Random thoughts

*   Who invented crispbread, and it is old or new?   This crossed my mind as I enjoyed some from Germany on the weekend.   Wikipedia indicates that it's a Nordic thing, either 500 or 1500 years old (the article is confusing),  but the oddest thing is this:

It was made as round wafers with a hole in the middle so the bread could be stored on sticks under the roof.^[4]

Why under the roof??

*  Steven Kates is like the perfect example of my rule of thumb:  do not trust anyone's judgement if they used to be a rabid Left/Right winger and subsequently became a rabid Right/Left winger.   His cult membership of the Church of Trump now leads him to see nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all, with a President insisting that his Justice Department must prosecute his former political opponent (the chants of "lock her up" during the campaign - and after - presumably don't bother him at all).   He is completely gullible to anything he hears via Fox News or Breitbart, clearly does not look deeply into issues, and has no qualms if the US ends up a tinpot dictatorship, as long as it is Trump's.

*  Slate runs an opinion piece by someone arguing that the gay community condemning Spacey for using his "gay" disclosure when he apologised for what might have happened (OK - what almost certainly did happen) many years ago to the 14 years old who (unwisely) went alone to his party are actually feeding an unwarranted "gay pedophile" panic that used to just be confined to the heterosexual side.   That's a brave opinion, but I suspect it is more or less right, although complicated by the fact that further disclosures have indicated that Kevin has had appalling workplace gay sexual harassment history anyway, so he is far from deserving sympathy for anything.   But in the big picture, while there are probably figures out there somewhere, as I have said before, I suspect that the normalisation of the gay lifestyle in the West has probably lessened the amount of predatory behaviour towards youth, not increased it.   But, who knows, it could be a wrong guess.  (I mean, it sure could be argued that the sexual revolution obviously did nothing to decrease workplace sexual harassment in at least Hollywood through the 70's, 80's and 90's.   But is media a business especially prone to power plays in sex?)

*  Texas would probably be the State most likely to resist gun law changes regardless of the number of mass shootings that happen there.   It's sad and tragic, but I am sure there will be some sentiment around to the effect "well, what did you expect?"    And wingnuts will freak out about how insensitive it is to say such a thing.   The NRA will come out with a proposal for a new scheme for no sales tax for Churches buying guns for self protection, or some such thing...

Update:  what did I say about Texas?:

Asked by Fox News what can be done to stop the insanity and carnage that is happening time and time again in multiple shootings, Paxton  [Texas Attorney General] replied:

“This is going to happen again.”
I wish some law would fix all of this.”
“All I can say is in Texas at least we have the opportunity to have conceal carry,” he explained. “And so … there’s always the opportunity that gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people.”

I see that it is reported that a local armed resident did fire at the guy - after he walked out of the Church leaving bodies everywhere.   Yeah, that helps:

Texas officials just held a press conference about the deadliest mass shooting in the state, and revealed that a local resident fired back at the shooter who killed 26 people at a small town church ... and then gave chase before the gunman was found dead.

A rep for the Texas Department of Public Safety gave a blow-by-blow account of what went down Sunday morning in Sutherland Springs, TX where a gunman opened fire at the First Baptist Church.

He says the gunman, reportedly ID'd as Devin Kelley, was dressed in all black tactical gear when he opened fire on the church -- using an AR assault-style rifle -- from the outside and then continued inside. When he walked out again, a local resident engaged him with his own rifle, causing the gunman to flee.

Thor viewed

Not being a fan of the more serious Marvel movies, I haven't seen the first two Thor movies.  (Well, I once  caught a bit of the first one on TV, and it seemed dull to me.) But Marvel comedy can be a lot of fun, and so it was off to see Thor: Ragnarok yesterday with my son.

We both liked it a lot.

The most surprising thing, really, is that the studio let director Taika Waititi have his way so completely in the use of his very distinctive voice, accent and humour in the character Korg.   I see from this article that Korg didn't actually have that much to do in the original script, but his role kept getting larger.  He is, without doubt, the funniest single thing in the movie.   (Funnier than the Goldblum role, actually.)

I liked the movie's visual style too.  It's not that I'm a fan of trippy fantasy art of the type sometimes found on surfer dudes vans in the 1970's (I think more than one review has referenced that style), but when it's done well in cinema, as it is here, it can be distinctive and memorable.  (The dreamy, short remembrance of the Valkyries on flying horses fighting Hela is perhaps a highlight of impressive CGI.)   And for all of the comedy, it did have some heart towards the end, rather in the same way the first Guardians of the Galaxy felt surprisingly serious in its opening with the death of Peter's mother.

So yes, a pleasing film that will be a major hit for all of the right reasons.

It also goes to show that you can film CGI heavy films anywhere - in this case,  the Gold Coast and Brisbane.  It is remarkable how little physical set needs to get built (see this article), but I  also wonder at the end of these movies about how much each special effects artist gets paid - hundreds scroll by, and even with a one or two hundred million dollar budget, it must get split up into pretty small fractions. 

As for the way Marvel has been not afraid to go into comedy, whereas DC Comics movies have such a dark reputation, I was amused by this in Christopher Orr's review:

...we now have Thor: Ragnarok, which is perfectly acceptable as an action movie but moderately inspired as a comedy. (This may well be the future of the entire superhero genre—see also: Spider-Man: Homecoming—which means that DC Comics and Warner Bros. will probably catch on in about five years.)

Having seen the shorts yesterday for the coming Justice League movie, it looks dour and only with the slightest laughs, as usual.   I have no interest in seeing it at all...

Trolleys and embryos

I see via And Then There's Physics, which led me to Michael Tobis's blog, which linked to another blog called Scary Mommy, which noted in a series of tweets in October by a science fiction writer called Patrick Tomlinson, that he had posed a trolley problem scenario with the alternatives being saving a 5 year old child or a vat of 1,000 frozen embryos.   (It's not exactly the same as the classic "trolley", since it just a question of which you save from the burning fertility clinic, given that you can't carry both.   It removes the issue of taking a positive action - throwing someone off the bridge, or hitting the switch to divert the train from one track to another - that will lead to the sure killing.)  The point is to show anti-abortionists that, at heart, they surely can't perceive embryos as every bit as worthy of "life" preservation as a person already living as an independent human.

I just mention this because I first thought "hey I came up with that idea maybe 4 or 5 years ago."  I noted here in 2015 that I had put the argument up at Catallaxy perhaps a couple of years previously.

But then I went back and noted that Tomlinson said he has been using the argument for about 10 years.  Oh well.  Another case of originality fail.

I still think it's a great argument.  

I don't like abortion, instinctively.  But I can clearly see that the religious argument that it is a case of life from fertilization that warrants the same protection as all human life makes no intuitive sense, too. 

Modern humans have been around a while

I don't find this topic all that interesting (it's a tad too complicated and rubbery, and I'm under no obligation to find every branch of science interesting, am I?), but a new paper in Science suggests an age range for modern humans that means they were stumbling around the place before building much for quite a long time:

Southern Africa is consistently placed as a potential region for the evolution of Homo sapiens. We present genome sequences, up to 13x coverage, from seven ancient individuals from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The remains of three Stone Age hunter-gatherers (about 2000 years old) were genetically similar to current-day southern San groups, and those of four Iron Age farmers (300 to 500 years old) were genetically similar to present-day Bantu-language speakers. We estimate that all modern-day Khoe-San groups have been influenced by 9 to 30% genetic admixture from East Africans/Eurasians. Using traditional and new approaches, we estimate the first modern human population divergence time to between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago. This estimate increases the deepest divergence among modern humans, coinciding with anatomical developments of archaic humans into modern humans, as represented in the local fossil record.

I see from various websites that the previous estimate was a mere 200,000 years, so this pushes it back somewhat. 

So, this is how the world ends?

Geez, I don't like sound of this:

Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA

Experts debate what amateur scientists could accomplish with the powerful DNA editing tool—and whether its ready availability is cause for concern

It's from Scientific American, and ends with an unknown number of DNA hacking scientists saying it's nothing to be to be too worried about: 

Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. “People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, ” he says. “How big is the risk? It’s not zero, but it’s fairly small.” Gersbach agrees. “Right now, it’s difficult to imagine how it’d be dangerous in a real way,” he explains, “If you want to do harm, there are much easier and simpler ways than using this highly sophisticated genetic editing technique.”

Scientists in fields like this have an incentive to downplay risk, so if they actually use words like "relatively low", it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence...

Won't be on the talk show circuit for a long, long time

Yet more details of workplace predatory harassment of (now former) talk show darling Kevin Spacey has come out:

Eight current and former employees of Kevin Spacey's show "House of Cards" have accused the actor of sexual harassment and, in one case, assault, CNN reports. A former production assistant alleges that Spacey sexually assaulted him during an early season of the show. Other accusers told CNN Spacey's behavior, including inappropriate comments and nonconsensual touching, was "predatory" and caused a "toxic" work environment.

I've never watched House of Cards, and I can't say that I have ever found Spacey an appealing screen presence (not just because he plays a bad character, either), so it's not as if this is shocking because I liked him before.   But he has been a popular figure with the audience whenever appearing on the likes of Colbert or other late night chat shows.  I expect it will be some years before we see him on one of those again.

But what does feel kind of shocking is that such behaviour, which has become so verboten in your average workplace for decades now, has not been addressed in such a high profile and (yes) largely liberal by reputation industry.   (Mind you, the culture around key figures at Fox News was clearly toxic as well, and so well tolerated that million dollar contracts were renewed.  Conservative media does not really have grounds to gloat.)   

It's just odd to think that, when young Ms Smith from accounts at a small company 30 years ago could (and often did) deal effectively with her predatory boss if she wanted to, entertainment industry folk have been putting up with it for many decades since then.

Gone, the revolution

I don't think there has been as much written in the media about the centenary of the October Revolution as I expected.

There wasn't a bad interview with a couple of experts on Radio National last night - but I am not sure who's show it was on.

There was one Guardian column about it a few days ago, but I can't quickly find it again.  I was sort of expecting that outlet to be overrun with quasi sympathetic articles , but it hasn't really happened.

I see that Henry Ergas has a column in The Australian:  I doubt it's all that interesting.  The Weekend OZ may well be full of conservatives decrying it:  we shall see.

So I'm down to noting a very lengthy review of Kotkin's two volume biography of Stalin in The New Yorker, which covers the Revolution succinctly, as well as Stalin's later actions, and it's a very good read.

One minor detail amuses, in the section which discusses signs early on that Stalin would become (shall we say) a problem:

They had had some intimations: they knew he could be rude, and they even knew he could be psychologically cruel. During his Siberian exile, he had briefly lived with Yakov (Yashka) Sverdlov, a fellow-Bolshevik and later the titular head of the Soviet government, but the two broke up house because Stalin refused to do the dishes and also because he had acquired a dog and started calling him Yashka. “Of course for Sverdlov that wasn’t pleasant,” Stalin later admitted. “He was Yashka and the dog was Yashka.”

 There are many bits of information in the review which I either didn't realise, or had forgotten when I last read a long review of a book on Russian history.   For example, after a brief summary of the Terror of the late 30's..:

The numbers are hard to fathom. According to the best current estimates, Stalin was responsible for between ten and twelve million peacetime deaths, including victims of the famine. But the most hands-on period of killing was the Terror of 1937 and 1938. At its height, fifteen hundred people were being shot every day. Most of the victims were ordinary citizens, caught up in a machine that was seeking to meet its quotas. But the Communist Party, too, was devastated—in many provinces, first secretaries, second secretaries, third secretaries all gone. Entire editorial staffs were erased. The officer corps of the Army was devastated. Five hundred of the top seven hundred and sixty-seven commanders were arrested or executed; thirteen of the top fifteen generals. “What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?” Kotkin asks. “What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive?” Yet this one did.

there is this:

In addition to everything else the Terror did, it greatly weakened the country’s international position. Stalin’s justified fear of the coming war made this war only more likely. The French and the British, contemplating a stand against Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, did not feel they could count on the now depleted Red Army. Worse still, the Terror made Stalin an unacceptable ally for the British in 1939. Kotkin shows that Stalin’s first choice in the months before the war was not Hitler but Chamberlain. He sent detailed terms to Britain for a military alliance. Chamberlain was not interested, and Kotkin, refusing the benefits of hindsight, doesn’t blame him. Stalin had just murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, staged show trials of his former comrades, and carried out purges of putative socialist allies in Spain. Hitler would eventually overtake him, but as of 1939 Stalin had killed more people by far. He was, as Kotkin says, “an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers.”

I didn't know about the approaches to Chamberlain.

The 20th century had a lot going on, to put it mildly...

Researching the vampire cure

Nature reports that a small study on infusing young blood into people with mild to moderate dementia has finished, and found some possible benefit, but it seems pretty slight.

The offspring remain safe from requests for blood, for now.  

Seriously...

Headline at Vox:

Rick Perry actually tried to argue that fossil fuels can help fight sexual assault

This is not the Onion.

Gay in Egypt

An interesting take on the matter of gay sex and gay identity in Egypt, and in Islam more generally, has appeared in The Spectator.  He starts by talking about the recent police arrest there of 60 allegedly gay men, found by scanning social media, and continues:

Obviously, that’s 60 too many. We should recall, though, that Egypt is a country of 95 million people, and those arrested mostly deny being gay. So either the police were not making much of an effort to round up the queers, or — more likely — there are in fact almost none in Egypt.

Of course, that’s not the same as saying that there are no Egyptian men who engage in gay sex.As someone who lived in the country for more a decade, is fluent in Egyptian Arabic and has written a book on the country that includes a chapter on male prostitution, I can testify quite emphatically that the exact opposite is true. And therein lies the rub, as it were.

Western correspondents filing dispatches about gay persecution in Egypt and the wider region are ignoring the more nuanced reality. Just as predictably, bigots determined to show how Islam restricts sexual freedom are also having a ball. But the latter especially are wide of the mark. The Koran singles out sex between men as a transgression, but uniquely in the Islamic holy book, proscribes no punishment. And there must be four independent witnesses to the act of anal intercourse (all other forms of gay sex seem to have escaped Allah’s attention). So it’s just a warning not to have sex in the middle of the street. Even then, for those caught, social rehabilitation is encouraged.  

Not sure if the author counts himself as bi or gay, but he certainly gives the impression that he thinks the far from unusual inclination of young arab men to want to bed attractive young guys (while simultaneously chasing women) is quite OK:

In Tunisia, two friends came round for dinner. A Justin Bieber special started on the cable TV channel, and I reached for the remote to turn it off. ‘What are you doing?’ one of them screamed. ‘Leave it on — that boy is so do-able.’

As with the Saudi, the Tunisians had not given any indication that they were ‘gay’. In fact, they spent the rest of the evening using my computer to chat with a French women one had hooked up with a few months earlier when she was holidaying there. Like most of the young, unmarried Arab men I befriended over the decades, they knew a gorgeous boy when they saw one, but would have considered it absurd to attach to such desire an all-consuming social identity symbolised by the rainbow flag.....

The commotion will blow over and Egyptian boys, like Arab boys everywhere, will get back to banging each other like rabbits as they have been doing for millennia. It would take more than the rantings of an MP to eradicate such a deeply entrenched tradition. The golden rule, though, will remain: discretion is the name of the game. And that’s the lesson the rainbow flag activists should now take on board.

 I'm sure that this pragmatic attitude (you can do gay stuff, but just keep it discrete) is considered appalling by Western gay activists who are all consumed with the importance of gay identity.  And I can understand the objection when gay identity can mean risking jail.    But I wonder if, in the long run, there will be a move back in the West towards the more ancient view that gay sex didn't have to equate with gay identity?

A late for Halloween story

At Catholic website Crux, the story of the Curse of St Peter.  Rather like an early, papal version of the Curse of Tutenkamun, actually.   

Opioids and libertarians, again

Jonah Goldberg in National Review makes some sense:

Think of the opioid crisis as the fruit of partial legalization. In the 1990s, for good reasons and bad, the medical profession, policymakers, and the pharmaceutical industry made it much easier to obtain opioids in order to confront an alleged pain epidemic. Doctors prescribed more opioids, and government subsidies made them more affordable. Because they were prescribed by doctors and came in pill form, the stigma reserved for heroin didn’t exist.

 

When you increase supply, lower costs, and reduce stigma, you increase use. And guess what? Increased use equals more addicts.

A survey by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one-third of the people who were prescribed opioids for more than two months became addicted. A Centers for Disease Control study found that a very small number of people exposed to opioids are likely to become addicted after a single use.

The overdose crisis is largely driven by the fact that once addicted to legal opioids, people seek out illegal ones — heroin, for example — to fend off the agony of withdrawal once they can’t get, or afford, any more pills. Last year, 64,000 Americans died from overdoses. Some 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War.

Kevin undone

Gee, if the account of Kevin Spacey's tactics for chatting up/groping men at news.com.au today is accurate, the long standing feeling from interviews that he is, well, creepy seems very justified. 

If he were to admit they are true, the only way I can see Spacey try to defend himself would be to argue that gay men have always been more blunt and direct when seeking sex (which would be true) - but it is refreshing to see that younger gay men are prepared to come out now and say that they don't welcome power plays in sex, just as women don't.   Acknowledging that gay men can be as sleazy as straight men is, in an odd way,  a good thing for normalising attitudes towards gay folk, as I can't help but feel that there has been an exaggeration implicit in the promotion of same sex marriage that everything is fine in the world of gay relationships apart from that issue.  For other human issues relating to relationships and decent behaviour to be acknowledged from the community is therefore a good thing.    

Convictions noted

That Western Australian case of the two nutty women who murdered an 18 year old Asperger's guy for a thrill kill has resulted in their conviction, as was entirely predictable.   Their attempts at blaming each other were exceptionally implausible. 

CCTV footage showed the teenager leaving the shops with the accused pair and security footage from their home showed the three entering the Broughton Way house around 10.30am.

"Mr Pajich did not ever emerge from that house alive," state prosecutor James McTaggart said in his opening address to the jury....

Mr Pajich's body was discovered around a week later buried in the pair's backyard garotted with multiple stab wounds to his chest and neck.

The home's loungeroom had a large section of carpet cut out, concealed by a couch, and police found multiple blood stains and knifes at the property.

Both women denied murdering Mr Pajich and blamed each other.

Lilley claimed she was unaware Mr Pajich had been killed and that Lenon must have murdered him and concealed the crime while she was taking a three-hour nap in the next room.

Lenon however admitted witnessing Lilley stab Mr Pajich to death, claiming she helped conceal the crime out of fear.

Bear in mind this:

Both originally lied to police and told detectives they had not seen Mr Pajich the day he went missing but later admitted he had visited their home.

During the trial, the jury heard how Lilley was obsessed with serial killers and knives, and had told a friend she wanted to kill someone before she turned 25.

She often referred to herself as SOS, a serial killer character she created for a book she wrote as a teenager in 2007.... 

Lilley, who took the stand for five days during the trial, claimed messages between her and Lenon about killing someone were role-play for a new book she was writing.

She claimed she was in character when she wrote Lenon a long message 13 days before the murder.

"I feel as though I cannot rest until the blood or the flesh of a screaming, pleading victim is gushing out and pooling on the floor, until all the roads and streets are streamed red and abandoned, and the fear in the back of everyone's minds and on the tongue of each human that's left standing is SOS," it read.

"I cannot shift this belief that the world has become not only ready for me, it needs me to be ready."

Lenon replied: "It's definitely time. I am ready. You are ready".

They should stay in jail for a very long time.  Preferably til dead...

Yet more murder

Gruesome murder is back in the news again this week.

I don't think that a likely serial killer in Japan is getting quite as much publicity as I expected.   Seems to have been pushed out of the headlines a bit by the goings on in Washington.  

Update:  the details appear to involve a very (sad to say) Japanese set of circumstances, involving loneliness, social media, suicidal desire, the quasi romantic (well, to some people - women especially perhaps) idea of doing it with someone else, and even the suggestion of disturbing sex.  Just awful:

Police suspect Shiraishi found suicidal women on the Internet and pretended that he also wanted to kill himself, posting, “Let’s die together.”

After they showed up, he invited them to his apartment where he killed them and took about 500,000 yen ($4,390) in total from the bodies, according to police.

Further information on his “obscene purposes” was unavailable.

According to police, the first victims were an unmarried couple.

In August this year, Shiraishi had a meal with the couple with whom he had become acquainted through Twitter.

On a later day, he invited the woman to his apartment, where he killed her, according to police.

The woman’s male acquaintance, unable to contact her, asked Shiraishi if he knew where she was. Shiraishi also invited him to the apartment and killed him, police said.

Shiraishi told police he killed most of the nine people when he met them in person for the first time.
Some of the nine people had posted suicidal messages on the Internet, and Shiraishi promised to meet them directly after exchanging messages online.

The Black Death (or sickness, at least)

I don't mind licorice, but don't eat it often.   I had read before that eating large amounts was not good for your health, but Vox explains in more detail:

According to the Food and Drug Administration, if you eat 2 ounces of black licorice — the equivalent of about four Twizzler vines — daily for at least two weeks, you could wind up in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat or even heart failure. 

That’s a lot of licorice — maybe more than most licorice lovers eat in a day. But the FDA is onto something: Licorice root contains a medically active compound called glycyrrhizin acid, and researchers have been discussing its potential health complications for years. Glycyrrhizin can elevate a person’s blood pressure, leading some to experience abnormal heart rhythms, lethargy, even congestive heart failure. Glycyrrhizin can also interfere with other medications and supplements, the FDA warned.

“No matter what your age, don’t eat large amounts of black licorice at one time,” the agency said, adding that people over 40 with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure seem to be most at risk of black licorice-related health complications.

Speaking of other teams...

Time to let the other team try

I still find Malcolm Turnbull likeable as a person, with his steadfast cheerfulness while the evidence continues to pile up around him that he and his Ministers are, shall we say, basically incompetent at this thing called "governing".  

So, seriously, isn't it time for an umpire or someone (electorate of New England, hello?) to tell him and his team that it's really time to take a break and give the other team, who could hardly do any worse, a go?   I mean, it just gets embarrassing after a while, watching the flaying about.

Rupert wants Donald

Who knows what's going on in the ageing mind of Rupert Murdoch, but people have been noticing how the Wall Street Journal is now agitating in defence of Trump and using all of the same "must get Hillary!" distraction squirrels as on Fox News and The New York Post, and up to and including hosting a piece arguing that Trump should just pardon everyone now, including himself!

It is all purely a coincidence that each Murdoch outlet is running the same line, I'm sure:

Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment. Mark Cunningham, the New York Post’s Executive Editorial Page Editor, also declined comment. Both did not answer questions regarding whether Murdoch had any input in editorial direction.

“There is a general flabbergastedness about the drift of the edit page,” said one former senior Wall Street Journal editor. “What is fascinating to a lot of people is, why are they now coming around to being sycophants to Trump, aping some of these things that are part of the Republican echo chamber?”

Given that these Murdoch outlets are actually encouraging Trump to get rid of Mueller, how dangerous has Rupert become to the rule of law and good governance?    "Very" is the obvious answer, surely.  

Murder talk (for Halloween)

I've noticed that the prosecution case in Perth against a couple of weird women has concluded, and the details are of the most chilling kind - a thrill kill by a woman with a nutty obsession with both serial killers and kinky sex:

Over the past month, the court has heard allegations of how Ms Lilley, a young woman obsessed with knives and serial killers, and Ms Lenon – a mother-of-three with a history as a “submissive” in Perth’s BDSM scene – had built a close relationship, referring to each other by ‘pet names’.

Ms Lilley was referred to as SOS – which was also a serial killer character in a book she had written in her teens, and also the name of an American serial killer who had murdered eight victims in the mid 70s’.

Ms Lenon was known as ‘Corvina’, a name she had adopted through her participation in bondage and sado-masochistic sex.

The state alleges after the two women met and moved in together, along with Ms Lenon’s younger children, they teamed up to carry out a ‘thrill kill’ on a vulnerable target.

That target, according to the state, was Mr Pajich, who was known to Ms Lenon through a shared attendance at a Kwinana college and his friendship with her teenaged son Cameron.

The 18 year-old was also on the autism spectrum, and according to Mr Taggart “still inhabited a child’s world”, including a passionate interest in computer games.

It was that interest which the state says Ms Lenon used to lure Mr Pajich to the Orelia house she shared with the 26 year-old Ms Lilley, who worked as a nightfill manager at Woolworths in Palmyra.
“Trudi Lenon delivered Aaron Pajich right into Jemma Lilley’s hands and together they murdered him,” Mr McTaggart said.

“These two ladies took Aaron Pajich’s life in a way that was as brutal and violent as could possibly be imagined.”

The motive, Mr McTaggart said, was Ms Lilley’s “life’s objective” to kill someone before she was 25 years-old, which she had revealed to a friend some years before.

 While it appears clear that they had some sort of sexual kink relationship, I'm not sure whether they count themselves as lesbians or not.

In any event, it got me thinking of other thrill kill nutty lesbian cases:   Brisbane had its famous one in  the "lesbian vampire killer" murder in 1991 - the main protagonist is now living in the community on parole.  

There was also the famous New Zealand case that was the subject of the Heavenly Creatures film.   (OK, not a thrill kill exactly, but a weird, obsessively relationship between young women none the less.)

Now, we're obviously not talking a huge sample here, but in comparison to male gay couples, apart from the famous Leopold and Loeb murder from way back in 1924, I can't say I have heard of any gay couple murders which are in the "thrill kill" category.

Sure, serial killers are almost always male, and presumably often kill for all sorts of demented reasons, but my point is that it seems that the shared idea of a kill, based on weird fantasy motivations, might be more of a female/lesbian thing than a male thing?  

I notice that some people complain of lesbians being too readily portrayed as obsessive killers in Hollywood -  I don't really know as it is a genre of film that generally doesn't interest me. 

But, given the grotesque examples of some lesbian murderers, I have to say I'm not all that surprised.  If any reader wants to set me straight with true stories of male couples murdering for the weirdest motivations, let me know...

I'm with Tony

Oh - tough guy cook and travel writer Anthony Bourdain is making a pretty transparent attack on Tarantino for working with Harvey Weinstein for so many years and doing nothing about his knowledge of Weinstein's uber sleaze behaviour.

I've never liked Tarantino or his movies, so good.   Mind you, Bourdain acts it up a bit too much for my liking too, but he's OK in small doses.    

Why Trump is interested in the JFK case

Great column by Adam Gopnik about the release of additional papers on the JFK assassination.

He starts:

The release last Thursday of previously classified, or at least unseen, government files of all kinds relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy is being heralded as Donald Trump’s decision—though it was simply his decision not to prevent their release, which had long been scheduled. In fact, at the last minute, Trump listened to requests from the intelligence services not to release some three hundred of the remaining three thousand files. But that decision raised more suspicions, so on Friday night the President tweeted, “I will be releasing ALL JFK files other than the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living.”

And here are the best paragraphs:

The pretense last week was that, in releasing the files, Trump took action on behalf of the American people, in the pursuit of openness. But Trump acts in his own interest, and his pursuit of apparent openness has as its real end the undermining of public institutions and practices which depend on professionalism, independence, and trust. Trump was likely prodded to speak out about the files by Roger Stone, one of the figures from the fringes of American life whom the President has brought to the center. Stone wrote a book titled “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.” Last week, his profane rants got him suspended from Twitter, but he still appears to be in touch with Trump. Stone has warned of the “deep state,” the new villain of right-wing paranoia—well, an old villain, newly restored to primacy. The thinking in this case seems to be that, if Trump’s followers can be persuaded that no one in the “permanent government” should be trusted, they can perhaps be more easily persuaded not to trust the institutions of the state when, say, they pursue charges against anyone associated with his campaign. The implicit, and increasingly explicit, argument here is: Don’t listen to special counsels who worked for the F.B.I.; those are the guys that withheld all those documents  about the J.F.K. assassination.

As David Frum has pointed out, what Trump’s surrogates really mean by “the deep state” is the rule of law. The idea that there are civil servants or functionaries within the government whose chief trait is loyalty to the Constitution and to the ongoing administration of the state is intolerable to the autocratic mind. So, if those other actors question challenge the White House, they must be taunted, demoralized, and, if possible, dismissed.

In time for Halloween - Holy Bowels

Yeah, we've all read about incorrupt corpses of various saints before, but this article in The Atlantic is a good summary of the topic.  I liked this detail:

Despite (or perhaps because of) the respect accorded to the saintly dead by medieval Christians, they were rarely allowed to rest in peace. As soon as a holy person died, his or her corpse would be scrutinized for signs of sanctity by those who prepared it for burial. When Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, died in 1200, his viscera were removed from his body, which was taken a long distance for burial. Some among his household were initially uncomfortable with this plan, but they warmed to it when the episcopal bowels provided first proof of their owner’s holiness. As the bishop’s chaplain Adam of Eynsham reported in his biography of Hugh, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, “no water or stool was found, and they were as clean and immaculate as if someone had carefully washed and wiped them.”

Certain cynics dismissed the results as the inevitable consequence of the dysentery that plagued Hugh in his final days, but others claimed it a miracle. 

 The reason the lack of decay was seen as significant is explained here:

The insistence on the lifelike qualities of these corpses comes from the Christian tradition that “the saints are not called dead but sleeping,” as St. Jerome once put it. They were expected to possess lifelike qualities even in death. Pink and white coloring, for example, was thought to be a sign of readiness for the resurrection: Their intact, lifelike bodies would literally stand and walk, just as Jesus had done.

 But an obsession with sexual purity was apparently part of the interest in post mortem lack of normal decay, too:

 The medieval mind also connected bodily integrity with virginity. The condition of corpses was thought to reflect individuals’ conduct during their lifetimes. Rapid decay was indicative of sin, whereas miraculous preservation signified sexual purity. This was especially true if a well-preserved corpse oozed sweet-smelling balsam. White corpses, too, were strongly associated with white lilies, a common symbol of virginity. Sexual purity was one of the most important qualities for a would-be saint, but it was also one of the hardest attributes to prove. The discovery of a perfect corpse could provide evidence that few would dare to question.

Blade Runner 2049 in three words (followed by many more)

Trying too hard.

Let me expand:   it's visually fantastic, we can all agree.  Everyone likes the flying cars again, I'm sure. The acting is fine, too.

But, here the slide in my opinion begins:  musically -  loudly pretentious is probably the best description.  (The Vangelis score in the original was just 80's pretentious.)   And I should have guessed, given its fondness for the sudden blare:  Hans Zimmer worked on the soundtrack.  He'll get an Oscar for Dunkirk: a really remarkable and crucial-to-the-movie score; but lots of people complain about aspects of his work on other Nolan films, and I can understand why.

As for my overall rating, I would have to call it a failure.   Not a completely unworthy failure, but a failure nonetheless.

It's OK, I suppose, to try to explore to a deeper extent the themes of the original, but this movie does it mainly by some protracted, serious, very serious, dialogue exchanges which go on too long and don't linger in the mind as to their cleverness or emotional punch.  The impression left with me was that the screenplay was just trying too hard for intellectual seriousness. 

In fact, having watched  three of director Denis Villeneuve's films now, I recognise this as a constant theme in my reaction to his work - he's visually stylish, but always leaves me cold in any emotional connection to the material.   I'm not entirely sure how he achieves that, but despite liking visually what I saw on screen for much of Sicario, Arrival and now this one, by the end of all I felt I had not really been convinced by the human story in any of them.

In this one, the Ryan Gosling character is played sympathetically, but somehow, there is no real emotional punch to watching his woes.   Actually, now that I think of it, the audience probably felt the most sympathy for his software girlfriend character rather than to any  than any flesh and blood one.   That's interesting, but not a good thing. 

For Blade Runner, the problem is probably that its core story is not really worth dwelling on, beyond a quick narrative hit and run.  In fact, re-watching the original cinema released movie last weekend, I was quite surprised at how quickly it went.  And that works fine for Philip K Dick movies, since he wasn't really about plausible science scenarios: just speculative ones allowing him for a one story, or one novel, take on his favourite themes of identity, memory, reality and sanity; all reflecting his own long ongoing issues with his drug addled mind.

Just as everyone agrees that it was a mistake to try to expand on the original implausibilities in The Matrix for a further two movies (massive numbers of comatose humans as alien battery banks: yeah sure),  I reckon it's not a good idea to dwell on the concept of vat growing quasi-humans to adulthood for the purposes of dangerous deep space or general slave work, not to mention giving them fake memories.   Maybe I'm just particularly resistant to the concept:  readers may recall that there was one well regarded science fiction movie that completely left me cold when I found out that that was the explanation.  

But dwell on this scenario is what the people who made this movie are trying to do, and it also felt very much like they were hoping to get a third one out of it too.   However, I see that the director and Ryan Gosling say that there are no definite plans for that.  Given the relatively poor box office, I think a third is now unlikely, and that's not a bad thing.

In fact, one thing that does surprise me is that the slowness and quasi pretentiousness of some of the key scenes were not recognized by the studio, and that they funded it in its current form.   It just seems to me that it should have been obvious on paper that it would not have wide audience appeal.    I fully understand why it has not drawn in the crowds despite mainly positive reviews.  

Again, the movie looks a million bucks, as they used to say before inflation, and all credit to some imaginative production design work.  I didn't fall asleep (Hans took care of that) but I was consciously wishing more than once that the plot would move faster, and (mainly) that it would make me feel more.

Update:  Deborah Ross at the Spectator didn't care for it either, and shares my skepticism of the scenario:

Thirty years later, we now have Ryan Gosling as our blade runner, K, in a world where replicants are still produced, this time by Wallace (Jared Leto), a mogul who sits atop a vast corporation and talks a lot of New Age gibberish. I think he’s meant to be evil, but he just seems like the worst kind of yoga teacher. You do have to wonder why anyone still has any faith in replicants, given their troublesome history, or why they are made so lifelike. They’d be much more useful slaves if, say, they had multiple arms shaped like shovels, plus you’d also be able to spot them a mile off. Just saying.

Spoiler warning:   Thinking about it overnight - what is the point of making replicants with a sex drive, anyway, if you never want them to be able to reproduce?   I suppose there could be a class of prostitute replicants for the sex industry, but why should someone like K have one at all?    Honestly, the basic scenario just makes less and less sense the more you think about it....

Alien asteroid

Interesting astronomy news:

Astronomers have spotted some kind of outer space rock that's the first visitor from outside of our solar system that they've ever observed.

The discovery has set off a mad scramble to point telescopes at this fast-moving object to try to learn as much as possible before it zips out of sight.

"Now we finally have a sample of something from another solar system, and I think that's really neat, " says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, "and so you'd love to see if it looks like stuff in our solar system."

It's long been assumed that an interstellar object like this one should be out there, because giant planets in forming solar systems are thought to toss out bits of space crud that haven't yet glommed into anything. But this is the first time scientists have actually found one.

The mysterious object is small — less than a quarter mile in diameter — and seems to have come from the general direction of the constellation Lyra, moving through interstellar space at 15.8 miles per second, or 56,880 miles per hour.

But there's no tension in this - it was spotted on the way out of the solar system, not on the way in (when we could all have speculated as to whether it was actually an alien spaceship):

"The orbit is very convincing. It is going so fast that it clearly came from outside the solar system," says Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's whipping around the Sun, it has already gone around the Sun, and it has actually gone past the Earth on its way out."

Agreed

Understand annoyance with extreme elements of PC  but not what Right gains from promoting this un-funny  clown https://t.co/FGPd4TXxcd

— jtfsoon (@jtfsoon) October 26, 2017

Good to see a J Soon tweet I can fully endorse.

I watched the 15 minute interview noted in the tweet, just to see if there was any sense in which all the Miloheads were right: that their hero had really showed up the interviewers  - "Milo slays Aussie feminist"  "Milo kills it with hopeless Australian media"  "Thank you Milo, aussie media is so embarrassing", etc etc.

And the answer, unsurprisingly, is - no, he didn't.    There was no "crushing defeat" on either side - the panel made good general points; Milo barrelled on at a rapid rate making myriad claims of misrepresentation which no one had time or capacity to challenge him on in that interview format.  He also make multiple claims of his vast success, as if having foolish fans is self evidently reason you can't contest the offensiveness and contradictions of his style.    Conservatives of only a decade ago would have run a million miles from his self promotion and dis-ingenuous use of "mixing high brow and low brow" as a way of claiming offensive insults as legitimate.   But the culture war allows them to forgive everything.

I've also noted before that the Right wing culuture warrior class on the internet have, over the last few years, gone completely over the top with ridiculous claims of victory in debate which are apparent only to them, and the language used is routinely that of violent, physical defeat.

I really find it creepy and puzzling, and put it down yet again to the unexpectedly corrosive effects of the internet as a means of communication.    

We can see what is going on, but how to stop it?

There's an analysis up at Slate as to how Hannity operates on Fox News, entitled Hannity is a Nightly Recruitment Video for the Cult of Trump, and I reckon it's entirely accurate.

The Right wingnut side of politics swallows whole virtually any conspiracy spun by the Right wing media, bedroom pundits or paid Russian disinformation disseminators;  they have been psychologically primed for this by years of dwelling in the conspiracy mindset of climate change denial.

The effects are absolutely cult like:   the world is divided into those who perceive the Truth, and everyone else is evil and corrupt and depraved.   The faults of the Leader are readily forgiven, as they are in all cults, as the power of ultimate righteousness are not held back by the mere temporary foibles of the Leader.  There's quite the element of a persecution complex, too:  the media are out to get their leader by lying about him. 

But how is this addressed?

The provision of information contrary to their conspiracy mindset is one thing - but we all know that is not enough to break your average cult.

Surely a huge part of the problem is the refusal of the more moderate Right to call out the cult as a cult.   Cults are weakened when former insiders break away and speak publicly about the tactics as viewed from inside. 

In particular, any half reasonable journalist or worker in Fox News needs to break from the network and speak openly about the rabid, harmful partisanship of the likes of Hannity.  

The ultimate would be, of course, the actual ownership of Fox News disowning the awful obsequiousness of most of its hosts - but Murdoch would have to want to stop counting money for that to happen.  Quite frankly, the death of Rupert can't come fast enough if we want any hope of his inheritors actually taking that step.

Besides that, what hope do we have?  

In other Papal news

It's a funny old world, isn't it, when the Pope is making phone calls to the International Space Station in the same week the first English translation of the rite of exorcism is distributed in the US.   (I see that it's not on sale to the public, though:  it would seem being a freelance exorcist is not something the Church wants to encourage.)

The Pope is also making conciliatory statements about the Reformation (not that he is the first to do so, of course, but it will probably annoy the noisy, Right wing conservative branch of the Church anyway.):

The grace of God and decades of ecumenical dialogue have enabled Catholics and Protestants to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation together, emphasizing their shared baptism and faith in Jesus, Pope Francis said.

But at the Catholic Herald, there's an interesting summary of the nastiness of the Church of England's break from Rome, which I'll quote from in part:

With little alternative, Henry resorted to the most basic tool of his power: violence.

Burning people for heresy was an option, but it would raise a few eyebrows. The problem was that Henry largely believed in the same traditional theology that his people did. He had not changed his views from the time of writing the Assertio. This ruled out widespread heresy trials. The solution his circle came up with was more radical.

Treason was originally a common law offence, but put on to a statutory basis by King Edward III in the Treason Act 1351. (It is still in force, although heavily modified, and last used in 1945 against William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”.)

The punishment for high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering – first recorded in 1238 for an “educated man-at-arms” (armiger literatus) who tried to assassinate King Henry III. Other famous early victims included Dafydd ap Gruffydd in 1283 and William Wallace in 1305. The victim was drawn (dragged) to the place of execution on a hurdle or sledge. There he was hanged (slowly strangled), and while alive his genitals were cut off, his abdomen was sliced open, his bowels were pulled out, and they were burned in front of him. Once dead, he was cut down, beheaded, sliced into quarters, and a section sent to each of the four corners of the kingdom for public display. For a woman, the punishment was burning and quartering.

Henry’s first victim was a 28-year-old nun, Elizabeth Barton. She had visions which earned her a following among leading clergymen, and she had even enjoyed an audience with Henry. However, when her prophecies spoke of the wrong Henry was doing by abandoning Katherine and marrying Anne, she crossed a line. Her visions, in fact, suited Cranmer, as condemning her gave him the chance to damage some of her theologically conservative clergy supporters. He and Cromwell obtained her confession to having faked trances, to heresy, and to treason. On April 20, 1534 she was hanged and beheaded at Tyburn along with five of her supporters (two monks, two friars, and a secular priest). Her head was then spiked on London Bridge, making her the only woman in English history to suffer this fate.

The article goes on to summarise some of the English Reformation's greatest lows. 

It's remarkable how attitudes have changed to gory punishment, isn't it?  I think I have speculated before that the best explanation as to why the public butchering of humans as punishment has changed from public spectacle to something sickening to contemplate is probably due to public butchery of animals being a common sight in the market place of old.   The treat a human in the same way was to degrade them to a level of animal, but the sight of blood and gore was not of itself something so uncommon as it is now.

Anyway, in other Reformation anniversary news, a bishop and a Cardinal are getting into a bit of dispute about how to characterise it:

German cardinal Gerhard Müller has said the Protestant Reformation was not a “reform” but a “total change of the foundations of the Catholic faith”.

Writing for Italian website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said modern-day Catholics often discuss Martin Luther “too enthusiastically”, mainly due to an ignorance of theology.

His comments come after the secretary-general of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, reportedly said “the Reformation carried out by Martin Luther 500 years ago was an event of the Holy Spirit,” adding: “The Reformation corresponds to the truth expressed in the saying ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda’”.

The tightrope the Church is currently walking continues... 

Don't mention the war...

Some pretty extraordinary news regarding the local Catholic Church's take on the situation in Myanmar, in light of a forthcoming visit by the Pope:

When Pope Francis visits Myanmar in late November, church leaders will be listening nervously to his every word, specifically hoping he does not speak about the Rohingya. Any mention of the Muslim group, widely hated in the predominantly Buddhist country, will have widespread implications.

"The pope's visit is keeping us very anxious, as many things can go wrong. A wrong word from the Holy Father can plunge the country into chaos," said Father Mariano Soe Naing, communications director for Myanmar's bishops.

"If the Holy Father in his speech evens mentions the Rohingya, the nationalist groups will respond. This is a historic problem, and we need a lot of time to solve this problem. We cannot just say this or that. That is the reason why Aung San Suu Kyi cannot say anything," he said, referring to the de facto leader of Myanmar's civilian government, who has been criticized internationally for failing to speak out against the military's actions against Rohingya in northern Rakhine state.

Father Soe Naing told Catholic News Service that while the bishops support democracy and back Aung San Suu Kyi, they understand her silence on the Rohingya.

"Aung San Suu Kyi has no right to comment on anything. The military has the authority to decide everything," he said. "The whole world wants to criticize her, wants her to fight against the military in favor of full democracy. But that's a fight she cannot win. She might have the force of the people behind her, but the bloodshed would be terrible. The blood would flow like rivers in this country. The military is not ready to give up easily. She knows that well."

The Asian church news agency ucanews.com reported the country's Catholic bishops told the papal nuncio in June that they would prefer Pope Francis avoid mentioning the Rohingya by name.

The true Pooh

At the New Yorker, there's a review of a film based on the true life strained relationship between AA Milne, of Winnie the Pooh fame, and the real life Christopher Robin.

Maybe I have read about this before, but had forgotten how Milne was traumatised by World War 1:

A. A. Milne fought in the epic Battle of the Somme, in 1916, when a million men were killed or injured. It was one of the bloodiest battles in human history. Milne, already a playwright and a novelist, was among those wounded. He went home shell-shocked, with all the haunting symptoms of what is today diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. He confused swarming bees with bullets buzzing by him, popping balloons with incoming cannon fire. He was morose and distant.

The success of the books brought attention to the son which was not wanted:

When he went off to boarding school, Christopher Robin Milne was never able to escape his name, or the storybook character portrayed by his father. He was taunted and teased and pushed down staircases. Fame produced a different kind of trauma from which he spent much of the rest of his life trying to recover.

You can read more at the link.

Going French in Vietnam

I was rather surprised to learn, via watching Travels with My Father on Netflix (about which I might  write separately regarding my mixed feelings), that in Vietnam they've been busy building a fake French village in the mountains:

It's called Ba Na Hills, and is very, very much like a Disney style imitation town, with hotels, rides, and Ukrainian actors who come out and dance in the square in something like Cinderella costumes.   Access is via a very long cable car ride.

Remarkable.

Blog needs cute

Happy baby sloth

Update:  Oh my.  Two comedians have just agreed that everyone who finds the clip cute are evil bastards:

A few observations:   Is Wendy Harmer a sloth body language expert?  Does she have a sixth sense in telling if a baby sloth is actually stressed?

Secondly:  I don't know how many wild baby sloths are kidnapped for pet purposes, but I had assumed it was a case of it being in a human setting because it was orphaned, or from a zoo and having a check up, or some such innocent explanation.   Perhaps I'm wrong, but how do I know this particular sloth is a victim?

Thirdly:   I think both of these comedians have talked about suffering bouts of depression before.  (Pobjie definitely has).   Seems to me they like to spread it around.

The ultimate bad boss

The stories of Harvey Weinstein as an abusive boss are really remarkable.  Here, in The Guardian, for example:

“Miramax was absolutely a cult, the cult of Harvey, and that’s how he got away with his behaviour for so long,” said Webster. “It was crude but very effective. People became brainwashed, some people had nervous breakdowns. People would be hired and then destroyed for no apparent reason, and then their careers and lives would be in tatters.”

He added: “Everything Harvey did was all about manipulation and fear. He was a massive bully. He would flatter people, get the best out of them and then dump on them really, really hard to destroy them. It was this whole thing of breaking people down so you could build them up in your own image.”

An ex marine developed nervous tics:

Other former Miramax employees described how their years working at the company had left them with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I remember friends would ask me what it was like to work at Miramax and I would always tell them that it’s kind of like telling people you fell down the stairs,” said Jesse Berdinka, a former US marine who worked at Miramax for seven years and said the “mental weight” of the sometimes “sadistic” experience would affect the rest of his life.

Berdinka, who worked his way from being a temp to being vice-president of development and production at Miramax, said he began drinking more than he should have in order to deal with the extreme stress, and developed nervous tics. The story of his own rise in the ranks was typical, he said, because when outsiders were brought into senior jobs they often did not last long.

“You see stories of domestic abuse on the news and think, how can people keep subjecting themselves to that? And then I would walk into the office the next day,” Berdinka said. “For me at least it was the drip, day after day, of never knowing if you are good enough or if you are going to be at the top of the world or the bottom of the shit list.”

An anonymous woman:

A third former senior executive, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, said she believed she suffered from PTSD. She described how Weinstein threw a glass frame in her direction, narrowly missing her head. The frame contained a picture of Weinstein and Mick Jagger.

“It wasn’t just sexual abuse. Everyone got abused. It didn’t really matter how high up you were, you got the same treatment,” she said.

“If I were to sum up the physical and emotional response, I would say I feel it is PTSD,” the executive said. She said some of the symptoms re-emerged when the first stories of Weinstein’s abuse were aired on television this month, making her physically ill.

“I’ve had years of recurring nightmares. Ten years of nightmares, while I was there and after,” she said.

The Washington Post had some spectacular stories too:

 And this past week, the Wall Street Journal described a Weinstein Company executive conference gone bad: “In about 2011, after an argument over how to allocate the studio’s resources between their respective movies, Harvey Weinstein punched his brother in the face in front of about a dozen other Weinstein Co. executives, knocking him to the ground, said two people who were present. ‘I’ve been assaulted!’ Bob yelled, according to those people. Bob, who was bloodied, wanted to press charges, but was talked out of it, according to a person familiar with the incident.”

 And he's been physically assaulting people for decades:

Producer Alan Brewer recounted to The Washington Post one episode from early in Weinstein’s career, circa 1984. Weinstein became enraged when he couldn’t locate Brewer for a few hours on the day before a premiere, and when Weinstein finally found him, as The Post reported, Weinstein “lunged at him and began punching him in the head, Brewer said; the skirmish tumbled into the corridor and then the elevator. By the time Brewer reached the street, intent on never associating with the Weinsteins again, he said, Harvey was pleading for him to stay.” 

 A real nutter from way back...

More on teenagers and marijuana being a bad mix

The study is about teenage use and earlier onset of schizophrenia:

At the World Psychiatric Association’s World Congress in Berlin on October 9, Hannelore Ehrenreich of the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine presented results of a study of 1,200 people with schizophrenia. The investigation analyzed a wide range of genetic and environmental risk factors for developing the debilitating mental illness. The results—being submitted for publication—show people who had consumed cannabis before age 18 developed schizophrenia approximately 10 years earlier than others. The higher the frequency of use, the data indicated, the earlier the age of schizophrenia onset. In her study neither alcohol use nor genetics predicted an earlier time of inception, but pot did. “Cannabis use during puberty is a major risk factor for schizophrenia,” Ehrenreich says.

Moderate libertarian explains himself

There is much to like in the explanation given by Will Wilkinson at the nice libertarian Niskansen Centre as to what makes their approach different from your regular, ideologically driven, Ayn Rand and gun sympathising, leave-me-and-my-money-alone!, government-welfare-is-for-losers, climate change? who-cares?-even-if-it's-real, and-I'll-chose-to-fence-sit-on-that-because-I-hate-taxes, I'll-be-on-my-floating-island-with-my-fellow-libertarians-genetically-engineering-embryos-for-life-on-Mars-anyway average libertarian.

Some key parts:

Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next? 

The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. This sort of political ideal actually can’t help us find our way through the thicket of real-world politics into the clearing of justice. I’ve discussed the problems with ideal theory at length, in the context Gerald Gaus’ tremendous book The Tyranny of the Ideal, in a Vox column. This piece will be easier to understand if you read that first. Jacob Levy’s paper, “There’s No Such Thing as Ideal Theory,” is an outstanding complement. And, on the more technical side, the work of UCSD’s David Wiens is state of the art, and adds texture to Gaus’ critique...

The fact that all our evidence about how social systems actually work comes from formerly or presently existing systems is a huge problem for anyone committed to a radically revisionary ideal of the morally best society. The further a possible system is from a historical system, and thus from our base of evidence about how social systems function, the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would work if it were realized. And the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would actually work, the more likely we are to be mistaken that it is more free, or more equal, or more socially just than other systems, possible or actual.  

Indeed, there’s basically no way to rationally justify the belief that, say, “anarcho-capitalism” ranks better in terms of libertarian freedom than “Canada 2017,” or the belief  that “economic democracy” ranks better in terms of socialist equality than “Canada 2017.”

You may think you can imagine how anarcho-capitalism or economic democracy would work, but you can’t.  You’re really just guessing—extrapolating way beyond your evidence. You can’t just stipulate that it works the way you want it to work. Rationally speaking, you probably shouldn’t even suspect that your favorite system comes out better than an actual system. Rationally speaking, your favorite probably shouldn’t be your favorite. Utopia is a guess.

He then looks at some rankings that countries are given in terms of personal and economic freedom by the Cato Institute (not entirely sure I'm sure their methodology is sound, but still) and makes the observation:

Every highlighted country is some version of the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state. Evidently, this general regime type is good for freedom. Indeed, it is likely the best we have ever done in terms of freedom. 

Moreover, Denmark (#5), Finland (#9), and the Netherlands (#10) are among the world’s “biggest” governments, in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP. The “economic freedom” side of the index, which embodies a distinctly libertarian conception of economic liberty, hurts their ratings pretty significantly. Still, according to a libertarian Human Freedom Index, some of the freest places in on Earth have some of the“biggest” governments. That’s unexpected....

That is our basic data. It doesn’t necessarily imply that the United States ought to do more redistributive social spending. But when a freedom index, built from libertarian assumptions, shows that freedom thrives in many places with huge welfare states, it should lead us to downgrade our estimate of the probability that liberty and redistribution are antithetical, and upgrade our estimate of the probability that they are consistent, and possibly complementary. That’s the sort of consideration that mainly drives my current views, not ideal-theoretical qualms about neo-Lockean libertarian rights theories.

And I like these paragraphs too:

Ideal theory can drive political conflict by concealing overlapping consensus. Pretty much any way you slice it, Denmark is an actually-existing utopia. But so is Switzerland. So is New Zealand. The effective difference between the Nordic and Anglo-colonial models, in terms of “human freedom” and “social progress” is surpassingly slight. Yet passionate moral commitment to purist ideals of justice can lead us to see past the fact that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state, in whatever iteration, is awesome, and worth defending, from the perspective of multiple, rival political values. We miss the fact that these values fit together more harmoniously than our theories lead us to imagine. 

I suspect this has something to do with the fact that utopia-dwellers around the world seem to be losing faith in liberal democracy, and the fact that  “neoliberalism” can’t get no love, despite the fact that they measurably deliver the goods like crazy. Yet ideologues interpret this loss of faith as evidence of objective failure, which they diagnose as a lack of satisfactory progress toward their version of utopia, and push ever more passionately for an agenda they have no rational reason to believe would actually leave anyone better off.    

Really, the article is a bit of a high falutin way of saying what I have felt about libertarians for years - they don't really care about the evidence of what works in other nations in terms of tax and welfare mix, and regulation:  they just have their pat idea that small government, low taxes and little regulation is obviously a good thing.  Governing by set ideology, though, is never a good idea, whether you are a Marxist or a member of the cult of Ayn Rand. 

Even conservatives make bad Spielberg calls

I see via Jason that someone at American Conservative has written an appreciation of Stranger Things first season, but I can't say I agree with large slabs of his analysis, despite my own enjoyment of the TV show.

My main problem is that it's a bit rich for a conservative writer to be joining in on the typical progressive critic dissing of Spielberg for sentimentality, but I reckon that's what this guy is doing.

His comments on ET go particularly astray:

In E.T., the cuddly, barely articulate alien with the glowing heart is a kind of apotheosis of romanticized childhood; it functions as a Spielbergian critique of rationalistic adults who have forgotten how to love and feel. 

Er, ET is from an advanced civilisation that has perfected interstellar travel: that doesn't strike me as a very child-like thing.   He also appears to communicates telepathically with his kin:  isn't that the obvious reason he's "inarticulate" with Earthlings?

E.T. doesn’t speak much because he is Spielberg’s Rousseauan icon of pre-linguistic innocence; Eleven doesn’t speak much because she has been traumatized. 

Or - as I said - his species is telepathic.   He's more likely post-linguistic, not "pre-linguistic".

E.T.’s lack of speech reflects this innocence; Eleven’s lack of speech indicates a violation of her innocence. 

Oh for goodness sake, see above.

Look, I'll grant you that the film lets Gertie, in particular, perceive ET as child-like and in that sense "innocent".   But the older kids soon learn they are dealing with something very smart and advanced.

Unlike the scientists in E.T., the adults in Stranger Things don’t characteristically lack feeling or love; they either lack the knowledge of how to act on their love appropriately or the will to do so.

OK, the comment about the scientists in ET is just completely wrong!

One of the great things about the film is the way the screenplay gradually opens up the audience's perspective of what is going on with the adults stalking ET, from an initially mysterious and somewhat malevolent appearance, to an understanding that they are actually well intentioned.  It's made clear that Elliott has trouble seeing this due to his child's level limited perception.   No one in the film ends up evil* - there are misunderstandings on both sides, but the film is a lesson in being generous when interpreting the motives and actions of others.  That's what makes it such a positive story.

That the scientists don't lack feeling is clear from the specific, gentle scene between "Keys" (the Peter Coyote character, who leads the alien search team) and Elliott, in which the adult explains that finding ET is the fulfilment of a life long dream for him, too.   That scene, together with all the effort put in to saving the alien's life,  shows us the scientists are good, loving, and sad when they can't revive their patient.

At the same time, we don't begrudge Elliott never really "getting" that the adults are only trying to help - he's the one with the telepathic connection to the alien and the knowledge that the spaceship is returning; his lack of trust that the adults would believe his explanation of what needs to be done is understandable from his perspective. 

The film is great, and emotionally realistic, because the child hero remains psychologically a child throughout.   Sure, it feels at the end like it will be a key maturing event for him, especially when he looks back on it as he grows up, but he doesn't ever stop "acting his age" in the film.   Now that I think about it, it shares this feature with To Kill a Mockingbird - a smart kid getting her perceptions of adult life and motives opened up by events. 

As for Stranger Things:    one of the least satisfactory things was the lack of any explanation of emotional coldness of the research scientists as to what they were doing to Eleven.   It needed more emotional realism in that respect, and in that way, I would say that the lack of "sentimentality" in that part of the story was a fault, not a strength.  

In any event, I look forward to the next season.  

*   Some reader might point out the police/security team pulling guns on the escaping kids; but hey, that's just realism for gun happy America.  It's not clear they would ever have shot...

No big surprise to all but the stupid

Wingnuts being wingnuts will be in full hyperventilation mode about the Washington Post confirming that the Democrats and the Clinton campaign took over funding of the Steele dossier (from an unknown Republican who had started it), as if it wasn't obvious before today hat someone on the Democrat side must have done so.

So, as many, many people in comments in various places are saying "well duh".    

The Slate take on it is here "Does it matter?"  (Short answer - very little.)

Just wow

This sounds so ridiculous for a modern European nation, my initial reaction is to actually wonder if it is being reported right:

A Portuguese man convicted of assaulting his ex-wife will face no jail time — after an appeals court, citing the fact that his former wife was "adulterous," and noting that the Bible calls for adulterous women to be put to death, upheld his suspended sentence.

The judges called adultery a "serious attack" on a man's "dignity."

The decision has sparked outrage in Portugal.

According to Esquerda, the victim of the violent beating was, indeed, having a brief affair, which she decided to end. The man then told her husband about the relationship. Both men began directing death threats toward the woman, Esquerda writes. Then, working together, they attacked her; the scorned former sexual partner kidnapped her, then her husband, who had since divorced her, violently beat her.

The Associated Press has more on the case:

"The [husband[ was given a 15-month suspended sentence and a fine of 1,750 euros ($2,000) for using a bat spiked with nails to assault the woman in the street in 2015, leaving her covered in cuts and bruises.
"The prosecutor had argued the sentence was too lenient and asked an appeals court for prison time of 3 years and 6 months. But the appeal judges on Oct. 11 rejected his request."

 

The authoritarian Right is benefitting the most from the use of disinformation on the internet

Who can seriously argue that the Trump administration is not the most authoritarian sympathetic Presidency we have seen?    All the shouting of Trump that media criticism is fake news, and musing about revoking media licences;  his invitation in campaign rallies that protestors be beaten up; his thwarted desire for a military parade at his inauguration; his Chief of Staff drawing elitist distinctions between people who have served in the military and those who haven't; his inability to clearly condemn Nazi style marches because he knows the alt.right supports him.  

And who can argue that the disinformation rife through wingnut sites and social media was a major influence on his "base"? 

Today, I see that the New York Times has an article by a Filipino writer about how such deliberate disinformation techniques are prominent in the Philippines too, fully endorsed by the dangerous and nutty Duterte.

It starts:

MANILA — Yen Makabenta, a veteran journalist now at The Manila Times, wrote a prominent column last month about the American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who enthusiastically praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. “The Philippines is suffocating,” Mr. Makabenta quoted the ambassador as saying. “We must give President Duterte the space to run his nation.” Ms. Haley, he reported, warned of “destructive forces” that “have calibrated their plot to ouster movements” against Mr. Duterte.

Mr. Duterte no doubt appreciated Ms. Haley’s support. The only problem: It wasn’t true. Mr. Makabenta had based his column on a fake story from a website whose web address, grammatical errors and far-fetched assertions should have made clear that it was a counterfeit of Al Jazeera.

As it has around the world, the internet in the Philippines has become a morass of fake news and conspiracy theories, harassment and bullying.

Further down:

Mr. Duterte’s opponents have at times benefited from fake news, but a disproportionate amount of it favors him. Nobody knows for sure who funds these efforts, though a study by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project determined that the Duterte campaign paid $200,000 for as many as 500 dedicated trolls to attack dissenters and spread disinformation. (In response, Mr. Duterte called Oxford “a school for stupid people” — before admitting that he had in fact hired trolls.)

One of the most egregious employers of this tactic is an informal group that calls itself the Duterte Diehard Supporters, whose initials, not coincidentally, are the same as those for the Davao Death Squads, which killed crime suspects in Mr. Duterte’s hometown when he was mayor. These supporters spin circuitous defenses of Mr. Duterte’s administration, disseminate spurious reports and cast dissent as destabilization. The most dedicated have been rewarded with government positions or other employment with his allies.

That's awful, and once again it makes me think how no one saw this coming as a consequence of the medium for distributing information changing.   (Well, maybe someone gave warnings about it, but not that I'm aware.)

A libertarian idea that didn't work (not much of a surprise, really)

I've joined in with the rubbishing of Megan McArdle before (you can find the posts via the search bar at the right if you want), but now that she has written a column arguing that the libertarian's school voucher idea is pretty much a failure after 20 years of evidence, I'll cite her with approval on that issue at least!

The thing is, the explanation she gives makes sense to me, so why should I disagree with her, even though I think she is generally a bit of a dill?