To Coco or not to Coco (and a bonus list at the end)

For some years now, I haven't cared for Pixar films, and even puzzled over the critical high praise that the occasional one still achieves.   (See Inside Out - which is on my mental list of the most undeservedly  over-praised movies of all time*.)

But it has one out now on a Mexican theme, and I've been feeling increasingly interested in all things about that nation and culture for years, so I think I should probably see it.   Christopher Orr in The Atlantic thinks so, but then again, while he also has noted the decline of Pixar, he thinks it's not as good as Inside Out.  (?)   What's a reader of movie reviews supposed to do?

*  OK, lets get some of those title down on the record:

Forest Gump:   don't exactly hate it, but found it basically glum and depressing and just couldn't see the point.   Sometimes eccentric movies are worth it just for the eccentricity - not this time.

The Godfather:   noted here before that I only finally saw recently on streaming TV, and found abundant flaws in the story and acting that left me very surprised at how it maintains its status.   Again, not terrible terrible, just puzzlingly over praised. 

Unforgiven:    hated it.  Only viewed it once, when released at the cinema; immediately puzzled about what critics saw in it from a directorial or story point of view.   I don't think I had even evolved my full blown dismissal of Clint Eastwood as bringing anything of value to cinema at that time - this movie was probably the start of it.

Inside Out:  not emotionally resonate or funny at all;   other audience members seemed to me pretty bored too, yet it was seriously praised by the great majority of American critics in particular.  Don't get it.

Chariots of Fire:   a simple, simple story: so simple what was the freaking point of telling it?  High praise evidence only of the disproportionate effect a memorable theme can have on a movie's reception.  Otherwise, it really was an incredibly slight film.

The Truman Show:  contains no redeeming value at all.   Look, I consider reality TV to be pretty awful and don't watch it; but making a whole movie (as opposed to, say, a 30 minute Twilight Zone exercise) about how cruel and awful it could become and how our hero will endeavour to escape it has to contain some plausibility and not just be a fantasy exercise for it to work.   This movie doesn't.   I found it such an awful waste of my time that (I'm embarrassed to say), I actually expressed my disagreement to a stranger I was walking past on the way out of the cinema who was praising it to his girlfriend.   They slipped away quietly, not willing to engage in critical debate.  Sorry about that...

The Piano:   come on, surely you have to have two X chromosomes to think this is the most brilliant movie?   I've no problem with stories from a female perspective, but there was just something so overwhelmingly, blatantly "I'm a woman director putting a strong, resilient woman's story on screen"  about this whole exercise it felt like the male audience was being punished, or frozen out, or something.  (To be honest, I remember little about the story - am more remembering some of my reaction and discussion with female friend I saw it with at the time.)  Oddly, my mother didn't mind it - but of course, she has the chromosomes for it.

Ghostbusters (the original):  well, I only add this because of the nutty enthusiasm for it of alt.righters into attacking last year's OK-ish female version.   From memory, the original wasn't that big a hit with critics, and I would certainly agree that it wasn't really all that funny, although basically harmless.   Fast forward to 2016 and it seems that a certain group of males (admittedly, nutty obnoxious ones with no sense of proportion) seem to think it was comedy gold that was the most meaningful experience of their childhood.   Weird. 

Update:

Silence of the Lambs:   not offensively bad, just that I found it not particularly scary, tense or engaging.  I couldn't see was particularly well directed, either.   Teaches you that a movie can be remembered for just once sequence - her first visit to Hannibal.   The rest of it - couldn't see the reason for any praise, and have never watched it a second time.





That's it for now  - must come back to expand this list as I recall more.

All about crossing the road

Sounds like a bland post, but it's surprisingly interesting.  I didn't know anything about the recent move in the UK to deliberately build "shared spaces" at intersections, and how well they work for most people:



(On a minor point - I'm pretty sure this American narrator actually pronounces analysis as "anal - ysis", with "anal" as in the body part.  How many Americans do that?)

Things have improved

First:  Hey, Jason, it is not a case of a "few drunken rants" by Gibson.   According to Joe Eszterhas,  Mel's views in private were (are?) just shockingly nuts and he was (is?) a completely gullible antisemite.  Read this article, if you never have.   I don't know how he has kept any other than the most superficial of friends.  Update:  this article asks a good question - How on earth did Mel Gibson get forgiven by Hollywood.?

Back to the point of the post:   I suspect it was my relatively late use of sunglasses as an adult that might have doomed me to this (I used to read books sitting in the sun in the Botanic Gardens without sunglasses all through university) but my increasingly smeary vision in my right eye means I'll be having a cataract operation in January.

Which has led me to wonder about the history of cataract surgery.  It's more lurid than I knew:

Cataract surgery is one of the oldest surgical procedures known, first documented in the fifth century BC.^[12] In ancient times, cataracts were treated with a technique called couching, which could only be performed when the lens had become completely opaque, rigid, and heavy to the point that the supporting zonules had become fragile. The eye would then be struck with a blunt object with sufficient force to cause the zonules to break so that the lens would dislocate into the vitreous cavity, restoring limited but completely unfocused vision. Centuries later, the technique was modified so that a sharp fine instrument was inserted into the eye to break the zonules to cause the dislocation.

Fast forward 2,000 years or so, and things improved, a little:

The first reported surgical removal of a cataract from the eye occurred in Paris in 1748.^[13] The advent of topical anesthesia made this procedure more practical. The early techniques involved removing the entire opaque lens in one piece using an incision that went halfway around the circumference of the cornea. It was critical that the lens remained intact as it was being removed, so surgery was restricted to so-called ripe lenses: cataracts so hardened that they would not break into pieces as they were being removed. This limited the surgery to only the most advanced cataracts. Since fine sutures did not exist at that time, patients were kept immobilized with sandbags around their head while the wound healed. Consequently, the early literature reporting cataract surgery routinely documented the mortality rate (secondary to pulmonary emboli).

Fortunately, now they need the tiniest of holes:

The evolution of smaller surgical incisions was matched by the development of new lens implants created out of different materials (such as acrylic and silicone) that could be folded to allow the lens to be inserted through a tiny wound. At the present time, commercially available lenses can be inserted through wounds a little over 2 mm.

 This is a pretty good period of history to be living in...

Right wing pays out

The Guardian notes that the Australian Spectator, edited by the clown haired (and brained) Rowan Dean, has had a big loss in a defamation case:

Spectator Australia, the conservative magazine already struggling to survive with paid sales of about 8,000 copies, will be deeply wounded by a $572,674 payment to a Toowoomba family who say they were defamed by the publication. Editor Rowan Dean, who was Mark Latham’s co-host on the doomed Sky News show Outsiders, has maintained his silence about the eye-watering sum and how it will affect the Australian arm of the UK magazine.

Denis Wagner, one of four brothers to take legal action, told Weekly Beast the family just wanted justice after the magazine published an article, “Dam Busters! How Cater and Jones burst Grantham’s wall of lies”, which implied they were to blame for the Grantham flood. “We are pleased with the successful resolution of the claim, which vindicates the stance we have taken in this matter,” Wagner said. “We are now focusing on vindicating our reputations in our cases against Alan Jones and Channel Nine.”

The large out-of-court settlement was made ahead of a defamation trial that had been set down to start in Queensland this month. The Wagners took action against conservative commentator Nick Cater, as well as broadcaster Alan Jones, radio stations 2GB and 4BC and Channel Nine for a 60 Minutes story involving Cater. A commission of inquiry in 2015 cleared the Wagners of any responsibility and inquiry head Walter ­Sofronoff QC concluded the flood was “a natural disaster and that no human agency caused it or could ever have prevented it”.

At a $100 a year to get the magazine, the payout is the same value as 5,000 odd subscriptions.    Ouch.

Presumably, flood conspiracists Alan Jones and Nick Cater are going to be coughing up dollars too.

By the way, whatever happened to the class action against the Queensland government that started in a fanfare of Hedley Thomas articles, but seems to have petered out?    Would like for it to die, too, given that it was mainly promoted by climate change denialists.

Globally ill

I often can't find much to post about on a Friday, especially if it's a busy day ahead.  Of course, I could go over to Catallaxy and watch the further self debasement of Steve Kates going so far beyond mere "brown nosing" of Donald Trump that only his feet are still visible, but even that gets boring after a time.

Anyway, here's one article from Discover that looks interesting - the matter of the global reach of mental illness, and how one researcher is trying to get treatment available in all countries, not just the rich ones.

The silly Senator

Where's Jason lately?   Because I'd like to know his reaction to this:

Senator Leyonhjelm to bring Milo Yiannopoulos to Parliament House

I've always said Leyonhjelm had no good judgement.  This is just further evidence.

A good spice

If you go this page, you'll see an article about cinnamon possibly being useful in burning up fat.  But look to the left - there's a bunch of other articles of hopeful cinnamon health effects, too: from Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, and liver health too!

And, of course, tumeric seems to be having its day in the fad sun, with vendors of a tumeric tea type drink to be found around shopping centres lately.

Seems that some spices are "hot" at the moment, in the matter of health.

More Yglesias

I'm finding Matthew Yglesias's explanations on economics to be rather like Greg Jericho's in Australia:  neither are economists (I think) but both have a convincing way of explaining economics issues.

Hence, Yglesias's article on the likely effect of the Republican's desired tax cuts sounds about right to me.

Pandamania

I strongly recommend that the gentle reader make haste to view a series of cute and kooky looking photos of pandas, many also featuring Chinese carers dressed as said animal, in this charming feature in The Atlantic.   An example:

I know that Star Trek IV featured aliens coming to Earth to find out what had happened to their favourite animals, the humpback whales, but I think it more likely that it would be this charming, but  inept, creature that looks like it was dropped off here for safekeeping 10,000 years ago...

A funny Travel Man

Yay:  SBS Viceland (I think) is showing another series of Travel Man, and they are up on SBS on Demand.

While Richard Ayoade is never unwatchable, some episodes are funnier than others, depending to an extent on the person he's travelling with.

The episode we watched last night, in Valencia (a gorgeous looking place to visit, incidentally), with a female comedian who I am not familiar with, struck me as particularly funny.   The paella cooking lessons were a highlight for my amusement:

Yes, pretty amusing (and sort of encouraging)

Spotted on Twitter:

Premier pro-Trump website in Australia is run by Sinclair Davidson

I see that the increasingly potty Rafe Champion, who used to respected enough to have blogging rights at Club Troppo, has been utterly convinced by a book by Newt Gingrich (who more sensible people blame for starting the rapid, poisonous decline in the dynamics of American politics) that Trump is just a great, salt-of-the-earth, man-of-the-people sorta guy, with remarkable political talent.

So Sinclair Davidson, libertarian and Trump skeptic himself, now hosts two of our nations most gullible and slavishly pro-Trump commentators on Catallaxy.   Sure, he has one (maybe two?) anonymous contributors who put the boot into Trump occasionally, but the blog commenters run about 90% in favour of Trump, I reckon.

I don't know how Davidson reconciles himself to the fact that running a supposedly libertarian/centre right blog has been taken over by the most wingnutty/conservative voices in the country.

The only - and I mean only - unifying thing about anyone who regularly participates at that blog is that they all know climate change is a crock.

Aliens any day now

I'm not sure how accurate this estimate could be, given that this is the first interstellar asteroid/alien star destroyer detected swanning through the solar system, but The Guardian reports:

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.

The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt, University of California Los Angeles, estimated how many other interstellar visitors like it there might be in our solar system.Surprisingly, they calculate that another 10,000 could be closer to the sun than the eighth planet, Neptune, which lies 30 times further from the sun than the Earth. Yet these are currently undetected.

Each of these interstellar interlopers would be just passing through. They are travelling too fast to be captured by the gravity of the sun. Yet it still takes them about a decade to cross our solar system and disappear back into interstellar space.

If this estimate is correct, then roughly 1,000 enter and another 1,000 leave every year – which means that roughly three arrive and three leave every day.

Presumably, this means that, despite decades of attempts to detect asteroids around the solar system, we could find that on any day of the week one that comes from interstellar space does a braking burn and our alien overlords will have arrived.  

The asteroid that looked suspiciously like a spaceship

I posted as soon as I read about that interstellar asteroid that zoomed in and out of the solar system last month because I thought that it may well be a spaceship instead.

Lo and behold, the observations made in a rush as it left the solar system indicate this:

Karen Meech explains the significance: "This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape. We also found that it has a dark red colour, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it."

These properties suggest that `Oumuamua is dense, possibly rocky or with high metal content, lacks significant amounts of water or ice, and that its surface is now dark and reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over millions of years. It is estimated to be at least 400 metres long.

and the artists impression is this:

which seems to me, if you add more red, to be a fair approximation to this:

That's one of the versions of Red Dwarf, for those who don't know.

As usual, someone else on the 'net has probably already made the comparison - because it does seem kind of obvious to nerds.

Tim Wilson - migration skeptic?

Judith Sloan has been whinging about migration for a while now (a couple of years?)   She thinks there's too many and that they don't really bring economic benefits that others claim.   She has a column in The Australian today making her arguments, in which she seems to concede they may have a small net economic benefit.  

Seems her gripes are exaggerated to me.  Where does she live, Melbourne?   Migrant neighbours bothering her, I wonder?

And then, to my surprise, Tim Wilson comes out in support of her views today:

What is it with these small government, IPA types getting into quasi One Nation migration whinging?

It's very peculiar.

That doesn't seem very sporting of God

Some researchers have studied flu infection rates in Middle Eastern countries with the timing of the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, and Hanukkah in Israel, and the results look very clear:

You'd think they would have done this sort of study before, but apparently Saudi Arabia doesn't like to play ball by providing its figures.  So this is for 6 neighbouring countries, plus Israel.

How ludicrous can he get?

I refer to Steve Kates, Trump cultist, who seems to honestly believe that as soon as the Presidency changed, every economic indicator was obviously due to incredible awesome powers of Trump.   And that everything under Obama was crushingly bleak:

The parlous state that Obama left the American economy in will require an astonishing amount of luck combined with a great deal of very well constructed policy to move past. You do know that in the entire eight years Obama was president, the US economy on not a singe occasion achieved a growth rate as high as 3%. Trump has now achieved it twice, with more to come. Obama even inherited the recovery phase following the GFC which is almost invariably an economy’s period of strongest growth since part of what happens is the recovery of ground lost during the recession. Instead, there were eight years of low growth and stagnant employment. There is not an economic story to tell to his credit, even with interest rates at near zero and public spending at an all-time high, which in standard economic theory are a good thing. Of course, both are harmful to an economy’s prospects but don’t expect your friend to know it or believe it if you tell him.

But why take my word for it. Here is Conrad Black pointing out that Trump is already the most successful U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. And as you can see from the beginning of this excerpt, he is not PDT’s greatest admirer, but even so:

Conrad Black!  Kates is outsourcing his economic analysis to the ex con who been writing odes of  praise for Trump for, what, years? 

monty:  how can you resist not telling Kates he's an embarrassment to his profession?

A New Zealand themed post

*  SBS on Demand has the popular New Zealand movie Boy, made by writer/director/actor Taika Waititi, available for viewing at the moment.  I had not seen it before.   There's a lot to like about:  it looks great for a small budget film; the child actors are excellent and quite charming; and it has a real sense of place.  On the downside, the story doesn't have much propelling it forward, and a clearer change in Waititi's character by the end might have been welcome.  But overall there's something about some of its imagery, scenes and music that made it rattle around in my dreams, and in my mind throughout today, after watching it last night.   That's always a sign of a good movie - when it clings to your brain, even if you don't quite understand why.

* Taika Waititi is, presumably, very happy with how many people have seen and liked Thor: Ragnarok.   it's been out for all of 16 days and will probably have taken over $700 million internationally.   I wonder if he gets a percentage of the take? Incidentally, I was surprised to see in Boy that there is a section where his character talks about the Incredible Hulk, which seems quite prescient.

I am happy to read that he is wanting to make a spinoff to What We Do In the Shadows, concentrating on the werewolves (not swearwolves.)   A clip of the vampire/werewolf confrontation, which amuses me more than it probably should, is here:



*  Well, that's a bit sad:  I see on IMDB that James Rolleston, the lead actor in Boy, made a couple of other movies, but was in a serious car accident in 2016 which involved some pretty major brain injury.   New Zealand media says that he has had to undergo a lot of rehabilitation, which sounds like is ongoing.  He was only recently sentenced for a dangerous driving charge from the indicent.Sounds unclear as to whether he will make a full recovery.

*  On a more serious note, Ed Yong writes at The Atlantic about how New Zealand conservationists who want to try to eradicate all rats and other introduced mammals are very keen on a kind of scary CRISPR technique called gene drives to spread extinction causing genes (for infertility, for example) throughout the rat population.  

I don't know:  getting rid of stoats I can understand; rats I feel sorry for, even if they like bird eggs.   I just can't see that it is worthwhile using gene modification techniques that could risk accidentally eradicating rats worldwide.  That would make for some major ecological changes, surely.   

A fake, I'd say...

On the public's understanding of Brexit

The SMH has a report about how badly Brexit is going, with experts complaining that the public, which apparently in polls still narrowly supports it, just don't understand what's involved:

Menon says the public wrongly equate a "no-deal Brexit" with the status quo. "They think 'no deal' is going to buy a car and you don't like the car so you come back with the car you have. They don't think it means they blow you up inside the old car."

Now this is disgusting

I've been meaning to post about this for some weeks, after I saw a bit of NRA TV on some site or other, with a talking head woman going on about this topic, as Time explains:

The overriding message is that the NRA identity is under attack. There’s a tone of simmering indignation and a sense of persecution that curdles into hostility toward government, media and other cultural institutions. “Their hateful defiance of [Trump’s] legitimacy is an insult to each of us,” Loesch says in one video. “But the ultimate insult is that they think we’re so stupid that we’ll let them get away with it.”

Yes, the NRA is encouraging people to arm themselves because Trump is "under attack" - it seemed as clear as day to me that it was a call for people to arm themselves for a coming civil war, except they are careful enough not to use the words "coming civil war".    And yet the danger of this pandering to armed paranoia is largely ignored by the media and politicians.

The liberals in America ought to be calling this out as dangerous and disgusting.

Getting a bit hysterical now

I've never followed the career of Al Franken closely:  I think as a comedian I probably would not have liked him - just a hunch, really.

But it seems to me that the reaction of liberal outlets Slate, Vox, Axios (many stories on it making it seem the biggest sex scandal that has ever hit Washington), and a columnist at Wapo,  is a bit hysterical.

In short - it isn't 100% clear that his fingers are actually touching her breasts , in fact, given the risk of her waking up if touched, I would say it's more likely they weren't.   It's a poor taste photo "joke":  it's not clearly sexual assault.

As for the kiss - her key complaint is that, in a public venue (backstage, where presumably there was little  risk it could advance to any further form of sexual advance without anyone seeing it), he pestered her into a kiss rehearsal and then used tongue.

Look, forced tongue would obviously be gross and unsettling; but it's also true that there are degrees of tongue and who knows whether it was fully engaged as she claims.  

She says she pushed him away and was upset and told him never to do it again.  Good.

Of course such behaviour (let's assume a clearly engaged deep tongue) is not "acceptable";  at the same time, it's getting a bit out of hand when commentators immediately call for resignation when a woman claims too much tongue in her mouth 10 years ago in a rehearsal.  This is not the same as the office staff suddenly been put upon by the boss.  As she explains:

Franken had written some skits for the show and brought props and costumes to go along with them. Like many USO shows before and since, the skits were full of sexual innuendo geared toward a young, male audience.

As a TV host and sports broadcaster, as well as a model familiar to the audience from the covers of FHM, Maxim and Playboy, I was only expecting to emcee and introduce the acts, but Franken said he had written a part for me that he thought would be funny, and I agreed to play along.

Get a grip, people. 

Look, what will happen if Franken is a general sleeze who has forced himself onto women repeatedly is that there will be other women coming forward, and that's when it will get to "call for immediate resignation" territory.    And I appreciate that Franken has brought this upon himself by being the liberal hero on allegations made against Republican figures.

But still, I say the reaction to this incident alone is going over the top.

The peculiar story of modern Japanese housing

I've occasionally talked about this to Australian friends (how the attitude to domestic housing in Japan is very different from that in Australia, and perhaps most other countries), and it's good to see that my understanding was correct, as all explained at length in this very detailed article at The Guardian:

Most of those houses built in the 60s are no longer standing, having long since been replaced by newer models, finished with fake brick ceramic siding in beiges, pinks and browns. In the end, most of these prefabricated houses – and indeed most houses in Japan – have a lifespan of only about 30 years.

Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.

The article notes that there is a bit of a movement towards renovation rather than demolition now, but it's still nothing like the renovation industry in other countries.

The good thing about this peculiar aspect to housing is that, for the Western buyer who isn't so fussed about the age of a house, and provided they don't need to live in one of the large cities, you can buy houses very, very cheaply in much of the country.  That's assuming you want to use in it yourself, I suppose, as you don't really buy them as an investment.

Cow wars

More on the situation with "cow vigilante" groups in India at Reuters:

A Reuters special report this month investigated the vigilantes, who snatch cows from Muslims whom they are convinced intend to slaughter the animals. It is an accusation that inflames passions in a Hindu majority nation, where many consider the animal sacred and killing cows is outlawed in most states. 

The reporting process revealed some fresh details about a rising tide of religious nationalism in India, beyond the country’s booming stock market and rising direct foreign investment. Interviews with just two of the Hindu-led groups found they’d seized some 190,000 cows, at times working with police, since Modi took office. 

Relations between right wing Hindus and Muslims is not great, it seems:

As reporter Zeba Siddiqui interviewed a local head of a right-wing Hindu group, the man paused and asked: “You’re Muslim, right?” Siddiqui said she was. 

The man began to rant: “It is in their religious books that you should kill non-believers, and that you should kill and eat animals. What kind of holy book says that? The Gita (a Hindu holy scripture) doesn’t. I don’t have a problem with the religion, but the people who follow it.” 

Siddiqui asked whether the man was saying he disliked all Muslims. He did not answer the question.

Stuck in the 1970's

This analysis by Yglesias at Vox about the problem with the Republican tax plan debate sounds basically credible to me:

The tax reform debate is stuck in the 1970s

Tax reform is lining up like this: Republicans want big, business-friendly tax cuts to spur savings and investments while Democrats complain it’ll blow a hole in the deficit. These terms of debate made sense 30 to 40 years ago. Back then, the economy was stuck in a particular kind of rut. With inflation high and profits low, companies weren’t investing and creating new jobs even as a torrent of new workers was flooding the labor force. Very high interest rates lurked in the background. 

Both Republicans and Democrats agreed this nexus of issues was a problem, so they had a debate over what to do. There were ideological disagreements about the prescription but consensus on the diagnosis. In his first term, Ronald Reagan implemented the conservative prescription. In his second term, the much-lauded bipartisan 1986 tax reform bill represented a reasonable high-minded compromise of the two poles of the debate. 

But today is different. Corporate profits are high, not low. Inflation is low, not high. The workforce is growing slowly, not quickly. Borrowing is cheap, not expensive. 

Everything about the situation has changed— except the tax policy debate. And the result is that Congress’ No. 1 priority has almost nothing to do with the biggest problems facing the country.

So there was some sort of survey result yesterday?

 Some quick observations:

*  participation rate was higher than I expected.

* that means it was pretty accurate, and it did match polling quite closely.     Newspoll in September had this result:

The proportion of voters who support same-sex marriage now stands at 57 per cent, compared to 63 per cent in August and 62 per cent in September last year.
The no vote has lifted to 34 per cent, from 30 per cent in August and 32 per cent a year ago.
About nine per cent are uncommitted.

So, the Australian government spent $100 million to work out that Newspoll is pretty accurate.   Congratulations...

*  I wonder how the 20% who didn't vote would have gone if voting had been part of compulsory election voting.   Very hard to say - this article at The Conversation talks about that.

*  Further on that theme:  it's funny how non compulsory voting enables a different slant on things, isn't it?  The "best" that the conservatives/cynics on this issue (like me!) can argue is that of the total eligible voting population, it was actually only about a 49% yes vote and a 30% no vote.    Yet a 60/40 split in those who did vote enables people to call it an "over-whelming" yes vote.   (You see the same in government elections overseas, of course.)   Admittedly, you would have to say that compulsory voting would have sent the yes vote well over the 50%, but still, let's not get too carried away with the "overwhelming" adjective.   For me, for something like this, I would hold back "over-whelming" for something like a 65 plus vote.  

*  I think everyone is surprised by the strength of the No vote across a swathe of Western Sydney electorates.  What a divided city.   Fortunately, we live in a country where riots over social issues rarely happen.   So a bunch of Labor politicians are at some risk of annoying their electorates by voting Yes.   I suppose they can always say "look, doesn't make any practical difference if you were to say that all members should vote according to their electorate result, as if we did that, it would still mean only 17 No votes in the House.   Just live with it."  

*  Kind of amusing anyway how many, many National Party electorates went for "Yes", though.   Queensland was different in that regard, with two huge outback electorates going "No".    It does just confirm that Queenslanders can be very "different" in voting  patterns; but in most respects, not in a good way.  (I'm talking the ridiculous prospect of One Nation getting some power in Queensland parliament again in the next election.  High temperature just does something to the voting brain, I am sure.)

Fundamentalist dating theory

Slate notes that there is one corner of American faith for which Roy Moore wanting to date teenage girls was not an unusual idea:

But there’s a group of Moore’s allies for whom the basic idea of an unmarried older man “courting” a teenage girl is not anathema at all—fundamentalist home-schoolers. Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, who endorsed Moore in the contested Republican primary and has spoken at his rallies, told an audience in 2009 that girls should marry when they’re “about 15 or 16.” Moore has appeared several times on a radio show hosted by Kevin Swanson, an ultra-conservative Colorado pastor who defended Robertson's notion that girls should be marrying at 15 because it helps them avoid sexual sin.

Moore has an even deeper relationship with Doug Phillips, a disgraced leader in the “Biblical patriarchy” movement. Phillips was president of Vision Forum, a Texas-based organization devoted to the “restoration of the Christian household.” In Phillips’ world, men ought to be self-sufficient by the time they marry, but women live under their father’s authority until they marry. Ideally, in fact, a woman would live under her father’s literal roof until her wedding day. Phillips promoted the concept of “stay-at-home daughters,” in which girls live at home until they marry, often forgoing formal education and focusing on homemaking skills. Independence is essentially a flaw in a Christian wife, who, Phillips taught, should be willing to call her husband “Lord.”

Gee.  

Of general interest

*   From an interview at NPR, here's the charming explanation of the Duffer Brothers (the creators and sometime director/writers of Stranger Things) of how they co-write:

Matt: A lot of our work is actually done on Google Docs, and so we don't speak to each other. It's a really weird thing where we're both on headphones, not talking, and just typing on the same document at the same time.

We're in the same room, same office. We have separate desks. We're not, like, literally right next to each other, because we'd probably punch each other every once in a while, so it's good there's a little bit of physical distance.

We'll get into Google Doc wars, where I type a line of dialogue or an idea for the scene — he'll delete it. I'll go write it back in — he'll delete it again. And then the headphones come off and then we actually have to have a conversation about it. So it's a little ridiculous.

* The BBC has an item about a small Siberian (I think) town which apparently has the record  for the highest temperature range (-68 degrees C in winter to 37 degrees in summer), but my impression is it spends a lot more time frozen than hot.  Here's how they live:

Blocks of ice are cut from the river and delivered to villagers for water.
Each house has its own stock of water stored outside in stacks of ice blocks.
The blocks are then melted inside the house.
Running water, which moves at very high temperatures to prevent the pipes from freezing, is not drinkable.
Temperatures are so low that some details of daily life take another dimension here:

• batteries last only a few minutes
• pen ink freezes before writing
• it becomes dangerous to wear metal glasses

The locals also let their cars run all day, afraid they might not restart until spring.
Armed with thick fur and a layer of fat grown during the autumn, the horses and the dogs of the village spend the winter outside in these freezing temperatures.
The yakut horse is small and resistant, little domesticated and raised mainly for meat.
It holds a great place in the life, economy and spirituality of the Siberians.

There are lots of photos, and the town looks about as bleak as you might expect.   

*  The Guardian talks about the financial failure of Blade Runner 2049, and lots of readers comment about whether they enjoyed it or not.   Some did, but I think the majority has issues with it, as did I.

*  There seems to be some suspicion that Justice League is not going to be very well reviewed.  I thought it looked pretty awful on the trailer.

*  A pill that tells your distant doctor via your mobile phone that it's been taken?  And it's an anti-psychotic?   Um, doesn't the very concept seem likely to encourage paranoia in those who already fear they are being secretly monitored?

Koch history

I just was doing a Google of the Koch Brothers, and turned up this bit of history.  (Perhaps I had read about it before, but forgotten):

The Kochs may be following in the footsteps of their father Fred Koch.  As New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer has detailed, Koch Sr. made the family fortune by working for Stalin helping to build 15 Soviet oil refineries. The experience made him virulently anti-communist and anti-“big government” in general, but these beliefs did not seem to stand in the way of making money.

Fred Koch would later go on to help Hitler’s Third Reich build an important oil refinery that had to be taken out by the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.

Going to the New Yorker article from 2010, I see that Fred Koch went from helping one of the worst Communists in history to being a anti communist to a nutty degree at home:

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

What a family dynasty, hey Jason?   His sons have more moderate views than their father - all they want to ensure they is that they can make money before their oil burning puts Florida, New York, Bangladesh, etc under 10 m of water....  



*A reference to their recent investment in a Chinese company, which is what the article is mainly about.

The culture wars have become very, very weird

I refer to two things:

*  Milo Yiannopoulos and his Australian tour, which I see is presented by Penthouse (Australia and NZ).   (Why?)   This is a screenshot of his sales site:

Who on earth would pay $90 plus, let alone $295, to meet this twit?    And the meet and greet starts at 11.45 pm.  ? 

I like the way the venue is secret 'til a week out, meaning that the "sold out" shows may be the 30 seat conference room in the back of the CBD Ibis Hotel, for all we know.

And yet, because he talks about how terrible "SJW's" and feminists are, he has the support of crossover conservatives/alt.righters, and Andrew Bolt, regardless of his apologia for older gay men who "mentor" young teen gay guys, as he plainly did in the now infamous interview that took an unusually long time to be publicised.  (Not that he's apologising for that any more, as far as I can tell.)

* Roy Moore in the US.   It seems hard to credit that there could be more evangelical support for him, after the first round of allegations about his unusual habit, as a 30 something year old, of dating/sexually assaulting teenage girls.   Maybe, after the latest claim, from a woman who says she is a Trump voter, they will actually start to wonder?    Or is it more that, the ways things are currently perversely working, a sex video of him with a 16 year old could only help strengthen evangelical support?    (After all, the Lord's mother might have only been that age, I can hear them say.) 

Talk about a religious group shooting their moral credibility in the foot over the last couple of years.

Axios says Rand Paul is the only Senator still endorsing him (!).   Maybe he has concussion or something affecting his judgement, or is it just a example of why libertarians can't get much of a foothold in the US government when their figureheads are lacking common sense?

The funniest thing was the report a day or two ago that Breitbart (read "Bannon") sent out two reporters to Alabama to try to discredit the claims, when in fact since then the reports have become worse and worse.

Fail, Bannon.   A complete fail.

Yet more disarray

Another Senator gone (Lambie). 

I think an election clean out of the entire Parliament is feeling more warranted every day...

Today's Freudian trivia

From a very short book review in Nature:

Sigmund Freud's first paper involved the dissection of eels in an attempt to locate their testes. To his frustration, Freud failed to find any.

I encourage all readers to attempt to slip that into workplace or household conversation today.

Update:  because I'm curious, I had to look up more about Freud's hunt for (eel's) testicles.  Here it is:

As they say with young people, Freud may not have known enough to know how futile this task would be when employed by a nondescript Austrian zoological research station. It was his first job, he was nineteen-years-old, and it was 1876. He dissected approximately 400 eels, over a period of four weeks, and he worked in an environment that the New York Times described as “Amid stench and slime for long hours”. His ambitious goal was to write a breakthrough research paper on the animal’s mating habits that had confounded science for centuries. One has to imagine that a more seasoned scientist may have considered the task futile much earlier in the process, but an ambitious, young nineteen-year-old, looking to make a name for himself, was willing to spend long hours slicing and dicing these eels, hoping to achieve an answer that could not be disproved.

Unfortunate for young Freud, and perhaps fortunate for the future of Psychology, we now know that eels don’t have testicles, until they need them. The products of Freud’s studies must not have needed them at the time he studied them, for Freud ended up writing that his total supply of eels were “of the fairer sex”. Freud did write that research paper over time, but it detailed his failure to locate the testicles. Some have said that he correctly predicted where the testicles should be, and that he argued that the eels he received were not mature eels. The result was that he did not find the testicles, and he moved onto other areas as a result. The question that anyone reading the psychological theories Freud would write later in life, has to ask, in conjunction with this knowledge, is how profound was this failure on the rest of his research into human sexual development? 

 The blog writer goes on with a lot of questions about whether Freud's obsession with human psycho-sexual development was a case of unconscious over compensation for being unable to locate eel's testicles.   It's an interesting thought...

A lyric misheard for a very long time

Something else happened on the weekend - after hearing someone singing it live, I realised that I had misheard the chorus and title of a rather popular pop song as "Valerie" instead of "Out of Reach".  The song's only been out since 1999, give me a break.   I thought it sounded an odd way of singing "Valerie" but I genuinely had no inkling that it was actually 3 words, not one.   

I see that at least one other man in his 50's had been hearing it the same way.   Maybe it's a Dad thing.

The great inconsistency

It occurred to me over the weekend:   don't zombie cultist Trump worshippers, like Steve Kates, find that their simultaneous beliefs that:

a.   Trump is right and doing God's work in wanting a better relationship with Russia (well, Putin) because Russia/Putin and the US could do good work together;  AND

b.   that Hilary Clinton and the FBI and Obama did the worst possible thing in the world and should be locked up because they let the Russians get control some (overinflated) amount of US uranium

are not exactly consistent, at least with respect to the view of Russia inherent in those positions?

I hope that's a real tweet..

I suppose that, as the world ends, at least we'll be laughing grimly about how it happened...

Update:  so sue me, I hadn't been following this fake twitter thing closely.  Still pretty funny.

Just vote Liberal Democrats and shut up

Another day, another Tim Blair whine about the ABC operating on government money.

Look, there is at least one Party with pretensions to power that wants the ABC privatised as soon as possible - the Liberal Democrats.   Given that the fact that ABC funding support is seemingly the most important, gut wrenching issue in the daily life of Tim Blair, why doesn't he just continually support the Leyonhjelm outfit for this reason alone (if not others - Blair really wouldn't seem to have any issue with that party's policies, I reckon), and blog about something else.   

Can't we just start over again?

News this morning that, as usual, One Nation (seems the party motto should be:  "You don't have to be nuts to run for us; but if you're running for us, you're nuts") is cracking up due to internal conflict just helps confirm in my mind that the public likely thinks this Parliament is such an enormous mess it really needs an election to sort it out. 

First, what went on in One Nation, from the Australian, so I probably can't link to it:

One Nation’s newest senator Fraser Anning has defected within hours of being sworn-in, causing a major upset for Pauline Hanson who now has just three votes in the chamber.

Senator Anning’s shock move follows weeks of internal party tensions and revelations Senator Hanson had wanted him to resign to allow for the return of Malcolm Roberts.

A long-time supporter and friend of Senator Hanson’s, Senator Anning replaced Mr Roberts as a Queensland One Nation MP after the High Court found last month that the latter was ineligible to sit in parliament because he was a dual British citizen when he nominated.

Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm, who with Australian Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi escorted Senator Anning into the upper house this morning for his swearing in, said he was aware Senator Anning had been “under pressure to resign” to make way for Mr Roberts.

If Senator Anning had resigned, he would have created a casual vacancy that could have been filled by Mr Roberts.

Secondly:   Turnbull is copping the fallout of the citizenship issue, and I suspect it's because sounding aggro about it when you already are not polling well is not a great look.

He would, it seems clear, lose any election held now, and perhaps by a reasonably wide margin; but if he is interested in how history may view him more favourably, as a PM who selflessly let the public sort out the mess via a new election with candidates who are all unequivocally entitled to be there, a trip to the Governor General to call one would be the way to do it.

Weekend events

Good and not so good news from the weekend:

*   we've had an Emile Henry ceramic tagine - one of these -

for a couple of years, and while they are not cheap, I realised yesterday (when I finally got around to cooking in it - instead of my wife) that they are a real pleasure to use.    It fries off like a nonstick surface, and I'm not sure why (very even heat conduction?) but there was very little heat sticking of stuff on the bottom even when it has been on the gas burner for 50 minutes without stirring.  (I didn't really mean to not stir for that long, but anyway...)

The recipe for a Moroccan style lamb tagine worked out really well too, based on a Jamie Oliver version on a Tefal website.  I adjusted a bit and record it here for my future reference:

About 400 - 500 g lamb shoulder diced
One teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, cumin and coriander
One big onion - red, brown, I doubt it matters much (diced of course)
Couple of garlic cloves sliced
A fresh red chilli sliced
Tablespoon of honey
Can of tomatoes
Can of chick peas
About 30 g of dried apricots (it's only about 4 or 5 whole dried ones)
40 g of black olives
Vegetables - I used a carrot and a capsicum, both cut into big chunks, but his recipe used eggplant.  Whatever.  I think anything is going to work.
Italian parsley (I didn't have any, but Jamie's recipe involves some cooked in it, and some on top as garnish)

Method:  lamb gets mixed with the spices and honey (and some salt and pepper), then fried off in some olive oil to brown in the tagine  Add onion,  chilli and other vegetables and cook off for another 10 or 15 mins or so.  Add tomatoes, a tomato tin full of water, the chickpeas (including some of the liquid from it - I used perhaps half.) and tear up the apricots and throw them in, with the olives too.  Check salt level and add a bit more (probably).

Simmer covered for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Served with couscous with roasted flaked almonds and some finely cut up dried apricot and lemon juice through it.

It was really nice.  But then again, everything cooked in this thing seems to come out nice.  Maybe tagines share the magical powers of wood serving platters, which make all food taste better.   They just do, OK?

Update:   out of curiosity, I had a look at a "products review" website for this brand of ceramic tagine, and found quite a few people complaining that it suddenly cracked and was thereby rendered useless.   Hope ours doesn't suffer that fate.

*   I've praised Mark Dapin as a magazine features writer before, and his article in Good Weekend on Saturday was particularly interesting.   He meets up with an old university friend who has finally revealed his sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest/teacher as a teenager.

It's really remarkable,  the way the stories of the life ruining effect of teenage sexual abuse are so often so similar: the subsequent drug or alcohol abuse, depression and relationship problems, etc.   Mark's friend's explanation of the ambiguities of the emotions at the time adds another aspect I hadn't really realised - as a smart, sensitive teen, he actually liked being groomed, as it involved making him feel special and warranting the attention of someone intellectually sophisticated and part of the adult world.   That makes sense, I guess, although not every abuse victim is groomed in exactly that way, of course.  And it doesn't stop it from causing decades of later turmoil, perhaps with that irreconcilable ambiguity and conflict of emotions being the thing at the heart of why it is so often so psychologically damaging.   I think it's an interestingly complicated issue, this matter of how exactly it is that such experiences have such long lasting, detrimental psychological effects, and I wonder if  abuse victims might be particularly suited to the one of the schools of psychoanalytical "talking therapies".   

*  Watched Korean zombie movie Train to Busan on Saturday night.    The zombies are definitely in the World War Z style of more-or-less instant conversion as soon as bitten, which is kinda silly even in the fictional universes where zombies exist, I reckon.   But I got over that and enjoyed World War Z more than I expected, but enjoyed Train less than I expected.   Too much traumatised child at the end; and one thing bothered me - modern trains don't go so dark inside when going through tunnels.  That was a plot contrivance that was not realistic, if you ask me.   (Yes, here I am, being pedantic over realism in an "instant zombie" movie.)

South Korean ways of living seem so, so similar to those in Japan don't they?   I found it interesting from that point of view.

* I seem to have one eye ageing unusually rapidly - so much so that it already is developing a cataract, and quite quickly too.   Will be booking in to see a specialist ASAP, as the hazing effect of the cataract is already noticeable and there is no point in getting new glasses until that is fixed.   The optometrist asked if I had ever injured that eye, as the type of cataract at my age is more often from injury; but no, I don't recall ever getting punched in that eye, or any other injury.  Just one of life's mysteries.

I've also learnt that looking at images of cataract surgery makes it look remarkably unpleasant, for something done so routinely (and in day surgery.)

Where is the dark matter?

Well, it really is a bit of a depressing time to be a research physicist, it seems.  From Nature News:

Physicists are growing ever more frustrated in their hunt for dark matter — the massive but hard-to-detect substance that is thought to comprise 85% of the material Universe. Teams working with the world’s most sensitive dark-matter detectors report that they have failed to find the particles, and that the ongoing drought has challenged theorists’ prevailing views.

The latest results from an experiment called XENON1T at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, published on 30 October¹, continue a dry spell stretching back 30 years in the quest to nab dark-matter particles. An attempt by a Chinese team to detect the elusive stuff, the results of which were published on the same day², also came up empty-handed. Ongoing attempts by space-based telescopes, as well as at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have also not spotted any hints of dark-matter particles.

The findings have left researchers struggling for answers. “We do not understand how the Universe works at a deeper and more profound level than most of us care to admit,” says Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The article explains some of the details of the searches, then gets to this point:

Future generations of detectors based on the same principle as XENON1T are already in the works, and will be needed if physicists are to finally close the window on WIMPs. But the particles’ continuing no-show is making theorists more open-minded and has allowed other theories to gain prominence, says Hooper. Perhaps dark matter consists of exotic axion particles, which are akin to strange, massive photons. Theorists are also looking at whether dark matter might not interact with known particles at all, but exist in a “hidden sector”, he says.

 The "upside down world" of Stranger Things, perhaps?

(There's always  MOND theories of gravity, but they have their problems too, apparently.)

Something I didn't see coming...

No pun intended in that post heading:  it really is surprising, isn't it?, this outpouring of people prepared to speak out now about the bad, unwanted, sexual conduct of Hollywood and media stars, the most recent being a high profile comedian and a Senate candidate.   (I have never seen Louis CK apart from briefly on some chat shows - I have no idea whether his comedy would appeal to me or not, although I have always suspected the latter - and now I feel I don't have to spend time checking.)

I trust Steven Spielberg never gets caught up in this.

Speaking of possibly the last nice guy in Hollywood who never put the hard word on a starlet (I'm hoping!), the trailer is out for his new, hurriedly made movie.   I haven't watched it with the sound on yet, so I don't know what I think:

 

This man teaches at a tertiary institution..

I see that Steve Kates says he gave a "presentation" on the first anniversary of Trump's election.    Not sure where, but I presume it looked something like this:

And here's a pic Steve's wife took of him before he left to go give his little talk:

He's put his speaking notes up at you-know-where, and I'll extract some highlights:

Who are the enemies he is dealing with and what are the central issues?

fanatical and ignorant opposition

• SJW are far left anti-capitalist, anti-free institutions
• the left in the US and across the world is no longer about provisioning the welfare state but is out and out communist and totalitarian
• Antifa is representative of the mindset

I wonder if he was stocking up on canned beans and bottled water for the collapse of civilisation last weekend went Antifa brought down the United States?

Anyway, here's more of his insights:

far-far left media
• malevolent, ignorant and totalitarian at heart
• utterly oppositional in everything they say or write
• stand for nothing other than a series of empty clichés
• tweet-storms is Trump’s modern means to outflank the media

 Yes, Kates genuinely believes Trump tweeting is a clever thing for him to do to "outflank" the malevolent, ignorant, media.   Paranoid much.

And finally:

personal qualities

• tough minded and clear headed
• understands business and the operation of a market economy
• a strong believer in education and learning
• has a high regard for the study of history

I keep saying he's an out and out cultist - and a nasty one who thinks those who disagree with him on politics are e-vil.

Aren't they just a tad embarrassed?

I see that via Hot Air that there was much right wing mocking of USA Today putting up an infographic about the AR15 showing that, amongst other various modifications (a 100 round drum magazine, for God's sake), there were also other rare ones, such as a chainsaw bayonet.

Allahpundit himself thought this was all very funny.   But he then ends the post with the realisation (and a Youtube video that confirms it) - the chainsaw bayonet really exists.  

Kingdom revisited

I think this is a scene from Helen Dale's Kingdom of the Wicked:

[Actually, I saw that movie, with my father, surprisingly, at the cinema when it came out in 1973.  He didn't mind it, too, despite its somewhat hippy vibe.]

More taxes

Robert J Samuelson in the Washington Post:

The truth is that we can’t afford any tax reduction. We need higher, not lower, taxes. What we should be debating is the nature of new taxes (my choice: a carbon tax), how quickly (or slowly) they should be introduced and how much prudent spending cuts could shrink the magnitude of tax increases.

To put this slightly differently: Americans are under-taxed. We are under-taxed not in some principled and philosophical sense that there is an ideal level of taxation that we haven’t yet reached. We are under-taxed in a pragmatic and expedient way. For half a century, we haven’t covered our spending with revenue from taxes.

Of course, there are times when borrowing (that is, budget deficits) is unavoidable and desirable. Wars. Economic downturns. National emergencies. But our addiction to debt extends well beyond these exceptions. We have run deficits with strong economies and weak, with low inflation and high, and with favorable and unfavorable productivity gains.

Since 1961 — and I admit to having reported this fact before — federal budgets have been in surplus in only five years. And these surpluses have invariably coincided with long economic booms that swelled government tax revenue: 1969, following the long boom of the 1960s; and 1998 through 2001, reflecting the “tech boom” of the 1990s.

We resist the discipline of balancing the budget, which is inherently unpopular. It’s what Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute calls “take-away politics.” Some programs would be cut; some taxes would be raised. Americans like big government. They just don’t like paying for it.

Borrowing is easier. It’s largely invisible to most Americans, creating the illusion of “something for nothing.” This liberates Republicans to peddle more tax cuts. Their tax cut would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over 10 years. A more realistic figure is $2.1 trillion, claims the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Democrats are little better. They advocate more entitlement spending, despite CBO’s estimate of $10 trillion in deficits under existing policies over the next decade.

This blog needs a photo

Seems to me there are too many words without enough graphic relief here lately.

So here, found via Reddit's Earth Porn thread, an unusual landscape in Peru:

There's an article in Forbes about this place.  

Makes the "coloured sands" on the beach north of Noosa in Queensland look inadequate...

Update:  I see from this travel site that these mountains have become a tourist destination only in the last couple of years, and the guy writing the post says to be very aware of photoshoped photos,  and that it is a terrible place to visit.    He sounds traumatised by his experience, just about.

Not all gun nuts...

This thing about assault weapon bans in the US:   regardless of how functionally it may be difficult to define an assault weapon, I reckon if it were any country other than America, no one would complain about a government that took a completely visual, somewhat arbitrary approach and had a committee that looked at photos of semi automatics and said "yes, that one looks so much like a military weapon - it's banned from future sale.  This one - functionally the same, but looks like a hunting rifle - can be sold with max magazine of 10".   Or for that matter, had the ability to ban gun makers from advertising weapons in such a way that their look appears military. 

Oh boo hoo, it would interfere with gun manufacturers right to make money by selling guns on the basis that they'll let the owner look like a pretend soldier.   I mean, look at some of the advertising, it's absurd.

And it's good to be reminded that some Americans with a military background think so too:

One of President Donald Trump’s nominees for a top Pentagon job just said he thinks it’s “insane” that civilians can buy assault rifles — just like the shooter in Sutherland Springs, Texas, was able to do.

“I’d also like to, and I may get in trouble with other members of the committee, just say how insane it is that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semiautomatic assault rifle like an AR-15,” Dr. Dean Winslow, the nominee for the Department of Defense’s top health affairs job, said during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee today....

Trump’s feelings go against those of some senior retired generals. In 2013, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal — who commanded America’s elite troops worldwide and troops in Afghanistan — came out in support of gun control. "I think serious action is necessary," he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe in 2013. 

"Sometimes we talk about very limited actions on the edges and I just don't think that's enough,” he continued. “The number of people in America killed by firearms is extraordinary compared to other nations. And I don’t think we’re a bloodthirsty culture, and so I think we need to look at everything we can do to safeguard our people.”

Kingdom not come?

 I have been trying to follow the success or otherwise of Helen Dale's recently published alternative history (Jesus as terrorist in technologically advanced Roman world) novel "Kingdom of the Wicked".    Must be about a month since her Australian book tour, duly attended by her libertarian,  and not so libertarian, pals (Mark Barnisch seems to be under her spell, when he's not busy tweeting like a teenager about having meals and drinks on his returns to Brisbane); and she got some free publicity in the media too.

I have not yet been able to find any mainstream media review, which I find a little curious.   But maybe they have a backlog of reviews to get done and it's coming.

On Amazon, there was an initial review by someone who said he read it quickly, and liked it, but it did contain qualifications, such as it being very lewd in parts (a nice, old fashioned word that makes me think the reviewer is over 60), and this:

The names and titles are also a bit cumbersome to someone not especially familiar with the language. That said, even without the glossary, most meanings are evident from context. Finally, the story is quite complex, and readers with attention issues will probably have trouble enjoying the story if they are unable to follow it.

That was the only review for the first few weeks, but now one has appeared by Katy Barnett - the legal academic, long term friend and co-blogger of Dale.  Unsurprisingly, it also gives the book 5 stars, and while it does admit that she was a "beta reader" of the book from the start, her review contains some curious qualifications too:

It follows that this is not an *easy* read, although it is compelling. If you are likely to be offended by the idea that Jesus could be arrested as a terrorist, or by sexually explicit or violent scenes, this is probably not the book for you. However, if you are interested in law, history, questions of morality and in being challenged, you will enjoy this book. My husband found the names and concepts confusing, but I did not have any problems as I am a lawyer and a history graduate.

Look, I think it's telling if the two 5 star reviews - one by an enthusiastic friend who has encouraged the author from day one - both have to warn people that it's not an easy story to follow, and having two degrees is an advantage to understand it!   This does not augur well for the general reception of the book, it you ask me. 

It's a wonder Sinclair Davidson hasn't gushed about the novel yet, given he seems to consider Dale to be a literary goddess and all round genius.   A David Leyonhjelm piece at Catallaxy in which he spoke about the book went over like a lead balloon in that conservative dungeon (Jesus as terrorist doesn't play well with them - not that I can really blame them for their skepticism about that).  But at least it gave forum to some anti Dale visitors, one of whom obviously doesn't follow the recent career path of her and Leyonhjelm closely:

I went to uni with Helen and knowing she was your staff member has just lost the last shred of respect I had for you.
BTW Helen claimed to have a lot of ‘degrees’ and expertise in things back in those days too. 

Anyhow, I await a review to appear somewhere other than Amazon to see whether my impressions from the first two are widely shared...

Update:  just after I post that, I notice that young economist Mark Koyama has said the book is "highly recommended".     We'll see...

The hypocrisy

Yeah, so Trump (and a bunch of Republicans) want to talk about mental health being the problem, not the country being full of semi automatic guns available for the mentally unwell to buy (background checks from private sellers are not necessary in more than half of the States).

What was that early thing Trump did that eased up on the mentally unwell not getting onto the national system?  This:

President Donald Trump quietly signed a bill into law Tuesday rolling back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun.

The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database.

Had the rule fully taken effect, the Obama administration predicted it would have added about 75,000 names to that database.

President Barack Obama recommended the now-nullified regulation in a 2013 memo following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 first graders and six others dead. The measure sought to block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns....

Trump signed the bill into law without a photo op or fanfare. The president welcomed cameras into the oval office Tuesday for the signing of other executive orders and bills. News that the president signed the bill was tucked at the bottom of a White House email alerting press to other legislation signed by the president.

The National Rifle Association “applauded” Trump’s action. Chris Cox, NRA-ILA executive director, said the move “marks a new era for law-abiding gun owners, as we now have a president who respects and supports our arms.”

Just one random thought today

You know how awesome I think smartphones are?   No?, well, they are incredible pieces of technology and everyone should say that aloud to their family over dinner at least once a week - I try to.   (I don't like incredible technology going unappreciated.)

On a "not quite as stunning as a mobile phone, but why don't more people think about this" note:   why aren't people more amazed at how far the remote garage door opener on their keyring can send a signal to the opener?   I mean, gosh, look at the tiny battery that's powering the thing, but when I'm walking the dog I am often approaching the house from the front from quite a distance (there's a park there), and it's very surprising how far the tiny, tiny energy of the radio "ping" can be picked up at the garage.   I've just checked using Google Maps (right click where you want to measure from, and chose "measure distance"):   70 m!

And it does this heaps of times before the battery dies, and you pick up a new one that comes from China on Ebay for 9 bucks or something.

All amazing...

Cat amongst the physicists

Oh - Backreaction has a post up about Popper and particle physics and how it's all gone wrong.

Good read, even if she has an unreasonable dislike of phys.org as a website!

More thoughts random

*  I'm pretty busy this week, but I get the impression from Twitter and scanning the press that the Texas church shooting is not causing as much national grief in the US as from other mass shootings because:

a. American Conservatives have the idea that it's sort of holy to be shot during Church, and
b.American Progressives have the idea that it was probably a bunch of white folk who all supported the gun accessibility that led to their deaths,  so meh.

I could be wrong...

*  The Atlantic notes how Google publicises fake news and hoaxes after mass shootings.  Yes, finally, the world realises after the election of Trump, we have a misinformation problem.  

Honestly, I'm starting to feel at least half sympathetic to  the Chinese solution to misuse of the internet.   And if Alex Jones were locked up in jail until he promised to stop making absurd inflammatory claims - I for one would not shed a tear.   

*  I see that poor old Tom at Catallaxy thought it was a dead cert that the Texas killer was antifa.  Yet he thinks he knows so much more than the "leftard" media.  Gullible means never having to say you're stupid.

* I also see some pretty strong snark from Sinclair Davidson in a comment to a Steve Kates post about free trade and Trump.   It's time the whole blog was shut down, really. 

*  Oh, Tom at Catallaxy writes:  

JC, big slabs of the FBI are still Deep State never-Trumpers appointed under Obambi. FFS, Mueller as FBI director was the Clinton bagman who buried the investigation of Uranium One.
Everything I’ve seen in the past month tells me the FBI’s investigation of the Las Vegas shooter is a sham.

Uhuh.  Internet, paranoia, wingnuts.  It's a dangerous combination.  Good thing Tom keeps himself locked away in a shed and gets up at 3 am every day to find right wing cartoons for his fanclub.   What a life...