did it for her.

I understand the sentiment, but I think I find that job too chemical intensive and therefore artificial to be completely pleasing.  (Not only that, but if you live in an older house where the shower screen glass has become impossible to restore to perfect see through transparency - it's the micro erosion of the surface, apparently, not soap scum or scale - you don't get the feeling that you've restored the whole room to "as new" condition.)

But for some time now, I find myself always thinking about how unusually satisfying I find hanging out washing to dry, and how putting on a load of washing is so simple, especially compared to my childhood, when my mother had to wrestle washing through this type of machine:

The whole washing and drying process now combines something like the best of technological convenience (the front load washer that has come from some far away land - possibly Germany?) with the ancient practice going back to the invention of clothes of hanging them out to dry in the sun and/or breeze.   When you think about it, the clothes drying part is actually nuclear powered, but at a very safe distance.   :)

I posted many years ago about the weird American aversion to using outdoor clotheslines.   I see that the struggle for them to get sensible about this continues.  Here's a recently updated post at Treehugger:

The New York Times Green Inc. blog ran an insightful post on an increasingly love it or hate it practice earlier today: using outdoor clotheslines in lieu of or in addition to conventional energy guzzling drying machines.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never used an outdoor clothesline. In fact, aside from movies and television and a trip to Spain several years ago I rarely see clotheslines being used. I, like much of young urban North America, consider clotheslines to be domestic relics; household staples that have either been banished to the "countryside" or disappeared decades ago along with egg timers, rotary phones, and washing buckets.

According to Project Laundry List, an advocacy group that’s pushing to give all citizens the legal right to hang dry their dirty knickers while raising awareness about alternatives to nuclear power, state-backed initiatives to lift bans on the use of clotheslines are increasingly common.

Clothesline bans, usually enacted by homeowner and condo associations, operate under the guise that they these simple energy-savers are unsightly blemishes on urban and suburban landscapes. States including Florida, Colorado, Utah, and most recently, Maine, have right-to-dry laws intact while other states such as Maine and Hawaii have similar bills in the works.

Imagine never knowing the nice feeling of bringing in naturally dried clothes?  They don't know what they're missing out on.

 

No translation needed

Now going with "elder statesman" hair

So, Trump has given a widely panned campaign speech from the White House (apparently supposed to be about China, but more complaining about Biden.)

Lots of people have commented on his hair being transformed into grey:

I reckon we'll have a leak from the White House soon enough - some media adviser (or Ivanka) has told Trump "maybe it's the grey haired 'elder statesman' look that explains Biden's poll numbers.  Let's give it a try."

Singapore, democracy, and housing

Keeping on today's Asian theme, I noticed the Singaporean election result last week gave the PAP (should be PGP - Permanent Governing Party) a lower than usual 61.2% of the vote.  Now that sounds more like a democracy - although I see that it still meant it got 83 out of 93 seats.   And I see that it has had similar vote just above 60% a couple of times before.   Hmm.  Is this another stupid first past the post system?  Yes, yes it is.  (The link points to other aspects of the Singaporean system that work in favour of the PAP.) 

Anyway, as I have said before, if you watch CNA a lot, you can't help but be impressed by the apparent technocratic and social reasonableness of the current bunch of governing PAP politicians.   I'd be inclined to give up on a more representative form of democracy too if I felt it meant government in the hands of such competent sounding people.   Instead, we get stuck with Smarmo (with the occasional fart smell of Mini Trump), who unfortunately is getting better approval ratings than he deserves due to his at least appearing to be on a more-or-less reasonable track regarding COVID-19.  

Put me down as someone who is never likely to give him an overall tick of approval - Labor would not have handled COVID-19 substantially differently, and we might at least have something vaguely resembling Ministerial accountability under them. 

But - back to Singapore.  I was reading this history of their public housing success, and learnt a few things:

While the government’s action helped solve the housing crisis, it was the decision to begin offering subsidized flats for sale in 1964 that laid the foundation for Singapore’s real-estate success. Under its “Home Ownership for the People Scheme” around 2,000 two- and three-bedroom apartments were sold to lower-middle-income citizens in a new estate in the district of Queenstown for as little as S$4,900 each. Like most HDB sales, they were offered on a 99-year lease and buyers were forbidden from reselling the property for at least five years.

Once that period finished, owners of flats in prestigious complexes stood to make a sizeable profit. Even in those venerable blocks in Queenstown, an unmodernized two-bedroom unit can now sell for around S$220,000, with only 43 years left on the lease. In 2016, the total resale value of Singapore’s HDB apartments was estimated to be more than S$400 billion.

The blocks were built in neighborhood clusters – miniature new towns with playgrounds, food centers and local shops. The larger ones, like Queenstown, had a health clinic, a community center and a library. And like most things in Singapore’s meticulously planned economy, the management of the estates was integrated into policies that included everything from the design of the city’s mass transit system to racial integration.

In a policy that began in 1989, HDB blocks require minimum levels of occupancy of each of the main ethnic groups in the city — Chinese, Malay and Indian — to prevent the formation of “racial enclaves.” The government continues to implement what one senior minister once called the “most intrusive social policy in Singapore” to encourage social harmony.

I find that kind of social engineering very appealing - when it works, anyway.

The government makes sure the blocks are well maintained:

While many governments have focused public housing programs on the poorest members of society—often allowing the austere concrete blocks to deteriorate into urban slums—Singapore recognized that these homes represented the biggest stake its citizens had in the prosperity of the country. The HDB not only maintained its buildings and grounds carefully, but periodically upgraded estates with new elevators, walkways and facelifts.

And how is this for a bit of "that's not how government is supposed to work!" PAP policy:

The potential financial gain from the value of the flats became so important to the nation’s citizens that it was used as a political tool, with the ruling People’s Action Party in the 1980s announcing that it would prioritize maintenance of estates in constituencies that elected a PAP member. The party has never lost a general election.

I don't think I had heard this before - but residents now get built in bomb shelters too!:

As the illustrated floor plan above shows, many have a store room, which, in all apartments built since 1996, has become a bomb shelter with reinforced concrete walls and a massive steel door to protect the occupants in case the Republic is attacked.

Gee. 

Anyway,  I can't wait to go back to Disneyland with the Death Penalty, but there is the matter of a certain coronavirus stuffing up my plans.  

What a year we're having...

I think it was obvious from years of watching Mythbusters that he must have been a likeable guy in real life, and because of that (as well as his age, the suddenness, and - more selfishly - the uncomfortable feeling this gives that an aneurysm time bomb could be in anyone's head) makes this more upsetting than the average celebrity death:

Super huff

That's a very huffy look from Trump while taking questions today:

Incidentally, you can see where he got this bit of "whataboutism" from - Fox News had an article about it a few days ago:

However, during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the Obama administration suddenly told states to shut down their testing, without providing much in the way of explanation. And, Biden's top advisor at the time has acknowledged that the Obama administration didn't do "anything right" to combat that pandemic, before walking back those comments.

The record seemingly complicates Biden's claims, in advertising and speeches, that he would have handled state-level coronavirus testing more effectively than the current White House.

As David Roberts said recently, the Republicans and conservatives have virtually no arguments that don't come down to "whataboutism".    It's a style of argument that appeals particularly strongly to a chronic narcissist.  

Pollution in Indonesia

Seeing I am in the mood for South East Asian talk, I watched this recent document from Germany on a very polluted river in Indonesia:



Most of the chemical pollution is from the textile industry, which seems to have dozens of factories lining this river.

I missed a few minutes, but my son said that one factory guy's attitude was that as long as the waste water didn't make your hand feel itchy, it was OK to release into the river!  And then there was the rice contamination.  All very bad, and rather unclear how much the government might be doing to make and enforce standards.

So, there's another thing to feel guilty about:  apparently, Uniqlo (my preferred place to buy casual shirts) sources a lot of its material from these Indonesian factories.  (Also H&M, but its clothes seem designed for 20 year old stick insects, so I don't buy from them.)

Rubbery figures

Yesterday's story about Top Glove in Malaysia making lots of money from the heightened demand for medical rubber gloves made me realise that I didn't really know where most of the world's rubber now comes from.   The perfect question for the internet!

World Atlas has this table:

I wouldn't have guessed that China now produces more rubber than Malaysia. 

Actually, those figures are just for 2013, and I see that other sites say that the top three are Thailand, Indonesia, then Malaysia (and the amount produced by countries 3 to 6 in the table above are pretty close - so maybe 2013 was just a bad year for Malaysian rubber plantations for some reason?)

Anyway, not sure I knew this bit of rubber trivia:

Although the Hevea tree is native to South America, cultivation there is limited due to the high prevalence of leaf blight diseases and other natural predators.

 See - globalisation is good.

I might have guessed that the rubber glove industry doing well would mean that the price of natural rubber would be holding up.   But I guess it only uses a tiny amount in the big picture.  Hence The Association of Natural Rubber Producing Countries has this bit of not so great news:

The key factor behind the abnormal fall in the prices of natural rubber (NR) since mid-January is the huge drop in the world demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The world consumption of NR dropped by 15.7% during H1 2020 (Jan-Jun 2020) as per the revised estimates. In China, the country accounting 40% of the world demand, the consumption fell by 20.1% during H1 2020.

It is relieving to observe that the worst is almost over as far as the world consumption of NR is concerned. The world consumption is now set to enter positive territory by increasing 1.4%, year-on-year, during Q3 2020 (Jul-Sep).  The consumption in China, in particular, is expected to increase by 0.8%, year-on-year, during the same quarter. Although the International Monitory Fund a week ago has further scaled down the global economic outlook for 2020, to -4.9% growth from -3.0% projected in April, the consumption sector of NR has almost returned to normal with the exception of a few countries. 

Now that I am on a rubber bender, so to speak, reading up on the history of the product, I see that Brazil was the victim of, well, if not industrial espionage, certainly undercover dirty business (there are a lot of similar examples from other products, over the centuries):  

From 1850 to 1920, businessmen were pushing entrepreneurs and traders to increase the amount of rubber extracted from Amazonian trees. During this period, the Brazilian Amazon was the only source of rubber and they controlled the price, making rubber expensive. At the same time, as more and more industry was developing in Europe and USA, more uses for rubber were being found [4]. Rubber was such an important material for Brazilians that they prohibited the export of rubber seeds or seedlings. However, in 1876, H. A. Wickham managed to smuggle 70,000 rubber seeds, hidden in banana leaves, and brought them to England. From those seeds, only 1,900 seedlings survived and were sent to Malaysia to start the first rubber plantations in Asia. This marked the beginning of the end for Brazil as the world’s main rubber producer. 

Monday, kind of depressing, stuff

*  So even the most corrupt Attorney General we've seen in a lifetime thought Trump's commutation of Stone would be corrupt?   Mitt Romney's reaction makes me like him, and Mormons, all the more.  There is just no debating this as corruption of historic proportions. 

*  Saw a tweet indicating the thickness of Arctic ice at the moment is pointing to a very low figure for ice extent by September.   Really looks like it may break the 2012 record - which in a way is not a bad thing, in terms of focussing the public's attention on global warming:

*  Remember I posted recently how I had started watching some off beat travel vlogs on Youtube by middle aged English guy "Bald and Bankrupt"?   On the weekend, he posted a short video explaining that he had, foolishly by his own admission, travelled to Serbia after the start of COVID 19 and caught it there.   Became very ill, was hospitalised, got to watch other patients dying around him, still feels very weak, and remarked how it seems to have even affected the, um, normal operation of his penis (!).   The guy is, I think, 45, so it's a cautionary tale of how ill it can make even the relatively young.   Oh - I see it seems he took down the video?  Or is it back up?  Dunno what's going on.  Also, it seems he has been popular for a long time - he seems very well known on Reddit.

*  If you want one, sort of, good thing that has come out of COVID-19:  if you had shares in the Malaysian company Top Glove, the biggest medical glove manufacturer in the world, you would be doing very well:



I'm sort of happy to see a Malaysian company doing well - at the political level, on the other hand, they're still jerks:

Six journalists including five Australians are being interrogated by Malaysian authorities who have accused them of sedition and defamation after the broadcast of a documentary about migrant workers in Kuala Lumpur during Covid-19.

Debating debates

So, Jazz Shaw at Hot Air thinks that it's Democrats who are fearful of Biden debating Trump:

It’s a highly uncomfortable subject for Democrats and their media allies, but it’s also a glaringly obvious truth. Nobody supporting Joe Biden wants to see him go into a debate with Donald Trump. Biden can barely manage reading a teleprompter in front of a camera in his own basement these days, even if he has multiple chances to get the words right. And his “aw, shucks” Uncle Joe routine probably won’t look very impressive when he has to answer a barbed attack. The fact is that Trump is just 100% Trump every minute he’s on camera. This has many liberals frightened of the prospect of a presidential debate between these two.

I think this is delusional.

As I have said before, in 2016 Trump got away with mouthing general motherhood statements about America and playing up to the Right's decades long vilification of Hillary Clinton.

He cannot take the same approach against Biden, a white male for whom polling is indicating Republican thrown mud is not sticking.  Trump has been showing increasing emotional fragility in his tweets, and there is a wealth of broken promises and lies made while in the job that can be listed against him.  Yes, he can and will say black is white, and his cult followers may believe him, but it will not likely work with those that he needs to swing back to him to win another election.

And, of course, people are exaggerating the significance of verbal stumbles make by Biden.

I had read that the Trump team had been asking for more debates, not fewer; and that this is normally a tactic taken by the underdog.   I think that this is just a sign of bravado on the part of team Trump, and that there will be people who are thinking the same way I am - that Trump's at risk of falling apart in debates against Biden, and they should be looking at a way of getting out of them.

Update:   someone wrote this in WAPO about Trump and debates on 26 June -

History also gives him reason to be wary. Sitting presidents — among them, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2012 — often stumble in their first debates because they arrived both overconfident and out of practice.

This year, the stakes for Trump could hardly be higher. His poll numbers are dropping, and there are signs that even Trump’s bluster-loving base is starting to have its doubts about him, now that it is seeing how he handles himself in a real crisis.

So as he looks ahead to the debates, the embattled president might want to focus on winning the old-fashioned way: by studying the issues, showing up prepared and commanding the facts.

That last paragraph is hilariously improbable.

A very obvious point

And surely their [White House press secretaries] salary is not high enough for this kind of credibility debasement?:

American failure

A good detailed piece in New York Magazine on the American failure to control COVID 19.

The only bit I am annoyed with is this:

With the exception, perhaps, of New Zealand, practically speaking, across the entire west, nobody has managed to properly and preemptively prepare for this pandemic.

I think Australia deserves some credit.

I more or less agree with this, though:

The first failure is one of hubris: Western nations looking on a disease outbreak in Asia and feeling protected by a sense of cultural superiority and wealth, and disregarding the emergency response in China and other nations as a reflection not of the seriousness of the disease but of an imagined, innate conformist authoritarianism. The second is a bit harder to name, but it does seem peculiarly American — a pattern of failure following failure, with each successive failure normalized by the last, which should have shaken us out of complacency.

Update:  more on the American problem.  Or should we just be calling it - the American problem caused by the American Right?: 

Ohio state Rep. Nino Vitale is urging his constituents not to get tested for the coronavirus, flouting advice from health officials — and from another Republican lawmaker, Gov. Mike DeWine.

"This is what happens when people go crazy and get tested," Vitale wrote on Facebook this week. "STOP GETTING TESTED!"

Vitale was evidently incensed by an order from DeWine and state health officials that people in seven Ohio counties with severe outbreaks must wear face coverings when out in public. That order took effect Wednesday.

Vitale shared an altered graphic about the order — in that version, there is an extra message at the bottom:

"!! NEVER GET TESTED !!"

About those Shellenberger claims

Michael Tobis, who has always been worth reading on climate change, has a detailed assessment at Real Climate of the highly dubious "facts few people know" by Shellenberger.  

Good stuff.

May help explain the 21st century becoming the Asian century

Over in Korea:

But in the USA:

Update:  the hypothesis - Americans' love of individualism and liberty to believe anything is ill-equipped to deal with the paranoid conspiracy and disinformation spreading effect of the communication-system-on-steroids that is the internet;  so Asian communitarianism just has to sit it out while the USA weakens itself with self-seeded stupidity.  

What a surprise...

Such a complicated virus

Of course, I can safely predict this will not influence Adam Creighton or Sky News at all:

Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.

Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.

The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.

A dozen patients had inflammation of the central nervous system, 10 had brain disease with delirium or psychosis, eight had strokes and a further eight had peripheral nerve problems, mostly diagnosed as Guillain-Barré syndrome, an immune reaction that attacks the nerves and causes paralysis. It is fatal in 5% of cases.

“We’re seeing things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we haven’t seen before with other viruses,” said Michael Zandi, a senior author on the study and a consultant at the institute and University College London Hospitals NHS foundation trust.

“What we’ve seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is you can have severe neurology, you can be quite sick, but actually have trivial lung disease,” he added.

 Update:  yes, here's Adam:

He's talking a UK report that the number of total deaths in the last couple of weeks there are below the 5 year average for the time of year - almost certainly because COVID "brought forward" the deaths of a lot of elderly people.   Has he ever read anything about the uncertainty of ongoing ill health for a number of people who didn't die from it? 

If anyone is interested...

....in comments in moderation which I won't release, Graeme is really going off like (as they say) a frog in a sock about criticism of Joe McCarthy, because (of course) Jews. 

Praising Rosehaven

Yeah, I watched the first episode of the fourth season last night and thought it was still really good.  It felt very psychologically true - the way Daniel does not feel bad about his "mutual decoupling" from his girlfriend until he finds out she is moving onto to a likely new boyfriend.   I don't find Luke McGregor all that funny when doing "bits" on The Weekly, but as a comedic actor, he's fine.  [Also, was it just my TV, but last night he seemed paler than ever.  I almost feel the need to put sunglasses on, he is so white.]  Celia Pacquola is just perfect in her role.

I see that Luke Buckmaster at the Guardian likes the show too, and he has written a lengthy explanation of why it works which I think is about right.   It's funny to see in comments following that there are people who cannot stand it - including one guy who says it's terrible because its paints a false good picture of Tasmanians!  

COVID 19 infections and deaths

An article at Vox looks at the question of why American infection rate is way up, but deaths are down.   Seems a good explanation.

Just too stupid and paranoid to engage with

I see the latest polemic sweetheart over at Catallaxy is Tucker Carlson - they swoon over his editorials which are encouraging the paranoid view of the Left (with barely concealed racism) at a close to McCarthy-ite level.

In fact, I had cause recently to look again at the famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and it quotes Joe McCarthy talking in 1951:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . . What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.

And let's compare that to a post by crackpot wannabe historian CL at Catallaxy today, wherein he compares efforts to remove Thomas Beckett's name from some manuscript:

I know. Comparing Donald Trump to St Thomas Becket might be a stretch comparable to that asked of one of the portly President’s Mar-a-Lago polos but the parallel that interests me is Henry II’s quartet of assassins and Barack Obama’s equally say-no-more-savvy knights. “Make sure you look over things and have the right people on it.” They knew what he meant. It was remarkable enough that a pandemic came along to cover up the biggest political scandal in US history. The Russia Hoax is now even more hazy following a nationwide race war incited by the media on behalf of the Democrats. Will the swordsmen get away with it? Ignore the distractions – riots and virus – because that is still the real test of whether the United States goes on as originally constituted.

Actually, defending Joe McCarthy is another favourite past time at Catallaxy.  Steve Kates had a whole post about that recently, but CL has done it too.  

 As with all of the Trump endorsing Right, they prefer to believe luminaries such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of self serving Republican politicians over the actual multiple intelligence services knowledge that Russia did interfere in the last election, and the public knowledge that Trump and his minions were rushing to them hoping to get their help.  

Interestingly, I don't think I have seen a single reference at Catallaxy to the intelligence services reporting that they believe Putin's minions are paying Afghanis to kill US troops.   If it's Russia, and if it hurts Trump, they have no interest at all.

They are too dumb, and too far into the culture war conspiracy rabbit hole, to bother engaging with.  

Update:  over at NPR, some interesting bits by the author of a new biography of McCarthy:

His crusade was launched one night in February 1950, in an out-of-the-way community, Wheeling, W.Va., and Joe McCarthy was there to deliver the famous Republican speech on the night of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. ... Joe McCarthy went there that night with the briefcase that contained two speeches and he wasn't sure which one to give until the last minute. One was a snoozer of a speech on national housing policy, and had he delivered that speech that night, you and I wouldn't be here 70 years talking about him.

Instead, he pulled the other speech out of his briefcase and it was a barn burner on anti-communism and it was the speech that launched his crusade. ... I think it was a matter of opportunism when he started out this crusade. He was looking for any issue that would give him the limelight. He wasn't sure until the last second which issue that might be, only when he got the response that he did that night, which was within two days, every newspaper in America put Joe McCarthy and his charges of 205 spies in the State Department, they put those stories on Page 1. Joe McCarthy was off and running and he never turned back....

At the beginning McCarthy ... clearly didn't believe what he was saying. And he had fun with it, waving around the sheets, saying he had this list in his hand when he knew he didn't have a list in his hand. Calling up everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to friends in the media after he created this firestorm, saying, "You've got to help me come up with some evidence to prove the things that I've said." He was the cynic. He was an opportunist, and he knew that he was embellishing, if not outright lying. But by the end, I am convinced that Joe McCarthy actually believed his own rhetoric. If you say often enough that there are spies in the State Department or that refugees coming across the border are ruining America, if you say it often enough, you might actually begin to believe it. And I'm convinced by the end Joe McCarthy was a true believer in his own opportunistically created cause.

Yeah, someone really deserving of being a Right wing hero...

The problem with herd immunity

A safe prediction:  this will have no effect on Adam Creighton, Andrew Bolt, David Leyonhjelm or any other number of "no lockdown" advocates:

A Spanish study has cast doubt on the feasibility of herd immunity as a way of tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

The study of more than 60,000 people estimates that around just 5% of the Spanish population has developed antibodies, the medical journal the Lancet reported.

Herd immunity is achieved when enough people become immune to a virus to stop its spread.

Around 70% to 90% of a population needs to be immune to protect the uninfected.

And it would seem that the reason why herd immunity may be such a problem for this weird virus:

Herd immunity can be reached either by widespread vaccination or if enough of the population is exposed to an infection and recovers. If enough people are immune to a disease, it is unlikely to keep spreading from person to person. Letting the coronavirus infection run and risking lots of people getting very sick with it is not an option - it would put too many lives in danger.

And currently, there is no vaccine for coronavirus - even though hundreds are in development. The challenge is to make a jab that provides enough protection. It needs to train the body's immune system to learn and remember how to make antibodies that can fight off coronavirus.

Scientists are concerned that this "memory" might be too short-lived though, given the nature of the disease. While some people who catch coronavirus develop protective antibodies, experts do not yet know how long these last.

Common colds are caused by similar viruses and the body's immune response fades quickly to those.

The "too stupid to brief" President

If you can get to it, have a read of this WAPO piece:  Donald Trump, the unbriefable President.

Some parts:

But Trump does not read the PDB. Or much of anything else, a former senior White House official told me. As his presidency began, it was an open question: Would Trump even bother to sit for CIA briefings? He didn’t, at first, and did so only after Mike Pompeo, then his CIA director, agreed to be there. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence services was stoked by their conclusion that Russia had intervened in the election on his behalf. Given his hostility toward the intelligence community, and his Twitter-sized attention span, Trump would be a challenge for any briefer.

Trump’s first briefer was Ted Gistaro, a widely respected career CIA officer on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), where he oversaw the PDB. Gistaro, who has a calm demeanor and a healthy sense of humor, got almost nowhere — so the briefing team devised a show and tell. Pictures of New York City landmarks, agency briefers thought, might help Trump grasp threats. In an effort to explain the scale of North Korea’s nuclear program, the CIA built a model of the Hermit Kingdom’s underground weapons facility and put a miniature Statue of Liberty inside it.

But Trump preferred his own sources. In July 2017, he batted away the CIA’s conclusion that the North Koreans had developed an intercontinental missile that might soon be capable of reaching U.S. soil. How could the president be certain the agency was wrong? Because, he said, Vladimir Putin told him so.

And this:

Trump’s current briefer, Beth Sanner, a highly regarded, 30-year CIA veteran, has endured a bumpier ride than Gistaro. When news broke that the alleged Russian bounties were included in the PDB, the Trump administration issued its usual denials and obfuscations. First, the president claimed the so-called reports were fake news. Then, he told Fox News that the intelligence was not credible enough to be in the PDB. Then the story changed again: If the intelligence was in the PDB, the White House said, his briefer didn’t bring it to Trump’s attention. 

It wasn’t the first time the White House had thrown Sanner under the bus. (In an early May tweet, Trump blamed his briefer for not sounding alarmed when she first spoke to him about the novel coronavirus in January.) But if Sanner had been routinely derelict in her duties, why hadn’t Haspel removed or replaced her? And why hadn’t national security adviser Robert O’Brien — who, along with other top aides, receives the PDB daily and presumably reads it — gone into the Oval Office, shut the door and briefed the president himself?

The answer is simple. The president is unbriefable. He will not listen to anything he does not want to hear.

Huawei out

The SMH reports:

Huawei has lost the anglosphere. The telecommunications giant that came to symbolise China's economic rise and the risks of its unique brand of state-linked corporations will no longer have a role in building Britain's 5G network or that of any Five Eyes partner.

The sudden backflip by Britain's security services on Monday over national security concerns is part of a much broader geopolitical play involving the US and Australia. Canada has effectively locked out the Shenzen-based company through its major carriers signing contracts with Nordic firms Ericsson and Nokia. New Zealand's former national carrier, now known as Spark, opted for Samsung over Huawei for critical components in March.

I didn't know this:

The cost of the British decision is likely to surge into the billions. 5G sits on top of 4G, rather than replaces it. Huawei was a key builder of its 4G network and no two providers are compatible. Excluding them from 5G will mean replacing the old technology with the product of another company.

I suppose China only has itself to blame, given its treatment of Hong Kong. 

But, you know, I still wonder if 5G  in its entirety is an upgrade that does not really have a market.    

Approaching peak Guardian

I am pretty sure there would be many amusing, derisive comments about this article at The Guardian with a very click-baity title:

'Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky' – do cities have to be so sexist?

 if comments were allowed.  But they don't seem to be.  Pity.   (By the way, I can imagine Coalition politicians, with some justification, using this as an example of why the government is justified in increasing the cost of Humanities courses.) 

Author war

This article in The Atlantic about why "Millennials" are upset with JK Rowling not slavishly sharing their endorsement of transsexual activism is pretty good, actually. 

I think it fair to say that it suggests that Harry Potter fandom into adulthood is a bit immature, as is being horrified that a member of an older generation does not share your outlook on an issue with complete affinity. 

It is clear that many transsexuals upset with her do not do nuance.   It's full of hyperbolic "why does she want to hurt me so much?  This is devastating."    They have a huge tendency to generalise from their own experience in ways which allow for (being generous here!) little in the way of contradiction, or the consideration of other evidence.   For example,  comments on Twitter along the lines "I knew I was a man/woman at age X, how dare she suggest some trans teens seem to 'suddenly' realise they are trans. They probably knew for years, like me, but just never told anyone."

At least I see that there is considerable push back on Twitter now about this in support of Rowling.    

Oh look - record rainfall causes death and destruction in Japan - again

For the last 5 years or so, during the Japanese summer, I've been posting news about record rainfall there, the resultant floods, landslides and deaths.  (My search bar will find the posts for you.)   Here's the latest entry:

Luckily, Michael Shellenberger has written that book which can reassure the victims that natural disasters like this are not increasing.   This must all be in the imagination of Japanese residents:

An average of almost 1,500 landslides rocked Japan every year during the past decade, marking an increase of almost 50 percent on the previous 10 years, according to a government report endorsed by the Cabinet on Friday.

The trend reflected the rise in torrential rainfall due to global warming, said the white paper on land, infrastructure and transport, which called for restrictions on the use of at-risk land and relocating residents to safer areas.

The average number of landslides per year was 1,006 between 2000 and 2009, but jumped 46.7 percent to 1,476 between 2010 and 2019. This compares with 1,027 between 1990 and 1999.

Downpours of 50 millimeters or more per hour in the past decade were recorded 1.4 times more frequently than between 1976 and 1985.

I never really did trust Shellenberger, and his turn to the Lomborg/Pielke style of environmental half truth advocacy, all stoked by a "if you don't agree with me as to what should be done, I'd prefer to create political doubt that anything need be done at all" attitude, has given me some retrospective justification for never taking him very seriously.

His reaction to the questions posed to him by The Guardian really does seem a bit nutty, if you ask me.  Ketan Joshi's post about his odd behaviour is good.

She could be right

Uh-oh for universities

At The Conversation:

Only 40% of students in China who previously intended to study overseas still plan to, while just under 50% of those who had studied overseas plan to return to their study after the borders reopen.

These are results from our unpublished survey of 1,012 students we conducted in China between June 5 and 15. We asked them whether they would continue with their plan to study abroad post COVID-19.

These findings are not surprising. Due to growing tensions between China and the West – even before COVID-19 – middle-class parents in China had become increasingly concerned about the safety of, and possible discrimination against, their children abroad, including in the US and Australia.

Doesn't everyone reasonable have conflicted feelings about this?:  while big fee paying Chinese students in our tertiary system helps keep Universities pumping (and I do like healthy universities), it is obviously potentially(/actually?) corrupting of academic standards.  But in the longer term, one would hope that their exposure to democratic countries and the relative freedoms within them is in our interest, if it makes our system look more appealing - and less worthy of being the target of drastic geo-political conflict.

And I really don't get Scott Morrison's bout of sabre rattling, just as I didn't get his wannabe Trumpism about blaming China for COVID-19.   Why go out of your way to annoy China right at this time - it's hardly going to help kickstart the economic recovery that he'll be desperate to show before the next election. It was always on the cards that the USA would have a harder time containing COVID 19 compared to Australia, and Trump and his cult followers should be of much greater discrimination concern to parents of students than what could happen in the streets of Australia.   Hence, I would have thought, Morrison could have made his angle "China - see how good we are at containing illness and providing a safe space for both students and trade".

Instead we get "look at me, mini-Trump of the South Pacific".

Wagner and Tolkien and the Ring connection

Given that I care little for Tolkien, and gave even less thought to Wagner until his Cycle was coming to my city and I was convinced by someone on the radio that to see it is "a life changing experience", I never really pondered the question of how derivative one Ring was of the other.

So, I am happy to have just read a discussion of this from The New Yorker in 2003.   Some quotes, but you should go read the whole thing:

Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,” he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of “Die Walküre” not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas. True, the Volsunga Saga features a ring from a cursed hoard, but it possesses no executive powers. In the “Nibelungenlied” saga, there is a magic rod that could be used to rule all, but it just sits around. Wagner combined these two objects into the awful amulet that is forged by Alberich from the gold of the Rhine. When Wotan steals the ring for his own godly purposes, Alberich places a curse upon it, and in so doing he speaks of “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring.” Such details make it hard to believe Tolkien’s disavowals. Admit it, J.R.R., you used to run around brandishing a walking stick and singing “Nothung! Nothung!” like every other besotted Oxford lad.

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner’s time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them. 

 Now here is a crucial take on what I might now take to calling "the real Ring" to annoy Tolkien fans:

There is a widespread conception of Wagner’s cycle as a bombastic nationalistic saga in which blond-haired heroes triumph over dwarfish, vaguely Jewish enemies. Wagner unquestionably left himself open to this interpretation, but the “Ring” is not at all what it seems. It is in fact a prolonged assault on the very idea of worldly power, the cult of the monumental—everything that we think of as “Wagnerian.” At the beginning, the god Wotan is looking to expand his realm. But every step he takes to assert himself over the affairs of others, to make his will reality, leads inexorably to his downfall. He is marked from the outset, and the ring becomes a symbol of the corruption of his authority. Tolkien believes in the forces of good, in might for right. Wagner dismisses all that—he had an anarchist streak early on—and sees redemption only in love.

When Tolkien stole Wagner’s ring, he discarded its most significant property—that it can be forged only by one who has forsworn love. (Presumably, Sauron gave up carnal pleasures when he became an all-seeing eye at the top of a tower, but it’s hard to say for certain. Maybe he gets a kick out of the all-seeing bit.) The sexual opacity of Tolkien’s saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron’s bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction.

This is fantastic!  It's giving me a whole new explanation as to why I didn't respond to Lord of the Rings - because it makes no, um, meta-emotional sense, to coin a phrase.  Back to what the real Ring - heh - is about:

Wagner, by contrast, uses the ring to shine a light on various intense, confused, all-too-human relationships. Alberich forges the ring only after the Rhine maidens turn away his advances. Wotan becomes obsessed with it as a consequence of his loveless marriage; he buries himself in his work. Even after he sees through his delusions, and achieves a quasi-Buddhist acceptance of his powerlessness, he has nothing else to lean on, not even his Gandalfian staff, and wanders off into the night. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, lost in their love for each other, succeed in remaking the ring as an ordinary trinket, a symbol of their devotion. They assert their earthbound passion against Wotan’s godly world, and thus bring it down. The apparatus of myth itself—the belief in higher and lower powers, hierarchies, orders—crumbles with the walls of Valhalla. Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.

Cool.

Studying up on the Ring

Well, seeing I am on my way to 15 odd hours of Wagnerian opera in a few months time, I should probably start getting a better idea of what its about and how it's been interpreted over the years, and why it seems particularly appealing (according to this very interesting article) to politicians (and not just Nazi ones.)   I didn't know GBS was a fan, for example:

...the first point to make is that Wagner’s music has inspired political interpretation since it was first performed. The 35-year-old anarchist who befriended Bakunin and took part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849 was 63 when the Ring cycle was first performed. By then, Marx felt able to mock the former firebrand as a “musician of state”, a court composer remote from the social realities of the age; deaf to the first whispers of modernity. Yet the notion that the Ring is essentially a critique of capitalism has always had its adherents – most obviously George Bernard Shaw, whose The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) declares the Ring to be a dramatised allegory of “shareholders, tall hats, white-lead factories and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view”. In this scheme of equivalence, Alberich is the wicked capitalist and Nibelheim his industrial Hades. Siegfried shimmers into being as an avatar of Bakunin, the great rebel whose struggle for freedom ends in defeat.

Well, given it went on to become a Nazi favourite, it's a wonder they haven't been duels in the street over conflicting interpretations.  (Actually, I suspect there may have been.)

On the perhaps more mundane matter of staging, the production I am (hopefully) going to see is said to be a "digital" production:  

Towering, moving digital panels create an immersive virtual world. Astonishing costumes and props imagine an unknown future.  

Given that the QPAC performance space is not the largest on the planet, perhaps that will work well, but I would be curious to see a more traditional production, too.  This article goes into detail about the history of its staging, with this amusing bit:

From 1896 on (when Bayreuth finally mounted its second Ring ), critics took issue with the fixed, semaphoric style of acting Cosima imposed there, which many thought more forced and unnatural than what her late husband's actors had done twenty years before. In 1889 Shaw wrote, "Bayreuth has chosen the law of death. Its boast is that it alone knows what was done last time, therefore it alone has the pure and complete tradition, or, as I prefer to put it, that it alone is in a position to strangle Wagner's lyric dramas note by note, bar by bar, nuance by nuance ." In 1896, he judged the Bayreuth style of acting to be an amateurish display of tableau-vivant attitudes, the striking of stupid poses by singers who were often little more than "animated beer casks." (From earliest days, Ring tourists mocked the girth of "youthful" Siegfrieds and "enchanting" Brünnhildes. Romain Rolland, at Bayreuth in 1896, described "the vast padded bulk" of a Sieglinde: "From bust to backside she is as wide as a city wall.")

Forget your downtrodden Humanities degrees

Instead, Australia should introduce something like this:

Japan university awards first-ever ninja studies degree 

Japan has produced its first ninja studies graduate after Genichi Mitsuhashi spent two years honing his martial arts skills and absorbing the finer traditions of the feudal martial arts agents.

The 45-year-old completed the master’s course at Mie University in central Japan, the region considered the home of the ninja.

In addition to researching historical documents, Mitsuhashi said he took the practical aspect of being a ninja to heart.

“I read that ninjas worked as farmers in the morning and trained in martial arts in the afternoon,” he said.

So Mitsuhashi grew vegetables and worked on his martial arts techniques, in addition to copious ninja study in the classroom.

As far as our government's policy to fiddle with the cost of going to University, I was surprised to see that the two most cost reduced courses are maths and agriculture.  I can understand the need for more maths teachers, but there is a problem with not enough tertiary qualified farmers?

As for the other changes:  I am not really bothered by the fee increase for some areas of oversupply (we could do with a lot less law graduates who have little hope of finding a job - not to mention every university under the sun setting up a law school because it is relatively cheap to do), but I am bit annoyed at the way all possible Humanities studies have been lumped together. 

Why pro-mask now?

I would still bet money on the reason Fox News has started to promote mask wearing is because of concern about being the target of litigation.

This article argues that such litigation has low chance of success - but I would not put it past litigious America to try it, and still it would risk costing the network in legal fees and embarrassing publicity.

Republicans on the coming dis-aster

Paul Waldman at WAPO looks again at the stupid Republican/conservative rhetoric about how Democrat control of government would be a communistic disaster:

Republicans are getting very worried about what might happen if Democrats win big this November. The polls look bad for President Trump, Democrats enjoy a lead in the battle for the House as big as the one just before the 2018 blowout, and the GOP’s Senate majority looks increasingly imperiled.

Faced with that kind of situation, some are spending less time arguing that their policy preferences are superior to Democrats’ policy preferences, and have instead gone to apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe should the Democrats take control. Here’s a striking one from conservative writer Rod Dreher:

You can smell the panic. And he’s not alone.

If your memory stretches all the way back to 2009, that kind of thing may sound familiar. When Barack Obama — a center-left president who spent years trying to win Republican support for his agenda — took office, many on the right absolutely lost their minds with fantasies of oppression and dictatorship.

Republicans said over and over again that Obama was a “tyrant,” when all that was happening was that he was enacting the policies he ran on. As Jon Stewart said in April 2009 after running through a litany of conservatives decrying Obama’s tyranny, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing."

“When the guy that you disagree with gets elected, he’s probably going to do things you disagree with,” Stewart continued. “Now you’re in the minority. It’s supposed to taste like a s--t taco.”

But Republicans never seemed to get their minds around that idea. It was never enough to say “This is a very bad thing Obama is doing.” He had to be a tyrant who was moments away from rounding us up, imposing martial law, and putting us in FEMA concentration camps.

How on Earth do we get the American Right to stop this catastrophising BS?    Where are the Republican who will decry paranoia and put national unity and goodwill over political scaremongering?   (OK, there are some -  look at those campaigning that they will vote for Biden.)  But how can they overcome the sick feedback loop between Right wing media making money from encouraging paranoid conspiracy amongst the grass roots, and the politicians who see their endorsement as essential? 

Update:  what a sick worry this is -

GOP Candidates Open To QAnon Conspiracy Theory Advance In Congressional Races

As predicted, Trump takes the worst possible line on the Russia story

This response by Trump makes  no political sense whatsoever:

Congressional Republicans who blew a two year fuse trying to prove that Obama and Hillary did not have American soldiers' interests at heart in Benghazi now have a President who is openly saying that the briefings they are getting directly from intelligence sources about the danger American troops are in is a hoax.

I reckon that the low regard most of them already hold (in private) for Trump as their useful idiot will plummet to new levels.

I said the other day that the worst outcome would be for Trump to say he spoke to Putin who denied it, and that's the end of the matter as far as he is concerned.   But this apparent attempt to even pre-empt that he would even need to talk to Putin about it is arguably worse.   It shows that if he doesn't like the way he found out about something because it makes him look bad, he will simply go into complete denial instead of doing anything responsible.  

What line are his Fox News puppet masters taking on this?   Because this is going to be next to impossible to spin.

Greg Sargent's piece in WAPO explains in more detail:

Trump is now defending himself not just by claiming he wasn’t briefed on that intelligence, or just by contesting the significance of that intelligence. Instead, he’s declaring that the entire story simply doesn’t exist — that is, he’s suggesting no intelligence ever actually indicated anything like this.

Yet this defense is itself deeply self-incriminating. It only underscores what critics are saying — that at minimum, Trump should be taking this intelligence seriously and trying to get to the bottom of what it actually does indicate, even if the worst interpretation proves wrong....

There is a great deal we don’t know about the Russian bounties, and we should be exceptionally cautious. But one thing we can state right now is that the president of the United States should be taking a lot more of an interest in this and should be saying publicly that he is doing so....

Even the most charitable interpretation here is incriminating. If you stipulate that Trump is merely demonstrating an instinct to protect himself politically — and is just lashing out at the “deep state” or whatever — then this instinct is itself preventing him from seeking a full accounting. Such a narcissistic reflex itself ensures that Trump won’t act for the good of the country.

 Update:

Jordan and the Nazis

A long article criticising how (and why) conservative hero Jordan Peterson has played loose with the facts about Hitler and his party has appeared in Haaretz.   Found via Bernard Keane on Twitter.

It's funny how the conservative Catholics and Jews who comment at Catallaxy have been Peterson admirers.   They are the ones who most need to read it:  I already thought Peterson was an unreliable flake.

It is done

I explained back in August that I was tempted to leap into opera not by dipping my toe into just any kid's pool of the genre, but by taking a running leap off a Germanic mountain and into the depths of the Rhine via the Ring Cycle.

I thought the production would be cancelled - the director is Chinese, but maybe he is already in Australia?   I would have guessed that some of the performers live overseas and their presence would be in doubt too.

Yet, they are still selling tickets, and in fact there are very few of the cheapest left.   (No, I am not spending $2000 plus dollars on this experiment in how much cultural enrichment I can endure over 4 nights.)

So, it is done.  I have bought a ticket, and can now start considering an appropriate horned costume, if I become an instant fan and want to come in cosplay for the last one.

As it happens, there is still a seat available next to me, if anyone is going to be in Brisbane in November, virus free, and offers to nudge me awake if my head is drooping. 

Hoyotoho!

Irony alert

Sinclair Davidson defending Facebook today:

Facebook does not amplify hate etc. Those people being ‘hateful’ on your Facebook page are the people you have chosen to ‘friend’ – by definition they are your friends, your family, your associates.

A few posts later, by his former RMIT buddy Steve Kates, referencing Democrats:

These lice will do anything to win the election, but what will be left of America if they do?

OK, I didn't have to "friend" Kates at all to read that bit of Nazi level dehumanisation of his political enemies (ironically, from a person I have been told in comments - by Sinclair? - is Jewish).   So am I allowed to think that Catallaxy amplifies hate by friends of Sinclair?   Yes, yes I am. 

Update:  Sinclair continues to host racist Mick Gold Coast, I see.  

Insult the host or his besties who he jokes around with, and you're banned from commenting there.  Post clearly racist comments repeatedly and they'll be quietly deleted, but (unless it's about Jews) never face a ban.   That's how Sinclair rolls. 
 

Things watched

*  I haven't finished it yet, but gee, the second series of Korean zombie, old timey fashion, and palace intrigue series Kingdom has been really good - really well made action, plot surprises (not always welcome ones, actually) and (for its kind of show) well acted.   My only criticism is that it should come with a map - the geography of where the zombie hoards are chasing the heroes to gets very unclear.  

* Have started watching the Belgium made (yes, another foreign show) slightly science fiction-y present day apocalypse show Into the Night, and I'm enjoying it so far.   It has a pleasing narrative push to it which comes inherently from the scenario - the sun has gone rogue and started shooting out gamma rays which kills life at sunrise, and one passenger plane - an Airbus 320 I think (it is Europe, after all) -  has to keep flying West to avoid the sun catching up with it.   Not entirely plausible, in more than one respect, but I hope it keeps up the quality of the first couple of episodes.   Here's a positive review that seems accurate to me.

* Also just started watching Tiger King.  Yeah, it's good, the first episode, but I do get the feeling that the story to be told shouldn't take 8 episodes.   I am anticipating tiring of it.

* On Youtube, recently discovered the idiosyncratic travel vlogger Bald and Bankrupt.  He's a very unusual character, naturally good at the narration to camera on a selfie stick that is his thing (no beautiful drone footage on this channel, that's for sure), and I see that he is pretty well known.   It's odd to see a more mature age character who seems to want to experience somewhat dangerous situations for the fun of it.  And who is the woman he is with sometimes?  Why would she follow him into some of the crappiest countries around?   This video was one of the most remarkable ones I have seen: