An article at The Conversation, about how Chinese school books are developing the personality cult around Xi Jinping.
I don't know - in the digital world, it feels it should be harder for a personality cult to be built up in children - or teenagers - especially when Grandpa won't let them play video games except for a few hours one night a week.
Not only that, but it seems to me that the wingnut Christofascim of Australia has a distinctly Catholic colour to it - unlike America where it's primarily Southern evangelical. I mean, last week it was a statue of Mary being paraded in front of the "hang Dan Andrews" rallies; on the weekend it was a long time nutter and Australia's own wannabe Michael Flynn starting his speech before the "Freedom rally" with the Lord's Prayer. (He is Catholic, and amusingly, I've noticed many people at dover beach's Cathollaxy think he's gone too nuts and Qanon-like.) Here's the video, if you can stomach it:
He called for a general strike until the country bends to his views - I am curious how many absentees there were today as a result of this call. I doubt it's many.
How much should we worry about the nutty Freedom rallies? They are scary in the way they illustrate the power of the internet to co-ordinate protest, internationally; but at the same time, the vaccination rate here (Australia) would indicate that their numbers over the entire population are not as large as they might think. I know - there would have been some vaccinated people in the crowd who were protesting for the rights of the un-vaccinated - but I suspect they would be in the small minority. So vaccination rates in the big states would tend to indicate the number of people whipping themselves into an anti-vaccination frenzy is probably under 10%, perhaps less than 5%? Yet the internet gives cranks the impression that their numbers are larger than they really are.
It must be driving many of them nuts that Dan Andrews is still polling strongly in Victoria.
Children of women who use marijuana during or soon after pregnancy are twice as likely as other kids to become anxious, aggressive or hyperactive, according to a new study. The findings add weight to a growing body of evidence linking cannabis use during pregnancy to psychiatric problems in children. The behavioral issues may be driven in part by changes in the activity of genes found in the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the growing fetus.
For pregnant women, cannabis isn’t just a means of getting high. Some women use it to ease severe morning sickness and anxiety, and they may not be aware that it can pose risks.
Women “tend to think smoking and drinking during pregnancy need to be avoided at all costs, but not cannabis,” said Yoko Nomura, a behavioral neuroscientist at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of the new study. “We have a long way to go to educate pregnant women, policymakers and even OB-GYN doctors on this issue.”
Research suggests that a growing number of women are using cannabis during pregnancy: One study found that in 2016, nearly twice as many women in California reported using cannabis while pregnant than in 2009.
Yet for more than 40 years, research has been raising concerns about the effects of marijuana use during pregnancy. A longitudinal study that began in 1978 linked maternal cannabis use with children’s behavioral problems as well as deficits in language comprehension, visual perception, attention and memory. More recent research has linked cannabis use in pregnancy to low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems, although some other studies have not identified such associations.
Of concern, too, is that cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of years past. Levels of THC, the compound responsible for most of marijuana’s psychological effects, have increased significantly in recent years. “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s,” said Dr. Darine El-Chaâr, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at The Ottawa Hospital in Canada who studies the health risks of marijuana use during pregnancy and was not involved in the new study.
That's quite some list of potential poor outcomes for the child!
I still suspect the US is going to regret the normalisation of marijuana use.
The topic: superdeterminism as a "solution" to the quantum measurement problem.
The reason I am writing it: possibly, because my future self is causing me to do so; but more clearly, because I see that everyone's favourite Youtube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder appears as co-author on a paper up at Arxiv with the title The Quantum Eraser Paradox.
She made a recent Youtube video in which she downplayed the retro-causality interpretation of the experiment. Let me post it: here we go -
Now, she has previously come out as suggesting that superdeterminism is probably going to turn out to be the best explanation of quantum measurement issues, and she has also gone on about how free will in humans does not exist.
In this new Arxiv paper, if I understand it correctly (and I have only had a quick read), it would seem that she and her fellow authors propose a new quantum experiment the results of which may show a difference between retrocausation as the explanation, and superdeterminism.
Sounds like an important experiment to me!
But what does superdeterminism mean? The Wikipedia explanation seems not very good, but this essay by Tim Anderson on Medium Superdeterminism may have solved the quantum measurement problem is a pretty good read.
Interestingly, it seems there is some potential cross over between both explanations (the future causing the past, and the now being predetermined.) On the Wiki page, for example, it notes:
Some authors consider retrocausality in quantum mechanics to be an example of superdeterminism, whereas other authors treat the two cases as distinct. No agreed-upon definition for distinguishing them exists.But is that what Sabine addressing in her proposed experiment: a way of distinguishing the two, empirically?
In Anderson's article, he writes:
Although there is no information transfer from future to past, so you can’t remember the future, there can be causal effects at the quantum level and relativity is not violated provided cause and effect are within light speed of one another. In that sense, you cannot know the future yet it can cause the present and the past. It can change reality itself, switching the electron spin orientation for example, or changing what reality was before you became aware of it.
This is why a better term for superdeterminism is “Future Input Dependency”. Thus, my actions in the future might, counter-intuitively, be determining my actions now rather than the reverse. Moreover, my future actions might even determine reality itself in the present. Thus, how I set up an experiment years in the future might determine the state of an electron emitted now.
Well, still count me as confused, then.
But, I don't know - if what I do in the future in some sense influences a decision I made in the past, is that a backdoor way to let a kind of free will in? Because if it's myself doing the retrocausation, it has at least a whiff of free will about it.
But how much I trust my future self to make the best retrocausative decisions? Being good now seems a sound way to ensure your future self is not a complete jerk - hence retrocausation might fit in well with your classic way of thinking about ethics. It's just that it's all circular (perhaps with a Mobius strip twist) instead of straight line running in one direction.
It's funny, too, isn't it, how we feel it's comforting to think our love relationships were meant to be - we give free will a hall pass to wander off when it comes to something like that, but want it back if it also means we're destined to die an early death (or end up in Hell forever.)
Anyway, I've written posts about retrocausation before on this blog. I find it appealing, and I'm just here trying to work out why.
This article at Philosophy Now about Buddhist metaphysics seems a nice, succinct overview. A couple of extracts:
Buddhism is often described as the philosophy of the ‘middle way’, in that the Buddha is alleged to have always urged his devotees to avoid ‘extremes’ in the quest for enlightenment – initially, the extremes of asceticism or self-indulgence.
Many scholars, like Sangharakshita, have emphasized that Buddhism is a form of ‘atheistic spirituality’ – a religion without a god – in that it attempts to steer a middle way between the theistic spirituality of the Hindu Vedanta tradition and the atheistic materialism of the Samkhya and Lokayata philosophies. But given the focal emphasis that Buddhism places upon the mind, its complete denial of a self, and the extreme idealist tendencies that developed within the Buddhist tradition, it is doubtful if Buddhism as a spiritual tradition ever took the middle way doctrinally. Indeed, many later Mahayana Buddhists, including such well-known figures as Daisetz Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa, may best be described as advocating not a middle way between spirituality and materialism, but a form of mystical idealism. ....
Aware of the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist concept of ‘no self’ (anatta), and the Buddha’s apparent ethical emphasis on the human subject as an embodied self with moral agency, some early Buddhists came out as phenomenalists. They had the notion of two realms of being, that of everyday life (laukika), and of a transcendental realm (lokuttara), which in turn was linked to the idea of two truths; the conventional truths of everyday life (our common-sense realism) (samvrti satya), and the absolute truths (paramartta satya). The latter truths are alleged to give us knowledge and experience of things ‘as they really are’. Under the latter perspective, not only are human beings in an absolute sense now alleged to be ‘unreal’ or as ultimately having no real (mind-independent) existence, so are all the material things and organisms that humans acknowledge and interact with in their everyday lives. We are thus informed by these Buddhists in accordance with this ‘phenomenalism’, that ultimately speaking, the substantive objects and enduring persons of everyday life do not exist: they are ‘fictions’ or ‘illusions’, or more specifically, merely constructs of the human mind. All material things are in this way mind-dependent, hence the label ‘phenomenalism’ (‘phenomena’ is Greek for ‘the things/experiences of the senses’). Buddhist phenomenalism is therefore a completely anti-realist metaphysic. What exists and has reality according to it are only fleeting mental events or moments of experience – described in the Abhidhamma as dhammas. This metaphysic is invariably linked by contemporary Western Buddhist scholars to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, or to the anti-realist subjectivism of postmodernist philosophy.And further down:
It is doubtful if the Buddha expressed any real interest in epistemology, nor was he really interested in understanding the material world and its rich diversity of life-forms in any sort of scientific sense. His concern – as he continually emphasized – was ethical: the understanding and alleviation of suffering.
It is however clear that the Buddha’s emphasis on ‘right views’ and on the cultivation of wisdom (prajna) has two very different interpretations. On the one hand it has an empirically-sourced meaning: wisdom is a result of understanding the impermanence of human life, and the fact that all things arise and cease to exist according to specific causes and conditions. For the Buddha, greed, hatred, and egoism invariably give rise to suffering. As with Aristotle, wisdom involves the application of empirical knowledge – about impermanence and conditionality – to ethics, thereby (for Aristotle) enhancing human flourishing and well-being, or (for the Buddha) enabling the alleviation of suffering with respect to sentient beings. There is, therefore, no alienation between empirical knowledge and practical wisdom. (It is also worth noting that what really ‘expands the mind’ is not the ingesting of psychedelic drugs, nor inducing some transcendental or mystical state through deep meditation, but empirical knowledge – contrary to even what most Buddhists think.) On the other hand, the ‘transcendental’ interpretation of wisdom has less to do with empirical knowledge and ethics than with the cultivation of a spiritual or mystical intuition, and the realization, through deep meditative states, that the world – reality – is pure empty consciousness or absolute all-mind.
I'm going to push my luck and extract more than I usually would, and press on:
It follows that both the experience and understanding of enlightenment within the Buddhist tradition has two very different kinds of meaning; either ethical (this-worldly) or metaphysical (other-worldly). Similarly, although Buddhist scholars invariably equate the concept of awareness or awakening (bodhi) with the experience of non-dual consciousness or emptiness (nirvana), awareness and emptiness imply two very different conceptions of enlightenment. Enlightenment as awareness suggests a common-sense realism. It posits that things in the world are transient and continually undergoing change, and that nothing is self-existent, in that all things are subject to specific causes and conditions. The human person as an ‘existing being’, to employ the Buddha’s own phrase, is no exception. The person as an embodied self is continually changing, and embedded in a complex web of relationships with both the natural world and with other people. Enlightenment as awareness thus entails a theory of knowledge that is historical, dialectical (that is, relational and dynamic) and this-worldly. Enlightenment in this sense occurs when an embodied self becomes fully aware of the truth that everything changes and that all things are subject to causes and conditions. Ethical conduct is here based on empirical knowledge, of the world as experienced in everyday life. It requires us to realize that suffering, along with sorrow and despair, arises from the three ‘poisons’, namely, greed, hatred and delusion – all egocentric strivings. And, as indicated, enlightenment as awareness also suggests a concept of wisdom akin to that of Aristotle; namely the application of empirical knowledge to the question of how to alleviate suffering, through the cultivation of wholesome mental states such as compassion, non-violence, generosity, and loving kindness.
In contrast, it appears that for many Buddhists – Daisetz Suzuki is a prime example – enlightenment as nibbana or emptiness implies a quite different worldview – that of mystical idealism. This involves the attainment of a state of mind that transcends the experiences of everyday life. This is a state of mind characterised as being unconditioned, eternal (or timeless), and empty (or disembodied). So here enlightenment is described as a form of non-dual consciousness that transcends both time and the material world of things. It leads to the understanding that ‘physical reality is created out of consciousness’ as one well-known scholar puts it (Bringing Home the Darma, Jack Cornfield, 2012, p.241). Enlightenment as nibbana therefore implies that ‘things as they really are’ are ‘mind-only’, as the ‘absolute all-mind’ or as the ‘cosmic consciousness’ beyond both the subjective mind and the body. For Suzuki, as for Nietzsche, it is a consciousness even beyond good and evil. This idea, however, appears to be completely at odds with the Buddha’s ethical philosophy.
And a point I haven't really heard made before:
Many contemporary Buddhists are dissatisfied with what they see as the overemphasis on meditation and the attainment of individual enlightenment. They have instead stressed the crucial need for a socially engaged Buddhism. This implies being directly involved in contemporary issues, specifically those relating to the ecological crisis and to social justice. It is also worth noting in passing that concepts of ‘no self’ and the ‘unconditioned’ were for the Buddha ethical concepts rather than metaphysical ones. They implied a rejection of egoism, not of the embodied self, and of seeking freedom from the unwholesome emotions of greed, hatred, and the craving for a permanent self.
I think it fair to say that the general approach taken by the writer aligns with a view of Buddhism taken by Karen Armstrong in her biography of Buddha which I am (very slowly) reading. She keeps emphasising that his approach was actually very pragmatic - working out by his own experience what "worked" to solve his spiritual concerns.
Update: I wanted to further add that this analysis provides some justification for my long held feeling that the religion is too concerned with the self - even though it also believes there's no self there! And I like religions that are heavily into charitable works, but one that has an "anti-realist metaphysic" is hardly likely to be motivated to do that. I am happy to read that there are some Buddhists who want it to be more socially engaged.
The New York Times has a lengthy version of a story in Science (which I also subscribe to - $66 US a year - bargain!) about a scientist who thinks the WHO made a mistake in attributing the first case of COVID in Wuhan. He thinks it was a woman from the wet market, as were most of the other early cases.
The scientist, Michael Worobey, a leading expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections.
Dr. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there.
“In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Dr. Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.”
Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the W.H.O., said that Dr. Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor.
But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the market. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Dr. Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick.
By the way, whatever happened to the story, which the Chinese media was keen to spread, that an Italian had COVID months before it showed up in Wuhan? Here's the story, at Reuters. But here's a much later report on why some suspect it wasn't an accurate study. All very complicated.
Hey, the New York Times just offered me a basic subscription for a year at 50c a week. Yeah, $2 (Australian dollars, too) a month for a year. That got me in as a first time subscriber. (Been paying for the Washington Post for quite a while - I just had to check, but it seems to only be $8.37 a month. $6 US.)
In Australia, I can get a subscription to the SMH for $3.50 a week; same for the Australian (as if). The Washington Post is substantially cheaper. Even after the end of my first year on NYT for small change, it says it will go up to $20 a month (AUD).
American newspaper subs are much better value.
The only other page I miss having free access to is The Japan Times - I always liked it, although the print version was getting extremely thin in my last visit there, quite a few years ago now. It's USD$15 a month on the cheapest plan, though.
What other paper would I like full access to? I thought the Straits Times was a very substantial paper when last in Singapore a couple of years ago - and I see I can get it for .99c a month for three months, thereafter $14.90 (SGD) a month thereafter. Tempting...
Gee, I see you can get the New Yorker for 12 weeks for $12 (US, of course). A full year at half price - $50, but full price is $100. Still, for a weekly publication, that is pretty cheap.
My problem is, though, that I still don't like reading lengthy articles on a phone, and I don't spend much time in front of the computer at home anymore. I have a very old tablet, which still has a good screen, but the battery is only lasting a few hours, and then takes overnight to re-charge. Maybe I should just get used to using it with a external charging battery in it all the time.
I've been meaning to say this out loud - that is, here! - for a couple of months now.
With all of the talk of CO2 emissions targets needing to be set and met, now on quite short time frames, it still seems to have the feeling of mere wishful thinking for any nation until they start to specify exactly how it will happen.
And why is it we still don't seem to be at the stage that nations can start to do that? What is the hold up? Is it because we let the private sector have too much independence in sorting out clean energy generation?
I know you hear of papers written with assurances that renewable energy can do it all - but there are lots of choices in the implementation of renewable energy, and when is any government going to get very specific about it?
Current power plants have know useful life spans: why can't we yet say how and when the replacement will be built and start operating?
I know grid scale storage is going to be important, and I also know flow batteries are looking promising - can't government agree to intensive research in which form of flow battery is best and will be installed with the next big (say) solar farm.
I'm just spitballing here, but in a country like Australia, here are what seem to me to be some obvious steps:
a. work out how much further we can get with domestic rooftop solar and domestic battery storage - presumably there is still plenty of room to reduce large power plant output by more of it;
b. work out the clear incentives for maximising rooftop solar. As I have said several time, I can't see why it should not be mandated on new house construction, for one.
c. engage in the flow battery question - work out the most promising contenders and get them to trial them here, if necessary;
f. work out where solar farms can go that are going to service the large cities - floating solar on dams or bays if you want to reduce transmission distance, and combined solar and agriculture on useful farmland. If necessary - work out where solar in the desert can go and if the HVDC cable is going to run to get it to where the population is;
g. work out what can be done with more wind, especially in the southern parts which have less sun in winter;
h. work out the national grid that's make it all work.
It seems to me that if ever there is a country that should be able to get by on full solar/wind combination with enough storage, it's Australia. But I want to see the specific plans as to how we are going to get there.
Yeah, this seems kinda surprising:
Pregnant women in the United States die by homicide more often than they die of pregnancy-related causes — and they’re frequently killed by a partner, according to a study published last month in Obstetrics & Gynecology1. Researchers revealed this grim statistic by using death certificates to compare homicides and pregnancy-related deaths across the entire country for the first time....
The researchers found that US women who are pregnant or were pregnant in the past 42 days (the post-partum period) die by homicide at more than twice the rate that they die of bleeding or placental disorders — the leading causes of what are usually classified as pregnancy-related deaths. Also, becoming pregnant increases the risk of death by homicide: between the ages of 10 and 44 years, women who are pregnant or had their pregnancy end in the past year are killed at a rate 16% higher than are women who are not pregnant.I guess to take the "glass half full" approach - does this at least indicate that the medical care of pregnant women there is a better than expected?
So this is broadly how it has gone:
a. climate change denial acclimatised the Right into believing grand conspiracy theories (even though it was not explicitly called such, but what else could it be when scientific body after scientific body, from all nations, continued year after year to not only acknowledge the science was right, but became more certain about it?)
b. Obama triggered underlying American racism and Hilary Clinton became a hate figure over feminism;
c. Trump came along as a leader endorsing the open statement of populist racism, anti-feminism and climate change denial, as well as making explicit a long simmering Manichean view of politics that all opposition to Right wing views is inherently evil and works undercover to destroy the God fearing people with their (ridiculous) figurehead Trump. Conspiracy belief is thus elevated to new heights.
d. COVID response is completely politicised primarily due to Right wing conspiracy belief, which transcends even the views of their idiot leader (Trump) when he recommended vaccination. [I suspect people will quibble about this, and say that libertarian opposition to lockdown is not a nutty as anti-vax conspiracy - I would say that ideological blinkers of libertarianism are only marginally less dire than anti-vax conspiracy - they are still virtually impossible to argue with.]
e. All of this has been able to fester and spread like never before because of both social media and the greed and power hunger of Rupert Murdoch and a cast of smaller broadcasters.
I just thought I would put this summary down again, after reading the absolute rubbish circulating on the post - Catallaxy blogs. (I hesitate to link to it, but this one today by the increasingly obnoxious Arky is typical.) They are in a particular period of pain at the moment because of the Scott Morrison turn around on climate change, with the dis-ingenous endorsement of the Murdoch press.
It never occurs to them that they simply made the wrong call on climate change, and instead of acknowledging that, they choose to double down on grand conspiracy. You know, the education system is just liberal/Marxist indoctrination, etc. And this is readily extended to their approach to COVID - the previously long standing institutional sources of expertise are not to be trusted, just like they cannot be on climate change, and amateurs in their sheds (mostly men) are capable of just a good an analysis as anyone else. And most stupidly, they think it is all about people wanting power over them, when it is they who are supporting authoritarian regimes around the world, as long as they share their conservative world view.
A ship of (mostly) old fools, and with a strong streak of religious conservatism thrown in now as well.
Completely unable to be engaged in reasoned argument.
I see that England is doing so well under Brexit that they can't even raise enough turkeys for Christmas:
A news item from last month explains:
Millions of British Christmas dinners are to be saved by turkeys imported from Poland and France after UK farmers were forced to slash production because of fears of labour shortages. UK supermarkets and restaurants will have to import hundreds of thousands of the birds from the EU for Christmas after British farmers reared at least 1m fewer birds, the poultry industry has warned.
Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said big turkey producers belonging to the group had slashed production by about a fifth this year after Brexit cut off their supply of cheap labour. These producers normally rear about 5.5m of 8m to 9m turkeys consumed at Christmas annually, he said.
Imported turkeys would likely come from Poland and France, said Paul Kelly of the KellyBronze free range turkey farm in Essex. “The supermarkets have supported British turkey over the past 15 years and we have been able to supply 100 per cent [of the demand],” he said. “Now we will be forced into buying turkeys from the EU.”
But also - it doesn't look from the video that the Poles are particularly good at raising turkeys in humane conditions. Maybe they are only temporarily crammed to virtually standing room only? I hope so...
This is pretty amusingly oddball (ha, a bit of a pun): this video from France 24 starts with a collective of young-ish, French men who meet to sew harnesses to, um, make their testicles ride high and hot as a means of male contraception. (!)
It does go on to note that French men (and I presume, their doctors) are remarkably reluctant to have vasectomies - the rate is apparently 20% in Britain, and 1% in France. (Can't remember if that is age related - men over 40 perhaps? I see the figures in Australia are apparently 25% of men over 40.)
The national cultural differences relating to contraception are pretty remarkable. In Japan, it seems it is still only 1.3% of women who are on the pill - compared to about 15 % in America (according to the top story on my Google search.) Oddly, I can't easily see figures for the number of Japanese men who have vasectomy. I did find a recent study of its effects in Chinese men, though. Seems that physically, they were fine, but had more psychological issues. Complicated!
The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was found liable on Monday for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, over Jones’s claim the massacre was a hoax....
Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for relatives of eight victims who sued Jones in Connecticut, said: “What’s clear from Judge Bellis’s ruling is that Alex Jones and the Jones defendants have engaged in a long, continuous course of misconduct in this case designed to prevent the plaintiffs from getting evidence about Mr Jones’ business and about his motives for publishing lies about them and their families.”
A Texas judge recently issued similar rulings against Jones in three defamation lawsuits, finding Jones liable for damages after defaulting him and his companies for not turning over documents.
Good.
And a hobo with a podcast is being done for contempt:
Steve Bannon has surrendered to US federal authorities to face contempt charges after defying a subpoena from a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
There's not much good news around these days, so you have to take what crumbs there are and celebrate them.
I'm three episodes into Squid Games, and having my doubts about continuing.
I don't know - I've just always found a serious credibility gap with dystopian-ish stories in which large numbers of people are involved in despicable behaviour. That may sound like an odd thing to say in light of the evidence of the 20th century - or even the absolute nuttiness of wingnut America at the moment. But at least people in those real life examples thought (or think) they have reason on their side. It seems hard to see how you fit any kind of moral reasoning into the behaviour of both players and masked staff in this show.
And masks - put a mask on an evil (or good) character and I start to find its credibility wanes. I don't think it matters who - Batman, the murderer in the last season of Babylon Berlin, the bad guy in V for Vendetta (which I have never watched, mind you): mask wearing stops me taking the story very seriously. Why? Maybe it's because it never happens in real life?
Some possible exceptions people might want to bring up: Darth Vader? Well, it always sounded like a ventilator, and helmets in space are OK, so I'm not sure it counts. Zorro? He wasn't really that serious a character in the first place. Same with Spiderman - the movies are never really meant to be that serious, especially in the Tom Holland incarnation. I can forgive a lot if a movie is light in tone, or largely comedic [Deadpool]; but that hardly describes SG.
To be honest, I am a little uncertain about the acting in this show, too. Sometimes it seems a bit over the top. The acting in Kingdom, by far the best Korean Netflix series I have seen, was better and didn't seem pushed too far, despite the zombie content.
I might go another episode (or more), but I am more inclined to just read about how it goes from here.
I wonder how that John Carpenter movie would hold up on re-viewing?
Anyhow, I'm talking about having watched the surprisingly well-reviewed (92% on Rottentomatoes, and 71% on Metacritic) Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. (It's now streaming for free on Disney, after only being on the cinema starting maybe 6 weeks ago?)
I'm glad I didn't make my first trip to the cinema for nearly 2 years to see it, as I was seriously underwhelmed.
It's not exactly bad - it's just that it's not very good. I don't think the script, which was meant to be heavy with family drama, was particularly good. And the action continually suffered from the Marvel issue of not always being able to do heavily CGI action in such a way to make it feel it carries any sense of danger, or at least, pleasing movement. (It's funny, but it's hard to work out sometimes why for me some obviously CGI action works well enough, and other times it doesn't.)
As with Black Panther, the climatic battle I found an uninteresting, badly edited visual mess, and going all in with Chinese mythology and dragons seems a bit of stretch for me, even in a movie series where the multiverse is a thing.
I ended up wondering why I like Dr Strange a lot, but didn't care for this. Maybe I'm more into Asian mysticism than Asian mythology, and the Dr S movie was very eye-catching with its innovative looking visual effects. (I still like seeing the sparky portal - it's charming.)
I hope I have a better reaction to the James Bond film - I hope to see that by this time next week.
Gosh: it's been years since they appeared in one of their music videos (unfortunately - it's nice to see them acting peculiarly on video again!) But here they are, with an immediately likeable song:
It's hard to explain how significant this band is to people who have never heard of them - I mean, clearly, they are well known amongst the creative types in Hollywood, given the number of things they have been asked to do in TV and the elsewhere. But it is so pleasantly intriguing: it's almost like the John's and their fan base both like them being a modest success forever, rather than hitting an early peak and flaming out. In fact, they pretty much explained this is a correct take on them in a recent interview with PBS:
In an article about whether free range chickens are as cheery as we might imagine them to be, there's this:
Feather pecking is when chickens peck and pull out other hens' feathers.
This can lead to cannibalism, where chickens eat the wounded flesh of the injured hen.
These three factors kill a lot of free-range hens. One Australian study found cannibalism was a major cause of death in free-range hens, second-only to being eaten by predators.
Dr Hartcher, who researched feather pecking for her PhD, says death by cannibalism is an "awful way to go".
"We understand more about it than we did a few decades ago but we still don't fully understand how to control the problem," she says.
I would have guessed that keeping too many chickens in too small a space may be a reason behind it, and I see from another website that is one trigger, but there are many others:
These stressors include crowding, bright light intensity, high room temperature, poor ventilation, high humidity, low salt, trace nutrient deficiency, insufficient feeding or drinking space, nervous and excitable birds (hereditary), external parasites, access to sick or injured birds, stress from moving, boredom and idleness, housing birds of different appearance together and birds prolapsing during egg-laying.
How do you cure "boredom and idleness" in a chicken, I wonder. I would have thought letting them scratch around free range on grass would go a long way to curing that, but maybe it's more the lack of good quality chicken cinema and poetry readings?
They're an odd animal.
Update: OK, let's just have a whole gross out afternoon, by reading this list of 10 cute animals you didn't know were cannibalistic. I did know of hamsters, and had heard of pigs too. But rabbits and red squirrels? It's a particularly cute bunny they have chosen to picture, too. Most of the examples are of babies being the victim of mothers, though, and I guess we tend to feel that crazy hormonal stuff maybe gives those individual Mums some sort of excuse. Males (or females) who go killing other mother's offspring, though - harder to like them!
As for primates and cannibalism - chimps seem to be the nastiest of all.
I'm almost starting to wonder why we don't have cases of modern humans feeling evolutionarily compelled to do something similar.
I am finding it refreshing, this new found confidence in Labor, and much of the media, to call Scott Morrison a liar:
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I find the argument in this article pretty convincing:
Prepare for the Shock Troops
A key extract from the end:
There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.
What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.
Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”
After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.
The lights are still flashing red.
In Science magazine, there's an article about disagreement amongst physicists about whether one particular experiment really did show interactions with dark matter. The problem is, it hasn't been replicated elsewhere, and it seems that the "no it didn't" group think they may have worked out what the first group did wrong.
You can read all about that at the article, but I wanted to note the very personal way the leader of the "yes it did" camp takes criticism:
Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”
Obviously, a fair bit of money has been put into this already, but the precision with which it has to work is surely a worry. (I mean, you can imagine the internal damage if the timing of the release if off by the tiniest, tiniest, bit.)
An article at The Conversation explains how there's a lot of oxygen on the moon - unfortunately, all in the soil and needing a lot of heat to extract. But still, the maths are interesting:
If we ignore oxygen tied up in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material — and just consider regolith which is easily accessible on the surface — we can come up with some estimates.
Each cubic metre of lunar regolith contains 1.4 tonnes of minerals on average, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630kg oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just over).
Only 800g of oxygen a day? I would have guessed it was more than that, probably influenced by things like the thought of the weight of a full scuba tank! Of course, there are going to be other gases involved too. The ISS has a 79% nitrogen atmosphere.
Anyway, more rough estimates from the article:
Now let’s assume the average depth of regolith on the Moon is about ten metres, and that we can extract all of the oxygen from this. That means the top ten metres of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years.
This would also depend on how effectively we managed to extract and use the oxygen. Regardless, this figure is pretty amazing!
Indeed.
First: quite a lot of snow:
Another video of buildings not coping with it:
And an article in The Guardian about recent heavy rains:
‘It’s alarming’: intense rainfall and extreme weather become the norm in northern China
The European Union brags that its climate ambitions are more aggressive than anywhere else in the world. There’s just one problem: If the world behaved like Europe, it would be burning an awful lot of wood.
Europe gets 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass fuels, a process that uses wood scraps, organic waste and other crops to generate heat and electricity in specially designed power plants. U.N. rules allow the European Union to write off the emissions as carbon-neutral, so long as sustainable guidelines are met, even though burning the fuel can release more warming gases into the atmosphere than coal.
The European Union’s reliance on wood-burning energy to meet its climate goals — which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions 55 percent by 2030 — is a measure of the difficulty of making the transition to clean energy even on a continent where politicians have shown political will and enjoy significant public support for their green agenda. For now, much of Europe’s emissions reductions are being achieved by burning biomass instead of coal — and then not counting the resulting greenhouse gases, which critics say they should.
....
Excluding emissions from biomass can make a big difference. According to their official numbers, the European Union and Britain together reduced energy-related emissions by 26 percent between 1990 and 2019. Adding emissions from biomass makes the reduction 15 percent over the same period, according to an analysis last month from Chatham House, a British policy think tank. Britain — which left the European Union in 2020 — is a major consumer of biomass pellets, so the post-Brexit E.U. figures for biomass are likely to be somewhat smaller.
Here's a good article at the ABC about the history and science of crowd surges, like the deadly one at the Travis Scott concert.
I think it clear that the most disconcerting thing about this one was the fans who were trying to get the concert stopped when it was clear a disaster was unfolding.
I didn't intend to, but I ended up watching about half an hour of the show on ABC "Girl Like You" last night. It was a documentary, made over many years, watching a young trans guy and his girlfriend dealing with his transition.
I didn't get his full background, and I have to say, as documentary it was very heavy handed.- lots and lots of music made to flag the emotions on display. And as with all "fly on the wall" documentary, I do wonder what influence the presence of the documentary makers have.
I also wondered why it was being pretty heavily promoted, but only being show in a pretty late time slot.
I suspect the answer is that because the story wasn't as positive about the whole trans experience as might be expected from the very queer friendly ABC. The story seems to be that his girlfriend thought their relationship could survive him transitioning, and it turned out it couldn't. She broke it off, abruptly, but it was clear that she had felt the whole experience of supporting her former boyfriend very draining.
As for the transition - it looked like he had not had the operation, just a lot of chemical treatment. And they made the point that one of the drugs taken to achieve comes with lots of potential mental health side effects - which isn't ideal for a group already prone to depression, etc.
As often happens, I again wondered about the body dysmorphia aspect of trans, which seems such a large part of it. We can all agree that body dysmorphia that leads to anexoria is bad and an issue that needs a mental cure; but when it comes to dysmorphia that is based on gender bits, it's considered wildly improper to approach it in the same way. I looked up links on cognitive behaviour therapy and trans, for example, and as far as I can tell, the only idea about using it is to help trans be happy trans - not to question whether their thoughts about how wrong their body is may be misguided. Yet isn't it used that way to encourage people with healthy bodies to stop thinking there is something wrong with it that will only be cured by being dangerously thin?
I suppose people will say that trans ideation is not only about body dysmorphia - or isn't always. But gee, it's a messy area full of unstated assumptions and ideas that seem to be rarely thought about by those sympathetic to their situation.
I guess it was somewhat refreshing to see a doco that didn't portray the whole issue as if all trans situations would have a happy ending if only everyone would "validate" the person going through it. (He seemed to have lots of support, including from his Mum when he moved back in after the girlfriend left.)
My main recollection of how I felt about the Carter presidency at the time is that I thought his popularity suffered because his administration gave the impression of the nation suffering a kind of paralysis in the face of several problems not really within anyone's control. And was there ever a worse Presidential PR look than the one of him running himself into collapse (and being attacked by a rabbit!)
I keep getting the feeling now that the Biden drop in popularity has similar features - OK, so the Congressional paralysis is something he perhaps could have done something about faster, but the other things which Americans are saying concern them (supply chain, the possible return of modest inflation, COVID, border rushes) seem to me to be much harder to pin on Joe.
But that doesn't seem to matter much - Americans like a sense of "moving forward", I reckon, even if the direction is dubious and going to be later regretted. (Like rushing into Middle Eastern wars under Bush.)
You perhaps get similar sentiment in other countries, but the hatred of not moving forward seems something felt particularly keenly in the American public, I suspect.
I find it impossible to imagine standing that close to the edge, let alone jumping across the gap, from a standing start too!
I also see on Twitter that the come back to this by COVID anti-vaxxers is "but the COVID vaccine is not a normal vaccine! It's new and untried and you have to keep getting boosters..etc etc".
I've said it before, and say it again: a significant chunk of the Right has spent 20 to 30 years telling each other that there's a massive conspiracy in the scientific community (in the form of climate change.)
Having become so acclimatised to believing one massive conspiracy, they find it easy to swallow another conspiracy that is also actually against their children's interest to believe.
I watched the 2020 movie The Invisible Man on Netflix on the weekend, and it's very good.
I kept thinking it's a mash up of #MeToo, Marvel-esque "hi tech in the wrong hands", and ghost story (invisible presence in the house). But it worked for me. Most of all, it's the suspense that works well - lots of good directorial decisions as to swapping between point of view and other neat ideas.
It also has a terrific plot surprise that I did not see coming at all. (Ha, I just realised that sounds like a pun on the title, but it wasn't intended as such.)
Now, without ruining my general praise for the movie - I think the ending was bold, and a bit confronting, and perhaps not set up as being as well justified as it could have been. But I still like that the director (who also wrote the movie) and studio went with it. It's the sort of ending it's possible to have decent discussion about afterward.
Anyway, I strongly recommend it.
I noticed on Insiders yesterday that the journos who had been to Rome and Glasgow with the PM thought that life was looking pretty normal over there (Rome was "pumping" I think Phil Coorey said), and that Australia needed to get used to thinking we have to do the same.
Yet later in the day, I was reading about the surge in COVID cases in Germany, France, and Ireland (all with high vaccination rates), and in a lot of the Eastern European countries (which have low vaccination rates, and seem particularly prone to believing Right wing culture warring on the matter.)
The WHO is worried, and I would guess that what happens with hospitalisation and death rates in the region in the next few months ought to deliver some more important lessons on the value of vaccination.
But it probably won't be simple. This weird pandemic will likely show some countries or regions with patterns that are hard to understand.
Update: As for Italy itself, I just noticed from Nov 6:
Italy has recorded 6,764 COVID cases in the past 24 hours.
Health authorities have confirmed the deaths of 51 people.
Italy’s COVID-related death toll has passed 132,000 – making it the second-highest toll in Europe after the UK.
Update 2: look at the waves of infection in the Netherlands:
And the government has introduced more restrictions due to the current outbreak, leading to this:
Thousands of people paraded through the centre of The Hague on Sunday afternoon to protest at the coronavirus measures currently in place in the Netherlands. New rules, including the return of face masks in shops and wider use of the coronavirus pass system, came into effect on Saturday. Their number included a number of supporters of extreme-right group Voorpost, identified by their use of the the Prinsen flag – an orange, white and blue version of the Dutch flag used by the Dutch Nazi party during World War II. Police estimated the crowd to be at 20,000 to 25,000, website Nu.nl reported. Read more at DutchNews.nl:
Another news article contains this explanation (my bold!) about the new face mask rules:
Face masks Masks will once again be compulsory in all public buildings where coronavirus passes are not required. This includes: Supermarkets and shops Libraries Government buildings and council offices Airports and railway stations Colleges and universities when moving between locations People in contact professions, such as hairdressers, will again have to wear masks, but not sex workers. Those who do not wear a mask can be fined €95. Masks remain compulsory in taxis and on public transport.
I have some misgivings about re-publishing this advice column from The Guardian, both because I am not entirely sure it's not a prank, and because if it's not, I don't really want to be part of encouraging other young people to similarly writhe in the somewhat narcissistic world of "what sexuality/gender identity am I today"?
I am 16, and identify as an ace lesbian (NMLNM, or non-men loving non-men). I have questioned my sexuality since the age of 12 or 13, thinking I was bisexual. I downloaded TikTok, which allowed me to explore my identity more and interact with other queer young people. Until this summer, I questioned my identity multiple times a day (exhausting and not affirming), but I slowly began to feel confident in labelling myself as a demi-romantic, asexual lesbian (I like to use labels). However, that feeling didn’t last long. I felt dysphoric a lot of the time, and I hated my breasts. Fortunately, after about a month, I rediscovered the term “demigirl” and it just fitted. I am also trying out she/they pronouns, but haven’t told anyone. My gender is quite fluid – some days I feel more neutral, other days ultrafeminine.
I am open about my sexuality at school and online, and would happily tell most people that I am gay, but don’t want to “come out” to my parents. I think it’s a combination of fear, not of rejection (they are supportive of the LGBTQ+ community), and the fact that I hate the idea of having to “come out” if you are queer; I don’t want to contribute to our heteronormative society. Should I tell my parents so they have time to process it, or should I wait until I have a partner to introduce to them? Also, I feel obliged to inform them of my pronoun change, but I don’t want to be the one to teach them how to use she/they pronouns. I wish they would educate themselves. If I tell them my gender and/or sexuality, I don’t want them to perceive me differently. I know how they react is not in my control, but ideally our relationship will stay the same or improve.
So she both wants to label herself and resents the idea of labelling herself. Makes sense!
Seems to me a good dose of "stop thinking about yourself" might be helpful here.
I've briefly noted before that old-before-his-age conservative commentator Currency Lad, who has resumed blogging, has developed into wordy, muddled, quasi-opaqueness in his writing. I offer an example this piece about the retirement of Alan Jones, which seems to me to swing wildly between praise and condemnation of his "skills", only to finally settle on "he'll be missed". Mind you, I saw on Youtube Andrew Bolt doing his farewell to Jones, and it was somewhat similar. Seems a lot of his defenders have quite a lot of mixed feelings about how he operates.
Let there be no lack of clarity from me - he's a long time disgrace and done more harm to the country than good, by far. I find his personality extremely grating, and have no understanding of how such a bombastic, thinks-he-knows-it-all-but-doesn't style succeeded for so long in media.
Making useful fuels from the sun and air? But the guys are German - I think I can trust them:
For the past two years, researchers led by Aldo Steinfeld, Professor of Renewable Energy Carriers at ETH Zurich, have been operating a solar mini-refinery on the roof of the Machine Laboratory in the centre of Zurich. This unique system can produce liquid transportation fuels, such as methanol or kerosene, from sunlight and air in a multi-stage thermochemical process.Read about it here.
Drinking alcohol to stay healthy? That might not work, says new study.
I wish it weren't true, but it does suggest a reason other studies might be misleading:
Increased mortality risk among current alcohol abstainers might largely be explained by other factors, including previous alcohol or drug problems, daily smoking, and overall poor health, according to a new study publishing November 2nd in PLOS Medicine by Ulrich John of University Medicine Greifswald, Germany, and colleagues.
Also - Rupert Murdoch, who is happy to watch his network burn down American democracy.
Update: despite much earlier hoopla about what a devastating result this is, the end result is going to be pretty close -
Maybe 49% to 50.5%.
And the galling thing will be that if it ended up in those figures with a Democrat win, perhaps 50% of Republicans would believe it was Democrat fraud.
Update 2: OK, maybe more like 48% to 51%? But still, you only have to shift half of the gap to win next time - or 1.6%.
Update 3: seems to be settling on 48.3% to 51.0%. Some progressive with the name "Princess" got .7% which would otherwise have been Democrat vote, too, probably. So more like a 2% win...
As a counterpoint to the rabid pro-China propaganda that is CGTN, I sometimes watch videos from the rabidly anti-China Youtube channel China Observer. I don't know which country it comes out of, but it does make some pretty detailed critiques of everything happening in China.
This recent one, about a famous pianist who has (like many, many other famous folk) suddenly dramatically fallen out of favour with the government, highlights a "citizens police" force (well, a bunch of older people, it seems, more than happy to make money by being State informants) which put me very much in mind of the 1984 Anti-Sex League - a concept which, in the book and movie, I found inadvertently funny.
But in China, it seems that something close to it is becoming a reality:
...I feel a little sorry for wild introduced animals that face culling.
A report in Nature:
Scientists say Australian plan to cull up to 10,000 wild horses doesn’t go far enoughI have a few observations to make about Gladys Berejiklian and her appearances at ICAC, which I am guessing many people will share:
* she sounds like she makes for a pretty uninspiring "girlfriend" - not only very willing to diss the seriousness of a former lengthy relationship, but sounding so drearily bored with a lover's demands in phone calls that she would re-allocate money in a flash, just to make him stop bothering her;
* using the phrase "love circle" was rather cringe;
* as Laura Tingle said on Insiders on Sunday, it's a bit (no, very) worrying to learn that such large amounts of money for essential services are capable of being allocated (or unallocated) in such a cursory fashion. I mean, a few million here, a hundred thousand there; but $170 million to a regional hospital?
* those who thought she was a mere victim of love, so to speak, look very silly now. Her instinct that her political standing was going to be irreparably damaged was correct. She'll end up on the company directors boards circuit anyway, making money by looking serious.
Google was reading my mind again, and knew that I would find interesting a rather graphic news special from a Grands Rapids (of all places) TV station about people with their livers destroyed by alcoholism being denied liver transplants:
What surprised me the most was how openly it showed the son being on death's door at home, while his mother tried to track down a hospital that might do a transplant. I reckon if anyone has a son or daughter drinking heavily each day, regardless of their age, they ought to make them watch this to see what a miserable death it can lead to.
Update: and here's an article from 2019 at The Atlantic about the ethics of denying alcoholics a transplant.
Almost twice as many voters now believe Brexit is having a negative effect on the UK economy as think it is benefiting the nation’s finances, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer, carried out during budget week.
The survey comes after Richard Hughes, the chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said his organisation calculated that the negative impact on GDP caused by the UK’s exit from the EU was expected to be twice as great as that resulting from the pandemic.
Hughes said Brexit would reduce the UK’s potential GDP by about 4% in the long term, while the pandemic would cut it “by a further 2%”. “In the long term, it is the case that Brexit has a bigger impact than the pandemic,” he said.
The survey by Savanta ComRes revealed that 52% believe that Brexit has delivered little, while 36% believe that Brexit has been a success.
In the five years since the referendum in June 2016, which saw Britons vote to leave the EU by a 52% to 48% margin, public attitudes have remained rigid and in a near 50/50 split should another referendum on membership be held.
However, the findings of the survey, of over 2,000 people, suggests that a significant proportion of Leave and Conservative party supporters are deeply underwhelmed by life outside the EU.
26% of Leave voters and one in third Conservative voters say that exiting the bloc has been a failure.
One in five of the voters for Boris Johnson’s party say that a policy to re-join the EU would improve the Conservative’s chances at the next election.
It's somewhat puzzling that there are 36% "believe it a success", but I guess that's the power of pointless populism.
As far as I can tell, though, there is no commentator who supported Brexit who can point to how its been a success.
Helen Dale, for example, would rather post 500 cat photos on Twitter, or go on about identity politics, than actually address the economic failure of a position she supported.
I strongly suspect this is correct:
Experts warn the federal government has overhyped the potential for carbon farming to offset a huge volume of emissions in Australia’s push to net zero by 2050.
Australia currently emits about 490 million tonnes of carbon a year and the government’s long-term emissions reduction plan, released last week, said up to 100 million tonnes could be offset by farmers through the commercially unproven practice of soil carbon sequestration.
A man dressed in Batman’s Joker costume has been arrested for attempted murder after a knife and fire attack on a train in Tokyo, according to Japanese media, with at least 17 people reportedly injured and one in a serious condition after being stabbed.
Witnesses told national broadcaster NHK of the bloody attack which happened on Sunday, when the Japanese capital was full of Halloween revellers, many in costume.
Media reports said the perpetrator, aged in his 20s and wearing a green shirt and indigo suit, attacked people with a knife and started a fire on the train.
I wonder how security conscious Japan is going to deal with this? I mean, the sarin subway attack more or less ridded the country's cities of convenient garbage bins, I was reminded on the weekend when watching a video about the cleanliness culture in the country:
In only a couple of decades time, probably, people will not be able to tell why this is funny, but it really is if you're the right age:
Heh. Astute readers might notice that you are now bothered by the occasional ad before you read my words of wisdom.
Look, I just thought it might amuse me to see whether giving in and letting Adsense place ads on this long running blog ever scores me, I don't know - $5 in a month?
You have to reach a certain number of minimum hits, and I think it might perversely amuse me if they show how few I manage to get. I have my doubts I will ever make a cent.
But of course, I recommend all readers to enrich me and prove me wrong. [As if...:)]
