He's taking it well

Jim Hoft, of prime wingnut disinformation site Gateway Pundit, is taking the mid term election results in his stride [sarc]:

BLOOD MOON BLOODBATH… Democrats Steal Midterms, Communism Comes Home to America… Crime, Inflation, Record Gas Prices, War, Open Borders and Corruption WIN BIG  

Why there won't be a civil war

There are lots of seats still up for grabs, but I took a screenshot of this from the NYT to show how red and blue is pretty mixed up within most states:

At the time of writing - nothing is 100% clear, except that it was not a "red wave".   Seems most likely that the Senate may be the same as it was (Dem control with the VP vote), but lose the Reps by a small number.  (Although some are saying it is still conceivable that the Dems keep the Reps by one.  That would be impressive...)

She is truly awful

Her losing today would be one of the greatest highlights:

Update:  this amused me -

Droughts and floods under climate change - a good explanation

I strongly recommend this video, which explains clearly the issue which millions of climate change denialists have clung to for a decade or two:  climate change can mean both worse floods and worse droughts.  It's not that hard to understand, but it does have its complications (in terms of the different effects in different parts of the globe):

 

The video also brings to my attention a massive American historical flood of which I was unaware - the Californian one of 1861-2. 

Pre-emptive conspiracy to comfort themselves

It's remarkable - the way they pre-arm themselves with conspiracy claims as the being the only reason they could possibly lose.   Read about it at the Washington Post (gift link.)

Prominent Republicans who do not call out this divisive fantasy BS on their own side are at the core of the problem.

Consider the chickens of Singapore

One of the most surprising things about Singapore is that it's not only so lushly green and fecund with plant life, but it's increasingly attractive to wild animal life.   I haven't managed to see the otters yet, but this last recent trip, it became quickly obvious that wild chickens are now a "thing" there.   

The photo above was near my hotel, pretty close to Chinatown, and as you can see, the busy road was no deterrent.  (It was, perhaps, thinking about crossing it...ha ha.)  This was not the only one I saw.  While having dinner at a footpath place there were a few on the nearby bit of lawn one evening.

And this recent article explains what's been going on:

Since 2020, the National Parks Board (NParks) has received more than 1,000 reports annually about free-ranging chickens, said Ms Jessica Kwok, group director of NParks’ Animal and Veterinary Service (AVS).

Animal Concerns Research and Education Society's (ACRES) co-chief executive Anbarasi Boopal told CNA that the animal welfare group has seen an increase in feedback related to the chickens. There were nine reports in 2019 as compared to 18 reports last year and 14 reports in 2022 so far, she said. 

Feedback came from locations “more or less” all over Singapore, such as Marine Parade, Pasir Ris, and Ang Mo Kio, said Ms Anbarasi.

Add to that list - Tanjong Pagar, where I saw "my" chickens.  I think they are more widespread than even that recent article notes.  More from it:

The issue of wild chickens came to the fore in 2017, when the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) revealed that it put down 24 chickens that were wandering around Thomson View and Blocks 452 to 454 Sin Ming Avenue. There were about 20 complaints from residents there, mainly about noise.

The incident sparked an outcry. AVA later clarified that it was not because of complaints of noise, but the risk of exposure to bird flu that prompted them to cull the chickens in areas where there are “relatively high numbers” of them.

Since then, a task force has been set up to deal with the chicken population at Sin Ming.

But just a moment - was my chicken actually a "junglefowl":

At the same time, not all wild birds are alike.

Often confused for wild chickens, native red junglefowl can also be spotted throughout Singapore even though they were rare a decade or so ago.

While they may look similar to chickens, they have a number of characteristics that set them apart, said Dr Yong Ding Li, the regional coordinator for migratory bird conservation and an ornithologist at BirdLife International.

These junglefowl have grey legs, unlike domestic chickens which generally have yellow legs. They also have a shorter and more abrupt call and a white tuft of feathers on their rump. However, many hybrids exist and it can be hard to tell them apart.

"It's very common that junglefowl come into contact with these farm chickens and they hybridise on and off, on and off, so the genes of these junglefowl and chicken have been mixing," he said.

Junglefowl have become increasingly common over the last few decades as they have "colonised" more habitats across the island, added Dr Yong.

In the early 2000s, red junglefowl were mostly found in the Western Catchment Area and Pulau Ubin, but they can now be spotted in many urban areas and most nature reserves, he added.

OK, so maybe my picture is a fine specimen of a junglefowl, but it's still surprising that such a densely packed city like Singapore has more of them around than ever before.  (Or, I guess, maybe it's just a case of reduced bushland in which to hide.)

Anyway, I like seeing them.

 

 

Thanks for the help, fellas: now get out

Watching a bit of CNA today brought this example of pretty shameful British behaviour to my attention for the first time.   I see now that there was a long article in The Guardian about it last year, from which these extracts come.

First, I didn't know this about Liverpool before:

By most reckonings, Liverpool has the oldest Chinese community in Europe. At the root of this relationship was the shipping group Alfred Holt & Company, founded in Liverpool in 1866, and their major subsidiary the Blue Funnel Line, whose cargo steamships connected Shanghai, Hong Kong and Liverpool. Alfred Holt & Co quickly became one of Britain’s biggest merchant shipping companies, importing silk, cotton and tea. Over time, some of the Chinese seamen settled in Liverpool, starting businesses to serve those on shore leave. Records from the turn of the century show Chinese-run boarding houses, grocers, laundries, tailors, a chandler and, in Mr Kwok Fong, even a private detective. The 1911 census shows 400 Chinese-born residents, with many more coming and going. By the end of the first world war, the community numbered in the thousands.  

So, in World War 2:

The second world war would bring many more Chinese seamen to Liverpool. China was, in historian Rana Mitter’s formulation, “the forgotten ally”. Not only did China play a vital role in the fight against Japan in Asia, Chinese seamen also kept the British merchant navy going. Beginning in 1939, Alfred Holt & Company, along with Anglo-Saxon Petroleum (part of Shell), recruited men in Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. They were to crew the ships on missions across the Atlantic, bringing essential supplies of oil, munitions and food to the UK, and escorting convoys to the front. This was exceptionally dangerous work. About 3,500 merchant vessels were sunk by Nazi U-boats, and more than 72,000 lives were lost on the Allied side.

One Chinese merchant seaman, Poon Lim, became famous for surviving 133 days adrift on a tiny raft, after his British vessel was torpedoed by a U-boat in the south Atlantic. Lim and his countrymen were hailed as firm comrades in a 1944 Ministry of Information propaganda film, The Chinese in Wartime Britain. “East met west, and liked it,” explains the film’s narrator in his finest Pathe News accent, as we are shown these new friends working as doctors, engineers and scientists, and then recovering on land in between missions, drinking tea, practising calligraphy and playing table tennis. The Chinese merchant seamen fought “shoulder to shoulder in the greatest battle of naval history, alongside their British seamen comrades. They, too, brave the torpedoes and the bombs and the mines, making history under fire … life at sea fuels a unique spirit of comradeship between the men of all nations.”

For the Chinese seamen, official British gratitude and friendship did not extend far beyond the silver screen.

In reality, they were (at least initially) paid half of what the British seamen got and did the worst and most dangerous jobs.  A strike improved their pay.   But their numbers were large:

During the war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. The seamen were a vital part of the allied war effort, some of the “heroes of the fourth service” in the words of one book title about the merchant navy. Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under heavy attack from German U-boats.

But the kicker at the end of the war was that the government decided that they couldn't stay in England, and were secretly and forcefully deported back to various Chinese ports, leaving behind wives and children in many cases.   (Apparently, the families often initially assumed they had been abandoned by their partner or father.)  

The plan was deceptive in many respects - dates were amended on papers allowing for the police to treat them as "overstaying", and men with families were deliberately not told of their right to stay:

Although marrying a local woman did not give the Chinese men the right to British citizenship, the Home Office was aware that it did give them the right to stay in the UK. This information was deliberately withheld. On 14 November, Liverpool Immigration Officer JR Garstang had written to London that “it would be unwise … to give any indication to the Chinese that because a man is married to a British-born woman he will have a claim to domicile in the UK”. In a follow-up letter, sent on 15 December, Garstang reiterated that it was best not to give the married men “a lever in their claim for domicile”. The authorities were determined to finish the job they had started.

The secret repatriation campaign was not a placid or cooperative affair. Written records suggest that it was conducted as a manhunt. The phrase “roundup” is used repeatedly in official correspondence. An immigration officers’ report to the Home Office filed on 15 July 1946 announced that: “Two whole days were spent in an intensive search of approximately 150 Pool boarding-houses, private boarding houses and private houses.” They had “spread the net as widely as possible”, they promised, alerting police chiefs across the country to look out for Chinese seamen. The report concluded: “When the operation is completed within the next few days I shall be satisfied that every possible step has been taken to secure a maximum repatriation of Chinese.”

I also didn't know before that the Chinese had even been of substantial assistance to Britain in World War 1:

Now that the war had come to an end and Japanese troops in China had surrendered, the Chinese coast opened up again – allowing the British government to commence, in its own words, “the usual steps for getting rid of foreign seamen whose presence here is unwelcome”. (Those “usual steps” probably refer to an earlier mass deportation: 95,000 Chinese men were recruited by Britain as non-combatant labourers and merchant seamen in the first world war. They were not allowed to settle in the UK after the war, either, and their sacrifice has likewise long been overlooked.)

Actually, a lengthy article at the South China Morning Post explains the story of the Chinese sent to help Europe in the earlier war:

Chinese workers helped rebuild war-torn Europe, says Hong Kong University historian Xu Guoqi. About 140,000 worked for American, British and French troops in France, his research shows. Up to half a million Chinese workers laboured on the eastern front for Tsarist Russia, before the empire crumbled in the 1917 Communist revolution, according to the unpublished research of historian Li Zhixue of Jinan University.

Xu, who traced the journey of Chinese labourers from Shandong to France in his 2011 book Strangers on the Western Front published by Harvard University Press, says the mostly illiterate farmers played a crucial role not only in the war, but in shaping China’s role in the new world order that emerged as empires fractured into nation-states worldwide.

 Many died, too, in tragedies of war:

By trains and ships, the Chinese made their way to Europe. Hundreds, if not thousands, died along the way. Xu estimated at least 700 perished. Between 400 and 600 workers died on February 17, 1917, alone when a German submarine sank the French passenger ship Athos near Malta. Many more died crossing Russia, according to Li’s research.

About 3,000 Chinese workers died in France, on their way to the Western front in Northern France, or on their return to China between 1916 and 1920, Xu estimates. Up to 30,000 Chinese died on the Russian front, estimates Jinan University scholar Li.

To avoid further German submarine attacks, Britain shipped more than 84,000 Chinese labourers through Canada in a campaign kept secret for years in the then British dominion.

“In view of the suspicion that certain Chinese are being used as a medium of communication by enemy agents”, Canada banned news outlets from reporting on the train convoys that crossed the country on their way to France.

I had no idea.

Both of these stories would be a good source for fresh stories for novels or cinema too, I reckon.   Barely know history is always good for that... 

 

Since when has just annoying people ever worked?

Look, I could kind of respect climate change activists more if they were actually prepared to do dangerous direct things against the fossil fuel companies they (with some justification) despise - I mean, get armed up like a 1960's Leftist radical, hijack an oil tanker and sail it to a remote island with no refinery.   Hold the crew hostage, even, while trying to get some concession from the company.   Or blow up a railway track that is only used by a coal mining company to get the black stuff to port (lots of opportunity in Queensland for that.)   I mean, I wouldn't exactly endorse those tactics, but I could at least see the perpetrators as people willing to put their lives and liberty on the line with radical action for their basically legitimate cause.  

But they are just uselessly naive and annoying to think that protesting by inconveniencing ordinary people in traffic (and putting their lives in danger - if they are in an ambulance waiting to get to a hospital), or doing theatrical things to great art, is useful:  it is just patently not going to work.    

We need politicians and climate scientists to be saying this, and not letting useless forms of activism lead to any increase in the Right wing vote in any country, with their dedication to not doing much.

Short story: it's a long way off

Noah Smith had a friend who works in the lab grown meat field do a guest post about where it's at.

Despite Noah's optimistic intro:

I actually read it as endorsing my skepticism that it's not really viable, and may be a waste of research and investment. 

Wild uncertainty

That's a surprise coming from Kristol.

Twitter (when not spending time in glorious schadenfreude about Musk losing advertisers and trying to blame everyone except himself) is talking a lot about the Republican favouring polls "flooding the zone" in the last couple of weeks.  Early voting, however, has been high, and traditionally favours Democrats - although I have also noticed that some people are claiming that Republican early voting is high in a couple of places (I think Florida is one of them.)   But I don't know how they know they know how the early voters voted.   

This weekend, there are some (such as Kristol above) suggesting that the Democrats are going to do OK after all (although his tweet above doesn't actually say they will retain control of congress), and it is no doubt based on stuff like this:

 And this is one theory about Republican polling:

As is this:

Yes - that is one safe bet.  If Democrats do surprisingly well (compared to the way the MSM is currently skewing their reporting on the assumption that the Republicans will do well), there are going to be millions of stupid American wingnuts (and their Australian counterparts) claiming it is due to electoral fraud, but (again) with no actual evidence.

The reality is, however, that polling is extremely difficult in the US and surprises have happened before.  

Countryside viewed

Went out to Mulgowie farmers market again on Saturday, which might seem a long way to go to get really fresh corn, potatoes, beans (and locally grown garlic) but it's a nice drive.  

The dams are full everywhere around Laidley, and for some reason, there seems to be an enormous amount of corn planted at the moment (see above - well I think it's corn.  This is right besides the market, but we drove around to Forest Hill, and up to Lowood, and corn was everywhere.  If the market is soon flooded with cheap corn, you heard it here first.  Actually, it's already around $1 a cob, I think, so it's not even that expensive at the moment.  Why is so much being grown?)

It was also surprisingly cool for November.  The weather is still very wonky at the moment.  I kind of don't recall wanting to wear a jacket in November anywhere near Brisbane before.

Some Friday science trivia - I just bought an ancient condiment

I like using Himalayan rock salt in cooking and on my food - it's pink, and makes me think about how incredible it is that I'm using something mined out of a hill in Pakistan that is incredibly ancient.   

You think oil drilled from far underground is old?  Well it is, but here's the specifics:

The formation of oil takes a significant amount of time with oil beginning to form millions of years ago. 70% of oil deposits existing today were formed in the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago), 20% were formed in the Cenozoic age (65 million years ago), and only 10% were formed in the Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago). This is likely because the Mesozoic age was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the ocean.

Himilayan rock salt, on the other hand:

Himalayan salt is mined from the Salt Range mountains,^[1] the southern edge of a fold-and-thrust belt that underlies the Pothohar Plateau south of the Himalayas in Pakistan. Himalayan salt comes from a thick layer of Ediacaran to early Cambrian evaporites of the Salt Range Formation. This geological formation consists of crystalline halite intercalated with potash salts, overlain by gypsiferous marl and interlayered with beds of gypsum and dolomite with infrequent seams of oil shale that accumulated between 600 and 540 million years ago. 

I had to check, of course, but Ediacaran period starts at 635 million years ago and ends at the (oddly specific) time of 538.8 million years ago (according to Wiki).   For more context, at that time, there weren't even land plants in existence:

We have land plants to thank for the oxygen we breathe. And now we have a better idea of when they took to land in the first place. While the oldest known fossils of land plants are 420 million years old, researchers have now determined that pond scum first made landfall almost 100 million years earlier.

"[This] study has important global implications, because we know early plants cooled the climate and increased the oxygen level in the Earth's atmosphere," conditions that supported the expansion of terrestrial animal life, says Tim Lenton, an earth system scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work.

There were squishy things in the ocean, and that was about it.  (Backbones didn't turn up until about 500 million years ago.)

So yeah, the salt I'll be cooking with is older than most oil, and probably pre-dates even plants!

(Although, for some reason, some salt company sites refer to Himilayan salt as being "more than 250 million years old" and one says only 200 million years.  But I trust Wikipedia, and NPR, more than them and think the 600 million year figure is more correct.)

I intend to impress my family with this news over dinner this weekend.   (It's the sort of thing I loved telling kids when they were school age, but I  like to inflict science stuff on anyone of any age.)

Exactly

 

The party of "we just make stuff up"

 

Thanks for your contribution, Joe

Too late for the millions of Trumpy culture warriors who will go on believing this was real:

Joe Rogan has admitted he lied about a school letting “furry” children use litter boxes, walking back his claims from a month ago that have since been amplified by Republican Senate Don Bolduc. In an October podcast, Rogan told guest Tulsi Gabbard that his friend’s wife taught at a school that “had to install a litter box in the girl’s room because there’s a student that’s a furry.” Now, he’s saying “I don't think they actually did it,” attributing the whole situation to “one wacky mother” who the school ignored. Claims that furry students are using litter boxes have been debunked over and over, but the lie has persisted as a right-wing talking point. Bolduc accused a school of using litter boxes in a campaign town hall, saying “I wish I was making it up.” Lucky for the New Hampshire Republican, he was. “I fed into that,” Rogan said in his podcast, admitting he had no facts to back up his claim.

More lights seen by pilots that aren't quickly explained

I mentioned this guy recently, and really don't know how much credibility I should give him.  But in these videos, he appears reasonable, and he is just putting up pilot and ATC recordings that seem genuine, and somewhat puzzling: 

 

What puzzles me in particular is that if it is a military test of something, why do it in that location, and with a brightness that is going to be seen from far away and attract attention.

Paranoid idiot watch (Australian edition)

Monty used to think he could be debated back to some sort of Right wing moderate position.  I told monty he was wrong, and daily I feel vindicated.

Lost credibility

Yes, I have felt this way about this guy.  The pressure to keep high numbers (and good income from it) is very likely what has brought down his credibility:

 

Some skeptic wins on UFOs

I missed this recent report in NYT that starts:

Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena — government-speak for U.F.O.s — as well as many episodes in past years.

The sightings have puzzled the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations.

It goes on to note that the Mick West explanation of the "Go fast" and "gimbal" video seems to be accepted by the Pentagon, and that there is nothing to the "green pyramids" video too.  (I always said that the latter was rubbish - any UFO video that shows lights of any kind flashing in a typical aircraft or drone type sequence is likely to be an aircraft or drone.)

Anyway, still no explanation for the verbal report of the Nimitiz Tic Tak case - confirmed by three pilots.  What a shame there is no good video of what they saw...

Yes, release video

Even though there can be problems with prosecutors rushing out evidentiary material because of political pressure, I reckon it would be a ridiculous look if video showing that the wingnut narrative about the Paul Pelosi attack is a 100% conspiracy fantasy only comes out after the mid term elections.   (The Axios version of this story does not say that the video is recorded, but I think the Wapo story said it was.)

Philip Bump writes about this at the Washington Post, noting how the current calls to release the video are mainly coming from those who want to further conspiracy belief, because any delay is "suspicious".   (Mind you, Bump also seems to think that we can sure than any ambiguity in the video will be used to spin further conspiracy, which is probably true, but it would likely have to be a completely different conspiracy to the one that millions of dumb, conspiracy addled American brains currently believe.)