We need better quality conservatives

Do you remember that when same sex marriage was being debated in France in 2013 there were sizeable street protests?   I see from this rather fascinating piece in The Economist that it has only just gone through Germany's Parliament, and an Archbishop was able to make this (to my mind, quite reasonable) statement:

AS YOU might expect, Germany’s Catholic hierarchs were less than thrilled when legislators voted on June 30th, by 393 votes to 226, to legalise same-sex marriage. Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin was one of many top clerics who voiced the church’s view that a distinction between civil partnership, for gay couples, and marriage, for heterosexual ones, ought to be kept. The decision to do away with it, he grumbled,

abandons the differentiated perception of various forms of partnership in order to stress the value of same-sex partnerships...Differentiation isn’t discrimination, and same-sex cohabitation can be valued through other institutional arrangements without opening up the legal institute of marriage.

The article goes on to note the differences in conservative issues between the two countries:

The very fact that German bishops insist they see some value in same-sex partnerships (so long as they are not described as marriage) might be surprising to an American who is accustomed to tooth-and-nail culture wars.

In France, gay marriage became law in May 2013. Street protests by social conservatives, including four huge rallies in Paris within six months, failed to stop the change. But they made history nonetheless, as unexpectedly large social and political phenomena.

True to the movement’s name—Manif pour Tous (Protest for All)—the French gatherings brought together a broad coalition. Some came from the political right and far-right: there were well-heeled Catholics from posh parts of Paris, poorer ones from the provinces and some Muslims. Some supporters even spoke the language of the anti-capitalist left, arguing that gay adoptions and surrogacy might lead to a heartless market in embryos. To some extent, the movement simply capitalised on the general unpopularity of François Hollande, then the Socialist president.

Germany, too, has seen street demonstrations in imitation of the French ones, under an identical banner, Demo für Alle. As in France, the rallies have received discreet encouragement from politicians and clerics. But the German assemblies (focused in particular on moves to liberalise education about sex and gender) have been smaller, and they have drawn counter-demonstrations. It is still possible that same-sex marriage will be contested in Germany, on grounds that it violates the constitution. But the argument will be conducted in the courts, not on the streets.

This Franco-German contrast seems paradoxical. Although each country comprises a wide spectrum of opinion, German social norms are in some ways more conservative than French ones. (Take the issue of abortion. Although both countries have quite liberal regimes for terminating a pregnancy up to 12 weeks, the German one lays down that women must have counselling—in which they are told that fetuses have rights—before undergoing the procedure. That would be hard to imagine in France.)

Some reasons for the French-German difference are clear enough. Any popular street movement that shades into the far-right feels toxic in Germany, more so than in France, for the obvious historical reasons.

The differences in how social conservatism manifests in both countries are interesting, but my broader point (admittedly made from afar and without direct knowledge of how conservative spokespersons present in the media there)  is that it seems to appear in not only a more aggressive, but also a more articulate and less embarrassing form, over there than it does here. 

I should  make allowance for the lack of direct knowledge, and as this article makes clear,  France  on the issue was politically in its own peculiar world.   But I still get the feeling that I am onto something here. 

For me, of course, (but really, how can any intelligent person disagree?) a key reason why I can't respect the social conservatives here more broadly is the stupidity with which they follow the lead of those in the US who are determined to disbelieve in climate change and resist a sensible economic response to it.  If you can't be sensible on that matter, how can you be seen to be sensible on anything?  

And it's true - the "no" case here is being largely built on overblown moral panic over things like Safe School program,  and the current over-reaction in Anglo culture towards uncritical acceptance of what anyone says (at any age) is their "true" gender.  

Much of the French pushback, based more directly on not wanting the government to be endorsing a move away from the natural order of children preferentially being raised by their genetic parents, is a much more solid ground on which to question same sex marriage;  yet it seems to me that the "no" case here handles that poorly too. 

First, they are on a hiding to nothing by claiming that kids growing up in gay households per se are going to do worse than kids from straight relationships.   Most gay households using surrogacy or insemination to make kids are going to be middle class and well educated, and will have deliberately planned the pregnancy.  Of course, they are going to look like their families are doing fine, for now.   And those gay families who have kids from their failed straight marriages - of course they should be able to raise kids too, and in most of those cases, the children are still going to know and spend time with their biological parents.

But none of that means that conservatives should not be able to mount a reasoned case that the matter of making same sex marriage the same as heterosexual marriage reads as endorsement for "anything goes" as far as reproduction is concerned.

It is a difficult argument to make, however, unless you are going to out on a limb against modern standards as to what heterosexual couples may do to make a baby too.   I personally don't have a problem with doing that - I think that surrogacy for anyone is a bad idea, and I find it remarkable that those on the progressive side make no acknowledgement at all that what they think is clearly reasonable in reproductive matters is demonstrably something about which opinion can change against them - the prime example being the idea that protecting the anonymity of sperm donors was something a government should do, to a complete reversal once those kids as adults questioned what politicians thought was "obvious" only two or three decades ago.

Anyway, my point is that we need a better class of conservative here - ours are an unimpressive lot who are doomed to failure on nearly all social issues.

A likely sounding analysis

Noted at The Conversation, the effect of having an optional survey on same sex marriage:

Last week’s Essential had Yes leading 69-28 among the 62% who will definitely vote, and 59-31 among the overall sample. Yes supporters are more likely to vote than No supporters, more than compensating for lower turnout among the young.

Furthermore, as Peter Brent writes, if everyone had to vote in the plebiscite, people who were grumpy about being dragged to the polls for something they perceived as trivial would be likely to vote No. With optional voting, these people are likely to toss the voting material in the bin.

With such strong support for Yes, No’s only hope is to persuade people to vote about different issues, such as safe schools and political correctness. These issues have little relation with same sex marriage, but the No campaign will highlight them in an attempt to persuade people to vote on these issues.

So, a potential 10% discrepancy by having it as an optional postal survey.  On the other hand, is it possible that younger folk, being more mobile in where they live than older families, might be more likely to not get their survey letter?   That might offset things by a few percent, I would guess.

But the point remains - this is a hopelessly inaccurate way of gauging genuine population support for such a matter.

Can't...resist...posting...

Chinese sex doll rental service suspended amid controversy

Right up Sinclair Davidson's alley

The new economy of excrement 

Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food.

Well, he'd be the richest man in the world, given the mountain loads of it available to him at Catallaxy.

That's a heck of a lot of S

I clicked onto Nature News and a Springer publications alert suggested I might like to see this article, at arXiv.  (Not sure why it would refer me to arXiv, but whatevers.)   Anyway, no time to read it yet, but here's the abstract, brought to you by the letter "S":

This paper uses anthropic reasoning to argue for a reduced likelihood that superintelligent AI will come into existence in the future. To make this argument, a new principle is introduced: the Super-Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSSA), building on the Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA) and the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSA). SSA uses as its sample the relevant observers, whereas SSSA goes further by using observer-moments. SSSSA goes further still and weights each sample proportionally, according to the size of a mind in cognitive terms. SSSSA is required for human observer-samples to be typical, given by how much non-human animals outnumber humans. Given SSSSA, the assumption that humans experience typical observer-samples relies on a future where superintelligent AI does not dominate, which in turn reduces the likelihood of it being created at all.

Sounds rather silly to me, actually, but perhaps I should read it first.

Comparing infinities

The somewhat mind boggling issue of comparing the size of different infinities is dealt with in more-or-less clear fashion in this Quanta article.  (It's about a recent mathematical discovery in this field.)

For the paranoid

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers -- breaking a long-held barrier and potentially enabling a vast array of interconnected devices.

Quite interesting, actually.  From Science Daily.

Movie noted

Hey, back in the 1980's I read a biographical book about Tesla (I'm not sure which one now, there have been so many), but I do remember thinking that the great AC/DC current wars between him and Edison could make for a pretty fascinating movie.

Today, I see that it has been done - with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Edison.

Of course, this is just the sort of movie that is likely to send me into great reveries about whether its historical inaccuracies are justifiable or not, but still, I hope it's good.

Something to look forward to

Alcohol Abuse Is Rising Among Older Adults

New word needed

I think there needs to be a specific word for the unpleasant feeling of half waking up from a dream in which you have missed an important deadline,  and not being sure if it was a dream or something from work a dream has alerted you to.  

Tim, I think this is up your alley.   Perhaps a German word combination?

Some Cold War history for a Sunday

I didn't know this:  the BBC ran a radio show up to 1974 (not sure when it started) in which they would read out letters from unidentified people in East Germany, detailing their life and suffering there.  This sent the East German secret police nuts, who went to extraordinary lengths to track down the writers:

The Stasi not only viewed the BBC as an enemy broadcaster, they specifically saw this programme as a form of psychological warfare aimed to destabilise the regime and incite resistance. They were convinced Harrison was an undercover spy, wooing agents in East Germany.

In the end it was the letter writers they really knuckled down on, and the Stasi were extraordinarily fastidious in their pursuit.

They took saliva samples from the licked envelopes to identify blood groups which they cross-checked with doctor's records. They traced fingerprints on the paper, sourced the ink and collated an extensive archive of handwriting samples. 

It was his handwriting that caught out Borchardt.

"It just seemed like an ordinary piece of homework," he says, when the pupils in his class were asked to write an essay describing themselves and their later goals in life.

"The thing is, my father thought I had such terrible handwriting he wanted my sister to write it up for me. He nearly got his way."

As ordered, the school passed the essays on to a Stasi agent. Documents show a painstaking analysis of every curve and stroke of Borchardt's pen, comparing it to the intercepted letters from the anonymous schoolboy.

Good news about our coming overlords

Clear your browser history and go read the Washington Post's lengthy story about the apparent turnaround in China getting most of its transplants from "volunteer" prisoners:

Thousands of organs were being harvested from executed prisoners every year, but over the course of a decade, Huang has garnered support at the highest levels of government and succeeded in pushing China’s medical establishment into dropping the often-lucrative practice.

Since 2010, Huang has slowly built the register of voluntary donors, who now meet the needs of patients who require transplants. Such a register is a breakthrough for China....

In true modern Chinese fashion, donors can sign up through a link and app available through the ubiquitous Alipay online payment system. More than 230,000 people have done so, and a computerized database matches donors with compatible potential recipients, alerting doctors by text message as soon as organs become available. 

Catholicism, but not as we know it

Oh look, an interesting post from Club Troppo.  (Doesn't happen often enough, these days.)

Paul Frijters looks at the demographic health of the Catholic Church, noting the decline in Europe and Australia, but the surprising growth in Asia and Africa.

According to the Catholic Church itself (which measures things partially on the basis of baptisms), its followers numbered 1.3 billion adherents by 2014 making Catholicism the largest religion on the planet and the largest branch on the tree of Christianity that holds about 2.2 billion adherents. Its strongholds in Latin America and Southern Africa are looking rock-solid, and conversion rates in the new centers of Asia (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.) are looking very healthy indeed. Catholicism is by far the biggest and probably fastest growing of the Christian faiths.

This is all rather interesting for what it means about the future of the character of the Church.   I think African priests, coming from societies where belief in supernatural influence in daily life has not become foreign as it has in the West, are nearly always very conservative and very "by the book", in the way the Church used to be here prior to the 60's.  

What I am not sure about is the likely doctrinal character of Asian priests, particularly Chinese.   I don't think they are likely to be quite in the same ballpark as African ones, but I could be wrong.

Paul notes this about them:

It is, speaking as a pure outsider to these religious games, very interesting to see how successful the Catholic\Christian message is amongst the Chinese in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even in China itself. In Singapore, the proportion of Christians went up from 10% in 1990 to around 20% now, and a little under half of them are Roman Catholic.

 The multicultural aspect of Catholic congregations in many parts of Australia is something that I personally find very appealing about it.   But the cultural conflict between the doctrinally conservative and more liberal wings in Western countries is only likely to be exacerbated by the use of Africa (and possibly some Asian) priests here.

Suffer wingnuts

NPR on the big, big confusion and dismay from the wingnut Trumpsters as to whether Trump is really on their side or not.

Kind of a fun show, if he weren't already irredeemably the worst President the country has ever had.

Bad news

North Korea is ramping up the anti-Japan rhetoric while sending another missile over it.

South Korea is thinking about assassination - but the big mystery I guess is whether Kim's underlings would fight back hard in revenge, or give a sigh of relief that they have a chance at a less nutty leadership.

I'm very fond of both Japan and Samsung products.  We need to find a way to keep both.  

Ridiculously open to manipulation

According to the media, quite a few people are saying that they have received multiple same sex survey forms from ABS, because of previous residents who have failed to update their address on the electoral roll.   A fairly obvious problem with this ridiculously flawed idea.

Does anyone doubt that the greatest enthusiasm for participation in this exercise is from the "yes" side?   Hence I would expect that any potential to exploit flaws is more likely to be come from that side too, and for the results to be skewed "yes" for that reason.

That said, I do expect a properly done survey - like the government could have got Newspoll to do at a tiny fraction of the cost - would also come up with a Yes win - and probably by clear 5 to 10% margin.   (That's my guess, anyway.)

But honestly, there is really zero reason to think that this postal survey idea is going to be accurate, and no one will have any idea as to how accurate it is (apart from comparing it to existing polls - making the exercise completely wasteful.)

Peak pansy

Yes, we've all heard elements of this story before - drag queen balls in New York, gay nightclubs in Berlin and Paris - in the 1920's and into the 30's.   But this account of what the media (and participants) called "the pansy craze" is still pretty interesting.

I don't think I had heard of this particular song before:

Like New York, Berlin’s regular drag balls made it a popular destination for LGBT tourists. Yet many regarded this tolerance as a sign of the country’s decadence, and Hitler’s rise to power saw countless bars, clubs and cafes closed. Nazi stormtroopers tore the heart out of Berlin’s cabaret scene, arresting anyone deemed entartete: degenerate. Max Hansen, who recorded War’n Sie Schon Mal In Mich Verliebt? (Weren’t You Ever In Love With Me?), in which a drunk Hitler made passes at a Jewish man, had to make a quick exit from Germany, and other cabaret stars either followed or went back into the closet.

(American) Doctors and their dubious drugs

Interesting article at Business Insider:

The most respected medical journal in the US just eviscerated a drug that's cost taxpayers over $1 billion

I hate everyone

This same sex marriage issue, it continues to have the perverse effect of making me dislike everyone.  The latest:

*  I was calling the kerfuffle about the Safe Schools anti bullying program a moral panic from the Right last year, before Benjamin Law got around to writing his essay on the same theme and being treated like a rock star on Twitter for doing so.

* Despite it being a moral panic, that Roz Ward exaggerates massively on the issue and is a bit of a Marxist nutter who just helps feed the equally stupid Right wing conspiracists who think Marxists are the ones who have brainwashed everyone under 30 into no longer fearing or deriding homosexuals, as all right thinking people used to do.  (There's sarcasm in there.)   Does Law cover the exaggerations of Ward in his essay?  (Maybe he does.  If so, sorry.)

* I don't like the way people like Law make polite language and argument in one forum, then on Twitter or elsewhere on the net use use language or make poor taste jokes that, if you're going to use them at all (and it doesn't speak well of you if you do) should be kept private - because they should be seen as embarrassing.  

* I still think Law is way over rated as a writer of his TV show.  It's just not that good.

* I think both Pauline Hanson and Penny Wong are making massively self serving exaggerations in this report.  Pauline's just an annoying, dumb twit;   Wong is trying to shut down any argument from conservatives that, yes, they do rather think that its preferable for kids to know both of their genetic parents - and much of their objection to same sex marriage is motivated by the normalisation of the deliberate use of reproductive technology by gay couples that will in many cases involve the disconnect between kids and one of their biological parents.  That's not to say that Wong's kids will turn out bad - they have well off, smart middle class parents, they'll almost certainly be OK - and for that matter, it may well be that the fathers are in contact with the kids - but laws are about society wide preferences, not just those of individuals.    

Sounds a bit harsh

From The Japan Times, an article headed Nagoya: The most boring city in Japan sounds a bit harsh.  I'm not sure the writer has ever been to Akita, for example.  (I'm just teasing - sure, it's remote and has a very ageing population, but my wife and I also each ate an oyster the size of my fist at the fish market, as well as a big scallop grilled in butter and soy, and I liked the central park and giant mural, so I don't regret a day trip there.)

I've never stopped at Nagoya, but I work on the theory that any town or city (well, above a certain population threshold - perhaps 20,000?) is interesting at least for a day.

The energy issue

The fact that Steve Kates (and Sinclair Davidson) work at RMIT makes me deeply suspicious about the entire staff at that institution, but this other guy who is a "Senior Industry Fellow" (?) there is about 180 degrees from them when it comes to energy policy, and he makes this reasonable sounding point today in The Conversation:

Solar power is driving down daytime prices – which used to provide much of the income that coal plants needed to make a profit. Energy storage will further reduce the scope to profit from high and volatile electricity prices, previously driven by high demand and supply shortages in hot weather, or when a large coal-fired generator failed or was shut down for maintenance at a crucial time.

There is now plenty of evidence that the diverse mix of energy efficiency, demand response, energy storage, renewable generation and smart management can ensure reliable and affordable electricity to cope with daily and seasonal variable electricity loads. New traditional baseload generators will not be financially viable, as they simply won’t capture the profits they need during the daytime.

The government is now focused on AGL and how it will deliver 1,000 megawatts of new dispatchable supply. In practice, appropriate policy action would facilitate the provision of plenty of supply, storage, demand response and energy efficiency to ensure reliable supply. But the government is unable to deliver policy because of its internal squabbles, and AGL looks like a convenient scapegoat.

Some Florida Keys photos, at last

Finally, we're starting to get more photos of damage to the Florida Keys area.  Seems to have taken a while.

Bannon as wannabe fascist

I haven't watched the Bannon 60 Minutes interview, but I reckon Slate's William Saletan has got his measure:

Bannon fancies himself a teacher of history, policy, and strategy. But what he really teaches, by example, is the psychology of the fascist intellectual.

The term “fascism” is thrown around too casually by the left, as “socialism” is by the right. But fascism has a genuine meaning based on past cases, and you can see its themes in Bannon’s interview. Fascism’s core idea is allegiance to a leader in the name of national greatness. What distinguishes fascism from republicanism is how he responds to conflicts between the leader and countervailing principles or institutions. A republican welcomes such conflicts as ways to challenge and check the power of the executive. A fascist, perceiving these conflicts as obstacles to national unity, seeks to obliterate them and to consolidate power.

Bannon takes the latter approach.

Also at Slate, I reckon Jamelle Bouie is also right:

Steve Bannon’s Intellectual Reputation Is a Charade

His erudite-sounding arguments ignore facts and revise history to coincide with his nationalist worldview.

Jerry Pournelle noted

So, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle died a few days ago.  

By way of The Mote in God's Eye, which (unusually) my mother bought for me as a birthday gift when I was 16 or 17 on the recommendation of someone in a bookshop, I got back into reading science fiction as a young adult and that continued for a good decade or so.  I did follow Jerry Pournelle in that period, and think I have A Step Further Out, his collection of science fact articles, on my shelf.   It was a good example of relatively realistic techno optimism of the period. 

That said, I think his fiction really did reach an early peak with Mote, and unfortunately (at least after Inferno, which I also enjoyed)  I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with his collaborations with Niven, even the ones which were commercially successful (Lucifer's Hammer, for example.)   I forget the last one I tried, but I have never picked up the sequel to Mote, out of a fair degree of certainty that there were no grounds to be optimistic that they were suddenly good again.  His own novels were rather staid and not memorable.   Some of his anthology collections he edited were OK, though.  I remember enjoying one on black holes, when they were all new and the talk of science fiction.

As for his politics:   they were right wing, although where he fell on the libertarian/conservative spectrum was always a bit unclear.   He was a practising Catholic, I believe, but there was never any softening towards the Left as he aged.   Unfortunately, he did show clear signs of culture warrior sclerosis of judgement, as in the last decade he was easily persuaded by the pseudo skeptics of climate change, and seemed to me to be very soft on Trump.  Still, he contributed to quite a few years of science fiction enjoyment when I was a young man, and I thank him for that.

Yeah, thanks Putin

An article  at The Atlantic here, explaining the economic ties between Russia and North Korea, and Putin's reason why he's soft on the country.   (Basically just a "You try to push me around, and I'll stuff up your attempts to push them around.")

Not every idea from Japan is great...

In Japan, you can now get Coca-Cola pre-mixed with coffee

More Bitcoin skepticism shared

From Axios:

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon slammed bitcoin Tuesday, calling the digital currency "a fraud," per CNBC. He said it's "worse than tulip bulbs” — a reference to the 17th century economic bubble.

"It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed," Dimon said at a Barclays banking conference. "Currencies have legal support. It will blow up."

Why it matters: Dimon has been pessimistic about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past, and has argued that there will never be a currency "that gets around government controls." And Dimon isn't the only critic. Other analysts have argued that bitcoin is nothing more than a fad with no value, and have warned that the currency's current market success could create an economic bubble.

Odd lack of images

Is it just me, or has it seemed to everyone else too that video or photos of damage to the Florida Keys, which is reported in words to be pretty extensive, is oddly slow to appear in news from America?

Opioids and libertarians

Well, I've been saying since at least 2014 that surely the opioid (and related heroin) problem in the US is an indication that the libertarian idea of drug legalisation is fanciful and misguided, at best.  (I could use stronger words, but I'm feeling generous today.)

I see that one German Lopez at Vox has explained at length why he would now agree with me, in his article entitled:

I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened.

Maybe in 10 years time he'll change his mind about marijuana legalisation, too.   

Happy driving

I must admit, I hadn't thought of this aspect of driverless cars before (I had only thought of the icky problem of people having sex in driverless cabs):

I wonder if the problems of bad behaviour in driverless taxis will mean that driverless cars remain mainly a privately owned thing, in which case, if there is to be some emergency override, would it still remain an offence to be drunk while in the potential driver seat? 

Vegetarian and depressed

Not sure that too much should be made of this (the number of vegetarians involved seems not very high to me), but still:

Vegetarians are at higher risk of suffering depression compared to those who eat meat and consume a conventional balanced diet, according to a new study. 

A Bristol University study of almost 10,000 people from southwestern England discovered that vegetarians were almost twice as likely to develop depression because of vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can negatively impact their mental health.

The 350 committed vegetarians who participated in the study had a higher average depression score when compared to the meat eaters, according to the study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Without meat, a vegetarian's diet tends to have less vitamin B12 consumption, as well as greater intake of nuts that contain omega-6 fatty acids, which have been linked with an increased risk of mental health problems.

In addition, roughly 50 percent of vegans and 7 percent of vegetarians have a vitamin B12 deficiency. Vitamin B12 can be found in red meat and plays an important role in affecting an individual's mood

What's this about nuts being linked with nuttiness, too?  That was something I don't think I have heard before, but yes, there are many links - like this one - about the Omega 3 and Omega 6 ratios and mental health.

On George Benard Shaw, Stalin, Russians

There's a good essay at the New York Times:  Why George Bernard Shaw had a crush on Stalin.

Here's a part:

In part, too, Shaw’s insistence on seeing the Soviet Union as the harbinger of the great socialist utopia can be explained by the disappointments of democracy. He had fought for decades to establish universal adult suffrage, especially for women and the working class. Like many radical intellectuals, he was dismayed to find that many of these new voters preferred king-and-country conservatism to the socialism they were supposed to support. Especially as the Great Depression took hold, parliaments and political parties seemed utterly ineffectual. Stalin’s apparent ability to move mountains and transform society with triumphant five-year plans offered an antidote to his impatience with the frustrations of democracy.

But underlying all of this, there was an even stronger impulse: the fantasy of Russia itself. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution gave the dream a very particular political content, Shaw was primed to expect a global spiritual resurrection that would begin in Russia. This hope was not as fanciful as it may now seem: In the late 19th century, when Shaw’s political and artistic consciousness was being formed, Russian music, drama and literature were at the leading edge of modern Western culture. As he later wrote to Maxim Gorky, “I myself am as strongly susceptible as anyone to the fascination of the Russian character as expressed by its art and personally by its artists.”....

Above all, Shaw was caught up in the great wave of enthusiasm for Tolstoy that broke over the English-speaking world in the mid-1880s when “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina” and most of his other works appeared in translation. Shaw called Tolstoy “the master.” His own insistence on the didactic purpose of art and his forging of a sage-like persona are pure Tolstoy.

This was not just a matter of artistic influence. Russia became, for Shaw, a kind of alternate universe, an imaginative field in which grandiosities that he would otherwise have delighted in puncturing were given free rein. He would have made devastating fun of anyone writing about “the Irish soul,” or “the English soul,” but he was happy to write without irony of “the soul of the Russian people.” When Kropotkin’s daughter told him that “the Russians would give the world back its lost soul,” Shaw did not scoff.....

Shaw’s infatuation with Russia became a full-on love affair with a Soviet autocrat, whereas the Trump bromance with President Putin appears unconsummated. But they share a fatal attraction that both preceded and survived the Soviet Union: the allure of a faraway place where the great leader is obeyed because he embodies a people’s soul.

Apart from Right wing conservatives currently having an infatuation with Putin for all of the wrong reasons, I reckon its hard to see anyone in the West recovering a sense of admiration or sympathy for for "the Russian soul."     Maybe we need more exposure to nice Russians, but am I wrong to think they currently have the reputation of being amongst the least humorous or friendly people on the planet?    The Russian Orthodox Church looks equally dour - unlike the sense of enthusiastic engagement with life you get in the some of the Catholic Church's traditions in countries like Italy, Mexico, or (I imagine) the Philippines.   And while some countries have a reputation as happy drinkers (Ireland - I think), you can hardly say the same about the Russians, with their spectacular rate of alcoholism.  Speaking of which, this short history of alcoholism in Russia is pretty interesting.  I don't recall this:

In 1223, when the Russian army suffered a devastating defeat against the invading Mongols and Tartars, it was partly because they had charged onto the battlefield drunk, Brown wrote.

Ivan the Terrible established kabaks (establishments where spirits were produced and sold) in the 1540s, and in the 1640s they had become monopolies. In 1648, tavern revolts broke out across the country, by which time a third of the male population was in debt to the taverns. In the 1700s, Russian rulers began to profit from their subjects’ alcoholism, as Brown, who spent 10 years covering Russia for Forbes magazine, explained. “[Peter the Great] decreed that the wives of peasants should be whipped if they dared attempt to drag their imbibing husbands out of taverns before the men were ready to leave.”

Peter the Great was also, according to Brown, able to form a phalanx of unpaid workers by allowing those who had drunk themselves into debt to stay out of debtors prison by serving 25 years in the army. 

 Wow.

The sensible take on Ridley

There's been this odd libertarian optimist take on the recent American hurricanes along the lines of "look at how well America will recover from this - because it's rich.  Rich countries always recover from disaster well, much better than poor countries, where more people die too.  So the answer to climate change is - don't do anything that will make people less rich.  Nothing.  Don't touch a cent.  That means burn more coal and make more electricity.  We need to be as rich as possible."

See Matt Ridley's article that appeared in the Murdoch press internationally yesterday for an example of this argument, but I had seen raised last week elsewhere, too.

That this is a shallow, shallow take on the matter of climate change and all of the research on it seems very obvious to me, and it's curious how it is so often put by the already rich.   But sometimes the obvious still has to be stated for the thick of head out there.   I think a reasonable, simply worded, response is at And Then There's Physics, from which I quote:

There’s however, in my view, a bigger issue with Ridley’s argument. It essentially seems to be that we should mostly ignore climate change, just get richer, and that fossil fuels are mostly better than any alternative. The problem is that if we drive economic growth through burning more and more fossil fuels and pumping more and more CO₂ into the atmosphere, then the climate will continue to change and the impacts will get more and more severe.

If we were confident that economic growth would always outpace climate damages, then this might be a reasonable suggestion (although, maybe don’t suggest it right now to those who live on Caribbean islands). However, this is almost certainly not going to be the case. There is almost certainly a level of warming above which the impacts would be utterly catastrophic. We may not be able to define it precisely, but it is almost certainly within reach, either because we simply pump all the CO₂ we can into the atmosphere, or because our climate is sensitive enough that we get there even if we don’t emit as much CO₂ as we possibly could.

Given this, there must be an even lower level of warming at which cimate damages start outpacing economic growth. So, suggesting that we can just grow our way out of trouble simply seems wrong. If people don’t like the current policy then the solution (in my view) is not to argue that we should essentially ignore climate change and simply grow, but to argue for something like a carbon tax.

There is much more to be said about Ridley's argument, including the implausibility of thinking that the only thing holding back poor countries (or countries with lots of poor people) from becoming rich overnight is a lack of coal powered electricity, but that will do for now.

A bit of exaggeration

I don't look at Boing Boing very often anymore, and I was rather surprised to find this heading for a post there over the weekend:

Australia's housing bubble is built on a deadly, about-to-burst credit bubble

Deadly??

Even the explanation in the post sounded, shall we say, a tad inaccurate in the current circumstances?:

If you buy a house in Australia -- where housing prices are out of control, even by global standards -- you can wait a couple months for the house's book value to go up, and then borrow against that "unrealised capital gain" to buy another house...and then you can do it again.

 This is how so many speculators in the Australian property market have come to own several homes whose rental income can't pay the mortgage, but who are still able to borrow on those unprofitable properties to buy more unprofitable properties.

We have some problems, but I didn't think this explanation sounds at all accurate.... 

A not very complimentary take on "comic book films"

At the TLS, a look at superhero films and why they are looking more homogenised. 

I sometimes feel guilty for dissing Marvel, when I can go and quite enjoy the ones that are funnier or more off beat than their average stuff.   (As it happens, this morning, for some reason, I had Blitzkrieg Bop as used Spiderman Homecoming going through my head while shaving.  But yeah, I am completely uninterested in stuff like The Avengers.) 

Maybe it wasn't worth posting, as the points made are pretty obvious...

Standing with Barnaby

Barnaby Joyce was on Radio National this morning talking about various things, including the same sex marriage survey thingee.  I actually share his view:   I am not convinced that politicians participating in the debate is actually all that helpful to whichever side they are arguing for.   Joyce has a pragmatic view that its a social issue on which not that many people are open to changing their minds, and the very nature of the issue makes it more likely that people can be easily put off by the tone of those who are trying to convince them.  

Barnaby sounds like me - finding both sides on this pretty irritating:   the "yes" side with its attitude that they are so obviously right they can't comprehend why anyone reasonable would disagree, a view which is as ahistorical as it is possible to be;  the "no" side too easily wants to portray the nuclear heterosexual family in some sort of Norman Rockwell glow which is not very realistic in its own way, as well as often displaying a lack of appreciation about how bad things used to be homosexuals.     (There are other aspects of how both sides argue that get up my nose, but I won't bother running through them now.)


Joyce just quietly says he will vote no, because he just thinks that the way things are has served society well, and I actually agree that this is about just as much as the "no" voting politician need say.   Similarly, a modest acknowledgement of the "yes" vote that marriage is something that some gay relationships want to participate in, and not encouraging a victimhood mentality if they don't get it, would be appreciated.  

But I would not be surprised if the perverse outcome of more debate about it is less participation, not more. 

Maybe there's a reason I don't read Stephen King

King's presumably not a bad author as such, given how many people have followed his career closely over decades.  (Then again, no one should accuse Dan Brown of being decent author based on number of readers.  I've tried reading both of them, but not for many pages.  I didn't care for the style of either, although I think Brown may be in a category of awfulness all of his own.)

But regarding King, that I had never heard before of the controversy about a very strange part of his  novel It, currently being discussed because of the new movie which I would probably watch on Netflix, but not pay money for at the cinema.

It (ha, a pun) makes me glad I never tried to read the book, because It (ha) sounds very, very silly.

Magnetic brain fiddling to control cocaine addiction

Here's the summary, from Science:

Among the major addictions, cocaine is the only one without a therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is a wicked habit to kick without help, as some 1 million people who are dependent on the drug in the United States can attest. A noninvasive method now being tested in clinical trials by a small cadre of researchers may at last offer help. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), applied by running electric current through a coil held near the scalp, is thought to tweak the out-of-whack brain circuits that define cocaine addiction. TMS is already approved for treating depression. But the researchers testing TMS today in people addicted to cocaine are aiming to strengthen impulse control and to restore to normality a reward circuit that is abnormally active when users are presented with cues like photos of cocaine. Although the therapy has been used in an uncontrolled setting on hundreds of cocaine users in Italy, the trials now underway will provide the first rigorous, blinded tests of whether it works.

Seems you can view the whole article, too.

Netflix reviews

There's a lot of viewing of Netflix going on in my new-to-Netflix household at the moment.  To update the one or two people (maybe I am being optimistic) who think my media reviews are worth reading:

Stranger Things (cont.):   nearly at the end of the first series, and I have to upgrade my opinion of it.  Something clicked in episode 5 about how much I was finding the acting of everyone involved very convincing and likeable.  The four child leads are really good, but the teenagers and all of the adults - they're just great too.  The Spielbergian mash up aspect of the scenario has stopped bothering me as I have realised that I just like being in the show's universe anyway.

I fear that there is a big danger that series 2 will disappoint - in fact, I think it quite possibly might follow a Twin Peaks spiral.   (Truth be told, I don't really recall anything about series 2 - I think I may have not watched it based on bad reviews coming out of the US.)   But let's hope not.

Norsemen:   who knew Norwegians could be this funny?   Have only watched the first episode, but there is a lot to like about its mocking of Norse cultural extremes.   It's a bit Monty Python and the Holy Grail (although more witty than absurdist); a bit Blackadder; even a bit The Office (according to someone on Reddit - I still have never watched either incarnation of that show despite its reputation.)   It can be gross and violent, but really, the writing is very amusing and unexpectedly good.  (Sorry, but I just didn't imagine the teeth chattering climate of Norway as an environment for producing good comedy.)

The show is made by Norwegians and shot in both English and Norwegian, and hasn't even been on Netflix in the US for long.   I strongly suspect it will develop a cult following.

The Babadook:    I knew this low budget Australian film, which I am not sure even got an Australian cinema release, was surprisingly well received by many American reviewers.  So, despite my quite intense, but readily justified, dislike of my own nation's cinema efforts, I gave it a go.

Let's just say, the reputation of Australian cinema remains for this viewer lower than a wombat's burrow.  (Go on, make up your own witticism, then.)

The movie exemplifies a couple of things that I have always disliked about Australian cinema:

* the low budget emptiness:  cheaply made movies in Australia somehow, more than low budget features from anywhere else on the planet, always manage to make the settings seem empty, lifeless and underpopulated.  Sure, you'll occasionally see some extras in this film, but it still manages to make everywhere look unrealistic due to a lack of, I don't know, normal people in the background doing normal things?  It's almost like a perverse special talent of Australian film makers:  do they never try to film secretly in a natural setting so that, for example, you actually do see streets or buildings with more than a handful of people in them?


* some arch, almost campy, acting.  Most of the supporting actors don't do well, in my opinion, and fall into some stereotypical (for Australian cinema) close to camp acting that doesn't ring true.  In this case, I point the finger at the Childrens Services couple, the police officers, the boss at the aged care home, the sister's friends.  But even the female lead, who has to carry the film, increasing struggles with the material, and becomes unconvincing in what is meant to be the scary climax.  As for the boy - he really is too irritating to be sympathetic for the first half of the movie, and his conversion to being the sensible one in the house for the second half doesn't make much sense.  (Nor does his precocious mechanical talent - no attempt to explain where that comes from at all.)

Which leads to my biggest complaint - the story just doesn't make psychological sense. It's presumably meant to work like a version of The Shining (one made with on a credit card budget in a friend's big old house,) in that it has deliberate ambiguity as to what is going on - just madness and mental health issues, or something supernatural, or a combination of both.   But at least in Kubrick's film there was some information of trouble in the father's past - alcoholism, domestic violence, perhaps a less than successful career - which you could see that, either through generic madness or a supernatural evil, were the seeds of his turning on his family.  In this film. there's nothing like that at all.

[Spoilers if you continue].   There is nothing to indicate the mother had a troubled relationship with the dead father - quite the opposite in fact.   And nothing to indicate why the father (if the babadook is him in some guise) would want to threaten the son who he never met.    If, as many reviewers say, the supernatural creature is a metaphor for grief,  I just don't see why grief would manifest in psychotic hatred for the son.  Sure, he was annoying at the start, but not so annoying that Mum would want him dead instead of getting him into counselling.   At one stage, I thought that the script was setting up for a split personality scenario, with the mother herself being the author of the book that is frightening her.  (She tells her sisters friends that she was a writer who had done some work for children.)   But that possibility goes no where - there are no further hints along this line - and if it was the old dissociative personality under stress situation, it doesn't really fit in with the possession by the babadook scene in the bedroom.

If it is meant to be taken as a supernatural cause, there is no hint as to why it is in the house - no hint of past violence there, for example.  Again, Kubrick gave enough (with the son's apparent psychic ability, the talk of past murders, not to mention the famous last shot) to give some reasons as to why there might be supernatural presences in the hotel.  In this movie, we have a boy who is having nightmares and worries about monsters under the bed - but we see nothing of what he is seeing. 

The final sequence of this movie continues the ambiguity but in an oddball, unsatisfying way.  Sure, use it as a metaphor for the Mum successfully taming but never banishing entirely rampant grief/psychosis, but how does feeding it work into that metaphor?   I don't think it does.  And if it is meant to indicate a real supernatural being of some kind - as I said before, where it came from remains completely opaque.

So - contrary to what a slew of American reviewers seem to think, I thought the story was a complete unconvincing mess from a psychological perspective.  It's not that I expect things always have to made clear in such a film (I love the discussion The Shining generates), but the film has to have enough in it to make possible interpretations plausible.  That's where this one fails utterly, if you ask me.

It's also, in my opinion, not even very scary.  My son watched it with me, and he is easier scared by ghost stories than me, but he also was underwhelmed.

So, no chance of me changing my mind about Australian cinema based on this.  No surprises of any variety, actually.

Some big damage

One of the best sets of photos I have seen of the damage already caused by Hurricane Irma is here at The Atlantic.   You don't often see cars, trucks and containers so tossed around by hurricanes.   It does look like tornado level damage, but over a huge area.

A tad stupid

Sinclair Davidson thinks that it's "a tad hypocritical" of Bill Clinton to defend DACA when it was under his administration that Elian Gonzalez was forcibly removed from his uncle (who thought he should stay in Florida) so that he could be given to his father (who thought he should return with him to Cuba?)

What was, essentially, a custody dispute is not by any stretch of the imagination in the same category as what DACA is about.

To correct my post title:  the comparison is not just "a tad stupid", it's completely stupid.  

Positive things I have heard recently

*  was told by someone who saw it himself that, yesterday morning, a dugong was happily feeding just off the rock wall at Manly (Brisbane) yacht harbour.   Some other guy there, apparently an old timer who has lived and fished in the area for many years, said he has never seen one, or at least, one so close to shore.   [I knew that there were dugong in the southern part of Moreton Bay - in fact, this website from 2009 says there are about 1,000.  But they are are not a common sight so close to shore, obviously.  It augurs well for a healthy local sea environment, I presume, so it pleases me.] 

*  was speaking recently to a surgeon in the Queensland public health system.  Asked how our public system here was going - pretty well, he said.  In fact, he said if people need a major operation, he thinks the equipment and staffing of Queensland public hospitals is such that he considers it is a better choice than going private.  

These were both nice things to hear.

I like airports...

Slate has several articles up about American airports and how bad most of them have become.   One article is entitled:  How the airport came to embody our national psychosis. 

While I appreciate that airports servicing New York, for example, may have their problems due simply to the huge numbers they need to provide for in sometimes hemmed in locations, I think Australian airports are doing pretty well, actually.

I like airports.  I like hospitals (well, new ones) too.   I guess I like all places where people are busy achieving remarkable things in buildings that look clean and modern.

I was in Sydney domestic for the first time in many years recently.   It was a lot better than I remembered.  Pretty great food selection now.  A very large number of recharging facilities on the long tables in the food court.   Security did not take long, even on a Sunday evening, with lots of people travelling home.

As with health care, where we manage to get better results with less money, maybe we just do some things better than the Americans...

 

Ethics question of the day

Is it wrong to wish that Hurricane Irma destroy Trump's cheesy looking Mar-a-Lago resort?

(I hope Disneyworld is OK; and Cape Canaveral too.  The rest of Florida - well, 49.02% of it - deserves at least a mild smiting because of their last electoral college vote.)

The Right in schism

Want to read a Republican hardliner's view on DACA?  Try Michelle Makin, who used to be bigger in the world of wingnutty online commentary than she is now.  Her stone hearted nonsense entitled There is no such thing as a 'deserving DREAMer'  encourages her base to blame immigration for everything from undereducated white guys not being to find a job to crime and murder.   The odd thing is that Trump himself used the same demeaning arguments during his rallies against illegal immigrants generally, yet it seems that even he and 66% of his supporters think the kids of illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay - in other words, that DREAMers do deserve something.

It's an incredible, messed up Party, that's for sure. 

Just a reminder

The heading for an article in 2010:

Atlantic Hurricanes to Become Less Frequent But More Intense

NOAA-Led Study Looks at the Impact of a Warming Ocean  

Postal probably gone?

My feeling is that the High Court should find that the government can't spend the money on the same sex marriage postal survey/plebiscite/Turnbull escape strategy.   George Williams thinks so, and that's good enough for me.

Which would lead me to go back to my previous suggestion:   let the government get a quote from Newspoll for doing a really large sample poll on the matter, and say that if there is a clear majority far enough outside of the margin of error, the Government will let it go to a vote in Parliament.

Update:  Well, HC goes its own way, again.   They're getting hard to pick...

Chaos in government

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank notes how government "works" under Trump:

On Tuesday, even as the administration announced that it was ending protection from deportation for the 800,000 “dreamers” — mostly young people who know no country but America — there were signs that Trump had no idea what he was doing. “As late as one hour before the decision was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind,” Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the New York Times reported, citing an anonymous source.

Sure enough, Trump fired off a tweet Tuesday night that revised his position. He called on Congress to “legalize” the dreamers program and vowed to “revisit the issue” if Congress can’t.

Even Trump’s close advisers seem to have little knowledge of, much less control over, what he says and does.

Trump has signaled that he wants to end a free-trade deal with South Korea, even though his national security adviser, his defense secretary and the director of the National Economic Council all object. He and Defense Secretary James Mattis have contradicted each other about whether to talk with North Korea. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attempts to tone down Trump’s antics have reportedly led Trump to escalate his attacks — on Kelly. Trump has publicly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions and repeatedly contradicted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner have let it leak that Trump ignored their advice on Charlottesville and other matters.

The biggest boost to the economy of a Trump presidency is probably going to be to the publishing industry, as there is going to be a never ending supply of "My first hand experience of chaos in the White House" memoirs.

Lucifer as the misunderstood naughty boy with Daddy issues

Jason suggested I watch the first episode of Lucifer, a combined supernatural/police procedural show with a humorous touch that is on Netflix now.

I did last night, and my thoughts are as follows:

It was enjoyable enough for me to watch again, but I have some reservations.

The actor playing Lucifer does it with a tad too much of what might be called "straight camp" if you ask me, but perhaps that's bit unavoidable given the lines he is given.  The emphasis on his enjoyment of sex I found a little bit off putting.   It reminded me of the movie Michael, in which John Travolta played the Archangel Michael as a supernatural character who enjoyed pleasuring women sexually.   I remember reading at the time that the writer defended this as being closer to the Old Testament version of angels, who walked and interacted with humans and weren't the ghost-like pure spirit creatures as Christianity came to think of them.   That may be right, but I think that supernatural beings enjoying sex with humans is still a very odd concept to the modern mind,  where ever it appears:  I think its a large part of what makes Greek mythology strange to us now.

As for the bigger picture, of Lucifer's depiction as more or less "just doing a job" when he was Lord of Hell: yes, it is sort of interesting.   I found a detailed version of this explained in an article from 2006 at Phys.org, of all places -  reviewing a book "Satan: A Biography". 

Henry Ansgar Kelly puts forth the most comprehensive case ever made for sympathy for the devil, arguing that the Bible actually provides a kinder, gentler version of the infamous antagonist than typically thought.

"A strict reading of the Bible shows Satan to be less like Darth Vader and more and more like an overzealous prosecutor," said Kelly, a UCLA professor emeritus of English and the former director of the university's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. "He's not so much the proud and angry figure who turns away from God as [he is] a Joseph McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover. Satan's basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he's still part of God's administration."

 That fits in extremely well with his depiction in the show, don't you think?

Frum on DACA - and Trump and the evangelicals

David Frum talking about immigration and the Trump move to pass the buck is, I think, a very good (and pretty balanced) explanation of what's going on. 

In other Trump readings, I thought this article in the Guardian by a former evangelical explaining why he thinks they love Trump despite him being an obvious sinner was pretty good too.  He reckons it's because they recognize a similar aggressive outsider psychology.   Here's part of it:

When I was a young evangelical Christian, I was eager to be oppressed for my faith. The Bible and my pastors had warned me to avoid “worldly” people – celebrities, intellectuals, scientists, the media and liberals. Those were the ones who forbid us from praying in school while indoctrinating us with communism and evolution.

Jesus once said: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.” So I went out of my way to piss people off – telling the goth kids they were prisoners of Satan’s lies, handing anti-abortion literature to the “loose” girls, and forcing science class to run late while I debated evolution with the teacher.

My entire identity became wrapped up in being disliked by a specific group of people, and they were happy to accommodate me. Trump has had no problem arousing hatred from those same “worldly people”, creating what appears to some like an imploding presidency, while others see a heroic martyr against liberalism.

After nearly eight months in office, it’s becoming clear that many of Trump’s actions are not ideologically based, but designed to inspire maximum outrage from climate-scientists, academics, feminists, LGBTQ rights activists – pretty much every demographic that evangelicals hate. Whether he’s banning transgender soldiers from serving in the military, pardoning a vigilante sheriff, or refusing to properly distance himself from white supremacists, it’s not about the act itself, it’s about the negative reaction he gets from liberals.

You’ll never get anything done in government with this approach, but that’s not the point. Just as the point of my witnessing to the lost souls of my public high school wasn’t to convert them to Christianity, it was to see how persecuted I could be.

Which is a remarkably addictive sensation, one that became a competitive game for me and my fellow young believers. My youth-group friends and I would share stories of being punched, spit on, or called “the biggest loser in school” the way other kids would brag about sports or sexual conquests. Just as Morrissey fans discovered loneliness to be a fashionable accessory, we wanted to emulate the sociopathy of our messiah, who said in the book of John: “If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you.”

Sounds reasonably plausible to me, and not really an explanation I have heard before.   

Wild man sightings

Nothing here that's as mysterious as bigfoot/yowie glimpses, but this post about unexpected sightings of what appear to be "wild" men living nude and dirty (or greasy - the story from New Jersey in 1935 is especially odd) is interesting nonetheless:

The group watched this naked individual for several minutes before he reportedly dropped down on all fours and fled, in a way resembling that of an animal. The group watched, stunned, as this wild-looking man “galloped off through the high grass along the edge of the road, along the tracks,” leaving nothing behind but bare footprints that marked his path.

Heading in the same direction the strange phantom fled on their way home, they once again encountered this individual, who was purportedly in a sunken barrel of oil by the railroad tracks, “up to his neck, his hands grasping the outer edge, and moving around in the oil.”

The unsettling incident was perhaps the first of what became known as encounters with “Oily Oliver,” as the degenerate had been so-named by the conductor and motorman on the trolley, who seemed well aware of the fiend when Quackenbush* and his company reported it to them. Similar stories would persist on up into the 1960s, including one encounter two women had while visiting a cemetery, during which they observed a naked, oily man creeping through the weeds toward them.

The writer notes, however, that this story is reminiscent of folk myth from the other side of the world:   

“Oily Oliver” bears some similarity to peculiar folk beliefs in Malay cultures that involve “grease devils,” phantom attackers that cover themselves in grease which makes them slippery, and thus able to evade capture more easily.

* Seriously, the number of American surnames which sound funny to the rest of us is pretty remarkable.  

My crypto-currency skepticism receives a boost...

Spotted at the WSJ:

Meerkat life

The organisation of meerkat life is pretty complicated and tough:

Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) live in complex, hierarchical social groups or "mobs" consisting of two to 50 individuals. These groups are ruled by a dominant male and female, called the alpha pair, that have exclusive breeding rights. The group also contains subordinate females who are typically closely related to the dominant female; subordinate males who are usually the offspring of the alpha pair; and one or more unrelated immigrant males.

Meerkats reach sexual maturity at 1 year old, and males willingly leave their group permanently at around 2 years old to attempt to join or take over another group. Adult subordinate females, on the other hand, are often forcefully (and sometimes violently) evicted by the dominant female — they'll sometimes remain on the group's territory, sleeping and foraging alone or with other evicted females until the dominant female's aggression towards them subsides...

Subordinate females may occasionally mate with the immigrant males from within the group or outside of the group. But this sneaky behavior comes at a price — dominant females routinely kill subordinate females' pups and evict the wrongdoers (sometimes while the subordinate female is pregnant, forcing her to abort).

As payment for their misdeeds, subordinate females that lose their litters or return to the group after being evicted act as wet nurses for the dominant female's pups.

So, I'm unfashionably late to the party

Has anyone in Australia done this variation yet?:

Not quite "peak Guardian", but it's getting up there...

Joy of unisex: the rise of gender-neutral clothing

Salt revisionism

Not a bad discussion here of the "how much dietary salt is too much" debate that seems to have been revived recently.

The problem with geo-intervention

Victor Venema, who does work on climate change, has a post up in which he explains that he thinks taking climate geo-intervention seriously is probably unavoidable, and we may as well start investigating it now.

But he does explain a key practical problem with the concept, as follows:

We would have to keep on managing the insolation for millennia or until someone finds a cheap way to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The largest danger is thus that humanity gets into trouble over these millennia and would no longer be able to keep the program up, the temperature would jump up quickly and make the trouble even worse. Looking back at our history since Christ was born and especially the last century, it seems likely that we will be in trouble once in a while over such a long period.

This danger could also be an advantage, just as the mutual assured destruction (MAD) with nuclear arms brought us a period of relative peace, the automatic triggering of Mad Max would force humanity to behave somewhat sensibly and make people who love war less influential.

My impression is that the main objection from scientists against geo-interventions is their worry about creating such an automatically triggered doomsday machine. Those people seem to think of a scenario without mitigation, where we would have to do more and more Solar Radiation Management. While carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere over millennia, the stratospheric particles (after a volcanoes) are removed after a few years. So we would need to keep adding them to the stratosphere and if we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions increasingly many particles. 

 I am surprised that he does not also consider that natural disasters effectively beyond human control might put a serious hole in maintaining the necessary work - a seriously large asteroid strike, for example, would have economic and society disrupting consequences that I doubt anyone can forecast.  While it won't likely be the end of humanity (it's a big planet), and the dust it throws up would initially cool the place, perhaps to crop destroying and famine inducing levels, when the sky clears enough again the world economy may take a long time to recover before large scale geo-intervention can resume.   This scenario would involve initial disaster from sudden darkness and lingering cold weather, to a reversal where the temperature climbs rapidly to dangerously high levels.

I would much prefer to not have the dangerously high temperatures a possibility.

And besides, at an ecological level, no one knows how ocean acidification is going to pan out.  Lots more algae, sometimes of the poisonous variety;  key crustaceans in the ocean food chain (pteropods) dying out;  oxygen low areas of the ocean that can support little sea life of any variety - these are all realistic predictions of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans, and keeping the temperature down alone won't solve them.

So, I will remain a skeptic of this band-aid approach to dealing with climate change and CO2 emissions.

Trickle down revisited

John Quiggin has a nice post re-stating, in economist terms, the problem with trickle down economics.

Of sociological interest

It's worth clearing your history so you can read the lengthy Washington Post feature on the annual "gathering" of Insane Clown Posse fans.

I really knew very little of the band, apart from seeing the odd photo of their ridiculous act, but limited knowledge is aided by the fact that they are, apparently, genuinely talentless as well as banned by nearly all TV and radio in the USA.

Being a commercial outcast who likes to act insane attracts other outcasts who like to act insane, and they apparently all come together in that fairly saccharine "we are family" way that Americans seem to like to embrace.

As people in comments say, it's like Burning Man for white trash, although I don't know that at Burning Man they really throw trash around for fun.

 It all sounds very ridiculously immature to me;  and somewhat dangerous for the borderline mentally ill who cannot always tell when an act should stop being an act.   The article talks at length about the controversy when the FBI deemed the fans to be gang members.

But if you want a grotesque example of how they entertain themselves, have a read of this:

They said the gathering was a place of radical acceptance, welcoming all comers. “If you can’t find any other place to fit in because society tells you you can’t fit in with this or that group, you’ve got to find your own group,” Creel said. “I kind of think that’s where Juggalos came from. We are outside of the outsiders.”

That point was driven home when I met Adam Roberts. Roberts became a Juggalo legend in 2013 for doing something so out-there even the gathering was shocked. He auctioned off his right nipple at the festival for $100 and then removed it with a scalpel. (He had previously sliced off his other nipple.) “I was going to do it anyway,” Roberts told me while sitting in a golf cart. “A lot of the Juggalos seemed to get a kick out of it. I figured if they liked it I would do it. … I was going to have dermal implants done with diamond tips, so I could have nipples of steel that could cut glass.”

Roberts, who has a ghoulish tattoo that covers his entire face, has yet to follow through on the plan, so he has the featureless chest of a doll. He said this year he ate a live scorpion. Some campers had trapped it and were offering $100 to anyone who could choke it down, but no one came forward. Roberts did it for $70 after chopping off the stinger. What did it taste like? “Seventy-dollar dirt,” Roberts said.

Must be the making of a conspiracy theory of some kind in this

Pope Francis went to a female Jewish psychotherapist for 6 months when he was 42.  A tad unusual, but apparently Argentinians really like their psychotherapy (why?):

Among the other women he confided in was his psychoanalyst whom he consulted between 1978 and 1979. These were trying years for Pope Francis as he was transitioning from the difficult task of provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina to rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel.

The pope’s visit with a psychoanalyst is not surprising, considering that Argentina has the highest number of therapists per capita in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

“I consulted with a Jewish psychoanalyst. For months I went to her house once a week to clear up some things. She was a doctor and psychoanalyst, and she always stayed put. Then one day, when she was about to die, she called me. Not to receive the sacraments, since she was Jewish, but for a spiritual dialogue. She was a very good person. For six months she helped me a lot, when I was 42 years old.”

Well, that makes sense...[no, it doesn't]

With the expectation that Trump is about to announce a big change to that DACA system, an article in The Atlantic talks about the odd politics around it:

Five years ago, President Obama ordered that young illegal immigrants be protected from deportation, a program known as DACA. As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to rescind that protection. He could have done it on his first day in office—but he didn’t, and still hasn’t, for reasons no one quite understands.

Now, President Trump appears poised to revoke DACA. The action has not been officially announced, and administration sources believe that the impulsive president’s mind is not totally made up, but he is reportedly planning to do so as soon as Friday.

If he does, he will have effectively been boxed in by immigration restrictionists—potentially against his own better political judgment. “I do not think Trump wants to do this,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told me. “But they’ve cornered him. This artificial deadline has created the moment the opposition needed to force a decision.”

Immigration policy is the battleground for the White House’s warring factions, and DACA is ground zero. Around 750,000 undocumented youths now benefit from the program, which allows them to work and go to school without fear of deportation. Allowing the so-called “Dreamers” to stay is broadly popular even with Trump’s base: Nearly 80 percent of Republicans, and three-quarters of Trump voters, support it. But immigration hardliners like the pundit Ann Coulter, Breitbart, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been vocal proponents of ending the policy.

 The article explains how the Republican Party is split on this, with State attorneys taking action against Obama's scheme a big part of the problem, and that it would appear that Trump actually has his heart in the right place, for a change (in that he doesn't want to hurt the youth protected by it.)   Yet he is not strong enough to overcome the "restrictionists".   If he had any abilities to actually get political foes behind him, instead of just abusing everyone who disagrees with him, maybe he could have actually changed minds.

What a mess the Republicans are.  When will it end?

People can do amazing things

I forget where, but I think I saw someone doing this on TV, and it's really surprising how well it can work:

Like some bats and marine mammals, people can develop expert echolocation skills, in which they produce a clicking sound with their mouths and listen to the reflected sound waves to "see" their surroundings. A new study published in PLOS Computational Biology provides the first in-depth analysis of the mouth clicks used in human echolocation.

The research, performed by Lore Thaler of Durham University, U.K., Galen Reich and Michael Antoniou of Birmingham University, U.K., and colleagues, focuses on three blind adults who have been expertly trained in echolocation. Since the age of 15 or younger, all three have used echolocation in their daily lives. They use the technique for such activities as hiking, visiting unfamiliar cities, and riding bicycles.

Something I don't understand...

Having nuclear weapons always goes hand in hand with having the missiles to deliver them, and there was talk in the media a few weeks ago about North Korea having received theirs from a Ukrainian factory:

North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines probably from a Ukrainian factory with historical ties to Russia’s missile program, according to an expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.

The studies may solve the mystery of how North Korea began succeeding so suddenly after a string of fiery missile failures, some of which may have been caused by American sabotage of its supply chains and cyberattacks on its launches. After those failures, the North changed designs and suppliers in the past two years, according to a new study by Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

You certainly don't get the impression that a country barely able to feed itself is capable of making anything but the most basic missile.

So - why is it so hard to stop the supply of missiles to North Korea?   Did they receive a very large batch a few years ago that they are just working their way through now?    Surely, you would think, the Ukraine and even Putin would think it a good idea to work hard on the matter of black market supply of missiles and missile components? 

A Douthat attack

Ross Douthat really gets stuck into Dinesh D'Souza in his latest column, which is also interesting because it makes it feel like Ross, as a sophisticated conservative, is barely clinging on to anything the Republicans believe on economic policy these days.

It's true:  D'Souza is like a walking Catallaxy thread - full of hyperbolic claims of evil in anything Democrat or even vaguely progressive.   Any credibility he used to have has long gone, and he is a prime example of the poisonous, nutty element that dominates so much now in the American Right.   (He is, of course, a climate change fake skeptic, as is compulsory for all Right wing culture warriors.)

Anyway, go read Ross.

A Close Encounter Anniversary

Way to make me feel old - it's the 40th anniversary of the release of the Spielberg classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the New York Times has a good story  looking back at its reception at the time.   (The movie's also getting a short remastered re-release in the US, which I think I read on Reddit is actually back to the original version, dropping the later tagged on scenes within the spaceship, which I didn't really care for.   Some things are best left unseen.)

I really liked it from first viewing, which was with high school friends, and it was probably the first Spielberg movie that I saw at the cinema.  (I didn't see Jaws for quite a long time later, and I still tend to think it is a relatively minor work in the Spielberg catalogue - it's more like a preamble showing what he would capable of later.) 

But Close Encounters - it was quite a joy because I had read serious books about UFOs in my teenage years, including those by J Allen Hynek, the astronomer who was always the most credible writer on the topic and who appears briefly in the film.   It was therefore clear to me that Spielberg was incorporating elements from some credible, still unsolved, sightings of the last 20 years from the US in particular.   (He is credited with the screenplay.)   I knew by this time that the Bermuda Triangle books were nonsense, so I wasn't as keen to see that element in the film, but hey, it made for some great images.

It was the film that showed me that Spielberg was a smart guy and natural wit too - as with Poltergeist*,  one of the things I have loved about him is his ability to combine humour and shivers in the one shot or sequence.   My favourite example from CE3K:  our hero's first encounter with a UFO while stopped on the road in his van - shot face on through the windscreen so we can see another car come up from behind, stop, and then drive around him.  Next set of lights (looking again like it could be a vehicle) approaches, stops, and then slowly rises in the air, unnoticed by Roy until he is blasted in bright light from above.   Just a brilliant idea, so well executed.   I don't really know of any other director who has done that type of nervous laugh scare so well.

Spielberg himself has claimed in much later interviews that, with his large extended family of many kids, he couldn't write a movie like that now, with a father effectively abandoning his children.  But the fact it happens is key to the film having a semi-religious feel about it - suggesting as it does that there are matters of greater transcendent importance than family ties.  And besides, we don't really know if he is going to be whisked away for 30 years, or just a week.

So, a great film that I would be happy to see again in its original format.    Long live Spielberg.

*(OK, he is just the writer on that one, and the director Tobe Hooper died just last week, but Spielberg was definitely on the set a lot too)

Update:  Homer mentions Duel in the comments, which I am pretty sure I saw on TV before I saw Close Encounters.  I didn't see it on the cinema release it got overseas.  I did enjoy it a lot, but for whatever reason, I don't think I have ever seen it a second time.   So Close Encounters was the first Spielberg at the cinema.