Update: and what does this even mean?:
The Taliban will not attend "any conference that shall make decisions about Afghanistan" until "all foreign forces completely withdraw," a spokesperson for the group tweeted on Tuesday.
Why it matters: That's an explicit rejection of an upcoming peace conference in Istanbul. It also follows President Biden's announcement that the U.S. will withdraw its troops by Sept. 11, but miss a deadline to do so by May 1.
I wonder what exactly the Taliban expects in a post foreign involvement country? They seem against all modern things except guns, bombs and heroin. Why does that attitude survive?
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I posted my prediction of this on Friday evening, within a hour or so of hearing about the Duke's death.
And it came true (not a hard one to predict, but still):
Sometimes the predictions that a narrative around “Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview contributing to Prince Philip’s untimely death” were uncanny in how they bore out.
It didn’t take long, for example, for the Daily Mail to trot out a piece that emphasized Prince Philip’s “tough final year” and the way the end of his life was marred, in part, by “bitter fallout from ‘his favourite’ grandchild Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit ‘the firm.’”
Notably, however, it was American outlet Fox News that seemed to get there first.
I can't remember why this came to mind the other day, but of all the people who I haven't heard of for a long time, and wondered whether they had died but I just can't recall the reporting of it with any clarity, prime among them would have to be Burt Bacharach.
I see that he is in fact still alive, aged 92.
I wonder if he still plays?
Oh, yes, he is still working at song writing, at least. Nice.
The White Tiger, which was released on Netflix a month or so ago and seems to be popular there, is really good - an entertaining take on the problems in Indian society, so well directed and acted. It's one of those very transporting, great sense of place, type films too.
As I said to my daughter after it - the caste system has to go down as one of the all time great really bad cultural ideas of the world.
One other minor note - I think I mentioned before, when discussing the Indian series Sacred Games, and even Typewriter, that it seems Indians are very florid with their swearing in their own language. It's very odd - in all Indian shows, the characters conversationally mix English with their native language, and the really strong swearing only (or mainly?) turns up in translation from the native language. They don't seem to swear in English much, but some of the swearing in Hindi or whatever other language they are using often seems oddly over the top in the context. (And did I mention before, but I asked an Indian client about that last year, and he confirmed - most, or a lot, of Indians swear like troopers.)
Anyway, a good film.
An article at the Washington Post about a new memoir begins:
John Boehner in a new memoir derides today’s Republican Party as unrecognizable to traditional conservatives like himself, held hostage by both former president Donald Trump and by a conservative media echo chamber that is based on creating “chaos” for its own financial needs.
....it's worth reading this review of a new, somewhat critical, biography of Stephen Hawking.
I would have mentioned before that it had long been obvious that his achievements were over-hyped in the popular press and the public mind. The review contains further confirmation of that.
Yeah, this muon test stuff seems a genuine indication of some sort of "new physics" lurking in the background. Let Fermilab explain:
Update: Oh. I see there is another explanation going around which does not involve new physics, but seemingly leaves the awkward Standard Model secure. I wonder which take on this is going to turn out right.
In Science:
Food supplements that alter gut bacteria could ‘cure’ malnutrition
To save a starving child, aid workers have long used one obvious treatment: food. But a new study suggests feeding their gut bacteria may be as important—or even more important—than feeding their stomachs. In a head-to-head comparison against a leading treatment for malnutrition, a new supplement designed to promote helpful gut bacteria led to signs of improved growth and more weight gain, despite having 20% fewer calories. The study also highlights how important gut bacteria—the so-called microbiome—can be to human health.....
About 30 million children worldwide are so hungry that their bodies are wasting away. Their growth slows, their immune systems don’t work well, and their nervous systems fail to develop properly. To combat malnutrition, health clinics often administer prepackaged, ready-to-use supplementary food (RUSF), which is easy to store and turns into goo after kneading. But malnourished children’s health improvements are rarely permanent, and many never fully recover, even after they eat enough. “It’s a problem that previously didn’t have an available solution,” says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale University not involved with the work.
For more than 10 years, Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has studied the role the microbiome plays in malnutrition recovery. He and his colleagues discovered that 15 key bacteria are needed for normal growth in mice, pigs, and to some degree people, and that children whose microbiomes fail to “mature” to include these species do not recover from malnutrition as well as children whose gut bacteria do mature. “Current therapies do not repair this disrupted microbiome,” Gordon explains.
So he and Tahmeed Ahmed, a malnutrition expert scientist who heads the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, tried with colleagues to find out which of a half dozen combinations of easy-to-obtain foods most encouraged the growth of these healthy bacteria. In the new study, they tested their best performing candidate: a complex mixture of chickpea, banana, soy, and peanut flours and oils that they call microbiota-directed complementary food No. 2, or MDCF-2.
About 120 malnourished toddlers from a Dhaka slum received either MDCF-2 or the standard RUSF supplement twice a day for 3 months. Every 2 weeks during treatment, and again 1 month after treatment ended, the researchers weighed and measured the children, sampled their blood, and analyzed the bacteria in their feces.
Not only did MDCF-2 boost blood components linked to growth—such as proteins needed for the proper development of bones, the nervous system, and the immune system—but it also resulted in a growth rate twice as high, measured by change in a weight-to-length score, as in those receiving RUSF, the researchers report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. What’s more, 21 types of beneficial bacteria increased in abundance. Enhanced growth in children continued even after the treatment ended. “A small amount of this food supplement can actually cure malnutrition in children,” Ahmed concludes.
What a fascinating area of research, this gut bacteria stuff.
I have been wanting to note for a while that my assessment of Adam Creighton and his ilk (economist Paul Frijters, for one, who Nicholas Gruen has let overrun his blog with "BUT YOU ARE ALL WRONG AND PANICKING UNNECESSARILY" guff about COVID) has moved from something like "dismissive of such clownishness" to "you absolutely disgust me".
I mean - it is just so freaking obvious that COVID spread and optimal responses to it are hugely complicated questions with wildly varying effects across wildly varying cultures and populations such that it is going to be years, if ever, that unpicking the evidence is going to provide anything like definitive answers that are 100% clear. Yet Creighton, Frijters and other economics types (for the most part) decided a position at the very start and are determined to promote it and attack all others (including, of course, public health officials whose lifetime job has been devoted to these issues) as if the answers are obvious and that those against them are the real ones causing unnecessary trouble.
It's a level of arrogant certainty and pig headedness that just makes me sick to read. I guess I could say I tend towards the same feeling now towards climate change denial - certainly towards the likes of politically motivated gadflies like Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair who promote stupidity in the media - but with COVID it's the immediacy of the problem that has intensified my anger and disgust with the economists who think they know best and will not change position or admit there is substantial evidence against them.
Update: just a couple of days after I wrote this, Adam outdid himself:
There are many funny replies rubbishing him.
I don't post much about Catallaxy any more - the intensity of the stupidity, misogyny, racism and crank conservatism is now so off the charts that talking about it is about as useful as noting that 8Chan is a bunch of obnoxious boys not worth even looking at.
Not only that, as I mentioned recently, the site doesn't even work property any more, and Sinclair Davidson doesn't seem too perturbed. I half suspect he thinks it good if the routinely defamatory comments about things like, you know, likely rape victims, are harder to find.
But I do note the irony of a man who has a run a blog devoted to promoting climate change denialism and clean energy scepticism for years is now also against proposals that scientists start serious research into the possible geo-engineering that may only be needed because of the very positions Davidson has shamelessly promoted.
I'm not the biggest fan of the concept of geo-engineering myself, as I would prefer aggressive actions to stop the emissions; but for someone effectively pro-emissions to also be against it is just numbskullery.
Last night, there wasn't much on TV and I found myself watching a repeat of the very interesting BBC documentary David Bowie: Finding Fame, about his struggles in the late 60's which finally paid off in fame in the early 1970's.
He certainly had a rough ride, in terms of false starts and projects that went no where. You have to admire his dedication to finding a way to break through.
However, I will still, for the life of me, never understand the appeal of the garish looks of the Ziggy Stardust performance character to Bowie, the audience of the time, or any audience since. As the show makes clear though, he rose to fame on it, but quickly recognized its limitations, and perhaps in a calculated sense, quit the character at its peak. The aesthetics of 1970's glamour rock will always remain a historical puzzle, I reckon.
There was a producer on the show who I have seen on Youtube explaining how certain later Bowie songs were created. The one about Heroes was particularly interesting, and showed the surprisingly circuitous and multi-contribution way modern pop music is sometimes created:
I was sceptical from the start about the EM drive, and it seems it has now been definitely disproved.
I'm talking about the prospect of a US Defence report that might issue soon confirming that they know there are some drone-like flying things of inexplicable capabilities, which are either secret new foreign technology, or possibly the tool used by extraterrestrial observers. Read the post here at Hot Air about it. Also, this article at Washington Post.
A large part of the reason my interest is tempered is due to the fact that a key figure who has recently given the story legs is John Ratcliffe, the Trump appointee to an intelligence job who was widely criticised as being completely unqualified for such a role.
I would not be at all surprised if he has oversold the story.
As I noted recently, it is kind of odd that it is the Right of politics that has suddenly developed an interest in UFO's and wanting to know "the truth". It's the side more associated with keeping secrets and crushing release of information.
So, Elton John was in town (Brisbane) and sold out a couple of concerts. He put on a special extra one in a park (fantasy park - it looked nice) and you had to be lucky to get a ticket. Despite my having no interest in ever seeing him in concert in real life, in the dream I ended up there and was happy about it, and found that a bunch of people I hadn't seen since high school were also there.
(I recently was talking to friends about high school people, so I know where that bit came from.)
OK, so the boring bit. Donald Trump was also there, up the back, and I was sitting quite close to him. The pre-show entertainment included 3 separate drummers who were in some sort of solo drumming competition, with Trump indicating when the next one could start. I thought "typical that this guy would be into the most boring form of musical entertainment conceivable." After that went on and on, some other stage entertainment started, and it was all incredibly dull. At one point I thought Elton had come out and I started clapping, but it was someone else. After a couple of hours, I thought that the whole concert may be a prank, but eventually Elton came out, a bit apologetic. I remember nothing of his performance.
The next bit I remember is that I slept in the park overnight, and was disappointed in the morning to realise I had no brought no change of clothes, and I had to catch public transport home looking dishevelled.
It was the intensity of the boredom of the pre-show entertainment that was the key feature, and I can't work out why such an idea was rattling around my mind.
The Wall Street Journal has put up an article explaining what China is doing with digital currency, and it is not paywalled via Twitter. Some bits:
A thousand years ago, when money meant coins, China invented paper currency. Now the Chinese government is minting cash digitally, in a re-imagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power.
It might seem money is already virtual, as credit cards and payment apps such as Apple Pay in the U.S. and WeChat in China eliminate the need for bills or coins. But those are just ways to move money electronically. China is turning legal tender itself into computer code.
Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have foreshadowed a potential digital future for money, though they exist outside the traditional global financial system and aren’t legal tender like cash issued by governments.
China’s version of a digital currency is controlled by its central bank, which will issue the new electronic money. It is expected to give China’s government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people. By design, the digital yuan will negate one of bitcoin’s major draws: anonymity for the user.
Beijing is also positioning the digital yuan for international use and designing it to be untethered to the global financial system, where the U.S. dollar has been king since World War II. China is embracing digitization in many forms, including money, in a bid to gain more centralized control while getting a head start on technologies of the future that it regards as up for grabs.
The dollar has faced challengers before—the euro, to name one—only to grow more important when rivals’ shortcomings became apparent. The dollar far outstrips all other currencies for use in international foreign-exchange trades, at 88% in the latest rankings from the Bank for International Settlements. The yuan was used in just 4%.
Digitization wouldn’t by itself make the yuan a rival for the dollar in bank-to-bank wire transfers, analysts and economists say. But in its new incarnation, the yuan, also known as the renminbi, could gain traction on the margins of the international financial system.
It would provide options for people in poor countries to transfer money internationally. Even limited international usage could soften the bite of U.S. sanctions, which increasingly are used against Chinese companies or individuals.
Josh Lipsky, a former International Monetary Fund staffer now at the Atlantic Council think tank, said, “Anything that threatens the dollar is a national-security issue. This threatens the dollar over the long term.”
Also:
The money itself is programmable. Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly, for times when the economy needs a jump-start.
It’s also trackable, adding another tool to China’s heavy state surveillance. The government deploys hundreds of millions of facial-recognition cameras to monitor its population, sometimes using them to levy fines for activities such as jaywalking. A digital currency would make it possible to both mete out and collect fines as soon as an infraction was detected.
A burst of cash-accumulation in China last year indicates residents’ concern about the central bank’s eye on every transaction. Song Ke, a finance professor at Renmin University in Beijing, told a recent conference that China’s measure of yuan in circulation, or cash, popped up 10% in 2020.
What about volatility? Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are famous for that. But the People’s Bank of China will strictly control the digital yuan to ensure there aren’t valuation differences between it and the paper bills and coins.
That means it won’t make sense for investors and traders to speculate in the digital yuan as some do with cryptocurrencies.
So, I do seem to understand this right: Sinclair Davidson and the jolly band of RMIT blockchain swooners and conference attenders have been busy promoting a technology that libertarians fantasise reduces government reach into financial lives, but is actually more likely to increase it? Right.
It's about as funny as his inability to run a website that actually works properly in the comments section. Yay, free marketeers can do anything - except make their website run properly.
My Easter weekends are usually pretty lazy: too many people on the road and the weather is often hit or miss for holiday fun. (It was a pretty big miss this year.) I was especially lazy this year, but not in a particularly edifying way.
Netflix viewing: I actually do recommend the unusually aggressive alligators standing in for Alien movie Crawl, if you are up for well made trashy scares. (Remember, I did enjoy The Meg last year for similar reasons. Sometimes you just want to see monster animals eating people.) I continually felt for the actors while watching it - they are in water for perhaps 75% of the movie's run time, and I can just imagine how tedious an acting day spending hours wet could be. But the biggest surprise: watch the end credits, and it turns out that it is Serbia standing in for Florida! Pretty convincingly too. Honestly, you can film anything anywhere these days.
The second movie more-or-less pleasant surprise: Bad Trip. Bad taste prank movies are not usually my thing, and I am not very familiar at all with Eric Andre. But I agree a lot with The Vulture review which is headed:
Netflix’s Bad Trip Might Help You Feel Better About Our Broken NationYes. Provided you can put up with things like pranking zoo visitors that a gorilla is raping a man - twice - (no doubt the worst taste scene in the movie, although to the Netflix viewer it looks sufficiently fake that it takes away some of the offensiveness), the surprising thing about the movie is that it shows so many people (black Americans in particular) willing to help strangers.
I was anxious a lot of time, though, as to how they could involve strangers without the concern that one of them was going to pull out a handgun to scare away the actors.
As the review says at the end:
I don’t want to oversell Bad Trip — if it doesn’t make you laugh, chances are it will annoy the shit out of you — but its generosity toward our fellow humans can, at times, be genuinely moving.
An unusual jinn story found in Gulf News:
Kuwaiti woman pays $96,000 to get rid of jinn
Cairo: A Kuwaiti woman has accused two other women of swindling nearly 30,000 dinars from her by purportedly ridding her of jinn, local media reported.
The woman, whose name was not disclosed, claimed that another Kuwaiti woman and her stateless Bidoon assistant had duped her into believing that she was possessed by a jinn.
In her report to the police, the 37-year-old woman provided evidence of paying KD25,080 via bank transfers and an additional 4,000 dinars in cash to expel the alleged jinn.
The alleged victim had been tricked by the two charlatans into paying the money on different occasions during the sorcery sessions, according to a security source.
“She presented a bank statement proving the payments,” the source said.
An investigation into a fraud case has been opened and the two alleged defendants will be summoned for interrogation.
I always feel I don't know enough about how widespread worrying about jinn might be in the average Arab mind.
I have written many posts over the years about time travel, and while I am pretty sure I read this article in 2020 about some theoretical work at UQ, I don't think I got around to posting about it.
Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible, according to the mathematical modelling of a prodigious University of Queensland undergraduate student.
Fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) student Germain Tobar has been investigating the possibility of time travel, under the supervision of UQ physicist Dr Fabio Costa....
“The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” Dr Costa said.
“Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus.
“However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.
“This is a paradox – an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe.
“Some physicists say it is possible, but logically it’s hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action.
“It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur.”
However the researchers say their work shows that neither of these conditions have to be the case, and it is possible for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action that the time traveller makes.
“In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” Mr Tobar said.
“No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.
“This would mean that – no matter your actions - the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it.
“Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency.
“The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”
The research is published in Classical and Quantum Gravity (DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc).
Actually, while searching this place for previous time travel posts, I realised that I had been thinking about a certain idea since at least 2013 - much longer than I would have estimated.
Time flies, I guess.
Has anyone else noticed that news camera operators (I was going to say "camera men", which most of them surely are, but I decided to be PC) in Australia are taking particular delight in showing needles going into arms in clear close up in any story they are doing about Covid vaccinations?
I am not needle phobic - in fact, I used to donate blood in my younger days - but I still don't particularly care to watch needles going into arms, whether it be mine or anyone else's. I do get people's squeamishness about it, and it seems to me the media is not helping vaccination rates when they ensure that any needle phobic person is reminded each time they watch the news about how far in the needle goes.
Someone should tell them to stop it. (I reckon there is much greater reticence in the American news I have seen to do the same thing.)
It's a couple of weeks old now, but I thought this sketch on Conan was pretty funny:
The SMH reprints a story I had missed in the Washington Post:
Taiwan is home to one of the world’s most active communities of pet psychics - or animal communicators, as Hsu and her colleagues prefer to call themselves. The cottage industry is fuelled by residents’ growing devotion to their animals - increasingly a replacement for children - and desire for companionship during the pandemic.
Every few months, the Taiwan Animal Communication Centre graduates a new class of students, keeping a roster of more than 80 certified professionals for hire. Hundreds like Hsu have been trained by other teachers at home or overseas, including the United States and Britain, where the idea of pet telepathy emerged earlier but has not been as popular as in Taiwan. It takes months to get an appointment with the most popular communicators.
“There are more communicators per capita in Taiwan than anywhere else I’ve seen,” said Lauren McCall, a British American animal communicator who has run workshops for students in Taiwan for seven years.
This takes the idea of fraudulent mediums to another level.
I haven't been paying much attention to the situation of China with cryprocurrency, but last night on China's All Propaganda, All the Time news network, I watched a video of a guy explaining Bitcoin:
So, oddly, it says at the start that China is going to wind down some coin mining in Mongolia because it is using up too much energy, but the general gist of the video still seems to be to encourage acceptance of cryptocurrency as the future of currency.
Which reminded me of some stories I had briefly seen but not paid too much attention to in the middle of last year about how China was going to introduce a digital currency that may challenge Bitcoin.
But the digital currency being talked about last year had the distinctly un-Bitcoin feature of enabling better government tracking of financial dealings?:
China's version of a sovereign digital currency is set to revolutionise the ability of regulatory authorities to scrutinise the nation’s payment and financial system as officials will acquire more power to track how money is used by its citizens.“Looking back years later, the two defining historic events of 2020 would be the coronavirus pandemic, and the other would be [China’s] digital currency,” said Xu Yuan, a senior researcher with Peking University's Digital Finance Research Centre.
Here's another recent story about it:
One of the ways the PBoC can keep companies like Ant Group and Alibaba on a leash in future is to embed the e-renminbi into the monetary system. It is arguably a perfect example of how the most central of authorities can use a distributed technology network to its advantage.
“You can say it [blockchain] is decentralised, but actually if you want to track everything you can do it easily,” says Zabulis, “they can see all the flow, all the wallets. It’s extremely powerful.”
China has long been concerned about regulating and limiting shadow banking activities. Blockchain ledgers are the perfect way to monitor loans. Before stricter oversight was introduced late in 2017, much shadow lending had been via banks’ off-balance sheet wealth management products, along with various trust products from non-bank institutions.
So, yeah, I guess I am a little confused about this. Cryptocurrency has never made much sense to me, and its appeal to libertarians and small government types like Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg seemed to always be based on it reducing government control of money. Because of that feature, I assumed that all governments would eventually legislate to control it.
And is the reality that the blockchange technology that the RMIT crowd swoon over actually will ultimately allow real Big Brother government knowledge of all financial dealings?
Update: recent stories like this one have talked about the complicated situation with cryptocurrency trading from China.
I don't really understand all of this, but it all smells a bit like big trouble to come, if you ask me...
At the Washington Post, an article about the odd cross over between some New Age masculinity fans (like the horned guy at the 6 January riot/insurrection) and Qanon. This goes back a long way:
Jules Evans, an honorary research fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, has investigated the history, philosophy and psychology of well-being. In an article for Medium called “Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap,” Evans wrote about how leading members of the Nazi party in the 1930s and ’40s were followers of alternative spirituality and medicine. “There was an idea that western culture has lost its way and we need to return to traditional sources of wisdom, whether that be Hinduism or Sufism or traditional gender roles,” Evans told me. It’s a concept that’s popular today with the alt-right. “There is an overlap,” he says, “between New Age and far-right populism in traditionalist thinking, that the West has lost its way with feminism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and we need a return to order.”Moving forward:
...the men’s movement took off in the ’70s and ’80s. It manifested in three expressions, says Cliff Leek, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado and vice president of the American Men’s Studies Association: “You get pro-feminist [men’s] groups that do work around reproductive health and sexual violence; and, on the other end of the spectrum, men’s rights groups that say, ‘We are gendered and the system is out to get us.’ The middle way is the mythopoetic: tying masculinity back to the sacred and mythological.”
The prevailing figure in the mythopoetic movement is the poet Robert Bly. In 1990, Bly, who was in his 60s (he’s now 94), published “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which includes lines like, “Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.” Bly’s idea, told through Jung-influenced archetypes and fairy tales, was that men had been robbed of true masculinity via emotionally withholding fathers who raised soft sons. With some reflection — and maybe some banging on drums with other dudes in the forest — they could reclaim their inner Zeuses and thrive. The book was sometimes the butt of jokes, but spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
And further down:
“As soon as we tie masculinity to spirituality, we turn masculinity into something ‘sacred’ as well as distinct and exclusive of women,” says Leek. “I’m not entirely sure that is something that can be done in a way that doesn’t reinforce or naturalize inequalities.” These retreats seem to be encouraging strong behavior from a group — White, ruling-class men — who are already the most privileged in our society. But you also see this core message about strong men in socially conservative packaging. There’s a fear of women getting too powerful and a veneration of the housewife that, frankly, reminds me of the Proud Boys, the alt-right group with a history of violence that believes women are best left at home raising children.
“The wellness and spirituality world is very parallel to the evangelical Christian world, especially when it comes to the messaging around masculinity,” Leek explains. “The mythopoetic aspect of the men’s movement is very much rooted in patriarchal notions of chivalry and men as protectors and warriors. Evangelical masculinity is basically identical.” He wasn’t surprised to see the QAnon Shaman beside evangelical groups at the Capitol. QAnon, with its fixation on pedophilic conspiracies led by Hollywood and the liberal elite, can give a certain kind of man in search of purpose a way to feel like a literal protector.
Interesting.
So that's how the Right goes wrong with an unwarranted emphasis on the differences between masculinity and femininity, but does the Left do the same with its uncritical takes on transgenderism?
Gee, I seem to recall that Arthur C Clarke and other science fiction optimists used to speculate that heart patients might benefit from a period in freefall in orbiting hospitals, the idea being that it would help recovery for the heart to have less "work" to do.
That idea has probably long gone out the window, but this article at the BBC sheds more light on the matter:
Spending very long periods of time in space has something in common with extreme endurance swimming: both can cause the heart to shrink.
That's the conclusion of a study that compared the effects of astronaut Scott Kelly's year in space with a marathon swim by athlete Benoît Lecomte.
Both remove the loads on the heart that are usually applied by gravity, causing the organ to atrophy.
Exercise wasn't enough in either case to counteract the changes to the heart.
I didn't know endurance swimming could have that effect, but here's the explanation:
On 5 June 2018, Benoît Lecomte embarked on an effort to swim the Pacific Ocean, having previously traversed the Atlantic.
He swam 2,821km over 159 days, eventually abandoning the attempt.
Swimming for very long periods also changes the loads placed on the heart by gravity because the person is in a horizontal position rather than vertical.
Lecomte swam an average of 5.8 hours per day, sleeping for around eight hours each night. This meant that he was spending between nine and 17 hours each day in a supine state.
Scientists sometimes use bed rest studies to simulate spaceflight because lying down eliminates the head-to-foot gradient that places a load on the heart. But Prof Levine said water immersion for long periods in a prone position is an even better model for time spent in orbit.
"Now you take away the head-to-foot gradient and then you put the person in the water, so you adjust that gradient too. It's just about like being in space," said Prof Levine.
The possible health consequences of a smaller heart in space:
The heart adaptations, however, aren't long-term - both men's hearts returned to normal once they were back on terra firma.
But chambers in the heart known as the atria expand in space, in part because of changes in the way fluid passes through. This might lead to a condition called atrial fibrillation, where the heart beats fast and in an irregular manner. It can impair exercise, but may also increase the risk of stroke.
And what's this? A whole new idea as to how radiation may hurt health?:
There's also another risk to this vital organ from space travel. The higher radiation levels in space might accelerate coronary heart disease. Astronauts are screened for atherosclerosis, but they are generally middle-aged when they go into space and scientists know this is a problem that builds with age.
News just now:
A huge container ship that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since Tuesday has reportedly been refloated.
Video posted social media on Monday appeared to show the stern of the Ever Given swung towards the canal bank, opening space in the channel. Maritime services company Inchcape also reported the vessel was freed.
Which reminds me of the stupidest take on the whole matter by one T Carlson:
A somewhat interesting interview with a professor of environmental medicine who is sounding the alarm bell about declining fertility and chemicals.
Earlier this month I mocked Tucker Carlson running a story about falling sperm counts, and he perhaps was inspired by this professor's new book? I still mock him anyway - because it's not as if conservatives and Republicans (and Trump) had or have the environment runs on the card when dealing with environmental contamination of any kind. (And the key blame appears to rest on chemicals.)
Well, this gut flora influences everything idea might be able to be taken to the next level:
The new Frontiers in Psychiatry study involved 187 participants, ages 28 to 97, who completed validated self-report-based measures of loneliness, wisdom, compassion, social support and social engagement. The gut microbiota was analyzed using fecal samples. Microbial gut diversity was measured in two ways: alpha-diversity, referring to the ecological richness of microbial species within each individual and beta-diversity, referring to the differences in the microbial community composition between individuals.
"We found that lower levels of loneliness and higher levels of wisdom, compassion, social support and engagement were associated with greater phylogenetic richness and diversity of the gut microbiome," said first author Tanya T. Nguyen, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
The authors said that the mechanisms that may link loneliness, compassion and wisdom with gut microbial diversity are not known, but observed that reduced microbial diversity typically represents worse physical and mental health, and is associated with a variety of diseases, including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and major depressive disorder.
Of course, while it might be a simple as wise and socially engaged people eat better and that encourages a certain healthy gut flora, it would be funnier if wisdom and compassion could be spread by, say, our Einsteins and (I dunno) Dalai Lamas of the world providing their poop for fecal implants amongst the unhappy.
From an interview with a historian who has written a pop history book about murder in ancient Rome, she explains why she got into ancient history (my bold in the paragraph itself):
Ars Technica: They rarely teach you the good stuff in history classes.
Emma Southon: It's true. Everything's hampered by curricula, is the problem. Curricula are never, like, "You know what you should do? You should show them a tintinnabulum [a decorative bell mounted on a pole] and then get people to talk about the tintinnabulum and about why somebody might put a penis-headed lion with a penis for a tail [on it]."
This is why I ended up doing ancient history. I did modern history at school, until I was 16. It's all battles and treaties and Hitler, and then some more treaties and battles. It just was so tedious. Ancient history sounded more fun. I got a copy of Suetonius and read it and thought, "These guys are great." It's all just gossip and people having rude pictures and ghosts and omens. And then I read Aristophanes, a Greek comedy playwright; it's just dick jokes all the way down. I thought, "Clearly, this was where I was always meant to be."
The history of ancient Rome is not this boring world of Cicero shouting or Julius Caesar marching around. It is this world where they would get really upset if they stubbed their toe while they were going to an important meeting, so they'd have to go home and end the whole day because that meant the gods didn't want them to do it. Or where they were nude all the time in the bars and had all seen each other's penises. They're such a weird and contradictory set of people. I love them more every year.
The article opens by noting this story:
There once was a wealthy Roman man named Vedius Pollio, infamous for maintaining a reservoir of man-eating eels, into which he would throw any slaves who displeased him, resulting in their gruesome deaths. When Emperor Augustus dined with him on one memorable occasion, a servant broke a crystal goblet, and an enraged Vedius ordered the servant thrown to the eels. Augustus was shocked and ordered all the crystal at the table to be broken. Vedius was forced to pardon the servant, since he could hardly punish him for breaking one goblet when Augustus had broken so many more.
That servant seems to have been spared, but many others had their "bowels torn asunder" by the eels.
and lots of people in comments say "really? your run of the mill eels don't have significant teeth."
Googling the topic shows that there is the possibility that it was moray eels - and if they are kept hungry enough...maybe they become instant maneaters? The Romans were really into eels, for some reason:
In researching this story I realized that there is some confusion as to whether Vedius Pollio had a pond filled with the razor sharp toothed moraena (moray) eels or the jawless, funnel mouth blood sucking lamprey. Both were popular in the diet of wealthy Romans.
The muraena (moray) eel was larger and more spectacular. Pliny the Elder wrote the fish was actually named after Lucinus Murena who is credited with the first muraena eel farm, although Lucinus might have been called Murena because of his love of the eel. The eels were considered more valuable than the slaves who tended the ell ponds.
During the 1st century Roman elite made pets of their eels. Antonia the Younger, the daughter of Mark Anthony and mother of the Emperor Claudius fastened earrings to the dorsal fin of her pet eel.
Lampreys, which I would have thought one is hard pressed to find on a menu these days, apparently don't taste like eel (which, having been to Japan, I've eaten quite often). And maybe they still get lamprey to eat in England?:
I’ve been told Lamprey meat tastes like squid. Eel pies (made with lamprey) have been an English tradition since the 19th century. You can still find Eel, Pie and mash (potato) shops in the UK.
So, there's your oddball history for the day...
So, some Liberals are disputing Peta Credlin's "I sacked the gay guy, but someone re-employed him" narrative:
Federal Liberal MP Warren Entsch has emphatically rejected Peta Credlin’s claim that several years ago she was responsible for sacking a Coalition aide dismissed again this week for allegedly masturbating over a female MP’s desk.
Entsch, the member for Leichhardt and former chief opposition whip, told Guardian Australia that not only did Credlin have no input into his decision to sack the staffer in 2012, but in fact, he dismissed the aide for an alleged unauthorised leak from his office to Credlin who was then Tony Abbott’s chief of staff.
Alex Somlyay, the chief whip before Entsch, has backed Entsch’s account and added that he had originally hired the staffer on Credlin’s suggestion.
Guardian Australia revealed on Tuesday the man had been employed on and off for more than a decade working for senior Liberal figures. The prime minister, Scott Morrison, later confirmed his employers included former chief whip Nola Marino in whose office the masturbation incident allegedly took place.
What a completely dysfunctional mob!
PS: I am somewhat sceptical of her "gay orgies" claims, too. I am not entirely sure how many participants it takes to make an orgy, but I wonder if she is counting any number greater than 2 as fitting the definition, when most people wouldn't.
I thought it was supposed to be only Labor, and perhaps the Greens, who were all busy having illicit sex since the 1960's because they were the ones who were all cool with the sexual revolution.
Instead, according to this bizarre bunch of claims by Peta Credlin, it's the Liberals who had many gay staffers (and a minister with a predilection to male prostitutes) creating sordid mayhem in Parliament House over the last - what? - 12 years?
The former chief of staff to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has also warned she knows the culprits exposed in sick videos of men masturbating on desks in Parliament House.
And she also said — for the first time — that she had sacked one of the men involved in the videos nearly a decade ago and had vowed he would never set foot in the building again.
Ms Credlin claimed that in one historical instance — that did not involve any of the men in the video — that evidence was found of a Liberal staffer involved in “orgies”.
After one man was sacked for what she described as “disloyalty” she revealed that evidence was found of “orgies” when MPs left the office for Question Time....
Ms Credlin said the names of other Liberal staffers involved in the masturbatory acts at Parliament House were known to her.
“The other three that Peter van Onselen broke in his story this week, I know who you are. I see you,” she said.
“The former minister who is alleged to have male prostitutes delivered to Parliament House … the former minister? I see you too.
“For years I copped hit after hit from unnamed sources. I stand by every decision I made. I would do it all again. And as a woman, boy I made some enemies. I have never publicly spoken about my side before.
“But I am not going to stay silent anymore.”
But is it fair to target the gay men as the source of most of the problems? It has a touch of the conservative Catholic "it's all gay men becoming priests that caused the sex abuse scandals" excuse making about it, I think. I mean, sure, men taking selfies of themselves masturbating and distributing it to other men is not exactly something heterosexual men are known for, is it? (at least, if they didn't go to an all boy's private high school?); but doing it on a female bosses' desk sounds like awfully like a creepy misogynistic, straight male dominance thing. And what was most of the sex that is said to taken place in the "prayer room": gay, or mostly straight?
In any event, as I said yesterday, its all weirdly amusing that it's the conservative side that is coming unstuck with sexual scandals of this kind.
Speaking of funny, maybe I had seen this before, a long time ago, but Tony Martin today tweeted it as "a new video from the LNP" and it really made me laugh:
Even the great Planet America show last week did not seem to emphasise this enough - they showed similar graphs, ran a full length interview with a conservative from the Heritage Foundation, and just a snippet from a Cato Institute guy saying that it's not all Biden pull factors, we've seen seasonal surges before. This is the graph:
Honestly, how much media attention is being given to the 2019 surge under Trump? Very little, if you ask me. There's also pretty small attention being given to the ease with which Trump's wall is being breached.
Planet America, I reckon, too often tries too hard to be "fair" to conservatives and Republicans, and ends up being unbalanced in their favour.
Update: yet more context -
That's from this article, which argues:
If you've been reading or watching mainstream media over the past week or so, you've undoubtedly heard a lot about a supposed screaming emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border. More migrants are trying to cross the border, which all three network Sunday shows gave frantic saturation coverage — ABC's This Week nonsensically held a panel segment on the border itself, as if that would somehow lend gravitas to a bunch of talking heads. On Monday, the networks' big morning shows all ran segments calling the story a "crisis" once more. CNN even ran a video of a repeated boat crossing that, as numerous experts testified to The American Prospect, gave every indication of being staged, possibly even by the Border Patrol.
This is nonsense. There is a problem at the border, but it is not remotely a "crisis." It's an administrative challenge that could be solved easily with more resources and clear policy — not even ranking with, say, the importance of securing loose nuclear material, much less the ongoing global pandemic, or the truly civilization-threatening crisis of climate change. The mainstream media is in effect collaborating with Republicans to stoke unreasoning xenophobic panic.
Sounds pretty accurate to me...
Well, if you overlook the infanticide they might commit before having their own kids, at least. Science reports:
A few years ago, four female mountain gorillas left home, abandoning not only their mate—a sick alpha silverback—but their infants, which were barely old enough to feed themselves. They may have sensed that their offspring would be safer with their ailing father than with new males that often kill infants from other groups. Still, most mammals abandoned by their mothers risk an early death, and researchers worried about the young gorillas.
Instead, the scientists got a heartwarming surprise. The juveniles’ uncle, a male gorilla named Kubaha, began to take care of them. “He let them sleep in his nest and climb all over him like a jungle gym,” recalls primatologist Tara Stoinski, chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
Kubaha’s willingness to be a foster dad turns out to be surprisingly common in mountain gorillas, according to a new study. An analysis of 53 years of data on mountain gorillas at the Gorilla Fund’s Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda has revealed that when young mountain gorillas lose their mothers—and sometimes their fathers as well—they do not have a greater risk of dying or losing their place in the social hierarchy because the rest of the group buffers them from the loss.....
The study is “terrific,” says Duke primatologist Anne Pusey, who was not part of the work. The data come from one of the longest mammal field studies, she notes, and the number of orphaned gorillas is high enough to compare directly with data from young chimps. Those data show that chimps die young or suffer other ill effects if they lose their mothers because females don’t change groups often—and infants are more dependent on their care longer than are gorillas.
Now, researchers need to comb decades of data for bonobos and other species to see whether they, too, adopt motherless infants more often than believed, Zipple says. A study published last week found that two bonobo females adopted infants from another social group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The findings suggest such altruistic behavior is not unique to humans—and that dads play an important role in primate youngsters’ lives, says Duke behavioral ecologist Susan Alberts, who was not part of this study. “Nonhuman primates often are really good dads,” she says. “This shows that paternal care goes very deep in our primate lineage.”
I get the feeling I have mentioned one or more of these before, but just have had an urge to repeat them:
* I am forever puzzled by the "too low to make sense to me" cost of carrots. Is it is a sign of something wrong with how agriculture works in Australia? I would not have these thoughts if they were, say, double the cost. Perhaps I should offer to pay more at the check out? I'm sure that's a conversation which wouldn't be awkward at all.
* A significant reduction in CO2 emissions will not be possible until we outlaw Pringles, or imitation Pringles. I mean, just slice and fry potatoes for a nice snack - don't expend all that energy on drying and powdering them, only to reconstitute it to bake them again. It's ridiculous.
* Elon Musk enjoys, I suspect, his Twitter avatar of his Starship looking rather pointy-phallic:
China is ramping up plans for government-sponsored satellites to beam internet from space, taking on U.S. rivals like SpaceX and Amazon in the race to own the next frontier of connectivity.
Why it matters: There's growing concern that China is trying to enter the space internet market with the same strategy it used on earth with Huawei and 5G — use a state-backed company to undercut competitors and spread global influence.
What's happening: China is attempting to launch its own network to rival global competitors.
- China's "StarNet" would launch 10,000 satellites in the next 5 to 10 years, according to an Asia Times report that cites a publication run by the official China News Service.
- China intends to build a space infrastructure system for communications, navigation and remote sensing with global coverage as part of its latest five-year plan.
* Speaking of China: as far as I can tell, they have become good enough at rocketry, but still can't put together a decent airliner. (And I think their military jets are all based on other nation's designs and tech, too.) Doesn't that seem a little odd? Maybe your basic rocket is relatively simple compared to a 777, and you don't have to worry about using it twice, so I guess it makes sense. [And I have read that airline manufacture requires so many components that they all inevitably have input from other nations, even if it is a Boeing or (obviously) an Airbus.] Is this technological barrier a reason to doubt China is genuinely in a position to take over the world - that if you can't put together a decent fighter or passenger jet in your nation, because other nations don't want to help you do it, you're not as powerful as you think you are?
And toilets - based on a couple of Youtube videos, it seems Chinese toilets are, outside of your decent big city hotels, routinely horrendous. Again, perhaps this is a measure of international power - you are not a country ready to take over the world while ever a significant number of your toilets are holes in the ground. But wait - maybe we only 10 years left!:
A “Toilet Revolution” was launched in China five years ago. The aim was to eliminate epidemics such as the deadly Covid-19 outbreak, which has so far claimed more than 1,800 lives and infected at least 72,000 people.
Geared to upgrade hygiene and sanitation in urban and rural parts of the world’s second-largest economy, up to 68,000 toilets were built or refurbished between 2015 and 2019.
By the end of this year, an additional 64,000 will come online as part of the ultimate goal to have a 100% “civilized” toilet culture by 2030.
“The toilet issue is not a small issue. It is an important part of civilized construction in both urban and rural areas,” President Xi Jinping said at the launch of his ambitious building program.
* Radical African Islam - I mean, seriously, how do these people ever think they will be popular enough to actually really run a country. In Mozambique, for example:
A leading aid agency says that children as young as 11 are being beheaded in Mozambique's Cabo Delgado province.
One mother told Save the Children she had to watch her 12-year-old son killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children.
More than 2,500 people have been killed and 700,000 have fled their homes since the insurgency began in 2017.
Militants linked to the Islamic State (IS) group are behind a conflict in the province....
The insurgents are known locally as al-Shabab, which means The Youth in Arabic. This reflects that it receives its support mostly from young unemployed people in the predominantly Muslim region of Cabo Delgado.
A group with a similar name has existed in Somalia for more than a decade. It is affiliated to al-Qaeda, unlike the Mozambican group which allied itself with the rival IS movement in 2019.
IS sees the insurgents as being part of what it calls its Central Africa Province. It released images last year showing fighters in Cabo Delgado with AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades....
Mr Briggs told the BBC World Service it was difficult to determine their exact motivations as they did not have a manifesto.
"They co-opt young people in to joining them as conscripts and if they refuse they are killed and sometimes beheaded. It's really hard to see what is the end game."
After visiting Cabo Delgado's capital Pemba last year, a delegation from the South African Bishop's Conference said that "almost everyone spoken to agrees that the war is about multinational corporations gaining control of the province's mineral and gas resources".
I don't know - but youth beheading even younger youth seems a, shall we say, very indirect way of dealing with too much control by multinational corporations.
I'm certainly hoping that more people are beginning to realise the asinine incompetence of Scott Morrison and the LNP generally. The sex scandals in Parliament are being appalling handled by a government more interested in self preservation than doing the right thing.
Now, I see Morrison has apparently got all teary eyed about not wanting to let down his wife, daughters and mother. Hasn't anyone told him to stop personalising it this way, as if he has no moral sense of sexism and misogyny unless he can personalise it to his own life?:
And as Bernard says:
Update: Yes, I keep thinking how the Coalition's moral authority on sexual conduct collapsed when its most conservative wing had Barnaby as a shining example:
Update 2: I wonder. Certainly the media's reaction to Morrison bringing up a sexual harassment incident within one of its outlets is so hostile, is anyone in the party starting to think leadership spill? Maybe Dutton is getting itchy counting fingers again - although, really, his gradual (but now complete) scary head-morph into Darth Vader without a mask, or scowling version of Mr Potatohead, rules him out forever. Frydenberg is surely the only person with a hint of charisma left in cabinet?
Another thought: isn't it ironic that sex in the workplace has caused the LNP so much trouble in recent years - I mean, arguably, Tony Abbott lost his job because many in his own party suspected he was sleeping with Peta Credlin. (And, funnily enough, the most common opinion seems to have moved on to believing they were not, after all; their behaviour together just weirdly looked like it.)
Similarly, it would be somewhat amusing if sex in the workplace (that he had no direct involvement in) brought down Morrison.
I can explain the title - James Morrow tweets/used to blog under the name "Prick with a Fork". He now features on the ridiculous Sky News show Outsiders, and did he make a fool of himself on the weekend, or what?
Here is the Youtube story - entitled "This is the most important story about Trump story you never heard":
It's about the Washington Post retraction of parts of a report which incorrectly quoted parts of a Trump phone call to Georgia election investigator Frances Watson. In fact, the bits they had put in quotes was more like a paraphrase - and yes, they should never have portrayed it as otherwise without having heard the actual recording.
But - gormless Morrow runs his segment conflating two entirely separate telephone calls - he actually appears to believe that the retraction relates to the Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger - a call for which there was always a full transcript and recording published!
I cannot fathom how lazy and stupid Morrow is to not have read into the story in any detail whatsoever so as to not realise that the retraction relates to a different telephone call. I mean, it was set out in easy to read detail at places like Vox: The Washington Post's correction about Trump's phone call to a Georgia official, explained.
What's more, as I have read before, Sky News Australia's nutty night time line up is actually very popular with American Trumpsters - and after the Morrow story, there are thousands of comments from Americans saying things like "this is why we don't trust the fake news in America". I scanned perhaps a hundred or two comments, and did not find one which recognised that the video was a crock. The nearest I got was one person who said something like "but I thought I had read a transcript of the call?" - again, still not realising that Morrow was conflating two separate phone calls. (And the one to Raffensperger was worse for Trump, too.)
Noticed this tweet today, which I guess is of renewed interest given that terrible shooting in Atlanta, but the news story it is from is nearly 2 years old now. I guess things probably have not changed much since then, though:
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I haven't read the article yet, but sounds like an plausible inspiration for a screenplay:
