A very accurate meme

 OK, well, perhaps the "existential threat to humanity" is too much:  even under the worst forecast, perhaps a few of our descendants may get to hunt crocodiles in the swamps of Antarctica for food...

He's such a catch. (Subtitle: pre-nup lawyers get the big bucks, again)

I don't know, but I reckon by the time you've hit your 80's, and especially if you've had multiple marriages already, it's a bit ridiculous to be wanting to remarry, even if you have a good companionship thing going with someone you just met.   (An observation prompted by news of Rupert Murdoch's engagement, a short time after getting unhitched from Jerry Hall.)

And I mean, really:   what 66 year old woman in her right mind wants to be in bed with this?:

A living out of grievance

Some notes from the world of indigenous grievance:

*  Lidia Thorpe:

Victorian independent senator Lidia Thorpe has made allegations she was sexually harassed and assaulted at Parliament House, including in the Senate chamber, during her time as a Greens senator. 

"It has been a very hard time for me in this place. I was sexually assaulted four times in my first six months," Senator Thorpe said. ...

Senator Thorpe confirmed her allegations of sexual assault and harassment were about Labor and Coalition parliamentarians, not members of the Greens. 

She said she chose not to speak out at the time, but the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service (PWSS) were aware of her complaints. 

"I didn't want any action taken," she said.

Uhuh.

*  Chelsea Watego, the Queensland academic I have mentioned before, (sued her University because she didn't like the workspace they gave her, dropped the case, blamed lack of support from her union, got arrested and pleased guilty to obstructing police, lodged a complaint that they had discriminated against her, and lost that case too) has a video of a Byron Bay TED talk(!) about "Black joy is for Black people" which is not about joy at all, but about intense grievance:

 

 * Sandy O'Sullivan has just left for a 3 month tour of the US and England is a part of Queer indigenous academia which, as far as I can tell, is centred in Macquarie University.   She seems, between posting selfies on Twitter every second day (some sort of psychological necessity for her, apparently), to be slowly writing a book on "anti-colonialism" and gender.  She is joined in this field of study by Madi Day, who has become a Fullbright scholar:

Madi Day, from the Department of Indigenous Studies, received the Fulbright Sir John Carrick New South Wales Scholarship, funded by the New South Wales State Government, and will undertake their scholarship at Southern Connecticut State University this year.

Day is a career researcher who works across Indigenous studies, trans studies and gender studies. They are completing their PhD titled Coloniality, gender and heterosexuality in so-called Australia.

Day’s Fulbright research will offer a comparative study of coloniality, gender and heterosexuality across Australia and the United States as settler colonial nation-states. The research will also examine how anti-colonial approaches are integrated into gender studies departments in the United States, and whether this could be improved in gender studies in Australia.

Madi also gave a talk, the details of which I cannot find online, which featured the term "heterosexual terrorists", apparently:

 * Dr Corrine Sullivan, by the way, is currently an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University, but got her BA and PhD at - yes, Macquarie University.    Her research interests are this:

Her current research project explores Indigenous Australian sexuality and gender diversity. For Indigenous Australians that identify as sexually and/or gender diverse there can be significant implications on cultural/social identities, and are at risk of being ostracised, ignored, silenced, be socially and culturally stigmatised, and may face rejection and ejection from their families and communities. The key objectives of this research initiative are to fill the gap in this area of knowledge by; working with Indigenous Australians who identify as sexually and/or gender diverse, and with Indigenous community organisations to develop appropriate educational resources that can contribute toward building inclusive communities. The outcomes of this research will inform law-making, policy, as well as access and delivery of support and services that are culturally appropriate, relevant, and morally unbiased.

 I'm not entirely sure how the comments in this (about queer indigenous being ostracised within their own community) are meant to tie in with Sandy O'Sullivan's and Madi Day's apparent project to convince us all that it was only the colonisers/settlers who brought in the idea of just two genders, and fighting discrimination is an "anti-colonial" project.   Guess we'll see when their little-read books (apart from within indigenous studies faculties) are published.

Contrary to appearances, I do worry that a post like this gives the impression that I have suddenly become a fan of Andrew Bolt and his dubious criticisms.  No, I have really come here via my own reading what passes for academic commentary on aboriginal issues on Twitter and elsewhere.    

It seems pretty clear to me that too much funding is going into the more esoteric sociological aspects of aboriginality and, most worryingly, into helping them promote an ever increasingly radical view (ironically, while making a good living from selling the idea) that the economically and socially struggling members of the First Nations community should only hold the rest of the country they live in with contempt.    Now that I think of it, it's pretty much the Left wing version of Fox News - selling grievance as a way of making a good living.

  

On the upside, sort of

What with all those photos of kilometres of dead (native) fish in a part of the Darling River last week:

 I've been meaning to say:  "wow, I had no idea the Darling River had so many fish!"  

Because isn't that the impression most people have of this river?  Pretty much a hot, overgrown creek that rarely seems to have all that much water in it?  Sure, the Murray looks capable of holding a bunch of fish, but my impression was that the Darling had carp, algae and maybe some turtles, and that was about it.

Heavy sighs have got something going for them

Here's an article at the Washington Post I'll gift link:

5-minute breathing exercises can improve your mood and reduce anxiety

Cyclic sighing appears to be particularly effective among different breathing exercises and better than mindfulness meditation, a study says

Yes, this is not a topic I have followed closely, but my impression is that breathing exercises, as a way of helping address blood pressure, anxiety, etc have been pretty well studied, and shown to be pretty effective.

This latest article suggests they help mood generally, which is perhaps a little surprising?:

A study in Cell Reports Medicine showed that just five minutes of breathwork each day for about a month could improve mood and reduce anxiety — and these benefits may be larger than from mindfulness meditation for the same amount of time.

“We’re always busy doing instead of being,” said David Spiegel, an author of the study. “And it’s a good idea to just take a few minutes to collect yourself, commune with your body and help it prepare to deal with whatever you want to deal with.”

In a randomized controlled study of 108 adults, the researchers compared three different breathwork exercises, in which participants deliberately guided their breathing in various ways, and mindfulness meditation, in which people observed their breathing but didn’t try to control it. The participants did the breathwork at home, following video instructions.

One group of participants was told to practice cyclic sighing. Participants were instructed to slowly inhale through the nose to expand the lungs, and inhale again to maximally fill the lungs. Then they were asked to slowly and fully exhale the breath through the mouth.

A second group focused on box breathing, which is spending the same amount of time slowly inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling and holding, before repeating the sequence.

A third group practiced cyclic hyperventilation, which “emphasizes inhalation rather than exhalation. It’s kind of the mirror image of the cyclic sighing exercise,” said Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University.

They took one deep inhalation through the nose, exhaled passively and then let the air “fall out from the mouth,” he said. Every 30 cycles, they would hold the breath after passive exhalation for 15 seconds....

The positive effects of breathwork took time to kick in: The more days the participants spent doing their breathing exercises, the better they felt each successive day.

Cyclic sighing appeared to be particularly effective among the different breathing exercises. Participants in this group reported even greater positive mood improvements compared with participants who practiced mindfulness meditation.

Now, John:  don't come here and ruin it for me with some criticism or other...:)

 

 

Yet another exotic way to die

The BBC reports on a disease you can catch if near certain nut plantations in India:

Kyasanur forest disease (KFD) – named after the forest in which it originated –  is a tick-borne haemorrhagic disease with a fatality rate of around 5%. Also known as "monkey fever", it was first discovered in 1957 after an outbreak in Shivamogga, the district of Karnataka in which Aralagodu is also situated.

In the following decades, recurring outbreaks remained largely confined to the area. But in recent years, the disease has begun to spread, with cases popping up for the first time in 2013 in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, followed by Goa in 2015 and Maharashtra in 2016.  

Still, the disease barely registers on global health watchlists; outbreaks largely occur in rural areas bordering forest land and affect a tiny percentage of India's population. But the spread of the disease is indicative of a much larger, more worrying trend, as highlighted most recently by the Covid-19 pandemic: the increasing likelihood of zoonotic disease spilling over into human populations.

 

The things that can happen

Gee, who would expect to die of...bacteria contaminated eyedrops?:

US health officials say that eyedrops may have killed one person and severely injured several others due to drug-resistant bacterial contamination.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have identified 68 patients across 16 states with a rare strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

The strain had never been found in the US before this latest outbreak.

In addition to the one death, eight patients have suffered vision loss, and four have had eyes surgically removed.

Most of the patients diagnosed with the infection reported using eyedrops and artificial tears, according to the CDC.

Ten different brands were initially identified as possibly linked to the outbreak, the CDC said. Eyedrops that are made in India and imported to the US under two brands were subsequently pulled from shelves in January and February.

In January, the CDC warned people to stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears and Delsam Pharma's Artificial Tears. The next month, the company that owns the brands - Global Pharma - issued a voluntary recall following a formal recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Twitter is such a bizarre mess now

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice - but the Musk fiddling with Twitter is really making it a complete mess.   It seems to be a on "watch this funny/scary video" bender now.   And really, I just seem to get shown about 10% of the tweets of the people I follow and want to see - or I can change to the "following" tab and it sometimes works to change the view, sometimes not.

I kind of wish it would give up the ghost entirely, so we really can get a decent replacement going.

Up periscope, down periscope

I don't really know what to think of the AUKUS deal, now that it has been warmly embraced by a Labor government, savagely attacked by an ex Labor PM who always seems far too willing to endorse China and attack those who criticise it (while at the same time, being correct that the SMH was being ridiculously bellicose in its recent "this is how a war with China will go down" articles), and met with scepticism by the likes of Hugh White and John Quiggin (the latter having long had it in for defence spending on navies, though.)   

The trouble is, of course, that the term "armchair expert" seems to just about have been invented for opinions on defence programs and procurement, as well as international relations.  Everyone thinks they have a better idea.

So my opinion is certainly going to be ill informed, but I will put it out there again anyway:   we should have gone with Japanese submarines, with some built in Adelaide.  

Update:  There's an article at SMH today by a former diplomat (not sure that's much of a qualification on technical defence issues, TBH) who argues that submarines are going to be made redundant soon anyway:

Manned submarines are nearing the end of their utility in hostile waters because of developments in smart sea mines, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and underwater sensors. China has already made a strong start on this, and will deploy them in large numbers in its coastal region and strategically important areas of the South China Sea and East China Sea.

Australia plans to buy at least three American Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines while it proceeds to build its SSN-AUKUS subs. The acoustic signature of the Virginia-class is known to China. It will be programmed into China’s defensive and offensive capabilities, which are cheap counters to an extremely expensive submarine – one that carries 132 increasingly vulnerable sailors.

By the time Australia gets the submarines from the US in the 2030s, it will be simply too dangerous to deploy them to contested areas that could take advantage of their performance and firepower. They will be restricted to home or benign waters, undercutting their main justification. Russia has already shown this to be true in the air. Its air force rarely ventures into contested territory, preferring to fire missiles from a distance. That is also the future of underwater warfare.

While that sounds sort of plausible, predictions as to the future use of naval power always seems to be a bit of a guessing game.   Going way, way back to when I used to be in navy cadets, and hence sometimes heard the opinions of actual navy officers, I remember that in (probably) the early 1980's there was an Australian senior submariner talking about how the (then new) technology of cruise missiles was going to make surface ships redundant.   Navies would move to having more submarines full of cruise missiles, he argued, with which to sneak up within range and launch from afar, with no significant danger of detection and destruction, in the way surface ships are vulnerable.

Again, sounds kind of plausible, but things haven't exactly panned out like that, have they?   Perhaps because you can fit a hell of a lot more missiles on a surface vessel than a submarine?   Perhaps because the visibility of (say) an aircraft carrier armed to the gills is helpful towards defusing some potential attacks?   

So I don't know - I'm a little skeptical of the "submarines will be redundant soon anyway" argument.

On the other hand, it's a little hard to see where we are going to get enough Australians who want to serve on submarines.   Perhaps we should follow the rest of shipping and just contract Filipinos to do it!

An extremely silly memory post

First, the not-so-silly bit:  an article about how "working memory" works:

In a study in PLOS Computational Biology, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory compared measurements of brain cell activity in an animal performing a working memory task with the output of various computer models representing two theories of the underlying mechanism for holding information in mind. The results strongly favored the newer notion that a network of neurons stores the information by making short-lived changes in the pattern of their connections, or synapses, and contradicted the traditional alternative that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active (like an idling engine).

While both models allowed for information to be held in mind, only the versions that allowed for synapses to transiently change connections ("short-term synaptic plasticity") produced neural activity patterns that mimicked what was actually observed in real brains at work. The idea that brain cells maintain memories by being always "on" may be simpler, acknowledged senior author Earl K. Miller, but it doesn't represent what nature is doing and can't produce the sophisticated flexibility of thought that can arise from intermittent neural activity backed up by short-term synaptic plasticity.

Sounds like synapses must reconfigure themselves very, very quickly, then.   How do they do that, I wonder?

Anyway, now for the silly bit.  For some reason, every now and then a memory of a bit of music written for just one episode of Lost in Space, and which I haven't heard for decades, bubbles up to my awareness.    This happened yesterday, and it's the "groovy" music that nearly brainwashes poor Penny (girls being much more susceptible to such things), but fails to win over good old, sensible boy Will Robinson.

Actually, I had trouble remembering the context in full until I went to Youtube.  For a while I wondered if it was from Get Smart, as I had an idea that it featured an episode with hypnotic hippy music too.   But the internet sorted me out - the Get Smart episode has a track with the message to kill, kill, kill the dean, and bump off a square.  (How could I forget that!)

It turns out that someone has gone to the trouble of editing together and fiddling with the various dance bits from the Lost in Space episode in question ("The Promised Planet") to make a whole video of the track, and it's exquisitely silly:

 

If you don't like this self made clip, there is this alternative, which is also repetitive but maybe better? 

I like this comment following:

I needed this video...that weird Penny Dance has haunted me for years and needed to see it like this...a 10 hour cut would be epic...this song is my Ring Tone by the way...

And wow - the audio track is up on Youtube too and I guess I could convert it to a ringtone too?   I have never bothered with silly ringtones, but I am tempted.

As for the whole story of that episode of Lost in Space (season 3, when they were getting desperate for ideas), I have a watched some guy's commentary on it to refresh my memory.  The Robinsons think they have landed on Alpha Centauri, but the station is run by teenagers, who turn out to be aliens who cannot turn into adults even though they want to.   Before I re-watched the end scene, I remembered how at age 9 or 10 I thought the line "all I wanted to do is be able to shave" was sort of poignant: 

Lost in Space was sometimes like that:   the execution may be very, very silly, but sometimes there was the hint of an idea that might make for something decent if told another way.   

Anyway, I wonder why my brain is dredging this up for my attention every now and then? Must be something about the strength of the synaptic connections made when 9 years old!

Update:  I just remembered that there's another track last heard by me about 50 years ago, which I remember bits of every now and then:  a cover version on some cheapo LP of  this "psychedelic" song by a German band that I don't think was ever played in Australia.  My mother bought the LP, not me.

Tears for the transhumanists

As noted in this story at Nature, gene editing by CRISPR on human embryos is still not a thing, basically because it's too clumsy a technique:

As well as addressing broader concerns about ethics and social justice, editing embryos would require a safe and effective genome-editing platform to minimize the chances of harm to the embryo, the resulting child and any descendants. Most research on genome editing in embryos, however, has been done using animal models such as mice, which might not accurately reflect what happens in human embryos. And, although potential genome-editing therapies have been widely studied in adult human cells, embryos might respond differently than adult cells to the DNA damage caused by some of the tools.

Only a handful of laboratories have directly tried to edit the genomes of human embryos using the popular editing system CRISPR–Cas9, and several of these presented concerning results at the summit.

The Cas9 enzyme works by breaking both strands of DNA at a site designated by a guiding piece of RNA. The cell then repairs the break, either by using an error-prone mechanism that stitches the two ends together but sometimes deletes or inserts a few DNA letters in the process, or by replacing the missing DNA with a sequence copied from a template provided by the researcher. DNA breaks created by Cas9 in embryos are usually repaired using the error-prone pathway, said Dietrich Egli, a stem-cell biologist at Columbia University in New York City, at the conference.

Egli and other researchers also reported on the consequences of the double-strand breaks made by Cas9. Developmental biologist Kathy Niakan, now at the University of Cambridge, UK, recounted that her lab found that some human embryos lost large regions of chromosomes when they were edited using CRISPR–Cas9¹. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, also said that his team had found large DNA deletions at the editing site in human embryos, and that these deletions might not be detected using standard tests².

“Can human embryos at this stage really tolerate this kind of intervention?” asked Dagan Wells, a reproductive geneticist at the University of Oxford, UK, who also reported concerning responses to DNA breaks in human embryos. About 40% of the embryos in one of his genome-editing studies failed to repair broken DNA. More than one-third of those embryos continued to develop, he said, resulting in the loss or gain of pieces of chromosomes in some cells. That could harm the health of the child if such embryos were allowed to develop further. “These results are really a warning,” he said.

 

 

Fad nerve

Here, I'll gift an article from the New York Times about the (rather faddish) attention that has been given to the vagus nerve on social media.   

I've had Youtubes recommended to me about "toning" this nerve (really, a bunch of nerves), and none of it sounded very convincing:

In recent years, the vagus nerve has become an object of fascination, especially on social media. The vagal nerve fibers, which run from the brain to the abdomen, have been anointed by some influencers as the key to reducing anxiety, regulating the nervous system and helping the body to relax.

TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times and there are nearly 70,000 posts with the hashtag on Instagram. Some of the most popular ones feature simple hacks to “tone” or “reset” the vagus nerve, in which people plunge their faces into ice water baths or lie on their backs with ice packs on their chests. There are also neck and ear massages, eye exercises and deep-breathing techniques.

Now, wellness companies have capitalized on the trend, offering products like “vagus massage oil,” vibrating bracelets and pillow mists, that claim to stimulate the nerve, but that have not been endorsed by the scientific community.

 Apparently, stimulation of it by implanted devices has seemed to help some conditions, but if you aren't going to go under the knife, you've still got to resort to things like putting your face in ice water.

I'm ok, thanks...

"Stupidest cult" watch

 

Yet more retrocausation and superdeterminism discussion

Gee, I would not have guessed that it is now over a year since I had a fairly lengthy post about the confusing issue of the difference between the ideas of "retrocausation" and "superdeterminism" as explanations for (or solutions to) the quantum measurement problem.   

But there is an article up at the Conversation which tries to explain the distinction between the two:

Quantum mechanics:  how the future might influence the past

I have to say, though, that the explanation doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense to me.   (Ha!, you might laugh - I'm expecting intuitive sense from quantum mechanics?)   I have the strongest feeling that Sabine Hossenfelder is going to have a problem with these paragraphs:

Superdeterminism agrees with retrocausality that measurement choices and the underlying properties of the particles are somehow correlated.

But superdeterminism treats it like the correlation between the weather and the barometer needle. It assumes there’s some mysterious third thing – a “superdeterminer” – that controls and correlates both our choices and the particles, the way atmospheric pressure controls both the weather and the barometer.

So superdeterminism denies that measurement choices are things we are free to wiggle at will, they are predetermined. Free wiggles would break the correlation, just as in the barometer case. Critics object that superdeterminism thus undercuts core assumptions necessary to undertake scientific experiments. They also say that it means denying free will, because something is controlling both the measurement choices and particles.

These objections don’t apply to retrocausality. Retrocausalists do scientific causal discovery in the usual free, wiggly way. We say it is folk who dismiss retrocausality who are forgetting the scientific method, if they refuse to follow the evidence where it leads.

I await her commentary...

 

Beautiful

From the Oscars today, and a little movie from 1984:

Incidentally, Stephen Colbert did a protracted interview with Steven Spielberg (alone, and with John Williams) and showed it segmented over a couple of nights last week.

I have said it before, but Spielberg always comes across as a very decent and quite humble man who has made no significant enemies in his career, and makes for a loyal and good friend.   He and Williams have been close friends for 50 years!  And for a man in his 90's, Williams still seems as sharp as a tack.   Their discussion of Williams' music in some of Spielberg's key movies is enlightening:

 

I also liked this short clip of Spielberg talking about the movie he has watched most often (excluding any of his own).   As it happens, I've never seen it all - only bits and pieces:

Update: for the first time in quite a few years, I watched all of the Oscars because, although I don't think it's the greatest movie ever made, Everything Everywhere All at Once did seem to have an unusually large number of likeable personalities attached to it.   And it was, at heart, good natured and positive, and made on a small budget:  all things that it's nice seeing a film being rewarded for.  And hey, Spielberg was going to be there too (I feel guilty for not having seen The Fabelmans yet), and I like Jimmy Kimmel as host, so it was worth a look.

The reviews for the show have been positive - the near universal theme being that it felt like a relief to watch a version which wasn't, um, trying too hard.   It felt like a throwback to an older style, with one slightly sardonic male host making relatively safe jokes, and although I suppose Asian representation was a significant theme, it didn't feel like the show was an intense complaint about it, in the way that in recent years they seemed to be in relation to black and female representation.   

So, good job everybody.

My main complaint about the awards given:   I reckon that song from RRR is pretty awful, as is all of that silly movie.   I don't understand why it received such sympathetic reviews in the States.

Why isn't the Washington Post leading with a headline: "Defamation case evidence shows Fox staff and management thought their audience was dumb and gullible but had to be pandered to"

The Washington Post has another deep dive into the Dominion defamation evidence - communications between Fox management, some of whom formerly worked for Trump.   

The evidence is just red hot, but you have go a fair way in the article to get to the worst of it, and look at the bland headline:

Ex-Trump aide at Fox wrestled with election lies, network’s interests

That's ridiculously soft.   Read what they were saying amongst themselves:

Despite his behind-the-scenes lobbying, Shah counseled a middle course in dealing with her claims on air. On the day after Carlson publicly challenged Powell, Shah and a Carlson producer weighed whether Carlson should devote time in his next show to Powell’s claim that she had an affidavit that would link Dominion to Venezuela.

“Might wanna address this, but this stuff is so f------ insane. Vote rigging to the tune of millions? C’mon,” Shah wrote.

Carlson’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, responded: “It is so insane but our viewers believe it so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t proof might insult them.”

Shah advised that Carlson should mention the affidavit noting it was “not new info, not proof” but then quickly “pivot to being deferential.”

Pfeiffer, who has since left the network, answered that the delicate dance was “surreal.”

“Like negotiating with terrorists,” he added, “but especially dumb ones. Cousin f----- types not saudi royalty.”

In the following weeks, Trump continued to court voices who embraced his false claims the election was stolen — and Powell continued to appear on Fox.

On Jan. 3 — three days before the Capitol was attacked by Trump supporters as Congress met to confirm Biden’s win — Shah exchanged text messages with another former White House spokesman, Josh Raffel, who had been primarily responsible for handling communications for Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner.

Raffel flagged to Shah a tweet noting that Trump’s daily schedule now carried with it the vague assurance that the president would make “many calls and have many meetings” and “work from early in the morning until late in the evening.”

“I think what they meant is The President will wake up early and commit many, many crimes including but not limited to obstruction of justice, attempted fraud, and treason in an effort to conduct a coup. Then he’ll fly to a rally in furtherance of the same,” Raffel wrote. (Now a public relations executive in New York, Raffel declined to comment on the text.)

“It’s really disheartening,” Shah responded. “The only clear cut evidence for voter fraud is the failed attempts from Trump.”

Hey John:   next time you are over at New Catallaxy, can you bring to cranky old Tom's attention that he's been had?   For years his theme has been "MSM journalists hate their readers" because they don't  write stuff that endorses his political and social biases.

Now the evidence is out there, in black and white, that in fact Fox (the heroic network that tells it like it is - hahaha) has management, including those who work with Carlson, who secretly despised the stupidity of their audience - such as Tom.  And Carlson himself despises Trump.

It's a harsh lesson, but time for Tom, and a host of New Catallaxy participants, to admit that they've been had, as those on the MSM side have been trying to tell them for years....

 

Monbiot on Brand

I enjoyed George Monbiot's take down of Russell Brand (and Rogan and Greenwald) both in The Guardian and on Twitter.   (I also learned for the first time that George has a full public disclosure of this income and assets - and it certainly appears he hasn't become rich through journalism and advocacy.   It's quite refreshing to see this openness from someone like him and I wish there were more of it.)

I happened to watch Brand's smug, loudmouthed performance on Bill Maher's show on Youtube last week.  I don't care for Maher, who suffers to a much milder degree from "a pox on both their houses" form of criticism, while actually complaining most about the Left, but his guests can make him worth watching.   Brand is like Maher X 20, though.  As Monbiot says:  

I can’t help noticing that most of the people who say “left? right? It’s all meaningless, man” are those who have made a major shift from left to right. Denying that left and right exist any longer seems to be a form of self-justification.

Someone else on Twitter made this wry observation of Brand as guru, too:

I am also more on the side of those on Twitter who responded to Monbiot with "actually, I've never cared for Brand, there always seemed something off about him, and his true addiction has always been to seeking attention".  

Monbiot thinks that Brand is merely chasing money and been corrupted by the algorithm, so to speak:

I don’t believe for a moment that his transition is ideological. I think it’s cynical. 

Here I think George is not giving enough credence to the psychological rule that if you pretend something long enough, you start to believe it.   But that rule also tends to make me agree with him here:

I think Russell, like Glenn Greenwald(@ggreenwald),@joerogan and other such entrepreneurs, who do not seem to be not committed to the far right themes they now amplify, but appear to use them to ramp up their numbers, are more dangerous than the actual fascists.

I think that second "not" is an error, by the way;  but I agree with the idea that someone who makes a lot of money by spouting fascist arguments while privately not believing or fully endorsing them (to a degree, surely we can put Carlson in that group now too?) may be more dangerous simply because of their successful reach and greedy motivation to never admit error.    

The claw

I'm having a hard time getting around to writing up a holiday report on Hanoi and nearby areas, but before then, I will note one minor oddity I didn't know about Vietnam:  the popularity of chicken feet as a packaged snack, as is shown by their continual presence in convenience stores:

I mean, I sometimes eat chicken feet at a yum cha restaurant, but the idea of eating a pre-cooked one from the shelf is not highly appealing.

Drilling for hydrogen?

I didn't know anything about this:  

The Malian discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas—but not in the same places. These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America. 

That's from a lengthy article about it at Science, which I hope is open for all to read.   

It also points out how drilling for oil has such a short history:

It is still early days for natural hydrogen. Scientists don’t completely understand how it forms and migrates and—most important—whether it accumulates in a commercially exploitable way. “Interest is growing fast, but the scientific facts are still lacking,” says Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geophysicist at Grenoble Alpes University. Big Oil is hanging back, watching while wildcatters take on the risky exploratory work. Commercialization of the Mali field has run into snags, and elsewhere only a few exploratory wells have been drilled. Donzé, who has sworn off accepting industry money, worries about hype.

Yet some scientists have become true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University of Bern, left a career at French oil giant Total because it wasn’t moving fast enough on hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery might end up in the history books alongside one that happened 163 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania. At the time, the world knew about seeps of oil in places such as Iraq and California but was blind to the vast deposits that lay underground. Then on 27 August 1859, a nearly bankrupt prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine and cast-iron drill pipes, struck black gold at a depth of 21 meters, and began collecting it in a bathtub. Before long, U.S. companies were harvesting millions of bathtubs of oil every day.

“I am thinking we are not very far from that with hydrogen,” Gaucher says. “We have the concept, we have the tools, the geology. … We only need people able to invest.”

 

Flash floods in dry areas discussed

From a commentary piece at Nature:

Last year, around two-thirds of Pakistan was affected by widespread flash flooding, with more than 1,500 people killed and around 33 million made homeless. Almost 2,000 people died in flash floods across Africa, and parts of the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Yemen were inundated with water.

Flash floods are a growing threat in some of the world’s driest regions. Deluges can trigger sudden and rapid torrents of run-off that flow down dry river beds and rocky channels.

Because parched soils repel water rather than allowing it to soak in, flash floods can be more devastating in drylands than in wetter areas. Surges can result from relatively small amounts of rain, as little as 10 millimetres in one hour. By comparison, floods in wetter regions typically follow more prolonged bouts of rainfall.

Look at this:

A slew of other factors will put many more people at risk from flash floods in future (see ‘Drylands: flash-flood risks’). Climate change is making such events more intense and frequent^1–3. In parts of Pakistan, for example, the 5-day maximum level of rainfall is 75% greater today than it was before 1900 (see go.nature.com/41awzzj). Our analysis shows that globally, the rate of dryland flash flooding was 20 times higher between 2000 and 2022 than it was between 1900 and 1999 (numbering 278 and 64 floods, respectively).