May Pieces Of My Mind #1

"Wonder if mammals without fingers have a functional clitoris."

You're saying a lot about yourself by saying "without fingers" instead of "without fingers or tongues". :-D

All mammals have tongues. Some even know how to use it.

The lilacs aren't blooming yet where I live, but my magnolia tree has just blossomed, and the trees are leafing out nicely.

Almost lost a thyme plant that I put in the ground last month. It had gotten covered with mulch. But I found it again while watering the new plants this morning. One of the phlox is still struggling, but everything else seems to be taking hold.

I take great pleasure in finally watering and fertilising three scrawny little roses that have languished for years outside our fence, and seeing them respond with healthy greenery. My wife bought a trellis for one of them and I put it in place.

And our magnolia is blooming richly!

Film suggestion: "Mood Indigo" aka L’ecume des jours.
Book suggestion: Swearing: Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English.
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46 years: There is a really bad 1970s scince fiction film where people are put to death when they get 30 years old.
Back then, they only knew how to do sound effects with theremins. It was not until the soundtrack of Alien that people got creative. (scraping, hooting sounds that may be artificial or caused by something living).

Sience fiction about time: The Sticky Fingers of Time. Low-budget but interesting.
Did a vanity search of my name in New Scienttist. Found Letters to the Editor I totally had forgotten about.

A step in the right direction. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts-entertainment/all-female-charac…
Certaioly better than the female characters in Enid Blyton's books.

The Magnolia started blomming here in Malmö in the middle of April.

However, at my location (New England) our last snow was 26 April and our last frost was 27 April. So we're really only two weeks into spring.

Even though I am much closer to the equator (about the same latitude as Toulouse), winters here are often harsher than in southern Sweden. In terms of hardiness zones, I am in Zone 5 while Stockholm is Zone 7. (Lower numbers mean colder winters.) Along the Swedish coast you have to get up to around Umeå to get to Zone 5. Along the Norwegian coast it's even more extreme: parts of Svalbard are in Zone 5.

Erratum: "Certaioly" should have been "Certainly"
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Umeå is on the brink of summer...but there is still snow in shady crevasses in the forest.
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Rock n' roll: "Rob Zombie Just Shut Down Trolls Hating On Girl Group Babymetal" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rob-zombie-babymetal-they-roll-hard…

Is this how the Bronze Age ended?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2087924-world-war-zero-brought-dow…

The Bronze Age never really ended in China because there was no cataclysm that plunged it into a dark age for centuries, so they went on mass producing bronze objects long after iron weapons and tools were also in mass production.

#7 - A bit of realism might be welcome, though. The very large difference between male and female upper body strength means that all of the depictions of smaller females beating up males are solely in the sphere of physically impossible fantasy. (I know what reality looks like - Aboriginal women carry bladed concealed weapons and use surprise attacks.) I haven't seen the latest Avengers movie yet, but apparently this is taken to ridiculous lengths in that film. Yes, I love the Black Widow, but I do realise that Scarlett Johannson is 5'3" and lacks testosterone-fuelled musculature.

Speaking of bladed weapons, 42 years ago I bought an antique Keris from a poor guy in a back street in Kuala Lumpur for a ridiculously small sum of money. That is, the blade was clearly antique, possibly some hundreds of years old; the handle and sheath were nicely made out of rosewood, but were clearly modern. To hold the blade in the handle, the poor guy had resorted to wrapping the spine at the hilt of the blade with plastic tape so that he could jam it into the hole in the handle, which was too big for the spine (or whatever you call it) - I knew that when I bought it too, but the blade was just too good to pass up for the price. Took it back to Australia, the dry climate quickly did its work, and all of the glued joints in the scabbard fell apart due to shrinkage of the rosewood, and because the glue used by whoever had made it wasn't that good.

I procrastinated about putting the whole thing back together for 42 years, because I was scared that I would mess it up. But last year my mother died, and I needed to rescue the parts of the Keris from her house where I had been keeping it, and bring it home with me. Now I am happy to report that after all that time, I have managed to do a good job on putting the whole thing back together again, and it looks brilliant. I surmise that the blade is so strong and rigid because it was made out of meteorite metal. I'm also suitably wary of it because some of the old Keris makers are reputed to have beaten Arsenic into the metal of the blades they made. So maybe it really does have 'magical' properties.

I have read of the Luwian kingdoms as a possible source of the Sea Peoples, but there just is not much information available.
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The readers of Ed Brayton's blog have the funniest comments:
" Robertson: The Gay Will Destroy America" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/05/12/robertson-the-gay-wi…
-The Mystery Mother of Molls"? Must--have name for a Frank Zappa tribute band.

Ancient Irish musical history found in modern India http://phys.org/news/2016-05-ancient-irish-musical-history-modern.html

“Wonder if mammals without fingers have a functional clitoris.”

Wonder if mammals without a functional clitoris have fingers.

"Even though I am much closer to the equator (about the same latitude as Toulouse), winters here are often harsher than in southern Sweden. In terms of hardiness zones, I am in Zone 5 while Stockholm is Zone 7. (Lower numbers mean colder winters.) Along the Swedish coast you have to get up to around Umeå to get to Zone 5. Along the Norwegian coast it’s even more extreme: parts of Svalbard are in Zone 5."

Two words: gulf stream.

"46 years: There is a really bad 1970s scince fiction film where people are put to death when they get 30 years old."

Logan's Run. There are many worse science-fiction films. It's not that bad. Like Star Trek (TOS), some aspects look cheesy, but at the time were comments on the then-current Zeitgeist. Such aspects are often overlooked today.

"Back then, they only knew how to do sound effects with theremins. It was not until the soundtrack of Alien that people got creative. (scraping, hooting sounds that may be artificial or caused by something living)."

Yes, but does it really matter? In The Wizard of Oz, one can clearly see where the real road ends and is extended on a painted backdrop. The Wizard's balloon is clearly not real. The mind fills in the details. More like a theatre set.

In any case, the fact that Logan's Run has a lot of nudity and sex for a mainstream film (and even got a PG rating in the States, surprising in retrospect but remember that this was just a few years after Deep Throad had a mainstream, errm, release) means that teenage boys at the time were not concentrating on the technical aspects of the special effects. :-D

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/1944583/no-doubt-icelands…

Good to know that Icelandic anthropologists are no more intelligent than most anthropoligists everywhere else.

There seems to be something that does not match up, on the face of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

Denmark is reported to be the world's happiest country, and yet it appears to have a high suicide rate.

New evidence that humans settled in southeastern US far earlier than previously believed http://phys.org/news/2016-05-evidence-humans-southeastern-earlier-previ…
Damn illegal aliens, coung to the South without passports!

Suicide rate is usually high among elder men, With a secular society the religious ban against suicide becomes irrelevant for elder, isolated people with chronic pain.

You also see high suicide rates (source: the second- latest issue of Science) in the Chinese rural areas, as the young ones have moved to the cities, leaving the elder generation alone.

Moar illegal uns in Florida. Bring in Trump! http://www.nature.com/news/underwater-archaeologists-unearth-ancient-bu…
And those librul elites are using fancy-scmancy terms, like "pre-Clovis" people. Everybody knows the pre-Flood people were called "nephilim"!

National happiness scores were calculated according to a formula (rather than doing what seems to me to be the obvious thing of going around asking random people if they are happy), and the differences between the scores of different countries were pretty small, so it's evident that the Danes don't have some secret magic formula for happiness, they just score slightly higher on some of the factors in this formula.

They do have one thing, though, which they appear to be adhering to doggedly against international criticism, and that is Trust. It has been shown that Trust is relatively high in homogeneous communities, and relatively low in multi-cultural societies.

Personally I never felt any desire to leave my baby sitting in her pram outside while I went into a coffee shop - the little bugger would never sit in her pram anyway, so that test of my level of trust of the community I lived in was never enacted. The problem never arose. In fact, I simply can't conceive of a parent wanting to do such a thing.

I don't think that the stupid formula demonstrates that the Danes are happier than everyone else at all.

Yeah, China has high suicide rates. So does Hong Kong, but more worryingly among teenage school students, who can't deal with the combination of the HK education system, which is a meat grinder, and parents with unrealistic expectations. Confucianism teaches that everyone can 'succeed' provided they just work hard enough - it's the Malcolm Gladwell blank slate theory that says that, if I practise playing basketball for 10,000 hours, I too can become a 6'10" tall NBA star. Well, Confucius didn't know about modern genomics, but he did sell a lot of books. So did Malcolm Gladwell - he has grown rich off people's unrealistic ambitions. If anyone deserves to be burned at the stake, it's Gladwell.

The loneliness of elderly people is a real thing, and a prime reason for topping themselves. The reality is that once you get to a certain age, you become invisible - people stop talking to you, stop listening to you, stop seeing you, and that age is surprisingly young - it kicks in long before dementia does. The only people who take notice of you are the vultures who think they might be able to squeeze some money out of you. I have seen this happen - elderly people surrounded by flocks of vultures who pick them clean. The elderly trade their last treasured possessions in exchange for being given some attention.

I see that medically assisted suicide is legal in Oregon and Washington State for people who are terminally ill. I would like to see that extended to people who have no specific illness, but for whom life has become a lonely, uncomfortable and unpleasant struggle.

"Denmark is reported to be the world’s happiest country, and yet it appears to have a high suicide rate."

I've heard this many times (in the good old days, back when Sweden worked better as a society, often against Sweden) and it is wrong for several reasons.

First, Denmark is also very non-religious. Not only might religion stop some people from committing suicide, the taboo makes some---even officials of the state---attribute suicide to other forms of death. Second, in many countries people die before they have a chance to commit suicide. Third, it does not necessarily imply unhappiness in a simple since, e.g. if someone chooses to die voluntarily rather than live a life of suffering.

With regard to trust: Bill Bryson has written many travel books. I've read parts of several of them. Sometimes, his description is spot-on, as in Hamburg. Sometimes, as with Sweden, it is woefully inaccurate. Foreigners can write about countries other than their own if they know what they should (the best book about Sweden, Fishing in Utopia, was written in English by an Englishman), but one shouldn't judge a country by one, possibly atypical, visit. (In addition, things change, so while on the underground in Hamburg unshaved women were the norm when he wrote about them, sadly this is no longer the case today.)

So, with the grains of salt above in mind (or under the tongue), I'm reminded of a story from his visit to Copenhagen, where he sees the Queen walk into a shop. Puzzled, he asks a pedestrian "Who protects her?". He is surprised by the question, thinks for a minute, then says "I suppose we all do".

Try to find the Oprah Winfrey episode where she is in Denmark. Fish out of water and completely dried up. She is astounded that parents in pavement cafes aren't worried about people stealing their children, and admires the people for being happy despite their small houses.

"The loneliness of elderly people is a real thing, and a prime reason for topping themselves. The reality is that once you get to a certain age, you become invisible – people stop talking to you, stop listening to you, stop seeing you, and that age is surprisingly young – it kicks in long before dementia does."

As the song says, you can't make old friends. If you are lucky enough to get very old, most of your friends will die before you.

The Danish suicide rate is not *that* high - I was more trying to be provocative about the use of some formula to gauge the happiness of people in any particular country. Who decided that formula was an objective measure?

But assuming it is, Denmark's score just took a big drop. So what caused that?

"Denmark is also very non-religious." Not according to Wikipedia: "A large majority of Danes are members of the Lutheran State Church, though the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion." Of course, it could just be the social acceptance thing. Or it could be that whoever wrote that in Wikipedia is full of it, I don't know.

It's not difficult to see why Danes might be a relatively contented lot - high per capita income, high standard of living, high level of income equality, very low level of corruption, etc. But it is also true that the population of Denmark is highly homogeneous.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine why any parent would want to leave a young infant alone outside while they do inside. My regret about when my daughter was that age was that I didn't have more free time to spend with her. The last thing I would want to do is leave her somewhere. I always enjoy having her around, and always did, from day one. It just seems to me to be a weird thing to do. But then I'm not Danish, so maybe it's me that's weird.

If I had to stick my finger into the wind and guess at what things might make people *unhappy*, I would guess low income equality, low standard of living, and high level of corruption. That kind of stuff. When you are sleeping on the street in mid-winter and don't have enough money to buy a simple meal, it must be fairly difficult to be happy. It must be even more difficult when you see obscenely rich people driving by who have become that way through institutionalised corruption. Or see members of your family being raped, tortured or killed - that could be a real downer.

Religion reportedly makes some people happy, at least those who are predisposed to be religious. Or maybe they are just fooled into believing they're happy when they are not really. Remember: all human traits are partly heritable, and religiosity (for want of a better word) seems to be one of those traits. That doesn't mean that the mean traits among a particular population remain static over time - humans are evolving more rapidly now than they ever have before (contrary to the assertion of Sir David Attenborough, who is too geriatric to get his head around modern genetic science and the ways in which evolution actually occurs), so mean traits must also be changing pretty quickly. And particularly more so if the population of a country is highly mobile, e.g. high influx of people of different 'heritage', again for want of a better word - ethnicity, ancestry, whatever you want to call it. You are not allowed to talk about 'ancestry' in Australia, that is outlawed along with words like 'race', so the favoured euphemism is 'heritage'. One 'celebrates' one's 'heritage'. Yeah - the last time I tried to celebrate my Scottish heritage, some guy from Glasgow told me stop being so bl**dy stupid. He was right. Those of my ancestors who were Scottish left the country a long time ago, and probably did so because they hated the place.

A large majority of Danes are members of the Lutheran State Church, though the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.

It could also be that membership in the State Church is considered the default, and a Danish national has to specifically opt out, which most don't bother to do.

"The Danish suicide rate is not *that* high – I was more trying to be provocative about the use of some formula to gauge the happiness of people in any particular country. Who decided that formula was an objective measure?"

Obviously it is not objective. That doesn't mean one can't make any such claims, but, like university rankings, it depends on how one weights the criteria.

"But assuming it is, Denmark’s score just took a big drop. So what caused that?"

Errm, religious extremists trying to kill people?

"“Denmark is also very non-religious.” Not according to Wikipedia: “A large majority of Danes are members of the Lutheran State Church, though the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.” Of course, it could just be the social acceptance thing. Or it could be that whoever wrote that in Wikipedia is full of it, I don’t know."

I'm not sure if Denmark still has a state church. Sweden got rid of theirs a while back, Norway I'm not so sure. So maybe the fraction is relatively high in terms of being a member of a church. But in terms of how many people answer "yes" to "do you believe in God?", it is quite low (even some priests say "I'm not sure"---really).

"It’s not difficult to see why Danes might be a relatively contented lot – high per capita income, high standard of living, high level of income equality, very low level of corruption, etc. But it is also true that the population of Denmark is highly homogeneous."

True.

"Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine why any parent would want to leave a young infant alone outside while they do inside."

Why not? If there is no danger, why go through the trouble?
I remember swimming in the sea with a baby in the pram on the shore (not in Denmark, by the way).

" My regret about when my daughter was that age was that I didn’t have more free time to spend with her. The last thing I would want to do is leave her somewhere. I always enjoy having her around, and always did, from day one. It just seems to me to be a weird thing to do. But then I’m not Danish, so maybe it’s me that’s weird."

Sure, but leaving the baby in the pram when it's asleep isn't a loss of quality time.

"Yeah – the last time I tried to celebrate my Scottish heritage, some guy from Glasgow told me stop being so bl**dy stupid. He was right. Those of my ancestors who were Scottish left the country a long time ago, and probably did so because they hated the place."

Indeed. One of the most outrageous things I've ever experienced was someone from Minnesota, who had never been to Scotland, referring to herself as a "Highland Scot".

Regardless of any formal membership in the old state churches, the Scandinavians are famously irreligious. In questionnaire studies, we stick out like a sore thumb in comparison with most other countries. See for example Phil Zuckerman's work in Denmark.

http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2010/04/19/lukewarm-normative-…

"leaving the baby in the pram when it’s asleep isn’t a loss of quality time" - well, (1) I thought it was for me - I used to wake up in the middle of the night and just go and sit next to her cot while she slept, and (2) my baby would never sleep or stay in her pram. She'd tolerate it as a feeding seat, but as soon as the food was consumed, one way or another, she was going to get out of there. Buying that pram was the biggest waste of money for us ever. The other one was the play pen - she regarded that thing like I would regard Alcatraz and *would not* stay in it. Total waste of money.

"Regardless of any formal membership in the old state churches, the Scandinavians are famously irreligious."

True. However, I think it is better when people go all the way an revoke their membership as well.

On paper, Turkey and the USA have complete separation of church and state. In practice, these are probably not only the two most religious countries in NATO (to take a group of which both are members), but also the two with the most influence of religion on politics.

I left the Swedish Church as soon as I could, that is, upon turning 18 and attaining majority.

I am very familiar with irreligious people belonging to churches for social reasons, or because it is useful for something, so I guess that explains it. It could even be that Danes regard church membership as some kind of glue that holds the community together, even though no one actually believes in it. That happens.

In practical terms, in some jurisdictions it can be hellishly difficult and expensive to find a suitable place to bury someone's ashes if they have no formal religious affiliation.

I'm no expert on the matter, but my guess is that it is just laziness on the part of most people. Perhaps some who have a religious great aunt might not want to offend her and thus hesitate. I don't think that there is any community glue here, since most Danes don't attend church services.

Yes, burial might be a problem, since sending them out to sea on a burning ship is so first millennium. ;-)

I don't know the status of the FSM, but IIRC paganism (Odin and so on) is an officially recognized religion in Denmark.

BTW the dominant churches in Sweden are quite harmless, and often play an important social role, especially for the elderly.
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A quite fun summary:
American Evangelical Christianity: a movement built on hypocrisy, by the worst people in the country https://vid.me/3hrx

John Oliver on the presentation of science in the TV media: https://youtu.be/0Rnq1NpHdmw

On paper, Turkey and the USA have complete separation of church and state. In practice, these are probably not only the two most religious countries in NATO (to take a group of which both are members), but also the two with the most influence of religion on politics.

I'm no expert on Turkey, but the US definitely has a strong religious streak. Arguably, the separation of church and state has helped to promote this, because rather than having a single official sect, we have lots of religious variation even among our self-proclaimed Christians, let alone people of other faiths (Jews started arriving within a few decades of the first English settlements; there are also Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus, most of them either more recent arrivals or, in the case of Islam, some native-born converts). There is at least one Muslim (Keith Ellison of Minnesota) and one Hindu (Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii) in the US Congress. Admittedly, both represent liberal districts; in much of the US only an evangelical Protestant would have a chance of being elected).

However, we do have a major party that promotes policies allegedly based on religious doctrine, which is alleged to be Christian. I say "alleged" because any resemblance between the policies being promoted and a reasonable reading of the teachings attributed to Yeshua bin Yosef is purely coincidental.

One for Phillip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSIeAQl_1jM&feature=youtu.be

You can get the sheet music here, for a price:

https://www.stringsbymail.com/guitar-works-of-agustin-barrios-mangore-v…

I now buy all of my strings from Strings By Mail because flamenco strings are unprocurable locally and they carry a reasonable selection. They are located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. They are prompt, friendly and reliable. On receiving an order, they send the purchase by normal air mail, and I get the strings 2 weeks after I have ordered them. I have never bought sheet music from them - there is not much flamenco sheet music around because the flamenco tocaores don't read music, and learn it by oral transmission/copying, then develop their own improvisations.

Lately I have been reading a lot of writing by Linh Dinh, who was a Vietnamese refugee who went to live in America as a child. He now seems to spend all of his time travelling around America and countries in Europe (and he really seems to get around), and he does a lot of stories on low SES Americans and young people sleeping in the streets, or rather he lets them tell their own stories.

He paints a scary, almost post-apocalyptic picture of American big cities, notably Philadelphia where he lives when he's not travelling. He also, along the way, writes a lot of interesting stuff on the small scale of the lives of individual ordinary people.

He's a bit of a conspiracy theorist - I'm inclined to forgive him for that, because he lacks the technical education to enable him to understand how a multi-storey building can collapse into its own footprint unless someone deliberately demolishes it with explosives, which is a nutty theory that should have been killed off a long time ago, but I guess wasn't, simply because the people asking the question did not understand the answer due to its technical complexity.

Anyway, last January he published this. If true, what does Angela Merkel think she is doing? Has she completely lost the plot? Her brilliant idea - young German women will put their names into a lottery, and if they 'win' they will be 'drafted' (i.e. conscripted by the German government) to provide free sex to male refugees for 6 months - what Angela refers to as a 'smallish sacrifice'. Has she gone totally nuts? Is this some gigantic put-on, or has Linh Dinh finally gone completely nuts himself? It beggars belief.

http://www.unz.com/ldinh/germany-to-introduce-comfort-women/

"If true, what does Angela Merkel think she is doing? Has she completely lost the plot? Her brilliant idea – young German women will put their names into a lottery, and if they ‘win’ they will be ‘drafted’ (i.e. conscripted by the German government) to provide free sex to male refugees for 6 months – what Angela refers to as a ‘smallish sacrifice’. Has she gone totally nuts? Is this some gigantic put-on, or has Linh Dinh finally gone completely nuts himself? It beggars belief."

What beggars belief is that you fell for this.

I'm wondering if I should forgive you: lack of education and all that. You're in the States, right? That's where a 17-year-old future medical student (now an M.D.) was blown away (pardon the pun) when a girl in front of him farted in class. Knowing that I was a science guy, after the lesson he came up to me, jaw still dropped, saying "I didn't know that girls could fart!"

Just to be completely clear: I live in Germany, I have lived here most of my life, I am fluent in German, I read several news sources daily, and if there were even a scrap of something which could be misinterpreted in the way suggested, I would know about it.

I don't think it's a put on, at least not by the author. I think that he is simply too credulous, believing outrageous claims without checking them.

That the moon landings were faked, that vaccines cause autism, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Bilderberg Group and the Illuminati rule the world---all of these are more credible than the outrageous claim above.

I believe that there is a lottery among young German women for who -- apart from Angela Merkel -- gets to fart on Linh Dinh.

In the States? Well, I could be, if that's where you would like to believe I am.

Sorry for the perhaps slight over-reaction, but COME ON! Angela Merkel pressing young women into service as whores? Who could believe it, even for a second?

No wonder some people believe that Obama didn't fulfill the criteria to be president (cue the birthers), that he is a Muslim, etc.

Enlighten me: Where are you?

I did express incredulity, if you cared to notice. I was looking for someone to tell me whether this unbelievable story had any kind of basis in fact or was pure fabrication. I see all kinds of weirdness emanating from Europe, and have no yardstick to judge it by.

Maybe he was being satirical. Or fabricating a gross exaggeration to make a point. Who knows? He's an artist and a writer, not a scientist; an old guy, a refugee, who has to count his pennies to figure out whether he can afford to buy himself a cup of coffee in McDonalds or not. But he writes some good stuff, and unearths some very interesting and poignant personal stories. He could well be weird, that would not be very surprising given his personal history, and he's probably fairly frequently drunk, but he's deserving of a little respect. You should read some of his stuff about homeless people and very poor people in America, it's educational. It's not stuff you will read in newspapers.

According to my VPN, I'm currently in southern California. I don't mind.

Phillip, John is of Australian extraction and lives in Hong Kong. He is quite multicultural, having grown up among Australian Aborigines and having married a Chinawoman.

And has a daughter who is half a Chinawoman.

*high five*

"I did express incredulity, if you cared to notice. I was looking for someone to tell me whether this unbelievable story had any kind of basis in fact or was pure fabrication. I see all kinds of weirdness emanating from Europe, and have no yardstick to judge it by."

OK, but this is in the "Elvis lives together with Marilyn Monroe in my grandpa's backyard" kind of unbelievable. :-)

"I see all kinds of weirdness emanating from Europe, and have no yardstick to judge it by."

I'm pretty sure that there is nothing which is real and as bizarre as this. Can you provide some examples (even if you suspect that they might not be real)?

"Maybe he was being satirical. Or fabricating a gross exaggeration to make a point."

The context provides no indication of this. Sure, I can imagine some comedian saying this or something, but then only if exaggerating something real. In this case, there doesn't seem to be anything to exaggerate.

I don't think that everything he writes is wrong. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and he presented none, even though part of Merkel's alleged statement is presented as a direct quotation.

If someone said that Hitler had been discovered living in some mountains outside of Berlin, would you believe it? Would you even ask if it were true? Something this sensational, these days, should spread over the internet like wildfire. Same for comfort women.

The UNZ review appears on a list of crackpot websites: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Webshites

That's why I suspect he was being provocative and making it up to make a point. He probably meant "Given what Merkel has done to the young women of Germany by letting in all these young single male refugees, she might as well..." You need to use your imagination, if you have one. Or just pass it off as the ravings of an old drunk Vietnamese conspiracy theorist - I don't care, he's no friend of mine. I just like some of the stuff he writes.

The UNZ review is populated by a fair number of crackpots, but a few of them are definitely not. It's listed as a Conservative site, but you won't catch herpes by going there.

Razib Khan *is* a friend of mine and is certainly not a crackpot. I have been reading his writing ever since he started blogging more than 13 years ago, and have read every blog post he has ever written on his Gene Expression blog (he has others elsewhere that I don't read). He leaves politics out of it.

Peter Lee is also not a crackpot, at least when he comments on matters relating to China. He provides very insightful analysis - about the most informed and insightful of any 'China watcher' I have ever read.

Reading it again, maybe it is intended to be satire. On the other hand, at least initially, you thought that it was real. If something this bizarre could fool you, then one must have sympathy with the birthers and other conspiracy theorists. :-|

Don't get upset. Life is too short for that. For instance, I just learned Mount St Helens erupted...precisely *thirty-six years ago*! There must be something wrong with the calendar, I thought it was the year before the last one... or maybe five years ago.
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Here is a creepy one:
“On Oktar’s A9 channel, a group of women in tight-fitting designer clothes and dyed blond hair help him promote Islam and attack evolution, all the while calling him “master.”

I learned about him from this news item: "Ohio Students Taught Muslim Creationism in Biology Class" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/05/17/ohio-students-taught…
(With a name like Oktar, the culprit should be wearing a mask and costume, and hang out in Gotham City. With a hunchback assistant going "yeth, masther".)

Stuck on hot: Earth breaks 12th straight monthly heat record (Update) http://phys.org/news/2016-05-april-12th-month-row-global.html
We are fucked. And a certain party in a certain major country is still opposing doing anythin about it.

Adnan Oktar is the Turkish creationist cult leader who published a really lavish pseudo-biological book a few years ago and had it sent to scientists all over the world. It's famous not least because one picture intended to show a fish actually depicts a fishing lure.

That's how evolution works - you throw a fishing lure into the water, and it comes back as a fish.

By the numbers, you are not living in Utopia.

http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

Australia and Sweden are marginally worse than Thailand and quite a bit worse than the Philippines, which should be worrying, because both Thailand and the Philippines are pretty wild. Australia is pretty seriously under-policed, but better than China.

India, which is only marginally better than Russia, is also seriously under-policed - worse than China. If anyone wants to know why rape is such a problem in India, they only need to look at the police to population ratio - there is no visible police presence in the communities. As the New York Police Department discovered, the best deterrent to crime is to have a visible police presence on the streets to discourage people from committing crimes, rather than trying to solve crimes after they occur and sending people to prison. Both India and China fail badly on that score, and Australia is not much better.

Germany is quite a bit better, but a bit worse than China and Azerbaijan - again, no room for complacency. I don't know about Azerbaijan, but China is seriously under-policed and has significant crime and law and order problems.

Denmark is doing well - no surprise there. Denmark is a very homogeneous country in terms of culture/ethnicity.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are all doing miles better than everyone else. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea are all very culturally/ethnically homogeneous. I am one of a small ethnic minority in Hong Kong, which overall as a region is 94% ethnic Han Chinese and notably well policed. The town I live in is 97% Han Chinese, and crime is just not an issue, with the exception of bicycle theft, which is easily preventable if people just follow some basic sensible rules. The bike theft is probably mostly out-of-towners who come to our town for easy pickings because the community is too trusting in relation to bicycle theft.

Singapore is much more multi-cultural, but also much more oppressive and a much less free society than Hong Kong. They have democracy in name only, and are hosting a million foreign contract workers, which is an uncomfortable situation and one which many Singaporeans are very unhappy about.

I once attended a very good course given by some professors from the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. These people were experts in their particular subject areas, no question.

One of the interesting case histories they gave us was of the New York Police Department, and how they had achieved a dramatic lowering of crime rates in NY by realising that their strategy of waiting until crimes were committed and then trying to solve them was getting them nowhere in terms of controlling crime, and adopting the alternate strategy of putting a lot more uniformed police officers out on the streets, as a visible police presence among the community to deter people from committing crimes in the first place.

But to do that, you need to have an adequate number of police officers in relation to the size of the community. How spread out that community is, is also a factor, in terms of the amount of ground the police have to cover. You can't have police officers walking the beat in Australian cities, except for the innermost city areas, because there is just too much ground to cover - they have to patrol in cars, which is more costly and less effective than having uniformed officers patrolling on foot.

The global statistics on number of police officers per unit of population are interesting (well, interesting to anyone like me who is interested in demographics and real numbers instead of ideology and endless political theorising), and they go a long way to explaining crime rates in different jurisdictions. They don't explain everything, party because of the factor I've already mentioned, and also partly due to the strategy for policing that the cops adopt in a particular jurisdiction. Plus no doubt there are many other socio-economic factors. One notable one seems to have been the banning of consumption of leaded petrol in motor vehicles, thereby removing a lot of lead from the environment which was adversely affecting brain development in children. Another one is undoubtedly the level of entrenched corruption - the lesson learned in Hong Kong is that if you want a corruption free police force, you need to pay them enough to live on, so they don't need to augment their income by taking bribes in order to be able to feed their families. But the numbers do have quite high explanatory power, if you compare the number of cops to the gross crime rates in any particular jurisdiction.

And I think this more broadly validates the case history of the NYPD, and how they succeeded in getting crime rates down in New York.

http://www.gutenberg.us/articles/list_of_countries_by_number_of_police_…

You can’t have police officers walking the beat in Australian cities, except for the innermost city areas, because there is just too much ground to cover – they have to patrol in cars, which is more costly and less effective than having uniformed officers patrolling on foot.

The same is true in the United States, which falls between Ghana and Ukraine on the crime index list. New York City is compact enough for foot patrols. So are Boston and San Francisco, but most other US cities are not. US police forces also have a tendency to develop adversarial relationships with the populace, especially but not limited to ethnic minorities. Too many US police are in that line of work to indulge their authoritarian tendencies--that should be disqualifying in a competently run police force, but there are too few of those in the US.

For a while many Americans tried to escape crime by moving to the suburbs. It worked for a while, probably because there was less danger of lead poisoning. But eventually crime rates caught up in a lot of places. Moving to the sticks won't help either: drug abuse has become a major issue in towns with no visible means of support. There are municipalities in Maine and northern New Hampshire where I feel less safe than in downtown Boston.

https://vimeo.com/166929892 - for entertainment, if it will play in your region. It's hard to get bored or lonely in Hong Kong.

Factors contributing to Hong Kong's low crime rates: high population density in the urban areas make them compact enough for foot patrols; large police force for the size of population; the HK Police have always had a policy of maintaining a visible police presence on the streets; the HKPF have programs to build bridges with youth groups and their numbers are bolstered by the Auxiliary Police (people in other jobs who also work as part-time police officers) which also helps to build a positive relationship with the community; young Chinese males have lower mean testosterone levels than other racial groups, making them less prone to random aggression and violence; mean adult IQ is 106, and is inversely correlated with crime; homogeneous society correlates with high levels of trust and lack of interracial and intercultural conflict; alcohol consumption is low - many Chinese lack the enzyme required to break down alcohol, so drinking just makes them sick; drugs are around but less prevalent than in Australian cities - the high visible police presence makes life difficult for drug peddlers; Chinese tend to be accommodating towards ethnic minorities - they expect 'foreigners' to be 'different' - not wholly, but any racism is passive and not confronting - indeed, Europeans might notice inverse racism, i.e. they get special treatment because they are 'white', not 'yellow', 'brown' or 'black'; when attacked, Chinese females are generally predisposed to fight back. There are other factors - most people live in high rise buildings which are relatively easy to make secure; housing estates have owners' committees who arrange for security installations and 24 hour security guards.

On the one occasion when I got a speeding ticket in HK, the police officer apologised to me when he handed it to me - he didn't need to, he caught me fair and square and I deserved the penalty, but he did it anyway.

In my home state of Western Australia, methamphetamine ('ice') usage is estimated at 3.8% of the population. During the commodities boom, people had a lot of disposable income from mining, and Chinese organised crime responded by flooding the state with ice manufactured in China; it is cheap and easy to manufacture, but risky - ice labs have a tendency to blow up. Local motorcycle gangs are in the business of distributing the drugs. Ice induces violent mood swings and random violence. The drug peddlers are all through the sprawling suburbs, operating around the schools and shopping centres, and very geographically dispersed through a large low population density area. The WA Premier (equivalent to state governor in America) recently announced that the government had lost the fight against ice - it was not the kind of public announcement that will get a politician re-elected, but he said it anyway, which is a measure of the seriousness of the problem. Alcohol consumption is high. The WA Police Commissioner has stated publicly that alcohol consumption is also a major societal problem. His own estranged son was injured when the ice lab that he was running in his own house blew up.

Other Australian states are certainly not immune - for the whole of Australia, ice usage is estimated at 2% of the whole population. The inner city area of Melbourne, Australia's 'cultural capital', the streets are full of ice addicts and street sleepers and people are afraid to travel on trains for fear of crazy people on the trains.

Australian communities are very low density and very difficult to police effectively. Breaking and entering of households is a major problem. Prisons are just schools where younger prisoners are taught how to commit crimes by older criminals. Recidivism is high. Imprisoning people doesn't work as a deterrent, sentences tend to be light, and it just takes them out of circulation for a while. The mean adult IQ of white Australians is 98.

Australia prides itself on being a 'successful multi-cultural society' and on being non-racist. It is a lie. Australia is still a heavily white dominated country; the majority of migrants to Australia still come from the UK; racial minorities are expected to assimilate rapidly and there is low tolerance of people who do not speak Australian English well enough. Visible racial minorities are subjected to overt racism, which is a major problem. Racism often manifests in public as aggressive and confronting. Although Australia has no official language, people talking in public in a language other than English are likely to be subjected to aggressive confrontation - this even happened to a group of white French tourists who were happily singing French songs on public transport; they were subjected to violent confrontation. The Chinese population of Western Australia was higher in 1926 than it is now. Most Australian cities have racial gangs, and gang violence is an issue, particularly in Sydney. Racial minorities and refugees cluster in suburban enclaves. The White Australia Policy was only formally abolished in 1973 - before then, the despised minorities were Greeks, Italians and migrants from the former Yugoslavia, who were regarded as 'non-white'.

Australian Aboriginal people were only inducted into the national census when I was a university student - the only 'activist' rally I have ever taken part in, when I was a 17 year old student, was in support of inclusion of Aboriginal Australians in the national census as equal Australian citizens. The current public debate is whether the Australian constitution should be amended to recognise Aboriginal people as the 'first people' of Australia - you might think that's a slam dunk as simply a statement of an obvious truth, but it's not, the majority of white Australians appear to be opposed even to holding a referendum on the question of whether such a statement should be included in the constitution, which would require a 2/3 majority in favour to pass.

I like numbers in preference to subjective impressions, so I keep notes on easily measurable indicators. I am also an inveterate door opener - I open doors for people, rather than barging through first. It's a lifelong habit and I can't change it. I have been keeping count on the proportion of people who say 'thank you' when I do it. In Hong Kong, when I open doors for women and children, 90% of them look me in the eye, smile and say 'thank you'. The proportion is just as high among Mainland Chinese tourists as it is among local Chinese. They may say thank you in Cantonese, Mandarin or fractured English, but 90% of all of them do it. About 20% show some surprise, but they still say thank you. In Australia the % is zero. None. People just sail through without looking at me or speaking to me. This is not what I remember when I was a kid, but it is now the case. It's a simple crude indicator and easy to keep score on, but I think it says something.

I think that's probably rant over, for the moment.

One Birger might like. Just guessing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v7LlS5Ajs4