I've always been skeptical of Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic joy ride space plane, and now I see that someone at The Spectator claims that it is wildly unlikely to ever be profitable, and will (economically, if not physically) crash and burn in the relatively near future.
Here's another gift link from the NYT, about how African countries find it difficult to raise the investment needed for solar power and other clean energy.
Political instability would have to have a lot to do with that.
And on that topic - does anyone really have good ideas as to how to deal with that, in the African context?
The NYT version of the science story last week that maybe we (in the generic sense) barely made it through a population bottleneck:
Researchers in China have found evidence suggesting that 930,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans suffered a massive population crash. They point to a drastic change to the climate that occurred around that time as the cause.
Our ancestors remained at low numbers — fewer than 1,280 breeding individuals — during a period known as a bottleneck. It lasted for over 100,000 years before the population rebounded.
“About 98.7 percent of human ancestors were lost at the beginning of the bottleneck, thus threatening our ancestors with extinction,” the scientists wrote. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
If the research holds up, it will have provocative implications. It raises the possibility that a climate-driven bottleneck helped split early humans into two evolutionary lineages — one that eventually gave rise to Neanderthals, the other to modern humans.
But:
But outside experts said they were skeptical of the novel statistical methods that the researchers used for the study. “It is a bit like inferring the size of a stone that falls into the middle of the large lake from only the ripples that arrive at the shore some minutes later,” said Stephan Schiffels, a population geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.Watch this space, I suppose. I suspect it's an idea that won't hold up - but that's just an uninformed hunch.
I quite liked Annabel Crabb's article on the Voice, as it does explain the difference with the 1967 referendum, and pretty much acknowledges that it's legitimate that the public is confused about the new referendum.
I see on the increasingly trashy X (my God, I'm getting a lot of Right wing, MAGA guff thrown at me now, but the clear successor to it is still not apparent) that the Lefty pro-Voice folk whose tweets make it through to me are very impressed with the new advertisement featuring John Farnham's song and think it might just turn things around for them. I'm way less convinced - I thought the ad featured some odd acting by the (I think) key male actor, who seems to stare in puzzlement at the TV while it features some key pro-aboriginal moments in history. I would have to watch it again to fully understand the narrative it's trying to show in that actor.
Personally, I'm still conflicted about it all.
On the one hand, I don't want to be on the side of Peter Dutton and the cynical No case which is playing this for party political advantage. I also don't want to be seen as on the Lidia Thorpe radical side against it.
On the other hand, I am very cynical about many of the presumptions of the Yes case - primarily, that governments have not been listening for the last several decades to the myriad of aboriginal organisations; and that adding another layer of bureaucracy in terms of who the government needs to listen to is likely to achieve any significant change. (It will, to be very cynical, probably increase the income of a class of aboriginal activist who are already firmly entrenched in the roles of advice to government.)
Then there is "the vibe" - the Yes case is nominally painted as a racially unifying act, but the general "vibe" of aboriginal activism over the last 30 years seems to me to be moving in the opposite direction. It has included attempts at rehabilitating (really, romanticising) the pre-colonial lifestyle and conditions; increasingly common power flexes over matters such as access to national parks because of claims of sacred or special status (including over sites never previously the subject of such talk); increasing and sometimes opportunistic claims to aboriginality by persons with either little (or no provable) actual evidence of aboriginal ancestry; and (if you believe the signs held by young activists at any rally) a denial of the very legitimacy of the Australian government and land ownership in toto (it's "unceded land", after all.) Similarly, the "welcome to country" fits right into a view that it's not really the land of everyone, but somehow still theirs.
I reckon the general trajectory of aboriginal activism has moved away from something like a late 1960's multicultural view of everyone working together co-operatively, with opportunity being open to all, to an increasingly divisive attitude centred on a type of identity politics that concentrates on grievance rather than opportunity.
As I have said before, Noel Pearson used to be an activist who leant towards the "must take responsibility for our advancement" attitude, and he occasionally still makes some noises along those lines, but I think it fair to say that such a conservative-ish attitude is far in the minority.
To flip back again - to complain about the general attitude - the "vibe" - of recent decades of indigenous advocacy is not to deny that historical institutional racism casts a very, very long shadow, and deserves forms of compensation and assistance to those who are economically disadvantaged from it.
But I don't see that this means we have to pretend that all claims are true or useful: I'm not of a postmodern view that terms are open to a change of meaning at a whim, such as I complained about in my recent post about the Dark Emu agenda. And I do think that academia has played a gullible and often unhelpful role in this game of grievance amplification.
So, I don't know what to do.
If I vote yes, it will be in the expectation that it will further entrench the inherent conflicts across indigenous advocacy, and result in a likely greater waste of money than under the present system, and be taken as a general support for a trajectory in advocacy that I do not support.
If I vote no, it may be taken as support of the radicals who I really do not want to support.
I think just leaving the ballot blank is an option, but that feels a bit too much like sitting on the fence, too.
Suggestions, anyone?
Update: Noel Pearson is now arguing that if the Voice is established it would mean:
... Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would no longer be able to say, “it’s the government’s fault” for failing to improve educational outcomes, as well as housing and health policies for remote communities.
But how does that make sense when the government is not bound to follow the advice of the body, and (as I have said from the start), what is bound to happen is that on the most contentious issues, the Voice will make a recommendation and there will immediately be dispute about whether it is the right recommendation from within aboriginal activism.
I mean, I can give credit for Pearson still pushing a line that it's important for the indigenous to take responsibility for some of the problems that befall them, but there is just no reason to believe the argument that the Voice is a way to end "blame the government".
I heard Noel Pearson on Radio National this morning, gushing how the "Yes"to the Voice side is coming from the side of Love. You can read about the message here:
Pearson rejects Voice rage, says Yes side must ‘maintain the love’
This, it seems pretty clear, is an attempt to reset his advocacy from his (and Langton's, and quite a few others) position that (my paraphrase, of course) "to vote No is essentially a racist position that ruins everything about race relations forever, and so we will justifiably hate you and this country forever more."
Well, at least I'm glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to sometimes get a little confused between Naomi Klein and (now, generic mad woman) Naomi Wolfe.
Klein has written a whole book about it, as explained in this New York Times article, which I'll gift link.
I see the bizarre Canadian story about the mega fake boob wearing teacher is back in the news because (as hard to believe as this is) it seems he has been employed at a different school, which has warned parents they have to respect his rights to his "gender expression", and the school will take special security precautions (which sound inconvenient for the kids) because of the expected protests.
In any comments following articles about this, there are people who still suspect this is a massive troll by the teacher, who has at least once been photographed going about his normal life as a male and without the ridiculous fake boobs. (He has also, apparently, given all types of explanations as to them being "real".)
I guess, as a troll, it might be considered successful - the total apparent sincerity of the new school board showing that they have zero common sense and are complete ideological captives on such an issue is astounding.
But even so, how nutty do you have to be to carry out such a troll for so long?
Trump open to Vivek Ramaswamy as vice president
I reckon that their working relationship would be lucky to last 6 months. Look at the history of other nuts who have tried to be on Team Trump.
By the way - Vivek is so crazy I don't have any substantial fear of him every support much beyond the MAGA (plus nutty technocrat billionaire and their fanboys) crowd.
I think Nikki Haley is capable of broader appeal - but as the last post notes, can she really get past changing her view of Trump every second week?
Here's a column by Frank Bruni at NYT pointing out the "pathetic" history of Nikki Haley's continual flip flopping on her support/condemnation of Donald Trump.
It's not just the intellectual dishonesty, it's the moral cowardice, and it applies to so, so many Republicans like her.
At the Catholic Herald, a big claim in the first sentence here:
As an AI-based app currently in the beta phase, Magisterium AI “could be a game changer for the Church”, Sanders said.Further down:
The app is an AI that is trained by using a limited number of Church documents and which, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, can be used to generate human-like text on specific content that could be used by anyone from church scholars and academics, canon lawyers, students seeking well-sourced information to assist in studies, and anyone curious about church teaching.
According to Sanders, the difference between Magisterium AI and ChatGPT is that “our AI is trained on a private database of only Church documents”, and therefore there is less chance the AI will “hallucinate”, which is tech jargon for “make stuff up”.
The app, launched earlier this year, currently has around 2,580 magisterial documents in its knowledge database, and the list is growing....
Magisterium AI is currently partnering with the Orientale, which contains the largest library on Eastern Christianity, to digitise the library’s contents and add the documents it contains to the app’s database so the AI can train on them and make them available to users across the world.
I look forward to hearing from the new, future AI PopeBot.
First. please read the footnote to this blog entry back in 2010.
Then, I offer as further evidence in support of my proposed Kant fan fiction/screenplay:
The billiards bit is at least confirmed here:
He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the frivolous activities common to university students.[9] Yet Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of money to help defray the cost of living.
And the card playing is mentioned here:
He would stay up late drinking wine and playing cards with his friends. He’d sleep late and eat too much and host big parties.
It wasn’t until he turned 40 that he dropped it all and developed the routine life he later made famous. He said that he developed this routine at 40 because he realized the moral implications of his actions and decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time or energy his consciousness had left.
I don't want to know that he dropped his time wasting ways at 40, though. In my screenplay, that's when he hit the higher class gambling dens and pleasure houses of Europe, as a Prussian James Bond, before becoming the uber-prude we all know and love. ;)
Recently Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, expressed some puzzlement in a post on X, formerly Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”
OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.
If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.
I’ve written about some of these things before, in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in the light of Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the G.O.P. nomination but could conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they appeal to so many wealthy men.
The key thing is, success can easily lead to over-estimation of your ability to understand complicated stuff:
Success all too easily feeds the belief that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject without working hard to understand the issues or consulting people who have; this kind of arrogance may be especially rife among tech types who got rich by defying conventional wisdom. The wealthy also tend to surround themselves with people who tell them how brilliant they are or with other wealthy people who join them in mutual affirmation of their superiority to mere technical drones — what the tech writer Anil Dash calls “V.C. QAnon.”
So where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the generations-old system of fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that “hyperinflation will change everything. It’s happening.”
Now, I’m quite willing to admit that monetary economics isn’t as solid a science as epidemiology or climatology. And yes, even noncrank economists argue about some big issues much more than their hard-science counterparts.
But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, “a technical and difficult subject” — one on which you shouldn’t make pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history — although “no one will believe it.” Certainly people who think they understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than epidemiologists are also likely to think they understand money better than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them that the world doesn’t work the way they think it does are engaged in some kind of hoax or conspiracy.
He adds near the end:
Thanks to the tech boom, there are probably more wealthy cranks than there used to be, and they’re wealthier than ever, too. They also have a more receptive audience in the form of a Republican Party whose confidence in the scientific community has collapsed since the mid-2000s.All sounds like a good enough explanation.
I guess this story will further cement Australia's reputation for all things dangerous:
Woman complained of forgetfulness and depression before doctors pulled out an 8cm roundworm normally found in pythons
It's kind of interesting that her earlier symptoms were to do with digestion, though:
It was a fairly regular day on the ward for Canberra hospital infectious diseases physician Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, until a neurosurgeon colleague called him and said: “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.”
The neurosurgeon, Dr Hari Priya Bandi, had pulled an 8cm-long parasitic roundworm from her patient, prompting her to call on Senanayake and other hospital colleagues for advice about what to do next.
The patient, a 64-year-old woman from south-eastern New South Wales, was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.
By 2022, her symptoms also included forgetfulness and depression, prompting a referral to Canberra hospital. An MRI scan of her brain revealed abnormalities requiring surgery.
I'll gift a link to this Washington Post article talking about concerns as to whether commercial building values in inner cities are (due to Covid forcing us how to do remote working) going to drop so badly that it will stuff up the economy.
This was a worry I was muttering about early in the Covid pandemic - because it was pretty remarkable how quickly everything was able to keep ticking over despite the dramatic drop in the number of people who needed to be in the inner city. And it's not as if turning office blocks into apartments or hotels is an easy thing to do in most cases.
It's a tricky thing, though, in the sense that if you're worried about transport's contribution to greenhouse gases, remote working is a great thing. Is that why John Quiggin is (I think) not worried at all about this as a major problem?
But half empty city buildings - it still feels lonely, and wrong.
Update: Anecdotal evidence, but still -
By the way, as far as Brisbane is concerned: seems to me that it might turn out to be a case of lucky timing that the inner city is having major transport and facility upgrades for the Olympics over the next decade. They should make the inner city more appealing place to visit, if not work, I would have thought?
Slate has stepped away from it's first person "this is my weird sex life" stories (why does this magazine spend so much time on these often hard to believe, click baity advice columns? I only occasionally click on them - honest) to print the account of one of the women who accidentally ended up in the mouth of a feeding humpback whale a couple of years ago. I'm pretty sure I saw the video about it at the time.
From the story, there is this fact, which I don't recall being in my brain before (my bold):
...if you slow it down just a little bit, you can see us sliding right into the whale’s mouth as he closes it and the only thing sticking out of the mouth is my right arm. I guess it happens to sea lions a lot and those kinds of animals because whales and sea lions are feeding on the same fish. The throat of a whale is about the size of a grapefruit. Anything that’s larger than that just kind of comes out. Thank goodness for that. We were in more danger of drowning or being squashed.
Who ordered or arranged the completely over the top police/security escort to Trump's arrest in Atlanta last week?
Many people were commenting on Twitter about how ridiculously extreme it seemed. And even if there had been early concerns about the number of pro (or anti) Trump protesters who might be outside the courthouse, you would deal with that with police on the ground, not on motorcycles and in SUVs.
I am amongst those who suspect it was arranged by the creepy MAGA element within the local police force, in a "we ride with him as a sign of support"type vibe.
But has any journalist looked into that yet?
The first is by Singaporean content creator Sneaky Sushii, who for some reason has done a series of videos with a supernatural theme, even though he presents himself as an all round skeptic. (He's also not Buddhist or Taoist - I suspect based on his appearing dressed as a bishop in an old video that his family might be nominally Christian.)
There are two interesting things about the video:
1. that in a modern city like Singapore, they do brightly lit, drive in ghost concerts in their Chinese cemeteries;
2. in the comments following the video, so many of his young fan base praise him for his great bravery in going into the cemetery at night and trying to find a ghost to communicate with (indicating how Singaporean young folk still firmly believe in the supernatural, even if otherwise not so religious. Well, I doubt they are conventionally religious, anyway. A bit like the Japanese, I expect.)
Anyhow, the video:
The second video is a useful educational background on the history of the Chinese ghost festival, from the great Religion for Breakfast Youtube channel. Not much to say about this, except that as always, he does a really good job.
Oh, actually I do have something further to say. He points out in the video that the festival's most important date this year falls on 30 August. This does actually explain why at my work, a matter due to settle that day, involving a Chinese buyer, has been brought forward to 29 August. I guess every year I should keep track of the date, just in case it affects other Chinese I'm dealing with...
