Good news (the poll)

Hey, I didn't realise that a Reuters online subscription was so modestly priced (AUD $6 a month, cancel anytime), so I'll give it a go.

It's from there that I read this somewhat encouraging news:

WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's approval rating fell to the lowest level of his presidency, ‌with an overwhelming majority of Americans concerned the U.S. war with Iran will last a long time, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Monday.

 

Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump's performance in the White House, while 64% disapproved. Trump's approval rating, down from 35% in a poll that closed earlier this month and ​lower than at any point in his current term, has now tied the lowest level of his prior term reached in December 2017.

Further down:

Reuters/Ipsos polling this month has shown voters prefer Democrats over Republicans as better stewards of the economy for the first time in about a decade. The latest poll showed 38% of voters think ​Democrats will handle the economy better, compared to 35% who prefer the Republican approach. Democrats are also seen ​as better equipped to ⁠manage the cost of living. 

I mean, in a way, it's still depressing that he manages even a 33% approval.  But Murdoch and the other greedy Right wing media outlets have their profitable propaganda networks to run, don't they.  (Seriously, what would happen if Fox News was genuinely a news network that had even neutral hosts?)

 

Good News (a movie)

I finally got around to watching the recent Korean movie Good News, which is probably the only (mainly) comedic film ever made about an aircraft hijacking, on Netflix last weekend.   

The movie is "based on real events", but I think nearly all of the characters involved are invented or fictionalised.  Still, I am surprised to read now how most of the key events were fairly close to what happened in 1970.  (As a newspaper reading 10 year at that time I suspect I would have seen a headline about the real life hijacking, but I do not recall it.)     

The movie is very watchable, but it has flaws.  The characters were perhaps written with too much eccentricity (for the most part), and the main hero was a little hard to understand.   But, I didn't get bored, it is well crafted, and there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours...      

Things I'm sick of

*  Donald Trump;

* Donald Trump's cowardly, dishonest and greedy enablers both in politics and in media;

* the culture wars;

* the way the culture wars suck attention away from little things (sarcasm) like the US executing hundreds of people on the high seas;   

* the entire world feeling economically trapped by dumb, nonsensical decisions made by Trump and his cowardly, dishonest and greedy enablers;

* the rise of anti-science in climate change and medicine under Trump;

* the intense petty and fantastical narcissism of Trump which is completely undeniable;

* tech billionaires being weirdos who can blow away money on stupid ideas and face no consequences;

* earthquakes.   

Buttgate

Plastics to the rescue? A space radiation vest tested

This is new to me - they are evaluating wearable radiation protection for future astronauts:

With preparations underway for extended-duration crewed deep space missions, the health risks of solar particle events (SPEs) to astronauts are becoming increasingly pertinent. To address this hazard, the AstroRad vest, a personal radiation shielding garment providing targeted organ protection, was tested during Artemis I. Two anthropomorphic female phantoms, equipped with internal and external passive and active dosimeters, were flown aboard the Orion spacecraft: one unshielded and the other wearing AstroRad. Inner Van Allen belt transit active dosimeter measurements were extrapolated to simulate SPE scenarios, predicting effective dose reductions of ∼60% for an August 1972–like SPE and nearly 40% for an October 1989–like SPE, varying slightly with anatomical model. Such reductions could spare astronauts the equivalent of up to 193 and 131 days of deep space radiation exposure, respectively. These findings demonstrate that wearable shielding such as AstroRad could serve as a vital element for safe and sustainable human deep space exploration. 

Further down the article:

While coating an entire spacecraft hull with a meaningful thickness of radiation shielding remains impractical due to mass constraints (7), concentrating an equivalent thickness of shielding around astronauts’ most radiation-sensitive organs and tissues in the form of a vest incurs a significantly lower mass penalty. Therefore, while the use of shielding materials such as high-density polyethylene (HDPE) has been extensively explored as environmental radiation protection in space (8–11), StemRad and Lockheed Martin worked to create a low-mass emergency countermeasure solution in the form of a personal radiation shielding garment, termed the “AstroRad vest,” intended to be worn by astronauts during SPEs in deep space, reducing both the risk of radiation-induced cancer and the already low probability of acute radiation syndrome (ARS). The AstroRad vest further minimizes the mass of radiation shielding through a targeted shielding architecture of a spatially variable thickness that is inversely related to the degree of self-shielding provided by the underlying tissue at each point, a technique first developed for personal wearable gamma radiation shielding on Earth (12).  ......

 In accordance with the 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), the vest optimizes protection for the red bone marrow (RBM), colon, lungs, stomach, breasts, and ovaries (Fig. 2A) (38). The shielding core of the MARE AstroRad vest is composed of HDPE, which has the largest percent composition by mass of hydrogen atoms of any nonvolatile and nontoxic material, maximizing the shielding efficacy against space radiation per unit mass as determined by the Bethe radiation stopping formula (39). Because HDPE is solid and inflexible, the shielding core consists of thousands of tessellated interconnected hexagonal rods, which behave in a scale-like manner to maximize flexibility, freedom of movement, and comfort (Fig. 2B). This design resulted in a vest with a mass of ∼26 kg. 

Wilful medical science lies as dangerous political propaganda

Yes, even on Twitter/X, whenever this claim has been posted, there have been scores of responses explaining clearly how and why it is untrue, such that to continue to propagate it is an outright lie.   That the likes of Cruz continue to lie, in a way that is going to continue making Fauci a target of extremist rhetoric and threats, is just appalling.

Catering for his escape

From the Washington Post:

The administration has claimed that Trump departed Turkey on July 8 on the former Air Force One. Trump announced on social media that he would use the “former Air Force One” rather than the plane that flew him there, a newer Boeing 747-8 gifted to the United States by Qatar. The security of the Qatar-provided aircraft has been called into question, and Trump said last month after the trip that it would undergo additional upgrades.

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.  

The Guardian had put it this way:

Prompted by an Iranian assassination threat, Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse that involved hiding the president in an airport catering cart, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times. 

That gave me the pleasurable image of Trump trying to be squeezed into some super sized version of these things:

 

But, sadly, apparently not...

A few comments on the Arday story

*  Twitter/X has been absolutely covered in its general feed with content about this story, in a way that makes you think "I know that this is now dominated by Right wing content, but this still looks like Musk made a call and required that the algorithm promote this story as much as possible."

*  As lots of people have said, significant parts of academic sociology (and the humanities more generally) have for decades (ever since identity politics and analysis became a thing) devolved into pretty vacuous and arcane complaint twaddle with little in the way of substance or remedy to social ills.   And as someone who has several times pointed to the (to be generous) dubious value of the work of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan and her Macquarie University compatriots, I sympathise entirely.

By the way, from my dim memories of it from some, ugh, 48 years ago, the introductory sociology subject that I did as a small part of my degree was actually pretty solid and interesting.  It's not an inherently valueless subject; it is just what academia has decided to do with it.   Basically, if this scandal results in Universities (and the bodies that fund academics) taking a harder look at what is being produced by who in their Humanities schools, it's not a bad result.

* I am somewhat puzzled as to how long it is taking for journalism to turn up comments from family or fellow students (or therapists) who knew Arday when he was young and allegedly unable to talk or read.  As one would think that if his claims were not exaggerated, there would be people willing to confirm it's true.   It is making it look more likely that there is no one who wants to defend the background story.

*  The New York Times has published some "Takeaways" from his (just published?) memoir, and man, I can just imagine the embarrassment of the person or persons who decided to fund it.  I like this little bit:

When he decided to go to college, his girlfriend “wrote out the entire application for me — including my personal statement.” At St. Mary’s University in London, he scored just 9 percent on his first exam. He worked hard, raising his grades so quickly that a professor at the school accused him of cheating.

“When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds, it weirdly makes people question your credibility,” he writes.  

 Actually, when you make claims that sound wildly implausible and an exaggeration that even Donald Trump would hesitate to claim, that's when people question your credibility.  

A venue can be too big

Yesterday was Singapore's National Day, and as a dutiful fan of the country, I watched the National Day Parade live on Youtube.   (I've explained before why I enjoy viewing it.)

Unfortunately, this year they moved it from the outside site of recent years to inside the National Stadium, which I thought might be a good idea, but turns out it isn't.   (A decade or so ago they held it there, but I wasn't watching at that time.)

The venue is simply too large for this kind of performance.   I've seen the stadium from the outside and did not think it looked gigantic; but the interior shots, even allowing for different lens focal length, made it look enormous inside.  It seated 42,000 apparently, but the centre floor area looks so big that it was never filled up satisfactorily with performers.  They always seemed to be surrounded by too much empty floor, and a repeated camera view kept showing how far away the centre stage must have felt to the attendees, too.     

The songs this year were bland and more like simple pop songs.  (Mind you, I sympathise with song writers trying to find a new way every year to come up with novel lyrics on the same theme.  I guess people do it with love songs, though?)  

Anyway, people on Reddit seemed underwhelmed too.   And now I see that someone said on CNA that it wasn't a great venue in 2016.    The only thing it helps with is people can rehearse out of the sun, I guess.  I think someone died from the heat during rehearsal last year, so it's not a minor problem.  

I'm curious if it will return to the parade ground setting next year.... 

 

Republican numbskulls and Fauci, again

There was an opinion piece at the NYT a few days ago by a guy who thinks Fauci should have answered some questions (I don't agree), but nonetheless, the best part of his piece is how he detailed the nonsensical contradictory positions MAGA and Republicans hold in their empty heads:

But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.

You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon. And you can’t really fault liberal hysteria on social media when some of the most vocal early advocates of aggressive mitigation were figures like the libertarian crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan and the reactionary neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin. National Review was slamming the case against lockdowns as “absurd”; Tucker Carlson was reportedly lobbying the president to take the virus more seriously.

Back then, support for aggressive mitigation measures was pretty close to universal: In May 2020, one survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that at least 80 percent of the country was on board with social distancing, stay-at-home orders and business closures. Even so, by the end of the next month, all states but one ended their stay-at-home orders. And if you think that early near-unanimity was the result of irresponsible fear-mongering, you may be surprised to learn that in 2024, when asked whether they would support any similar measures again if faced with another pandemic, Americans answered in the affirmative by a margin of 81 to 19.

And people (including me!) forget this:

In retrospect, it is especially striking that Fauci initially downplayed the risk of the virus, suggesting that it was sufficiently low-risk that Americans need not worry about it in February 2020, and implying that they should worry more about the seasonal flu. When Fauci did come out as a relative alarmist the following month, offering what were seen at the time as worst-case scenarios, he predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths — about one-tenth as many as the country eventually endured. 

Back to Wagner

I haven't had a reason to write about Wagner since seeing the Ring Cycle a couple of years ago, but here's an article on the annual Bayreuth Festival in Germany that has appeared in the New York Times.

Some interesting bits and pieces:

It started in the years leading up to 1876, when the composer Richard Wagner was seeking an appropriate venue for the performance of his monumental, four-opera “Ring” cycle.

Think about the first scene of the film “The Age of Innocence,” set in the early 1870s — how Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, wanders into a New York opera house and takes his seat in a box partway through an act. The audience is lit almost as brightly as the stage. He can pay attention to one or two arias while still flirting shamelessly with a countess in the box opposite. The theater is a social setting to see and be seen, where the goings-on onstage are only a part of the experience.

Wagner was opposed to this. He wanted to create “music drama” that was audience’s sole focus.

The Festspielhaus has no boxes. Its seats rise in an amphitheater-shaped fan, its walls and proscenium focus attention on the stage. The pit is covered, so the orchestra’s sound rises as if from the building itself. The cover also ensures that no light leaks out of the pit to remind audiences that they’re watching a staged show.

It was designed as a singular place to interpret and contemplate Wagner’s works: more religious temple than standard-issue opera house. As Wagner wrote, the theater aimed to transport viewers into an “ecstatic state of clairvoyance in which the scenic image” becomes “a true reflection of life itself.” 

 Also - it has no airconditioning, and the seats are really hard.   Still, suits the stoicism of the Germans, I guess.  

Attendees might still end up going to the toilet in a Portaloo during intermission:

Despite the elegance of its audiences and the price of its drinks and tickets, the Festspielhaus has a rustic vibe. The grounds are dotted with portable toilets. There are barely any indoor lobbies; before the performance and during the luxurious, hourlong intervals, audience members stroll across plazas and parks outside and munch on sausages.

The end of the intermissions (Wagner operas usually have two) are announced not by bells but by brass fanfares, arranged by the composer himself from the music of the upcoming act, which ring out from a balcony at the front of the theater.

The festival is still a family business, run now by 48 year old Katharina Wagner, the great granddaughter of Richard.  Some businesses really have legs!

And while I knew Hitler had visited and been a fan, I didn't know about this:

The 2026 opener, “Rienzi,” is a youthful Wagner effort about a populist Roman leader. Hitler loved it so much that he owned Wagner’s original score, which is now lost and presumed to have been in Hitler’s bunker when it was destroyed after the dictator’s suicide. 

I might go looking for a recording of that on Youtube.  Let's see - there is an avante garde looking modern dress version which only runs for - 3 hours 50 minutes!   (And looks like no English subtitles.) 

Even videos of just the overture go for 13 minutes. 

Oh well, something to catch up with on retirement, perhaps! 

 

Let them fight

So, one side of the MAGA influencers and politicians are gaslighting about how you can feed a family of 8 an (impliedly) satisfying burrito meal for $20, and so the cost of living whiners are just lazy people who don't know how to cook economically; and the other side is saying "come on, be real, that's impossible, I've got a family of 8 and I know it; and we ignore the rising cost of living as a genuine concern of people at our peril."

 

Funny to be on the side of Matt Walsh, but he's obviously right.   

And a special birthday shout out to...

Race Around the World - and Gina Rinehart

I have been meaning to post about the ABC revival of Race Around the World and why I have found it watchable, but still disappointing.

Since the first series, the drop in price and improved quality of video equipment (and, of course, the Youtube based plethora of independent travel vloggers) has certainly taken the sheen of novelty off anyone being able to make TV quality content  anywhere in the world.     So the revival feels more than ever to be mainly about the pressure on the competitors to find stories and edit them into shape in the relatively short time they have.   This led to one guy having a serious looking stress breakdown on last week's episode, which he incorporated into the video, but it was uncomfortable to watch.

As far as the competitors are concerned, I have to admit that I can't really remember any apart from John Saffron from the first series, but my feeling is that this lot are generally not as likeable (with an exception I will get to.)    The two leading guys, especially moustachioed Jayden, whose hairy body looks like it escaped from some 70's era porno, seem to me to be overly self-confident and too pre-experienced as travellers and video makers.   Or should I say, it's especially Jayden who seems too competent for the show - it was, after all, Elliott who had the breakdown last week.  

I find two of the women a bit bland but inoffensive.  But Kate - her deadpan style seems far too contrived and I find her positively irritating.  As does Gina Rinehart!

The one competitor that I have consistently felt sorry for is poor old William.   He seems to be a gentle, modest person who enjoys creating gentle parody styles in his videos, and the irony was that the one which was not like that (and the only one for which he got much praise) was the one he liked the least.   I found his videos likeable and comforting (certainly not irritating like some of the others), and felt that the judges should just accept that while they might not share his taste, there's nothing wrong with his, and that creative types who stick to their guns often eventually find their audience.  (Hello, Wes Anderson.)   

William also often seemed a little hurt by their criticisms, and kept making comments about finding it harder than he expected.   As I say, I just wanted everyone to be nicer about his style and tastes.     

Anyway, onto the Gina Rinehart aspect.  Irritating "I'm so wacky" Kate ended her video from Scotland, in which she was referencing Braveheart,  with a satirical comment about imagined violence on Gina, for which Gina demanded (and today received) an apology from the ABC.  

As much as I dislike Rinehart, it didn't work as humour, made no real sense in the context, and at the risk of agreeing with the idiots at Sky News (now rebranded to News24, I see), the ABC should have pulled it before it was shown.

It's a bad day when something on the ABC makes me think Gina probably deserves an apology.     

Himmler's masseur

I guess it was inevitable, given the number of people involved, but it still kind of surprises me when new stories of intriguing people and what they did in World War 2 just keep turning up this long after it ended.  

The reason for this post is the movie discussed here in The Guardian:  

Himmler’s ‘anti-Nazi’ masseur: Claes Bang stars as SS chief’s ‘magic Buddha’

Felix Kersten, the personal therapist of Hitler’s principal enforcer, claimed to have saved countless lives from the Holocaust. A new feature film exposes him as a narcissist prone to myth-making 

Some extracts:

In I Is Another, which has its world premiere at the Locarno film festival this week, he is played by Danish actor Claes Bang (once a Dracula for the BBC), as a mercurial, charming but very slippery figure.

The myth the masseur promoted in his postwar memoirs was that he had used his influence over Himmler to save many people from being sent to the gas chambers.

A biography by French journalist Joseph Kessel, The Man With the Miraculous Hands, reinforced the idea that Kersten had helped “entire populations escape the terror of deportation” and that he “prevented the crematory ovens from receiving their full quota of corpses”. Randau now dismisses the book as “full of lies”.

In the film, Kersten is shown on a long train journey to Oslo where he hopes he will be awarded the Nobel prize. During the journey, he is accosted by a fictional investigative journalist Hedda Wohmann (Valerie Pachner) who strongly suspects he is liar and hopes to catch him out.

In preparation for the movie, Randau did extensive research of his own and discovered the masseur’s SS membership card in an archive in Berlin. Kersten had always concealed his SS membership but Randau found a letter in the archive in which the masseur asked if he was allowed to wear the SS uniform in public, undermining his later claims that he was an avowed anti-Nazi. There was also plentiful evidence that Kersten forged several of the documents which showed him in the best light.

However, when it comes to establishing whether or not Kersten really was spying on behalf of the Swedes, as many have claimed, he hit a dead end. For reasons no one could explain, all the files still remain classified (although Randau can’t help but notice how well connected the masseur was with Swedish government sources).

“I think he definitely saved some people’s lives but not thousands,” Randau concludes. “I am sure he did it only because he wanted to save his own reputation, maybe even his own life.

“He was a narcissist, and like all narcissists, his self-confidence was really weak. For him, it wasn’t enough to be a hero, he wanted to be a superhero and that was his mistake.”

The writer-director believes that after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, Kersten realised that the ship was sinking. “He had to jump off somehow. At that point, he started to manipulate Himmler and there was this mutual whitewashing with other guys involved. A lot of letters and documents are definitely fake, letters saying things like, ‘thank you for being such an enemy of the Nazi system like I am’ and stuff like that.”

One fact was incontrovertible. Kersten, who died in 1960, was a brilliant masseur. He provided instant relief for Himmler from his excruciating intestinal spasms. The SS chief called him “a magic Buddha who cures everything” and was extremely indulgent toward him as a consequence. 

He seems to have shared a similar feature to Schindler in his private life:

Kersten was personable too. People tended to like him. He was, the director says, “a skirt chaser, a ladies’ man” and he is rumoured to have lived in a menage a trois with his wife and his secretary. 

 (Not that Schindler did the menage a trois, since if the movie was correct, there's no way his wife would have accepted it.)