An accurate take on Trump

I don't know this columnist for The Guardian, and I guess this take on Trump's psychology (and his birthday celebration):

Trump presides over spectacles of violence like a dysfunctional Roman emperor 

is not exactly new, but it's well written and accurate:

Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.

But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses. 

He wants praise. He wants to see his name and his portrait everywhere. He wants to feel like a big man, to see those he feels have wronged him be penitent and upset. Maybe most of all, he wants to indulge in his own bad taste, repeatedly visiting the lowbrow staples of the 1980s, when he was young and at the height of his tabloid fame.

He loves the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He loves the music of Bon Jovi and the Village People. And he loves the gaudy, clownish tokens of masculinity that appeal to very small children: big trucks, big muscles, and demonstrations of physical strength.

And so it felt fitting that on Trump’s 80th birthday, at an event nominally meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding but really functioning as a celebration for a very special boy, the White House hosted a cage fight for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is a competitive league for mixed martial arts – a vaguely sports-like endeavor that combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, and traditional boxing, and seems designed to satiate a television audience’s appetite for maximum violence. 

The event, planned for months, required a diversion of Secret Service resources, use of military musicians, and the construction of a large octagonal cage and audience arena on the White House’s south lawn, all at untold taxpayer expense and in likely violation of numerous ethics rules. On Saturday, the night before the event, the combatants posed shirtless, nose to nose, at the ceremonial weigh-in – a press event that seems primarily designed to pique the interest of online gambling markets – in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Let's skip a little, and note her paragraphs on UFC itself:

Mixed martial arts is a frantic and unbeautiful spectacle, with none of the redeeming grace of boxing and little in the way of required strategies. The primary assets required seem to be physical size and a willingness to hurt someone....

The object seems to be to inflict repeated head injuries, which might help explain why so many of the fighters issued effusive praise for Trump. After his fight, one victor, a redhead with pronounced cauliflower ear named Bo Nickal, thanked the president first and God second.

Yeah well - I don't even see "the redeeming grace of boxing", to be honest - but I agree with her about UFC, which if I ruled the world would be banned.   

OK, two final paragraphs sum it up:

That the event was the UFC – cynically primitive, a celebration of violence and brute strength – similarly reaffirms his values. The US is him now, the event seems to say.

Trump wages war at will without Congress. That is already plenty imperial. Now he presides over spectacles of violence carried out for his entertainment, like some dysfunctional Roman despot eating grapes at the Colosseum. Soon, he’ll be appointing his favorite horse to the cabinet. 

Well done, Moira Donegan. 

Good art, or bad messaging?

OK, I have to admit, even though I said X was dominated by reactions against Disclosure Day, I have to admit it is allowing a genuine debate about the movie, and it's making it near impossible for me to stop thinking about it. 

I don't think enough people are making the point that it's pretty great that there is a movie engendering a lot of debate about its message and interpretation.   I know I have said this about certain movies before - that I really enjoy arguing/debating about them almost as much as viewing them.  

I tend to think that it is a sign of good art - although the cynical view could be that it can also be the result of muddled messaging, and simply failing to make the intent clear.    Even that can be debated as part of the process!

There are some more specific things I want to say about the movie, but still feel its a bit early to do so...  

 

     

Proof there is no God

C'mon!   If ever there was an easy way for God to prove his providence, it would have been for a summer storm to hit the UFC metal stadium in front of the White House with lightning at least once.  A strike setting Trump's hair alight, or a tornado blowing it all away, would have reversed decades of church attendance decline.

 But alas, it was not to be....

In which I have to discuss Disclosure Day in a somewhat meta way

*  Man, this movie seems to have attracted a huge amount of commentary on social media - and I find it hard working out the numbers between those who enjoyed it and those who hated it.

*  I predicted that those approaching from an American culture war Right point of view would find reasons to hate it - and I was very correct about that.  X is dominated by hatred/dismissal of it - so much so that I suspect Musk might have even tweaked the algorithm to highlight it.  But to be fair, there are some reviewers who I would presume are politically neutral or lean Left in their tastes who dislike it as well.  

*  Wait a minute, I guess I can check audience review numbers online.  I see that on Rottentomatoes the critic reviews are running at 80% positive, and audience at 73% positive.  Metacritic is running at 74% positive and audience at 5.2 (which seems low - but the break up is 33% negative and 38% positive and 29% mixed.)  Not bad.

*  I saw it last night with my daughter, and we both enjoyed it in somewhat trying circumstances (just about the most restless, toilet attending audience I can recall ever being in.  Has streaming caused people to think everything about watching a movie at a cinema is just like watching a movie at home, so they not only text on their phone without compunction, but don't plan so they can avoid going to the toilet for two hours?)   

I have some observations:

*  Most of the criticism, in my view, comes from people thinking it would be a different kind of movie, and not judging it for what it is.   People shouldn't take kids to it, not because it is violent or anything - it's just that it's a movie of mature themes.  

*  It is a quite "clingy" movie, in that I have continued to think about it a lot today, and not just because of social media.  I do quite like that it is causing some debate, in a way.    And I actually think I may need to see it again, with a smaller, less annoying, audience.

*  I don't think it's perfect, and to do my own bit of judgement, there are background story elements that I would have liked emphasised more.  Maybe some bits ended up on the cutting room floor, and an "extended edition" would add a bit more explanation.  

* I think it is a bit of bad luck that it would have been written before the rise of "AI video for all", which has only been a thing for a couple of years, as there probably should have been a bit more emphasis on how that issue was not a problem for the disclosure.

*  The ending did surprise me somewhat, but I thought it was fine.   

*   People might like to argue with me that I get hyper-critical about the scientific accuracy in some movies - like The Martian, Hail Mary Pass and Sunshine - but not in other movies.  But it all depends on the story, and if you are dealing with speculative advanced technology, it often just has to be accepted uncritically as part of a story.  Overall, the movie is thematically consistent with both Close Encounters and ET in that in all three, aliens have telepathic powers or technology.   This makes accepting the technology in the latest one easier. 

*  There is something of an irony, isn't there, that there is a strong element of Right wing Christian commentary against the film (and Spielberg) on X in particular, when one theme in the film is whether disclosure of alien reality would hurt people's faith.  Seems that if a mere movie speculating about that upsets them, they would have issues with alien reality!

I may come back to add more to this later... 

The appalling Musk

Axios says what I reckon every decent media outlet and politician should be highlighting - and not just leaving it up to people who watch Twitter X to understand how appalling Musk is:

Elon Musk is on the verge of financial immortality: The world's richest man — and potentially its first trillionaire — has built a sovereign corporate kingdom that is too systemic to fail.

• And yet, on the eve of SpaceX's monster IPO, its CEO was hunkered down in his digital fiefdom stoking far-right culture wars with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history.

Why it matters: Musk's years in the public eye, marked by serial controversy and an accelerating embrace of white identitarian politics, have inured investors to conduct that would be disqualifying for almost any other CEO.

• Nothing Musk says or does can dent Wall Street's appetite for a stake in his future-forging empire.
• Look no further than SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO, where demand for shares has already vastly outstripped the available supply ahead of Friday's historic market debut.

Zoom in: Anti-immigration riots erupted in Belfast on Tuesday night after graphic footage of a brutal street stabbing, allegedly by a Sudanese migrant, ricocheted across X.

• Masked mobs set fire to vehicles, a city bus, and several homes, marching through neighborhoods while chanting "foreigners out" and forcing minority families to flee under police protection.
• Musk, who posts near-daily about violence committed by migrants, shared British far-right activist Tommy Robinson's list of locations to protest against "another invader attack on our people."
• "Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!" Musk declared to his 240 million followers, drawing allegations of incitement from British leaders.

Zoom out: Musk's intervention in Belfast followed weeks of fixation on Henry Nowak, the white British teenager whose murder by a British Sikh man ignited a far-right backlash over claims of "anti-white" policing.

• Musk's anti-migrant activism extends across Western countries, where he suggests elites are intentionally engineering the demographic erasure of white populations — also known as the "Great Replacement" theory.
• In the U.S., Musk has been relentlessly focused on non-citizen voter fraud, claiming that Democrats are harvesting illegal immigrant votes to create a permanent, one-party state.
• That includes in California, where he joined MAGA allies this week in alleging, without evidence, that Democrats committed massive fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.

Between the lines: Musk's worldview relies on a singular, apocalyptic thesis: that Western civilization — which he frequently equates with white culture — is being systematically dismantled by mass migration, demographic change and "woke" institutions.

• He has clashed with world leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has accused the tech billionaire of using his platform to "whip up division" and interfere in foreign democracies.

• "Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what's making people angry, not "social media!" Musk posted Wednesday in response to allegations of incitement.
• Musk rejects characterizations of his rhetoric as racist or xenophobic, arguing that those accusations have been weaponized to shut down debate on migration and crime.

The big picture: As Musk's personal net worth rockets toward the thirteen-figure mark, he has achieved escape velocity from the traditional rules of corporate governance.

• A decade ago, a CEO amplifying white-identitarian panic at home and overseas would have triggered a board crisis, investor revolt and days of corporate cleanup.
• Musk does it daily, in public, in real time, on the platform he owns. His companies have become critical infrastructure, and Trump-era politics have shifted the Overton window on the rhetoric of racial grievance.
• If SpaceX's massive valuation secures it an eventual spot in the S&P 500, ordinary Americans with standard index funds or retirement accounts will soon own a stake in Musk's empire — whether they like it or not.

The bottom line: Asked Wednesday why the world's richest man spends his days in a bitter online culture war instead of enjoying his billions on a beach, Musk posted: "Nothing else matters if civilization falls."

Being strapped onto a Starship and shot into the sun would be an improvement for the whole solar system 

 

 

 

But so close to a deal to end this...

 Incidentally, that photo, which has appeared with various different people standing near it, just makes me react "there's no way I would be standing that close to a downed missile."  (If that's what it is.)

Some drone tech that sounds very worthwhile

Forget the stupid "use a drone to deliver coffee and pizza" wasteful ideas, this one sound very sensible and useful:

It's a race against the clock when someone falls overboard: People's chances of being found before they drown from exhaustion or freeze to death dwindle by the minute. Rescue efforts are often hampered by the time it takes a vessel at full throttle to halt so a rescue boat can be deployed and start searching for the person, who is by now far from the ship.

The data paint a grim picture: Figures from, for example, the Cruise Lines International Association show that more than 70% of people who fell overboard between 2009 and 2019 died.

Researchers at DTU are working to improve these odds by developing a prototype for a fully automated drone that can be dispatched automatically from a moving ship as soon as such a man overboard event is confirmed.

The drone has three types of cameras so it can see at night and spot body heat, enabling it to identify a person in the water. Once it is fully developed, the drone will carry an inflatable life jacket that sends a GPS signal.

"This has a twofold purpose: One is to extend the person's life in the water—the other is to guide a lifeboat to them easily," explains Ph.D. student Dimosthenis Angelis.

A life jacket can extend survival time in 4–10 degrees Celsius (39–50 degrees Fahrenheit) water from 30–60 minutes to as much as three hours, according to the Life Jacket Association. Survival time depends on several things, including the state of the sea and the person's swimming ability. 

I mean, there would probably be a market to have at least a few on every single cruise ship - not to mention merchant ships.  I would guess more people fall off cruise ships than merchant?   Let's ask an AI!:

 Cruise ships: ~20–25 per year

This is the best-documented category. According to a 2020 CLIA report, an average of 19 people per year fell off cruise ships between 2009 and 2019, with 212 total "man overboard" incidents over that decade. More recent figures are a little higher — in 2019, cruise ships reported 28 incidents worldwide, and in 2022, there were 42 documented overboard incidents across global cruise fleets. The survival rate is grim: of the 212 incidents between 2009 and 2019, 170 were fatal — a survival rate of roughly 20%. Alcohol is a major factor, and in reality, at least some of these incidents are suicide attempts rather than accidents.

Merchant ships: harder to count, but likely more in total

This is less well-documented precisely because merchant seafarers are a working population rather than paying passengers, and there's no single global registry. However, the numbers are substantial. A 2025 ILO global register covering ships under the Maritime Labour Convention recorded 403 seafarer fatalities across 51 countries, with "persons overboard" the second-leading cause of death at 91 cases — behind illness/disease (139 cases) but ahead of occupational accidents (74 cases). That's from only 51 reporting countries, so the true global figure is certainly higher. Broader industry data from 2019 recorded 112 seafarers killed and 116 missing globally. Not all of those are overboard incidents, but disappearances at sea account for a large share.

 OK, so there should be a market for them on merchant ships too - although I guess countries with low regard for crew safety are not going to be splurging on these anytime soon.

But yeah, it just seems something with obvious life saving potential. 

Not a whole lot going right for the Donald

How could anyone (except a Trump cultist) not be (negatively) impressed with the spectacular number of things that are going badly for him at the moment.   Here's a list of things that come to mind easily:

*    he can't find an off ramp to a war he got talked into.   (Even his right wing supporters in the military are probably sick of bobbing around in the ocean doing nothing much.)

*    has decided to make his country's 250th anniversary into a lame political rally because he can't get any actually popular concert artist to perform for him.   The optics are going to so bad.   (And I reminded of the dud military parade he held because he's jealous that Putin and Xi have them.) 

*    has trashed the White House grounds in the most indulgent, this-is-how-empire's-end, kind of way, with a ballroom no one asked for, and a UFC fight night that even Joe Rogan is cringing about!

*    has been forced to remove his name from a building, because, you know, a court told him he's not actually a king and has to live with laws that Congress makes.  

*   he pushed one spectacularly corrupt idea so far that even Republicans found it impossible to support.

*   he's thrashing about with tariffs again in a way in which he has, essentially, zero international support.

*    he looks terrible, with puffy eyes, fatter than ever, continually bruised hand - virtually everyone thinks he must be being treated for something that is being kept hidden.

*    he got next to nothing out of the visit to China.

*    even he has recognised how badly the ICE raids were going and making him look, and dialled them back.

More would come to mind if I had more time... 

 

 

American headlines

I saw clips on Youtube this morning of the American Baby-in-Chief having another dummy spit at a female reporter who dared tell him he has no evidence for his claims, then checked the headlines of the articles about it on three US news outlets:

 

 

 

They are from the following:  the top one is the New York Times, the middle one is the Washington Post, and the last is Fox News.

Why is the New York Times the one that is by far the "softest" take on the Trump performance?   I mean, the Washington Post under Bezos gets (and deserves) criticism for taking a softer line on Trump, and I have been thinking about cancelling again.   But then the New York Times doesn't always do a great job either, as shown above.   

 

When Fox News headlines a report more appropriately than your paper, you know something has gone wrong in the process! 

Catholicism in Spain

The Catholic Church in Spain is discussed in an article in the Washington Post, due to the visit there by Pope Leo.  Not surprisingly, it is as riven there by internal conflict between conservative and more progressive elements, just as it is in most of the world:

The Catholic Church eschews political labels. But in practice, the church in Spain is led by an across-the-spectrum mix of senior clerics, including conservatives, liberals and others.

As a whole, though, the Catholic Church in Spain is not as outwardly liberal as its counterpart in Germany, for example, where senior clerics have been reprimanded by the Vatican for backing same-sex blessing ceremonies more akin to marriage.

In Spain, several senior positions in recent years have been filled by bishops elevated by Francis and who share many of the late Argentine pope’s priorities. 

In a nation that gave birth to some of the most conservative Catholic movements and religious media outlets in the world — including Opus Dei and the InfoVaticana website — the church’s full-hearted embrace of migrant rights, as well as what critics describe as other liberal causes, has generated unease in some conservative quarters.

Spanish bishops denied a report this year that Leo had described the far right’s “instrumentalization” of the church as the faith’s biggest threat in Spain. Leo did, however, cite concern more broadly over the leveraging of faith for “ideology,” they said.

Madrid-based InfoVaticana, one of the most aggressive and conservative outlets writing about the Catholic Church, has brought a right-wing hue to its criticism, decrying a recent meeting between Sanchez and Leo as “obscene” and calling out the Spanish church’s support for “massive regularization” of migrants.

“We are covering Leo XIV’s pontificate very closely because it could determine whether the Church corrects certain ideological excesses of recent years or deepens them,” InfoVaticana’s editorial board said in written replies to questions from The Post.

The board expressed “nervousness” about Leo’s early pontificate. But it fretted more broadly about what it described as an “ideological” shift to the left by the Spanish church “due to fear of social irrelevance, economic dependence on the State, and cultural adaptation to the dominant consensus.”

 The article also notes this:

A close reading of Leo’s statements on migration shows that he is often more nuanced than Francis.

Leo, for instance, frequently prefaces his defense of migrants by noting that countries have the right to control their borders, calling for investment in impoverished countries to discourage migration. At the same time, he has stressed the Christian philosophy of welcoming the stranger, as well as safeguarding migrant rights. He has described the Trump administration’s crackdown in the United States as “inhuman.” 

I hope the Pope condemns VP Vance's appalling, Musk view endorsing, view of immigration in light of the Nowak murder in England.  It certainly deserves it...

 

 

Back to aliens

The New York Times ran an article a week or so ago about how, in the conservative Christians in the US (and MAGA nutters, and the likes of Tucker Carlson) have been running with the "aliens are demons" angle.  Or, "some are angels, but some are demons."   There are some interesting points made:

Christians in the United States are significantly less likely than the general public to say intelligent life exists on other planets, according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center. Among atheists and agnostics, 85 percent say their best guess is that intelligent life exists outside Earth. Among white evangelicals, only 40 percent say the same.

“The U.F.O. topic in particular is a big challenge to any religious worldview,” said Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, where he has compiled an archive on paranormal subjects, including accounts from U.F.O. “experiencers.” 

I didn't know that.

Further down:

The possibility that extraterrestrial beings might be better understood as demonic entities is not a new theory among some conservative Christians. But it has lately burst from the fringes of speculative religious cosmology into more prominent view, including from elected officials at the highest levels of government.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said on a conservative podcast this spring.

The Catholic church has no formal teaching on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, though it has intrigued some Catholic theologians. A Vatican scientist made headlines in 2010 when he suggested aliens might have souls, and said he would baptize an alien “if they asked.” 

Quite a few people in comments to the article refer to CS Lewis and his space trilogy, and also (I think) a poem he wrote about Christ appearing to other intelligences in their form on their planets.   He's pretty big in conservative circles, but ignored in this respect.  (Well, he's not so big in the rich world of American evangelical churches, I think - probably because he lived too humble a life.  If he had made millions off his books and bought a mansion in which to entertain visiting US pastors, they probably would have higher regard for him.)

Anyway, it occurs to me that perhaps I shouldn't be too cynical, in that while I have always leaned towards the "nuts and bolts" explanation of UFO as alien flying craft, I do find some of the paranormal-ish crossover theories of the likes of Jacques Vallee and John A Keel to be a bit intriguing too.   But if MAGA types start believing something, it's a good rule of thumb to assume it's wrong!  

Have the British gone mad?

So, for weeks/days, Elon Musk, who bought a social media platform so he could turn it into his own personal forum for inflaming racial tensions - was talking up the race element of the British Henry Nowak murder and calling for the release of police body cam.   (Of course, Musk has no connection to Britain at all, but if there is a white race riot to encourage, he's there for it, no matter which country.  He is a repulsive billionaire.)   

The murderer (a young Sikh, an ethnicity not known for being particular troublemakers anywhere in the work, as far as I can tell)  was convicted yesterday and got life imprisonment (which means a  minimum of 20 something years in Britain, I think.)   Some other family members are being pursued too, for helping in a cover up.   And the police body cam was released.

Out of curiosity I watched it.   Musk and other racebaiters had been going on and on for weeks about how the British police had attended and let the young white victim (who said he had been stabbed) die because they believed the perpetrator who said he had been the victim of a racial attack.   Sounds bad, hey?  How could they just let a stabbed man die?  

Watching the video, my reaction was "well, that was a terrible and unfortunate mistake by the police, but I can see how it happened.   There was no sign that the young victim had been stabbed - no obvious blood on his clothes.  He's lying on the ground, groaning; someone says he has blood in his mouth; someone says he had jumped over a fence and landed on and fell off a parked car, the mouth blood could well be caused by that.  He was probably mistaken as a drunk lout.  It is not at all a case of police withholding treatment, they just didn't realised how serious his condition was.  This is a complete beat up by Musk."

Yet on British media, and especially on Musk's X (which he has probably rigged to make sure the algorithm promotes this to the hilt)  there are very few people taking the view that I took - the poor police made a mistake, and while sure, there was no need to handcuff the victim, they did nothing to cause the death.  They put him on his side, and he died in front of them within a couple of minutes of their arrival.  It is not comparable to the George Floyd death at all, where police proactively exacerbated the difficulty in breathing while people standing around begged them to stop. 

The medical evidence at the trial (referred to in the judge's sentencing remarks) was that he would not have been saved even if first aid was attempted immediately, given the artery that the main stabbing cut.

And yet Musk and his racebaiters are acting like this was the worst thing they have ever seen - a white person not believed!  Because the police believed an ethnic who falsely said he was racially attacked!  (Completely ignoring that the police took the perpetrator back to the police station, investigated it promptly and worked out the guy was lying and he's now in jail.  The process to get him convicted was, in fact, remarkably quick, I reckon.)   

The New York Times has a relatively dispassionate report on it.  Someone on Reddit posted this section of the sentencing comments, which also is dispassionate and realistic:

 Another consequence of those lies is that the attending police officers honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence and arrested him with the consequence he was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR. The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life- threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.

Why aren't there more people in Britain standing up for the police - some of whom are now under death threats.

And bear in mind, I have felt for years that the British system of using police for things which should be dealt with civilly (investigating someone for offensive namecalling, for example) was pretty stupid and hard to understand.    It's not like I'm saying the use of the police there is never inappropriately "woke."

But I just can't see that the outrage against the police behaviour in this particular case is in any way deserved here - it is over the top and more people need to start saying so.  

Update:   Even Starmer is mouthing stuff about how "the police have serious questions to answer".  Coward.   The police have apologised, and sure, politicians can legitimately can talk about better training, etc.  Politicians can even talk about reviewing the Sikh exemption for carrying knives, since many do it with mere ceremonial knives, without making it a crisis. 

But if you want the state of the UK get even worse, try making the Police feel insanely victimised (to the point of fearing for their life) when they make a genuine mistake in handcuffing someone, and not offering first aid when they didn't realise it was really needed (not that it would have stopped the death anyway) and make it harder to recruit and keep them.    

Update 2:   Reddit is mostly dominated by people wanting police blood too - charge them!  With what?  Manslaughter?   They didn't cause the death.   Criminal negligence?   The medical evidence has already said first aid administered would not have prevented death - especially as the guy died within a short time of the police arriving.     

Some lawyers had better start talking about the reality here.  People think the police should be criminally liable for making a mistake and causing offence by not believing the poor victim.  It's not realistic.

Update 3:  If Claude.ai can be believed (I know, but I might try searching elsewhere too) have Sikhs been in trouble before in the UK for using their exempt knives?   Nope: 

On historical prosecutions: the search results turn up no other case in England where a Sikh was charged with a criminal offence arising from use of a kirpan or similar religiously carried blade. There have been incidents of Sikhs being stopped by police for carrying kirpans (cases in Birmingham and Gatwick airport), but in the Birmingham incident the man was advised regarding his behaviour and no further action was taken. The other knife-related cases involving British Sikhs in the search results involved Sikhs as victims, not perpetrators using religiously carried weapons. deccanherald

There was a Sikh man charged with stabbing two people at a community event in Southall, London, but that involved charges of GBH and possession of a bladed article — not a kirpan religious exemption scenario. tribuneindia

In short, to the best of available records, the Digwa/Nowak murder appears to be the first — and as yet only — case in England where a Sikh has been convicted of a serious violent offence involving a knife carried under the religious exemption. The rarity of this is part of why British Sikh groups are pushing back strongly against calls to ban the kirpan, emphasising that this is an isolated criminal act, not a community pattern.

One of the weirder stories

I think I read about this case a couple of years ago, and thought I might have written about it before, but I can't find an earlier post.  (Although, if you search "eunuch" in the side bar, you will find previous posts about this strangest of issues, including the story of a freelance human castrator (castrater?) who went to jail in Brisbane for providing his services.)

Anyway, the UK story of something similar:

 A surgeon has been struck off after it was found he injured his own limbs with dry ice to fulfil a sexual fantasy.

Neil Hopper had opened up about his story on This Morning, claiming he had lost his legs to sepsis after a family camping trip, according to The Sun.

But in 2025, the consultant vascular surgeon was jailed for 32 months for fraud totalling more than $872,822 AUD after causing his injuries himself....

The dad, who carried out hundreds of amputation operations on others, was branded the “bravest surgeon in Britain”.

He was short-listed in the European Space Agency’s search for an astronaut with a disability and featured in a documentary around his progress towards heading to space.

Hopper had worked at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals since 2013.

  

The most remarkable thing, of course, that it shows the smartest of men can still get weird obsessions and act on them. 

It also should give trans activists some hesitation, surely?   I mean, it is self evident from social media that autogynephilia is real, given the number of men who post (what they think is) erotic photos of themselves cross dressing.   The main uncertainty seems to be the number of transexuals who get the operation due to the sexual fascination.   

It's hard to see why there should be a legal objection to one form of body part removal for sexual arousal motivations, but not another....  

Another science fiction movie that didn't grab me

I refer to Project Hail Mary, which (despite it being at the end of its run) I actually saw at a cinema on the weekend.    

I wouldn't say it's a terrible movie, in the sense of offensive in any way, but I just find too many problems with movies sourced from author Andy Weir.  Like The Martian, which I also found unconvincing, I can see that he tries to be pro-science, which should appeal to me, but the movie versions at least contain too many things I find too unrealistic despite the veneer of realism.

Things I had issues with in this movie:   (like The Martian) the domestic setting seeming to be not that too far into the future, yet the rockets are huge and full of wasted space in a way that current technological progress would suggest is going to take a long, long time to achieve;   astronauts doing stuff outside of the spaceship that look not entirely realistic;  spaceships doing things that look unrealistic;  an alien that was far too cutesy and too human-like in attitude, especially considering its completely alien biology;  plot points that don't make sense when more carefully thought about;   a hero who likes to work things out by hand on a whiteboard, when it's obvious that the ship's computer would have enough intelligence to work it out in a flash.   (Maybe the book had the misfortune to be written just before LLMs and AI became such an all consuming topic of interest, and therefore missed the reality that a starship like that in the film is now, more than ever, really likely to have a HAL type intelligence running it.)  

I didn't really care for the mixed tone of the movie:  it tries to keep everything light hearted and "feelgood" with the main character, when it's a "have to avoid the end of the world and billions of people dying" movie.

I am puzzled by how many good reviews it got.  But, I see via Metacritic that Variety didn't care for it and I agree with the review, which is summarised in its headline:

 ‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling in a Lavish but Derivative Outer-Space Adventure

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's lone-astronaut saga wants to be "Interstellar" meets "E.T.," but it's too long and too cutely formulaic. 

One other thing:  Ryan Gosling seems to routinely turn up in movies I find just barely OK, but overall underwhelming.   He has a certain charisma, but it's never enough to carry a movie for me.

 

The nutty politics of aliens

The forthcoming release of Spielberg's Disclosure Day, as well as the continued trickle of obscure government videos of things that may, or may not, be balloons or other human stuff, is causing me to re-visit the topic of the strange inversion of US politics around UFO's.

Firstly, I have to say that I have a suspicion that the movie might not be testing all that well with audiences, as the final trailer features Steven Spielberg talking to camera about it, and I think does give away the key plot elements. There was also Stephen Colbert interviewing Spielberg in the final week of the Late Show, and it seems a tad odd that Spielberg has felt the need to promote his own movie in person to this degree.   

The combination of both of these do tell us one thing:  the movie seems to have aliens who enable telepathic empathy in humans.   This ties in nicely with ET, The Extraterrestrial when you think about it.  It's a little more puzzling as to how it ties in with the aliens in Close Encounters, which many think has its direct sequel in Disclosure Day, as the aliens in it didn't seem to have much empathy for the families of the people they kidnapped for a few decades!   (That said, I think the obscure motivation of the aliens in that movie is one of the reasons to like it, as it not dissimilar to the religious mystery of why a good God would let some of his (or her) followers suffer so much.)   

So, what does this have to do with weirdo changes in US politics in particular?  Well, as I have explained before, it feels very peculiar that belief in UFOs used to be perceived as a bit of a countercultural, hippy-ish thing, and therefore probably aligned with Left leaning politics, and it has now flipped and become the interest of Right wing conspiracy mongers.   Yeah, believing that climate change is not real (which is a "conspiracy of scientists and socialist billionaires" belief) now aligns with "aliens are real and already here and the government is hiding it from us".  Look at this recent tweet by the incredibly gullible Ross Coulthart, who thinks a government somewhere found a crashed UFO so big it build a huge building over it to hide it:

(By the way, the whole "they have backed away from the worst predictions and lied to us for decades" is a dumbass beat up, and climate change "skepticism" - by which I mean denial - generally is having an algorithmically driven heyday again at Musk's X.  My own conspiracy theory is that it might be because Musk wants to get ahead of the growing concern that his money making Starlink - not to mention his intended huge number of Starship launches - is actually a big environmental problem for the upper atmosphere.)   

 Now, Spielberg himself, as a Hollywood liberal, is playing with fire here, as while there are some Right aligned people who think he is on their side on the question of alien reality and government secret knowledge of it (see Coulthart, for example), there are also plenty of others who will find a way to continue to condemn him in the nuttiest of Right wing ways.   Already in comments to Disclosure Day content on Youtube, I have seen them bring up the old, completely without foundation, rumour that he was responsible for the child abuse related death of the young actress in Poltergeist.  And on today's final trailer, there are a few comments bringing up the Right wing religious nutter theory - promoted by Tucker Carlson and others - that UFOs and aliens are demons and Spielberg is doing their bidding by making a movie pretending that they are good and should be welcomed!

So yeah, I expect that MAGA conspiracy types who might be tempted by the topic of the movie are going to do their regular routine of finding the movie objectionable because, basically, Spielberg is a Hollywood liberal and liberals cannot be trusted.      

Update:   Ooh, I might be wrong in worrying about audience reactions.  We finally have a handful of reactions from people who have seen it, and they seem all positive.  (One does call it Spielberg's "weirdest" movie - but seemingly in a good way.)

Update 2:  As I suspected from the start, the final trailer seems to confirm that there was no need to worry about the CGI looking animals in parts of the film, as they were never meant to be real, anyway.

And yes, it is clear from social media that there is a anti-Spielberg pushback going on, even though most comments about him and his movie legacy are positive.  Again, there is a bit of an odd turnaround about this - it used to be Left leaning critics who would criticise Spielberg as too emotionally manipulative for them, so liking him used to feel like you were part of middle class class mainstream which the Republicans used to try to appeal to.  Now, after making many specifically liberal themed movies (none of which are extreme in message, but stand in a solid tradition of Hollywood movies and their makers mostly being soft liberal), the MAGA crowd went into nutjob land and invented reasons to dislike him.