Into Java

Yes I'm back from the short trip to Jakarta/Yogyakarta.   

There is quite a bit to say about it, but for now, I'll put up some photos and come back to it later.  

The one above is of the Hindu (and Buddhist) temple compound at Prambanan, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta.   It's pretty amazing that amount of reconstruction that had to be done, putting together the blocks again after eruptions and earthquakes over the centuries.   (It was built in the 9th century, but abandoned for about 900 years.)



On arriving there, this was the first "influencer in the wild" that I spotted on this trip.   A simple photo of smiling, happy to be at a grand historical site, was not enough for her, obviously:

[The rest of the photos are all out of order and need resizing - I come back later to fix this up gradually over the next couple of days.]

As you can see, the inside of each temple has a Hindu god or divine figure (if I remember correctly, the bull is Nandi, Shiva's mount and guardian.)   The interior space in each temple is small and fairly dark, but I like that in an ancient temple!   

We were assured by our guide (well worth paying for one) that all statues were originals.  Some rocks in the temples themselves had been replaced, but not any of the carved panels (which tell Hindu stories).

After seeing the group of Hindu temples, you can take a golf buggy ride (or walk in the heat) to a separate large group of temples at the back of the compound to see the one that is believed to have been Buddhist (and yes, I think the tops look more obviously stupa like than in the Hindu temples above):

As you can see, there remains a lot of reconstruction of the smaller buildings yet to be done - although it is not entirely clear how many they think they will ever get to.   (We also did not have a guide at this part of the complex, but the guardian statues did look new.  Also, the Buddhist statues inside the temple had been lost.)

As with Borobudur, the grounds of this complex are very large.  And it was from here that I first realised how close we were to active volcano Mt Merapi:

(I never found out who it was that were staying in the campsite set up there - they were teenagers in red uniforms, so possibly a school group, or something like scouts?)

Before moving onto Borobudur, the other famous temple everyone visits, how was Yogyakarta generally?   

It is obviously beloved by Indonesians themselves - of course Western tourists are around, but it felt like at least 90% of tourism on the street was domestic.   We stayed at a very lovely heritage hotel -  The Phoenix -  which was rather like a mini Raffles and which attracts a clientele of nearly all Westerners for whom, I guess, colonial style still appeals.   Well, who can blame us, really :)

One minor point that surprised me - that courtyard was the main dining area, especially at breakfast, and for some reason, flies were rarely to be seen.   (Even on the street, the street food vendors with their wide variety of meat and innards on sticks waiting for sale uncovered, and unrefrigerated, didn't usually attract flies.   My tentative theory is that it's too hot for them!)

And I doubt there are too many hotels from which you can watch an active volcano from your balcony:

(And I swear, that night I did see a brief flash of a of a red dot from lava flow on the left hand side near the peak, before it disappeared under steam.  But no, the lava flow was not strong during this visit.)

Posting from on high

Well this might be a first for this illustrious blog. 

Qantas wifi might allow me to post during a flight over the vast and soooo empty Australian interior, which is covered in parallel lines for hundreds of kilometres:

Large parts - and I mean enormously large parts - are also currently covered in muddy water from the recent floods:

Where am I going?  I'm off to Yogjakarta, via Jakarta, for a brief visit to some ancient temples.

I do feel extraordinarily lucky that, only a few months ago, I was listening to a writer talking on Radio National (Late Night Live) about how remarkable Borobudur is and it piqued my interest; that I have a wife who was agreeable when I suggested a trip to see it; and that I have  a kind sister who worked for Qantas for decades and has provided us with cheap staff travel opportunities for the last 18 months or so, such that this trip came together very quickly.

Expect more photos...

If there's one thing Trump is good for, it's doomscrolling

Seems to me that the American stock market is actually not taking as seriously as it should the effect of Chinese tariffs.   I guess there is a fair chance that it is because of Trump's constant reversals, or pauses, but it seems to me he is not likely to make a major reversal on several key Chinese exports that are important to American manufacturing and business:

 

The other amazing story going on is Trump pretending it's no problem sending a guy to an El Salvador prison by mistake - in fact, he hopes to be able to do it to American born citizens!

 

The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him.

And why exactly is this guy Buekele sucking up to Trump?:

Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the fate of the father of three is now up to El Salvador.

Buekele then said that he does not have the power to return Ábrego García t the US - and that he won't.

Also on the agenda was topics including transgender people in sports, DEI and women, Iran and tariffs and Ukraine and Russia.

Temu Goebbels, as I have seen Stephen Miller called on social media, insists that the deported guy deserved it and it wasn't a mistake, contradicting court filings by the administration.

We're about a centimetre away from being able to declare the US a fascist state.

Mystery religion

I finally got to the end of the abridged version of Journey to the West.  I liked this passage in the last chapter about Buddhism:

It is difficult to comprehend fully how yin and yang pervade Heaven and Earth because the forces themselves are invisible. That images may manifest the minute is a fact that does not perplex even the foolish, whereas forms hidden in what is invisible are what confuses even the learned.

How much more difficult it is, therefore, to understand the way of Buddhism, which exalts the void, uses the dark, and exploits the silent in order to succor the myriad grades of living things and exercise control over the entire world. Its spiritual authority is the highest, and its divine potency has no equal. Its magnitude impregnates the entire cosmos; there is no space so tiny that it does not permeate it. Birthless and deathless, it does not age after a thousand kalpas; half-hidden and half-manifest, it brings a hundred blessings even now. A wondrous way most mysterious, those who follow it cannot know its limit. A law flowing silent and deep, those who draw on it cannot fathom its source. How, therefore, could those benighted ordinary mortals not be perplexed if they tried to plumb its depths?

What I like is the acknowledgement that it's not easy to understand....

Corruption in religious places

Interesting opinion piece seems to be free to read at the Jakarta Post (for now anyway):

Why corruption thrives in a religious society

This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title "". Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2025/03/26/why-corruption-thrives-in-a-religious-society.html.


Download The Jakarta Post app for easier and faster news access:
Android: http://bit.ly/tjp-android
iOS: http://bit.ly/tjp-ios

 Why corruption thrives in a religious society

Here are some bits:

In a widely shared article titled “Religius tapi Gemar Korupsi, Ada Apa?” (Religious but keen to corrupt), Kompas journalist M. Zaid Wahyudi raised a timely question: Why does corruption remain widespread in a nation so openly religious? His article highlights a common assumption, that religion guarantees morality, that belief and ritual naturally lead to ethical behavior. A paradox indeed: Indonesia ranks high in religiosity but low in clean governance. Places of worship are crowded; prayer groups flourish. Yet corruption remains a daily reality. So, if religion is not to blame, what is missing?

....

 WW Howells, in The Heathens: Primitive Man and His Religions, explains that early religion was never primarily moral. It was a response to fear. Faced with death, disease and natural disasters, early humans created rituals to reduce anxiety and restore order. Religion gave comfort, not necessarily ethics.

This primitive function has not disappeared. Today’s religious practices, prayers, fasting, sacred artifacts, still serve psychological and social needs: belonging, identity and comfort.

However, these rituals do not always shape conduct. One can fear God yet cheat the system. One can wear piety as a badge yet abuse office. Religion works well as a symbol. But without inner conviction, it does not restrain wrongdoing. The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg showed why. His six-stage model of moral development explains that people grow from a basic fear of punishment to principled reasoning. But most never reach the higher stages. Many obey rules to avoid shame or to be accepted by others, not out of justice or compassion.

Public religiosity often reinforces these early stages. One fasts only to be seen, prays to belong, avoids alcohol to gain respect. The moral compass is external. Right and wrong depend on who’s watching. And so corruption thrives, not because people lack belief, but because belief stays stuck at the surface level.

....

Ruth Benedict and Koentjaraningrat both showed that Indonesian society leans more toward a shame culture than a guilt culture. What matters is not whether something is right, but whether it is seen. The wrongdoing itself is tolerated as long as it stays hidden. When exposure comes, the shame is in being caught, not in having done wrong. So the question is not “Why are religious people corrupt?” but “Why has religious life become more about performance than formation?”

Personal stories about tariffs are effective

I was watching a clip from CNN this morning featuring two American women who run small businesses and their concerns about the tariffs.

One in particular had a story which would be happening in thousands of small businesses across the country.   She designs and manufacturers some kind of baby products, and has them manufactured in China.  It's a small business, I think with 5 employees.   She has a loan secured by her house to support the business.

She said she has a shipment of products waiting to leave China, but she knows she cannot afford the massive tariff abuptly imposed on them.  It means the few months of stock she has left might be the end of the business.  She can't figure out a work around (she mentioned shipping them first to Australia and repackaging them before sending on to the US) because of the continuous changes in policy "every 36 hours".  She also said there is no way an American factory can be expected to be geared up to make her particular products in less than (I think) 6 to 12 months.   That's assuming she can find any factory that can take it on.

This all sounded very realistic and with no exaggeration for political spin.

I thought it a very effective and telling story on the turmoil which Trump and his very rich advisers, who don't have a worry in the world about how it will affect them, are causing.

Here's a link to the video.

 

Trump in Oz

Funny the things that can pop into your head while ironing a shirt.  Or am I just remembering something I have already read online?

For some reason, I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz, and the song "If I only had a heart/brain/the nerve", which sums up the deficiencies of each of Dorothy's companions.   Then Trump came to mind, and I realised how remarkable it is that he is like a Trinity of each of these deficiencies in the one man.

No brain - the evidence is overwhelming.

No heart - has no real interest in justice and wants to punish foreigners for all of America's woes.

No nerve - President Heal Spurs who flip flops on policy continuously.

The only way in which the analogy falls apart is in the resolution in the movie, where the characters are taught they always had what they desired within them.   I try to be generous, but I can't see that happening with Trump...

[The other obvious Trump in Oz comparison was in the meme that went around a few months ago that showed Putin as the true Wizard behind the curtain controlling the fake Wizard head in the form of Trump. I liked that too.]    

Bond markets as saviour?

I would guess that like most people, I have the slimmest understanding of bond markets, but as far as I can tell, the changes in the US market may well have been the motivation for Trump to "pause" his tariff plans (on everyone except China). See this article, for example:

U.S. Treasury bonds are being sold off. Here’s why it’s concerning.  

I don't really understand why it seems no one can tell who is selling - there was speculation by some that it was retaliatory selling by China, and denials from other finance types that the pattern indicated that this was the likely explanation.

Here's an opinion column at the NYT about it:

What’s Probably Going On With the Volatile Bond Market 

And how disingenuous is Bessent:  that this was Trump's plan all along.   And he denies the bond market had anything to do with it.   Not to be trusted in the slightest.

Finally:   many, many people suspect a lot of insider trading happened on the Republican side.   Who would be surprised?  No one, given that this administration seems to be the first to think that if you do it (pretty much) in the open, it can't be corruption.

 

Still would have been 10 times better than this president, even if he napped 3 hours each day

I note that the headline on an NPR article about a new book on the last Presidential election has this headline:

Biden's closest advisers were in 'denial' about his decline, 'Uncharted' author says

But in the body of the interview, the author seems to make the case that the decline was in stamina only, and nothing to do with mental ability when sufficiently rested: 

As the 2024 campaign kicked into gear, the president couldn't hide from public scrutiny, Whipple says. He notes that in the days leading up to his disastrous debate with President Trump, Biden "was in a terrible state."

"He was absolutely exhausted. He was unable really to follow what was happening in the campaign. He was tuned out," Whipple says. "Early on, he walked out of a [debate preparation] session in the Aspen Lodge, the president's cabin, went over to the pool, sank into a lounge chair, and just fell sound asleep." 

OK, but then further down:

        On why Biden's staffers believed he could still govern

I think that this is much more interesting and not nearly as simple as the notion of a cover-up. In other words, I am convinced that Joe Biden's inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of governing, and they believed that he could do it for another four years. And we can't dismiss the fact that Biden on the very last day, July 21st, that Sunday when his aides came to hammer out his abdication statement, Joe Biden was on the phone parsing the details of a complex multi-nation prisoner swap. He was on top of every detail.  

People who visited Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the Middle East said he was on top of every nuance of Middle Eastern policy. ... Joe Biden, behind closed doors, was governing, capably, whether you liked his policies or not. So there's no question that he was a shadow of the campaigner that he once was, and that was true from 2020 all the way to the end. But, you can't dismiss the fact — it's an inconvenient fact for people who say it was a cover-up — that Biden was capable.

In mildly encouraging and distracting news

*  I still think, after viewing the extended sneak peek on Youtube, that the new Superman film does look good.  It's weird, but so many people in comments on Youtube agree that it literally "looks great" - meaning the colours and CGI and cinematography overall.    And there's a dog, of course.  It's funny how some trailers can really still hit the spot and make a film look like it will definitely be a hit - I felt the same about the one for Everything Everywhere All at Once.  

*  I see that Spielberg is now actually directing his first film in years, and it's a science fiction one something to do with UFOs.   Cool.   

*  There is also a new Wes Anderson film coming out.  And again, it is in his highly, highly idiocentric and stylised, um, style, which makes the recent films play more like dryly and ironically amusing comic books than anything reflecting the real world.   In fact, I reckon people now feel that his refusal to back down from this signature style has become something of a meta-joke in itself.   As for me:  I do think his "miss" rate has been getting higher (I didn't think much of Asteroid City, although I was watching on an jet and had interruptions), but I still am happy to try out each new one to see just how amused I am.  I don't know why, but there is something pleasing about his persistent self indulgence, perhaps because you have a sense of how much he likely enjoys creating it?  

*  On politics:   I am encouraged about the Labor policy to subsidise more home battery power.  As I said a while ago - why aren't they (and solar panels, and solar hot water) a requirement on all new house builds under State construction codes?  Maybe not worth it in Tasmania, but definitely for most of the country.

Can you ever really trust rich people?

Sure, there are some around who tread carefully, sound socially responsible and don't go nuts.  

But - Elon Musk, obviously.

And now, I'm wondering about this Scott Bessent, (worth about half a billion, apparently) who I knew nothing about until this tariff meltdown.

I mean, Wikipedia indicates that he used to have decent Democrat supporting credentials (originally worked for Soros, supported by donations Gore, Hilary Clinton and Obama.)  Now he works for Trump.

Despite rumours (JC at New Catallaxy referenced them, but I think I have seen it said online too) that he's privately freaking out about how Trump has dealt with his tariff scheme, there is no indication of that at all in his public appearances - he went on Tucker Carlson to defend the whole scheme, talking about the need for a complete recreation of American trade, etc.   And look at the reference to him in this article from WAPO, about how the MAGA Right has gone all Maoist:

Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution. 

What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.

This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.

I don't trust him in the slightest.  

Quite a few stories of note here...

Today's New York Times:

 

A ridiculous situation

More reason to never use Tik Tok

‘Profiting from misery’: how TikTok makes money from child begging livestreams

Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts

My daughter has said that she is very close to deleting Tik Tok off her phone because she fully recognises the way it saps attention span and wastes time.  I must ask her if she has done it yet...

 

Yay, Krugman talks

Paul Krugman is back in a de facto way at the New York Times, talking to Ezra Klein about tariffs and Trump and national security and all sorts of good things.  

The whole thing is worth reading, but I will extract some of it:

I think most people thought it was going to be some kind of across-the-board tariff — same on everybody. Or maybe two or three different types of tariffs.

Instead, he announced this whole complicated, different tariff for every country, at levels much higher than the smart money — or the money that thought it was smart — was betting. Something like a 23 percent average tariff now, which is huge. It’s higher than U.S. tariffs were after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was passed. And trade is a much bigger part of the economy now than it was in 1930. So this is the biggest trade shock in history.

And:

There’s a funny thing here, which is that ordinarily I would say that while tariffs are bad, they don’t cause recessions. It makes the economy less efficient. You turn to higher-cost domestic sources for stuff, instead of lower-cost foreign sources, and foreigners turn away from the stuff you can produce cheaply. But that’s a reduction in the economy’s efficiency, not a shortfall in demand.

What’s unique about this situation is that the protectionism is unpredictable and unstable. And it’s that uncertainty that is the recessionary force.

If you were a manufacturing company in the United States and your next investment is going to be, let’s say, a components plant or something — well, should you put that components plant in Mexico, where it’s cheaper? Not if there’s a 25 percent tariff. But should you put it in the United States, where it’s more expensive? What if the tariff comes off?

So either way, you run substantial risk of just having stranded investments. And that’s happening across the board. So this is the instability of policy. The fact that nobody knows what’s coming next makes a recession certainly a whole lot more likely.

And:

If you were asking what a national security oriented industrial policy that tries to keep production of strategically important stuff in the United States looks like, it looks like the CHIPS Act. It looks like what the Biden people were trying to do. Probably bigger than that — in an ideal world, we’d be doing substantially more. But that’s how you do it.

Putting high tariffs on imports of clothing from Bangladesh is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. That’s the kind of thing that is disruptive, raises the cost of living for American consumers, does nothing to make us more secure.

There is a national security rationale for domestic production, but also for friendshoring and for nearshoring, because the stuff that’s close by is a lot easier to secure. If that’s what we were wanting to do, then we would not be levying tariffs on Vietnam and Bangladesh, and we would certainly not be putting tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

And this bit by Klein makes a lot of sense to me (it's in bold because that is how Klein's voice appears in the transcript):

 When I try to dive into MAGA world’s thinking here, something that I tend to hear is a somewhat contradictory or troubled relationship to American power.

On the one hand, they want America to be stronger, more feared, more dominant. And on the other hand, there’s a broad view that we have overextended ourselves.

Financially, we’ve made the dollar the reserve currency. We’ve allowed all these other countries to buy our assets and buy our money even as our industrial base flowed out.

And then on the military side, we have these bases all over the world, we have all these troops in Europe, we’re part of NATO, we’re spending more as a percentage of gross national product than some of these other countries. But this is part of why we can no longer take care of our people.

And so there’s this feeling: Well, for America to be stronger, it can’t be operating this global umbrella of financial and military protection.

But then you ask: Well, do you want the dollar to not be the reserve currency? And they say: No, no, no, no. We definitely want to keep it the reserve currency.

If you ask: Do you want America’s military to be weak? Do you want people to not be tied to us in the way they are now? They say: No, we actually want more leverage over them.

There’s something here that I think is very strange and very unresolved in this movement that wants both more dominance and somehow, at the same time, to pull back from the actual architecture of that dominance and leverage.

Krugman's reply was something that I was recently saying to an overseas friend who is generally very anti-American: 

We have been a kind of imperial power. Some people say more than kind of — we’ve been an imperial power, in many ways, since the end of World War II.

But it’s not like any previous empire. The Pax Americana starts with the Marshall Plan.

Instead of plundering our defeated enemies, we rebuilt them. And then we built a system of alliances: We have NATO. We have international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which do actually kind of reflect U.S. interests, but at least on paper, we’re at most first among equals. So we are a polite, low-key, relatively generous imperial power.

That is a very hard role for many people to understand.

I'm sure that Krugman would, if asked, agree that there has also been a lot of awful direct foreign interference in the post war period; but America's role in re-building defeated countries after their destruction is no doubt the explanation for its continuing popularity (until now!) with much of the free world. 

 

Re the "accord"

When I first heard the "Mar a Lago accord" I thought it might be another conspiracy theory, perhaps this time of the Left.   But now I know it is a pet theory of someone in Trump's ear, and it looks like we have to put up with the chaos that happens when you have a dumb narcissist as leader who other people want to manipulate.  

Here are two articles on the idea that are worth reading:

Unpacking the Mar-a-Lago Accord 

After tariff shock, Trump may weaponise finance against allies

As any commentary points out - the idea that countries will trust the US under Trump so much that they will co-operate in devaluing their own currency seems wildly implausible when everything he has done and said indicates that he is completely untrustworthy.

A bit late, but some of the best BlueSky content this week...