You talk, I press the like button and interject occasional one-liners.
Open Thread For June
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Aardvarchaeology – by Dr. Martin Rundkvist
Scandinavian archaeology, history, skepticism, books and music
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Protesters are now spraying cops with caustic soda. What’s next, concentrated hydrochloric acid?
They are progressively stepping up the violence, claiming that they are ‘forced to’ because peaceful protests have not achieved their demands that the CE immediately resigns, all criminal charges against violent protesters are immediately dropped and a commission of inquiry is set up to investigate the ‘police brutality’, etc.
The way things are going, it could all get very nasty very quickly. People are going to go to prison for this, and not just for token sentences. One guy from the 2016 riots got six years, and plenty of people are doing as much or worse than he did.
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WTF?
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Shit is getting real very fast here.
Thousands of demonstrators have broken into the Legislative Council building and they are literally trashing the whole place – smashing everything up, pouring red paint everywhere. The Police have retreated, evidently not willing to engage in the level of violence they would need to in order to try to bring the situation under control, knowing the condemnation they would face if they do.
Meanwhile, elsewhere there is a much larger number of people engaging in a perfectly peaceful outdoor protest, with no problems at all.
It’s becoming clear that some hard core has formed who are intent on continually escalating the violence and damage, who are separate from the very large majority of peaceful protesters. Well, that happens, I have seen that happen in other countries.
This is not going to end well.
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I just had another thought – maybe the Police are being clever. They are capable of cleverness.
There is only one way in and out of the LegCo building: through the hole that the violent demonstrators smashed in the glass doors. And it’s not a very large hole. So effectively they have trapped themselves inside the building. All the Police have to do it wait outside and arrest them as they come out in necessarily small numbers. And they are all guilty of an offence for which they can be arrested – entering the Legislative Council without authorisation.
That could turn into a nasty stand-off, but the demonstrators can’t stay in there forever. They need food, and they won’t find any in there.
Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I think this violent mob might have just outwitted themselves.
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I would expect any public building in a place like Hong Kong to have one or more emergency exits on other sides of the building. Maybe there are police staking out those exits, and maybe someone trying to use one of those exits would set off an alarm (this is sometimes done in the US, particularly at airports as many emergency exits would lead out onto the tarmac where planes are parked, but I don’t know how common this would be in Hong Kong). And maybe the violent protestors are dumb enough not to think of looking for one of these exits. But I do know that you would not want to build a building, especially a public building, with only one means of egress. Otherwise somebody targeting that building would only have to block the one exit and starve out whoever is inside, whether they should be in there or not.
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Yes, of course there are emergency exits, but they lead to secure outdoor areas that are ‘places of refuge’ in the event of a fire.
The Police finally cleared the building by warning the radicals that they were coming and would use whatever force was necessary, so being the great heroes that they are, the radicals all exited the building, having thoroughly trashed and vandalised it, and engaged in running street battles with the cops, who dispersed them all. Not clear yet if there have been any arrests. The Police deserve credit for exercising maximum restraint to minimise the violence, but it means that the radicals are congratulating themselves that they got away with it.
This is the worst violence since the 1967 pro-Communist riots, and has left most HK people utterly stunned. And I don’t think it’s over.
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Yep, confirmed that caustic soda and drain cleaner were their anti-personnel weapons of choice on this occasion, in addition to the usual bricks and steel stakes.
It will be interesting to see what they decide to use next time. Because these radicals are not done yet, and their modus operandi is progressive escalation to keep elevating the threat level.
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I wouldn’t mind betting we see that good old standby the Molotov Cocktail make an appearance at some point. That presents them with a bit of a logistical problem, but they have already been smuggling stuff to where they need it using closed vans, so they could do it. But the cops have been down on that, stopping vans and inspecting the contents, and yesterday they seized some stuff from one van, so who knows – maybe the Molotov Cocktails were already in there.
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OK, let’s see if this link works. If a ruin city has a lot of catapult stones at the top layer, and the official chronicles have a lot of pages missing for that particular year, you know that some bad shit went down, things the later rulers do not want to talk about.
It is like the blind spot in vision, you are not aware of it… unless you measure the foundations of a lot of buildings, and look for anomalies that began that particular year. And keep in mind a medieval army is unlikely to cover 1000km without proper roads in just 40 days. The Mongols might have pulled it off, but they did not bother with huge supply trains.
https://bit.ly/2YoYsCN
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Jewish Group Demands End of Child Separation and Detainee Camps https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2019/07/01/jewish-group-demands-end-of-child-separation-and-detainee-camps/
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American Culture in Sweden: Car shows
“A great American pastime for motor lovers alike is to go to car shows around the United States, which focus on old-time cars with beautiful exteriors and big personalities. Sometimes people buy these cars or trade them, sometimes they partake in street racing but most of the time it’s just a bunch of people gathered together to appreciate cars from all over
.It might come as a surprise that very similar car shows are popular all across Sweden, for example the ten-week Trosa Veteranbilsträffar on Thursdays during summer in Trosa, and other gatherings include those in Uppsala, Norrtälje, Västerås, and perhaps the most famous, the Power Big Meet, in Lidköping. These are known as bilträffar (literally ‘car meetups’) in Sweden, and there’s very likely to be one near you”
Power Big Meet http://bigmeet.com/eng/ They need a John Travolta lookalike.
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New model suggests lost continents for early Earth https://phys.org/news/2019-07-lost-continents-early-earth.html
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John Hawks has a 1943 piece up by Franz Weidenreich about the Neanderthals as (modern) human ancestors. Um, but John, they weren’t.
Weidenreich, long since deceased, is honorary patron of the Neanderthal Anti-defamation League (not kidding, it’s a real thing in America), of which Hawksie is an active supporter. I can understand people getting steamed up about defamation of living people, but Neanderthals? What for? They’ve been extinct for 40,000 years. What does it matter if most people are not informed and regard them as primitive, hulking brutes living a brutish existence in caves or whatever? Or even that some people (can’t be too many by now) don’t know that they are carrying a small % of Neanderthal DNA?
Just on that, 25% of the hominin bones recovered so far from Sima de los Huesos show cuts marks, which are interpreted as evidence of cannibalism, or some hominins eating other hominins. ‘Brutish’ might be an unfair description, but sensitive, gentle, peaceful, highly intelligent archaic people living in harmony with nature (no, that has never happened anywhere) is likewise over the top.
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While we and Neanderthals have (had) only minor sexual dimorphism- a supposed proxy for how violent inter-group conflict can get- we are less violent than chimps *relatively* speaking. I am not at all surprised by signs of cannibalism.
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RT has made my blood run cold for the second day running by posting a video of a female cleaner at Moscow Zoo fending off a polar bear with a broom. The bear (which was obviously not meant to be able to get in there while she was cleaning the enclosure) had her cornered, but she got away from it with the help of another female cleaner who distracted it, and they both got out.
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Ooh. More archaics.
Mapping gene flow between ancient hominins through demography-aware inference of the ancestral recombination graph.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/687368v1
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Razib’s take on that paper, plus the recent one on the two 80,000 year old Neanderthals.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/07/01/the-vines-around-the-tree-trunks/
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One of the things to note is that there was introgression from modern humans into Neanderthals pretty early, including mtDNA (so that means modern human females mated with male Neanderthals and had hybrid daughters who grew up among Neanderthals and had more daughters) – that was important to them, because at that stage Neanderthal mtDNA was degrading pretty badly.
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Why would the mtDNA degrade? Highly selected for.
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Inbreeding.
The introgressed modern human mtDNA was strongly selected for – a strong sweep.
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But mtDNA doesn’t recombine. It just drifts. Why would the typical Neanderthal mitochondrion get successively worse at its job over the generations?
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I don’t know. Gregory Cochran covered this a while back, but I don’t link to him here for reasons. But he’s smart. I’ll maybe try to find exactly what he said and copy it.
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This is his whole comment on it. I already knew about the modern human mtDNA introgression into Neanderthals from seeing it referenced elsewhere, but this is what he said about it:
“Some time ago I discussed the idea that Neanderthals were fucked-up because their low effective population size led to inefficient purifying selection. But the usual harmonic-mean effective population size is not quite right: for salvage mutations, things that somewhat correct the wrongness caused by increased genetic load, the effective population size is closer to the average. In other words, there were probably a lot more Neanderthals during interglacial periods, and these genetic consequences of those population booms ameliorated their genetic problems.
Second, Neanderthal Y chromosomes and mtdNA have even smaller effective population sizes, 1/4th as big as the autosomal effective size, and thus were even more likely to be messed up. which is why, maybe the Neanderthals seem to have picked up mtDNA from some African group closer to modern humans around a quarter of a million years ago: they needed it.”
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Nancy Pelosi is full of shit, as usual. The extradition legislation was not ‘reprehensible’ – she clearly hasn’t read it. If she doesn’t like extradition arrangements, then presumably she would be OK with cancelling the extradition treaty that HK has with the USA, where many states still engage in judicial killing.
In any case, the legislation is as dead as a door nail, so she can stop grandstanding about it and giving oxygen to a bunch of violent thugs. The American Chamber of Commerce in HK has condemned the violent radicals, so Pelosi can shut up and leave it to them – they know a lot more about it than she obviously does.
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Nancy Pelosi and her allies are also not very interested in examining Trump’s taxes. It seems the Old Boys are mostly interested in stopping the more radical Democrats (Sanders, OAC, Warren) and maintaining status quo after the Dems have defeated Trump.
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(Here is a question I posted to Charles Stross about an oddity in his Merchant clan novels)
“A few books back, when Clan members explore new parallel Earths, they by an extreme coincidence arrive right on top of a radioactive ruin with a functioning gate out to vacuum (the world at the other side has been crushed into a black hole, so the other side of the gate just hangs there 6400 km above the singularity).
-Is there any way to “fix” that coincidence, like some odd geograpic quirks that make it likely the clan members would explore precisely *that* location, and that the extinct civilisation would build a site there?
.
I mention this, because this is the same problem you encounter in Prometheus: The expedition descends through clouds and end up right on top of the Engineer facility!”
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(Charles Stross responnds) General rule of writing: you’re allowed one howlingly implausible coincidence per novel. (This mirrors real life, which is under no obligation to provide an internally consistent narrative and thus comes sprinkled with howlingly implausible coincidences.) That’s the coincidence for, let me see, was it “The Revolution Business”?
That the forerunners left installations like the slighted paratime fortress scattered up and down the North American eastern seaboard is not in and of itself a coincidence: it’s a fairly good spot for human colonization, if you arrive on a previously-uninhabited late Cenozoic Earth.
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…And this is another reason we should sequence the genomes of non-human entities.
“Mechanism behind low cancer occurrence in bats signals potential treatment strategies for humans” https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-07-mechanism-cancer-occurrence-potential-treatment.html
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I need to let för steam. As I have mentioned to Martin, I have been speaking a lot
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Goddamit, touched “post” too soon!
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(continued) talking a lot with a woman who is working with “honour” oppression among the local immigrants, and as a result has been targeted for harassment by a gang of local creeps.
A lot of regions and religions have “honor culture” but for this particular posse, it has gone beyond sporadic stone-age mentality.
I wish western muslims would go on inventing Islam 2.0 along with openly rejecting the regressive passages in scripture, thus making the kooks unable to hide behind some unholy book to get the appearence of respectability.
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The local cops managed to shut down a gang of outlaw bikers, and a group of young would-be gangstas who wanted to emulate their peers in southern Sweden.
This gang is harder to nail down since they are not motivated by money and won’t be caught with a bag of stolen goods, but as the public becomes aware, this, too, will pass. I just wish the cops could hurry up and shut them down.
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Another thing that makes me furious: -A member of the Green party in Umeå is opposed to all talk about honor culture, calling it racist.
Since the *victims* are mostly refugees who came here to escape this shit, it is the perpetrators that are the “racists” and so are the ignorant assholes who enable them.
Now I will blow off steam going to an American blog making fun of the Best President Ever. 😁
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I got the same reaction when I spoke against female genital mutilation. What my accusers don’t know is that I have been friends with 3 Indonesian sisters since childhood, who know me well enough to tell me what was done to them and how it has impacted their lives.
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There’s no sympathy with that view in mainstream Australia, though. Not only is FGM a criminal offence in Oz, it is also a criminal offence for people to take their daughters to another country to have it done, and they are liable to be arrested when they return to Oz. The hard part is for the cops to know about it, though.
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Shifting Memories: Burial Practices and Cultural Interaction in Bronze Age China: A study of the Xiaohe-Gumugou cemeteries in the Tarim Basin.
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1328477&dswid=-2276
Remember those tattooed Europid-looking Tocharian mummies in the Tarim Basin?
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Lee Iacocca (the Ford Mustang guy ) dead at 94
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One of the few books my dad read when I was a kid was Iacocca’s 1984 autobiography.
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The moving force behind the Ford Pinto, which is a staple of engineering ethics courses (not for good reasons, obviously).
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A chief of state wants to have a military parade tomorrow.
I would love to see him riding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a Carro Armato M13/40, with biplane fighters and tri-motor bombers flying overhead.
BTW, the White House has backed off about inserting a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
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At least they seem to have managed to make him understand what an Abrams tank will do to an asphalt pavement.
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LOL!
Hunt is threatening China with “serious consequences” if it doesn’t do something or other that he has pulled out of his overly fertile imagination.
I wonder what he has in mind – sending a gun boat up the Yangtze River to teach those yellow, slant eyed, foreign johnnies a thing or two, perhaps.
Or maybe he’s planning to wade ashore in Hong Kong wearing his solar topee and bombay bloomers, Douglas MacArthur style, to retake the colony himself and reinstate HK people’s right to protest. Oh wait – under the British colonial administration protests were illegal. Bugger.
And I thought Boris was a moronic, posturing prat.
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The current battle for Tory leadership is a bit too reminiscent of the classic Monty Python Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch.
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Genetic contributions to variation in human stature in prehistoric Europe.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/690545v1
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God Orders All Followers To Swallow Cyanide Capsules In Preparation For Voyage To Alpha Centauri https://www.theonion.com/god-orders-all-followers-to-swallow-cyanide-capsules-in-1835954069
Tucker Carlson: “They are going to ban the speaking of English!”
The last one was not satire.
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They’re going to ban the speaking of English where, according to Carlson?
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In his own imagination, of course. Speaking of upper class twits….
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