The dog that caught the car

I thought this Slate column on why the Republicans (and Australian Right wingnuts) have been fairly muted in their excitement over the Texas effective ban on abortion was pretty good.  Key parts:

Despite the Republican Party’s decades long crusade against Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of GOP politicians declined to celebrate, or even note, Roe’s functional demise. Why?

The most obvious answer is that Republicans are now the dog that caught the car, fearful of the political ramifications of their own victory. Indeed, it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts. After all, hundreds of similar laws were blocked by the courts for years. Their decision to downplay this victory should upend the conventional wisdom about Roe not just politically, but also from a constitutional perspective.

For years, conservative lawyers have argued that the Supreme Court should not uphold pro-choice precedent because it is unsettled, unstable, and unworkable. As evidence, they cite the fact that red states continue passing all manner of abortion restrictions to contest the legitimacy of Roe as settled precedent. But the GOP’s reaction to the Texas law suggests that this analysis has it backward. What if Republicans only continued to pass abortion restrictions because they knew the laws would get struck down? What if the passage of these laws proves that Roe is such a settled, stable, and workable precedent that legislators think they can pretend to defy it without worrying about the consequences?

The rest of it, talking about the history of Republican tactics, was interesting, too.

Feminism and pornography

There's an interesting review in The Atlantic of three feminist themed books on the current (Western) attitudes to sex, and there are some interesting passages:

Porn consumption is now such a fixture of modern life—there is no chance the American government will take your smut away—that space has opened up to question its effects without being dismissed as a wannabe censor. Which isn’t to say that admitting to reservations about current sexual trends is easy. For Clark-Flory’s 30-something generation (which is also my generation), being Cool About Sex is a mark of our impeccable social liberalism. If two or more adults consent to it, whatever it is, no one else is entitled to an opinion.

Yet here is the conundrum facing feminist writers: Our enlightened values—less stigma regarding unwed mothers, the acceptance of homosexuality, greater economic freedom for women, the availability of contraception, and the embrace of consent culture—haven’t translated into anything like a paradise of guilt-free fun. The sexual double standard still exists, and girls who say no are still “frigid” while those who say yes are still “sluts.” Some men still act with entitlement, while others feel that, no matter what they do, they are inescapably positioned as the “bad guys” by the new sexual rules. Half a century after the sexual revolution and the start of second-wave feminism, why are the politics of sex still so messy, fraught, and contested?

More specifically on pornography:

In The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan confesses her reluctance to cover second-wave criticisms of porn in the feminist-theory course she teaches at Oxford. She is Cool About Sex, after all, and assumed that her students would be bored by the question of whether porn oppresses women. She also assumed that the reputation of “anti-porn feminists,” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had been fatally damaged by their alliance with the religious right to pass laws restricting access to pornography. What self-respecting member of Generation Z would want to line up alongside Jerry Falwell Sr. and Phyllis Schlafly, particularly when the other side is selling a fantasy of libertine pleasure?

Yet her class was “riveted,” she observes in “Talking to My Students About Porn,” the longest essay in her collection. Their enthusiasm was so great that it made her reconsider her own diffidence. The exchange is worth quoting at length:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically … My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission.

Well, it's good to see such things being admitted;  I guess it's also something of a sign of the scale of the sexual revolution that you can have a class of (presumably) young adults in Oxford so keen to share with their teacher their views of their own sexual experiences.   Not exactly a scene you'd expect in CS Lewis and Tolkien's day!

There is also this aspect of pornography, which I guess I hadn't thought much about before:

But how much do culture and politics shape those wants? Porn-aggregator sites, to take one example, use algorithms, just like the rest of the internet. Pornhub pushes featured videos and recommendations, optimized to build user loyalty and increase revenue, which carry the implicit message that this is what everyone else finds arousing—that this is the norm. Compare porn with polarized journalism, or even fast food: How can we untangle what people “really want” from what they are offered, over and over, and from what everyone else is being offered too? No one’s sexual desires exist in a vacuum, immune to outside pressures driven by capitalism. (Call it the invisible hand job of the market.)

Ha ha.

I think it's good to see serious, non religious, discussion of the downside of ubiquitous easy access to pornography;  but it is difficult how you can ever see a solution without in some way being censorious.  Let's not shy away from that, I say:   people should feel OK with saying "I really think pornography that depicts practice X, Y or Z really ought not be available." 

 

Still not 100% sure

Another study indicating that the warming Arctic region is helping cause freak cold winter spells in North America, due to the polar vortex breaking down and causing cold air to spread south:

In their study, published this week in Science¹, Cohen and his colleagues compared 40 years of satellite observations of atmospheric conditions over the Arctic with experiments based on computational climate models. The models probed how a decline in Arctic sea ice and snow cover would affect airstreams in the region. Since ice and snow reflect a large fraction of incoming sunlight back into space, whereas the darker ocean and land surface absorb more radiation, this decline is known to drive Arctic warming.

The researchers found that episodes of polar-vortex stretching have markedly increased in the past few decades, and that their models reproduced this behaviour well when they included the effects of Arctic warming.

But some climate scientists are still not sure:

...the idea that Arctic warming might be responsible for cold spells in mid-latitude regions is still hotly debated among climate scientists. At first glance, it might seem obvious that winters will generally tend to get milder in a warming world. But climate models that are commonly used to study complex links between the different components of the climate system diverge on the issue of how strongly Arctic warming might influence mid-latitude winters, and state-of-the-art models do not accurately replicate observed trends in the behaviour of the polar vortex. It remains to be seen whether the models are missing something, or whether the observations of polar-vortex stretching merely reflect natural climate variability, says Daniela Matei, a climate modeller at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

I don't know:  seems a bit of an odd co-incidence for it to be "natural climate variability" at a time of clear and rapid Arctic warming...

A voter fraud conspiracy for every election

It seems that the Democrat concern that California's governor will lose the recall election is much reduced.    Hence this:

Tweets on life extension

Was waiting for a tweet like this...

...but Jason spotted it first:

Agreed.  I mean, the guy looks like he should be retired, too.
 

Update:  I posted that before I even watched the video.  Now that I have seen half of it - I definitely do not want this guy as my pilot.  Not only that, it sounds like he has been barely psychologically stable enough to be a pilot for much of his career - he recites a litany of personal problems he's experienced.  

Pilots can be nuts, too.

Libertarian follies at sea

He's talking about this long piece in The Guardian, in which I was surprised to learn that a P&O cruise  ship that used to operate out of Brisbane (and with a bit of a dubious reputation, I think) had been sold to cryptocurrency guys who thought it could be the start of some mini seasteading operation.  

It all failed.

How very Trumpy

France 24 reports:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions including the Supreme Court.  

Anti-Bolsonaro protesters also gathered for huge demonstrations in cities across the country, making the annual national day festivities a high-risk event, with just over a year to go to elections that polls currently put the far-right president on track to lose.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity is at an all-time low, is seeking to fire up his base and flex his political muscle in the face of a flagging economy, soaring unemployment and inflation, and a series of investigations targeting him and his inner circle.

With hardline supporters urging a military intervention to give Bolsonaro unfettered power, there are fears the day's rallies could turn violent, with echoes of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump -- to whom Bolsonaro is often compared.

The main difference, and main worry, seems to be that he has the military on side.   Trump never did; at least at the higher level.   (Loose nuts like Flynn excepted, of course.)

 

Tough on COVID

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

While on COVID:  there seems to be some online fighting going on about whether that Bangladesh study into the effect of mask wearing is really a well designed and statistically convincing one, or not.  I read this guy's take on the matter and I am inclined to think it is significant.   And yeah, even though the effect was only to reduce infections by 10%, in context:

While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.

"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.

And:

The study’s authors — led by principal investigators Abaluck, Laura Kwong, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice, emphasized that this did not mean masks were only 9.3 percent effective.

“I think a big error would be to read this study and to say, ‘Oh, masks can only prevent 10 percent of symptomatic infections,’ ” Abaluck said. The number would probably be several times higher if masking were universal, he said.

Yeah, seems to me to be good evidence for mandating mask wearing, at least in some scenarios.  (Schools, I would expect.)

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

Smart people can be nuts

I had noticed Trumpy Right wingers citing the opinion of the (now dead) inventor of the PCR test as proving that it's useless or misleading as a COVID test.  I never looked into it in detail:  obviously, culture warriors of the Right are gullible and cling to anything, no matter how stupid, that they think supports their "independent thinking"; and the actual medical authorities saying that PCR is really the test to use were just always likely to be right.

So yeah, I didn't really realise how nutty the inventor of PCR had gone, until I read this article.  Highlights include an encounter with a glowing talking raccoon (probably an alien using a screen memory), and having his life saved by an astral travelling woman he later met for a sexual hook up.    

All very, very plausible.

For those waiting for my last Ring review...

[...hi Tim, although I'm not even sure if you care.  :)]

 Anyway, this last weekend I only got through Act 1 of Götterdämmerung and didn't have time to finish.

The story has taken a turn I wasn't quite expecting - with the new love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde (literally, just one night old) the subject of interference by the very oddly named (even by Wagnerian standards) Gibichungs.   

I really liked the orchestral bit when Siegfried sets off on the Rhine -  it's back to the first theme in the first opera, of course, and elaborated at some length.   And, as people said in their commentary on watching the whole cycle, by this stage, you really start to enjoy recognising the prior themes popping up, even briefly, and being mixed up.   

I hope the end of the world in flames lives up to its hype...

The Chinese puzzle, continued

Noah's substack piece about what on Earth China thinks it is doing with its attack on its own successful tech industries was really good, a few weeks back.  I think I forgot to link to it?  Here it is...

Believe it when I see it

I smell a strong whiff of Murdoch-ian playing both sides of the fence for economic gain in this potentially (kinda, sorta, maybe) big news today reported in the SMH:

News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions....

From October 17, the company will run a two-week campaign that will advocate for a carbon net zero target to be reached by 2050, which is expected to focus heavily on jobs in a decarbonised economy, particularly blue-collar industries such as mining, resources and agriculture. The campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they are confidential, said it will be fronted by news.com.au columnist and former Studio 10 host, Joe Hildebrand.

Several sources said Sky News will support the cause that will feature across the metropolitan tabloid mastheads. The Hildebrand-led campaign will not appear in the national masthead, The Australian, they said, but the newspaper will continue to temper its editorial stance on the issue.

The Australian wingnut Right already doesn't think Hildebrand isn't one of them - any campaign by him will be readily ignored. 

The far, far bigger issue is this:

A plan has been devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators, who will be expected to reframe their political arguments both in print and on its subscription news channel, which is now broadcast across regional Australia on free-to-air on WIN.

Well, it's impossible to imagine Bolt, Jones and the idiot show that is Outsiders "re-framing" their climate science denial in any meaningful way.   If the Murdochs successfully muzzle them on the issue, well and good.  But I can't see it happening.

 

Odd things seen last weekend

I accidentally ended up at a country athletics meet.  This was an unusual thing for me - to be at something involving sporting competition - so it warranted photographic proof:

(I was actually at the Mulgowie farmer's market.  The athletics meet on the same field was not something that had attracted me.   Fantastically good corn was purchased, by the way.  And a truck on the side of the road at Gatton - not so far away - was selling 20kg of potatoes for $20.  We passed it twice, but my wife wouldn't let me buy a sack.)  

 

The next day, it was fake Italy on the Gold Coast:

To be honest, I don't mind Disneyesque fake environments in terms of buildings, at least. I could do without the imitation art though, in the form of the nude dude.  That's pushing it too far.

Some interesting tweets on China and socialism

Sunday deep thoughts

By the way, that Oklahoma story is so intensely attention grabbing for anyone who believes the Right has been driven nuts by the culture wars, I have been suspecting it might be too good to be true.  Not seen it debunked yet, though.

Update: yes, it would seem the doctor who made the Oklahoma claim was, at the very least, exaggerating.  (I am curious to know the number of cases of Ivermectin poisoning there are, though, whether in that State, or elsewhere.)  Still, my sense of "too 'good' to be true" seems to be working well.

Well, when you put it that way...

Some further tweets from the thread:

Record intense rainfall causes flash flood...again

My prediction for years that flooding will be a key factor in convincing people and governments that dangerous climate change is real seems to be getting vindicated repeatedly this year:

Why is my screenshot not always capturing the image in a tweet now?  It's annoying.

Stare into the robot's eyes

One of the most surprising bits of research of recent years has been that about the effect of people staring into eyes.   

It seems that robot gaze even has an effect:

In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals, and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the way people strategically reason in a social decision-making context. Specifically, participants played a strategic game with the robot iCub while we measured their behavior and neural activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were slower to respond when iCub established mutual gaze before their decision, relative to averted gaze. This was associated with a higher decision threshold in the drift diffusion model and accompanied by more synchronized EEG alpha activity. In addition, we found that participants reasoned about the robot’s actions in both conditions. However, those who mostly experienced the averted gaze were more likely to adopt a self-oriented strategy, and their neural activity showed higher sensitivity to outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that robot gaze acts as a strong social signal for humans, modulating response times, decision threshold, neural synchronization, as well as choice strategies and sensitivity to outcomes. This has strong implications for all contexts involving human-robot interaction, from robotics to clinical applications.

Update:   hey, this reminds me - I recently got around to watching the modest budget, but pretty good, science fiction movie Ex Machina on Netflix.  Staring into a robot's eyes is a key part of that movie.   I recommend it.

That Texas abortion law is a really bad way to deal with the issue

I find it hard to believe that anyone of moderate Conservative values (say, Douthat), can run a credible defence of the Texas anti abortion law as being good for society when it operates by enabling private actions against abortion.   From Axios:

Details: Texas' Senate Bill 8 does not provide any exceptions for rape of incest. It also allows for people to sue anyone suspected of helping a person to obtain an abortion, regardless of whether they have a direct relationship with the person or not.

• Those who are successful can be awarded at least $10,000.
• Texas Right to Life set up a "whistleblower" website where people can submit tips on individuals that they believe are violating the law... 
  

  Texas' abortion ban is hard to challenge because the state is not the one enforcing the law, private citizens are.

• "The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals," Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, told TIME.
• "That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights," Tribe added.

And this:

 This is real serious culture war stuff:   enabling those with pretty fundamentalist views of the morality of abortion to sue others who do not agree with them.

True observation

 

Bad smells from COVID

This video about the odd, sometimes long lasting, side effect of COVID 19 called parosmia (whereby normal food smells become unpleasant) is well done and quite interesting:

From the "Can't they just put this dangerous jerk in jail?" files

 

Hard to keep up with what's going on in China

I saw a link to this article last week - it would seem that, perhaps after toying with softening official attitudes to gay relationships (I had posted not so long ago about the surprisingly sympathetic treatment given to the issue on some CGTN Youtube stories from 3 years ago), the government that thinks it can control everything is now trying to dissuade public discussion of it, and actually did place media control over its depiction from 2016:

Earlier this month, China's do-everything app (which is also a leading social media platform) WeChat permanently suspended the official accounts of more than a dozen LGBTQ+ campus advocacy groups. The move was part of the Chinese state's tightening grip over civil society, but also indicative of a rising backlash toward LGBTQ+ rights within the general population.

And further in the article:

In February 2016, the Chinese gay series Heroin (known in Chinese as Addicted, 上瘾 shàngyǐn) was banned from broadcasting online. In 2018, Sina Weibo declared a ban on all LGBT-related issues — though the state-owned Party newspaper People’s Daily came to the defense of individual citizens, offering a glimpse into the inconsistent and contradictory stances on the matter within the state apparatus. State censors also barred the Beijing International Film Festival from screening Call Me by Your Name, the Oscar-winning movie revolving around a same-sex couple....

One may be tempted to view the backlash toward LGBTQ+ content and viewpoints as entirely state-driven, yet this would be an oversimplification. Several prominent Weibo influencers took to gloating over the government’s recent censure of campus LGBTQ+ groups, with blogger Zǐwǔxiáshì 子午侠士 declaring that they were “so glad that the government is finally taking some action on the LGBT organizations.” Elsewhere, conservative, reactionary voices have celebrated the elimination of what they deem to be the perversion and distortion of established sexual norms and family values.

Many more have come to associate the movement with perceived foreign interference and Western meddling in China’s “domestic affairs” — a motif oft-recycled by official sources and leading media figures alike in castigating ideals deemed to be “Western” or “anti-Chinese.”

So, their new wave of nationalism may well be behind the new "let's never talk about this again" attitude.

Yet the article indicates public sympathy has already taken a very Western path:   

According to sociologist and LGBT+ advocate Pān Suímíng’s 潘绥铭 research, in 2006, 52.2% of surveyed respondents disagreed with the statement, “Homosexuals should be completely equal to other people,” a percentage that declined to 28.3% by 2015. The percentage of individuals reporting a “strong desire to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex” increased from 1.3% in 2000 to 5.1% in 2015.

Those last figures sound a bit dubious, but still.

And meanwhile, someone has posted this about the new online games restrictions:

The trouble with genetic studies on homosexuality

Over at Nature, there's a story about a study of the genetic profile of a large number of people which tentatively finds:

....genetic patterns that could be associated with homosexual behaviour, and showed how these might also help people to find different-sex mates, and reproduce.

But the limitations of the study are really more interesting that their results.  I'll extract some parts, first explaining what they did:

Evolutionary geneticist Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues used data from the UK Biobank, the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the company 23andMe, based in Sunnyvale, California, which sequence genomes and use questionnaires to collect information from their participants. The team analysed the genomes of 477,522 people who said they had had sex at least once with someone of the same sex, then compared these genomes with those of 358,426 people who said they’d only had heterosexual sex.  ....

Zietsch and his team decided to test whether these genetic patterns might provide an evolutionary edge by increasing a person’s number of sexual partners. They sorted the participants who had only had heterosexual sex by the number of partners they said they had had, and found that those with numerous partners tended to share some of the markers that the team had found in people who had had a same-sex partner.

The researchers also found that people who’d had same-sex encounters shared genetic markers with people who described themselves as risk-taking and open to new experiences. And there was a small overlap between heterosexual people who had genes linked to same-sex behaviour and those whom interviewers rated as physically attractive. Zietsch suggests that traits such as charisma and sex drive could also share genes that overlap with same-sex behaviour, but he says that those traits were not included in the data, so “we’re just guessing”.

Doesn't take much to think of problems with this study:

All of the participants lived in the United Kingdom or United States, and were of European descent. And the databases’ questionnaires asked about sexual behaviour, not sexual attraction. Most of the participants were born during a time when homosexuality was either illegal or culturally taboo in their countries, so many people who were attracted to others of the same sex might never have actually acted on their attraction, and could therefore have ended up in the wrong group in the study.....

Julia Monk, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, thinks that these caveats are so important that the paper can’t draw any real conclusions about genetics and sexual orientation. Sexual behaviour and reproduction, she says, occupy a different place in modern societies than they did for human ancestors, so it’s difficult to infer their role in our evolution. For instance, people might engage with more sexual partners now that sexually transmitted diseases can be cured. And the existence of birth control and fertility treatments negates many of the reproductive advantages that genes might provide. “It’s clear that people’s behaviour when it comes to sex and reproduction is highly culturally informed, and maybe digging into genetics is next to impossible,” Monk says....

 Dean Hamer, a retired geneticist in Haleiwa, Hawaii, who published some of the first studies on the genetics of sexual orientation, is disappointed with the study. Defining sexual orientation on the basis of a single same-sex encounter is not a useful way of categorizing people, he says, because many people who identify as heterosexual have experimented with a same-sex partner. “You’re not even asking the right people the right question,” Hamer says. Instead, he thinks the researchers have found genetic markers associated with openness to new experiences, which could explain the overlap between people who have had a homosexual partner and heterosexual people who have had many partners.

 Yes, I can see how hugely complicated it must be to draw any firm conclusions from such studies.

More from the "consistency is an evil socialist conspiracy" files

 

American COVID

Also:

Milo Yiannopoulos says he’s caught COVID-19 and is injecting himself with livestock medication.

And:

A conservative Florida radio host who spoke out against Covid-19 vaccines died after a weekslong fight with the virus, marking the third radio personality to die from coronavirus who publicly rejected vaccines.

Biggest gaming news EVER

Either this will lead to the downfall of Communist Party rule in China, or secure its future in eclipsing the USA as the dominant global power for the next 500 years:

SHANGHAI, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Chinese regulators on Monday slashed the amount of time players under the age of 18 can spend on online games to an hour of gameplay on Fridays, weekends and holidays, in response to growing concern over gaming addiction, state media reported.
The rules, published by the National Press and Publication Administration, said users under the age of 18 will only be able to play games from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time on those days, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Online gaming companies will be barred from providing gaming services to them in any form outside those hours and need to ensure they have put real name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market.
Previously, China limited the total length of time minors could access online games to three hours on holiday or 1.5 hours on other days.

Siegfried's done

Here's the complete opera newbie's review of No 3 in the Ring Cycle - Siegfried.

 Plot summary:   for reasons not entirely clear to me (apart from Wagner wanting to show up a Jewish stereotype as annoying, as well as greedy and incompetent), young Siegfried, the result of twin incest (and actually, it kinda shows - more below), spends a lot of time complaining about how he hates his dwarf "uncle" who raised him since he was a baby.  This seems ungracious, given I don't think there was any scheming motive at the time he found said blond baby just after birth.  (Although it certainly does come later.)  The dwarf, Mime, spends all his time trying to recreate the magic sword from its broken pieces, but his blacksmith skills aren't up to it.   Siegfried, as one who doesn't understand what fear is (reminder: incest), of course is able to remould it and will soon be off to slay a dragon.  End of Act one.

Act Two:  dragon slaying.  Said dragon was formerly a giant who had grabbed the all powerful ring and a bunch of other loot (hello, Hobbit), but I think he chose to convert to dragon, all the better to protect the ring.   (I would have to pay closer attention to the first opera about this, as I was cooking and missed some explanation.)  Anyway, following said dragon slaying with his magical sword (and which, it seemed to me, was dealt with in very perfunctory manner), Siegfried starts understanding birds, one of which tells him there's a sleeping woman (or human?  I would have to double check) on a rock he should probably go visit.   This is, of course, Brunnhilde, left at the end of the last opera sleeping in a circle of fire on top of a mountain as punishment for disobeying Dad Wotan.  This sounds like a good idea to young Siegfried, so it's off to find her, taking the cursed ring with him.

Act Three:   of course, Siegfried is brave enough to walk through the ring of fire to get to the sleeping person in helmet and fake Norse horns, I presume.  Amusingly (well, I thought so), he can see the face  through the helmet and first thinks it's a very handsome man (!).   Who knew this gender diversity/androgynous stuff was in Wagner?  A man ahead of his time.  Or, it could be the incest induced lack of smarts again.  Anyway, as you can guess,  deals with the armour which was presumably preventing him seeing it was a buxom woman, wakes her up, and in classic over-the-top opera fashion, falls immediately madly in love with her.   And she with him, even though she knows (I don't think he does at the end?) she is his aunt.   But hey, it's another case of "love is love" a long time before conservatives decided that "woke is broke".   And by the way, Wotan turned up at the start and confesses that he's had it, he doesn't care if the Gods lose their power any more.   He just seems sick of the power plays, or whatever.   Foreshadowing of the last opera, there.   Anyway, opera ends with Siegfried and his aunt embracing.

My opinion and random thoughts:  Wagner is really good at opening and ending an Act.   In this one, Act One was good, although I started missing the presence of female contribution.   Thrilling musical climate at the end though.   Act Two was really a bit tedious, I thought.   Again, little female contribution and I miss it.

Act 3 though - wow, it's musically fantastic, and makes up a lot for the unexpected tedium of Act Two.   

I wonder if any critics out there don't care for Act Two.

I want to talk more about the character of Mime:   it really seemed to me that he is written like the modern caricature of a Jewish mother.   I see that there have been many words spilt on the question of  the degree to which we should see these dwarf characters as being lightly disguised Jews - but after seeing this, I don't have any doubt at all.   I will read some of the articles that have been written about it, and write more.

There is also something to be said - but I don't really understand what yet - about the psychological aspect of Siegfried wanting to understand what fear is.   Seems facing a dragon didn't do it, but falling in love with an inert buxom woman did, and that makes him ecstatic.  Maybe it was hormonal, or something.   Anyway, I would not be surprised if psychoanalysts have written screeds about this.

As I wrote last week - this is a large part of the appeal of the Cycle:  a weird story that nonetheless makes you think, and you have plenty of time to do it while actually watching the opera.

Anyway, next weekend, it's the End of the World in flames.   Cool. 

Update:  an observation (my bold) from a funny summary of the plot in an article in The Independent:

The love interest is provided by twins who have an incestuous affair, and whose son is fated to marry his aunt. All male members of the cast are notably stupid (especially Siegfried, a dumb hillbilly along the lines of L'il Abner), while the females are nearly all strong and terrifying. The characters' names tend towards the absurd: Wellgunde? Mime? The Gibichungs? You wonder what exactly Richard Wagner was on for the 26 years he took to write it.

Update 2:  Gosh, it's easy to find stuff these days.  From a book The Hard Facts about the Grimm Fairy Tales, I get this:

 

So, the Germans had long been into dumb, naive heroes, and Wagner didn't realise he was continuing it?  How odd, on both counts?  Doesn't exactly fit in with Hitler's fondness for Wagner, either, does it?  

Update 3:   and here's a couple of forum pages of people going back and forth about Siegfried and whether people really assess his character fairly.   Oh, and the whole "free will" thing gets a going over too - a key theme of the Cycle story.

Update 4:   hey, I find support for my problems with Acts 1 and 2, in a recent review:

The problems with “Siegfried” are manifold. The first two acts are unnecessarily long and stubborn and tirelessly dominated by men – it takes more than two hours of the opera’s entire playing time before a female voice can be heard. The portrait of Mime teems with Wagner’s anti-Semitism (while Wagner was resuming work on “Siegfried”, he decided to republish his infamous book “Judentum in der Musik”, this time in his own name, proud of his hatred). And the title character is a person who is difficult to love. Not only can he not feel fear, he also cannot feel compassion, respect, and gratitude, and he barely develops during the trip. Throughout the opera he talks about wanting to learn fear – he can finally experience it for a moment, then he quickly forgets that feeling and returns to be a stupid macho guy.

At the same time, “Siegfried” is interesting in several ways. The opera is a variant of the Oedipus myth: a young hero attacks his grandfather and takes all his strength away, then he gets together with his aunt without knowing the relationship. Fate is cruel and nobody escapes it, just like with Sophocles – but since the tragedy only strikes in the next part, “Ragnarök”, “Siegfried” ends happily in an uncomfortable way.

Pretty brave

So the police officer who shot the loopy woman at the front of the mob which was, quite literally, calling outside for Mike Pence to be found and hung, has revealed himself in an interview and made some salient points:

The far-right has characterized Babbitt as a martyr, with former President Donald Trump himself saying in a statement that she was "murdered at the hands of someone who should never have pulled the trigger of his gun."

Byrd told Holt that Trump's statement was "disheartening."

He said of Trump: "If he was in the room or anywhere and I'm responsible for him, I was prepared to do the same thing for him and his family."

Exactly.    The gun happy, Trump loving wingnuts are into shooting for self defence in all circumstances except when its them who are doing the threatening.   

Its absurd and somewhat nauseating to hear them approve of no action against scores of police officers who have shot black men stopped on the street, but when its a black man who shot at a white mad woman at the front of a violent mob, it's all meant to be so unfair and unjust.

More from the article:

The interview was released three days after the police force announced that Byrd acted within department policy on Jan. 6 and would not face disciplinary action. The department allows officers to "use deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes that action is in the defense of human life, including the officer's own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury." 

That followed an April decision from the Justice Department that said it would not seek charges against Byrd. 

I see that David Roberts thinks it's a bad idea, this guy going public.

I think it's pretty brave, and will perhaps help bring to a head some of the absurdity within the Republican Party.  If they want to continue attacking him now, they can't use his non appearance as suggesting he knows he's guilty and won't defend himself.

Update:   just appalling:

Lots of people in comments urging Byrd to sue for defamation.   I agree:  Carlson's and Murdoch's pockets are deep.  

Faith in hype punished

 

For more detail on why Brexit is a fishing industry disaster:

Analysing the fortunes of the industry six months after the UK left the EU single market, Deas said the deal negotiated by Lord David Frost had broken “very, very solid assurances” by the prime minister and senior cabinet members that the UK would win extra quota share and take back control of UK waters. 

“We didn’t even secure exclusivity over our coastal waters, which is something that every other coastal state takes for granted. We thought that was a red line but we didn’t manage to secure that,” he said. 

Under the terms of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the EU’s fishing quota in UK waters will be reduced by 25 per cent over the next five years, with the UK theoretically able to exclude EU boats from coastal waters after 2026.

However, Deas complained that, in practice, the agreement had created an “exploitative and asymmetric” relationship that would give the EU leverage to retain access to UK waters well beyond 2026. “It’s clear that the EU is quietly confident that it has sufficient dissuasive powers to prevent the UK asserting its rights in terms of access and quota shares as an independent coastal state,” he said.

On a more positive note, the NFFO said that delays in sending fish for sale in Europe had now eased after a disastrous January and February, although market access bans for some fishing sectors, such as mussels and scallops, remained unresolved. 

Rare blood clots discussed

Nature has an article about that rare, but sometimes deadly, AstraZeneca blood clotting side effect I still have to have a tiny concern about for another couple of weeks:    

Something in the vaccine or the body’s response to it must be binding to PF4 — but what? VITT has been linked to two COVID-19 vaccines, both of which use disabled adenoviruses as a ‘vector’ to shuttle a gene encoding a coronavirus protein, called spike, into human cells. Once there, the gene is expressed and the protein is made. The immune system detects spike and generates antibodies against it that are crucial for protection against coronavirus infection.

Some researchers have proposed that impurities in the vaccines left over from the manufacturing process — such as snippets of DNA floating around in the solution, or proteins in the broth used to grow the virus — are interacting with PF4 to generate the clumps that are then targeted by antibodies⁶.

Others think the culprit could be the adenovirus itself. Previous work has shown that adenoviruses can bind to platelets and trigger their depletion in mice⁷. It’s conceivable that those mice might also have developed clots if they had been followed for longer, says Maha Othman, who studies blood clotting at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and was lead author of the study.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, adenovirus-based vaccines were being developed against infections such as HIV and Ebola, but had not yet been used in large populations. There have been no reports that these vaccines produced a VITT-like condition; however, they were not tested in nearly as many people as have received the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

 Haematologist Mitesh Borad at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, and his colleagues have analysed the structure of the chimpanzee adenovirus used in the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine and determined that it has a strong negative charge. Molecular simulations suggest that this charge, combined with aspects of the virus’s shape, could allow it to bind to the positively charged PF4 protein⁸. If so, it could then set off a cascade much like the rare reaction to heparin, says Borad, although it remains to be seen whether this happens.

Even if the adenovirus is to blame, Borad says he would not advocate that vaccine developers stop using adenoviruses in vaccines. Some adenoviruses could be engineered to reduce their negative charge, he says, and some are less negatively charged than others; the Ad26 adenovirus used in the J&J COVID-19 vaccine does not have as much of a charge as the chimpanzee virus, which might explain why VITT seems to be less common in recipients of the J&J vaccine. And so far, no link to VITT has been reported for the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, which uses both Ad26 and another adenovirus called Ad5 that has still less negative charge, he adds.

There are other theories, explained in the article, but I have probably copied as much as I should.

 

 

From the Creighton case notes

An extraordinary effort by Adam, for which the words "putting lipstick on a pig" is an understatement:

He gets, shall we say, some well deserved pushback:
 

Look, I like to take credit for disliking him and his takes for years before this.

Food fights

Today, it's this:

 Last week, it was a Twitter war over an Asian woman claiming a white woman who wrote a cook book was culturally appropriating - noodles.   Well, it wasn't really a war.  As far as I could see, the women whining about cultural appropriation - Roslyn Talusan - received overwhelming ridicule from both Left and Right.  Her tweets and now protected.  She had ended up asking for money for therapy, though, given she was traumatised by the number of attacks she received.

In fact, people who worry about "wokeness" ruining the world should feel some comfort that there was virtually no support for her.

Ring interrupted

This COVID problem is getting serious:  the Brisbane production of the Ring Cycle, which had been postponed a year, now seems to be postponed indefinitely (but not actually cancelled.)   I think they had got a fair bit of pre-production worked out by mid 2020, so I guess they will not want that to go to waste.

So, this is by of background to explaining that I made my way through the second in the series, Die Walkure, on Youtube on the weekend.  It's the Opera North production still - which is more a sung version on stage than a full production, but the story is there in clear subtitles, and it's easy to follow.

I'm happy to say I'm enjoying it.   The music is often very impressive, and while I don't really know enough about opera style singing to know how objectively good the artists are, they seem pretty impressive in this production.  

I'm also continuing to enjoy trying to summarise it to my son, and annoying him by explaining how much more substantial in themes it is than Tolkien.   (I also re-read the posts I wrote last year on that comparison, and must point them out to him as well.)  

Anyway, Die Walkure is where the internal family squabbles of the Wotan clan really start to ramp up.   And, to again put a modern spin on things, Wotan's first response to his wife's complaint that it's really creepy that the separated twins he had fathered meet up as adults and become lovers (very quickly - it only took a cup of mead) is pretty much "love is love".   He changes his mind though, and decides to keep his wife happy by killing Siegmund (or perhaps, by letting him be killed) after all, getting his daughter Brunnhilde (a Valkyrie) into the plot, but she changes her mind too and decides to try to protect Siegmund, but fails.   Which leads to Wotan punishing her by stripping her of immortal status, and putting her to sleep so she can be woken by the first dude who finds her, and become a mere housewife.   She begs her Dad to make it hard for anyone to do that, otherwise she might have to marry the first weakling who decides to take advantage of a woman sleeping on a rock.  Wotan does, by circling it in flames.   Dramatic music rises, and curtain down.

That's the very short version.  There's also another unhappy marriage; a wife drugging her husband so she can have sex with her twin (well, the sex is only implied - she is pregnant by the end); the magical sword in the tree; Wotan wandering around in disguise; the sword not being as useful as Siegmund might have hoped; and the Valkyries not sure whether they are really up to protecting their sister from their Dad, or not.

The other fun of these operas is working out which lines would have been pricking the ears of young Adolph.  I wonder if he watched them with a notebook.

Next week - hopefully I get through Number 3.    

Update:   hey look, someone from Brisbane has written a very lengthy article explaining Wagner's  evolving ideas about the father/son story that is Wotan and Siegmund.   More information than you knew you needed!

Also - I can now agree with what this person said in his witty take on watching the Ring Cycle :  How Crazy Do You Have to Be to Sit Through 15 Hours of Opera?:

It contains numerous prolonged sections of inner monologue and narration, redundant to an exasperating degree.....[I've deleted some of the funny notes he apparently wrote during some of the more protracted sequence.]

But yes, this benefits the soul. These stretches, however maddening, are not mind-numbing.   The Ring is so long that it lulls one's brain into a state of semi-hypnosis, resting but active. This is where the magic happens. Your mind floats above the story, free to think upon its greater themes, to weave them into your own life and your flashes of memory.

Yes.   I mean, what other work brings up so many issues and gives you so much time to think about them?

 

A recent thread about butter and Europe

I forgot to post these tweets which appeared in a thread last week.  Both somewhat amusing and somewhat educational:

Didn't see that coming

Well, this news seems to have caught everyone by surprise:

OnlyFans, the subscriber-only website synonymous with pornography, has announced it will ban adult material from the site after pressure from its payment processors.

The company will continue to allow some posts containing nudity but “any content containing sexually-explicit conduct” will be banned, with the site instead focusing on more mainstream content.

Not that I have ever used it, but it is pretty remarkable, I think, to watch the way that people have realised there is more than one way to skin a cat (a phrase which, incidentally, feels deserving of replacement in this animal friendly era) when it comes to online porn reduction:

Payment processing companies increasingly control what material pornography sites are able to host. Last December, Visa and Mastercard briefly banned payments to websites owned by online pornography giant MindGeek, following reports it was hosting “revenge porn” uploaded without the consent of those involved. The financial businesses only backtracked when MindGeek deleted tens of millions of unverified videos from its sites such as PornHub.

OnlyFans has enabled tens of thousands of sex workers to earn substantial incomes in return for handing over 20% of their earnings to the company, with many creators saying it has given them financial freedom. Internal figures obtained by Axios suggest about 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 (£36,000) annually from the site.

However, it has also faced growing political and regulatory scrutiny over its ability to remove illegal and exploitative material. Earlier this month more than a hundred US congressmen and women demanded a department of justice investigation into OnlyFans, relating to the alleged presence of underage material on the site.

Comedy tastes change

I see that relatively well known British comedian Sean Lock has died.   I barely know of his work, as it seems to me he has mostly appeared on panel shows which I have not found amusing, largely because I have an aversion to (the far too ubiquitous) Jimmy Carr.   My general impression is that I used to find him harmless - but not especially funny.  [Update:  I have watched some "best of" compilations of him on Youtube since his passing - and yeah, I just didn't find him particularly funny.]

But, once again I have to observe, there are few British comedians - or at least, few shows featuring them - that I have any time for now.

I still find Would I Lie to You to be by far the best, with consistently likeable and funny performances by the three regulars (David Mitchell, Lee Mack and Rob Brydon).   And I do particularly enjoy episodes with guest appearances by Bob Mortimer.  He was on one last night, as it happens, featuring a wildly improbable story about giving a scotch egg to a formula 1 driver in the 1990's as a sort of good luck charm before a race.   It was hilariously told, and I laughed again during it, even though I think this is the third time I have seen it.  (I saw it on Youtube originally, last year - it is from a quite recent episode.)

But so, so many other British panel shows leave me cold.   I positively dislike so many of their comedians now, and really, I don't quite understand why.   As I have long thought, at some point during my life, I switched from liking a lot of British comedy to feeling that most of it kind of repulsed me.

Speaking of comedy panel shows, last night on the ABC also featured a new one with Wil Anderson and Jan Fran, Question Everything.   Anderson can be very funny, I think, and Fran has a pleasing style of delivery too.  But man, did the panel amuse themselves too much last night, or what?   They seemed to find each other absolutely hilarious - and it really wasn't warranted.  It was like the studio had been filled with laughing gas:  that was what the giggly, excessive laughing at slightly amusing quips reminded me of.

Someone needs to get a grip on this aspect of the show - and get better guest panelists.  I had heard of none of them last night, and none struck me as worthy of exposure. 

 

The cheery world of the Taliban

Back to the pessimistic takes:  the Washington Post has an article on How Life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan has changed.   A taste:

Over two decades of conflict and politicking, Taliban control in Afghanistan has become a patchwork of edicts and codes, with some areas seeing modest reform. But overall, fear and intimidation remain at the heart of the militant group’s command.

In one district, elders successfully lobbied Taliban fighters to open a high school for girls. In other provinces, clinics funded by international aid groups are now allowed to function. But in those same places, harsh, often public punishments remain common. Torture and imprisonment are widely used for infringements as minor as possessing the wrong SIM card....

Public beatings and executions are routine inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And women are almost entirely absent from public life, largely denied equal access to education and employment. Access to health care and some education has expanded under the Taliban, but that is largely a result of work by select international aid groups the militants have allowed to operate.

“All their changes are only for their own benefit,” said a 22-year-old university student from Helmand province who has lived in Taliban-controlled territory on and off his entire life. Like others in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the Taliban.

“If you start criticizing the Taliban, you are their enemy,” he said. “Nothing has ever changed with that.”

 And yet, to answer the question "why does anyone support this mob", we get this brief observation:

Other civilians said they prefer the Taliban’s justice system to that of the government. A taxi driver who lives in Mazar-e Sharif said he repeatedly traveled into Taliban territory to obtain a ruling on a family property dispute after government courts proved ineffective.

“The Taliban’s process is faster than the government,” said the driver, Mubaraksha Zafar, 38, “and there is no corruption.”

Huh.