The old invisible ink trick

Spotted this at Gulf News:

Dubai: A customer service employee was sentenced to 10 years in jail for stealing Dh1 million from a customer’s account, a Dubai Court of First Instance heard.

The Egyptian defendant, 42, who is still at large, conned the customer by using magic ink when the latter wrote his name on the cheque to deposit the money in his account. When the name disappeared because of the ink, the defendant put his name on the cheque, cashed the money and escaped.

That lasted a long time

MIT Technology review notes that Facebucks might never happen: 

The company has warned investors that the currency, which it wants to launch next year, may not ever get off the ground.

The news: In its quarterly report, Facebook reminded investors that the proposed currency, called Libra, is “based on new and unproven technology," adding that the legal environment surrounding digital currencies is “uncertain and evolving.” That could cause Libra to be delayed or even blocked, it said.

The backstory: Facebook revealed its ambitions for Libra a month and a half ago. Since then, it has faced skepticism and backlash from government bankers and politicians, who have criticized Facebook’s track record on privacy and warned that its plan to launch a private currency to billions of people could be risky.

Onward: During Facebook’s quarterly earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck an optimistic tone, affirming that the company will spend “however long it takes” to earn regulators’ approval before launching.

Living under the Moon

From Space.com: 

Living Underground on the Moon: How Lava Tubes Could Aid Lunar Colonization

Finding a lava tube that has lots of ice inside would be fantastic site for a base, I would think. 

And the doctor is always in

Psychoanalyse yourself:

A new study shows that conversation with oneself embodied as Dr. Sigmund Freud works better to improve people's mood, compared to just talking about your problems in a virtual conversation with pre-scripted comments. Researchers claimed that the method could be used by clinicians to help people dealing with minor personal problems.

The explanation as to why this should be is given at the link as follows:

People are often much better at giving useful advice to a friend in trouble than they are in dealing with their own problems. Although we typically have continuous internal dialogue, we are trapped inside our own way of thinking with our own history and point of view, and find it difficult to take an external perspective regarding our own problems. However, with friends, especially someone we know well, it is much easier to understand the bigger picture, and help them find a way through their problems.

A research team of the University of Barcelona (UB), IDIBAPS and Virtual BodyWorks, a spin-off of both institutions and ICREA, has used immersive virtual reality to observe the effects of talking to themselves as if they were another person, using virtual reality.

The technique is complicated, though:

For this technique to work out,researchers scanned the person to obtain an 'avatar' which is a 3D-likeness of the person. In virtual reality, when they look at themselves, at their body parts, or in a mirror, they will see a representation of themselves. When they move their real body, their virtual body will move in the same way and at the same time. Seated across the table is another virtual human, in the case of this experiment, a representation of Dr Sigmund Freud.

The participant can explain their personal problem to Dr Freud, and then switch to being embodied as Freud. Now, embodied as Freud, when they look down towards themselves, or in a mirror, they will see Freud's body rather than their own, and also this body will move in synchrony with their own movements. "They will see and hear their own likeness explaining the problem, and they see their virtual self as if this were another person. Now they themselves have become the 'friend' who is listening and trying to help," said Mel Slater.

 Working in psychology research sounds fun, no? 

A flicker of hope

From Axios:

Carbon emissions from China could peak as soon as 2021, which is nine years before the voluntary deadline in their Paris agreement pledge, a new peer-reviewed study finds.

Why it matters: China is by far the world's largest carbon emitter. The trajectory of its emissions affect whether the world has any chance of meeting the Paris temperature goals — or, more likely, how much they're overshot.

• It adds to separate analyses suggesting China could see a peak well before 2030 if things break right.

Meat substitute scepticism

Someone from the CSIRO casts a deeply sceptical eye over how much potential growth there really is in the "fake meat" industry that excites high market valuations for the companies making these new fake burgers.   He notes the growth in demand for meat as nations get richer as being a major factor offsetting any reductions in livestock that an increasing market for meat substitute products would involve.

You should read the comments too, where the author expands his scepticism about lab grown meat - a topic of which I have been sceptical from day one.

In these discussions about future food, it annoys that I have not been able to track down a person who I once heard on the ABC arguing that lab grown protein derived from microbial sources could readily and cheaply feed the world.   I don't think he was talking about fungus derived protein either - from which we get Quorn.   But who this was, and which exact source for the protein he was talking about, I have not worked out.  I think he had written a book on the topic of future food, but there are a lot of books on that topic around.

One other point:   because I looked at a couple of vegan recipe videos, I keep getting this topic coming up on my Youtube feed now.  It is very clear that the matter of vegans trying to make plant based food look and taste like the meat equivalent is very "hot" at the moment.  There are no end of videos about how to make tofu look and taste (allegedly!) like chicken, fish, or whatever.  And a guy who tried various ways to come up with something that resembles bacon - he ended up recommending strips of daikon, dried out a bit, soaked in his mix of soy and stuff, and fried.   I am not at all convinced it would taste anything like bacon.

So yeah, it seems to me that a lot of people are convinced that getting people to eat more vegetarian or vegan is a matter of making the food at least look like what they like in meat.   I am pretty sure that this must be annoying some more purist vegan types...

When Dick doesn't work

I've been watching The Man in the High Castle, the alternative history series on Prime based on Phillip K Dick's novel of the same name and which (I think) got pretty favourable reviews when it first started.

I've seen 4 (maybe 5?) episodes now, and while I initially enjoyed the novelty of the scenario, I am prepared to abandon it. 

Looking at an imagined Nazi New York and Japanese California (and the desolate bit of the country in the middle) is cool for a while, but the plotting has slowed down and I'm not finding much of a reason to keep following the story.

The main problem is that it's too much of a bleak monotone, and none of the main characters seem particularly charming, or interesting, really.   I did once start reading the novel and couldn't get into it, either:  maybe I was just distracted with other stuff at the time, since I have read and enjoyed quite a bit of Dick's other work, and the novel won many awards, so you would think I would like it.

But, sorry - not finding it engaging enough.

Might be a bit of a pattern here...

About that teenager who shot up the garlic festival in California:

Legan posted two photos on Instagram not long before the attack.

One photo depicted Smokey the Bear in front of a "fire danger" sign, with a caption that said to read the 19th century book "Might is Right," a work that claims race determines behavior and is popular among white nationalists and far-right extremist groups.

About one of the teenage fugitives from the Canadian killings:

For Schmegelsky a dark but depressingly familiar picture began to form—a young man with a tense home life who found solace in online activities and had connections to the far-right. The two have been connected a YouTube account featuring a Nazi insignia, online game accounts using the banner of the Azov battalion (a Ukrainian far-right militia) and had photographs of a Nazi armband and a Hitler Youth knife. Schmegelsky's father, while adamant his son was not a neo-Nazi, did admit to having to drag him out of an army surplus store eight months ago after his son got too excited over the Nazi memorabilia. VICE also viewed photos of Schmegelsky with a gun barrel in his mouth.

An article at Business Insider in January:


All of the extremist killings in the US in 2018 had links to right-wing extremism, according to new report 

And over at Quillette:    but look what happened to Andy Ngo, the poor guy got punched, and some Lefties said he had been provocative.  The Left is appallingly violent!

Update:  also, count me as pretty amused about the long, boring, pointless Quillette piece "Why isn’t Jordan Peterson on This List of the World’s Top Fifty Intellectuals".  Not even worth a link, that one.

The ridiculous Ninja show

So is this three seasons now that the Australian version of Ninja Warrior has had a final in which no one got through the final course in order to have a go at the final climb?  

I saw some of the first season; none of the second; and bits of the third including last night's final, in which Channel 9 had been putting out hints that someone finally completed the whole thing to "win".

Instead, we got contestants who all found the "swinging doors" impossible - not even able to move past the first one in a row of 4 or 5.   This seems to me, and surely many viewers, pretty ridiculous.  As someone on Twitter said, the show might have more credibility if they showed that the obstacle was actually do-able, as they (apparently) have people who test the different segments of the course.

But these swinging doors looked ridiculous - a smooth metal edge giving no grip to two hands, let alone the one hand that would have to remain while trying to grab on to the other.

Do the international versions have this issue as well? - going several seasons before anyone can even try the final?

Planet of the Rats

Japan is going to do some human stem cell in animal experiments that sound a little confusing:

A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people....

Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal’s organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The reason why some people worry about these experiments:

Some bioethicists are concerned about the possibility that human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition.

Oh.

Woman with stupid idea has daughter with dubious ideas

NPR reports on the woman who allegedly invented or popularised the very stupid idea of gender reveal parties now saying that she regrets it.  In part, due to have a very "woke" daughter:

"Plot twist! The baby from the original gender reveal party is a girl who wears suits," Karvunidis says. "She says 'she' and 'her' and all of that, but you know she really goes outside gender norms."

The post went viral. Karvunidis says her views on sex and gender have changed, especially when she's talking to her daughter.

"She's telling me 'Mom, there are many genders. Mom, there's many different sexualities and all different types,' and I take her lead on that," Karvunidis says.

She says she does have some regrets and understands these parties aren't beneficial to everyone.

The daughter is about 10 or 11, given that Karvunidis' gender reveal party for her was in 2008.

Singapore and fake news

I just read a good article about Singapore trying to deal with the problem of fake news via legislation and its usual "soft authoritarian" style whereby politicians can order the correction or removal of fake news.

I have great sympathy to the goal, if not the exact means of execution.  

The throbbing sphere of education

So, it's university open day season in Brisbane, and given that I have a daughter approaching the end of high school, we once again went out to a university to listen to a couple of talks and view the facilities.

Yesterday, it was QUT, but we went to the Kelvin Grove campus, which does education and creative industries.  The education building is pretty new, and as with most new university buildings these days, is pretty flash.  Of some particular amusement, though, is the huge feature of a glowing central sphere in the centre of the building, the exact point of which was not made clear.  Some of the changes it undergoes in the projected pattern look vaguely like neurons firing; at other times the convolutions look a bit too much like intestines.  (I assume the former association is intentional; the latter, not so much.)   Here it is in action:



There was mention that people doing something on the interactive screen on the wall would influence what the Sphere of Educational Destiny, or whatever it's called, shows.

Anyway, it's certainly eye catching, and seems ready made to be used in a science fiction film; but I do wonder if it has much point.

As for the open day itself:  as usual, it was full of optimism about the courses; how students can do some of it overseas; and how easily they will find getting a job.   (The teachers course in particular put up a figure of 97% employment for graduates soon after completing the course - I guess they didn't say that all of the jobs were as teachers, but I assume that would be case.)  

They told us that there is a shortage of teachers not only in Australia, but world wide, and that Australian teachers are well regarded internationally.   Apparently, if you stick it living out in a remote community, you can make principal barely a couple of years from graduation.

All very positive vibes, as they usually are at these open days, and modern universities are such nice built environments, I really enjoy the open days.  More than my children do...

Someone needs to invent cooking meat smell

To atone for the eating of a few mouthfuls of raw dead animal a week ago, this last Saturday I was inspired to try cooking with one of the new-ish products that is purely vegetarian but trying to look like meat/mince.  

This one is soy protein based - which is a meat substitute source of protein that has fallen out of favour, it seems.  Remember the days when Textured Vegetable Protein was about the only fake meat in town?   I didn't mind it, really, especially the chunky version for things like chilli.

So, I tried chilli con carne with this product.

I don't know if it was really necessary, but I tried frying it off with onion, and that was the main problem.  I thought it had a most peculiar smell while frying.  Not really food like at all.   My son came into the kitchen and said "I can tell that's not meat you're cooking", and he had good reason to so comment.

I tasted some of it after it was "cooked" (the mince alone, I mean) and it was a pretty underwhelming flavour.  I think the Beyond Burger had inherently more flavour, and a somewhat meat one at that.

The end result chilli was quite OK - this product certain holds a mince meat-like texture quite well, and sufficient chilli and spices means that it is not as if the bland taste of the "meat" is all that noticeable.   I doubt it would taste great as a burger, though.

And they really need to do something about that odd cooking smell.

Some welcome pushback on the Mueller "optics"

I'm happy to see that there has been some pushback against all media's assessment of Mueller's congressional appearance as a disaster.   There's been quite a bit on Twitter by journalists and writers I follow, such as:

And now there is an article at The Atlantic along similar lines: Robert Mueller and the Tyranny of ‘Optics’:

“DAZED AND CONFUSED” was the Drudge Report’s blaring headline. But the Twitter verdict of NBC’s sober-sided Chuck Todd was almost as severe: “On substance, Democrats got what they wanted,” Todd wrote. “But on optics, this was a disaster.”

Optics—the kryptonite of the modern media age, the glimmering, crystalline material that can subsume substance at every treacherous turn. Or as the former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett rejoined to Todd on Twitter: “When you say ‘on optics, this was a disaster’ it is you saying so that helps make it true. The disaster of the optics is the elevation of optics and the claim by pundits that it was a disaster.”

 

I am not alone

Well, the odd things you sometimes find via Twitter.

Turns out that Hannah Gadsby does get negative reviews, even from high minded reviewers who seem to have approached her work wanting to like it, after all.   This one, about her latest show, is in the New Yorker, and it's pretty strong:

Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.

Then there is this review of the ridiculously over-praised Nanette, which is ever fiercer:

Nanette is awful, and it’s time we gave ourselves permission to think and say that out loud. Its few patches of genuine comedy eventually lead to giant yawning holes of intellectual chicanery masquerading as Deep and Profound Thought. Nanette assures viewers, especially straight ones, that queers and women can and must be understood and assimilated by first understanding us as uniquely and literally broken and bashed in. It isn’t comedy that is broken in Nanette, but queer life and feminism. Worse, the breaking of queerness comes about via Gadsby offering straight people in particular the assurance that this is a globally universal experience. Gadsby offers Nanette as a mirror to herself, and her self becomes a stand in for queers and women everywhere. If she had simply discussed her own story, Nanette would simply be an account of one woman’s trauma, but Gadsby takes it much, much further. She frames her story in a very particular, prescriptive, and retrograde vision of sexuality (“homosexuality is not a choice”) and in a denunciation of art that looks like a massive feminist takedown of male artists but is in fact embedded in a vision of the self that allows no place for the fragmented and fragmentary nature of experience and life itself.

Of course, the view of this queer reviewer that "homosexuality is not a choice" is a retrograde vision of sexuality may be controversial, but I'll still go with any review that points out the comedy empress has no clothes.   (So to speak.  No body size joke intended.  Well, not much.)

A problem noted

To say I am no fan of Tarantino is an understatement - and I suspect his legacy is already starting to degrade - so I won't be seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.   But I will still read reviews of it, especially if I can find support for my disdain for him and his oeuvre.  Hence, I was interested to read this in the Slate review:

A revelation about Pitt’s character’s past midway through the movie might change how you respond to the culminating orgy of violence, which, as is often the case in Tarantino films, seems at once like a critique of the vision of masculinity that’s imposed on us by TV and the movies and like a celebration of it. (In fact, a character in the movie—to reveal which one would be to say too much—at one point advances a theory about our culture’s dependence on mediatized mayhem.)

Well, if you ask me, such ambiguity is a problem, not a feature.  You don't critique something by celebrating it.   Back to the rest of the review, confirming that it's not just me that wonders how shallow his motivations seem to be:

In choosing to set a movie on Cielo Drive in the summer of 1969, Tarantino took on a historical event that not only changed how Americans thought about fame, violence, and the counterculture but also ended five innocent lives (seven if you count Tate’s next-door neighbors the LaBiancas, who died in a separate Manson-incited incident the following night). It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements—the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees—were just so cool.

Modern America, noted

OXFORD, Miss. — Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The South remains a worry.

Here's the story.

Hot in Paris

Météo-France said the mercury at its Paris-Montsouris station in the French capital surpassed the previous high of 40.4C, set in July 1947, soon after 1pm and continued to climb, reaching 42.6C soon after 4pm.

“And it could climb even higher,” the service said, noting that 43C in the shade “is the average maximum temperature in Baghdad, Iraq in July”. David Salas y Mélia, a climatologist, said the heatwave was one “of quite exceptional intensity”.

That's hot, anywhere; but especially in a city that has not been well fitted out with airconditioning.  (And adding lots of airconditioning can make a city hotter too.)

When are the decrepit dopes of Catallaxy going to admit they are wrong, JC?  Needs to start at the top - with Sinclair Davidson's apology to society.  

Indian woes

France 24, of all places, has an article about the continuing problem of sex selecting abortion in India.  It's startling how entrenched it is, despite successive governments trying to stop it:

Over the past three months, not a single girl was born in 132 villages in the northern Indian state of Uttrakhand, according to local authorities. An investigation was launched over the weekend after official data revealed that of the 216 children born in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, not one was female, according to Asian News International (ANI). In 16 of the 132 villages, now marked as a “red zone”, no female births were recorded over the past six months.

Quantifying India’s skewered gender ratio is a depressing business and it keeps getting worse. The 2011 Census found the world’s largest democracy had 919 female children for every 1,000 male children, down from 927 in 2001. 

The country’s preference for boys results in fewer female births due to sex selective abortions as well as excessive female deaths due to neglect or maltreatment. Together, they account for what statisticians call women “missing” from national populations. In 2017-2018, the Indian economic survey found 63 million Indian women were “missing” and an additional 21 million were “unwanted", resulting in lower nutritional and education levels. 

They've tried to ban dowries, but everyone ignores it, it seems:

While wedding costs in India are customarily borne by the bride’s family, rising consumerism has sparked increasingly lavish, long-drawn-out ceremonies. Media coverage of extravagant ceremonies hosted by a growing section of “super-rich” adds aspirational pressure on bridal families struggling to cope with wedding costs. 

The economics of traditional Indian marriages then are brutally simple: the family of the bride enriches the family of the groom. In low income and caste groups this means the family of the groom can impoverish the bride’s family. And that, experts say, accounts for India’s entrenched preference for sons and declining value of women.

“The dowry that must be paid to marry off a daughter encourages parents to prefer sons, because in this case, they do not pay for the weddings and instead receive dowries and gifts,” explained Bénédicte Manier, a journalist and author of “Made in India”. “These dowry-related transactions are worth billions of rupees each year in India, it’s an economy by itself, growing with a new middle class. Not surprisingly, this social category, which has high dowry rates, also has the highest birth sex selection rates.”

I also would not have guessed that the arranged marriage rate was still so high:

Arranged marriages account for an estimated 90 percent of Indian marriages, almost all of them within societally prescribed caste and community groups. The lack of choice is largely unquestioned and enthusiastically promoted in popular culture such as films and TV series.

The sex ratio leads to some horrible situations for adult women too:

A skewered sex ratio, far from increasing the value of a woman’s life, puts her at graver risk, say experts. Manier explains that it sparks a “strong disruption of the marriage market” resulting in “many men struggling to find women of their age”. This, she warns, results in high celibacy rates in some areas. “In the long term, some 30 million men will remain without a wife. This situation also leads to trafficking of young women from poor families. Some are even bought by several men who "share" or sell them several times in a row.”

In some of the worst affected northern Indian states, the practice of buying and selling wives is so prevalent that vulnerable women are resigned to the fact that they will be sold on to a next husband after delivering a son.

What a society...

Another in the series: very late movie reviews

I've always meant to catch the 1994 New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, and finally did last night.

First:  did Auckland really have bits as ugly as that in 1994?   Did Maori gangs really look exactly like escapees from the Mad Max movies?  Do they still look like that?   What about that trashy bar, and the amount of beer typically being drunk?   (Actually, I read in an article afterwards that it was not a Maori pub at all in real life.  Huh.)

Anyway, apart from it looking much uglier than I expected, and the acting sometimes in my opinion feeling a bit more theatrical than cinematic, I could see why the film had impact.   Unexpectedly, almost, I found myself quite upset by the pivotal death and the funeral scenes.

I was surprised that it did not get more criticism, or at least questioning, from other countries about its race politics at the time, though.  I see that the author of the book was a right wing figure, and although the movie changed the book's perspective a lot (focusing on the mother - and its hard to see how you could do it otherwise), the deeply bleak picture it painted of urban Maori behaviour was still controversial in New Zealand.  But not, it seems, in other nations' reactions.

I suspect it would face a strong attack on PC lines everywhere if being released today.

Update:  Vice asked recently why a prominent NZ bike gang, the Mongrel Mob, uses Nazi symbols.  Seems it wasn't started by Maori, but is now dominated by them.  But on the upside, membership is ageing and not being replaced by younger.   This article shows artsy photos of the gang members, whose heavy face tattooing is, shall we say, a tad on the extreme side. 

A fast food confession

This may well be considered controversial.

I prefer KFC mashed potato and gravy over their chips.

That is all.

Climate change and compound events

A new paper at Nature:

Floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts often result from a combination of interacting physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of processes (climate drivers and hazards) leading to a significant impact is referred to as a ‘compound event’. Traditional risk assessment methods typically only consider one driver and/or hazard at a time, potentially leading to underestimation of risk, as the processes that cause extreme events often interact and are spatially and/or temporally dependent. Here we show how a better understanding of compound events may improve projections of potential high-impact events, and can provide a bridge between climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers, who need to work closely together to understand these complex events.

Another case of murder by social media

What an appalling story, again illustrating the harm of social media:

Eight people have been killed in vigilante lynchings in Bangladesh sparked by rumours on social media of children being kidnapped and sacrificed as offerings for the construction of a bridge, police have confirmed.

The victims, which include two women, were targeted by angry mobs over the rumours, spread mostly on Facebook, that said human heads were required for the massive $3 billion project ($4.3 billion), police chief Javed Patwary said.

"We have analysed every single case of these eight killings," Mr Patwary told reporters in Dhaka.

More than 30 other people have been attacked in connection with the rumours.

Mr Patwary said police stations across the country had been ordered to crack down on rumours, and at least 25 YouTube channels, 60 Facebook pages and 10 websites have been shut down.

AFP has identified several posts still on Facebook that share the rumour, however.

Mob lynchings are common in Bangladesh, but the latest incidents are particularly brutal.

Do these countries where rumours that lead to lynchings spread like wildfire on social media try to educate the public that they cannot believe everything they read?

How hard is it for Facebook to have a local office that gets notice of a dangerous rumour and shuts down the account immediately?  Is part of the problem that you can't easily search Facebook content?  Does Facebook itself have the ability to immediately search posts across all accounts? 

Many questions I have.

Sammy Davis Jnr considered

There's a not so old documentary about Sammy Davis Jnr that has been on TV before, but I only saw it last night.  (Most of it, anyway.)

It fits in with something that has become a bit of theme here - as you get older, history feels closer than it used to.   As a child, something that happened 50 years before your birth feels like ancient history; but once you get into your 50's, you start thinking "hey, the 1960's doesn't feel so long ago", because you can remember bits of it directly, and lots of older people don't feel mentally much older than their perceived peak at (say) 30-ish.  Hence, anything that happened within any one lifetime doesn't now seem, in the big picture, all that long ago; and the timing of radical changes to our understanding of humanity (evolution, the "deep time" of the age of the Earth, the vast scale of the universe, etc) which are all still within roughly 150 years ago from today need to be considered in the perspective.    The intellectual and social reverberations of those discoveries have not had all that long to work themselves through.


Hence, watching the story of the rabid controversy in America that Davis Jnr's relationships with white women caused in the late 50's, but well into the 60's as well, is really eye opening.    Or things like the way blacks, at least in the 50's, had to drive way out of town to find somewhere to stay if working at Las Vegas.  (It wasn't entirely clear when that started to change.)  And the story of a motel operator being asked to drain the pool by a white person who saw Davis Jnr swimming in it, and they did (!).

This was all going on when I was a child, which isn't long ago.  It all puts nostalgia for the 1950's and 60's into perspective, and just because legislative action against discrimination happened,  no one should be surprised that lingering effects should take a long time to work themselves out.

It's all in the editing (and the understanding)

It's pretty funny to read how Right wing political punditry think the Mueller testimony was a disaster for Democrats (and it's true that quite a few on the anti-Trump side gave bad reviews to his performance as well), yet when you see on TV the key parts done as a 60 second highlight reel re-iterating the scandal that was the Russian interference, the welcome use by Trump of stolen emails, the lies of those around the campaign to cover it up, and Trump's trying to shut down the investigation, it doesn't look dire at all.  

Of course, others have made this point too:

As has been clear all along, this historic scandal is a case of Republicans gaslighting themselves about what went on and preferring fantasy Deep State conspiracy over reality.    All fed by their fawning to a President whose intense narcissism means that he cannot admit reality because he thinks it erodes the legitimacy of his narrow win.  (And in truth, it does.)

Republicans already look like fools - I can't imagine how bad they are going to look with the clear perspective of history.

The good balm

Another "if only I was an 'influencer'" post:   this product is ridiculously expensive (I think $45 for a tube) but if your spouse is taking hints as to what you might like as a birthday or Christmas present, you could suggest this:

It's a nice smelling "aftershave balm" that I find particularly good to use in the dry winter weather in Brisbane, when shaving does sometimes cause dry, sore patches near the corners of my mouth.  Or is that because I was dribbling in my sleep?  Who knows.

Anyway, it's moisturising but not in a heavy or oily way.  A little goes a long way, so the price is not as bad as it initially might seem.

I don't use it in hot, humid weather, when the cooling brace of an alcohol based aftershave is called for.   But for at least a third of the year (in Brisbane) it's great.

Thank you.

L'Occitane, please send me money, or a trip to Provence, at the very least.

A telling tale of the United States

So, the US could get him to the Moon and back, but couldn't assure safe surgery under their health care system?

Either that or I am being unfair and it was not the hospital's/surgeon's fault, but what about the ridiculous litigation infested US system that was unfairly used to enrich a white family that probably had money to spare?

Either way, I can turn it into a Lefty attack on the modern US.

Maybe he can tell us about Harry's Dad?

Well, what an odd story:

A television personality in Australia says that his four-year-old son has made a number of inexplicable and eerie statements which suggest that he was Princess Diana in a past life. The bizarre revelation reportedly came by way of a magazine article written by the boy's bewildered father David Campbell. He explained that the strangeness began two years ago when the youngster first pointed to a picture of Diana and declared "look, it's me when I was a princess."

According to Campbell, the boy continued to make spooky comments about what appears to be his past life, such as saying that he had two boys that he called his 'sons.' While the confounded dad initially dismissed these statements as fanciful talk from the toddler, he really took notice when they began to become more detailed. In particular, Campbell says that his son was able to name a site in Scotland where Diana frequently stayed and can describe the interior of the residence known as Balmoral.

Chillingly, the child has even allegedly made mention of Diana's tragic death, saying "one day the sirens came and I wasn't a princess anymore."

As might be expected

Over at Quillette, a profile of Boris Johnson has some lurid passages.  Here is a memory of him from 1983, debating at Oxford:

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:

You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.

Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:

The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.

Update:  following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:

Brexit was won with an impossible promise that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100 days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.

As they chunter in their think tanks and newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the elite. By anyone but them.

As if a rush to Mars wasn't nutty enough

Axios says that Robert Zubrin, who has spent a lot of time trying to promote a complicated way of getting to and from Mars, and a couple of other "space evangelists" got caught up in the excitement of the Apollo 11 celebrations by saying that actually, colonising Titan is a better long term for humanity.   By 2069.  

Ha ha. 

I will write a post about the continual confusion about the aims of a space program sometime soon.

But what's really important

What a tosser:

Yeah, because the fear of the white male (and the occasional Asian one) being so oppressed that they can't talk about how annoying they find the cultural Left is the major danger to the world at the moment.  

Actually, last night I was thinking:  people like Latham and his latest acolytes from Catallaxy past and present (he is big at Catallaxy at the moment, which people should take as a bad sign) complain that the cultural Left is all about "feelz" - claiming victim status, seeking out offence whether it intended or not, etc.    But their reaction against it has exactly the same over-emotional colour - how else can you inflate the matter of "PC-oppression" into such a large scale, crushing problem of global proportion?    You're into the "feelz" just as much as they are, Latho. 

Sounds all above board [sarcasm]

I really like the spaghetti diagram of Adani's financial set up in this article which lists these key points:

 Key points:

• The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
• The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
• Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

Woke mining executive

The chief executive of the world's largest mining company has endorsed drastic action to combat global warming, which he calls "indisputable," and an emerging crisis.

"The planet will survive. Many species may not," BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a business breakfast in London on Tuesday.

"This is a confronting conclusion but as a veteran geologist once said, 'you can't argue with a rock.'"

The link is here.

A pod of pea brain opinion writers for The Australian are drafting their pooh-poohing columns in response as I write.

Domestic violence of the American kind

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy — though an FBI spokeswoman later clarified the percentage is smaller.   ......

At a congressional hearing in May, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division testified that the bureau was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases and that of those, about 40 percent involved racially motivated violent extremists. Most in that group, he said, were white supremacists.

That's from the Washington Post.

But the real problem is that a journalist/opinion writer who knows he gets up the nose of Leftist thugs stood in the middle of a protest involving some of them and got beaten up, hey Jason.  

Some Guardian funnies

Author John Marsden has a piece at The Guardian in which he complains about over-parenting and the harm he sees it doing to kids education these days.  (He apparently now runs a couple of private schools in the bush where physical activity is far from discouraged.)

Anyway, I thought this comment was not too far off the mark, but the follow up comment was a bit funny nonetheless:

Yeah, sure

Axios headline:

Top 2020 Dems would punish China over mass detentions of Uighurs 

Had missed the support that China has received from some countries:

Context: Earlier this week, 37 countries — including North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia, among other mostly-authoritarian states — signed a letter defending China's policies in Xinjiang.

• This came shortly after 22 other countries formally condemned China's abuses in the region.

The bottom line: Most of the world has been largely silent on this issue due in large part to China’s economic clout and penchant for lashing out over criticisms of its internal affairs. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized China but not acted on concrete proposals to impose costs on Beijing.

I don't think anyone can do much about it anyway.

I think it will be very interesting to see if such an attempt at compulsory mass re-education to love your authoritarian government can actually work.  

An unusual form of dark matter detector

At Science, an article explaining that scientists think they can rule out one form of dark matter, because if it existed, " people would be dying of unexplained ‘gunshot’ wounds". 

The idea boils down to this: If a certain type of dark matter particle existed, it would occasionally kill people, passing through them like a bullet. Because no one has died from unexplained gunshotlike wounds, this type of dark matter does not exist, according to a new study....

A less mainstream dark matter candidate, known as macros, would form heavier particles. Although macros would be much rarer than WIMPs, any collisions with ordinary matter would be violent, leaving an obvious trace. The new study explores what those traces might look like if the macros hit people.

Glenn Starkman and Jagjit Singh Sidhu, theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, were originally searching for traces of macros in granite slabs when a colleague made a suggestion. “Why can’t you just use humans as a detector?” they recall Robert Scherrer, a co-author and theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville saying. “The energies you’re talking about, these things would probably at best maim a person, at worst kill a person.”

The team forged ahead with the idea and modeled macros that would have a similar effect to a fatal shot from a .22 caliber rifle. Such particles would be minuscule, but very heavy, and thus release the same amount of energy as a bullet as it passes through a person. Their calculations focused on the millions of people living in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe over the past decade because researchers say these countries have more reliable data on how many people died and from what causes.

In this sample, scientists would expect to see a handful of reports of unexplained deaths from invisible dark matter “bullets.” But there were none, the researchers report this week on the preprint server arXiv. These deaths would not go unnoticed—they would leave victims dead or dying with a tubular wound where their flesh was vaporized.

Good thing it doesn't exist, I guess.

Ups and downs (global warming is not as simple as some want it to be)

Well, that's interesting.  And Graeme will be along in comments today to say that he's taken time off from contemplating space cows on Ceres, unlimited electricity in space, water oceans on the Sun,  and ancient greenhouses on Mars to say "try science, Steve."

 Climate-related risks are dependent not only on the warming trend from GHGs, but also on the variability about the trend. However, assessment of the impacts of climate change tends to focus on the ultimate level of global warming¹, only occasionally on the rate of global warming, and rarely on variability about the trend. Here we show that models that are more sensitive to GHGs emissions (that is, higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)) also have higher temperature variability on timescales of several years to several decades². Counter-intuitively, high-sensitivity climates, as well as having a higher chance of rapid decadal warming, are also more likely to have had historical ‘hiatus’ periods than lower-sensitivity climates. Cooling or hiatus decades over the historical period, which have been relatively uncommon, are more than twice as likely in a high-ECS world (ECS = 4.5 K) compared with a low-ECS world (ECS = 1.5 K). As ECS also affects the background warming rate under future scenarios with unmitigated anthropogenic forcing, the probability of a hyper-warming decade—over ten times the mean rate of global warming for the twentieth century—is even more sensitive to ECS.

Here's a press release type report about the same study.

Mayor Pete and the loss of well written, politically topical novels

Slate has an article up looking at a Pete Buttigieg speech in which he referenced the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American (but, in Slate's view, somewhat misread its message.)   I see that the book came out in 1955 (I thought it was a bit later than that.)

All very interesting, and a great reminder that this is what we seem to have lost in recent literature - authors who are widely travelled, well read, and can write really well with a distinctive perspective  about the current, complicated, state of the world.   

 Instead, modern literature seems to have become intensely navel gazing and way less interesting for it.

I should really go read more of Greene.  (I think I have read 4 or 5.)  I think even some of his lesser known works have key parts that have lodged in memory due to their distinctiveness.

Moon telescopes

Once again, I wonder: why hasn't there ever been a decent science fiction novel (that I know of) about the far side of the Moon?   I mean, there are good astronomical reasons for having a base there, but if orbiting communications satellites stopped working, it would be about the loneliest place in the local corner of the universe.   Surely the potential isolation could be a good setting for a story?  

Anyhow, that's all by way of preamble to noting that Science magazine has an article about possible astronomical uses for the far side, from low frequency radio telescopes:

Charting the dark ages' 21-centimeter radiation “is essential. It has to be done at some point,” says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works on the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a vast radio telescope spread across northern Europe. The problem is that after 13 billion years of cosmic expansion, photons from the dark ages arrive at Earth stretched to frequencies below 50 MHz, where they not only have to contend with the ionosphere, but also with confounding signals from ham radio, aviation, and long-distance communications. LOFAR, for example, has struggled to detect the 21-centimeter signal from that epoch (Science, 7 November 2014, p. 688). The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, which Hewitt and others are building in South Africa, may have a better shot. But Falcke and others are looking to the Moon.

Burns's 35-year campaign for a lunar radio telescope won him NASA funding in 2008 to form a team called LUNAR to work out how to build it. The researchers designed a lunar telescope array that would include hundreds of simple dipole antennas laid flat on the ground. They demonstrated how autonomous rovers could lay out strips of conducting film to act as antennas. In a 2013 experiment, astronauts on the International Space Station remotely guided a rover that laid out antenna strips on a simulated moonscape at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to show how a future crew onboard NASA's proposed Moon-orbiting Lunar Gateway station could supervise construction.

 to optical:

One solution, proposed by a NASA-funded team last decade, is to build a liquid mirror. The idea is simple: Construct a large shallow circular dish, fill it with a liquid, and set it gently spinning. Centrifugal force will pull the surface into a parabolic shape. Liquid mirror telescopes on Earth use mercury, which is naturally reflective. The biggest so far was the 6-meter Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia in Canada. That testbed telescope, built in 2003 and now decommissioned, paved the way for the 4-meter International Liquid Mirror Telescope, which will take its first view of the sky from the Devasthal Observatory in India later this year. Although a liquid mirror is limited to looking straight up, the rotation of Earth—or the Moon—scans it across the sky.

Mercury won't work on the Moon—it would evaporate in the lunar vacuum and is too heavy to transport from Earth. In its place, the NASA team came up with a class of organic compounds called ionic liquids, essentially molten salts, that would remain liquid in the frigid lunar night. Ionic liquids are not reflective, but could be glazed with silver to make an ideal reflecting surface. Superconducting bearings could levitate the dish and keep it spinning frictionlessly. “In principle there is no limit on the size,” says team member Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. “This would be totally impossible in space, but not that expensive on the Moon.”

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) followed up the NASA study by looking at the practicalities of building such a scope. “There were no showstoppers and the mechanical tolerances were more relaxed than for a space telescope,” says Paul Hickson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A 20-meter telescope, CSA concluded, would require no more than 3.5 tons of material to be transported to the surface. An even larger instrument, as big as 100 meters across, “would be in a class of its own,” Hickson says, able to study the very first stars that formed and coalesced into galaxies at the end of the dark ages.

No beer burps in space

At NPR, they have an article talking about the way astronaut food has changed over the years, and end on this point (my bold):

Astronauts must go without many popular foods and beverages on the International Space Station, including soda — the carbonation goes wacky in space and could wreak havoc on the digestive system; perishable items, because food poisoning would be pretty terrible in space; and alcohol, because it could damage water recovery equipment and impair astronauts' judgment.

And some have been staples since the early missions. Tang, a beverage nearly synonymous with spaceflight, remains popular among astronauts today. What you won't hear about as often — shrimp cocktail. "Shrimp cocktail has almost forever been [one of] their favorite foods," Bourland says (and Kloeris agrees).

New Scientist once had an article on beer in space, and noted:

Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.

“That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have carbonated beverages on the space menu,” NASA spokesperson William Jeffs told New Scientist.

Burping got coverage in another article, which explained: 

You can't burp in space - at least not like you do here on Earth.

"You can't burp in space because the air, food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles," Hadfield replied on Twitter.

"If you burp, you throw up into your mouth. So guess where the trapped air goes?"

But you can try to time your burps right:

If you do end up going to space, there was one enterprising astronaut who found a way to belch without bomiting. According to the book What's it Like in Space? by Ariel Waldman, NASA astronaut and physicist Jim Newman, who has spent 43 days in space, developed what he called the "push and burp."

"He found that by pushing off a wall, he could create a force in lieu of gravity that kept his food down in his stomach, giving him a brief chance at expelling gas without consequence," Waldman wrote.

Ultra violence as entertainment

Yesterday, my wife had put on John Wick 2 on Netflix but proceeded to spend all of her time looking at her phone, while I occasionally saw bits of it from the kitchen. 

I once started watching the first one, but left it before the violence started.   (I think I thought some of the acting was bad, and wasn't interested in a revenge over a dog story anyway.)

Well, the tiny amount I did see of JW2 I thought was pretty dismaying regarding the desensitisation of society to graphic violence.  It was what, back in 1969 (in the news this weekend for obvious reasons), would have been called shocking ultra-violence.   It's still ultra-violence, but now people watch it for entertainment.

I really do not like the way this incremental change happened to society, and continue to be  dismayed at the lack of critical thought applied to the question of the depiction of violence.

I would also add that while Keanu Reeves get all this adulation for being such a nice guy, to my mind he has no taste for being in these movies.  

Serious Catholics who do not have a problem with the film (such as this guy) need their head read.   

Raw

Guess what I ate for the first time on Saturday? 

Steak tartare.  It was at a French cafe at South Bank which my wife and I quite like; and no, I didn't order it for myself, but my wife had it as a main and there was too much for her.

The idea of the dish has never appealed to me (I am not even that keen on seafood sushimi), but it was pretty nice.  I expected a raw meat flavour but the seasoning overrides all of that.

See, all of you with an electric cook top can now cut your electricity bill substantially by eating the way lions do, and help save the planet from CO2 emissions.   (This line designed to annoy Jason.)

The (lack of) clear memory of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 post

I write this knowing that at this exact  time 50 years ago I was keenly watching Armstrong step onto the moon.  But as I have confessed before, despite my great interest in all space related news as a child, my 8 year old brain did not record permanently enough whether I was watching at school or at home. 

I know I saw some Apollo stuff at school, but I am pretty sure the lunar step was not the only time they got the TV out.  I also am pretty sure I watched some of the lunar walk at home,  and what might have happened is that I saw the first part at school and the rest at home, having been allowed to go home early.  Even staying at school all afternoon, I might have caught the tail end at home.  Or did they allow us to go home when there was some uncertainty, I think, as to when they would leave the module?  I have an idea that someone complained about how long it was taking for them to get out, but was that my Mum or a nun?  (I'm leaning towards Mum.) 

There are two people from my class that year that I could probably track down.  One was a best friend that I lost all contact with  from the age of perhaps 16 or 17.  He went to a different high school and (so I was told by the other person I could probably contact, as I met her again 10 or 15 years ago) had become a bit of a wannabe, or actual, Lothario as a teenager.  People change, obviously; but I was pretty much the opposite, so it may have a case of a hormonally induced loss of friendship even if I had seen him much as a teenager.

So, this post has gone off a bit more personal than intended!

Anyway, I am pleased to see how much attention the anniversary did eventually attract.  A pity Armstrong himself didn't live to see it.  

Modern technology should address the memory uncertainties I discuss here.  Any kid watching today would probably have at least some selfies showing him or her watching it.  That's at least one advantage of the way technology has evolved that is perhaps under-appreciated.

Update:   I was somewhat surprised to hear a man on ABC News saying that he was in Britain, working on a satellite project, at the time of the moon walk, and despite his great interest, was asleep at the time of the moon walk because it happened there in the "middle of the night" (yes, I checked - started just before 4 am) and he thinks the BBC has closed for the night and didn't carry any live telecast anyway!    I had sort of forgotten about TV ending overnight and, even on this occasion, apparently refusing to break that rule.   I guess that would not have seemed odd at that time if it had happened similarly in Australia, but the 24 news cycle - and even 24 sport -  we have all become used to now makes it seem a very antiquated world.

Update 2:   going back to the topic of the fallibility of memory, I remember being particularly amused by Spike Milligan, in one of his WW2 memoires, talking about a particular incident in which he couldn't remember a detail, leading him to ring his old mate who had a completely different recollection of the incident in total.  Spike then joked about what this might mean for the real history behind some of the Bible, giving a comedic example.   That did strike me as a good point, and that one should be cautious about recollections, be they your own or someone else's.   In fact, it started to bother me that scepticism of their own memories is not very common amongst people, when psychological studies, and incidents like Milligan's, teach us that we should be.    

A great Boris explanation

Turns out I was way more accurate than I realised when I opined here that Boris Johnson seemed to have the same rank political opportunism of Tony Abbott.  As explained in detail in this great read from New York Review of Books, Boris was very equivocal on the matter of whether he would support Brexit or not, finally settling on the pro side almost by accident (despite having played a key role in writing the often inaccurate tabloid level "the EU is bureaucracy gone mad" press stories for years):

To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself,² had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.”³ While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain.

Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”) Then, early on Sunday evening, he texted Cameron to say that he was about to announce irrevocably that he was backing Leave. But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, at the time, Johnson added two remarkable things. One was that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed.’” The other was staggering: “‘He actually said he thought we could leave and still have a seat on the European Council—still making decisions.’”⁴

The expectation—perhaps the hope—of defeat is telling. Johnson’s anti-EU rhetoric was always a Punch and Judy show, and without the EU to play Judy, the show would be over. But the belief that Britain would keep its seat on the European Council (which consists of the leaders of each member state and makes most of the EU’s big political decisions), even if it left the EU, is mind-melting. Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since World War II, but he was unaware of the most basic consequence of Brexit. Britain had joined the Common Market, as it was then called, in 1973 precisely because it was being profoundly affected by decisions made in Brussels and was therefore better off having an equal say in those decisions. Johnson’s belief that Britain would continue to have a seat at the European table after Brexit suggested a profound ignorance not just of his country’s future but of its entire postwar past.

This ignorance is not stupidity—Johnson is genuinely clever and, as his fictional alter ego Barlow shows, quite self-aware. It is the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class whose manners and attitudes Johnson—in reality the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois background—thoroughly absorbed. Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess.

 Incredibly, Asian Latham Jason seems to think this is the kind of flim flam person who will make a good Prime Minister.

My rules for life (updated, again)

This is proving a slow process.  My book based on this will be out by 2030, at this rate.

Attentive readers (ha!) will remember I am up to 4, but something occurred to me today that is worthy of being rule 5.  The first four:

1.  Always carry a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket.  Always.
2.  Never buy into timeshare apartments or holiday schemes.
3.  If you have a choice, buy the washing machine with a 15 minute "fast wash" option.
4.  Always buy reverseable belts. (You know, usually black on one side and brown on the other.)

And now, number 5:

5.  The best souvenir when on a good holiday is a distinctive cup or mug, which is to be used semi-regularly on your return.  (Don't get in the rut of using the same mug daily for years - you need to rotate through all of them.)  Use will prompt good memories and make you happier.  

[My rabbit patterned cup from Okunoshima, and my mug with Julia Gillard's face on it from Canberra, both make me happy.]

Kippergate

Boris Johnson is, according to the BBC, just flat out wrong on one of the tabloid level "EU red tape is outrageously holding us back" examples he just used.

He'll still be PM, apparently, because people fall for bluster and don't care about details.

Spot the difference?

(Trump has long reminded me of the mugging speech performances of Benito, and it struck me again this week after seeing the rally in which he tried hard, really hard, to stop the "send her back" chant.)

Update:   the Colbert discussion of the rally is pretty funny - and it is incredible to see other parts of the rally and how dumb he truly comes across:

Great reviews for Thiel

Reason takes a bat to Thiel's speech that my "Asian Latham" reader Jason thinks was "a good thought provoking speech"*:

Thiel used to be roughly identified, including, at times, by me, as a libertarian. One reason was his decision to fund what started as a libertarian-rooted wild idea, Seasteading. Another indicator was his big-money support of an ultimately feckless Ron Paul-oriented SuperPac. These decisions made his warm embrace of Trump back in 2016 confusing, but he has now made it clear he has, and wants, nothing to do with the idea that human liberty is overall good and enriching.

Instead, Thiel has some interests and some enemies, and he wants to use the power of the state as a weapon to help one and harm the other. The main enemies are Google, China, and the U.S. university system. He advocated vigorous police actions against the first and third, and a trade war (at least) against China.

One of the comments following the article contains a handy list of things Thiel's President buddy has done:

You probably can’t but try to imagine how fast Obama would have been thrown out of office and probably arrested if he had done and said the a 10th of things Trump has said and done in office. Whether it’s threatening people, paling around with dictators, using the public office to enrich his businesses, spending $100 million dollars playing golf, putting his children in positions of authority, lying everyday, inviting foreign help in his election, engineering a disaster on the border for political gain, encouraging police to beat people up, encouraging his supporters to commit violence, the obstruction of the special counsel investigation, the attempt to rig the census, singlaling out certain states for punitive attacks such as withholding disaster aid or writing a tax law designed to damage states that didn’t vote for him and more. I can’t help but chalk up the double standard to racism but maybe it’s partisanship which probably comes from the same place in the brain as the racism. Anyway one day a future generation is going to look and this time from a detached perspective and they will recoil in horror at the madness of it all just as we do so now at the madness that existed in our past.

*  Yeah, I would agree if the thought provoked was "what an outrageous and dangerous nut, using his influence on the dumb-as Trump to try to incite investigation of a rival company."

Zen terrorist discussed

Aeon has an interesting article up, talking about a Zen Buddhist terrorist who sort of kicked off the military/imperial power period in Japan that led to World War 2.

I didn't realise that things were quite this dire in that country in the 1920's - 30's:

Following his father’s death in 1926, Emperor Hirohito had ascended the throne at a time of great social and political domestic instability. Across Japan, banks were closing, and the government was arresting Left-wing activists, accusing them of harbouring ‘dangerous thoughts’ as defined by the Peace Preservation Law.

The Great Depression that began in the United States in 1929 greatly reduced both demand and prices for raw silk, Japan’s single largest export product. At the same time, Japan’s population was increasing by nearly 1 million people a year. Its workforce was growing at an annual rate of approximately 450,000 people, all seeking jobs in a shrinking economy.

In addition, successive poor harvests in the early 1930s, especially in the northern prefectures, brought widespread starvation to many parts of the country. Rural debt rose rapidly, leading to delinquent tax payments, and more and more farmers either lost their land altogether or were forced to take desperate measures, such as selling their daughters into prostitution. Japanese society was in a state of crisis that in many people’s eyes required immediate and drastic remedies.

The article goes on to note that Nissho Inoue, the Zen terrorist, saw his revolutionary role as entirely consistent with Buddhism:

Inoue threw himself into the work of training a small group of about 20 young people. He drew on a variety of Zen training methods, including meditation practice; assigning koans (Zen riddles) and conducting private interviews with his disciples, all to create an intrepid group of volunteers with a ‘do or die’ spirit.

At first, Inoue planned to train young people for legal political activism. However, by 1930, under the pressure of events and young civilian and military activists, Inoue decided to take more resolute measures. ‘In an emergency situation,’ he wrote, ‘emergency measures are necessary. What is essential is to restore life to the nation. Discussions over the methods for doing this can come later, much later.’ Inoue fully expected that his political actions would lead to his death: ‘We had taken it upon ourselves to engage in destruction, aware that we would perish in the process.’

In his previous Zen training, Inoue found the basis for his commitment to destruction. Drawing on the lessons of a 13th-century Zen collection of koans known as the Mumonkan, or ‘The Gateless Barrier’, he claimed:

Revolution employs compassion on behalf of the society of the nation. Therefore those who wish to participate in revolution must have a mind of great compassion toward the society of the nation. In light of this there must be no thought of reward for participating in revolution. 

In other words, in the violently destructive acts of revolution one would find the mind of Buddhist compassion.

And there is more:

In October 1930, Inoue and his band shifted their base of operations to Tokyo. From there, he recruited more young people, including some from Japan’s most prestigious universities. One of Inoue’s band members later explained: ‘We sought to extinguish Self itself.’

Inoue’s band chose assassination as their method of revolution. Assassination, Inoue explained, ‘required, whether successful or not, the least number of victims’. He also thought it ‘was best for the country, untainted by the least self-interest’. He and his band members were prepared to die in the process of the revolution. By being prepared to sacrifice themselves, they believed they could ensure that as few people as possible would fall victim to revolutionary violence.

Well, that was big of them.  

Anyway, read the whole thing.

 

Comedy analysed

An opinion piece at the Washington Post notes that some prominent Hollywood comedies have not performed well at the box office, regardless of whether well reviewed or not.

He thinks comedy as a movie genre may be suffering because of the culture wars, and he might be right.

But he ends on a good point - which ties in with my take that I only like Marvel films if they are funny enough:

Still: I’m not entirely sure big-screen comedy is as bad off as some suggest. Indeed, it may be flourishing. You just have to squint a little. The biggest comedies in the world right now come wrapped up in spandex and armor: What is the Marvel Cinematic Universe but a series of spectacularly done (and spectacularly successful) action comedies?

“Spider-Man: Far From Home” is almost entirely a teen rom com wrapped up in a superhero bow: My audience was rolling at the mentions of “Peter Tingles” and polite Dutch hooligans and the amateurish high school news program explaining life after Thanos. “Captain Marvel” is basically a buddy comedy with a dreadfully dull straight woman and her wacky S.H.I.E.L.D sidekick. (This is among the reasons that movie didn’t really work, but I digress.) And “Avengers: Endgame,” with its Fat Thor and Smart Hulk, is almost an existential action comedy, a darkly comic look at how to deal with tragedy that culminates in a lot of punching.