Shopping centre memories washed away

I grew up on the north side of Brisbane, and in 1967 the big local news was the opening of Toombul Shopping Centre, one of the very first large scale suburban shopping malls in Brisbane.   (I thought Westfield Indooroopilly may have opened first, but now that I check, it followed a few years after.)

A few things I remember about Toombul when it opened:   

*  the big T out the front:

* A water feature inside which was like droplets flowing slowly down multiple strands of fishing line - you don't see that style of water feature anymore, and I still don't quite know how it worked.  Can't find a photo of that...

* And in the smallish outside play area there was a metal cage rocket ship with (I think) 3 levels to climb up.  This is apparently it:

I recall a milkbar making very nice thickshakes, too.  And donuts - I would say that I probably ate my first cinnamon and sugar fried donut, made by an automated machine, from there.

My Mum was very fond of the place, and quickly abandoned the old (what the English would call) "high street" supermarket at Nundah and drove the short distance further for the convenience of "all under one roof" shopping.  She went there almost daily - a shopping habit from a time of smaller refrigerators and larger families requiring constant re-stocking.

I haven't been inside it for many, many years (in fact, I'm not sure I have ever been back since I returned to live in Brisbane in 1995, settling on a different side of the city.)   But looking at the internet, I see that over the years, it had cinemas added, and the sort of mid range eating areas you get around mall cinemas these days.   Although high end retailer David Jones had left years ago, I presume it was still the central shopping district for the surrounding suburbs.  (Westfield Chermside is bigger, and more up market, but it's still quite a drive away.)  Not sure when this photo was taken, but it gives an idea of its not inconsiderable size:

 

 

But, this is what it looked like a couple of months ago:

I hadn't even realised that this had happened and that it's been closed since then!   I mean, it always used to be prone to having a "lower car park" beside the canal flood, but I don't think that in 2011, when Brisbane had more extensive river flooding than this year, the waters made it into the shopping centre at all. 

This has only come to my attention because of the news yesterday that Mirvac, the current owner of the centre, has decided to not re-open it.  They say the damage is too extensive, and they are considering what to do with the site.  All leases have been terminated (about 140, I think I heard.)

This is pretty extensive and remarkable damage, and I would presume that something grander will  arise from the flood plain.  But it just goes to show the extent of urban damage that is going to be caused by increased flooding under climate change.

A dangerous man

Elon Musk is in the news, promoting a Trumpist wingnut meme that Biden is so mentally deficient, he doesn't know what he's doing:

Musk, who said he has voted "overwhelmingly for Democrats," slammed the Democratic Party and Biden in particular. He suggested that Biden is something of an empty suit. 

"The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter," the Tesla CEO said. "The path to power is the path to the teleprompter."

"I do feel like if somebody were to accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it's going to be like Anchorman," the CEO added, referencing the 2004 film in which Ron Burgundy reads whatever is written on the teleprompter, even if it would ruin his career.

"This administration doesn't seem to get a lot done," Musk said. "The Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done."

As with his naive view that "more free speech on Twitter will cure misinformation and propaganda" line, this just shows he is an intellectual lightweight of the dangerous rich libertarian kind.   (Ultimately, only interested in his own pet projects, and willing to aid the return of dangerously authoritarian political leadership if it will indulge him.)

Update:  About Musk and his honesty, a post at Hot Air discusses the Twitter purchase (and notes that Musk has announced he is voting for the party that's infected with Trumpist authoritarianism and denial of reality) -

Ed wrote earlier about Musk’s latest complaint, that Twitter supposedly hasn’t been forthcoming about the number of spam bots on the site. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine makes a compelling case that that’s the purest of BS, beginning with the fact that one of the reasons Musk gave when he announced his offer for Twitter was that the site supposedly needed new leadership to … clean up all the spam bots. Levine thinks he’s trying to welsh on the deal. His offer price of $54.20 per share seems too high now that various tech stocks, including Twitter and Tesla, have tanked over the past month. Musk’s alleged concern about bots reeks of a nonfinancial excuse to walk away now that he’s overextended. And there are no good remedies for Twitter if he does, Levine writes. 

 

High temperature energy storage

I reckon (just as many people say in the comments following) that this idea has a distinct air of "too good to be true" about its claimed cost and efficiency, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless:

 

 One thing I am curious about:it is very reliant on components being surrounded by argon.  How rare is argon?   [Answer - not very - "Argon is the third-most abundant gas in the Earth's atmosphere, at 0.934% (9340 ppmv)"]   I assume it's relatively cheap, then.

But what happens if the argon gas escapes and you get normal O2 around the super hot elements of this plant?   At least there's no radioactivity involved, even if there is some kind of explosion.

"Manifesto" discussed

By far the best article I have read about the "manifesto" of the Buffalo shooter is by Jeff Sharlet at Vanity Fair:

The Terrifying Familiarity of the Buffalo Shooting Suspect's Extremist Creed

Worth clearing your cookies to read it, if you have to.

Update:   worth reading the Slate article on the Tucker Carlson attempt at deflection from blame for his promulgating the same racist theory that inspired the shooter (even allowing that the shooting never cites Carlson or Fox News as a source or inspiration):

Since taking over Bill O’Reilly’s old primetime slot in 2017, Carlson has come to embrace “Trumpism without Trump,” as the Times put it. That ideology,  in Carlson’s interpretation, means a steady diet of paranoid nativism modulated by seething contempt for anyone who is not a paranoid nativist. In the world of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the terms “racist” and “racism” are almost only ever bestowed in bad faith by leftists hoping to chill public discourse and cow conservatives out of expressing and/or acting on their beliefs. And so it was both depressing and predictable that during Monday night’s show—his first show since the shootings in Buffalo—Carlson heaped scorn on those pundits and observers who had dared to suggest that the mass murderer who openly announced his own racism was, first and foremost, a racist.

In his monologue, Carlson argued that the top-line takeaway about Gendron should not be that he was racist, but that he was insane—and, implicitly, that the unsung villains of the Buffalo attack were the liberal pundits who had had the gall to connect two very obvious and proximate dots. “The truth about Payton Gendron does tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership,” said Carlson. “Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting, before all of the bodies of those 10 murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents. ‘They did it!’ they said, immediately. ‘Payton Gendron was the heir to Donald Trump,’ they told us.”

A quick Google search for the term “Payton Gendron was the heir to Donald Trump” indicates that no one other than Tucker Carlson himself is actually saying those specific words or anything particularly like it. Likewise, no one credible is saying that anyone other than Gendron is directly responsible for the attack. Carlson surely knows this, just as he surely knows that his viewers do not particularly care whether or not the things he says are fair, accurate, or logical. What his viewers want is to be made to feel like they are the true victims of every real or imaginary outrage that makes the news.

On Fox News, and especially on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the scariest attacks are always those being systemically waged by liberals on conservative values. Even in the immediate wake of a definitional racist massacre, committed by a person whose stated ideology was not entirely dissimilar from ideas that are routinely voiced on its own airwaves, Carlson could not help implying that the real victims here are, perhaps, the conservatives whose speech might be trammeled by liberals hoping to capitalize on the shooting for their own political end

“So, what is hate speech? Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate,” Carlson said on Monday night. “So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.” Implicit in this response is the argument that while Gendron’s views and Carlson’s views share a lot of overlap, it would be unfair to criticize Carlson for holding and professing those viewpoints, because, in this construction, the racist opinions and the racist violence are not directly linked. (This sidestep ignores that white supremacist ideology is inherently violent.) While the host, in part, was deflecting, the deflection was also a force of habit. The meta stories that Fox News has always liked to tell when the actual news is inconvenient or unpleasant for the right have, over time, become virtually the only stories that the network is able to tell in an era when the Republican Party is at its moral nadir.

It ends:

In a humane and functional polity, our top political leaders and opinion-makers would want to promote a responsible, fact-based discourse; would see nothing controversial in acknowledging hard truths about American history and in condemning racism in the past, present, and future; and would generally try to avoid voicing and normalizing the sorts of spurious cultural grievances that might ever motivate some crackpot to go shoot up a supermarket. This is not the polity we have today. Instead, we’ve got one where spurious cultural grievances are the only grievances worth nurturing, a world where the only people worth directly condemning are those who dare to call racism by its name. The dead, like the truth, are merely collateral damage.

Because I can....

The Right wing threat - Part 2

Oh, it seems as a subscriber to the Washington Post, I can "gift" 10 articles a month, including by linking.  I should do that more.

Here's a column about the rise of "Christian Nationalism" in Pennsylvania, and the GOP generally.  An extract:

With his motto “Free indeed!” — an excerpt from scripture that says freedom from sin is found in Jesus — Mastriano is a hero to some in this swing state who say they are fed up with church leaders as well as political parties they perceive as weak-willed, and with debates about religious liberty and the advantages of a diverse democracy. Fueled by a generation of religious leaders arguing that Christianity is persecuted in America, the new movement wants to see a more explicit, constitutionally approved dominance of “Christianity” — which to them means conservative politically, theologically and socially. They see themselves in a spiritual battle with Satan.

“The forces of darkness are hitting us really hard right now,” Mastriano told a few hundred people last month at a church parking lot rally in Pennsburg. “We’re going to bring the state back to righteousness, this is our day, our hour to take our state back and renew the blessings of America.”

His wife, Rebbie, then told the crowd that her husband’s opponents are not just challenging another candidate but God. “When you’re against God’s plan, there is nothing that will stop it, and they are very worried right now that there is nothing that’s going to stop this.”

Other speakers emphasized to the crowd, which included a man in a Minuteman costume holding a flag, that this Christian vision is what the Founders intended. “The Constitution prevents the government from imposing on the church. It doesn’t say anything about religion imposing itself on the state,” Rick Crump, a Christian branding expert and community organizer, told the rally.

This ethos is very different from earlier iterations of the Religious Right who were looking to engage with — even win at — mainstream politics, some experts say.

I think called it "Christian Nationalism" is too soft - calling it Christofascism gives a more accurate name.

The Right wing threat

Yes, I'm enjoying the threat being made that if people "punish" the LNP for never dealing with its climate change denying, culture warring, "conservative" wing (which I would still guess accounts for about 30% of the government - a large enough slab that is impossible to ignore), it will only cause the Party to go further in that direction.

That would be a good thing, according to gormless Mitchell: 

By the way, do you have to be at least 70 to write opinion at that paper?  

The threat summarised in this one:

I wonder if Barnaby is still smiling about this:

A depressing but accurate sounding take

From Twitter, obviously:

 

 

Impossible is fantastic

It's been a long time since I ate at Grill'd, but I'm pretty sure they used to sell the Beyond Burger as their imitation burger.

On the weekend, I was there again, and see they now sell the Impossible burger, which I have never tried before.  (I see from Googling that this is a relatively recent change.)

So I tried it in the basic burger version, and it was very, very good.  They've really nailed that texture element, which I used to say was the main thing that you could tell was different from real beef.   And the taste seemed indistinguishable to me.

I got home and told my fake meat skeptic son that, along with my "reverse Pol Pot" plan (de-populate regional areas so to stop the spread of Right wing ideas), my next law as Benevolent Dictator would have to be to ban beef burgers.   There simply is no need for them any more. 

Chicken nuggets will probably be next in the firing line, since I've seen a few videos of people tasting plant based ones which they say are indistinguishable.

Reeking of desperation

Gee, its hard not to interpret this as s sign that the internal polling (and focus groups) must be looking disastrous for Morrison and the LNP:

 That's on top of this:

But the Prime Minister has changed his tune as he enters the final week of the campaign, trailing in the polls and momentum swinging behind Labor.

"I know (that) Australians know I can be a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to issues," he conceded.

"As we go into this next period on the other side of the pandemic, I know things that are going to have to change with the way I do things."

A promise to change, if given the chance, "because we're moving into a different time, a time of opportunity."

In campaign terms, it is a tectonic shift.

 

I hope this causes the NFT fad to die completely

The online world, and especially the crypto community, is lambasting Madonna upon the release of her and Beeple's new collection of sexually graphic NFTs, which include explicit footage of the singer giving birth to trees, butterflies, and robotic centipedes. The video clips include close-up shots of the singer’s genitalia created using scans of Madonna’s body.

That extract is from Fortune, which at least has the good taste not to link to the site where you can watch the tree grow.  (Yes, I looked at it, and it is so, so stupid and creepy looking: a good comedian could probably do at least a 30 minute stand up set about it.)     Can't she just take up knitting, or something?

Awful people

Yes, Glenn Greenwald actually says that people who make on line death threats are not the people the target of the threat should worry about - because people who really want to kill you don't tell you ahead of time.  It's just an outlet for their anger that, if you take it away, is actually more dangerous. (!)

That Tucker Carlson actually laughs in agreement, when he is one of the biggest pretenders that "Leftists" are threatening his safety, is just ludicrous.

These are ridiculous, awful men:

 

 

Not just at my house

My wife is home with a cough and sore throat, and I have been having (admittedly mild) passing symptoms of a cold too.  Both of us did a RAT yesterday that showed a strong negative...

 

They have built their own fantasy alternative reality, and insist on living in it

 

Update:   Speaking of Republicans/Conservatives always wanting to be the victim, have a read of the ridiculous lines Ted Cruz was mouthing on Hannity, as shown in this Philip Bump column at the Washington Post.

As someone said in the comments following:

Fascists frequently paint themselves as victims.

For goodness sake, don't tell Peter Thiel...

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from young mice can improve memory function in older mice, researchers report today in Nature. A direct brain infusion of young CSF probably improves the conductivity of the neurons in ageing mice, which improves the process of making and recalling memories. The team also suggests that the improvements are largely due to a specific protein in the fluid.

“This is super exciting from the perspective of basic science, but also looking towards therapeutic applications,” says Maria Lehtinen, a neurobiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts.

That's from Nature.

And a reminder about Peter Thiel

Phil fails (to get a grip)

 

The laughable pretence that the Left is being scary by protesting like this

I'll just let a series of tweets tell the story:

 (I initially thought the tweets saying that judge's neighbours were supporting the protesters were probably too "good" to be true, but it seems right.)

Yes, I understand the point that no one in a gun happy nation welcomes a group of protesters outside their door.   Still, if there is one side that has made a deliberate point of protest with the potential of deadly violence from a gun, it's the wingnut Right, not the Left.  

Also, there is no doubt the Right is especially hypocritical in the case of the abortion issue:

That graphic doesn't tell half the story, given the amount of daily harassment abortion clinics - or even suspected abortion clinics - have endured.

And let's not forget the completely conspiracy based harassment that MAGA people have conducted against election officials:

Update:  Slate article After thirty years of turning abortion clinics into war zones, now you want "civility"?

Naive

 

Um...

 

I would assume it's because if voters don't see abortion affecting them personally, they won't change their vote regardless of what they think about its legal status.  

I would guess that it may take some high profile case (or cases) of women dying due to inability to get an abortion under new State laws to change this.    

Update:   I don't know - it's possible I could be wrong, given the enthusiasm with which some Red States are coming up with new ideas in anticipation of Roe going:

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception, sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

 

An encouraging graph

I'm starting to think that even the pro-mining voters of Queensland and NSW can't stop a Labor victory:

Speaking of the pro-miners, there was a 30 minute show on ABC News on the weekend about this - with the usual vibe of "we have to listen to the concerns of the mining towns."

Quite frankly, I don't know why we have to.   

As was shown,  people already know of small towns that have died after the local mine closed.   If you live in a town that expands under mining projects, you should accept that the mining money is not going to last forever, and that governments therefore have every reason to be careful as to how much they invest in infrastructure (hospitals, etc) to support a place that they can confidently know is going to face a dramatic population downturn as soon as its key economic reason reason for existing goes away.

And yeah, climate change means less coal mining.   Live with it.  

I'm thoroughly sick of the pussy footing around the sensitivities of people on this issue.   Sure, they can make their money while the going's good, but don't expect that it's going to last forever.  

About "primitive communism"

Quite a good essay at Aeon here about an idea popularised by Marx that has been influential.  Here's a part near the start:

...the most peculiar project born from Marx’s notes was released a year after his death. Engels titled it The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I’ll call it The Origin, for short.

The Origin is like Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens (2014) but written by a 19th-century socialist: a sweeping take on the dawn of property, patriarchy, monogamy and materialism. Like many of its contemporaries, it arranged societies on an evolutionary ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilisation. Although wrong in most ways, The Origin was described by a recent historian as ‘among the more important and politically applicable texts in the Marxist canon’, shaping everything from feminist ideology to the divorce policies of Maoist China.

Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith, proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism, circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles.

The essay goes on to talk about evidence from modern anthropology that goes against the idea.

 

Right wing paranoia watch

 In Australia:

 

Mind you, the evidence from New Catallaxy is that Australian right wingers, who are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to American conspiracy theory about Trump, still find that Aussie-style Qanon garbage is just too much.   Bosi will be lucky to receive a couple of hundred votes.

The New Catallaxy dumb ageing cranks are, however, swayed by "massive voter fraud at the Trump election" conspiracy, as evidenced by them linking to article about that D'Souza "documentary" 2,000 Mules.  

As this article explains, the movie proves precisely nothing, and it's easy to see the misinterpretation (and lack of understanding) of information that has been manipulated by conspiracy theorists who make money by promoting it to the gullible.   

It's once again, as always, a case of Trumpists seeing something they don't understand, saying "Hey, that looks suspicious to me!", and then thinking something has been proved.

 

A case of "grin and bear it", I suppose

A somewhat disturbing picture:

Yes, yes:  pragmatists will argue that this is what politicians do when campaigning - and look at the amount of sucking up Rudd did to News Corp and others to get and try and keep the job.

But, just as it did Rudd no good, what is the point of sucking up to such a has-been who surely can't keep "working" forever.  Mind you, ancient Sydney based radio personalities seem to have found some magic elixir to stay alive enough to keep using a microphone, even if they don't enjoy the best of health.   It's not just confined to Right wing figures either - look at Phillip Adams. And here's a photo of John Laws (86, but he could pass for older) from today:

Can anyone explain why such a rich man can't afford a decent haircut?

A pleasing attack on Rupert by Denis

Denis Muller really puts the boot into the News Corp abandonment of journalism in its coverage of the Australian election.   Good.  [Don't know why I thought it was Michelle Grattan - I was posting in a hurry, of course.  I was a bit surprised if it was Michelle, because I haven't been completely happy with her approach either, this election.]

Asian eating

I've been to a couple of Asian restaurants in the last few weeks, over in the heavily Chinese/Asian part of Brisbane (Sunnybank/Sunnybank Hills/Runcorn).

As I said to my family, there is something very pleasing about the liveliness of the way Asian family and friends gather in groups to eat.  I mean, eating in Western food places just does not have the same communitarian/family vibe as going to Chinese restaurant where the tables have a dozen or more people eating together, often with kids of all ages, and a busy staff running all over the place.  

And you get the impression this is a regular part of their life - good Asian restaurants in predominantly Asian parts of town are very busy.

My son thought I was ignoring things like bar-b-ques at home as a family/communitarian thing that Australians do - but really, we don't hold big ones very often, do we..

  

 

Women I thought had probably died

Over the weekend, I realised that two women who, if I had been asked, I would have guessed incorrectly had already died, came to mind:   Imelda Marcos, and Shirley MacLaine.

I was thinking of Imedla for obvious reasons (her son is probably going to be the next president of her country), but why Shirley came to mind, I don't know.

That is all.

 

Climate change in action

Yes, Andrew Sullivan has become very stupid

Spotted on Twitter:

How old is Sullivan?   58?   He's old enough to know better.

I posted before about a Noah Smith substack post in which he countered the American Right wing myth that America has become some sort of dystopian social nightmare in recent years (all caused by Democrats and "Leftism", of course),  which goes to show that a much younger man (with an eccentric fondness for rabbits) has a much better grasp on history than someone who has been making a living out of political commentary for decades.

Anyway - back to abortion in the US.   I see that Sullivan has joined in with the Creighton  "why are Leftists so scared of democracy dealing with abortion in the US?"  line.  

This is so naive, and so dismissive of the obvious problems with the current operation of democracy in the US, I almost can't be bothered dealing with it.   OK, I will, anyway:

*    of course if the courts have found a constitutional right that was left in place and re-affirmed over 50 years, and then (on what's obviously essentially religious grounds) remove it, the beneficiaries of that right are going to be unhappy;

*  of course the country has enormous problems with how democracy is implemented there - from political interference with gerrymandering, the neverending and politically motivated fiddling with electoral laws, the effort that has to be put in to even get people enrolled and out to vote, to the dubious effect of the Electoral College;   

*  of course, it was via an ethically illegitimate exercise of democracy - the Republican stacking of the Supreme Court, and Republican judges willing to lie and dissemble about the importance they would give Roe as precedent - which is leading to the overthrown of Roe.  It's already an example of the failure of democracy as implemented in the nation right now, writ large! 

*  of course there is a problem with trying to work out a democratic compromise with people who have built themselves into their own belief universe, not just on the question of "when does life begin" but on something as basic as "who won the last Presidential election".   

*  of course it's dismissive of women's interests to take the attitude "pro-abortionists will just have to wait for the inevitable Right wing over-reach" i.e. to wait for the high profile examples of women who have died - or are prosecuted for having an early abortion - rather than relying on the protection of a Court found right.

Roe may not have been perfect, but it was a compromise on an already vexed issue that could have been made to work.   And the likes of Sullivan and Creighton turn a deliberate blind eye to the rise of Christian Nationalism (read "fascism") that has captured a large chunk of the American Right that makes dealing with many issues "democratically" so extremely difficult.

Indications that the Coalition will lose

*  David Koch this morning was extremely dismissive of the answers Peter Dutton was giving regarding the Solomon Islands situation.   He did all but roll his eyes and say "yeah, you're wasting my time"; instead he just seemed to cut the live cross very abruptly.

*  Shortly after that, there was a pretty clear defence of Albanese not being able to list the 6 NDIS policy points without looking at the printed list.  

*  On Twitter, there is a ongoing strong pushback on the "gotcha" style of questions - and although Twitter does not reflect the general public (especially as one tends to follow people already on your own side of politics), I suspect that there is a broad public sentiment that the media is doing a terrible job in this campaign, including with the "gotcha" attempts.

I have trouble taking the Greens seriously

The Guardian notes:

Greens candidate for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, has taken out an advertisement on Grindr, “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people”.

“You always come first with the Greens,” one reads, and another says: “Spice up Canberra with a third”.

Speaking directly to a specific market – in this case, a younger, LGBTQ+ market – could work, according to Dr Andrew Hughes, a political marketing lecturer at the Australian National University who says for any other party it might come across as “tokenistic”.

I do find this supports my feeling that while the Greens are in the right space on the environment and climate change, and (possibly) economics, they have a sort of air of immaturity about them (when they're not being overly earnest on "culture war" issues - which I also think is a kind of immaturity) on other issues that really puts me off voting for them.    

Just an attention seeking idiot

A simple, and accurate, proposition

 There has never been a worse Prime Minister for the way he has gone about managing his Ministry.

Impressive engineering

Like most of the world, I expect, I hadn't heard of the major airport runway that is (part) built on massive concrete pylons:

Some attitudes needing reform

In a BBC report:

Last month, police in India arrested a 46-year-old man who allegedly murdered his wife because his breakfast had too much salt.

"Nikesh Ghag, a bank clerk in Thane, near the western city of Mumbai, strangled his 40-year-old wife in a fit of rage because the sabudana [tapioca pearls or sago] khichdi she served was very salty," police official Milind Desai told the BBC.

The couple's 12-year-old son, who witnessed the crime, told the police that his father followed his mother, Nirmala, into the bedroom complaining about salt and started beating her.

"He kept crying and begging his father to stop," Mr Desai said, "but the accused kept hitting his wife and strangled her with a rope."

Some other examples of death for food related matters are listed:

The murder of a woman by her husband, triggered by a quarrel over food, routinely makes headlines in India.

Take some recent cases:

• In January, a man was arrested in Noida, a suburb of the capital Delhi, for allegedly murdering his wife for refusing to serve him dinner.
• In June 2021, a man was arrested in Uttar Pradesh after he allegedly killed his wife for not serving salad with his meal.
• Four months later, a man in Bangalore allegedly beat his wife to death for not cooking fried chicken properly.
• In 2017, BBC reported on a case where a 60-year-old man had fatally shot his wife for serving his dinner late.

But get this:

More than 40% of women and 38% of men told government surveyors that it was ok for a man to beat his wife if she disrespected her in-laws, neglected her home or children, went out without telling him, refused sex or didn't cook properly. In four states, more than 77% women justified wife beating.

In most states more women than men justified wife beating and in every single state - the only exception being Karnataka - more women than men thought it was okay for a man to beat his wife if she didn't cook properly.

The numbers have gone down from the previous survey five years ago - when 52% women and 42% men justified wife beating - but the attitudes haven't changed, says Amita Pitre, who leads Oxfam India's gender justice programme.

 

 

And yet most of the audience probably believes this is correct

The actual number, available at an instant, has dropped to around 800,000 a year.   (Even less on CDC numbers.)

Update:  an important reminder about Roe, and how Right wing politics has changed:

Roe vs. Wade was decided with a 7-2 vote, and not along partisan lines. Those who ruled in favor were as follows, with the president who nominated them and the party of that president indicated in parentheses:

• Harry Blackmun (Nixon, R)
• Lewis Powell (Nixon, R)
• Warren Burger (Nixon, R)
• William Brennan (Eisenhower, R)
• Potter Stewart (Eisenhower, R)
• Thurgood Marshall (LBJ, D)
• William Douglas (FDR, D)

Those who dissented on Roe vs. Wade:

• Byron White (Kennedy, D)
• William Rehnquist (Nixon, R)

 

Lying to get a job

With the news that it appears the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe v Wade, it is of course worth remembering that members of said majority were quite willing to lie about their views:

 

As someone else pointed out in the thread following:

 And:

Update:   Gee, my 2019 post arguing that laws on abortion should be about compromise (of the type set up in Roe) still reads fine to me.  

Fickle market

According to Financial Times:

Shares in the Google parent fell more than 5 per cent in after-hours trading after Alphabet reported a 23 per cent increase in revenue in the three months to the end of March, to $68bn, slightly below forecasts for $68.1bn. A year prior, revenues had increased 34 per cent. Net profits fell 8 per cent from a year ago to $16.4bn.

Shocking but true

I increasingly have the desire for politicians on the Left to tell people that they are simply being stupid if they think the energy status quo is not going to have to change quickly, even if there is a cost.  

In short, people need to be told there has to be temporary sacrifice.

Do we really want such long range flights?

Basically, there's a part of my mind that always whispers to me that it's more dangerous to be flying at high altitude that it is to be going up or down from that altitude (with the exception of flying into storms, of course).   I would guess that this is very much not true, with most accidents happening at below cruising height.   I'll check later.

But still - I find it difficult to sleep on planes at all, and with seats as close as they are, it's hard to get comfortable.   A flight of about 8 to 9 hours is fine, but more than double that?

So, overall, I would prefer to have one landing on the way to either London or New York, should be I be going to either.   Yes, any more than one would be a pain, but one landing seems "right".

I wonder how many people feel the same way and won't be rushing to take Qantas's long haul flights direct to those cities.

An interesting problem

It's well worth reading this thread:

A crisis in fertilizer chains of supply might finally get some serious reconsideration going for how nations deal with their sewerage, given that scientists have been saying for ages that it's being wasted.  [OK, yes I know, a lot of solids have been put to use as fertilizer in Western countries, but it's been controversial, and I think the separate management of urine has been something proposed and trialled on a small scale very often, but never widely implemented anywhere.]

I expect they'll soon be selling tickets for the "Russia/Putin Friendship Tour 2022 - with your host dover beach"

I don't like linking to the New Catallaxy site, but just have a read of this post (and the comments following) to luxuriate in the "Conservatives for poor, misunderstood Russia" vibe oozing from the site.  (I use "luxuriate" ironically, of course.)

I am also amused how over recent weeks the unctuous-for-Russia owner of the site, dover beach, now  considers himself a military analysis expert.  

As Noah Smith wrote in his post Putin's War and the Chaos Climbers, about how the worst of the Left and Right have united in Putin/Russia sympathy (oh no, they'll say, of course Putin has done the wrong thing - it's just that it's completely understandable why he did it and Ukraine and the West were asking for it), there are a few possible explanations to consider:  

a.    he (Putin) just appeals to authoritarians (and it is clear the American Right has moved to embracing authoritarian to get their way - look at the gerrymandering and enforcement of religious views on abortion by stacking the Supreme Court);  

b.   But there is also this:

Another, more subtle theory — which I’ve advanced myself — is something I call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S. and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe. And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the Russian government goes out of its way to encourage such perceptions. To all of these groups, the distant sphinx of the Kremlin might have seemed like a power capable of offering support while representing no threat.  

c.     Noah then expands upon any way of looking at it:

The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.

This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.

It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.

Yup.

So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss. This doesn’t mean they’re ready to cheer for Putin openly, or even to hope for his victory — the blazing moral clarity of the situation is still too strong for that. But it does mean that they feel the need to muddy the waters, to curb U.S. support for Ukraine and make the establishment look irresolute, and to prepare narratives that would allow them to take advantage of a Putin victory.

What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization.

It's also the most unappetizing chicken korma I have ever seen...

Someone tweeted that a bit of the chicken looked undercooked. I don't know about that, but it still looks crook. 

Google is guiding me

Well, what a coincidence.  Just when I start talking about Pure Land Buddhism and how it sounds (more or less) consistent with a Many Worlds multiverse (inspired, as I was, by Everything Everywhere All at Once), up on my Youtube recommendations pops up this: 

 

Just in case you can't see it - the title is "Pure Land Buddhism: The Mahayana Multiverse".  And it was only published this week, too.

In fact, the whole channel that this comes from (Religion for Breakfast) is new to me - but it's very good.  The guy who runs it is has a doctorate (I presume in religious studies) and is currently in (of all places) Cairo,  but he's very listen-able and crams a lot of information in a short space of time.  I recommend, for example, his video on the development of the idea of the Anti-Christ.  

Thank you, almighty Google for guiding me to it.

Anyway, I mentioned this "co-incidence" to my son, and mused again (I'm sure I've raised it before) the  theory that Google is already so all knowing, and will continue to grow in knowledge, that it is likely the beginning of the God that will be fully formed by the end of the Universe (the Tipler-ian God).  In fact, it might already be alive and at least God-like:  how would we know?      

He responded with something like "Geez, it's only cookies".

Oh yea of little Google faith.

Anyway, I also asked him if there already was a Church of Google - something I've probably Googled before, but I don't recall the results.

So I checked again today, and note that a site now called The Reformed Church of Google has been around for a long time, although it's just an inactive re-creation of a parody religion "Googlism" set up in 2009 by one Matt MacPherson but which he let lapse in 2016.    Most of the content is pretty dated, but still gives me some amusement:

Oh, and someone made a short Youtube about it in 2016.  (It's OK, although it's more like an art project.)

Anyhow, while we are on the topic of religion, another Youtube recommendation which amused me somewhat is this one, about the once (and by once, I mean around the time of Buddha) relatively popular (although it's hard to see why) Indian sect known as the Ajivikas:

 

Here's a brief description of the key part of their philosophy: 

The problems of time and change was one of the main interests of the Ajivikas. Their views on this subject may have been influenced by Vedic sources, such as the hymn to Kala (Time) in Atharvaveda.^[48] Both Jaina and Buddhist texts state that Ājīvikas believed in absolute determinism, absence of free will, and called this niyati.^[8][12] Everything in human life and universe, according to Ajivikas, was pre-determined, operating out of cosmic principles, and true choice did not exist.^[12][49] The Buddhist and Jaina sources describe them as strict fatalists, who did not believe in karma.^[8][16] The Ajivikas philosophy held that all things are preordained, and therefore religious or ethical practice has no effect on one's future, and people do things because cosmic principles make them do so, and all that will happen or will exist in future is already predetermined to be that way. No human effort could change this niyati and the karma ethical theory was a fallacy.^[16] James Lochtefeld summarizes this aspect of Ajivika belief as, "life and the universe is like a ball of pre-wrapped up string, which unrolls until it was done and then goes no further".^[8]

Riepe states that the Ajivikas belief in predeterminism does not mean that they were pessimistic. Rather, just like Calvinists belief in predeterminism in Europe, the Ajivikas were optimists.^[50] The Ajivikas simply did not believe in the moral force of action, or in merits or demerits, or in after-life to be affected because of what one does or does not do. Actions had immediate effects in one's current life but without any moral traces, and both the action and the effect was predetermined, according to the Ajivikas.^[50]

Hmmm.  Superdeterminism, anyone?

How this extreme fatalism ties in with their extreme asceticism is hard to understand:

Like Jains, Ajiviks wore no clothes, and lived as ascetic monks in organised groups. They were known to practice extremely severe austerities, such as lying on nails, going through fire, exposing themselves to extreme weather, and even spending time in large earthen pots for penance! There was no caste discrimination and people from all walks of life joined them.

Another Youtube video did explain, though, that they still believed that there was a soul that had to sort of evolve upwards before being released from the life and death cycle.  So I guess that has something to do with their idea that there was a point in extreme asceticism?

Or maybe, just maybe, it's a religion that disappeared because as a philosophy it made no sense?

Exactly

Not just me

It's nice to read online people who have had the same type of feelings at times.  (Although, I do wonder, can you divide people into two groups - those who sometimes feel on the edge of epiphany, and those who have never had that feeling?  Because I feel pretty sure that there are some who just don't think enough to be epiphany adjacent.  Or am I being elitist?)