But Mum, I don't want to control monkey brains with light

 

I underestimated the stupidity of Trump supporters/cultists

I was opining earlier in the year that the problem for Trump would be the inability to hold campaign rallies due to COVID-19.  Little did I realise that not only the intense narcissism of Trump would mean that he would insist on them, but his dumb cult followers would attend, even in the freezing cold:

At least seven people were hospitalized and 30 had to receive medical attention during and after a Tuesday evening campaign rally with President Trump in Omaha, Nebraska.

You would have to suspect that campaign induced spread of COVID is going to be a significant factor in reduced Republican turn out.

Update:  just been amusing myself on a meme generator page -

 

That rare thing: stand up I like

You all know I am generally not a big fan of stand up comedy.   But no one probably recalls that I thought the (deliberately?) amateurish show Aaron Chen Tonight, which turned up on some obscure ABC secondary channel slot a couple of years ago, was likeable.

Well, superstardom seems to be escaping Mr Chen, but Youtube has thrown up at me some more recent short clips of his stand up (probably because I watch Uncle Roger videos), and I do find his whole comedy persona pretty funny:

Much worrying speculation

Maybe you've seen on Twitter this nightmarish scenario:   Trump loses, but not by enough of a margin to immediately concede, and in fact announces a bunch of lawfare to try to knock out enough votes to let him cling on.

At this time, perhaps midway through a couple of months of chronic uncertainty as to who the real winner is, China decides to make a move on Taiwan, confident that America doesn't know who speaks for them anyway (and while redneck militia take pot shots in the streets against Democrat protesters who think Trump must step down.)   

It has a worrying sort of plausibility about it, no?

The BBC wrote:

Is China preparing to invade Taiwan? It's a question being discussed with feverish intensity on many China forums right now. And what should be one of the top geopolitical concerns for the incoming US president.

The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

In response some newspapers ran headlines suggesting an invasion is imminent.

It almost certainly isn't. But there are good reasons for the urgency with which China experts are now discussing the future of Taiwan.

I don't know:  the main reason for doubting the scenario is that it would seem China would be buying itself a region full of bitter and unhappy citizens - more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.

 

 

Girls are weird

Sorry for the Bart Simpson-like analysis in the heading, but this does seem really odd to me:

Girls who do not live with both parents from birth to age two may be at higher risk of starting puberty at a younger age than girls living with both parents, research published in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests. The authors suggest that their findings support the hypothesis that stress in early life may influence puberty onset. The risk of early puberty onset could potentially be mitigated by interventions aiming to improve child wellbeing, according to the authors.  

A team of researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, U.S., found that girls who did not live with both parents from birth to age two were 38% more likely to begin their period before the age of 12 compared with girls who lived with both parents. Girls who did not live with both parents between the ages of two and six were 18% more likely than girls whose parents lived together to begin their period before the age of 12.

I am surprised that stress at such a young age can have such a specific biological effect 9 or 10 years later.

My quick assessment of Rogan as not worth paying attention to seems vindicated

 

Yes. Increase the court.

This woman is showing no good sense on anything:

 

Another worry

At the Washington Post:

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 coronavirus cases in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, even though the flight was only 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”...

Masks were utilized by nine of those 13 infected passengers, with one child not wearing a mask and three passengers’ mask use “unknown,” the report noted.

A full return to something like "normal" international air travel is likely some way off.

 

The writing process

I thought this interesting, because I have a story I would like to write (would prefer it as a screenplay, to be honest) but while I can imagine certain scenes very well, haven't got the overall thing to work in my mind yet:

 

If you want some really worrying reading today...

...try this abstract from a new paper in Nature Geoscience:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity above 5 °C plausible due to state-dependent cloud feedback

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of Earth is defined as the global mean surface air temperature increase that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For decades, global climate models have predicted it as between approximately 2 and 4.5 °C. However, a large subset of models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project predict values exceeding 5 °C. The difference has been attributed to the radiative effects of clouds, which are better captured in these models, but the underlying physical mechanism and thus how realistic such high climate sensitivities are remain unclear. Here we analyse Community Earth System Model simulations and find that, as the climate warms, the progressive reduction of ice content in clouds relative to liquid leads to increased reflectivity and a negative feedback that restrains climate warming, in particular over the Southern Ocean. However, once the clouds are predominantly liquid, this negative feedback vanishes. Thereafter, other positive cloud feedback mechanisms dominate, leading to a transition to a high-sensitivity climate state. Although the exact timing and magnitude of the transition may be model dependent, our findings suggest that the state dependence of the cloud-phase feedbacks is a crucial factor in the evolution of Earth’s climate sensitivity with warming.

What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.

Very deadpan, and funny

This one's for Jason, who hasn't made an appearance in comments for a long time.  From The Onion:

 

So, how's the debate going?

Which means his cult members will think he's doing fantastic, because he's confirming their "insider who thinks he/she knows what's really going on" status.  The rest of the country, though... 

Update:

Again, his cult members, who are all about punishing those who don't align with their politics, will see no problem.

Hugh Hewitt: Give me my tin-pot dictatorship and give it to me NOW!

What a laugh:

 Get this next bit:

It's too much for even the White House to take seriously?   

As always with Hewitt's columns at WAPO, the comments are about 99% mocking him.   This one is moderate in tone, but sums it up correctly, for anyone who isn't part of the Trump cult:

Just a minor detail

So I just had a look at the New York Post to see what is behind the pants wetting excitement on the low information Right about Tony Bobulinski.

Seems to be all about an email in which Hunter Biden makes (what Tony says is a) cryptic reference to Joe Biden getting a cut in a deal with a Chinese firm in 2017.

I had to read way down the article to get to this:

What is not clear yet is whether Joe Biden had secret stakes in any of Hunter’s other deals. As for this one, while the date on the May 2017 email would be nearly four months after Biden left the White House, it’s not known when discussions among the partners and with the Chinese first began. Certainly they started before the email.

And while such deals would be legal for Joe Biden when he left government service, the facts take on extra significance during a campaign where China policy is a frequent topic — and a big dispute between Trump and Biden.

So, when the Right sees sudden disclosure of a Trump company in China making money, it's all just shrug shoulders, legitimate business deals.   And they have no interest whatever in the fact that no one understands Trump's  true financial position because Trump has stonewalled on providing the information for at least 5 years.

But when its Joe Bodin, it's a matter of national security that he (possibly) had a cut in a deal in China.   

Right. 

Just a random thought...

....it's been rattling around my mind for a while that whiny, whiny Trump is like an unfunny version of Rodney Dangerfield.  He "don't get no respect", and no  laughs either.  I think his deliberately stupid dancing at rallies has re-kindled the thought.

Someone else somewhere would probably have made the comparison a while ago, but I personally haven't seen it.   Oh look, someone did a "deepfake" video last year that has Trump's face on Dangerfield's head.  Doesn't look all that different, though.

Yeah, thanks again, unfettered social media

In Berlin, there's been some vandalism of items in a museum, and while it seems they are not 100% certain, the media thinks there is probably a connection to this:

....the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit and public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, which broke the news together, were the first to draw a link between the vandalism and conspiracy theorists.

One of the conspiracy theorists who's gathered a large following of coronavirus deniers, Attila Hildmann, has claimed a number of times on his Telegram channel that the Pergamon Museum is the center of a 'global Satanism scene' which, his followers allege, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been using for 'human sacrifices,' noting that she lives opposite the Museum.

 

A most unusual election

A few observations:

*  Isn't it weird that while Republicans and their Right wing media have been on a blitz to emphasise Hunter Biden's drug problems, they haven't been able to stop the president's own son from making appearances in which he looks either coked up or mentally unwell?:

Yes, that’s a real clip of Donald Trump Jr. lying in bed with his head in such a position that his neck is completely obscured, nursing what appears to be a serious sunburn, and claiming that Instagram has been purposely hiding his posts from his legions of followers. “Hey guys, hope you’re doing well,” the president’s eldest son says, again, from his bed. “Just watching my algorithms getting crushed. I guess I did something to piss off the Instagram gods, so hopefully you’re seeing this stuff anyway. We’ll do what we can. Talk to you soon.”

From the outside, it’s extremely difficult to understand why Donny boy posted this clip, the only logical explanation being that he thinks he looks good.

*  Have we ever had an election before in which the issue of men masturbating has featured so prominently?

*  Just today, we have Republicans claiming that fake emails threatening Democrats to vote Trump are actually intended to hurt Trump.   Because they are too obviously fake?  Or they think they come from Iran, and of course they would not want to help Trump?   But John Ratcliffe is a completely unreliable pro-Trump appointee:

On Monday, Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to bolster an unconfirmed news report by The New York Post related to the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in the Ukraine. Mr. Ratcliffe suggested on Fox Business that the Obama-Biden administration had committed (unnamed) criminal abuses of power and that voters should take these supposed actions into account in the upcoming election.

Such personal political commentary for a sitting intelligence leader is virtually unprecedented. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, tweeted that Mr. Ratcliffe’s actions were “reprehensible” and worthy of a “tin-pot dictatorship.”

 Can he believed about the nation behind the emails?

Why is the intern hours problem so slow to be properly addressed??

So, last night I was at a high school awards night, and the guest speaker was a graduate from 2008 who now works as a doctor in the Queensland hospital system.

She explained that she initially studied for a science degree, but after a couple of years swapped to medicine.   This means she would have been an intern only about, what?, 5 years ago?

While she is very happy in her job now, she did say that the intern years were the worst - 70 hour weeks I think she said, and so stressed and tired she would cry when she got home.  And get this:  if she raised her exhaustion at work, the response from senior doctors was the old "well, that's what we had to go through, so suck it up."

That way of thinking has been driving me nuts for decades!   I saw it in an unrelated profession in my 20's, and it has offended me ever since.  (That's a story for another day.)

It's consistent with a Four Corners story on this problem in 2015 (and in fact, she would have been an intern around then.)

But 5 years later, what sign is there that the problem is being actually addressed?

Here's a report from last year:

Almost half of Queensland's junior doctors working in the public system are concerned they are so exhausted that they will make a clinical error, the state's peak doctors association has warned.

The Australian Medical Association Queensland's latest Resident Hospital Health Check report surveyed almost 900 of the state's junior doctors, of which 46 per cent reported concern about their long working hours burning them out.

The figure is unchanged from the year before....

Dr Abdeen said junior doctors worked long hours, with some going on call for 120 hours in a row.

"You're working day shifts, you're on call all night, getting called multiple times per day, and then going back to work the next day, of course you're going to be fatigued," Dr Abdeen said.

"All of these factors lead to a person who is going to be burnt out and ultimately prone to mistakes."

Dr Abdeen said he himself had just recently covered two other doctors on a single shift, forcing him to do the work of three doctors and treat all of their patients.

Here's a report from earlier this year:

The Black Dog Institute and UNSW Sydney have published Australian-first research examining the relationship between average working hours and the mental health of junior doctors.
 
And the results are stark.
 
A quarter of all junior doctors work unsafe hours, which researchers found doubles their risk of developing mental health issues and suicidal ideation.
 
Associate Professor Samuel Harvey, study co-author and Chief Psychiatrist at the Black Dog Institute said working long hours has been an accepted part of the culture of medical training for decades, but ongoing research is changing perceptions.

‘We’re now starting to understand the human cost behind these excessive workloads,’ he said.
 
‘Pressure on junior doctors to “earn their stripes” by taking on long work hours has always been common, but what we now know is that this can have profound mental health impacts, with concerning implications for both the individual doctors and our broader health system.’
 
A cohort of almost 43,000 randomly selected junior doctors in Australia were invited to participate in Beyond Blue’s National Mental Health Survey, with 12,252 providing data to form the research – the largest and most up-to-date national figures available on doctors’ mental health outcomes.
 
Junior doctors who worked over 55 hours a week were more than twice as likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation, compared to those working 40–44 hours per week.  
 
The same results applied regardless of age, gender, level of training, location, marital status or whether the doctor was trained overseas or locally, confirming a link between long working hours and poorer mental health among junior doctors.

So it's pretty clear that the problem is still not being adequately addressed.

I presume it's a combination of inadequate hospital funding, variable intern numbers, and A PERSISTENTLY STUPID ATTITUDE OF [SOME] SENIOR DOCTORS IN HOSPITALS.

Because honestly, if it wasn't for the latter, you should have doctors at every election telling people to vote for governments that will do their utmost to address the problem.

 

Mud brick city

A story at the BBC says that a palace made of mud bricks in Yemen is in danger of collapse (due to poor maintenance and heavy rain.)

It's a big building, and you wouldn't guess it was mud bricks:

But even more interesting, further down in the story, is a photo of a large number of crumbling mud brick houses "in the Old City of Sanaa":

I had no idea there were such large mud brick buildings anywhere in the world.   

Another site has an interview discussing this place:

These are homes for Yemenis. I know some people had to leave because their homes were damaged. But what is life like in these buildings?

The house develops, as I said, in vertical. So you have the lower floor: storage, the kitchen and so on. And two or three rooms per floor where the family or the extended family lives. So, of course, now they have more modern services. The toilets and so on are more modern than the old ones, but still they live in the same way. 

I'm guessing there are no elevators. So if you have company over, they have to walk up nine stories if you're on the top floor.

Absolutely. And not only that, but you are at 2,200 meters high. It's one of the highest capitals in the world. So it is quite an effort, I would say.  

You're running out of breath by the time you get up to the ninth story. 

I would say so. But the inhabitants are used to that. 

I've been in mud brick structures before, some two stories high. But it's hard to imagine anything in mud brick taller than that. As an architect, what in your training prepared you to appreciate this construction? 

These are the highest buildings in mud brick in the world. The fact that they are one adjacent to the others, of course, helps with the height. But they are all individual houses with different plans and layout, built around a staircase — a stone staircase that goes from the lower floor to the upper floor. And the rooms open around this staircase. So people move all the time from one floor to another and some floors are dedicated to the kitchen, some other to women. And as you move up, you know, there are more open space and the public space for the house and the community. 

Oh well.  A fair chance that climate change might wash away this city over the next century, perhaps?