I don’t watch a lot of television, but when my sister gave my Arts Editor a gift of a Amazon Prime membership, we started taking advantage of it.

One of the shows we tripped across is Endgame, the principal character of which is fictional chess Grandmaster Arkady Balagan. Having witnessed the assassination of his fiancee, he is now trapped by the psychological damage from the incident in the hotel in which they were staying prior to her death. In order to finance his stay in this high-end hotel, he turns to crime-solving using his analytical skills and his Russian temperament, but in the background is conducting his own investigation of his fiancee’s death, in association with his fiancee’s young, determined, yet naive sister.

If you enjoy modern crime solving dramas, this is not a bad little series to try out. The acting is more than competent, the staging and character chemistry is well done, and the stories are enjoyably intricate.

The wonder, of course, is why this intriguing effort didn’t make it more than the single season. It certainly had a lovely cliff-hanger season ending, as Balagon is warned not to further pursue his investigations of his fiancee’s death. Perhaps even better, characters are not necessarily permanent, as one dies in the final episode.

We’d have happily watched more episodes, and I don’t know why they didn’t continue this show. Put it in the file labeled One season wonders.

From Retraction Watch:

35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper

Yes, you read that headline right.

In a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington (also on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization), Roger Davis of the University of Massachusetts (and former MCB editor), and Amy Kullas, ASM’s publication ethics manager — found 59 potentially problematic papers, of which five were retracted. Extrapolating from these findings and those of another paper that scanned duplication rates, the researchers propose that tens of thousands of papers might need to be purged from the literature. That 35,000 figure is double the amount of retractions we’ve tallied so far in our database, which goes back to the 1970s.

Wow. I’d like some more explicit information. Ah, here we go:

RW: You extrapolate that if 10% of the MCB papers needed to be retracted for image duplication, then 35,000 papers throughout the literature may need the same. How did you perform that calculation, and what assumptions is it based on?

EB: We extrapolated the results from previous studies to the rest of the literature. In our previous study, in which we analyzed 20,000 papers, we found that 3.8% contained duplicated images. We know that the percentage of duplicated images varies per journal, because of a wide variety of reasons (different editorial processes, variable levels of peer review, different demographics of the authors). Since this percentage was calculated on papers from 40 different journals with different impact factors, this percentage serves as a reasonable representation of the whole body of biomedical literature. The 10.1 % is the percentage of papers that were retracted in the MCB dataset. Granted, this was a much smaller dataset than the one from the mBio paper, but it was a set that was seriously looked at.

If there are 8,778,928 biomedical publications indexed in PubMed from 2009-2016, and 3.8% contain a problematic image, and 10.6% (CI 1.5- 19.8%) of that group contain images of sufficient concern to warrant retraction, then we can estimate that approximately 35,000 (CI 6,584-86,911) papers are candidates for retraction due to image duplication.

And one of the researchers on this subject, Elizabeth Bik, commented:

Errors can be found anywhere, not just in scientific papers. It is reassuring to know that most are the result of errors, not science misconduct. Studies like ours are also meant to raise awareness among editors and peer reviewers. Catching these errors before publication is a much better strategy than after publication. In this current study we show that investing some additional time during the editorial process to screen for image problems is worth the effort, and can save time down the road, in case duplications are discovered after publication. I hope that our study will result in more journals following in the footsteps of ASM by starting to pay attention to these duplications and other image problems, before they publish their papers.

So this really is a matter of carelessness OR working on a very difficult enterprise with either inadequate tools or methodologies.

It’s still a big number.

This is the Creeping Bellflower. The pic is from our garden of last year, but it’s back again this year:

And how has it attained the exalted title of this post? From iNaturalist:

This plant is native to Europe and western Siberia and it has been introduced to North America, where it has become an extremely invasive weed. It chokes out other plants, and eliminating it is nearly impossible due to its multiple propagation mechanisms.

Sound familiar? I might point out it’s actually fairly attractive on the surface and has wormed its way to the heart of our political system garden, and is going to be damned pernicious.

Adumbrate:

1. : to foreshadow vaguely : intimate • the social unrest that adumbrated the French Revolution
2. : to suggest, disclose, or outline partially • adumbrate a plan
3. : overshadow, obscure • bubbling optimism, not at all adumbrated by difficulties [Merriam-Webster]

Heard on Dr. Who today, Trial of a Time Lord.

Such camera hogs. I daren’t bring the camera anywhere near them or they’ll snatch it away.

Then, no more spam phone calls.

Hmmmm.

Dicta:

The part of a judicial opinion which is merely a judge’s editorializing and does not directly address the specifics of the case at bar; extraneous material which is merely informative or explanatory.

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case.

Dicta are regarded as of little authority, on account of the manner in which they are delivered; it frequently happening that they are given without much reflection, at the bar, without previous examination. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “Fellow conservatives, stop the baseless attacks on a potential Supreme Court pick,” Alberto R. Gonzalez, WaPo:

The same reporting included another case where the District of Columbia Circuit ruled to allow an undocumented pregnant teen to get an abortion. Again, Kavanaugh dissented, and once again nameless conservatives argued that the dissent should have gone further, no doubt frustrated that Kavanaugh did not take on abortion rights even though he is bound as a circuit judge to follow Supreme Court precedent. I remember a time when true judicial conservatives did not act to advance a social agenda through dicta — words that have no legal bearing in the case at hand nor serve as precedent for future cases.

Source: Wikipedia

In case you hadn’t heard about it, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a man reportedly powerfully in conservative and Tea Party circles, has been accused by former Ohio State athletes of knowing about the activities of Dr. Richard Strauss, the Ohio State University doctor who examined athletes for treatment and research purposes. The doctor committed suicide after he was convicted. Jordan, then an assistant wrestling coach at the OSU, reportedly did nothing about the sexual assaults. I have no opinion on the guilt or innocence of Rep. Jordan in this matter – it’s up to our law enforcement representatives to determine his knowledge of the sexual assaults in the matter.

But I will note that the alleged behavior, which is essentially protecting the power hierarchy, is certainly congruent with the  culture of the GOP. True, moderate members are chased out of the Party, and the Tea Party wing has certainly revolted against the establishment. But notice that, so long as ideological purity of the wing is maintained, non-ideological transgressions are tolerated. It’s a symptom of an addiction to power, an allegiance overwhelming that of good sense. It’s also worth noting that the nature of ideological purity will change over time as a function of the membership kicking out the moderates and recruiting ever more extremists from the right.

I have no idea if the allegations against Jordan are truly credible, or if they’ll just fizzle and fade away. I have no animus against Rep. Jordan. It’s simply a note that his alleged behavior would not be surprising in this context.

Note to all outside garbage bin makers:

PLEASE do not make deep, deep grips to be used for hauling around your bins. Wasps and other stinging creatures love to use those deep grips to make their nests. And it’s damn hard to see those nests unless you lay the damn thing over on its side.

Thank you.

The nest was in the right-hand cubby. One dead wasp may be barely glimpsed by the morbidly minded.

First, a bit of lily.

Then, a shot down a neighbor’s grape arbor:

Our tomatoes from two weeks ago.

Finally, a lovely artifact of the camera.

Like I said a few days ago, the hocks are out!

Building with the plentiful to make the rare.

(Vimeo’s being annoying with its privacy settings, but I’ll post this anyways.)

https://vimeo.com/237604550

On 38 North, Michael Madden suggests recent North Korean coverage might be a bit over the top:

Prior to the Singapore Summit, the biggest news about the DPRK concerned a personnel shuffle of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) High Command. Some of the coverage of these changes, obviously targeted on a general audience, was misleading. According to recent commentary, Kim Jong Un, the “brutal dictator,” had once again embarked on a bloody purge of senior officials.

A more coherent and accurate interpretation of Kim Jong Un’s rationale was that he switched his top military leaders as part of the preliminary phase of mothballing the DPRK’s WMD program; there is a certain logic to moving malcontents to other positions, lest they resist Kim’s moves on denuclearization. However, this was only a minor factor in Kim Jong Un’s calculations. …

If the shorter time periods are considered, then this is a characteristic similar to other political systems, democratic and totalitarian alike. When the longer time periods are considered, the institutions in question go through periods of interim or transitional management to facilitate a smooth arrival for the new boss. In any event, these changes are not undertaken rashly; rather, they are deliberate and well-planned. This personnel management method—which is highly risk-averse—is one of the foundations of the DPRK political system’s resilience and survival. This lends itself in watching leadership activity in state media to occasionally seeing political dead men walking. Some conceal their alienation better than others.

In other words, Kim is settling into the job, and the job is settling out around him. Reading every personnel move as cold-blooded murder leaves open the question Why hasn’t the rest of the leadership just shot Kim in the head and moved on? To suggest that every change in high leadership is an occasion for blood ignores the problems engendered by such an unsettling way of changing people around. And, if the media is being appropriate proctored, it leaves them with egg on their face.

But we don’t proctor them. We’ve confused media with entertainment in some crucial ways, and unless we backtrack and disentangle news from entertainment, and understand that the former can be deadly serious, we’ll never really see improvements in coverage.

My Left Foot (1989) is the biographical film of the poet, painter, and novelist Christy Brown of Dublin, Ireland. He was born with cerebral palsy, a condition which was not only a challenge to him as an artist, but for him as a person in a large, poverty-stricken family. It covers the period from his birth to his marriage, after achieving fame with his novel of the same name. The title refers to the only limb over which he had the necessary control to express himself visually, his left foot.

Like most biographies, it seeks a central theme around which to build what may seem to be a series of random incidents, and, unsurprisingly, for Brown it’s perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. Along with that theme is that of the importance of a loving, supportive family, although in this he had to win his father over, as the man, at least in the movie, would hardly accept his mute, uncommunicative son could be his progeny. He thought of Christy as something near a vegetable, until the day Christy proves he can think and communicate.

But if the storyteller is to demonstrate the virtues of perseverance, then hurdles must present themselves, and for Christy they are numerous: personal relationships, sudden black depressions, and the continual physical challenges someone with cerebral palsy must face. But, as the movie would have it, Christy did not accept the constrictions his condition would have put on him in the eyes of others, and so we see his eventual triumph as an artist.

And that’s part of the mythos of the Western version of the story of perseverance, isn’t it? The success stories are told, but what of those of those who struggled and persevered – and did not succeed? I sometimes wonder if those stories should be told to honor those who struggled and lost, much like those numberless, nameless men who fought and perished int those few, tragic days of the Battle of the Somme in World War I. Crushed into the mud, lost to their families, what of them? Is it enough that the poets who wrote for them and then lost their own lives were published?

Or is it just that, someday, their constituent atoms will once again be star stuff, as will those atoms of my reader and myself?

My Left Foot chronicles someone who was a winner, and it’s well-done, if predictable. If you’re in the mood for the inspirational struggle, you won’t go wrong with this technically excellent movie.

Conservative WaPo columnist Max Boot finds it necessary to confirm his decision to leave the Republican Party in the wake of it transforming into the Trumpian Party:

Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.

They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators.

That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must first be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

It’s encouraging that some of the conservatives who populated the Republican Party recognize the disaster into which the GOP has transformed itself. But there really needs to be more than this: how this has occurred must be identified, isolated, and procedures put into place to discourage it from happening again. For example, one of my favorite hobby horses is the Team Politics rule and how it turns out that it encourages victory at the electoral box, but discourages the development of worthy leaders, locally and nationally. The result is that he or she who is best at lickspittle politics ends up occupying positions of power – the opposite of a meritocracy, which is the basis of the United States. This policy, this entire culture, should be banned by the leaders of the future reborn GOP, or whatever the legitimate conservative party ends up naming itself.

So when Mr. Boot waves a flag of national emergency, it’s all well and good. But we need to learn from this national mistake, and try to prevent it in the future, if possible.

They’re on a date. Bestiality will occur later.

For science nuts, Dinosaurus! (1960) is an abomination and a blasphemy – if you also don’t have a sense of humor. For the rest of us, it’s an agonizing stop-action / sock puppet movie set in the Virgin Islands. A crew of Americans are dredging out a bay at an island when they encounter two frozen monsters. In the interests of paleontology, they drag them up on the beach, much to the delight of the local cute kid, Julio. In the meantime, the local equivalent to a mob boss has been menacing the waitresses of the restaurant and Julio (the Americans are not impressed), but during the night, he inadvertently discovers the frozen body of a caveman. Smelling a cash cow, he pulls the body off the beach and into the woods.

The incoming tropical storm of the evening features lots of lightning, which functions as a giant automated external defibrillator (AED) for giants, and soon enough the monsters, a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus, are up and tromping about, making dinner out of the watchman (who, in a touch of humor, happens to be reading a comic book named Rip Van Winkle) and then charging off into the forest.

An unusual and, sadly, unfortunate element of this movie is the recovery of the caveman, who invades a local house and proceeds to puzzle over the sputterings of the short-wave radio, tries on the lady’s frilly dress (it doesn’t suit him), and is eventually discovered and befriended by Julio, who serves him a bit of pie after teaching him how to sit in a chair. In what’s otherwise a survival tale, the humor is ill-fitting, if earnestly presented, but has little function in this story.

The mob boss refuses to let go of his dream of riches, and despite the shrieks of the T. Rex in the forest, he and his minions (another couple of farce-specialists) track down the caveman. However, he proves hard to handle and escapes with Julio into the forest. Pursued by the mob boss, the T. Rex, and the leader of the Americans, Julio gets a ride on the Brontosaurus before he and the leading lady, who has little function beyond being cute, take refuge in the abandoned mine from the T. Rex. (We’ll skip over the uncomfortable near-sex scene of the caveman with the leading lady.)

T. Rex proves impervious to the Molotov cocktails dreamed up by the Americans, but soon enough the refugees escape and end up at the ruins of the colonial fortress of the island, where a moat of oil-fueled fire holds the T. Rex off until the leader of the Americans hits on the idea of forcing the T. Rex off a cliff and into the sea below using construction machines.

I shouldn’t have wasted my time reciting the plot. While the comedic element of the caveman was unusual and unwanted, it was otherwise the typical dinosaur survival story, or, to misquote Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, a screaming and running movie. The Rip Van Winkle bit made me laugh, but otherwise it was all fairly boring. Perhaps in 1960 it was thrilling, but in the context of today’s CGI effects, it’s more a historical curiosity.

On The Resurgent, Susan Wright is discomfited by another evangelist leader who’s using the Bible to support Donald Trump:

Televangelist Andrew Wommack hosted a Facebook question and answer time on Facebook Tuesday night, as a lead-in to his usual Truth & Liberty livestream event.

At some point, the pastor was asked by a viewer why so many Christians were “blinded” and couldn’t see how God could be using Donald Trump.

It’s the same kind of nonsense I have dealt with in a thousand interactions since the election. Trump, with his adulteries, cheating, scamming, lying, and abusiveness is King David. He’s King Cyrus. They’ve stopped just shy of assigning messianic qualities to him, in some cases.

Just shy.

Wommack’s answer to this question was the dangerous twisting of Scripture that so many have used to excuse their support of an ungodly man.

Citing a passage from 2 Thessalonians in which Paul warns that, in the Last Days, God will send a “powerful delusion” on those “refused to love the truth,” Wommack said that this is precisely what is happening now.

“How come people can’t see things today?” he asked. “It really defies logic. It really does defy logic. It seems like there is a supernatural deception that’s over people that they can’t see the fallacy of what they’re doing.”

“I do believe that we are in the End Times and this is one of the signs of the End Times,” Wommack said. “I believe that there is a demonic deception that is blinding people today.”

I’ll agree with Wommack on this: There is a great delusion that has overtaken the people.

Four heads are better than one.

Trying to derive doctrine from a text readable in so many ways, years after it’s been translated, all strikes me as one of the nuttier ways to spend one’s time these days. But I suppose it’s not surprising, as it’s a movement pre-disposed to accepting the cloying bullshit of charlatans.

I know it’s just chanting into the wind, but how about evaluating President Trump on his own terms, using your life experiences with liars and cheats, and then tell me how you feel about his competency in a position completely outside of his experience? The difference in conclusions will cast a new light on the rancid remark magical thinking.

Yacking over “doctrine” … just leaves me shaking what I use for a head these days.

The US Chamber of Commerce has evaluated the costs of the “easy to win” trade wars President Trump is kicking off, and broken them down by state. What does Minnesota stand to lose?

Tariffs imposed by the United States are nothing more than a tax increase on American consumers and businesses–including manufacturers, farmers, and technology companies–who will all pay more for commonly used products and materials.

Retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries on U.S. exports will make American-made goods more expensive, resulting in lost sales and ultimately lost jobs here at home.

This is the wrong approach, and it threatens to derail our nation’s recent economic resurgence.

This is coming from a bastion of Republican support. As the Republican Party becomes the Party of Trump, of right-wing ideology (that being, manic loyalty to Trump) and Trump’s poorly thought out political actions, the Chamber of Commerce becomes a marker of sorts of just how far the GOP has slunk from its old mooring at the pier of capitalism, free markets, and a strong defense, and moved to the pier of mercantilism, xenophobia, and a cult of personality that might begin to verge on Mao-like someday. It’s not hard to attribute some principle to the CoC, while the Republicans, as embodied by Trump, are now more or less moving through a self-interested set of political moves, not motivated by love of country, but love of self.

Kevin Drum thinks this means the cultural war we’ve been expecting is about to begin:

Trump hasn’t responded with a devastating tweet yet, but I’m sure he will eventually. At this point, though, China has retaliated against Trump. Canada has retaliated against Trump. Europe has retaliated against Trump. And now the Chamber of Commerce has retaliated against Trump. The battle is finally fully engaged.

I don’t know that Trump considered the CoC to be a vital ally, so he may not consider their ‘betrayal’ to be much of an event. But time will tell.

Or so does the amaranth appear to have.

Being neither musical nor obsessed with the literature of the 19th century, I was unaware of this particular vacation trip, as described by Jonathan Gaisman in Standpoint:

The most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music was that taken by Chopin and his androgynous literary lover George Sand (and her family) in Majorca in 1838-1839. The trousered, cigar-smoking Sand was derided by Baudelaire as possessing the morals of a janitress; her future lover Alfred de Musset mordantly observed of the silver dagger which pinned her hair that “a woman of such slight virtue hardly required so immoderate a weapon”. Chopin’s characteristically acidulous comment on his first encounter was, “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” That was in 1836; by 1838 the two were lovers. They numbered Delacroix (who painted them both) and Heine among their Paris friends.

In Majorca, where they arrived in November 1838, they soon retreated to a former charterhouse in the valley of Moses or Valdemossa, high in the mountains outside Palma. Here they occupied cell 4. (In the late 20th century, the owner of this cell successfully sued the owner of cell 2, who was passing it off as the composer’s former residence.) Relations with the islanders did not prosper: in her 1841 memoir Un hiver à Majorque, Sand referred to them as “cowards, hypocrites, pickpockets, Indian monkeys, Polynesian savages”. The local newspaper retaliated, describing her as “the most immoral of writers . . . the most obscene of women”. Chopin’s fragile health deteriorated through the winter. A neighbour observed: “That consumptive will go to hell, first for being a consumptive, and next for not going to confession.” Sand claimed that her children were stoned in the streets. They abandoned Majorca in February 1839, leaving the Bauza behind them. As is the way with unsuccessful holidays, this one improved in recollection; Chopin later told Liszt that the short visit was one of the happiest times of his life: “It was as if, like Linnaeus’s clock, the time of day was told by the blossoming of flowers, each with a different perfume and each disclosing other beauties as they opened outwards.”

I cannot say I’ve had such an unsuccessful vacation myself.

Kevin Drum is riding his favorite hobby horse, but this time in the context of Mexico. It’s a fetching Iron Horse …

This little fellow was very patient with me.

Last time I talked about a Nazi in Illinois who had managed to win the GOP nomination for a seat in the House of Representatives, but he’s not the only example of the Republican run to the right. WaPo discusses the mass embarrassment felt by the Virginia GOP after a former Minnesotan by the name of Corey Stewart won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat currently held by former VP candidate Tim Kaine by embracing Southern statuary, attacking immigrants, and refusing to disavow white supremacists:

Stewart’s elevation has some lifelong Republicans questioning their political identity.

“I am extremely disappointed that a candidate like Corey Stewart could win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate,” former Republican lieutenant governor Bill Bolling tweeted on the night of Stewart’s primary win. “This is clearly not the Republican Party I once knew, loved and proudly served. Every time I think things can’t get worse they do, and there is no end in sight.”

Rory Stolzenberg, who began identifying with the GOP as a fourth-grader and had a seat on the state party’s governing board in his early 20s, plans to vote for Kaine.

“When the debate is between bad policies and fundamentally un-American policies that betray the democratic ideals that this country was founded on, it’s not even a choice anymore,” said Stolzenberg, 26, a Charlottesville entrepreneur. “I question whether I’m still a Republican, but I think it’s important that we don’t surrender the party to people like that.”

It’s not trickery, it’s a matter of numbers and attitude of the base. Stewart claims he’s not a supremacist, but he appears to be repulsing traditional members of the Republican Party.

I think there’s a clue here, though:

Fissures opened anew the next year when Dave Brat, a little-known professor with a tea party following, toppled then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, with help from Breitbart News. Divides between Cantor and his supporters, and Brat and the tea partyers still resonate four years later.

And Brat then won the seat, despite being little-known. That’s the key, little-known, because it implies the Party’s levers of party have been usurped by the extremists.

That’s something to think about, for the moderate Republicans. How long will they stick around?

Courtesy my Arts Editor. This amuses me a lot, not least because the rider reminds me of a late cat of mine…

The Green Revolution, long lauded as averting mass famine, turns out to have an attributed dark side in India: farmer suicide. Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com  comments:

Amrita Bhoomi offers an alternative to this deadly cycle. The centre’s educational philosophy is based largely on the teachings of Shri Subhash Palekar, the charismatic guru of “zero budget natural farming“, who teaches that a farmer doesn’t need anything other than what s/he has available locally to maximize soil fertility. The method uses home-brewed concoctions made from fresh cow dung (it must be an indigenous cow), cow urine (the older the better), jaggery (coarse palm sugar), and lentil flour to promote microbacterial growth in the soil. In Gifford’s words:

“Zero budget natural farming is amazing because it’s not top down; it’s informal, decentralized; there’s no central organizer, no revenue or paid staff, no bank account, and there are already millions of people practicing it.”

The approach is not all that unusual. Amrita Bhoomi’s director Chukki Nanjundawsamy told FoodTank last year:

“Agroecology isn’t new to Indian agriculture. The Green Revolution technologies that wiped out agroecology happened only 50 years ago. Before that, agroecology was everywhere… I’m proud of how this movement has evolved. Young farmers are joining. They know what’s going on with the agrarian crisis and are choosing agroecology as a way forward.”

Amrita Bhoomi wants to reclaim crops that once were staples in the Indian diet, such as millet, or ragi. Ragi was displaced by white rice, a more chemically responsive crop, when the Green Revolution enabled farmers to practice water-intensive, paddy-style agriculture, but Indians’ health has suffered as a result; there are 50 million cases of type 2 diabetes, the highest rate in the world, that are largely attributed to refined white rice. The centre is pioneering millet production and hoping to get it added to the public distribution system.

I was not aware that rice was more carbohydrate-intensive than other crops. I’m always wary of the charismatic, since they motivate people to do irrational things, so I’d like to see this put under a dispassionate microscope.