Weight watch

After eating quite a lot yesterday, I weighed in at 89.3kg this morning.  Still 4kg down from my starting point a fortnight or so ago.  Yesterday morning (after a fasting day) it was 88.7kg.

I wonder how long to break the 88kg barrier.  

I should also note that the loss of just 3 to 4 kg has had a significant effect on my blood pressure, which is giving some very comfortingly "normal" readings after a couple of years of worryingly high readings at times.  And it seems that intermittent fasting itself, rather than just the loss of weight, might have be the reason.  Here's Perplexity:

 Studies have shown that intermittent fasting can result in rapid improvements in blood pressure, particularly in people with elevated or hypertensive levels. Research involving hypertensive patients who fasted for about 15-16 hours daily over 30 days demonstrated significant reductions in both systolic and diastolic blood pressures. These improvements were not associated with notable changes in body weight or other metabolic markers over the one-month period. Instead, the primary mechanisms linked to the blood pressure improvements involved reductions in angiotensin II and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) activity, key regulators of blood pressure, as well as positive changes in markers of autonomic nervous system activity (such as heart rate variability).

With alternative day fasting, I think the results are even faster.

Quite a pleasing thing to discover. 

Update:  88.0 kg this morning.   Good.  Good. 

Update:  Two days later, after a particularly big eating non fasting day (my stomach did feel overstretched - I overate at lunch), and another fast day - 87.9kg.   

So, still progressing.  I will eat more within carefully today. 

Stop trying to normalise fantasy relationships

From the New York Times:  a sympathetic take on three people who have had "relationships" with chatbots.    

(Arguably, I reckon a Buddhist shouldn't have any problem with such relationships, as their analysis virtually puts humans barely above chatbots.  Or am I being unfair?)  

Update:  oh, it just occurred to me too - maybe atheists don't see much harm in it either, because they can draw a comparison to the way some Christians perceive themselves having a deep and meaningful "personal relationship" with God or Jesus.  (Especially the emotional evangelicals.  Of course, Catholics believe in talking to God via prayer, but that's more of a pure one way street compared to use of a chatbot.)      

Oh dear, it's David Brooks again

David Brooks. I'm not sure that there is any other opinion writer in the main stream media who seems to have the talent of writing views with which I feel I can I can say "Yes...Yes...Yes;" only to then read a paragraph that leads to anti-climatic "Nooooo."

Take, for example, his second most recent column in which, actually, the "Nooooo" came first.  He opens with criticism of the Democrats for shutting down the government because it wants to preserve lower health insurance costs;  only later does he get stuck into Trump and the modern Republicans for trashing all previous "democratic norms".   

But the most recent column (Hey Lefties! Trump has stolen your game!) the "yes's" came first - he makes the point I'm sure I've said before here: that the MAGA movement has co-opted what the Republicans used to criticise in Leftist intellectual circles - such as postmodernism-ly believing that Truth doesn't matter and isn't a real thing, and everything is but putty in the hands of power.    I think it's a really good list of the way the American Right has intellectually debased itself.   But then, at the end, he blows it:

But the left doesn’t get off the hook. Since 1848, leftist intellectuals have been working on a core body of thought, composed, in part, from the ideas listed above. Back in 2020, woke Democrats embraced these ideas with gusto — until Donald Trump utterly co-opted and discredited them. One of the reasons the Democratic Party is struggling so much is that the radical left ideologies that undergirded its cultural stances are kaput, and it hasn’t yet built a more moderate intellectual tradition to fall back on. 

Much wild exaggeration there, me thinks.  He just can't resist turning things around to find a way to blame Democrats, after all. 

Good Lord - Russell Crowe has made a decent film again?

It feels like a very long time since Crowe was in anything decent:  he seemed almost to have descended into late career Orson Welles territory, if you ask me. 

But here you go.  The Washington Post review calls his performance "Oscar-courting".  Huh. 

The never ending working life in Japan (via the New York Times)

This human interest story at the New York Times (about 5 centenarians in Japan who are still working - and happy to be doing so) is very charming, and I really like the design, with the short, clear videos as your scroll down.  It's a really impressive use of the medium, don't you think? 

For my future reference

I like dishes that combine meat and fruit, and here's another one from the Washington Post for future reference:

Sounds too simple, but people in comments like it, and suggest using sweetened balsamic instead of pomegranate molasses.  I have a couple of bottles of rather sweet apple flavoured balsamic from Stanthorpe which are being used up very slowly - I think that could work well.  
 

Rivers in the sky discussed in detail at the Washington Post

Well, they haven't exactly been promoting it highly on their website:  and I can't even see a "gift link" to it, so I don't know if this link is behind a paywall or not.

But - the Washington Post has complied a graphics heavy, but very useful, article on the increased flooding under climate change from increased moisture flow in the atmosphere, and the parts of the world it is affecting most.  (It includes an interactive global map.)   It reads more like a science journal article than a newspaper story, and it's very good. 

I don't understand how stupid old climate deniers can watch the regularly occurring news of record floods (and record rainfall intensity)* and continue to think that climate change is socialist conspiracy.   They are, basically, too stupid to argue with; but unfortunately, they still influence politicians.  

 

* Latest example - Hoi An and central Vietnam. 

Diet tales

The scales have been indicating the weight was still slowly climbing - I once thought 90 kg was a barrier I would settle at, but it reached 93 kg probably a few months ago and stayed there.  In fact, it was one morning's reading last week of 93.3kg that made be decide enough was enough.

My famously sedentary lifestyle obviously is not helping, as is living in a household of only 2 adults again leading to eating larger size servings of leftovers.  (Both my wife and I are having trouble adjusting cooking sizes from "enough for 4, with some leftovers" to "enough for 2".)   

Anyway, I've dieted before, more or less successfully, using the old 5:2 diet, but I usually ended it because of getting sick of trying to work out how to make 500 to 600 calories on a "fast" day as tasty and as filling (and varied) as possible.  

So, I commanded Youtube to tell me what other system to try, and one that works pretty quickly too.

It seems that the various types of "fasting" diets other than 5:2 are now getting the most attention:  the restricted hours one; or alternate days; or even more extreme stuff.  

I went with alternate days. The advantage that appealed to me is the simplicity of just not eating on the days that is my duty, and not calorie counting at all on any day of the week.   I also ignored the advice of some to ease into it by things like skipping breakfast, or lunch, for a while, or whatever.    I just stopped eating for a day at a time, and eating what I want on the next - although I have taken the universal advice of not having a high carb breakfast and having (for example) a nice two egg omelette with ham, cheese, spring onion and little bit of diced tomato in it, on one piece of wholegrain toast.  That really is a very filling breakfast on a very empty stomach.   And later during an eating day, I really don't find a desire to eat any substantially larger size portions.   Even if you do take a particularly rich meal, as the people on Youtube say, there's no way you're likely to eat anything close to the calories you missed the day before.

The first few fasting days were pretty hunger inducing - although it's not hunger pangs as such that bother me, it's more the general "off", slightly headachy, feeling of knowing your body would like some food now but can't have it.   But yesterday - fasting day 5 since I started just over a week ago - I felt fine all day.  It really didn't feel at all like the earlier days, and came with a clear and non distracted mind (as lots of people claim fasting provides) and I really only started to feel a tad hungry when I went to bed late last  night.

So yeah, I hope I have reached the point that the body has just accepted the fasting days and stops complaining about it.  Curious to see how tomorrow goes.

And how has the weight gone?   Surprisingly quickly - in fact I'm starting to wonder about the scales.  After 5 fast days (alternate days only), the scales showed 89.2 this morning.   I do weight myself the same time each day, before breakfast, and after toilet, which no doubt means it's the lightest I am all day.   But from 93.3kg (or even if that reading was not quite right, let's call it 93) to just over 89kg is more than I expected.

I know that the first few kilos can drop quicker on any diet than the later ones, so I shouldn't get too excited.   I think, ideally, a weight of 85kg would be OK to reach and maintain.  Depending on my exact height, it looks from BMI calculators that 84 would put me just under "overweight" by a tiny fraction, and 85 puts me a tiny fraction over.   But depending on how my trousers are fitting, which have been bought for a weight closer to 90kg, I think a long maintained 85kg might be fine.  If I can fit comfortably into the suit pants I bought - I dunno, 9 or 10 years ago? - I would be happy.

So, we will see how we go. 

Loose thoughts

*  It's funny how Noah Smith told the world a few months ago that he had re-gained his libido (after many years of mysteriously having none, and he had checked it out medically), but this seems to have coincided with his become more right wing.   He's never been 100% reliable in his takes (and tends to be more reasonable in his substack essays than on Twitter/X), but he is saying more sillier things lately after (presumably) resuming a sex life.  Curious!

* That Zohran Mamdami is causing a MAGA freakout, and Noah Smith and some Democrats are wary of him; but he clearly has plenty of charisma and, who knows, maybe he will do good for the city of New York.  It will be a curious experiment, at least.

*  Was Prunella Scales the only person in the world with the name "Prunella"?  It was an very distinctive name.   (For what it's worth, I think Fawlty Towers was a bit over-rated, though.)

*  The storm in my suburban area on Sunday was very bad.   I was in a shopping centre with water coming out around light fittings, again.  This seems a very common feature of heavy storms in Australia - the number of times you see video of water leaking into a mall around light fittings.   I wonder why this is such a common problem.

 

 

What if this whole "humanity" thing was a mistake?

I'm being facetious in the title:  but it's just that the dropping birth rate everywhere, no matter how conservative or liberal the society appears to be, can be used to suggest the zeitgeist is not too far from that. 

Actually, I should take that back.  I don't want to sound like Elon Musk, who has taken it upon himself to try to impregnate any (barely) willing woman as a way of keeping humanity going.   

Anyway, here's the reason for the post:

Finland's stubbornly low birth rate shows why a population shift may be inevitable 

And in the big picture, let's remember Africa.   It's a curious question as to how long it will take for them to catch up.  

 

 

 

Impermanence

I think I commented earlier this year about the abrupt disappearance of long time conservative blogger Currency Lad, and see that (as some people predicted in the comments thread which they continued to inhabit after he stopped posting) the blog itself has gone, as (I think) the domain was up for re-registration in October, and it was expected that if he had actually died (or had lost mental capacity), it would disappear.

Hence, the only record that seems to exist of his years of writing is on Trove or the Wayback Machine, and they tend to go back to his earlier blogs.  (For whatever reason, he changed blog hosts).

Now, while I had initially liked some of his takes when I first starting blogging and was more conservative, and then later found he was a dislikeable and dishonest person in debate on Catallaxy, and he ended up going full right wing nutter in his last blog, I still find it disheartening that the internet is such an impermanent place for records.

Even in this blog, the number of dead links in my older posts seems to be climbing rapidly.

I keep getting the feeling, perhaps under the influence of science fiction or Twilight Zone episodes, that we are going to one day get to the point where people are sure some vital piece of information for the survival of humanity was once to be found on a defunct website, and no one can find it anymore.   Or am I worrying too much?   I mean, the same story could be run about a lost book.   I guess it's just that the internet is more accessible to everyone, and the impermanence of information on it feels worse for that reason?  

I even lost courting emails to my wife when a free email service I used at the time went belly up.

On the other hand, who needs crap kept forever?  There are obviously billions of photographs saved online now that no one is ever going to look at again after the owner dies and their account disappears.

I don't know - the current haphazard situation of what gets preserved and what evaporates seems unsatisfactory to me. 

 

The modern problem

This is a rather interesting article at The Guardian, all about how even in relatively conservative (and Catholic) Poland, the birth rate is in free fall.   

As Noah Smith has said many times, no one has a "solution" to this issue. 

I can never quite decide how much it should be worried about.   I mean, I think it a great pity that more people don't get to enjoy child rearing - and seemingly don't realise how good it can be - but if the world as a whole wants to settle on a smaller long term population, that's probably a good thing from an environmental point of view.    

 

Hard to believe what is going in the US

The New York Times:

Since early September, U.S. forces have carried out eight strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least 34 people. President Trump says the strikes are legal, and that the boats were trafficking drugs, but he has not offered evidence to substantiate the claim. Nor has he explained how the deliberate, premeditated killing of civilians — what Colombian and Venezuelan leaders and some jurists have called “murder”— can possibly be reconciled with domestic and international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has reportedly deemed the strikes lawful, but its analysis hasn’t been disclosed.

A quarter-century after the Sept. 11 attacks, then, we find ourselves in a familiar place: Our government is once again committing grave human rights abuses on the ostensible authority of a legal opinion that is being kept secret. 

The Washington Post:

Why the demolition of the East Wing is so shocking

The speed of destruction, and the projection of power, are part of the strongman playbook. 

The White House:

 

Talk about your "get a life" stories

The Guardian says that Interstellar is Nolan's  "most loved" film.  The article starts:

Every Saturday, for the last 18 months, Shane Short has watched the same film: Christopher Nolan’s 2014 space epic Interstellar. He’s not even sure how many times he has seen it now, though he does know he saw it 31 times in cinemas when it was briefly rereleased for its 10th anniversary in 2024. This year he has flown from his home in Hawaii to Melbourne to watch Interstellar projected on 1570 film at the city’s Imax – twice – where the regular screenings of Interstellar, even those held midweek and during the day, can reliably sell out in minutes. 

I wonder if he is in a relationship - of any kind.

Maybe he is?  Further down in the article:

 Even Short, 38, wasn’t that impressed with Interstellar when he first saw it in 2014; the ending confused him. But now he credits the film as having fundamentally changed who he is.

“A lot of things in Interstellar are very emotional for me,” he says. “I never really connected with that part of myself, and the movie has helped me. Like, I wasn’t on board to have kids at all. I wasn’t against it, I was on the fence. But after seeing the relationship between Cooper and Murph, I wanted that. It definitely changed my mind.”

 OK...

I feel I'm being mean to him, but to my mind it remains a terribly written, uninterestingly executed, and dull bit of silly science fiction (even allowing for the relativistic bits being realistic.) 

The darkness would not be for me

Here's an interesting article by someone who went on a Buddhist inspired weekend retreat in a completely blacked out room.   It seems he was generally into meditation and "spiritual enquiry", but isn't a Buddhist.

Oddly, despite the experience sounding very weird and disconcerting, it doesn't seem as if it had much effect on him.   

No way I would do that - I'm even hesitant to try one of those float therapy pods, in case I revert to a pre-human.  (Readers require knowledge of the wacko movie Altered States to understand...) 

Trump and Albo

It's disappointing that Albanese has had to join the long standing tradition of Labor Prime Ministers pretending they have no issue with an American Republican President.  I remember Hawke getting all defensive of Reagan with Australian reporters, saying something about how he was sharp and on top of his game, etc.   You could tell it was an insincere, opportunistic performance.  

To have to be all smiley while doing deals with Trump is far more dismaying.

What can you do, I guess?   Perhaps just buy subs off the Japanese, like I was suggesting years ago? 

Nothing much to disagree with here

Trump Is Dragging Us Down to His Level 

We learned last week that a cohort of Republican activists and political staff members had shared racist and misogynist messages in a private text chat. It’s a story that repeats itself with depressing regularity, varying only the names of the participants and the depravity of the content.

As Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo reported in Politico, leaders of Young Republican groups from across the nation “referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.”

Chats like this are so widespread in right-wing circles that Aaron Sibarium, one of the best reporters in right-wing media, posted this comment in 2023: “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.”

Thankfully, the Young Republicans National Federation forcefully condemned the chats, along with a number of other Republican writers and politicians. Several participants in the chat lost their jobs in politics.

 But not everyone was outraged. Far from it. The vice president of the United States rallied to their defense. In response to the Politico report, JD Vance posted screenshots of vile text messages from Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia, in which Jones wished death on a man named Todd Gilbert, a Republican, who was one of his colleagues in the Virginia House of Delegates.

“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” he wrote. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

The responses to Vance are obvious, or at least they should be. Why can’t we condemn Jones and the Young Republicans? None of those individuals belong in American politics, so why not condemn them all?....

 

First, when the most powerful and successful politician of the past decade is an immoral man who is dishonest, cruel and illiberal at a fundamental level, it creates a situation — especially in his own party — that rewards all the same vices.

The result is a push-pull dynamic that pushes people of good character out of the party and pulls in new leaders and new people who share the leader’s ethos. Every year, this cultural trend reinforces itself. Decency becomes rarer, and decent people feel more isolated.

Meanwhile, the trolls multiply until the radicals become the mainstream and the previous mainstream becomes the fringe.  

The rest of it is worth reading, but it ends on this point for which the Republicans are much, much worse culprits:

The story of this past week is the story of this past year. It’s the story of this decade. If your political opponents represent ultimate evil, then the only morality left is the morality of victory. The only true sin is the sin of defeat. 

I've been saying that for years.  And it is Republicans who are far more likely to believe Democrats are literally evil.  Democrats are more likely to think Republicans are primarily dumb, as well as malicious. 

Sounds familiar

 

Of course it's illegal - and I can't see why if Duterte is chased down as a criminal, Trump shouldn't be too

It's driving me a bit nuts that the condemnation of Trump FOR DECIDING TO EXECUTE ALLEGED CRIMINALS AT SEA is not louder.

 This is appalling behaviour that idiotic MAGA cult membership is excusing because it's a cult.   Cult leaders can do no wrong:

Trump has argued that he has the legal authority to conduct these strikes because he has determined that the United States is in “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels.

Some in Congress, which has the sole authority to declare war and has not formally authorized the use of force in this instance, have pushed back against the president’s claims. Lawmakers from both parties have been frustrated with what they say is a lack of information from the administration about its objectives.

However, last week, Senate Republicans narrowly defeated an effort led by Democrats that would have blocked the U.S. military from continuing the strikes.

In January, Trump issued an executive order designating a number of Latin American groups as foreign terrorist organizations. He has leaned into that declaration in recent weeks as he and his administration have sought to justify its lethal campaign in the Caribbean.

In a recent notice to Congress that was reviewed by The Washington Post, the White House indicated that Trump directed the attacks pursuant to the law of armed conflict after he “determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations” and must conduct the strikes in self-defense. 

 And charge JD Vance too, an appalling twerp.  (This is from an article by a lawyer from the ACLU):

...we already know enough about these strikes to call them what they are: extrajudicial killings that are flagrantly illegal under both domestic and international law.

No one is under any illusions that anyone in the administration is likely to listen to the voices across the political spectrum who agree with this conclusion: Vice President (and Yale Law graduate) JD Vance declared he doesn’t “give a s---” whether the strikes are illegal. But it is critical that the rest of us refuse to treat these strikes as a new normal. Everyone who cares about the rule of law and human rights must continue to press for transparency, accountability and an immediate end to this illegal and lethal campaign.  

From General to all purpose God

 

Here's my personal souvenir from the last trip to Singapore:  a figurine of a Chinese deity who I had been seeing in different versions everywhere, pretty much, but without recognising it as the same god, or his name, until this trip.  As mentioned in a recent post, a guy in a Buddhist temple on the northern edge of Singapore took the time to explain to me the different statues and figures I was looking at, and one was indeed this guy, who does feature as a side character, so to speak, in many Chinese Buddhist temples.    I'm pretty sure I have seen him in Japanese temples, too.  He is also the red faced guardian deity who features in some Chinese homes (or businesses) on an altar facing the front entry, in order to ward off evil entities (or perhaps people?) from entering.   

He's Guan Yu, or Guan Gong, and there is a pretty extensive Wikipedia page that explains his history.  It's an interesting case of a real person being deified after death, in a process taking centuries and including the benefit of fan fiction in a popular novel.

He lived around 200BCE, and there are several aspects of his life and legend that are pretty fascinating:

*   He didn't exactly dies in a glorious manner as one might expect - in the midst of battle by a lucky arrow, or anything.  He was captured and executed.  Didn't hurt his reputation, though.

*  How did Buddhism claim him as their own?   According to Wikipedia:

According to Buddhist legends, in 592, Guan Yu manifested himself one night before the Chan master Zhiyi, the founder of the Tiantai school of Buddhism, along with a retinue of spiritual beings. Zhiyi was then in deep meditation on Jade Spring Hill (玉泉山) when he was distracted by Guan Yu's presence. Guan Yu then requested the master to teach him about the dharma. After receiving Buddhist teachings from the master, Guan Yu took refuge in the triple gems and also requested the Five Precepts. Henceforth, it is said that Guan Yu made a vow to become a guardian of temples and the dharma. Legends also claim that Guan Yu assisted Zhiyi in the construction of the Yuquan Temple, which still stands today. 

 *  Apparently, both the Hong Kong police, and the triads, honoured him - you really are an all purpose God when both sides of the law think you're on their side.

*   There also features a period in which he was believed by some to be communicating directly through "spirit writing".  Here's the Wiki explanation:

Guan Yu's messages were received by mediums through spirit writing, later called Fújī (planchette writing) (扶乩/扶箕), since the late 17th century. "By the mid-Qianlong period (1736–96) the number of 'sacred edicts' issued by Guandi ordering people to do good and help those in need became increasingly frequent." In the 19th century, Guandi's messages received through spirit writing assumed a millennialist character. Dates were announced for the end of the world, followed by messages indicating that Guandi had "prevented the apocalypse" and was indeed "the savior of endtimes." In 1866, the Ten Completions Society (Shíquánhùi 十全會) was established to propagate the messages of Guandi and promote the charitable work his spirit had ordered to perform. The tradition of Guandi spirit writing continued in Chinese folk Religion well into the 20th century. 

 I was aware of "planchette writing" as part of the Spiritualist movement in the West in the 19th century.    What I didn't know was that it was a thing way earlier than that in China. There's a whole Wiki page on that topic, too!

This is all pretty fascinating, and feel it is something I should have known about earlier.  All the more reason for me to travel to Asia, I think...