Straight to the point

It's hard to imagine a more damning take on Trump's personality than this article by David Roberts at Vox.  The key paragraph:

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

Also at Vox, Matther Yglesias notes that Trump is still avoiding the key question about his connection with Russian money, and the lawyer's letter last week does not answer it.

At Axios, Mike Allen says there is talk of Trump sweeping a huge broom through his White House and Cabinet - but whether he will or not remains unclear.

And yet, despite the obvious turmoil of last week (a President openly taunting a sacked FBI director that he might have been taped being the ultimate low-light), it is stunning that the culture war grip remains as tight as ever on the judgement of those on the Right who supported him, so that they still cannot find significant fault with this patently awful and hopeless President. 

Look, Trump is no Hitler - but the wilful blindness and excuse making with which a scarily significant slab of people treat him gives at least a taste of how many Germans could engage in a similar exercise in self delusion.

Cary and LSD

It's not news that Cary Grant tried using LSD therapeutically to overcome some ongoing psychological issues that pursued him throughout his life, but still there are some details in this Guardian article that are surprising.   This for one:

Turned on to the treatment by his third wife, Betsy Drake, Grant submitted himself to weekly sessions with Dr Mortimer Hartman at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. The effects were startling. “In one LSD dream I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

Well, hard to know what to say about that without any impropriety.

Yet, despite the silliness of that hallucination, Grant was terribly enthusiastic about the drug as a psychological elixir, at least initially:

“He claimed he was saved by LSD,” explains Mark Kidel, the film’s director. “You have to remember that Cary was a private man. He rarely gave interviews. And yet, after taking acid, he personally contacted Good Housekeeping magazine and said: ‘I want to tell the world about this. It has changed my life. Everyone’s got to take it.’ I’ve also heard that Timothy Leary read this interview, or was told about it, and that his own interest in acid was essentially sparked by Cary Grant.”

The article says that his enthusiasm later dampened (after perhaps 100 sessions!), but that early reaction does sound typical of the false promise of mind altering drugs generally,  doesn't it?  Specifically, it reminds me of the enthusiasm for tripping on mescaline that was the basis of Huxley's The Doors of Perception.  (As I have explained before, I actually read that book as a teenager - I think from the high school library, of all places - and found it quite an exciting idea, that a drug could let you see a numinous world as it really is.  I was never tempted to actually seek out any hallucinogen, however, realising soon enough that the theory the book promoted was itself a hallucination.)

Anyway, it does seem that Grant was relatively happier late in life, which is pleasing to know for a person who gave so much enjoyment to the world.

Movie upgraded

I watched Inception with my son last night, the first time I have viewed it since seeing it at the cinema in 2010. I enjoyed rewatching it more than I expected, then decided to go back to read what I had said about it first time around.

Boy, I feel I was a bit harsh, in retrospect.   The film still looks great - really great, actually; and I found myself  enjoying its level of complexity and generally "cool" vibe.   I felt more admiration for DiCaprio's acting this time around, too.  In my earlier review, was I reacting a bit too much against some very high praise it received?   Possibly - I see it got 86% on Rottentomatoes - it's good but not that good. 

Furthermore, I still think it is indisputable that the final level of dream "inception" - the meant-to-be climatic snowy fortress sequence - was a really major mistake.   The movie just starts looking  like a complete James Bond rip off, and despite the (I still say rather poorly directed or edited) action happening around the mountains, it actually loses narrative momentum within a few minutes of them popping up in that location.    

A good, basically clever, movie, but one that could have been great, with some modifications.

Does this mean I would like Interstellar if I watch it again in 6 years time?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. No.


PS:  my son - now 17 - liked it a lot; but then again, he knew it was by Christopher Nolan, and he knows he can annoy me by overpraising his work.  Especially Interstellar.

Maybe I am a Russian pawn

Hey this is a bit of a surprise.  Based on a computer tech's recommendation, I use Kaspersky anti virus on my computers, but NPR reports that the US government won't.   Not only that, it apparently paid money to sacked Flynn!  Read this:

The Kaspersky Conundrum

The cyber-frustrations of members of Congress and their witnesses are a frequent feature of Intelligence and Armed Services Committee hearings and other national security hearings on the Hill. They seldom, however, get more specific than broad statements and almost never involve the name of a specific problem or company. On Thursday, however, two senators mentioned one in particular: Kaspersky Labs.
The Russian company — which supports NPR and is a provider of security services for its IT systems — has been linked to work for Russia's intelligence agencies. The leaders of the House Oversight Committee released documents showing payments by Kaspersky to Flynn. Even so, millions of Americans use Kaspersky software, as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out to the witnesses — but, he asked, would they run it on their systems?
Here's how they answered:
McCabe, of the FBI: "A resounding no from me."
Pompeo, of the CIA: "No."
Coats, the director of national intelligence: "No, senator."
Rogers, of the NSA: "No, sir."
Stewart, of the Pentagon's DIA: "No, senator."
Cardillo, of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: "No, sir."
Later, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked the intelligence bosses about Kaspersky again. They repeated their own government systems were safe from any danger, but the DIA's Stewart said he couldn't be sure about all of his contractors. Intelligence and defense contractors have been the sources for huge leaks of secrets from the NSA, CIA and other agencies.

Update:   one of the reasons I wonder about this is because of the mysterious level of activity from Russia (or, sometimes other odd countries) that can appear when you check "stats" on Blogger.   The hits Blogger shows must include heaps of 'bot hits, or something, because if you have a separate company's hit counter embedded on the blog, you  get a much more realistic number.  For example, today Blogger stats says I got 2,800 hits yesterday, and by far mostly from Russia!:

My embedded statcounter shows a much more realistic 96 hits.

It makes me feel my blog is somehow being used, but I don't know how...

The inflation fight (cosmology, not economics)

I've always been a bit leery of post Big Bang inflation as an explanation - because the mechanism of how it happened had just been left hanging for decades, but everyone seemed to just accept it must have happened, anyway.   (Here I was, commenting briefly on it back in 2006.)

Well, I see from The Altantic that there has been a bit of a recent skirmish going on between cosmologists about whether it is really good science if it is not really testable:

In January, Steinhardt, and fellow Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb published a feature in Scientific American criticizing inflation. They concluded by characterizing it as an idea outside of empirical science altogether. The myriad ways inflation could have played out would lead to so many possible outcomes that no astronomical observation can ever rule the general idea out, they say—and moreover, some advocates for inflation know it. This would go against a basic, popular framing of science suggested by philosopher Karl Popper, in which a theory becomes scientific when it takes the risk of making predictions that nature could then uphold or disprove.

“They really made the accusation that the inflationary community understands that the theory is not testable,” Guth, one of the idea’s founding fathers, says. “Those words angered me.” In response, Guth and his colleagues have taken the unusual step of replying with their own letter in Scientific American that insists they are doing science. They even went to the trouble of circulating their response, in order to collect signatures from many of the world’s most prominent cosmologists. “What’s the point of just making it look like it’s three people disagreeing with three people?” says David Kaiser, another author of the letter.

The 29-person list of other experts who signed on includes four Nobel Prize winners, a Fields Medal winner, Steven Hawking, and leading figures from the  cosmology experiments COBE, WMAP, and Planck. (Also, twenty-five members of the list are men.) In turn, Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb have published their own response-to-the-response.

For both sides, the core of the issue is whether inflation as a general approach makes specific predictions that can be checked against the sky, and the extent to which these comparisons count as empirical tests. If the universe did inflate, some kind of mysterious, short-lived field must have pushed everything apart. But theorists have wiggle room as to how exactly that field behaved, with a wide array of consequences that can both match and contradict reality, the critics note.

I still feel more-or-less vindicated in my suspicions about inflation being accepted too quickly.

Governors creeped out

The Govenor's Mansion in New York apparently creeps out governors who stay there.  (They worry it is haunted.)

Worth noting

It would seem that the ignorance highlighting interview that Trump gave with The Economist has been swamped for media attention somewhat by the Comey sacking.  But it really was a doozy.

Just to show I'm not a complete "lefty"...

...I will link with approval (it rarely happens these days) to a post at Tim Blair's, about a truly ridiculous case of "cultural appropriation" hysteria from Canada.

Is there possibly any more humilitating job than being "White House Spokesperson for PresidentTrump"?

Vox headline:

Trump himself just confirmed his White House’s story about Comey’s firing was a lie; 
It took less than 48 hours.

Update:   I like this last paragraph in a Slate article about Trump's anger problem:

The problem with a doctrine of wrath—in the presidency as in other walks of life—is that the rationale so clear to the boiling brain can appear ridiculous to the outside observer. The administration’s babbling excuses have a knee-jerk quality; it’s as if the president so desired to disappear his Putin problem that he was willing to embrace whatever absurd explanation came to hand (and then became surprised—and angry all over again—when we didn’t fall for it). Don’t look at Russia! our commander in chief shouts in fury, and of course our gaze stays fixed on Moscow. Such transparent terror is contagious: Republican senators this week tried to make the Trump–Russia hearings about the travel ban, leaks, and Clinton’s emails—anything but Trump and Russia. After a certain point, this is no longer strategy. It is reflex. It is a child covering his eyes to make the loathsome object in front of him vanish. Trump may be a politician, but he is also a man consumed with desperate, narcissistic rage. Easing that pain will always be his primary goal. 

Too stupid to understand how it would look

From the Washington Post, there's a recurring theme of "anger" in this story.  (These are various extracts from the report):

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists....

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement, and a White House official refused to discuss conversations between Trump and Comey....

The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans. Trump and some of his advisers did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout.  ...

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.

The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.

 And yes, I see there is a twitterstorm coming from Trump, which confirms that he is indeed indignant that he is copping so much criticism.

Am I missing something here?

I'm no medical researcher, but I've previously questioned how these studies of how long HIV positive patients can expect to live if they are being treated can be all that accurate.  Don't you have to wait 'til the (say) 20 year olds who have started on antiviral treatments in the last decade have lived on the drugs for 40 years before you can know of any long term consequences of such intense medication?

Here's news of another such statistical study, saying that if they get onto treatment early, they can expect to live near normal life expectancy.  The article says:

The researchers looked at 88,500 people with HIV from Europe and North America who had been involved in 18 studies.

They based their life-expectancy predictions on death rates during the first three years of follow-up after drug treatment was started.

They found that fewer people who started treatment between 2008 and 2010 died during this period compared with those who began treatment between 1996 and 2007.

The expected age at death of a 20-year-old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 2008, with a low viral load and after the first year of treatment, was 78 years - similar to the general population.

Furthermore, publicity about this type of finding surely is (the major?) part of the reason for complacency in the at risk community about catching it in the first place.?  

Socks in space

Here's a thought:  when you wish upon a shooting star, it might turn out to be a load of astronauts' dirty socks and jocks* burning up:

Astronaut Don Pettit, a University of Arizona College of Engineering alumnus, wore the same pair of shorts for months at a time while living on the International Space Station. Doing laundry was not an option. When clothes got too dirty, he and his crewmates stored them onboard until they could be thrown out—launched with other debris on a spacecraft and incinerated upon entering Earth's atmosphere.

Anyway, you can read about attempts to work out a clothes cleaning system that would let them clean their pants occasionally, instead of throwing them out.  Silver embedded socks (I had written about silver space underwear before) washed in low concentration hydrogen peroxide looks promising.

*  Sexism alert - there's been a lot of female astronauts up there too.   In fact, only last week I noticed that Peggy Whitson had set the record for total hours in space.  I wonder how many change of clothes she's had in that time...

Poor Mexico

I had the impression that the drug wars and general rate of murder and mayhem had been improving recently in Mexico.  But not according to one report (which Mexico disputes).  Second most violent nation in the world, it says.  (Which, actually, does sound a stretch.)  

I've seen some travel shows through the country in the last year or so, and it always looks to me like an interesting place to visit. 

What is truth?

Certainly, as Matthew Yglesias convincingly shows, it's not what Trump and Republican speak.   Here's the opening section:

Unknowns always exist in politics, but in the case of the Trump administration, that’s severely compounded by his habit of constantly lying. That’s especially true because the lying disease seems to be catching.

High-ranking administration officials regularly stand before the public and say things that plainly aren’t true. Increasingly, so do many of their leading allies in Congress. Not just in the sense that they make exaggerated or contestable claims about the likely impact of their policies — though they do that too — but in the sense that they aren’t even correctly stating what their policies are.

On the campaign trail, for example, Trump promised time and again that his administration would build the Keystone XL pipeline and do it with American steel. His actual executive orders do not require this. But even after his administration clarified that he wasn’t requiring the pipeline to be built with American steel, Trump stood before the cameras at an Environmental Protection Agency event and said, “If you want to buy pipelines in this country, you’re going to buy your steel here and you’re going to have it fabricated here.”

There’s no sneaky verbiage here or technical explanation of some sense in which this is accurate. Trump is just claiming to have ordered something he never ordered — just as how in the alternative universe of Trumpland, he held the best-attended inauguration in history and had the most productive first 100 days since FDR.

There’s always been a certain amount of dishonesty in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level — and seems to be making it work. His allies in Congress have adopted the same technique, and it’s the core of House Republicans’ health care sales job. 

 He then goes on to list examples of lies about the Obamacare repeal, and notes this:

It’s worth emphasizing that this kind of lying is different in character from what we are used to hearing in politics.

Politicians, for example, exaggerate routinely about the job-creating punch of whatever new initiative they’re touting, far beyond what most objective analysts would state. But typically, politicians select economic policies that they truly believe would boost economic growth and create jobs. There happens to be systematic ideological disagreement about whether tax cuts supercharge the economy or environmental regulations kill growth.

But what you don’t hear is politicians saying they are cutting taxes when they are actually raising them, or claiming to have put in place a rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they actually did the opposite. 

On the ACHA, in contrast, House Republicans just voted for a law that will let insurance companies charge patients with preexisting conditions arbitrarily high premiums to avoid covering them. And they are running around the country saying the opposite.

 It is a ridiculous situation that only self blinded culture warriors could defend.

Sacked for all the wrong reasons? (Maybe I'm wrong)

Bigger news than the Labor rebirth of Malcolm Turnbull is the Trump sacking of Comey.

The funny thing is, I see that the FBI has had to issue a letter correcting a lot of what Comey claimed  at his committee meeting last week - which exaggerated the seriousness of the renewed Clinton email investigation - and that certainly does hurt his credibility.

Yet (if I am reading it right) it seems as if Trump is sacking him for not having gone harder after Clinton, and hence it looks completely partisan and virtually corrupt.

I think this is going to hurt Trump bigly.   (I know, we stop copying his childish talk, but it's hard not to.)

Update:   oh, it seems I was reading it wrong.    At least Vox says the reason is (on the face of it) in support of Clinton.  

Update 2:   I'm not sure who is interpreting this right.   I can't really see how the Vox interpretation is correct....

Budge it

I'm pretty busy today, so not much time to comment.

But - the Federal Budget seems to be annoying all the right people, so it's probably OK, more or less.

It's about time Turnbull became the Labor-lite Prime Minister we all hoped him to be.  (Ha ha.)

I don't think Abbott has surfaced yet - what would be good would be for him to do a complete dummy spit, and leave with a few other Libs and Nationals to join Bernadi to forge a new dead end party that would attract votes only from Catallaxy readers and Andrew Bolt.

But he's probably not brave enough...

The jokes write themselves

Noticed in the Jakarta Post of all places:

Due to its yellowish color and strong odor, beer has oftentimes been likened in jest to urine.

However, one brewery in Denmark, has been taking the comparisons way too literally, as it is making beer using the said human waste.

According to CBS news, local corporation Norrebro Bryghus is using the unconventional liquid in their malting process by fertilizing the traditional barley grain with human urine.

The cleverly named “Pisner” pilsner, which comes from a wordplay between the type of beer and local slang, was made from contents of urinals at the largest music festival in Northern Europe.

All in all, over 50,000 liters of human urine  was used as an alternative to traditional animal manure or factory-made fertilizer products, the report said.

I hate to think what recreational drugs might be in urine sourced from music festive (I assume, of the doof doof type.)

Macron as "closest thing to libertarian"?

Jason Soon noted here yesterday that Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with, and while I see that while he is indeed credited with some economic liberalising ideas, he also has plenty of others which American or Australian libertarians would run a mile from.  Here are some of them, as chosen from a list at the BBC:

Would make public investments worth €50bn spread over five years for environmental measures, apprenticeships, digital innovation and public infrastructure

Foreign aid: Eager to increase spending in Africa but wants to help countries stand on their own two feet in defence terms

• In areas of special need - notably poor suburbs (banlieues) - would limit class sizes in primary schools to 12 pupils per teacher
• Would ban children's use of mobile phones at school
• At the age of 18 French teenagers would get a "Cultural Pass" worth €500 to spend on cultural pursuits such as the cinema, theatre, books

Energy and environment

• Calls for half of food provided in school and work canteens to be organic or locally produced
• Would promote France as a world leader in developing green technologies
• Advocates renovating one million poorly insulated homes

He is, of course, also pro EU, an institution which I don't notice many libertarians celebrating.

Anyway, Macron is fully on board with climate change - quite possibly the single biggest distinguishing thing between a libertarian and a sensible person.    

Rural men and city women both missing out on marriage

I'm talking about Japan:

Generally higher rates of unmarried men in eastern Japan prefectures and among women in prefectures home to major cities have led some analysts to say the trend of women moving to cities and men staying in rural areas to carry on family businesses in agriculture and other industries may explain the differences.

A National Institute of Population and Social Security Research report released last month showed a record 23.37 percent of men aged 50 nationwide in 2015 had never married, compared with a record 14.06 percent for women of the same age.

Among Tokyo and 46 other prefectures in the country, the highest for men was Okinawa in southwestern Japan at 26.20 percent and the lowest Nara in western Japan at 18.24 percent, while the highest for women was Tokyo at 19.20 and the lowest Fukui in central Japan at 8.66 percent.

An official of the northeastern Japan prefecture of Hokkaido, which logged the second-highest unmarried percentage of women at 17.22 percent, said a higher rate in the capital city of Sapporo has pushed up the average for the island prefecture.

"Hokkaido has long been said to have less social pressure for marriage. In Sapporo in particular, women may be feeling less pressed to marry, as there are many singles around them," the prefectural official involved in marriage promotion said.

Also included on the list of 10 prefectures with the highest rates of unmarried women are such major cities as Osaka, Fukuoka and Kyoto.

Still sounds unpleasant

A new, nonsurgical weight-loss procedure — which involves inserting a tube down a patient's throat and suturing the stomach — is safe and effective, a new study finds.

During the procedure, which is called endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, doctors insert a long tube down a patient's esophagus to the stomach. Then, they sew "pleats" into the stomach, which makes it resemble an accordion.

The procedure reduces the volume of the stomach, so that patients feel fuller faster and therefore eat less, said lead study author Dr. Reem Sharaiha,

Link is here.

Let's drop in on the Ship of Fools as they watch the French election results

a.k.a. "Catallaxy":

All calm and under control, then.   (Can't wait for Steve Kates to turn up, too.)

Update:

 Update 2:  for a calm survey of the actual political landscape in France, this article from The Atlantic seems pretty good.

Update 3:  struth seems to broadening his critique of France, probably due to his losing his money:

Life in Pyongyang

NPR talks to an American back from a recent second visit to Pyongyang, who says that life seems relatively normal, at least in that city:

On what has changed since Lee's last trip to North Korea

I have to point out that I've only been in Pyongyang, which is the showcase capital. This is a city of elites, and so I'm only getting that side of the picture. It's like only going to Manhattan, rather than seeing the rest of the United States.

That said, it's surprising given what we hear about the sanctions how things have progressed. Everybody has a smartphone — sometimes two. Everybody is on their phones. They're all playing video games. They're doing what we do with our cellphones as well, they're checking the news, messaging their friends.

There's quite a bit more English, which is interesting. English is the main language that children learn here. There's certainly a lot more cars, which is surprising given the concern about fuel shortages.

I did some shopping today ... and it's just amazing the kinds of products that they have on the shelves. [That] certainly wasn't the case when I started coming to North Korea. So, in some ways, life has improved for the people of Pyongyang.

That said, I think that things are still incredibly difficult in the countryside. They have a chronic food shortage, and that's only going to get worse, of course, with the tightened sanctions.

I didn't expect that bit about English, either.

And even with state controlled media, it seems they are not being whipped into a frenzy (or if the attempt is being made, it's not working?):

It's amazingly calm. You would be surprised at how calm things are here, and I have to say that like most North Koreans, I've been largely cut off from the screaming headlines that we've been seeing. I didn't have Internet access for several days. And, as you probably know, most North Koreans don't have Internet access. They get their news from their own state media, so unless they read about it in their own state media, or see it on the evening news, they're not very aware of it.

To be honest, it's remarkable, we are not seeing people who are preparing for war. They've had a month, really, of some big anniversaries. They celebrated May Day. I did go to a May Day celebration in the park, where they were singing and dancing and drinking.
But they're getting ready now for a busy season of rice planting in May, so they're gearing up for that. They are completely unfazed, it seems, by all the rhetoric that we're hearing overseas.

Plain packaging win (it seems)

Are there tears in the Sinclair Davidson, Tim Wilson and John Roskam households this morning?

Because Sinclair may have to put his passport back in the draw after getting some international invites to talk at tobacco sympathiser meetings about how plain packaging doesn't really work (the signs are that governments just don't believe him);  Tim looks likely to have been proved completely and utterly wrong in every respect  about his warnings while he was on the tobacco funded IPA's payroll; and similarly John Roskam's institute might get less funding from tobacco and have to go asking for Gina for more.  

Because - it looks very likely that the WTO has decided that Australia (and any other country that wants to do it) can do plain packaging on tobacco and not be an illegal barrier to trade.

Yes, laugh out loud

It's not that often that I do laugh out loud at a short tweeted video, but the one here, which looks like it has been retweeted a huge number of times already,  really does look so bizarre I could not help it.

Self serving mush

Gee, Chris Kenny is a political commentator well worth ignoring, isn't he?   Here is the start of his excuse making ramble in The Australian today on the state of politics:

Wandering around the US last month I was reminded about the less than compelling place that partisan politics has in our daily lives. 

Even in the Democrat heartlands of California and Hawaii, whether in the big cities or the back blocks, Americans didn’t mention politics or their new President unless I raised the topic. They were — to use a phrase — relaxed and comfortable; just getting on with their lives.   [My note:  it's hardly common in any country, is it, to ask a tourist to discuss what they think about your country's politics?]

 This, of course, should be no surprise and it merely confirmed my instincts as I mulled over what we are told are tectonic shifts in the political mood in Western liberal democracies.

Brexit, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and even Pauline Hanson are often characterised as evidence of a far-right, populist upsurge. This analysis often veers into patronising or demeaning references to the voting public.   [Yes Chris - protestor bashing, redneck rallies for Trump spouting know lies were just typical examples of all political rallies from the last 50 years, hey?]

If this were true, what could be the trigger? Why would this be happening? And where will it take Australian politics? [Gee, what might Chris think is the reason - oh yeah, the Lefty political/media class has gone completely nuts and out of touch.  Like the significant majority of American voters for actually voted for Hillary, I suppose, you moron.]

Perhaps much of the political/media class has misjudged what is going on. Maybe this is less a case of the public mood shifting than voter realisation that the political/media class has shifted from a once centrist axis.

 And so on and so on.   A predictable worthless commentator if ever there was one.

Yet another post about the Guardians 2 movie I didn't care for much

Oddly, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 opened overseas a week ahead of the USA, and hence there are some reviews from there only coming out now.

I found myself just about in complete agreement with the very mixed review in the New York Times, and was happy to read this out to my son over breakfast, citing vindication for the comments I had made to him about the Yondu killing spree section of the film:

At times, Mr. Gunn’s ambitions badly backfire. Like the first movie, this one is jammed with action-driven sequences, some wildly bloated and most of them cartoonish. For one fight, though, he cranks the music and lets the screen bleed as the ostensible good guys kill one villain after another, the casualties falling to the sound of a head-bobbing song. Tonally, the episode feels unpleasantly sour and wrong for this young series, which is best when it goes light; it’s a bummer watching another director attempt the kind of smiling sadism that not even Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino can always pull off.

Interest piqued

I'm far, far from being a Christopher Nolan fanboy, but I have to admit, the new trailer for his forthcoming Dunkirk has a very pleasing look of realism about it.  (In reality, there probably will be plenty of CGI in it, but if you can't tell, it doesn't matter.)



Of course, it may look great but still have no emotional connection to the audience, and he did write it himself (which is a warning sign, given he and his brother did the God awful dialogue in Interstellar.)   But the claim is that Dunkirk is actually light on dialogue.

We shall see....

Nothing if not inconsistent

Are Republican congressmen (well, there was barely a female to be seen) just not that bright?   Because I thought the optics of them guffawing over their Obamacare repeal at the White House was clearly bad - especially when the long term consequences look certain to hurt the poor and give tax cuts to the rich.   There will be no excuse that they did it with some sort of regret, but it just had to be done as an economic necessity, as other Right wing policy sometimes sells itself.  No - the history books will show they celebrated, essentially just because they finally got enough on their own side to vote for an ideologically driven, but socially harmful, law.  Congrats, boys...

And as for Trump:  well, we know he's an narcissistic, immature idiot who just thinks a win's a win and that's all that matters.  But to go from celebrating with Ryan to praising the Australian health system??   Could he possibly be any more intellectually inconsistent?   Well, I guess it takes an intellect, first of all...

Adam throws a tantrum

Adam Creighton, being of a libertarian mind, cannot bring himself to support the idea that banks or investors should base decisions on taking the largest environmental issue the world has seen into account.   Libertarians are stupid this way - either they are greedy rich grubs who spend part of their squillions protecting their income by ridiculing the idea that there is any problem with CO2 at all (see Koch brothers), or even if they do believe that climate change is real and that the precautionary principle means there should be action against it, they can't be bothered being concerned about nothing much being done about it (because "big government", or "I hate Hillary Clinton," or something..see Nassim Taleb.)   And if it's a matter of it taking harm to a mining company to help ensure coal burning stops adding to CO2 - well of course that's offensive, because "you're stopping someone making money".

Hence Adam spends his time criticising Westpac today, because it said it won't finance Adani.

Given that it seems most economists think that Australian banks are relatively well placed financially, I am not at all confident that Adam's criticises are accurate or fair.   Some of his criticisms are obviously ideological, and I would need someone with a better understanding of banking systems and regulation to parse it before I trusted his assessment.

An entry exam too far

Last weekend, I posted about the rather extraordinary story of romantic deception that was in the SMH magazine.

Today, we have a more oddball tale of deception in what sounds more or less like a private pre-spy school in Washington DC.  (Who knew they existed?)

Long story short - a guy ingratiates himself with staff at such a school, and with retired spies more generally, with stories that he used to work in some agency or other, killing bad guys and so on.  Some young male students fall for his stories that he may be recruiting them for his still active covert group, but some of the training involves visits to his apartment.  (Uh-oh.)

Then, Levin began inviting his protege back to his Arlington apartment building to practice drawing a weapon — shirtless. Soon, the man said, Levin began fondling him and giving him prostate exams, telling him the inspections were key to his recruitment. Levin also washed him in the shower, according to the alleged victims’ lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers Tamara Miller, a former Justice Department deputy chief, and Peter Masciola, a retired brigadier general.

Although Levin told him that he was free to refuse, the Arlington man said he did not want to imperil his candidacy for the clandestine organization or risk losing out on government jobs.

About the same time, Levin had persuaded a second young student at the Institute of World Politics to get in the shower, under similar pretenses, the lawsuit says.

The whole story is interesting though, because of the way it suggests that retired spies don't really talk in detail to each other about places they worked for, and what they did.  Which makes it conveniently easy to concoct a past.

As someone in comments after the article says:

The general impression, from reading this story, is that there are a bunch of stupid people in the IC.

(I also how hope that the pun in the title to this post is now appreciated.)

Two other points about Guardians 2

*   The Washington Post has an article noting that the movie really doubles down on the use of retro pop music, and it did feel a tad excessive compared to the more restrained use in the first movie.  The article criticises this whole genre of movie as getting a bit lazy:

When needle drops have been curated carefully and deployed judiciously, they can enhance a film’s atmosphere and its characters’ unspoken feelings. Too often, though, they’re lazy ploys to earn the audience’s buy-in, or to signal the connoisseurship and impressively arcane tastes of the filmmaker. Music that should be used to convey added layers of environmental and emotional information is instead used simply for nostalgia appeal and self-congratulation.

Yes, I concur.

*  Has anyone else yet mentioned that Ego's origin story seems to draw on the idea of a Boltzmann Brain?  Let me Google it - yes, someone at IMDB has already commented on this.  (It is very hard to be first on the internet!)

Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.

A good survey of the rise of China

This review of a book on Asia's rise contains an interesting summary of what has been going on with China.   Some things of note:

Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit rates every year for two decades....

Rachman links China’s newly aggressive policies to President Xi Jinping, noting that the month after he took office “Chinese military aircraft entered Japanese-controlled airspace for the first time since 1958,” and that in his first eighteen months Xi “paid more official visits to the People’s Liberation Army than his predecessor had done in a decade.” Xi has paid equal attention to building public support for his newly assertive policies, bolstering decades of Communist Party propaganda that China, at long last, is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation.

This “aggrieved nationalism” coexists with an equally strong feeling of insecurity within the Chinese government—a dangerous mixture. The Communist Party’s legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth, which is slowing. The Party is convinced that the West fomented the string of so-called color revolutions demanding democratic governance that took place during the 2000s—from Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan to Lebanon and Iran. It fears and expects similar subversion in China. Outrage at elite corruption was a common feature of these movements, and corruption is rampant in China. So Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against it—conveniently jailing many of his political opponents. The difficulty, as Rachman points out, is that “arresting more than one hundred thousand people…risks creating political instability by another route.”

Scenic Norway

This photo appeared on Reddit recently, noting the unusual and spectacular setting for a soccer field in Norway.   (I am interested in what the buildings on the point beyond the field are, as well.  Looks like a lighthouse keepers house?)   No wonder there seems to be a surge of interest in Norway as a scenic wonderland.

Another rule of thumb

A politician (or political adviser) unduly obsessed with immigration and how it's wrecking the place (and allegedly so unfair on those already here) is never a good sign.

The case in point:  Steve Bannon.

The trouble with wisdom teeth

Forgot to post this last week: an article explaining why so many of us moderns need our wisdom teeth out:

Sarah Zhang: I’d like to begin with where your book ends, which is the modern scourge of impacted wisdom teeth. Our ancestors had wisdom teeth, they did not have dentists, and they did not have so many problems. Aside from possibly being over-diagnosed, why are impacted wisdom teeth a uniquely modern problem?

Peter Ungar: It’s a uniquely modern problem because we don’t grow our jaws long enough to accommodate our teeth. It turns out that nature has selected our jaw length on the basis of what it expects us to be doing during the period of time the jaw is growing. The more frequently you put force on the jaw, the longer the jaw grows. Nature has to guesstimate how long your jaw should be for teeth of a given size. Today we don't achieve that because we’re eating mush as kids.

I don't think my diet was particularly mushy, but these things are relative, I suppose...

Inheritance taxed

Adam Creighton does something relatively useful today (don't worry, he's bound to say something stupid or otherwise objectionable tomorrow) by doing some straight reporting on what a visiting Japanese banker says:

He said Japan’s “40 to 50 per cent inheritance tax (on) wealthy people” helped keep a lid on inequality in Japan, which made politics more stable. It capped house price growth too. “Here people have a strong incentive to buy a house for kids, whereas less so in Japan,” Mr Yoshizawa said.

He also said the financial sector could learn from Japanese banks, which have not been caught up in fraud and mis-selling scandals that have cost major US and European investment banks up to $320bn in fines since the financial crisis.

“In Japanese culture staff have a long-term commitment first of all. And the compensation system is flat,” he explained. “There’s less incentive to make a quick result.”

Colbert should apologise

While it is, of course, ridiculously hypocritical that anyone on the alt.right (or even those who decline to criticise them) should criticise Colbert for using an insult because they say it is politically incorrect, it's still true that Colbert should apologise to his audience for using an insult that no one should use.

There's nothing politically correct about my attitude to this:  I've always disliked the insult because it is juvenile and can be readily be taken by any truly homophobic and violent gay basher to be sympathetic to their attitude.

Update:  reading my link above, which seems to suggest that Colbert should never use any form of gay jibe for the relationship between Trump and Putin, I think that is a step too far.  There are fine lines to be drawn here, to be sure, but I don't really have a problem with a comedian mocking Trump and Putin by pretending they are gay lovers, especially given their reputation as uber heterosexuals (and in Putin's case at least, outright homophobic.)    But an insult based specifically on a homosexual sex act is different - it suggests (as Putin himself presumably thinks) that a particular sex act itself is degrading, but only when done by two men.  By specifying it as being about a homosexual sex act, it is too easily read as either directly or indirectly mocking homosexuality itself.

I suspect Colbert will apologise.

Ketamine and depression

It's pretty surprising how people use drugs for their hedonistic pleasure, but it takes so much effort for scientists to properly understand what said drug is doing in the brain. 

Not very funny

Here's another thought that I choose to speak in the open here:   there seems to me to be a disproportionate number of gay people in stand up comedy in Australia at the moment.

I could be completely wrong - stand up comedy has never been my thing, really.   The modern version is too crude, and (with few exceptions) involves too much self disclosure and seems too much of an attempt at self therapy. 

But on the ABC, you get to see comedians on panel shows and that's where I have the impression there seem to be a lot of gay stand up comedy.

And the trouble is, I don't find any of them particularly witty or funny.  I don't think it's a gay bias thing - I've always found Stephen Fry can be funny and witty, although I think some people do go over the top in their admiration of him.  Ellen Degeneres - well, I think she is a bit over rated, but she can be witty and a basic likeability is undeniable.  

But Tom Ballard - I find him hard to warm to.  Rhys Nicholson - can't see the wit there.  Josh Thomas - maybe he doesn't count as a stand up comic, but I was very underwhelmed by what I saw of his dramedy TV show.  Hannah Gadsby - surely a case of attempted public therapy, lasting years and years now.   Seems uncomfortable in anything I see her on.

But perhaps I should warm more to Gadsby, as she has decided to give up stand up and actually sounds as if she has reached a sensible position about gay identity:

The knotty complexities of the contemporary identity conundrum has been one of the thoughts weighing heaviest on Gadsby.

"I've come to realise I don't like the word queer, for myself at least, because it takes that concept of identity beyond sexuality, in my mind. I guess I was born under the star of Nanna. I realise at the moment there's quite a lot of pressure to declare how you identify, particularly in the LGBT community, so to be totally honest, I probably identify as 'Grandma'," she reveals. "The idea of Queerness - with a capital Q - is about making a statement, so I don't identify as that because I never set out to go, 'Oh I want to be different.' When I was a kid, being not normal was incredibly dangerous and unsafe, but I was powerless to change that, so I was just, y'know, not normal, in a sort of generic, none specified way. I desperately didn't want to stand out. I think that's why I've always been friends with old ladies - even though I'm not that old."

 To be fair, I should point out that I have no idea whether I would find stand up by many of our straight comedians very satisfying, either.  But I did watch some of a Kitty Flanagan stage show on Stan, and she was OK.   I like Tom Gleeson's comic persona of the moment, too.  

Not sure why so much of the younger set seems to be gay, though...

Lukewarming danger

I liked this article at New Republic, making it clear that scientists have been warning of the disingenuousness (and therefore danger to good policy) of the lukewarmer argument on climate change for years.   It is right that should be an outcry against the New York Times hiring one.  

Modern thoughts in Mongolia

I enjoyed last night's Foreign Correspondent - Mongolia - The Last Eagle Hunters. 

Apart from making me wonder, yet again, at how humans have this remarkable ability to learn to love the landscape and lifestyle in some of the most desolate looking places on Earth, the thing that really caught my attention was how these isolated people were expressing thoughts that were more modern than what you'll spot on some Western conservative websites.

The two examples of that - the 55 year old who said he remembered childhood winters were snowier and colder than they are now, and he thought that global warming probably meant that winters there would not be like that again.   Yes - global warming accepted as true by a nomadic, dirt poor Muslim who has probably never been on the internet.    Way to go, internet, to enable the conning of large slabs of the population of the West.   (I think I have read that you similarly won't get any arguments about global warming from the Inuit in Canada.)

The second example - the 12 year old girl (well, around that age anyway) who was learning to be an eagle hunter, expressing the view that girls who apply themselves can do anything a boy can do. This is location where most women are married off by about 19 and become homekeepers.  

Modernity is indeed spreading.

In praise of LED lights

Every time I use LED lights, I'm pretty amazed.   Use the torch app on a mobile phone on a really dark path - it seems ridiculously bright for such a tiny source.   Put a bulb in a lamp and leave it on overnight - it's still just a little bit warm to the touch in the morning.   Take a modern torch using 3 or 4 LEDs - impressively brilliant beam with quite long battery life.

It bothers me a little that, like the computing power and location finding utility in a mobile phone costing even only one or two hundred bucks, LEDs are a technological marvel that people just instantly get used to without thinking about the stunning results science and engineering have delivered literally into their  hands.

Think about your LEDs when you use them, and encourage your children to do so, too.  And get unimpressed responses from them if they are teenagers.  But you have to try...

More than you needed to know

The BBC is running an article originally from The Conversation - all about the physics of defecation.  (There's a phrase you don't hear often in a lifetime.)  A highlight (if that's the appropriate word):

What else did we learn? Bigger animals have longer feces. And bigger animals also defecate at higher speed. For instance, an elephant defecates at a speed of six centimeters per second, nearly six times as fast as a dog. The speed of defecation for humans is in between: two centimeters per second.

Together, this meant that defecation duration is constant across many animal species – around 12 seconds (plus or minus 7 seconds) – even though the volume varies greatly. Assuming a bell curve distribution, 66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It's a surprisingly small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters. How can big animals defecate at such high speed?

The answer, we found, was in the properties of an ultra-thin layer of mucus lining the walls of the large intestine. The mucus layer is as thin as human hair, so thin that we could measure it only by weighing feces as the mucus evaporated. Despite being thin, the mucus is very slippery, more than 100 times less viscous than feces.

During defecation, feces moves like a solid plug. Therefore, in ideal conditions, the combined length and diameter of feces is simply determined by the shape of one's rectum and large intestine. One of the big findings of our study was that feces extend halfway up the length of the colon from the rectum.

Putting the length of feces together with the properties of mucus, we now have a cohesive physics story for how defecation happens. Bigger animals have longer feces, but also thicker mucus, enabling them to achieve high speeds with the same pressure. Without this mucus layer, defecation might not be possible. Alterations in mucus can contribute to several ailments, including chronic constipation and even infections by bacteria such as C. difficile in the gastrointestinal tract.

Guardians 2 noted

I went off to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2 yesterday.

Unfortunately, I have to say I was pretty underwhelmed.   I didn't think the story had much narrative push to it, and was a bit silly even for a silly, not to be taken seriously, comic book story;  there was one sequence which reminded me a little too much of Tarantino trying to make mass slaughter cool;  baby Groot was too transparently cute; and the look of the film really moved into CGI overload, if you ask me. 

It's not terrible, but in a way it reminded me of the second Men in Black film - not a great story, and not enough original elements to make it feel like it wasn't just trying to get more money from its audience.  (Although I think MIB2 was more enjoyable than this film.)

Perhaps number 3 will have a better story and script?  MIB3 did...

The extremely broad brush of Philippa Martyr

I think Philippa Martyr is an interesting character: conservative in her Catholicism, but with an interest in spiritualism and mental illness; a fan of Evelyn Waugh; prone to exaggeration and likely more fragile underneath than her cheery on line persona indicates.  (She is, or was, a smoker:  I've often noticed over the years that this is a sign of underlying nervousness.) 

She's turned up again in Quadrant, that hoary, next to unreadable, magazine with her take on the findings of the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse (with respect to the Catholic Church), and her piece seems to show some genuine shock and regret at the extent of the abuse revealed.  (She also seems to be particularly down on the bureaucracy within the Church at the moment, given her own knowledge - as a witness - of a recent investigation into a priest having an affair with an adult woman.)

But, being who she is, she does go on to try to pin as much of it as she can on there being too many homosexuals in the priesthood.   And in doing so, she makes some pretty broad, dubious, statements.  The prime example:

The first uncomfortable fact is that since ancient Greece, countless texts demonstrate that the culture of male homosexual activity in the West largely revolves around adult men sexually enjoying boys and adolescent males. There are novels, non-fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, histories, documentaries, interviews, and other texts in abundance, the most recent example being that which caused Milo Yiannopolous’s very public downfall.[22] They all provide a very similar picture: close-knit communities with their own rules of sexual engagement which are often at odds with those of the dominant culture; initiation, secrecy, substance abuse and violence. Male youth has always been the most powerful and desirable currency in this sexual world, and the younger, the better.[23]

Well,  that seems to me to be convenient exaggeration:  that last line "the younger, the better" in particular.

I'm no expert, but my impression is that in all of the cultures where homosexual interactions between adults and youth have been more or less accepted, none extended to viewing prepubescent boys as being an appropriate target for adults.*   In fact, Philippa earlier in the article says she is concentrating mainly on the 30 to 40% of victims who were teenagers, not boys, as being ones targeted by homosexual priests.   Why then, in that sloppy paragraph quoted above, talk as if gay men have always aimed at the very youngest possible targets, which is (obviously) boys?

If her point is simply that post pubescent teenagers have always been a target of homosexual attention, well, there is an element of truth in that, but it's a case of a generalisation too far.  True, she can cite the Greek pederasty/mentoring system (also seen in cultures such as Japan), the history of sex tourism of older white men to Europe in past centuries (or South East Asia more recently) for youthful males, even the "rent boy" reputation of The Wall in Sydney, and so on.    There's no doubt that those activities show the attraction of some gay men to youth.    

But on the other hand, what proportion of total sexual encounters in history between men have been with partners of roughly equal age, or at least, with both clearly adults?  Really, who would know?  And anyway, let's face it - heterosexual sex tourism, and use of prostitutes and pornography has a strong bias towards youth, too.  

Certainly, Philippa cites a surprisingly useless study to support her case - one in which a mere 192 adults had to rank the sexual attractiveness of 15 facial photos of various ages.  Big deal.  (She does encourage the reader to look at a particular table in the paper, which apparently "speaks volumes".  What it shows is a mystery, as there appears to be no version on line.)

In any event, I would take a guess that, if anything, the social normalisation of homosexuality in the West has led to significantly less targeting of youth by older men than previously.   There are so many more outlets for sexual gratification now that there is little need to exploit a youth to satisfy it.   And surely it's clear that the pro-pederasty organisations that, a few decades back, used to seek sympathy and understanding via media appearances have pretty much given up on that undertaking now.  Acceptance of homosexuality between adults has not translated into any slippery slope acceptance of relationships between men and young teenagers.

Philippa, after claiming that homosexual men are invariably attracted to youth,  notes that some seminaries in Australia in the late 60's to the 80's did become known for an unusually high proportion of gay seminarians and staff.  I don't actually dispute that this was true - we even have Tony Abbott's experience in a seminary seems to back that up!  So, the argument goes, get rid of the homosexual priest and you get rid of (some) child abuse.

While there is a sense in which that is obvious (a priesthood of pure, 100% heterosexuals - if there was any way of objectively assessing them as such - may presumably result in a lesser proportion of sexual abuse of teenage guys), it still smacks of scapegoating for a few reasons:

a.   I would bet that the age of many of the abuser priests of the 70's and 80's was such that they went through seminaries prior in the 50's and early 60's, before the apparent increase in gay seminarians post Vatican 2;

b.  it ignores what might have attracted a man with same sex attraction to the seminary in the first place, and that the then conservative views against homosexuality may have contributed to it.  For example, young men who were fearful of their same sex  attraction , and thought institutional celibacy would keep it under control;  or those resigned to their sexual feelings but seeing that the priesthood was one way in which they could attain a certain social status despite of it.  A third possibility (and one I think quite likely):  young men who had not resolved their sexual feelings via much experience at all at the time they entered the seminary, and only later identified they were indeed attracted to men.   (Perhaps because of opportunistic encounters, which they then went on to repeat.)

c.  Philippa explicitly says that homosexual men are not suited to the priesthood; no ifs, no buts.  (Of course, she is supported by Pope Benedict's policy introduced in 2005.)   Her statement:

As to same-sex attraction, I wish I could say that men in this situation would make fine priests, but I can’t. The psychological strain placed upon a priest makes him vulnerable, and he cannot afford to have to struggle with a deep-seated sexual attraction to other men in addition to everything else. I think many people personally know priests who are in this situation, and their priesthood is rarely a happy one. The Church’s ruling on ineligibility for ordination is a sound and compassionate one, not just for the men themselves, but for those who may be at risk of being exploited by them covertly in the future when they can’t cope.

Way to tell homosexuals that they just aren't capable of keeping it in their pants, so to speak, the way all righteous heterosexual priests can.  Isn't this line a bit odd coming from a woman who just went through an investigation of a straight priest breaking his vow of celibacy?

The thing is, if it isn't already abundantly clear - conservative Catholics have an investment in defending the matter of clerical celibacy, despite it being not a doctrinal matter at all.  Why?  Because "conservative".   It's reminiscent of the numbskullery of a crusty surgeon who complain that he (it's usually a he) went through hellish, ridiculous and objectively unsafe work hours and personal abuse when he went through training 40 years ago - and so trainees today should just toughen up and face the same.  Evidence that it just doesn't make sense anymore (such a high suicide rate) is, as far as possible, ignored, in favour of blaming someone else for just not being tough enough. 

In any event, one suspects that the overall loss of credibility of the Catholic Church on all matters pertaining to sex likely means that there are now few same sex attracted young men who would even consider becoming a priest, whether or not Benedict had made his rule.    They likely no longer feel any guilt about it, can have a good career in virtually any field while being openly gay, and so the motivations they formerly might have had to consider an all male career path have gone.   

Philippa, and other conservative Catholics who blame gay priests for child abuse are ignoring the bigger picture re the whole issue of celibacy its harmful effects on disencouraging good people from considering the priesthood, not to mention the widespread rejection of the entire way the Church thinks about sexuality.

Back to MKR

Of course I watched last night's grand final of My Kitchen Rules.  I now have to update my recent commentary about the show:

*  My big oversight on what this year's recipes indicate is "in":   PICKLING.   Did an episode go by in which at least one contestant wasn't pickling some vegetable or other as an accompaniment ?  Oh. Actually, now that I think of it - last night's grand finale might have given it a well earned rest.   And perhaps the cooking on board ship episodes?   Alright, let's just say that approximately 95% of episodes featured pickled something.  It seemed a tad excessive, to me.

* I've been meaning to complain about this for years:  isn't it obvious to every contestant that to get not only nutty carnivore Pete Evans on side in a big way, but every other chef judge, is to get a dirt cheap big bone, bake it and bung it on the plate as marrow.   They always gush about how delicious that is, yet it takes absolutely no technique to speak of, and for me, the idea of eating marrow alone is just unpleasant.   (I suspect it is what gives pressure cooked osso bucco a delicious sauce, as often the marrow has melted out into the liquid, but still, the gelatinous fatty look of it by itself just puts me off.)   The power of marrow on this show's judges, however, just seems ridiculously out of proportion to what it is.   Last night's winning team had probably worked this out, but their main course of veal, marrow and hardly any vegetables didn't look particularly attractive to me.   Of course, it won raves from the judges.  .

*  As for last night's final:  everyone liked the Indian mother and daughter as people, but I get the feeling that the intense India-centric aspect of every single dish they could cook perhaps put them behind.   (Yes, I know, last year's winners were those Indonesian sisters who did everything Asian, as did the "hashtag" team  - who advertisers seemed to absolutely adore - this year.  But if I were to assess South East Asian cooking versus Indian cooking, I would say that the SE Asian cuisine has at least some more variation  in flavour profiles and techniques than does Indian.)

And as for Amy and Tyson, the winners:   poor old Tyson gave the impression of being a socially challenged shut in who puts all his pent up energy into thinking up odd flavour combinations and innovative ways with offal.   If he has a job, I would guess it's as a backroom public servant (they likely don't trust him with direct interaction with the public.)* So it felt like letting him win was somehow right in the big picture:  he has the potential anger profile of a new Gordon Ramsay and seems perfectly suited to the unsocial hours and isolation of being a chef.

But, despite all of that - many of the dishes he and his sister put up were basically unappealing to the average person, I reckon.   Sweetbreads last night!  Didn't they do brains early on?   Putting pickles on dessert?  No, sorry, give me the good curry from the other team, any day.


*  my usual disclaimer:  this impression of his personality outside of the TV show could, of course, be completely wrong.   (Although any 20 something year old who does no social media of any type whatsoever is, well, unusual.)

Successfully smoking fish

Given how much I like eating smoked fish (or smoked anything, really), it's a wonder that I haven't previously tried hot smoking trout in the Weber kettle barbecue.

I think the reason was that the only curing recipe in the Weber official cookbook I have involved a dry cure in lots of salt.  That always seemed to me to be unduly wasteful (even though salt is pretty cheap), and I have never given it a try.

But today, I googled around and found this American guy's* straight forward recipe, involving a salt and sugar curing brine, and gave it a try tonight on rainbow trout fillets.   (Two trout, filleted, gives a satisfying one big smoked fillet per person.) 

It worked a treat.

For my future reference:

One quart of water is close enough to 950 ml.   The brine of 2 tablespoons of salt, and a 1/4 cup of brown sugar, worked fine.  I had the fish in it for about 4 hours, but I suspect longer might have been better.  (The saltiness was OK, but could have perhaps gone longer.)

For cooking - used about 22 pieces of charcoal (I think), and two good handfuls of soaked hickory chips.  One handful still only smokes for about 15 minutes, so I put second handful on after that.  Total cooking time was 45 minutes.

.*  it seems he is particularly fond of pressure cookers, like I am, so I should read his site more. 

Back to Laffer

Quartz magazine succinctly describes what's wrong with the Laffer curve:

The problem is, this tidy arc of cause and consequence doesn’t exist in the real world. Sure, extremely high tax rates douse economic activity. But there’s no reason to assume the relationship between tax revenue and tax rates is perfectly U-shaped. And the equilibrium point at which a government collects the most revenue possible without dragging down the economy is impossible to know—and varies by country. There was no reason in 1974—or, for that matter, now—to think the US was on the curve’s “prohibitive” half (many economists put the inflection point for the highest marginal tax rate at around 70%). In fact, without detailed data, you can’t tell where on Laffer’s curve (or non-curve) you are at all.

Laffer’s general idea of supply-side stimulus can sometimes work. Cutting tax rates that primarily benefit rich people shifts wealth from the middle classes to the rich. That might sound unfair, but in developing countries where there’s not enough money to fund the investment needed to spur growth, a Laffer-style policy could (temporarily) help stimulate economic expansion by channelling wealth to potential investors.

But this scenario is not applicable to the US. Private investment tends to ebb and flow with the business cycle; when demand is feeble, so is investment. Cutting taxes on America’s rich isn’t going to encourage them to invest more—they already have plenty to spend and aren’t spending it. Worse, by shifting wealth from middle class families to the moneyed few—a group that is able to consume far less than the working masses—this sort of policy suffocates demand even more. Slowing demand drags on growth, causing debt and unemployment to rise.

A classic of the romantic deception genre

Wow.  As stories of romantic deception by compulsive liars go, the confessional, true life account of Stephanie Wood in today's Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald is a great one.

I can't quite work out, though, whether I should feel just a little bit guilty over enjoying it so much.    But I suppose it's the same as reading about a serial killer husband who kept his secret from his wife - it's the curiosity about how the deception was exposed, and how extensive it turned out to be, that is the hook. 

Looking on the bright(er) side

A couple of weeks back, I wondered out loud whether we really have the right impression about how the black American population is doing economically. 

Well, here's an article in the New York Times that shows that, at least, the black upper middle class is acting doing better and better.   And the education trends aren't looking bad, too:

The most important trend driving African-American gains at the top can be found in the data on higher education. Between 1980 and 2016, the percentage of African Americans over the age of 25 who had completed a four-year college education tripled from 7.9 percent to 23.9 percent.

Top-flight colleges and universities have played a crucial role in the growth of a black upper middle class.

According to a January 2016 report in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, eight highly selective universities (Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Emory, Vanderbilt, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania) and five highly selective colleges (Amherst, Pomona, Barnard, Wesleyan and Williams) had freshmen classes with 10 percent or more African-Americans in them. Many of these selective schools had notably high black graduation rates, ranging from 83 to 96 percent.

What a way to run a Presidency

From Politico:

One key development: White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.

“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”

Downplaying the downside risk of a decision can win out in the short term. But the risk is a presidential dressing-down—delivered in a yell. “You don’t want to be the person who sold him on something that turned out to be a bad idea,” the person said.

Advisers have tried to curtail Trump’s idle hours, hoping to prevent him from watching cable news or calling old friends and then tweeting about it. That only works during the workday, though—Trump’s evenings and weekends have remained largely his own.

So how do the aides come to work out the "preferred course of action" before they put it before the boss?  Especially given a lot of them are in high conflict?

Adam and morality

So Adam Creighton urges caution about the (apparent) Trump tax plan working out all that great.

He likes the company tax cuts, but is doubtful about any economic benefit from the personal tax cuts. This line, though, shows what a jumble of thoughts he is:

The moral case for cutting taxes — “hands off my money” — is stronger than the economic case. On the other hand, the Trump plan could ratchet up inequality — already severe — to levels not seen since ancient times.

So he is acknowledging that inequality, at too severe a level, is immoral?   Which makes quite a puzzle of his years long finger pointing, in the Australian context, of the number of households not paying any net tax.  

Send us your women

Ah, the Faroe Islands - I don't think I had even heard of them before a Foreign Correspondent story a few years ago.

Anyway, the BBC has a story about how quite a few men there are getting their wives from the much, much warmer climes of South East Asia:

There are now more than 300 women from Thailand and Philippines living in the Faroes. It doesn't sound like a lot, but in a population of just 50,000 people they now make up the largest ethnic minority in these 18 islands, located between Norway and Iceland.

In recent years the Faroes have experienced population decline, with young people leaving, often in search of education, and not returning. Women have proved more likely to settle abroad. As a result, according to Prime Minister Axel Johannesen, the Faroes have a "gender deficit" with approximately 2,000 fewer women than men.

This, in turn, has lead Faroese men to look beyond the islands for romance. Many, though not all, of the Asian women met their husbands online, some through commercial dating websites. Others have made connections through social media networks or existing Asian-Faroese couples.

For the new arrivals, the culture shock can be dramatic.

Officially part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroes have their own language (derived from Old Norse) and a very distinctive culture - especially when it comes to food. Fermented mutton, dried cod and occasional whale meat and blubber are typical of the strong flavours here, with none of the traditional herbs and spices of Asian cooking.

 Fermented mutton!   I suppose it couldn't be worse than those Scandinavian swollen cans of fermented fish that make people vomit at the very smell.  Or could it...?

Thank God they're not in the 60's

This is the sort of story I'm reluctant to post about, because trivia doesn't really deserve it.

But Michelle Grattan's headline has it right:  Abdel-Magid Anzac row is a storm over not much.

Is it ever.

Now I perfectly understand that people, especially on the Right-ish side of politics, may not like her views as a sort of politically correct Muslim.   I hardly pay her any attention, but she was one of the ninnies who complained bitterly about Lionel Shriver's not unreasonable criticism of the anti-cultural appropriation set in Brisbane last year, after all; so yeah, she's probably quite the annoying twit.

But the reaction to her ANZAC Day tweet by Right wing culture warriors in the Murdoch press, and politicians, was ridiculously out of proportion.   It demonstrates:

a.   a complete sanctimonious and un-selfaware hypocrisy, when they complain about Lefties, like her, going out of their way to take offence on matters such as identity politics.  I mean, yeah, way to show people how to not completely over-react to a mild political comment promptly apologised for in any event;

b.  as Grattan argued, a complete lack of historical  perspective as to how ANZAC Day was directly criticised in the past, before it underwent its remarkable transformation into a "sacred" day.   I mean, I like the way it is respected now, but I never lost sleep as a young man if there was routine cynicism of it from certain anti-militarism circles.  Thank God Blair, Bolt, Devine, etc etc were still kiddies at the height of anti-establishment protest of the 60's and early 70's.   They would have been bursting blood vessels at the news every single night.

c.  a complete lack of proportion in terms of priorities for any politician who used it as the flimsiest grounds on which to attack the ABC for, I don't know, not being Fox News or Russia Today.

Equality in Japan

Gee, another good long read today - this one in The Guardian about the very low amount of economic inequality across Japan, the reasons for it, and how that may be changing.