How often do I get to put "lesbians" and "Nazis" in the one post title?

Researcher sheds light on life of lesbians in Nazi Germany

Long story short:  the Nazi's didn't get as worked up about lesbians as they did about gay men.

The systematic persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime has been well documented by historians. The regime's laws explicitly criminalized homosexual acts between men. About 50,000 men were convicted for being homosexuals and between 5,000 and 15,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where up to 60 percent of them died, according to scholars.

But how lesbians fared is less clear. Females were excluded from the law that made homosexual acts illegal. Aside from a few cases that have been uncovered by a handful of scholars in the United States and Germany, little documentation exists describing how the Nazis treated lesbians.

There were still some attempts at prosecutions, though, and the article notes 8 cases on the records where the women were not convicted.  One was particularly odd:

Liu née Holzmann, whose lesbian relationship was also documented in a recent German monograph, struck Huneke as particularly strange. Holzmann was a Jewish lesbian who lived in Nazi Berlin. In 1941, she married a Chinese waiter and received Chinese citizenship, which the police insisted shielded her from deportation to a concentration camp. Once Holzmann's husband became aware of her lesbian relationship, he filed for divorce and contacted the police.

Yet, as in the other three cases, the police opted not to intervene. "It is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship," Huneke wrote.

Magnetic brain rewiring for depression

They should make this available to the threadsters of Catallaxy:

The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA is one of a handful of hospitals and clinics nationwide that offer a treatment that works in a fundamentally different way than drugs. The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation, beams targeted magnetic pulses deep inside patients' brains—an approach that has been likened to rewiring a computer.

TMS has been approved by the FDA for treating depression that doesn't respond to medications, and UCLA researchers say it has been underused. But new equipment being rolled out this summer promises to make the treatment available to more people.

"We are actually changing how the brain circuits are arranged, how they talk to each other," said Dr. Ian Cook, director of the UCLA Depression Research and Clinic Program. "The brain is an amazingly changeable organ. In fact, every time people learn something new, there are physical changes in the brain structure that can be detected."

To Norway, again

My interest in Norway is piqued again by an article in the NYT (with some photos too) about the Americans building a new radar on an isolated Norwegian island, and the Russians are not happy about it:

The joint American-Norwegian radar project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and consume substantial amounts of electricity, has infuriated Moscow, which sees it as part of a Pentagon drive to encircle and contain Mr. Putin’s resurgent Russia. The Russian ambassador in Oslo, Norway’s capital, recently warned Norway that it should “not be naïve” about Russia’s readiness to respond.

“Norway has to understand that after becoming an outpost of NATO, it will have to face head-on Russia and Russian military might,” the ambassador, Teimuraz Ramishvili, told Norway’s state broadcaster, NRK. “Therefore, there will be no peaceful Arctic anymore.”

The new radar system at Vardo will merely upgrade an earlier American-built radar system and continue its mission, Morten Haga Lunde, the chief of Norway’s military intelligence agency, said in a cryptic statement last year. That mission, he added, is to track space debris like defunct satellites and to “monitor our national area of interest in the North.”

But Russia’s generals and many Norwegians have dismissed the space-trash story. They say they believe that the new Globus 3 radar is part of the Pentagon’s efforts to develop a global missile-defense system, making it a prime target for attack in the event of a conflict.

Send in the cows

How do you start a dairy industry overnight in a wealthy desert nation with its transport links blockaded? You buy 4,000 cows from Australia and the U.S. and put them on airplanes.

That is what Qatari businessman Moutaz Al Khayyat told Bloomberg he is doing. The airlift will require as many as 60 flights on Qatar Airways, but Al Khayyat said, "This is the time to work for Qatar."

Here's the link.

Putin on the risk (to the tune of...never mind)

There's a pretty decent article on why Putin is probably feeling pretty cheery about how things are going for Russian influence at the Interpreter, and one odd bit in particular I wanted to extract:

Taking into account all of the above, it seems remarkable that some foreign commentators still find it difficult to see that Putin has been engaged in an all-out attempt to bring his Western enemies down, by whatever means. If 'enemy' seems excessive, let us recall that the standard KGB expression for the US during the Cold War was 'chief adversary', and that until quite recently the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Patrushev, was claiming publicly that US hostility to Russia was 'systemic' and 'immanent' – that is, no matter who was president, the US would continue to seek to 'dismember' Russia.

As Robert Horvath noted in an unpublished address to the Pacific Institute in February (cited here with permission), the most lurid specimen of this propaganda is the allegation that Madeleine Albright once said it would be impossible to construct a just world while Siberia's vast natural resources were controlled by Russia alone. That allegation was first aired in an interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta with a former KGB general about an occult secret project to read the minds of Western leaders. This project was the source of the Albright-Siberia claim.

So one bit of notorious Russian fake news has started from their secret mind reading projects? Huh.  How more "fake news" can you get?

And for a tale of Putin and strong suspicions of his knowledge of hits on Russians who have crossed the interests of Russia:  there's a rather interesting report on Buzzfeed about a death in Britain in 2012 which everyone, apart from the British, think is highly suspicious.  The British investigation does sound rather, shall we say, oddly lacking in curiosity.

I see that I still haven't managed to fit the word "risk" into the post in order to justify the attempted musical pun in the title.  Well, here's a Bloomberg article from early 2016:  Putin is a Compulsive Risk Taker. Hey, it's the best I can do.

Unwanted movie review

In my never ending search to find more than one A grade movie on the Stan streaming service, I watched the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Nightcrawler last weekend.  It got a 95% rating on Rottentomatoes, which just goes to show how unreliable it can be.   (Metacritic gave it a much more reasonable 76%, but I would put it much lower than that.)

It's a very peculiar movie, seemingly made mainly to show off Jake's earnest ability to make himself look physically quite awful and act as really oddball sociopath.   A mix of Sheldon (Big Bang Theory) and Nathan (from Nathan for You - the somewhat amusing but disorientating comedy series also on Stan - you should try it), the role is very menacing and cringingly funny, but it doesn't ever really dramatically build up to much. 

Thematically,  it did keep reminding me of Network,  not that I particularly enjoyed that movie either. 

Good acting in search of a good story, I would say.   4.5/10.   

Addictions of the religiously conservative

For a socially conservative religion, it sure sometimes seems that Muslims have quite the problem with drug addiction.   Although, to be a little bit fair when I don't really want to be, I suppose you could have said the same thing about Catholic Ireland's reputation for overindulging in alcohol.  Which leads me to this extract from a paper talking about the Irish and their reputation for heavy drinking:

Mind you, I should be targetting the Scots instead, perhaps - look at this per capita consumption of spirits table from the same paper:

Gosh.

Batman, too considered

I have to say, prompted by all the commentary appearing with the passing of Adam West (who seemingly was a nice enough, self-effacing fellow), that the amount of words devoted to analysis of his 1960's lightweight show is rather excessive.   The show was mildly amusing for children and adults, but was not all that culturally significant.  You can stop talking about it now...

A mentally unhealthy blog

The threads of Catallaxy, which have become a self selecting support group for the perpetually angry conservative, culture warrior Right, have long made me suspect that many who cyber-live there have, at least, actual personality defects, if not more serious mental health issues.

Yesterday, one of their regulars spoke seriously about feeling depressed and angry to such an extent that he recognises he has a problem, but does not know how to address it.  (He is a teacher, and doesn't trust antidepressants, based on how he has seen them affect children.)

Well, the responses did indeed surprise me, to the extent that so many "regulars" did volunteer that  they have had serious issues with depression - with several mentions of suicidal thoughts and bouts on antidepressants.  (Most of whom indicate they have recovered, of course, although some made it clear it was a continuing battle to some extent.   One of the more unpleasant regulars said he had more or less been born depressed - I can believe that, and would add in "angry" - and was fanatical about exercise as a way of battling it.)

Now I am not wanting to mock those who have bouts of depression, however caused, and of course there be would abundant numbers of people on the Left who have suffered from it as well.

But it does strike me that living your mental life in a perpetually angry Right wing echo chamber, and one which is undoubtedly in denial on several major culture war issues (climate change, and that the younger generation accepts changing marriage to include gay relationships, to give the two clearest examples), is actually not a mentally healthy place to be in the long run, if you are inclined towards depression.

The relief they may feel that "I'm not the only one who thinks like this" has to be off set by the fact that it encourages them to continue denying reality, and thus leading to frustration that, if so many can (apparently) agree with them in this corner of cyberspace, what is wrong with the rest of society?   The site reinforces their sense of anger, ultimately, but based in large part on a denial of reality.

Thus I say that Sinclair Davidson's blog is not only a corrosive one for civil political discussion, it's probably mentally unhelpful for its own community, in the long run.   

Update:  just to show I am not making up the startling outpouring of admissions of past depressive illnesses, here's what the recent depression sufferer has noted today:

All completely normal..not

Much well deserved mockery of Trump's "you must pledge your allegiance to me and proclaim how brilliantly I am performing" public cabinet meeting.

Seriously, no amount of culture war warrior-ing, or just shrugging shoulders and saying "we can work around him to get policy we want"  can excuse defending this fragile, narcissistic ego as normal or nothing to worry about in a leader with the power of POTUS.  

And as for Newt Gingrich, who is credited with starting the Republicans decent into "let's win at all costs, who cares about evidence based policy" stupidity,  his reversal within a month just shows how incredibly shallow and untrustworthy he is.  Just like his President.

Bring back the old Conversation

Can I say, I don't care for the way The Conversation is going under its new leadership, with headline articles like this:

Not merely costume: the power and seduction of the Queen’s hats

Swimming with Lincoln

Also at NPR, a story about how the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is to be drained and cleaned to try to rid it of a parasite that's been killing ducks, and can irritate humans too.

Interestingly, the article then wanders into a discussion of how the pool has never had swimming allowed, but obviously this was not always strictly enforced, as this photo from the 1920's shows:

Where did they swim officially around Washington?:

According to the site Histories of the National Mall, the District of Columbia operated three small whites-only public pools near the Washington Monument in the mid-1920s and early '30s, which were demolished in 1935.

The site says that starting in the 1880s, there were segregated swimming areas near the Mall in the Tidal Basin: "In 1914, Congress voted to create an official beach on the Tidal Basin for white patrons. African Americans swam nearby in a segregated area that never received funding or buildings. Facing increased criticism from black leaders and concerns that the water was polluted, Congress voted to ban swimming in the Tidal Basin in 1925."

Considering that the Brisbane Spring Hill Baths, which I wrote about in detail in 2011, were opened in 1886, it would seem we were pretty advanced compared to other cities in providing that type of facility.

Still pretty dark in parts of Africa

A surprising story at NPR:

Authorities in Mozambique say bald men are being killed, allegedly because of the belief that their heads contain gold.

So far five bald men have been killed, all in central Mozambique: two in May in Milange district close to the border with Malawi and three this month in the district of Morrumbala.

Bald men across the country are afraid of exposing their scalps. Some stay indoors. Others hide their baldness with caps....

Dina accused traditional healers of conniving with the murderers of bald people because of the cultural belief that their heads contain gold. It is also possible that the goal is to obtain body parts to use in rituals aimed at bringing wealth — the reason that albinos have been targeted for their body parts in some countries.

Ready for her close up

There's been too many words here lately, and not enough cute.  Here's some:

And here's a prisma filtered shot:

Cockroaches, retrocausality, event horizons, and Titus-Bode is still a thing...

I've been scrolling through arXiv again, as you do on a rainy day, and suggest the following papers are worth a look:

* Can we Falsify the Consciousness-Causes-Collapse Hypothesis in Quantum Mechanics?
I see that it's co-authored  by someone from the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies from San Francisco State University - which sounds about the unlikeliest school on the planet to expect a groundbreaking paper in quantum physics to come from.

Sorry, perhaps that's too impolite, because I did like it.  As you may see, the paper discusses experiments that could use living creatures to test the hypothesis - with cockroaches being touted as a potential candidate.  (Cats who can walk through walls are one thing, but I hope cockroaches never manage that trick.)  Anyway, it ends up making the point that CCCH (see the title) is probably unfalsifiable, because to test it properly would require removing any arguably conscious thing (a cockroach brain, for example) out of the thermal effects that (apparently) can confound such an experiment.  In other words, whatever you use would have to be taken down to a temperature within a few degrees of absolute zero.  Since no one expects that anything arguably conscious can be conscious at that temperature, it's effectively unfalsifiable.   Neat argument - I wonder if it is right?

*   Did you know that there was a Centre for Time at the University of Sydney?  No, nor did I, but someone from there has written a short paper outlining the way that retrocausality can help sort out some of the perplexing problems in quantum mechanics.   (The only problem is, I thought that some experiments designed to show retrocausality hadn't come up with anything yet.  I have some posts about Cramer's experiment in the past, but here's a not so old media story about his failure.)

*  It's not quantum physics (although it involves it), but there is still some argument happening about whether event horizons really exist around black holes.  Because if they don't, it avoids the information loss paradox.   (I see one of the authors is from Macquarie University, by the way.)  

*  Hey, I didn't realise that scientists still puzzled about the Titus-Bode rule that applied to planetary orbits around the sun, but they do.  (I remember that in a Heinlein novel, the interstellar explorers find that other solar systems exhibited the same rule, and it was still being puzzled over.  I either hadn't heard, or had forgotten, that we already know that some other observed systems do eem to follow the rule.)   I learnt all of this from the intro to this paper, which is short but argues a physical cause for it.  It's not the clearest explanation I've ever read, but here's the abstract:

We consider the geometric Titius-Bode rule for the semimajor axes of planetary orbits. We derive an equivalent rule for the midpoints of the segments between consecutive orbits along the radial direction and we interpret it physically in terms of the work done in the gravitational field of the Sun by particles whose orbits are perturbed around each planetary orbit. On such energetic grounds, it is not surprising that some exoplanets in multiple-planet extrasolar systems obey the same relation. On the other hand, it is surprising that this simple interpretation of the Titius-Bode rule also amounts to a straightforward refutation of the celebrated theorem of Bertrand that has been in existence since 1873. 

A convenient memory

I just noticed from Twitter someone referring to Trump's own lawyers, back in 1992, saying that they always met him in pairs:

This was noted in a Buzzfeed report last year.

25 years later, and inane Trump fans think Trump is now the one you can always believe if it's his word against another person's?   It's just nuts how gullible they are.

Poor badgers - lucky cows

Only recently realising that there were badgers in America (so, I didn't study zoology), I now see that they are also in Japan, and being culled at an excessive rate.  (And also eaten!)

Time to check Wikipedia to get a better grip on badger distribution.  Here we go:

Key: Gold = Honey badger (Mellivora capensis) Red = American badger (Taxidea taxus) Teal = European badger (Meles meles) Dark green = Asian badger (Meles leucurus) Lime green = Japanese badger (Meles anakuma) Blue = Chinese ferret-badger (Melogale moschata) Indigo = Burmese ferret-badger (Melogale personata) Azure = Javan ferret-badger (Melogale orientalis) Purple = Bornean ferret-badger (Melogale everetti)  (It says I have to acknowledge the author - so here: By IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, species assessors and the authors of the spatial data., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16275523)

As for eating them (an idea I find rather unappealing - not keen on eating a creature that lives off worms):

Although rarely eaten today in the United States or the United Kingdom,^[39] badgers were once a primary meat source for the diets of Native Americans and white colonists.^{[40][41][42][43][44]} Badgers were also eaten in Britain during World War II and the 1950s.^[41] In Russia, the consumption of badger meat is still widespread.^[45] Shish kebabs made from badger, along with dog meat and pork, are a major source of trichinosis outbreaks in the Altai Region of Russia.^[45] In Croatia, badger meat is rarely eaten. When it is, it is usually smoked and dried, or less commonly, served in goulash.^[46] In France, badger meat was used in the preparation of several dishes, such as Blaireau au sang, and it was a relatively common ingredient in countryside cuisine.^[47] Badger meat was eaten in some parts of Spain until recently.^[48] In Japan, badger is regarded in folktales as a food for the humble.^[49]

I'll pass, thanks.

And as for other eaten mammals - I noticed on TV recently that there is a sudden push in India to give broader, Hindu based, protection to cattle:

A sweeping ban on trading cattle for slaughter, imposed by India's Hindu nationalist Government, is being seen by the nation's meat and leather industries as an attempt to destroy businesses conservative Hindus do not agree with.

Other critics argue the ban is an attempt to control what people eat, and accuse the Government of using prevention of cruelty as a justification for imposing Hindu values.
"They [the Government] want to destroy people engaged in leather industry," said Seth Satpal Mall, a hide trader in Punjab's industrial hub, Jalandhar.

"They just want to kill us."

The snap Government decree, issued last week, requires documentation proving any cattle sold are for "agricultural purposes" only, effectively outlawing trade for slaughter.

The report also notes "cow protection groups" have become violent vigilantes recently, bashing up people they suspect of slaughtering cattle.

Religion and politics in a different form from what we normally read about lately, hey.

Shopping centres as living rooms

I'm been meaning to ask this out loud for about 6 months now:   who came up with the idea of making shopping malls into living rooms?

Honestly, the amount of trendy looking, living room-ish style furniture that has appeared in public spaces of the local large shopping mall in the last year or so is pretty astounding - and I'm not saying that I don't like the look of it, really.  It just strikes me as slightly odd.   I assume that it must be based on some research that shows that if you let people relax in a colourful high back chair, with a funny shaped coffee table in front of them, probably while they use their mobile phones to check up on Facebook, they'll end up buying more?

But we all know that retail rents are already astronomical in large Australian shopping centres - and my local one also seems to having a series of prominent departures of smaller retailers, perhaps due to leases that started when they opened the last extension about 5 or 6 years ago expiring.    So, you just have to wonder whether the cost of all these mini lounge rooms appearing every 30 metres or so down every walkway is really worth it.   (Not to mention the question of how often they will end up needing to be cleaned and/or replaced.)  The retailer tenants will end up paying for it, no doubt.

I'm guessing that the idea originated in America, or England, but it's a very distinctive change.

Emperor to abdicate

So, Japan has done the right thing and will let the Emperor abdicate.  The BBC has a "ten things you may not know" article about him, which includes this:

1. He has a really long family history Born 23 December 1933, he is the 125th emperor of a line which is traced back more than 2,600 years, according to official genealogies. That would make it the world's oldest continuing hereditary monarchy.

In keeping with ultra-formal royal tradition, he was raised apart from his parents in an imperial nursery from the age of two.

Let's check in on how the brains trust* forecast the UK election..

 

And how are they taking the news of a very, very close result?:

* sarcasm of the highest order.   And yes, I did get the last US presidential election wrong - but this is still fun.