Sometimes I wonder if dedication to hyperbole causes permanent brain damage

 

Quite a few people make the following point in response: 

Update:  oh look, gullible Adam is impressed too:

Yet, as calmer people are pointing out (my God, this comes from one of the new Catallaxy blogs):

And yeah, the link is to a Nature story from Feb 21 pointing out that:

As countries roll out vaccines that prevent COVID-19, studies are under way to determine whether shots can also stop people from getting infected and passing on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Vaccines that prevent transmission could help to bring the pandemic under control if they are given to enough people.

Preliminary analyses suggest that at least some vaccines are likely to have a transmission-blocking effect. But confirming that effect — and how strong it will be — is tricky because a drop in infections in a given region might be explained by other factors, such as lockdowns and behaviour changes. Not only that, the virus can spread from asymptomatic carriers, which makes it hard to detect those infections.

As some comments note in the thread after Adam's tweet:

Noah tries to counter

Right wingnuts are 100% committed to a belief that Black Lives Matter led to several cities being laid to waste, and that Democrats endorsed the destruction.  As with the "Obama was a disastrous President" narrative, it's difficult to not see underlying racism in the fanciful exaggeration they have convinced themselves is obviously true.  Anyway, I agree with Noah, as I do on many things:

So, how bad was that dinosaur killing asteroid?

Probably even worse than you imagined, according to a pair of stories on Science Daily.  First, wouldn't it shake your confidence to feel the planet quaking for weeks after the impact?:

66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer asteroid hit Earth, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs. New evidence suggests that the Chicxulub impact also triggered an earthquake so massive that it shook the planet for weeks to months after the collision. The amount of energy released in this "mega-earthquake" is estimated at 1023 joules, which is about 50,000 times more energy than was released in the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra earthquake in 2004. ...

The rocks exposed on the coast of Gorgonilla Island tell a story from the bottom of the ocean -- roughly 2 km down. There, about 3,000-km southwest from the site of the impact, sand, mud, and small ocean creatures were accumulating on the ocean floor when the asteroid hit. Layers of mud and sandstone as far as 10-15 meters below the sea floor experienced soft-sediment deformation that is preserved in the outcrops today, which Bermúdez attributes to the shaking from the impact. Faults and deformation due to shaking continue up through the spherule-rich layer that was deposited post-impact, indicating that the shaking must have continued for the weeks and months it took for these finer-grained deposits to reach the ocean floor. Just above those spherule deposits, preserved fern spores signal the first recovery of plant-life after the impact.

As for the tsunami, another story notes:

"This tsunami was strong enough to disturb and erode sediments in ocean basins halfway around the globe, leaving either a gap in the sedimentary records or a jumble of older sediments," said lead author Molly Range, who conducted the modeling study for a master's thesis under U-M physical oceanographer and study co-author Brian Arbic and U-M paleoceanographer and study co-author Ted Moore....

Two and a half minutes after the asteroid struck, a curtain of ejected material pushed a wall of water outward from the impact site, briefly forming a 4.5-kilometer-high (2.8-mile-high) wave that subsided as the ejecta fell back to Earth.

Ten minutes after the projectile hit the Yucatan, and 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the point of impact, a 1.5-kilometer-high (0.93-mile-high) tsunami wave -- ring-shaped and outward-propagating -- began sweeping across the ocean in all directions, according to the U-M simulation...

According to the team's simulation:

• One hour after impact, the tsunami had spread outside the Gulf of Mexico and into the North Atlantic.

• Four hours after impact, the waves had passed through the Central American Seaway and into the Pacific.

• Twenty-four hours after impact, the waves had crossed most of the Pacific from the east and most of the Atlantic from the west and entered the Indian Ocean from both sides.

• By 48 hours after impact, significant tsunami waves had reached most of the world's coastlines.

For the current study, the researchers did not attempt to estimate the extent of coastal flooding caused by the tsunami.

However, their models indicate that open-ocean wave heights in the Gulf of Mexico would have exceeded 100 meters (328 feet), with wave heights of more than 10 meters (32.8 feet) as the tsunami approached North Atlantic coastal regions and parts of South America's Pacific coast.

 

 

What a nightmare for the parents

Noted in The Guardian:

A nurse murdered seven babies and attempted to kill 10 others by poisoning them on a hospital neonatal unit where she was a “constant malevolent presence”, a court has heard.

Lucy Letby, 32, fatally injected newborns with insulin, air or milk during night shifts when she knew their parents would not be present, a jury was told.

One of the babies was just 24 hours old when Letby allegedly injected him with air, killing him just 90 minutes after she came on shift. The nurse tried to kill his twin sister the next day, it is alleged.

The court was told that Letby, who was trained to care for the most seriously ill babies, developed an “unusual interest” in the parents of some of her 17 alleged victims and in some cases tracked them on Facebook.

Sounds like something you would read in fiction, but I don't want to see Netflix making money off it either.   

About that Florida advice

As I expected, plenty of valid sounding criticism is coming out about that Florida Surgeon General's "study" about mRNA vaccines and cardiac arrest.

Here's one article.  Here's another.  I didn't realise the Surgeon General was always a contrarian on virtually everything to do with COVID.   

But as I said before - in the Right wing information bubble world, the damage is already done.

AI as your friend, and doctor?

Odd, but I'll give it a go:

A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. Registered users type in messages and get responses. They can also create a chatbot of their own on Character.ai, which has logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing.

“There were reports of possible voter fraud and I wanted an investigation,” the Trump bot said. Character.ai features a disclaimer at the top of every chat: “Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!”

Character.ai’s willingness to let users experiment with the latest in language AI is a departure from Big Tech — and that’s by design. The start-up’s two founders helped create Google’s artificial intelligence project LaMDA, which Google keeps closely guarded while it develops safeguards against social risks.

In interviews with The Washington Post, Character.ai’s co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas said they left Google to get this technology into as many hands as possible. They opened Character.ai’s beta version to the public in September for anyone to try.

“I thought, ‘Let’s build a product now that can that can help millions and billions of people,’” Shazeer said. “Especially in the age of covid, there are just millions of people who are feeling isolated or lonely or need someone to talk to.”

In other AI news, which I'm not sure I like the sounds of (a pun there, actually): 

The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.

Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida's Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.

"We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?" Bensoussan says. "And that's where we got all our information."

Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson's disease. Slurring is a sign of a stroke. Scientists could even diagnose depression or cancer. The team will start by collecting the voices of people with conditions in five areas: neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays.

I wonder how far this will go in future - visit the AI doctor online with a frog in the throat, and end up admitted to a psych ward?

A deeply unimpressive Metaverse

A reporter for the New York Times has an article up "This is Life in the Metaverse", and boy, it may not have been the intention of the writer, but for me, it only helps confirm all of the scepticism about what a bad idea it is.  I will gift the article so you can read in full.

The culinary workplace - does it have to be that way?

Because it has been getting favourable comments on Twitter, I decided to watch the first episode of The Bear, which is on Disney Plus in Australia.

It's a comedy drama (with, it would seem, a heavier concentration on the drama) about a talented chef who comes home to Chicago to try to keep his recently deceased brother's "Italian beef restaurant" going.

I guess I expected all of the Kitchen Confidential-esque, working-as-a-chef-in-a-restaurant-is-high-energy, high-conflict, sometimes-high-reward, stuff.   (Ratatouille and Gordon Ramsay's shows contributed to our understanding of what type of people it attracts, too!)   But my overall feeling remains:

*  gee, there seemed to be an awful lot of people needed to run that place with the limited menu options.  That felt a bit unrealistic.  Apparently, though, the show gets reasonable marks for accuracy from people in the business.

*  Given that we have had a couple of decades of public exposure to what it's like to work in these businesses, is it is really, absolutely, unavoidable that they have to be like that?   I mean, can a restaurant be started on the basis that respect and workplace harmony are prioritised, and can it possibly survive?  

Ronny Jackson was the warning

Ronny Jackson was the warning - any doctor who goes all in for support for Trumpy politicians has dubious judgement in everything, including medicine.

Hence, my initial reaction when reading that the Florida Surgeon General was promoting an unpublished analysis about the increased risk of cardiac arrest in young men from mRNA vaccines was that this was likely to be from a badly flawed analysis.  (The warning in his Tweet "FL will not be silent on the truth" pretty much seals it, that he's acting from biased political motives.)

Early commentary indicates my reaction was probably right - although we all await more detailed analysis.   But the (likely) damage has already been done in the politicised information bubble the Right has built for itself. 

No, they don't

 

Tablet time

After many years with only an old mid sized Samsung tablet, which still has a great looking screen, but a battery that will only last a couple of hours and then take 8 hours to charge again, I went and bought my self a new, larger tablet - a relatively cheap one from Lenovo.

I have to say, the way Lenovo names its models is pretty confusing - but a 10.6 inch model with 128Gb (and room for expansion) for $327 seems pretty good value.   It makes reading books much, much easier than trying to do so on phone.  In fact, I have a theory that it will turn out conclusively in the near future that the world overall has become 20% dumber due to the atomisation of information necessary to fit it on a phone screen. 

It's still a bit tricky doing blog posts, though.  Hence my last post with the dubious quality of the resized screenshot.  I'm working on it, though...

Wikipedia and physics

A twenty minute fire in the kitchen caused by a lightning strike is nothing, according to anti-Biden wingnuts

I still get absolutely dismayed at the way wingnuts self-gaslight via social media about Biden and dementia.   (And for the record, no, I don't think it was hugely embarrassing [or, put it this way - that big a deal] that he called on someone who had  died a couple of months before the event - he dwelt on it for all of about 8 seconds and moved on, possibly even realising his mistake at the time - and as was noted on Planet America, it is also possible that the name was accidentally left on the teleprompt.)

The guy has made verbal faux pas for decades - there are compilations on the net from well before the election.    It infuriates me that clips of minor matters, such as exiting a stage in the wrong direction, is snipped out and shown as if it is proof that he doesn't know where he is, or some such BS.   It's really malicious treatment of a public figure, feeding a gullible audience, if you ask me.   

Of course he's not as sharp as a younger man, but if you actually watch his performance in delivering speeches and off the cuff commentary, there is no way an honest person can say that any person well into a dementia decline could perform those tasks as competently as he does.   

Stop believing 10 second clips and watch his lengthy performances, morons.    

And on the question of honesty, look at this hyperbole:

So thousands of wingnuts stop there and believe whoever this Schwartz is.

You have to go to the thread to read:

 

As others point out:

So people are calling him a massive liar because a fire that (apparently) took 20 mins to control in the kitchen counts as a "small" fire, and it's wrong to call that "an awful lot" of his home.

I mean, this is just ridiculous criticism or what could, at the most, be described as mild exaggeration made in an attempt at showing empathy.

And nothing like the chronic "living in a fantasy world" type of lie that comes out of the mouth of Trump as an absolute matter of routine. 

I wish there were more people speaking aggressively about the maliciousness and gullible world bubble the Right has built for themselves, with the help of social media and money grubs like Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. 

PS:   none of this means that I necessarily think Biden should run again.  In fact I think he shouldn't, and yes, because of his age;  but he needs to be replaced by someone sharper than his VP.

A shocking week for senseless and unexpected death

First, it was the Indonesia soccer stadium deaths, and now the Thailand preschool attack, the details of which are about as bad as they could possibly be:

The attacker, a former police officer, opened fire as children were sleeping at the centre in Na Klang district in Nong Bua Lamphu province at about noon on Thursday, police and witnesses said.

Police said most of the children killed at the centre were stabbed to death. As he left the nursery the attacker drove his car towards and shot at bystanders then returned home, where he shot himself, his wife and his child.

Police identified the attacker as Panya Khamrab, a 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel who had been dismissed from the force last year for methamphetamine possession and had appeared in court earlier on Thursday on a drugs charge.

It's so easy it is to imagine the shock of being personally affected by that....

 

I'm willing to try this...

Here's the recipe, but it's very simple.

Curious ancient practices

From Smithsonian magazine:

Thousands of years ago—and thousands of miles apart—the people of what are now Britain and Japan both created elaborate stone circles set up to interact with the solstices and to house remains of the dead.

A new exhibition at Stonehenge highlights compelling parallels between English and Japanese cultures during the Neolithic and Jōmon eras. Though they never interacted with each other, the two cultures seemed to have shared a lot in common—from stone circles to elaborate pottery to rituals connected to the sun.

“Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan,” which opens today, explores those similarities through some 80 items from the Japanese Jōmon period, many of which have never before been on view outside Japan.

“To understand the significance of Stonehenge, we have to understand what is happening elsewhere in the world in prehistory,” Susan Greaney, a historian with English Heritage and a curator for the exhibition, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. “Although there was obviously no contact between Japan and Britain at this time, there are surprising parallels.”

Consider, for example, the Japanese stone circles from Ōyu and Isedotai in northern Japan. While not the imposing monoliths of Stonehenge, the two circles, made of thousands of smooth river stones, line up with the sun during the summer and winter solstices, and they were both used in burial rites. And for both monuments, collecting materials and completing construction would have taken enormous community effort.

 Here's a photo of one of the Japanese circles from one of the above links:

Is tiny nuclear really much use?

This may be mainly all PR to help university funding, but there's a story on phys.org about a new-ish reactor design (which doesn't really explain if one has been built):

BYU professor and nuclear engineering expert Matthew Memmott and his colleagues have designed a new system for safer nuclear energy production: a molten salt micro-nuclear reactor that may solve all of these problems and more.

The standard nuclear reactor used in America is the Light-Water Reactor. Uranium atoms are split to create energy, and the products left over will radiate massive amounts of heat. They are kept in solid fuel rods, and water is run through the rods to keep everything cool enough. If there is not enough of a flow of cooling water, the rods can overheat, and the entire facility is at risk for a nuclear meltdown. Memmott's solution is to store these radioactive elements in molten salt instead of fuel rods...

In Memmott's new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature—550°C—and it doesn't take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn't remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What's more, many of these products are valuable, and can be can be removed from the salt and sold.

But how small is this design?   Pretty small:

A typical nuclear power plant is built with a little over one square mile to operate to reduce radiation risk, with the core itself being 30 ft x 30 ft. Memmott's molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places. 

 I have my doubts this is useful.  Maybe good for somewhere like Antarctica, though?

Freshwater crabs considered

 CGTN shows how a lake in China is famous for its (freshwater) hairy crabs:

and I thought -that seems a useful thing to have in your country, why don't we have them here (in Australia)?

But it turns out there is an Australian inland freshwater crab - but it's small, only growing its carapace to about 5 cm, apparently.

The Chinese crab has in fact spread around the world:

This crab originates from the temperate waters between East Russia (Vladivostok) to South China, the Korean Peninsular, Japan and Taiwan Province of China. It has been transferred, probably in ballast waters to northern Europe in 1900s and appears to have established self-reproducing populations there. It has more recently been found in North America and Hawaii.

 Learning something new every day...

Quick takes

*  Elon Musk might be buying Twitter after all?   I hope someone is working on an alternative, because I can see a lot of people happy to leave it if Trump and endless lies and disinformation resumes on the platform.

*  Really, I find it puzzling that being CEO of an aussie rules football club is such a newsworthy thing.  

*  It certainly seems true that we are in for yet another cool, very wet, summer.   

*  This is a pretty boring post. 

*  Update:  famously great Christian husband defends another famously great Christian husband -

It's clear, by the way, that this is end result of - what? - 40 decades of increasing use of demagoguery (kicked off by Gingrich himself) as the Republicans' prime political tactic:  if you keep telling your followers that anyone to the Left of you is 100% evil and wants to destroy everything good, absolutely any loser with terrible personal morals can represent you by just saying "but I'm not evil like them." 

More mystery needed

About a week ago, Noah Smith tweeted a little nostalgically about this:

...and I am also sympathetic to the view that it's a little sad that there seems less mystery around lately.  Yes, I know, so much of it was silly, but as someone said in response, it was a bit of an early education in empiricism to read debunking books on the likes of von Daniken and the Bermuda Triangle.   With UFOs, though, I was never satisfied with the debunking efforts, and while Hynek may have been gullible about some cases, I always found his books pretty persuasive.   

On the definite downside in the current mystery Noosphere:  it seems that terrible, cheap and trashy American "ghost hunter" reality shows have really killed the credibility of ghosts and haunting stories.   (I know these shows have never been really popular in Australia, but I see bits of them on Youtube and elsewhere, and they are awful.  American cable TV still seems to have a lot more space to fill up with trash than we do in Australia.)  Same for bad shows about celebrity mediums.   I haven't seen a medium make a convincing looking "hit" with a reader for a long, long time.

And it's not just TV or Youtube:  it seems that I haven't even read a good first hand account of any ghost or mediumship story in an online newspaper or magazine for a very long time.   

This is a real pity.   I love a good story of that kind from a person who found it unexpected and hard to explain.   But you just get the feeling lately that the souls of the departed may be too depressed by all the fakery going on that they can't bother appearing to anyone anymore!

On the upside, of course, we have seen a real and major revival of UFO speculation, with the US Navy story which, I admit, is very cool and interesting.   Of course, drones and Starlink launches are making for many, many fake events, but there still is enough real mystery about the military related events to keep a good level of excitement there.  And revisiting some older cases is still pretty interesting.

I also somehow recently again came across this story from 2018, which I don't think I have mentioned before.   It's hard to believe, but it is seems it is still possible for a large white jet aircraft to be flying over California and Oregon and to have no one know where it ended up.  (It was tracked on radar, had no transponder working, was sighted by commercial pilots at some distance, and F 15s were sent up to try to identify it.)   I mean, really:  how is that possible that they lost track of it.  But it appears they did.  

One other persistent mystery, although again it is more of a technological than a paranormal one, is the Havana syndrome.  I don't think I have ever gotten around to commenting on it, but I saw a clip this weekend of a doctor explaining what happened to him when he visited Cuba, and again it's a case of a first hand account by a credible sounding person being surprisingly convincing.   I am inclined to think that there is a real phenomena there. 

Update:   I suppose the better heading for the post might be "Paranormal mystery down; technological mystery up".  

While I do like technological mystery, paranormal ones have always struck me as having potential to be truly revolutionary.   I mean, convincing proof of an afterlife, or even ESP, would blow the current state of scientific materialism out of the water; proof of observation by alien UFOs - not at all, really.  Hence I am a little disappointed if evidence for paranormal events seems to be fading. 

I think I would pass on being the first to try this...

Odd headline from Science magazine:

RoboCap: Robotic mucus-clearing capsule for enhanced drug delivery in the gastrointestinal tract 

The story:

Here, we describe the development of the RoboCap, an orally ingestible robotic drug delivery device that locally clears the mucus layer, enhances mixing, and topically deposits the drug payload to enhance drug absorption (Movie 1). The RoboCap’s rotational and churning movements are generated by surface features designed to interact directly with small intestinal (SI) plicae, villi, and mucus. We hypothesize that drug bioavailability will be significantly greater when delivered with the RoboCap compared with standard oral delivery. We test the efficacy of the RoboCap in delivering two model peptide drugs, vancomycin and insulin, through Franz cell diffusion and in vivo testing in swine.

There is a video embedded in the article which I can't copy, but the commentary to it sometimes strikes me as inadvertently funny.

Oh, another unhappy poet

Put this in the drawer marked "Reasons all parents of teenagers should be happy if their child says they don't have any interest in writing poetry":  a review of a new book about TS Eliot enlightens me about his unhappy personal life.   Sure, sure, there must have been happy famous poets - just that they seem to be in the serious minority:

In 1915 Eliot proposed to Vivien Haigh-Wood, partly out of desire for sexual experience, which he was too shy to seek in other ways. Following “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender/Which an age of prudence can never retract,” the young poet found himself shackled to a needy, fragile woman he grew to dislike, then pity and finally loathe. He would turn for love and sympathetic understanding elsewhere....

This second half of Crawford’s biography begins with a brief account of Eliot’s short-lived, unsatisfactory affair with the rich, notoriously promiscuous Nancy Cunard. Soon, though, this unhappy husband found his thoughts returning to the girl he had left behind in America, Emily Hale. In due course, Eliot and Hale embarked on an intense correspondence that would continue for more than 20 years. Any guise of mere friendship was soon abandoned: “I would literally give my eyesight to be able to marry you. … If I ever am free I shall ask you to marry me.”  ...

His eventual commitment to an exceptionally austere Anglicanism revolutionized Eliot’s later life but ruined Hale’s. The bonds of matrimony, he repeatedly told her, were sacrosanct. There could be no divorce. Nonetheless, the two would meet occasionally during the interwar years — both in America and in England — for what seem to have been afternoons of decorous yearning. Hale would long cherish the remembrance of their few kisses ...

Both Vivien and Eliot almost continually suffered from an array of illnesses. Hers included intestinal inflammation, shortness of breath, influenza, shingles, emotional and mental instability, and drastic weight loss — at one point she was down to 80 pounds — while Eliot ran his wife a respectable second with recurrent colds, bronchial trouble, seriously decayed teeth (five were extracted on one dental visit), a hernia that required a truss, surgery on his finger and frequent periods of nervous exhaustion. He also drank impressively, as many as five gin drinks during dinner...

Crawford estimates that in 1925 alone the couple spent a third of their income on doctors, medicines, and stays in hospitals or sanatoria. During the ’30s, Eliot arranged for the increasingly troubled Vivien — at one point he wondered if she might be suffering from “demonic possession” — to be cared for in various rest homes, and in 1938 he signed papers committing her to an asylum. With typical Prufrockian cowardice, he did this by letter while out of the country. He never saw her again....

Then, get this!:

...in 1947, Vivien died. At this point the now-free Eliot suddenly recoiled at the prospect of actually marrying Hale, to whom he wrote, “I cannot, cannot, start life again, and adapt myself (which means not merely one moment, but a perpetual adaptation for the rest of life) to any other person.” Hale was crushed but hoped he’d change his mind.

He went on, at age 68, to do this, after lodging with " wheelchair-bound bibliophile John Hayward."

Eliot’s bedroom was flamboyantly ascetic: a single bed, an ebony crucifix, a bare lightbulb hanging from a chain. Very early one morning in 1957, though, Hayward’s “lodger” announced — without warning, through a letter — that he wouldn’t be back the next day or, indeed, ever. The 68-year-old Eliot had proposed — via letter! — to his adoring 30-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher, and been accepted. In due course, Hale received her own letter, disclosing this ultimate betrayal. For the final years of his life Eliot was soppily besotted with his new young bride, and the two grew inseparable. He died in 1965 at age 76.

Sounds quite the cad.

How's the current Russian holy war going

Of course, it was utterly predictable:   Putin would have know that if he brought transexualism into his ranty "Russia will rise again against the evil and corrupt West" speech justifying the invasion of Ukraine, American and Australian Right wing culture war reactionaries would be impressed with that, and ignore broader matters like, you know, how wars of conquest should no longer be a thing.  And sure enough, the disgusting and madly ignorant (of anything other than arcane Catholic history) Currency Lad could not resist but repeat Putin's words with approval.

He might, if he had any credibility as a Catholic at all, question the issue of how a key figure of the Russian Orthodox Church has tried to turn it into a Holy War - promising that soldiers killed on the battlefield of Russian expansionism would automatically have their sins forgiven.    And I see there was a rally in Moscow (with a bussed in crowd, but still) which featured this rally cry:

I would have thought a Catholic should have concerns about this, but you know, as long as Putin joins in with the moral panic about transgenderism*, all is forgiven.  Or at least, not worth making a song and dance about.

 

[* an issue on which it is possible to believe - as I do - that there are nutty and unreasonable pro-trans activists, and conservatives who have taken up the issue in true "moral panic" style that sounds at times as if they think kids are at risk of being put under the knife even without consent.]

Confucius is (literally) big in China, again

As the dear reader may know, I like both big statues and watching clips from CGTN to keep on top of what is "in" with the  Chinese government at the moment, hence this recent clip of a Confucian centre at his birthplace caught my eye:

 

(And, seriously, once again I find myself wishing China had a more "normal" regime to which Westerners could feel safe visiting, because it's clear there are many, many awesome looking places to see. That library looks fantastic, although I doubt it caters to English readers.)

I thought that this video might have appeared because the statue, or accompanying centre, was new; but I see online that the statue (if not the whole centre) was opened 6 years ago.  I must have missed that.

CGTN has lots of videos up endorsing the philosopher, including a stream of the recent, annual, "Grand Ceremony of Worship of Confucius" featuring lots of costume and dance and a precision that makes you worry for the wellbeing of anyone who might make a mistake. 

Anyhow, this got me thinking that I was pretty sure Confucianism was on the outer for quite a while in China, but clearly the Party has revised its view of him.  I could watch a CGTN produced forum  discussion about this*, but instead, I went to extremely erudite Religion for Breakfast channel to watch his video the Confucian revival:

 Well worth watching, as is virtually  every single video he puts out.  My only complaint is that sometimes I think his delivery is so rapid and dense, I can tell I won't remember much of it, as it is too fast to process.

 

*  I haven't watched much of it, except I am amused to see it does say the worship ceremony has it origins from the 1980's! 

Their conspiracy paranoia makes them a danger

Update:  Sharlet later deleted the Tweet, explaining that he was being targeted by morons saying "if you're against capital punishment for pedophiles, you must be one."  

Makes the wingnut theory look rather improbable

Noted on Axios:

NATO formally labeled the mysterious leaks in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines detected earlier this week the result of deliberate sabotage and warned that such attacks would be met with a collective response from the organization.

Driving the news: "All currently available information indicates that this is the result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage," the North Atlantic Council said in a press release Thursday.

    "Any deliberate attack against Allies’ critical infrastructure would be met with a united and determined response," the statement added.

    "NATO is committed to deter and defend against hybrid attacks," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg tweeted, noting that the "sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines is of deep concern."

Would be most surprising if one or more members of the organisation actually hasn't admitted to the others that they did it.  

The most incredible storm surge video you are likely to see

This is really remarkable stuff:

 

Friday nudism update

The history of nudism as a social movement of the 20th century (and its relative decline even though one might have expected otherwise with the sexual revolution) has always interested me - go and use the search bar at the side to find my previous post, if you want..

For more on this topic, there is an essay up at Aeon (which will require you to get past the "begging for donations" page which appears half way through it, but if you guess where the "X" is on the top right hand side, you can close it and continue.)

It explains the "high minded" attitude of (some) intellectuals of the early 20th century that it was a society changing, morally uplifting, movement:

The New York sociologist Maurice Parmelee was one US visitor who became a convert to the cause. His much-reprinted book Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy (1929) developed a theory of nakedness for an Anglophone readership. He claimed that ‘gymnosophy’ – his preferred term, as an ancient Greek word combining nakedness and wisdom – ‘stands for simplicity, temperance and continence in every phase of life. It is useful in the rearing of the young,’ he claimed, ‘in the relations between the sexes, and in promoting a democratic and humane organisation of society. Consequently,’ he argued, ‘the implications of gymnosophy extend far beyond the practice of nudity alone, for it connotes a thoroughgoing change in the outlook upon and mode of life.’

For Parmelee, and those who followed his line of thinking, nudism was libertarian, democratic and humanitarian. He claimed it would deliver a more egalitarian world, destroying class and caste systems, and establishing gender equality. Nudism, he asserted, ‘is a powerful aid to feminism, because it abolishes the artificial and unnecessary sex barrier and distinction of dress. The gymnosophic movement is,’ he believed, ‘the logical continuation and consummation of the woman’s movement, for it at last brings woman into the man’s world and man into the woman’s world, so that they can see each other as they really are.’ Parmelee’s study was illustrated with black-and-white photographs of naked white German youths assuming expressionist dance poses or boldly leaping for joy in the open air.

But, of course, the rise of readership of nudist magazines indicated that they were being bought for reasons other than moral uplift:

By the early 1930s, several nudist periodicals could be purchased cheaply from British newsstands, from the short-lived monthly Gymnos, which styled itself as ‘For Nudists Who Think’, to the longer-lasting quarterly Sun Bathing Review. Both were populated with high-brow articles written by physicians, psychiatrists and clergymen who detailed the physical, mental and spiritual messages of the movement....

Sun Bathing Review particularly promoted its status as ‘copiously illustrated’, which ensured it a readership of 50,000 by its second issue, far more than the quantities of practising nudists at the time.  ...

By the end of the 1930s, nudist membership was at an all-time high in Britain, with around 40,000 members. New nudist magazines were launched, boasting readerships of more than 100,000 per issue; evidently, more people liked to look on than to join in. In wartime, nudists found new justifications for their cause, when sun and air were reconceived as ‘unrationed benefits’, and public health was a national priority.  The photographic nude also took on new meanings in a wider culture where pin-ups were achieving popularity as imports from the US....

Nudes were perceived as a national tonic under wartime conditions, and their viewing was restorative. But nudists were aware that there could be right and wrong ways of looking. A quiz in Sun Bathing Review in 1945 asked: ‘How Good a Sun Bather are You?’ To pass the test, readers were expected to be able to identify the Sun’s actinic and abiotic rays, the relative merits of artificial sunlamps, and a list of foods containing Vitamin D. ‘Good’ nudists were those who understood the practice intellectually. But highly educated members worried that readers were looking at depictions of flesh for less than scholarly aims. The experimental psychologist J C Flügel, for example, had warned a 1938 meeting of the Sex Education Society that ‘even the editors of our nudist magazines must admit that most of their readers are attracted by a sexual interest in the pictures’.

I've always found this funny:  the dedication in the magazines themselves, and in censorship bodies, to the pretence that nudist magazines were only being read, or bought by, the "high minded" nudist.   

The essay ends on a point about the apparent retreat from nudism acceptance on significant parts of the internet: 

A hundred years after the first tentative attempts to establish nudism as a collective cause in Britain, some of the founders’ ambitions may seem wrongheaded, quaint or merely curious. But as I assembled my recent book on the subject, Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th-Century Britain (2022), the echoes of their claims were still everywhere to be heard. A book about nude photography with a nude on the cover still cannot be sold on most bookselling platforms in the 21st century. Facebook and Instagram will not allow uncensored images from the book’s contents to be shown, even those with historic retouching or otherwise concealed pubic areas. Breasts and buttocks, deemed harmless a century ago, are now forbidden by social media moderators, our new censors. Nudists have long argued that seeing the bodies of others would open minds from repressive tradition and lead to a fairer world based on knowledge. The 50-year moral battles that were won for photography in print in the 1970s are still being fought on social media more than 50 years later.

 

 

 

Harassment on ice

The news story this morning:

Australians sent to work in Antarctica have complained about a widespread and predatory culture of sexual harassment with unwelcome requests for sex, taunting, displays of offensive pornography and homophobia.

surprises me a little, because I would have assumed that the problem would have been recognised and dealt with by strong leadership (and psychological assessment) long before now.   I mean, I assume that all people go through a selection process that includes psych assessment, and I would also assume that part of that would include questions like "How do you think you will handle the isolation and the effect that it may have on your sex life?  Do you expect to find a sexual partner there?"

In fact, I have a recollection of reading somewhere, many years ago, a woman who had gone there who said something like "You just go there expecting to face some competitive sexual tension amongst the men until you chose one of them to sleep with.  Then it settles down."   It surprised me for its pragmatism, but I thought "well, it would seem there are some well know issues for women who go there."

Is it perhaps that women have simply decided they do not have to put up with that anymore - perhaps an ongoing effect of the MeToo  movement?

I prescribe a ban on Fox News

This from NPR:

This experience – of farmers grappling with suicide – is devastatingly common. Farmers and ranchers are nearly two times more likely to die by suicide in the U.S., compared to other occupations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

I wouldn't mind betting that, if it was allowed to be studied, a ban in rural regions from watching Fox News would lead to an improvement in suicide rates.  

Media poison

I continue to be gobsmacked that the Murdoch family exert no editorial control over Tucker Carlson and are happy to watch him destroy any hope of anything resembling national unity on any issue, and that there isn't more consternation about it amongst the US political class.    

The latest example:

Tucker Carlson Fuels Suspicion U.S. Behind Nord Stream Sabotage

What a pure propagandist for Putin.  All so that Fox News can continue to demonise Joe Biden and Democrats.  And Rupert and Lachlan (and Carlson) can make a dollar. 

I mean, go back 30 or 40 years, and if any high profile media figure were speculating nightly against US interests, you would have had politicians from both sides cautioning about how damaging (or at least "unhelpful") unfounded speculation is.  I mean, it might not have been out of the question that someone on TV could have questioned if the US might have secret operations underway, but we all know Carlson and his gullible audience doesn't work that way - suggest a conspiracy, and they will believe it.

Yet I can tell from the Australian Right wing nutoverse that Carlson is very influential here as well.    

All part of how the Right has gone nuts, as my blog heading says. 

 

A serious Samsung battery issue?

Why am I posting about this - I haven't had a Samsung phone for years.

I just thought it was interesting that a big Youtube phone/tech vlogger like this would bring this up - knowing that the company (which no doubt values the amount of publicity he gives them, and perhaps pays for some of it) would absolutely freak out over the damage to its reputation that this story could bring.

Yay for fantasy failures

As far as I can make out, the Tolkien Rings of Power series is being very widely derided and has very few viewers expressing enthusiasm for it on social media. (I noticed some left leaning some pushback on  the "it's Tolkien gone woke" rubbishing - which, to be honest, what most criticism is about - but I don't think the defenders have found much to be enthusiastic about as it has progressed.)

The Game of Thrones prequel seems to be pulling big numbers, but while I could be wrong, it still seems to be lacking the audience enthusiasm that the original series had.   Apparently, it jumps ahead suddenly by 10 years, involving recasting some key characters - a rather "brave" move. I see on Metacritic the audience rankings are unusually equally split between positive and negative.

This, for a person who does not rate fantasy as a genre at all highly, is a Good Thing.   Apart from The Witcher, I'm not sure that there is any other recent fantasy series viewed as a success.   (I don't care for it at all, either.)  I guess the audience numbers staying high might mean something for more Game of Thrones content, but didn't the audience stay with it even during the terrible last season?   I mean, audience enthusiasm has to count for something...

The lesson I hope studios take from this is "stop making fantasy series - they're expensive and risky."

Krugman on the British pound

I can gift you the whole article.  I will extract just this bit, though:

So why the sudden run on the pound? One answer I liked came from the City of London economist Dario Perkins, who declared that the problem with the budget wasn’t that it was inflationary but that it was “moronic,” and that an economy run by morons has to pay a risk premium.

But while I like the idea of a “moron” premium, there may also be a more concrete concern. I’ve been in correspondence with other City of London economists, and they have expressed doubts about whether the bank will actually be willing to tighten enough to offset the inflationary impact of Trussonomics.

Cuba and that social change

I meant to post about this the other day:

Cubans have approved gay marriage and adoption in a referendum backed by the government that also boosted rights for women, the national election commission has said. 

More than 3.9 million voters voted to ratify the code (66.9 per cent), while 1.95 million opposed ratification (33 per cent), Alina Balseiro Gutierrez, president of the commission, said on state-run television on Monday.

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise - given that nearly all of Latin America has moved pretty rapidly towards recognition of gay relationships, and gay marriage:

Over the past decade, Latin America has stood out for its recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. Outside of the Caribbean, the majority of countries in the region have decriminalized same-sex sexual acts between consenting adults. In Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, LGBTQ+ individuals are constitutionally protected from discrimination based upon sexual orientation. Elsewhere, many of the region’s constitutions now include broad non-discrimination clauses that offer some protection to LGBTQ+ citizens. Since 2010, eight countries have approved laws prohibiting discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

Latin America has also made impressive progress on marriage equality. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in the region to approve same-sex marriage; 20,000 same-sex Argentine couples have since married. In 2013, neighboring Brazil and Uruguay followed suit, and later Colombia (2016), Ecuador (2019) and Costa Rica (2020). In 2019, the Mexican Supreme Court declared bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. In Chile, President Sebastián Piñera vowed earlier this month to advance a marriage equality bill stalled in congress since 2017.

But I still don't quite understand what it is about Latin America culture that has apparently made it so amenable to the change, especially given that there is a range of (sometimes odd) politics in the region.   

If Noah doesn't like Singapore, I'll be very disappointed

This on Twitter:

 prompted many responses, including this one, which I can endorse (although I haven't been a film at the Projector):

I would still go for staying at Tanjong Pagar over Katong, just for ease of wandering down to Chinatown.  And add not only going to the Pinnacle (although finding the ticket office to get to the roof was not so easy, a few years ago), but up to the roof top garden at CapitaSpring, as per my previous post.

That specifically American thing

It would seem that Noah Smith shares the peculiar American aversion to hanging out washing to dry:

 

 

I would love to know how much America could save in power generation if people actually only used the dryer as a last resort.   (Which is, I think, still how most Australians - at least if they live in a house or townhouse - view clothesdryers.)   

I have posted about this before...

The question on many people's minds

 She would likely have a history of dogwhistle anti-Semitism, though, if she is one.  I haven't yet seen anyone point that out, but I haven't gone looking hard either.

Interesting, though, that I have noticed that mad-as-a-cut snake Cassie, the Jewish woman who accuses anyone who makes even the mildest criticism of Israel wrt to its treatment of Palestinians of being virulent anti-Semites, has not appeared on Currency Lad's blog posts to join in the conservative swoon over her election.   Just when I do want to know her opinion on something, she doesn't give it!

Update:   seems we have found the one Australian conservative-ish commentator has his concerns:

Update 2:   The Guardian ran an article about her and fascism some weeks ago:

But let’s be clear. Meloni is not a fascist. She will not command armies of black-shirted armed groups and she will not look to overturn liberal democracy. Beyond those basics, the signs are extremely worrying – for Italy, Europe and democracy. Meloni and Salvini are populists in the Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen mould. They have built their success on promises of huge and regressive tax cuts, nationalist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric (with elements of Great Replacement theories) and anti-EU and anti-euro narratives. Much of this has been played out on social media, where Meloni and Salvini are expert players, unlike Berlusconi, who has never moved beyond television as his favourite medium.

While Meloni officially, and angrily, denies any connection with fascism, the base of her party contains many activists and others often quaintly referred to as “nostalgic” for Mussolini’s regime. Examples of these links (slogans, statues, salutes) are common and often dismissed as “folklore” – not serious, or mere window dressing. Councillors for Meloni’s party have often been seen giving “Roman salutes”, praising Mussolini and indulging in open racism. The carefully produced moderate image Meloni has cultivated for years does not always seem to have been communicated to the base of the movement.

Moreover, Italy is a country where the memory wars have been raging for decades, often around moments linked to the Second World War and the upheavals of the 1970s. It is clear that the rehabilitation of that past, the idea that “Mussolini did a lot of good things”, will gain further credence with Meloni as prime minister. Salvini, however, is perhaps the more dangerous personality. His tenure as interior minister was marked by a chaotic migrant “policy” that involved illegally blocking refugee boats from docking in Italian ports. He is likely to have a major ministerial role in any new government.

Salvini and Meloni have both been rapidly backtracking on their past links with, and support for, Vladimir Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, Italy’s foreign policy promises to be much softer on Moscow after the election. Berlusconi has continued, in the meantime, to be a mouthpiece for his old friend and ally throughout the Ukrainian crisis. It is easy to dismiss the former prime minister as a joke figure, but his influence remains powerful, not least within his huge media empire.

She's a loose cannon (to put it generously)

So, the Lidia Thorpe who was aggressively against commemorating the Queen's death:

At the intersection of Flinders and Swanston streets, Greens senator Lidia Thorpe, her hands covered in fake blood to highlight the impact of colonisation, addressed a seated crowd of about 500 people.

“You want to mourn the coloniser who brought the pain and the genocide and the murders here to our people. Shame,” Thorpe said. “The Crown’s boot is on our neck and we’re sick of it. And we are here to fight for our rights as the first people of these lands.”

was, only last year,  also so abusive to other aboriginal activists she doesn't agree with (on what, we don't know) that her Chief of Staff resigned:

Greens senator Lidia Thorpe’s former chief-of-staff says he was scared and appalled by her outburst in a meeting with two Indigenous community leaders at Parliament House last year, calling her behaviour among the most unprofessional conduct he has ever witnessed.

The claims by Thorpe’s ex-top adviser reinforce the account of the meeting by Aboriginal elder Aunty Geraldine Atkinson, aged in her 70s, who has previously alleged the tirade of abuse levelled at her by the senator distressed her so much she sought medical attention from the parliamentary nurse.

It's the fact that the party absorbs such immature, aggressive nutters that puts me off ever being able to support them, regardless of whether their policies have their heart in the right place, or not.

A comparison that might surprise

Because I'm kind, I will gift to my ever diminishing number of readers this opinion piece in the Washington Post that argues that, even with a new, pretty far Right leader in Italy, the country is probably going to be in better economic shape than England, with it's "let's try trickle down tax cuts - again!" nutty new leader:

Britain has replaced Italy as Europe’s problem economy 

 

Sabine in The Guardian now!

Sabine Hossenfelder continues on her quest to publicly annoy a huge slab of theoretical physicists in a piece in The Guardian today:

It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions , giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Obviously, she thinks it isn't.  I like this (semi- serious?) explanation, too:

I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science. 

 

Famous astronomer death noted

Oh, I missed that Frank Drake, of SETI and Drake equation fame, has died:

Often called the father of SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — Frank Drake made the first attempt to detect radio transmissions from life beyond Earth in 1960. He spent decades advancing SETI’s technology and philosophy. Drake was collaborative and helped others to pursue a high-risk, fringe topic whose fruits he might not live to see. He helped to legitimize SETI and pushed humans to address the ultimate question: are we alone?

In 1961, Drake, who has died aged 92, led the first scientific workshop on the search for alien civilizations. To prompt discussion, he wrote on a blackboard several factors — such as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets and the chance that those planets harboured life. Multiplied together, these yield an estimated number of communicative, technological civilizations. Six decades later, this calculation — the Drake Equation — remains a scaffold for discussions in the field.

 

Countries with cursed politics

I had to stop following Adam Creighton on Twitter because he is just too intensely annoying.  Of course, he may also just be an attention seeking troll much of the time - something we all like to see in allegedly serious economic/political commentators for allegedly important papers [sarc] - or is it that we can fairly imagine Adam if he had lived in the 1930's would have been telling us that Hitler and Mussolini should be given a fair chance, even though they're a little Right of centre?:

Mind you, as explained in this article in The Conversation, strongly Right wing politics in Italy have not exactly ever disappeared, and this woman has the problem of trying to work in a coalition of fellow Right wingers which may not be sustainable.  I didn't even realise this until now:

Enter Berlusconi. He was pushed to resign in 2011 during the sovereign debt crisis in favour of technocrat Mario Monti and was convicted on a number of charges related to prostitution and tax fraud.

He completed community service and was banned from Parliament, but this ban was lifted by a judge in 2018. 

He may be poised to be the kingmaker of the coalition. Running as a more responsible, pro-EU statesman and centrist than his partners, he could have a large say in the direction of governance and policy if the election results are tight, and could threaten to remove his support at a moment’s notice.

Given that there has been relatively recent interest in the USA politics as to the moderating political effects of voting systems other than First Past the Post, I wondered if this had something to do with Italy's terrible politics.  I'm not the only one:

But, the situation is very complicated there.  As AP notes:

FEWER LAWMAKERS

Many lawmakers won’t be reelected — regardless of their legislative record — simply due to math. Since the last election, a reform has been passed aimed at streamlining Parliament and make its operation less costly to taxpayers. In the upper chamber, the number of senators drops from 315 to 200, while the lower Chamber of Deputies will number 400 instead of 630.

PINBALL POLITICS

Just about everyone agrees Italy’s electoral law is complicated, including lawmakers who created it. Of the total seats, 36% are determined by a first-past-the post system — whoever gets the most votes for a particular district wins. The remaining 64% of the seats get divvied up proportionally, based on candidate lists determined by parties and their alliances.

Lawmakers have likened the proportional part of the electoral system to a game of pinball, particularly in the Chamber of Deputies. Under the “pinball effect,” a candidate who, say, came in first in a specific district could see another candidate who finished second elsewhere suddenly shifted to her or his district, knocking the first-place candidate out of a seat.

Confused? So are many voters. Except for in the first-past-the-post contests, many Italians are essentially voting for alliances and parties, not candidates, and don’t have a direct say in determining their specific representative in the legislature.

What an awful system!  

The other countries that I keep thinking about their cursed politics are the United Kingdom and Malaysia.   I mean, in the UK, FFP seems largely to blame, but how unlucky was the entire country to have such a strange and dubious character as Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour while Brexit was being debated.   (He's now an ineffective "having it both ways" weirdo on Ukraine too, I see.)  

As for Malaysia - one day I will get around to trying to understand why its politics is so cursed, too, but not today...

 

Time for some Thiel rubbishing

He gave an interview much noticed on Twitter: