In "another strange guy goes trad Catholic" news

Slate reports that Shia LaBeouf has said he is converting to Catholicism - and that it is in large part because of attraction to the Latin mass.

The article gives a fair summary of the reputation of the Latin mass for attracting Right wing reactionaries:

The traditional Latin Mass is at the center of an ongoing controversy in the Catholic church: the small, conservative group promoting it claims it is a beautiful and true expression of the faith, while more progressive Catholics—and Pope Francis—see it largely as a breeding ground for reactionary beliefs and conflict in the church. The TLM, as it’s called by those who celebrate it, refers to the “extraordinary form” of the Roman rite that makes up the rituals and prayers of the Mass and which was in use until the 1960s, at which point the Second Vatican Council took place and ushered in the “ordinary form” (Novus Ordo, or NO).

The overwhelming majority of Catholics attend Novus Ordo Masses; indeed, the overwhelming majority of Catholics today have likely never seen anything else. But traditional Latin Masses have a small but highly enthusiastic faction in the church. The main difference between the two rites is in style and not substance: In the extraordinary form, priests recite prayers in Latin instead of the vernacular; they celebrate the Mass facing the altar, with their backs to the congregants; there are no female altar servers. Proponents of the TLM describe it as solemn, beautiful, ancient, mysterious, sacred. Traditionalists believe that the Latin Mass is key to reviving the faith among young Catholics....

There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the Latin Mass. (With the caveat that some traditionalist groups, such as the semi-legitimate Society of Saint Pius X, incorporate fully outdated parts of the pre-Vatican II liturgy into their worship, which can include explicitly anti-Semitic elements.) In the interview, LaBeouf explained that he was drawn to the Latin Mass because it was “immersive” and felt “almost like I’m being let in on something very special.” Fair enough!

But the traditionalists who love the TLM can be deeply toxic. “Trads” embrace traditionalism that goes beyond the language spoken in services. Many of them reject the reforms of Vatican II altogether, and stick to uncompromising positions on gay marriage, divorce, and the dress of women and their role in society. Their extreme counterparts, the radical traditionalists, or “Rad Trads,” often go further, idolizing the crusades, making vile comments about Jews and Muslims, and spreading conspiracy theories that decry the infiltration of the church by evil forces and accuse Pope Francis of being an antipope or even antichrist. The Rad Trad community flourishes on Twitter and Reddit and Discord, trafficking in memes about the saints and feminists and monarchism.

These highly engaged traditionalists may be small in number (most Catholics are blissfully unaware of the “liturgy wars,” as this debate is called). But they are well represented among clergy, including bishops and cardinals. And over the course of Francis’ papacy, their dissent has grown increasingly loud, to the point that many liberal Catholics began to worry that the culture wars in the church would lead to schism. The controversy came to a climax last summer when, in an effort to crack down on the “division” sown by the traditionalists, Pope Francis laid down strict rules for when and where the traditional Latin Mass can be conducted. The outcry that followed was intense. Pope Francis has not backed down from his position; In June, he said that those who “call themselves guardians of traditions, but of dead traditions” were “dangerous” to the church. Traditionalist Catholics have continued to claim to be martyrs.

And here's the biggest danger sign that LaBeouf is going "Rad Trad":

There’s another reason it seems LaBeouf knows exactly what side he’s taking: he told the interviewer that he had sought guidance from Mel Gibson in his conversion process. Gibson is not just an unabashed anti-Semite; he is also someone who speaks at traditionalist Catholic events, builds churches for disaffected orthodox Catholics, and makes friends with radical right-wing priests. (His father, Hutton Gibson, was a leading proponent of the idea that all popes since Vatican II have been antipopes.) In fact, in the interview, LaBeouf said that Gibson was the one who had shown him where to find the illicit Latin Masses.

 

 

When you've lost the Wall Street Journal

So even the Wall Street Journal is putting up videos in which an increase in flash flooding in the USA is noted, and the connection with climate change and increasing temperatures is fully acknowledged:

Huh.

Synthetic milk closer than I realised?

I was only musing recently about the slow progress in making synthetic dairy milk, but here's an article talking about it, and how a company in Melbourne is working on it:

In Australia, start-up company Eden Brew has been developing synthetic milk at Werribee in Victoria. The company is targeting consumers increasingly concerned about climate change and, in particular, the contribution of methane from dairy cows.

CSIRO reportedly developed the technology behind the Eden Brew product. The process starts with yeast and uses "precision fermentation" to produce the same proteins found in cow milk.

CSIRO says these proteins give milk many of its key properties and contribute to its creamy texture and frothing ability. Minerals, sugars, fats, and flavors are added to the protein base to create the final product.

 

Honestly, who would care, especially in France?

An odd story from Rolling Stone:

On the FBI’s list of documents seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, item 1a is listed solely as “info re: President of France.” For Trump, that has been a subject of intense — and tawdry — interest for years.

Specifically, Trump has bragged to some of his closest associates — both during and after his time in the White House — that he knew illicit details about the love life of French President Emmanuel Macron, two people with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. And the former president even claimed that he learned about some of this dirt through “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on, these sources say.  ...

In his musing on Macron’s alleged indiscretions, Trump was light on details and specifics, according to the sources. And as a notorious gossip peddler for decades, it’s difficult to know if any of what he says is grounded in reality. “It is often,” one of the sources says, “hard to tell if he’s bullshitting or not.” 

 

Moral philosophising about the future

I haven't read all of this yet, but it is worth coming back to:

The New Moral Mathematics

In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.

 

Incident in France

I found this rather amusing:

 In the comments following, some further discussion of how things are done in France

I love their food, though.  And really thought they must be the most attractive Europeans on the street in all of Europe.

 

Stand over tactics

Allahpundit on lickspittle Lindsay Graham's weekend comments:

When it comes to making veiled threats dressed up as dispassionate observations, I see that this rodent has learned at the feet of the master.

In fact, Trump himself posted this video last night on Truth Social.

Graham isn’t wrong. If Trump is indicted, “riots in the streets” are plausible. But it’s one thing to say that as an analyst and another to say it on television as a well-known, influential Trump crony. Why, if I were a cynic, the clip below might look to me like a U.S. senator dangling the prospect of violence to try to influence a decision by the Justice Department on whether to charge someone. Imagine one of John Gotti’s goons musing in an interview about people getting hurt if the boss is charged. Then imagine electing that guy to the Senate.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Lindsey Graham has engaged in blatant civic malfeasance on Trump’s behalf either.

Graham is correct that Trump should be held to the same standard as Hillary Clinton. If he mishandled classified information no more recklessly than she did, he should walk. But we don’t know yet whether he did and neither do any of the would-be rioters. I understand why some were offended by Joe “The Uniter” Biden describing parts of Trump’s base as “semi-fascist” but if we’ve reached the point where a sitting senator is hinting at mass violence if his caudillo is charged and all of us look around at each other and think, “Yeah, that could definitely happen,” maybe we shouldn’t feel so offended.

He ends on a strong note:

It should not to be too much to ask cretins like Graham to accept moral responsibility for the worst excesses of the populism with which they’ve aligned themselves. If he wants a caudillo, let him make the case for having a caudillo. Blaming the Justice Department for riots on “look what you made me do” grounds is weak sauce even for a weakling like him.

 

 

This is what you do when you go to the North Pole via luxury French icebreaker

I wish they wouldn't do video thumbnails of Kara's skinny body, but still - it's interesting to see what a  luxury cruise to the North Pole does for entertainment when they get there:

 

One other thing:   I suppose I expected the ice to be a little thicker, even in summer.  I mean, yeah, submarines can break through it, so it can't be too thick.   But still, it seemed there was more open water around, and ice that was easily broken, than I expected.

Also, if you watch the video, you will probably understand why I find this couple cringey at times - they kiss and tell each other they are "so proud of you" in about every second video.

Amusing tweets noted

Lulz at that second one in particular...

Interesting comparison

Dark Brandon IS rising

The Dark Brandon meme continues to make for pretty amusing tweets:

Mexico needs better folk saints

Wow, this isn't the usual Axios fare:

Devotion to unsanctioned Catholic folk saints is one of the fastest growing religious movements in Latin America and is surging in the U.S., experts say.

The big picture: Some Latinos who feel alienated by Christian traditions are turning to saints not sanctioned by the struggling Catholic Church for spiritual guidance around love, crime and money.

• Catholic leaders worldwide have denounced unofficial "narco" saints as sinful, but makeshift shrines continue to pop up, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to New Orleans.

Details: Catholic canonization of saints often takes years of thorough reviews of miracles performed and of the figure's contributions. Believers say unsanctioned saints offer divine assistance to steal gas, move a drug shipment, cross a border, or bless an LGBTQ+ romance.

• They're gaining devotees in Mexico and the U.S., said Andrew Chesnut, the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan chairman in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The funniest unofficial saint would have to be this one:

Santo Niño Huachicolero, a perversion of the Roman Catholic image of Santo Niño, depicts the Christ child with a can of gasoline and a hose.

• He's the patron saint of gas thieves who ask for help to avoid arrest, prevent fires and protect their families from a different kind of flame

Here he is:

I feel the need for the eye roll emoji...

 

China peaks (in population, at least)

 Also on the Nature website:

When will China’s population, the world’s largest, peak? It’s a point that demographers say is fast approaching. The country’s health department announced this month that the population will peak and then begin to shrink in the next three years. Others think it could happen much sooner.

“The turning point is right around the corner,” says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “I won’t be surprised if population decline is reported at the end of this year.”

After years of falling birth rates, the National Health Commission wrote in an article published online in early August that China’s population growth has slowed significantly and will start to decline between 2023 and 2025. According to an estimate published last month in a peer-reviewed Chinese journal, Social Science Journal¹, Wei Chen, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing, concluded that, on the basis of national census data released in 2020, China’s population might have already peaked in 2021 (see ‘Projected peak’).

Here's the graph:

 

Waiting for my brain stimulation

I still think this research attracts less attention than it deserves:

People’s ability to remember fades with age — but one day, researchers might be able to use a simple, drug-free method to buck this trend.

In a study published on 22 August in Nature Neuroscience¹, Robert Reinhart, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues demonstrate that zapping the brains of adults aged over 65 with weak electrical currents repeatedly over several days led to memory improvements that persisted for up to a month.

Previous studies have suggested that long-term memory and ‘working’ memory, which allows the brain to store information temporarily, are controlled by distinct mechanisms and parts of the brain. Drawing on this research, the team showed that stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — a region near the front of the brain — with high-frequency electrical currents improved long-term memory, whereas stimulating the inferior parietal lobe, which is further back in the brain, with low-frequency electrical currents boosted working memory.

“Their results look very promising,” says Ines Violante, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. “They really took advantage of the cumulative knowledge within the field.”

Memory boost

Using a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain known as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), which delivers electrical currents through electrodes on the surface of the scalp, Reinhart’s team conducted a series of experiments on 150 people aged between 65 and 88. Participants carried out a memory task in which they were asked to recall lists of 20 words that were read aloud by an experimenter. The participants underwent tACS for the entire duration of the task, which took 20 minutes.

You can read the rest at Nature.

 

Floods continue

*  In Pakistan:

Record monsoon rains were causing a "catastrophe of epic scale", Pakistan's climate change minister said on Wednesday (Aug 24), announcing an international appeal for help in dealing with floods that have killed more than 800 people since June.

The annual monsoon is essential for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes and dams across the Indian subcontinent, but each year it also brings a wave of destruction.

Heavy rain continued to pound much of Pakistan on Wednesday, with authorities reporting more than a dozen deaths - including nine children - in the last 24 hours.

"It has been raining for a month now. There is nothing left," a woman named Khanzadi told AFP in badly hit Jaffarabad, Balochistan province.

"We had only one goat, that too drowned in the flood ... Now we have nothing with us and we are lying along the road and facing hunger."...

Zaheer Ahmad Babar, a senior meteorologist office official, told AFP that this year's rains were the heaviest since 2010, when over 2,000 people died and more than 2 million were displaced by monsoon floods that covered nearly a fifth of the country.

Rainfall in Balochistan province was 430 per cent higher than normal, he said, while Sindh was nearing 500 per cent.

*  In the USA:

The summer of big flash floods strikes again.

Up to a foot of rain fell across parts of central Mississippi on Wednesday, leading to life-threatening situations and numerous rescues. The intense rain swept away portions of a highway, while floodwaters partially submerged cars and trees....

The highest totals seen in the past day or two are at least 1-in-200-year or 1-in-500-year rainfalls, rare events that have only a 0.5 to 0.2 percent chance of occurring in any given year.

A full analysis may show some locations end up with an even rarer rainfall. This flooding event could be the sixth 1-in-1,000-year rainfall in recent weeks in the United States. In other words, it has a 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Increased moisture availability in a warming world is a factor in these events.

 

A gut reaction

I think the Biden student debt forgiveness decision is being very disproportionately attacked from the Left.  (See the Washington Post editorial on it, for example.)   I doubt it will have as dire an effect as some are claiming.    

I mean, I would like to see the Left get as agitated by Republican moves that are much worse.

Updating the membership of the B Ark

I think that Douglas Adams had the "B Ark" filled with the following:

"....the telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants."

Updated to the present day, I sure know that this category would now be at the top of the list:

As I said to friends recently, and perhaps a bit meanly, because I actually do admire so much of their work on Youtube, it would also be full of crackshot video editors under the age of 30.   

Perhaps I should throw in drone operators too (again, despite my actually liking their contributions to travel vlogging - it's just that there is so much of it now I'm starting to feel the number needs culling.)

I also keep having an urge lately to tell the two travel vlogging couples that I like to watch (The Endless Adventure - a very likeable couple, and that Kara and Nate - the somewhat irritating pair into "personal challenges" but who are OK some of the time) something like this:   "Look, you're in your early 30's now, you've had a lot of fun travelling the world and getting paid for it, but unless you stop and have a child, you're going to miss out on the simpler, domestic pleasures of life.   Don't do that for the sake of 'the next big travel adventure'."   I mean, they both say "we're not sure if we are ready to have a child yet, or if we will", yet they seem to like their relatives' kids, and they are leaving the child bearing decision to that dangerous point in life at which many couples find they can't easily get pregnant even if they want to.

Speaking of drone shots, here's another ridiculously attractive one of yet another Chinese temple built where no sensible person would build:

Why 83?

Google kept trying to get me to watch a short Youtube about a Buddhist parable, so I did today, and quite liked it:

 

The only problem is: why so specific with 83 problems?  Reminds me a bit of the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything being 42. (Actually, in the parable, there are 84 problems, and half of that is 42.  A connection?)

I also can't see where the parable is supposed to have originated.  Quick Googling indicates in not in any old Buddhist material, and some say it sounds kind of Zen, but I wouldn't have thought it should be hard to track down a source, if it's relatively modern.   Maybe I try again later.  It's one of my current 83 problems...

As simple as that?

I was only criticising Matt Damon as an actor earlier this week, but now he has turned up on my Twitter feed with a simple, plausible explanation for why movie studios are so risk averse in the type of film they make now:

 

The example he gave was a movie that might cost $25 million to make (a very modest one, then) will have a publicity and distribution budget of another $25 million, so $50 million all up, and revenue has to be shared with the cinemas, so it needs to make more than $100 million to turn a profit.   

The only thing I continue to be puzzled about is that I thought that digital projection was going to save heaps of money in terms of physical distribution.   Why hasn't that translated into making smaller, riskier films worth trying?   

Anyway, I should add that Damon doesn't appear to be in any way dislikeable in real life:  my only problem with him is I don't find him a very convincing actor.

Google is a harsh mistress

As much as I admire the free services Google provides, I do think it's faceless approach to customer service is a real worry.  

I mean, I did try to contact it once with respect to a real, work related problem, and I was deemed not worthy of response.   

But this story from the New York Times, of people who have been cast into the darkness due to being inappropriately labelled as having saved child porn, is a bit of an eye opener about relying too much on everything Google.  

Long story short - a guy (with his wife's knowledge) takes a photo of his toddler boy's infected genitalia for a doctor's televideo consult, which does happen (and there is a record of that and the treatment provided.)  The photo, however, gets automatically backed up into Google's cloud, and an automated AI system tags it as child porn, and the father automatically loses access to his Google accounts.   Appeals have no success.

As the article notes:

...in 2018, when Google developed an artificially intelligent tool that could recognize never-before-seen exploitative images of children. That meant finding not just known images of abused children but images of unknown victims who could potentially be rescued by the authorities. Google made its technology available to other companies, including Facebook....

A human content moderator for Google would have reviewed the photos after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, it locks the user’s account, searches for other exploitative material and, as required by federal law, makes a report to the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The nonprofit organization has become the clearinghouse for abuse material; it received 29.3 million reports last year, or about 80,000 reports a day. Fallon McNulty, who manages the CyberTipline, said most of these are previously reported images, which remain in steady circulation on the internet. So her staff of 40 analysts focuses on potential new victims, so they can prioritize those cases for law enforcement....

In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.

The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.

Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.

“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.

Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.

“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted, Mark spoke with a lawyer about suing Google and how much it might cost.

“I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said.

 It's kind of nuts that Google doesn't listen to appeals about incidents like this.

Update:   I was thinking of this last night, and thinking how Google is like the Old Testament God - sort of a "take it or leave it, them's the rules" being that is inscrutable, as in the Book of Job.   (On the other hand, I know, there are parts where God does grant the appeal, so to speak.  We're still waiting for Google to reach that level.)

 

 

Chinese property problems noted

This seems a good and detailed explanation of the developing crisis in China's property market by someone who seems to know that they are talking about:

The property sector in the Chinese economy has always been something of a puzzle. At its peak, it accounted for a quarter of the nation’s economic output, broadly measured. And it sees people in Beijing and Shanghai paying house prices similar to those in San Francisco and New York, despite having just a quarter the income of American buyers.

Now many believe that we are about to see a violent contraction of the property market in China. The government wants to intervene to curb speculation, and rein in what it calls the “three high” problem: high prices, high debt and high financialisation. The approach has been nothing short of dramatic. Financing for property developers has tanked. Earlier this year, property sales declined by as much as 20-30%, in-progress developments are not being completed and people have taken to the streets, banding together to stop mortgage payments on such projects in protest.

Many of China’s largest property developers are failing to repay their debts. Even the survivors are cash-strapped and in a liquidity crisis. The risk is that the property market crisis will drag the broader economy down with it, hitting suppliers, small- and medium-sized companies in construction, as well as household consumption. And dangerously, the banking system has at least a quarter of its assets in property.

But, fortunately, there is this:

Nor is a full-blown financial crisis likely. Major banks are state owned, and will not be allowed to fail. There are no complex, opaque chains of intermediation that characterise the western banking system. Foreign creditors to Chinese property developers will have to take a massive haircut, but the ripple effect on the international economy is likely to be limited. Foreign players have limited exposure to Chinese assets in general: today, less than 5% of Chinese equities and bonds are held by foreigners. This is unlike mortgage-backed securities, where the whole world was exposed leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

And we don't want that

 

Odd residence noted

There was an article about Bryan Dawe, of Clarke and Dawe satire fame, in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, about how he fell for an online scam.

But the odd feature that struck me was this:

Dawe, who now lives in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, offered to forge an unlikely partnership with the Palestinian photographer and leverage his considerable public profile in Australia.

How did he end up living there??  His wiki entry sheds no light.  This ABC article says he went there after John Clarke died - still seems a really odd choice.

From the Onion

It does seem lately to be going better (for Ukraine) than many expected. 
 

Worrying tweets noted

 

In aquatic news of note

*  Alaskan snow crabs have been in steep and sudden decline:

The theories are many. The crabs moved into Russian waters. They are dead because predators got them. They are dead because they ate each other. The crabs scuttled off the continental shelf and scientists just didn’t see them. Alien abduction.

Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.

Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.

Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.

And then they weren’t there.

Scientists, despite earlier optimistic signs, found that snow crab stocks were down 90 percent. The season opened and the total allowable harvest went from 45 million pounds to 5.5 million pounds. Commercial fishers couldn’t even catch that quantity. 

*   Orcas have taken to nibbling boats.   

Killer whales are 'attacking' sailboats near Europe's coast. Scientists don't know why

 

To the North Pole by luxury icebreaker

I don't watch everything that the travel vlogging couple Kara and Nate put up on Youtube as they can be quite the drama queen act at times, when not being all too demonstratively affectionate to each other. 

But, when they do a special trip, such as on a ship to Antarctica a year or two ago, they do it pretty well and the videos are interesting and quite fun to watch.

They are currently doing a tourist trip to the North Pole, and on a recently launched icebreaker ship that is not what you normally envisage for that type of vessel.  It's a luxury icebreaker, French owned, it seems.

Here's there first video of the trip, giving a tour of the ship:

 

Travel on any ship this nice looking (and with an in-cabin mini bar that is free and refurbished every day) could not be cheap. (I assume they are getting it for free for the publicity value?) But I decided to look it up anyway, and yes,a 15 night cruise to the North Pole and back (starting with flight from Paris) will cost about AUD$55,000!!

Still, looks very impressive.   Perhaps it gives the feeling of tempting fate, Titanic style, though:  an engineer on the ship in the video said that if a certain heat pump stops working while at the North Pole, the entire ship would be down to about minus 25 degrees freezing within a hour or two so.    Brrr...

Good politics, for his country

I was looking at Youtube last night and saw that a National Day speech by Singaporean PM Lee was being live broadcast, so I started watching it, expecting some dry content about economic development, but instead the part I happened to join it at was the announcement about decriminalising male to male sex.  

I don't know how the audience in the auditorium were chosen, but I think it fair to say that the response was not exactly enthusiastic.  It was kind of funny to watch.

Anyway, PM Lee, playing what I think is smart politics for his country, immediately then swung into saying that while he believed most Singaporeans would support this bit of late modernity, they wanted traditional marriage protected, and the government wasn't going to risk a liberalising court in future find that the constitution meant the government had to recognise same sex marriage.  The answer:  they will amend the constitution to enshrine a definition of marriage as heterosexual.   This part of the speech gained more approval from the audience.

I guess that, in future, there might still be scope for government recognition of gay relationships for some purposes.   But it will be a long time before Singapore comes close to following the Western path towards full recognition of gay marriage.   Given the cultural mix there, with a mix of three  that are all highly orientated towards conservative views about family, recognising gay marriages as the equivalent of heterosexual ones would (I suspect) be a problem for the Indians and Muslim element in particular.  (I think there might be an argument for Chinese to be more malleable of the topic - at least given the example of Taiwan*.)      

Still, I do admire PM Lee, and all Singaporean politicians, for the calm and reasoned way they put arguments, and always seeking a path of national unity and security.   

 

*  Oh, but look at this article, indicating that legalisation in Taiwan has actually not been followed by improved public perceptions of gay marriage.   The reaction to legalisation is very dependent on the local culture, I guess:

...in the United States, public approval of same-sex marriage improved after its legalization. Similar trends have occurred in European countries where same-sex marriage is legal. However, as seen in South Africa, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, and Ecuador, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2019, public opinion does not always improve after legalization. One survey in Taiwan found that 93 percent of respondents felt their lives had not been impacted by the legalization, but when asked about the impact on Taiwanese society as a whole, only 50.1 percent indicated no effect, while 11.9 percent said the overall social impact was positive, and 28.4 percent said it was negative. 

 

Huh

Another very late review

Finally caught up with The Talented Mr Ripley on Netflix last night.  I was just married when this came out, and there was soon a baby on the way, so I had other things on my mind.

I thought it good but not great.   A large part of the problem is that I routinely don't care for Matt Damon's acting.  He doesn't put me off quite to the same degree that Matthew McConaughey does, but I would be very happy if he would just retire so I don't have to keep on wondering why I never find him convincing.

Anyway, on reflection, the story is a bit odd for the complete lack of a sympathetic male character.  (OK, maybe there is one, but even he appears pretty dumb by the end and doesn't survive.)  I think that the 3 key male actors all seemed a bit too, um, trying too hard?   Or perhaps that is more the problem I found with Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances:  Damon's acting was more controlled, but still not super convincing.   

The women, on the other hand, are likeable enough, and there's no denying Gwyneth Paltrow in her day had a charming screen presence.   But the one who stood out for me was Cate Blanchett - she was 30 when this movie came out and probably at the peak of her attractiveness, and does rich elegance so, so well.   It's a pity her role doesn't get more screen time.

I had a read on Reddit about it afterwards, and find it hard to believe some people were still saying after viewing it "was Tom Ripley meant to be gay or bisexual"?   Well, duh, it's an unavoidable conclusion from the movie.  However, I see from an online article that the book highlights more than the movie does a conflicted sexuality, and in fact an aversion to sex:

Tom’s aversion to all things sexual is central to his characterisation in the novel. He feels secure in his friendship with Cleo because ‘she never wanted or expected him to make a pass at her’, and dismisses Dickie kissing Marge as ‘cheap, obvious, easy’.

At the same time, Tom’s adoration of Dickie is painted in clearly romantic terms; he is drawn to Dickie’s ‘handsome’ looks and ‘the proud way he [carries] himself’, and fantasises about killing his girlfriend Marge for ‘interfering’ with ‘the bond between them’. In a moment of vulnerability with Peter towards the end of the novel, he briefly wonders whether ‘the same thing that had happened with Dickie could happen with Peter’. Tom’s asexuality and the fact that he is romantically attracted to men are given equal weight in the novel, but adaptations of the novel exaggerate the latter and ignore the former entirely.

So, he might not be cinema's first bisexual (or repressed gay?) psychopathic murderer and liar, but it's first asexual one who none the less feels romantic attraction (and is repulsed by it).  Interesting concept.  In retrospect, I can see how that is reflected to some degree in the film (there is never an indication that he gets physical with anyone, on or off screen), but it could have been made clearer and perhaps made for a more interesting explanation of his psychological problems.

I also see that the character went on to appear in another 4(!) novels.   So there was quite a following for this anti-hero.  Personally, I'm glad there have no more movies about him.   I'm not a fan of the bad guy winning.  

Update:  I did think during the movie about how it had themes very common in Hitchcock films, and see today that Patricia Highsmith, about whom I could recall little apart from knowing she had lesbian relationships, wrote Strangers on a Train.   This New Yorker article about her is pretty interesting.

Oh, so I can blame English royalty

As this BBC article explains, tattooing is pretty much normalised in most of the West now, and there is a push to get it recognised as a worthy artform, but you still can't convince me that 95% of what I see on "sleeves", legs, faces or backs of necks isn't trashy art. 

I don't think I knew this before:

"Western tattooing has been a commodity-based art form for only about 140 years," he explains, suggesting that one of the key drivers behind its commercialisation in the UK was King George V, who got a "desirable" tattoo of a dragon on his arm during a trip to Japan as a teenager in 1881.

Is it just me, or is there genuinely a lot of flash flooding happening around the entire globe now?

Of course, Google via Youtube is pushing a lot of this content to me lately, and maybe it's not above global averages:  but I suspect something genuinely novel is going on at the moment.  

Flash flooding stories are coming from all over the place:   Death Valley,  Afghanistan, France, China.   And that's only the past few days.  A couple of weeks ago it was Kentucky.   

It could all be confirmation bias, but sometimes I reckon the lay person can notice genuinely unusual sudden trends (or flips to a "new normal") that scientists do later confirm.

Update:   how convenient!  Just after I posted this, I see very credible climate scientist Andrew Dessler has a twitter thread on non-linearity in climate change, which is the sophisticated way of explaining what I am worrying about.

And, I might add, surely this has always been reason to doubt the credibility of economic forecasts on the long term effects of climate change - a topic I have posted about many, many times over the years.

Sand in the eyes

For what it's worth, I tried the first episode of The Sandman on Netflix and found it rather tedious and unengaging.

This type of fantasy is really not my thing.  I'm feeling happy that I've (mostly) avoided Neil Gaiman in written form.   The only thing I've read that had anything to do with him was the co-authored Good Omens, which everyone likes, but I presume the humour and light tone of it came from Terry Pratchett.

I have my doubts too

 Anyway, I'm betting on Trump is not going to be the GOP candidate.   He's in too much trouble...

Something we knew, but in more depressing detail now...

In Science magazine:

A nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts are calling the most expansive modeling to date of so-called nuclear winter. Although the exact effects remain uncertain, the findings underscore the dangers of nuclear war and offer vital insights about how to prepare for other global disasters, researchers say....

Scientists have long known massive explosions can throw enough dust, ash, and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, Mount Tambora in what’s now Indonesia unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in history. In the following months, its ash rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”—a cold spell in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe.

For decades, scientists have warned a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. Worries about climate effects of nuclear warfare emerged soon after World War II, and studies took off during the Cold War.

Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter studies, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to take the calculations further. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies—but used the models to simulate global cooling instead. “Now, we have the computational capacity to simulate these kinds of things in a sophisticated way,” says Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate change scientist, crop modeler, and team member at NASA and Columbia University.

So, how bad could it be?  Pretty bad! 

A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the researchers report. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.

Baum urges caution in interpreting the estimates. Although the climate models are “excellent,” he says, there’s too much uncertainty in how humanity would react to such a global catastrophe to get an accurate read on the death toll. Still, the study “makes a very worthy contribution” to envisioning these scenarios, he adds.

It's interesting that some people are putting effort into envisaging how emergency food production might work, though:

The nightmarish prospects have already inspired others to look for ways to fight the hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, who co-founded the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas including scaling up “resilient foods” such as seaweed, repurposing paper factories to produce sugar, converting natural gas into protein with bacteria, and relocating crops to account for an altered climate. He and his research associate Morgan Rivers think those approaches could dramatically increase the amount of food available to humans. “Even if [a substitute] doesn’t taste as good as sweet corn, it’s better than starving,” he says.

I don't know - maybe Soylent Green would actually happen in these circumstances?  All very unpleasant to contemplate.

 

 

 

Amusing tweet of the day

I don't know:  I'm pretty sure Morrison has managed to firmly take the title from Abbott for weirdest Prime Ministerial behaviour since Federation.

There are many, many jokes swirling around on Twitter about this, and I might add more later.

I reckon the GG should go in embarrassment too.
 

Stars get closer than I realised

Phil Plait writes that the evidence suggests some stars have cruised near our sun at surprisingly close distances, and will do so again:

A few years ago, research using Gaia data indicated that the last such close encounter was about 70,000 years ago, when the star WISE J072003.20-084651.2 — also called Scholz’s Star, after the discoverer — passed just 0.8 light-years from the Sun.

But that was then. Every few years the folks with Gaia release updated data from the mission, with newer numbers. This generally improves the accuracy of the motion measurements, because the longer you look at a star the more it moves and the easier that motion is to see. The third such data release occurred in 2022, and a team of astronomers used it to review the data on Scholz’s Star [link to paper].

Things changed with the revised numbers. They found the encounter occurred more like 80,000 years ago, and the distance was more like 1.08 light-years, with a small uncertainty of just 0.026 light-years.

But there's more:

The astronomers then asked, has there been another star that passed even closer with a high degree of statistical confidence?

The answer is yes! They found that the star UCAC4 237-008148 also once swung past the Sun. In this case it passed us at 0.844 ± 0.02 light years about 1.158 million years ago. Even within the uncertainty that’s closer than Scholz’s Star, breaking the record.

I’ll note that today, UCAC4 237-008148 is about 318 light-years away — a million years is a long time for it to move off — and Scholz’s Star is only 22 light years distant. 

The astronomers also looked at a third star, HD 7977, about 246 light-years from us now. They found that about 2.77 million years ago it gave us the incredibly close shave of just 0.49 light-years! That’s definitely violating our personal space.

 And if humanity can manage to last another million years, it sounds like it won't be too much of a stretch to hop over to this one:

So those are stars that zipped by us in the past. What about the future? The astronomers in this new work didn’t look into that, but with the new Gaia data I imagine that will be done soon. As of now, using older and less-accurate data from the Hipparcos satellite, the next star to come close is Gliese 710, a red dwarf that will slide past us at a hair-raising 0.163 light-years about 1.3 million years from now. I’d love to see how this might change with the new Gaia data.

As Plait writes, the problems of close encounters of these types is the danger of them disturbing the Oort cloud enough to send a lot of comets into the inner solar system.

All very interesting. 

The Republican walk back has started, but has a long way to go

Several lawmakers pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism of the FBI’s court-authorized seizure of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, with even some in the GOP warning that the violent rhetoric was “dangerous” and “absurd.”

Still, many Republicans continued to defend the former president, casting doubt on whether the FBI search of Trump’s Florida home earlier this week was justified — and whether the documents seized were actually top secret.

That's from the Washington Post (free link here.) 

As usual, I found Allahpundit at Hot Air has a decent take on the matter (the "he" here is, obviously, Trump):

If he truly wanted to turn down the political heat in America, I can think of a few things he might have done differently.

1. He could have returned all of the documents the first time the National Archives asked for them back.

2. He could have returned them later when the DOJ subpoenaed them.

3. Having failed to return them, he could have kept the search of Mar-a-Lago a secret. Remember, it wasn’t the feds who announced it. Trump announced it on Truth Social because he recognized that the incident would benefit him politically. The FBI even carried out the search dressed in civilian clothing so as not to alert bystanders as to what was happening. Trump alerted the country because he wanted to raise “the heat.”

4. He could now call on his followers to chill out before one of them kills someone, as nearly happened a few days ago in Cincinnati.

5. He could, at the very, very least, refrain from further inflaming the situation:...

Of course, the best way to have turned down the heat would have been to not remove classified material from the White House in the first place, thereby risking this sort of standoff over recovering the documents.

 

Weekend update

*   This remains the coldest Brisbane winter I can remember for years.   Pity the rest of the world is burning up (literally, in the case of Europe.)

*   I didn't realise before how much blood pressure jumps around.   I've been taking it three times a day, and have learnt the benefit of doing two readings within a few minutes.   Overall, it would seem my recently concerning BP is dropping down, presumably as a result of the modest increase in physical activity and/or the addition of flaxseed (and natto) to the diet.   I've not really started with walking every day yet, but I get the feeling it will be properly licked if I can get to doing that.   Somewhat warmer mornings will help.  

*  Flaxseed, especially ground flaxseed, really gums up your morning cereal or porridge, if you add a couple of tablespoons to it.   It has no great effect on taste, though, which is good. 

*  I didn't realise that the immediate effect of alcohol can be to decrease blood pressure.  Because it raises heart rate, I would have guessed the opposite.   So I guess one way to permanently decrease BP is to always be under the influence of 2 glasses of wine.  (Just kidding.)