China and government control

Quite a surprising story in The Conversation about a Chinese "Social Credit System".  It starts:

While many are planning trips to their home towns to attend family reunions, millions more Chinese citizens have been blacklisted by authorities, labelled as “not qualified” to book flights or high-speed train tickets.

This citizen ranking and blacklisting mechanism is a pilot scheme of China’s Social Credit System. With a mission to “raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness of Chinese society”, the Chinese government is planning to launch the system nationwide by 2020 to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.4 billion citizens.

And continues:

It is a question Chinese authorities have been exploring for more than 10 years. When the plan of constructing a Social Credit System was first proposed in 2007, the primary goal was to restore market order by leveraging the financial creditworthiness of businesses and individuals.
Gradually the scope of the project has infiltrated other aspects of daily life.

Actions that can now harm one’s personal credit record include not showing up to a restaurant without having cancelled the reservation, cheating in online games, leaving false product reviews, and jaywalking.

On the other hand, do the right thing, and get rewarded:

Most pilot cities have used a points system, whereby everyone starts off with a baseline of 100 points. Citizens can earn bonus points up to the value of 200 by performing “good deeds”, such as engaging in charity work or separating and recycling rubbish. In Suzhou city, for example, one can earn six points for donating blood.

Being a “good citizen” is well rewarded. In some regions, citizens with high social credit scores can enjoy free gym facilities, cheaper public transport, and shorter wait times in hospitals. Those with low scores, on the other hand, may face restrictions to their travel and public service access.

OK, this is very dangerous idea; but on the other hand, I find the idea of punishing certain people - for example, 90% of threadsters at Catallaxy - for bad behaviour on the internet quite appealing.   

A nice Spielberg interview

At The Guardian.   I like the opening part, about M Night Shyamalan claiming (just after the success of The Sixth Sense) that he had worked out the secret of Spielberg's success, but wouldn't tell the interviewer what it was.   Hah.

Misunderstanding St Paul

I don't know a lot about theologian David Bentley Hart, but he seems to have been creating a bit of a stir lately with his own translation of the New Testament (which most reviewers seem to find interesting, if not always convincing -see discussion here and here), and with recent essays, such as this one from only a couple of weeks ago, discussing what (he argues) is the modern lack of understanding of St Paul's core world view.

The key paragraphs:

Questions of law and righteousness, however, are secondary concerns. The essence of Paul’s theology is something far stranger, and unfolds on a far vaster scale. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.

In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ (hypetaxen) all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

Interesting...

Sort of glad I missed online dating

I stumbled across this link today, and suspect it's been pretty popular, given how high it was when I Googled about Elaine from Seinfeld.

It's by a 40 something woman who details some of her worst online dating meet ups.   (She says she's never had a good date, despite trying several different sites.)   The details of how strange men can be is pretty hair-raising.  Here's a slightly edited version:

For instance, I exchanged several long emails with the Furniture Restorer. We seemed to have a lot in common, but within five minutes of meeting face to face, he uttered an anti-Semitic comment. It hadn’t occurred to me to say: “I’m glad you like kayaking, mushroom pizza and the Band, but do you happen to hate Jews?”

My date with the Logistics Manager wasn’t memorable for what happened during the 25-minute coffee interlude, which had stretches of awkward silence, but for what happened afterwards. I shook his hand and catapulted out of there, pointedly not saying, “It was lovely meeting you.” An hour after our deadly dull date, he sent me a text with a vulgar sexual suggestion.

Ummm . . . No thanks.

As I’ve tried the different dating sites, I’ve revised my dating profile, hoping that this version will catch the eye of Mr. Right. I tried a lighthearted tone, with a bit of humour and ended up meeting the Contractor at 11 a.m. one summer Sunday. He told me he had been to a party at a friend’s the night before and had stayed over. Fair enough. But he was still quite drunk when we met. He took a king can of beer out of his knapsack and chugged it there on the street.

Next, I tried a more serious, academic tone and that led to lunch with the Computer Programmer. There was a little basket on the table, filled with those little plastic creamers. This dude peeled the creamers open one by one and drank them....

But those dates don’t even come close to what I call the “Elaine Date.” If you watched Seinfeld, you may remember an episode where Elaine tells Jerry that her date “took it out.” Yup. That happened.

The Runner Up for awful/bizarre dates was when I went for lunch with the X-Ray Technician. He revealed himself to be a furry . . . I don’t even know how to explain that, other than to say he was covered in more plush than a truckload of teddy bears. He wore a spotted giraffe hoodie, with pointed ears and a mane, and matching socks. And he wore a tail. Yes, a furry tail. ...

I had one profile that was rather long-winded and very detailed about my values, my political leanings and about what I was looking for. It attracted a lawyer with a foot fetish who said he would buy me as many shoes as I wanted, provided I let him suck my toes. And then there was the Comedian who forewarned me that no sex by the third date was a deal breaker. ...

My final date was with the Advertising Guy. We did the usual coffee thing, which by that time already seemed like more effort than it was worth. During our hour-long cappuccinos, Ad Guy emptied the contents of his Dockers pockets and gave me a detailed commentary on everything he carried: screwdriver, tissues, pocket knife, measuring tape, Purell, Band-Aids, wrench set, hammer, magnifying glass, eyeglass repair kit, two HMV gift cards, a poem to his mother, fire starter, antiseptic wipes, allergy pills, pen, notepad, Starbucks gift cards, family photos, TTC tokens, elastics . . . As he displayed each item, he’d say something like: “This comes in handy,” or “You never know when you might need these.” At the end of the “inventory,” he read me the poem he had written for his mother. While I appreciate family bonds, reciting maternal verse was not the way to win me over.

I guess the big question is - how many unpleasant/strange women are out there in the online dating world?  I saw on Reddit today an example that was being widely mocked: 

A poke in the eye

Not entirely sure that I should have watched this YouTube of a procedure I'll be having tomorrow,  but it at least shows how eyeballs can take quite a lot of poking around in them.

Update:  that was interesting.   All seems OK,  so far.

About The Post

It seems a fair guess that Spielberg decided to make The Post because you can imagine every single element being utterly disdained by Trump:

*  key character:   a woman forced by circumstance to make her own way in a male dominated corporate world, and succeeds;

*  said woman makes an important right (not Right) decision in the public's interest, contrary to what the powerful men in the White House want;

*  lying politicians undone by a whisteblower and dedicated reporters willing to take risks;

*  a talk heavy story - hardly any guns or fights at all.

The perfect anti-Trump movie!  It's hilarious to think  that the White House asked for a screening (not sure if it was given);  I suspect Trump would have just said "no thanks" if told it was on, or walked out after 10 minutes claiming boredom.

I thought it was very good - not earth shatteringly remarkable, but a well directed, largely well acted, and (from what I can gather) only mildly fictionalised recreation of an important moment of US history of particular resonance to politics today.    There are one or two pretty static bits of background exposition near the start, but the story picks up speed and ends up quite engaging and satisfying. 

Even though it shares the same inevitability of Bridge of Spies, in that it is a true story and we pretty much know the ending, I thought it was significantly better than that movie, which I really felt had no surprises or complexity of any kind.   I remain a bit puzzled as to why so many reviewers praised it so highly.

One other point of comparison with Bridge:   this may seem minor, but there was something about the look of the rooms and streets in that film that seemed to me to look too much like a fake recreation of the era.   (Not sure that any other viewer in the world was thinking about art direction as I was, but there you go.)   On the other hand, The Post somehow looked to my eye to be much more convincingly of its day.   There, I've made some art director happy.  Unless it was the same person for both movies, of course.

Spielberg's use of hand held camera in some sequences is, as usual, fluid and not unsettling as it is with some other directors.   He just knows how to add subtle interest to scenes via camera movement and framing.   I think, to be objective, that there were a couple of "overtalking" scenes between characters that did not ring true (I think Spielberg used to do this in some of his earlier movies), but this is a very minor quibble about a movie in which, in large part, my Spielberg admiration was amply satisfied.

Late comments on the Last Jedi

Yes, I know you've all been waiting for my opinion on this.  No?  I don't care, you're getting it anyway.

I thought it was just OK.  Let's do this in dot form, and I guess you might not want to read it if you still haven't seen it:

*   For a movie for which I had taken much effort to avoid reading spoilers, I found there was a disappointing lack of important ones.   And did everyone like me suspect that Leia was going to be killed off (perhaps via a late re-write), given the unfortunate demise of Carrie Fisher?   Speaking of her, I have to note this, if I haven't before in this blog:  her voice/accent in both Force Awakens and this one did bother me.  In the original movies, I thought she strived for something a bit mid-Atlantic (it helps to sound a bit British if you are playing royalty, after all.)  But in the revivals, she has sounded like she had spent the intervening years is some smoky New York bar roughening up her throat.   I didn't care for the effect.

*   It's a more than a bit embarrassing to admit, but I do get some of the alt.right-ish backlash against the number of women in the movie.  What's been going on in the Resistance?   Did they start sacrificing men to some volcano or something?   Were the members of the Rebellion who didn't bother turning up at the end all guys who got sick of the positive discrimination policies under Leia?   "Ha!  I got overlooked for promotion 6 times for ethnic girls who kept flunking their X Wing course before they lowered the standards, and you think I'm coming running when you need me?"

Really, I quite liked the multi-cultural-ing of Force Awakens, and  Rogue One, and didn't mind that they had female leads, but with the increase in the number of women in (what seems)  every single scene in Last Jedi,  I thought the politically correct motivations are starting to look just too obvious.   That, along with the key theme that "men are too impulsive and gun happy to understand strategy and are going to get us all killed", and even the morally ambiguous position of Luke Skywalker through most of the film, all indicate a serious case of over-compensation for the lack of female roles in the first three movies.  (By which I mean, movies 4 to 6.)    In fact, not that I care at all about the prequels, but I would guess the amount of female presence in the Star Wars series if graphed would look something like this:

(Sorry I misspelt Abrams)

*   I'm not convinced that Rian Johnson is all that good a director, particularly of light sabre fight scenes.  I thought the whole confrontation with Snook's henchmen was very underwhelming, with a set that looked too simple and fight choreography that had too many silly, unnecessary spins and twirls.   I think JJ Abrams did a substantially better job in Force Awakens.

[Gee, this is coming out way more negative than I anticipated.]

*  What did I like?   Some of the jokes were pretty good, and I don't mind the general theme of Luke having a crisis of confidence, given that the Jedi just keep on seeming to stuff things up with some of their decisions.  Mark Hamill was pretty good in the role.    I guess I don't even mind the theme that you don't want to let old style, fundamentalist religion bog you down to seeing what's right and good.    But that also leads to the main problem with the film:

*  The on-going problem with the series is that it can't seem to decide on the nature of the Force, or give a coherent account of it in terms of evil.  Yes, it has a theodicy problem.

It is almost certainly not worth over-analysing a nebulous term written by a young director with a vague idea of inserting a mystical element into his fantasy universe, but when you read articles like this one (a semi defence of the awful idea of the Force as mediated by Midi Chlorians) you can see that writers and viewers of the movies have been trying to make sense of it, but failing.

This article in The Atlantic discusses the substantial change in the nature of the Force in this latest movie.  I suppose that, in principle, I don't mind the democratising idea that anyone can be a Jedi (or use the Force), but it does just seem to come out of nowhere, doesn't it?    I mean, if the series had done something like have a Buddha or Christ figure who, at some sort of universal level, had come to bring the Force to all, that would make sense?  But the sort of burbling on by Luke, Rey and even Yoda (although I was pleased to see him, and in puppet form), just didn't do near enough to clear up the change.  Or the nature of the Force.

Another in depth discussion of the movie by David Roberts explains that he felt the movie kept indicating it wanted to make a clean break from a good/evil dichotomy, but eventually pulls back from it.   I'm not sure I agree - I think the movie just leaves the nature of the Force vis a vis good and evil more confused than ever.

I don't know whether this will ever be capable of proper resolution.  I fear it would take some character to sit down and give a 20 minute lecture to clear up the matter, and it's not going to happen.

*  But anyway, it's not completely forgettable, like the prequels.  It's probably fair to say I enjoyed it at the time of viewing more than this analysis would indicate, but some movies do suffer a bit when you think about them too much.



  

Some Trump Youtube mockery

I found this Colbert clip, talking about the details of a Trump affair that it seems everyone during the campaign had forgotten about, to be particularly hilarious:



Which reminds me of this bit of art that was on twitter recently:

While I was on Youtube, the Trump mocking parody songs of Roy Zimmerman, who seems to have around for a long time, but I hadn't heard of him before.

He's a pretty good singer, and even if you think at first that the look or lyric is not so clever, each song usually gets to one or two lines that are very funny indeed.  For example, you have to get to the chorus in this one:



Or this, where one line in the middle is very LOL:

About Hillary

The other night, I saw a repeat run of The Graham Norton Show featuring Hillary Clinton, when she was promoting her book about the loss of the election.

As noted in this piece of commentary, she came across as nice, sharp and emotionally together.   I kept thinking "this is the woman about whom the Right wing internet idiot machine kept finding so called "experts" to claim that she was virtually on death's door during the campaign.  Aren't they embarrassed to see this?"   But I've never heard anyone from that side express any regret about that conspiracy nonsense...

Rough figures on Apple

So, Apple is boasting that it's going to pay $38 billion in tax when it brings its overseas pot of money back to the US.   (Ireland and Europe sound worried that this means they miss out on the tax they've been chasing from Apple for years - showing that they've been played for suckers, I reckon.)  

Trump and Republicans are crowing that this is what happens when you reduce corporate tax rates by 40% (from 35% to 21%).  

But wait a minute:   how much tax does the US collect annually from companies?   According to this site, in 2015, it was $342 billion, roughly.     So, using that figure, a 40% drop in the amount of tax collected due to Trump's new rates would mean revenue of $205 billion in lieu of $342 billion.   A drop of $137 billion (!). 

Add in $38 billion from Apple, and that brings revenue back up to $243 billion, still down to 71% of the tax collected in 2015. 

Let's be (what I suspect is) generous and allow other companies paying (say) a further $30 billion in tax on monies coming home to the US.   That would bring it up to $273 billion, or 80% of the 2015 tax revenue.*

Of course, Apple investments in the US should generate more personal income tax from workers, (and payroll taxes?) so there will be some improvement on that side of the ledger. 

But, don't these rough figures indicate that the gain to US revenue by big, but one-off, repatriated profit tax payments like those from Apple will come no where near making up for the lost revenue from a permanent massive corporate tax rate cut?

*  My guestimate might not be far off - according to this article, it's been estimated that repatriation taxes could bring in $338.8 billion, but over ten years.   If it was spread evenly, that would be $34 billion or so a year.


PS:   Incidentally, any renewed investment by Apple in the US is, I would imagine, hardly likely to benefit the ageing, white, non college educated Trumpsters in rustbelt areas who find it hard getting work, or well paid work.   What's the bet that Apple will in fact, soon enough, be pressing Trump to ease up on his anti migration vibe so to let in the skilled foreign workers that they need for their new investment?

And Slate points out how people are easily misled by Apple PR machine, when they are spouting "billions and billions":

The press release predicts that between its “current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers—an estimated $55 billion for 2018—Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years.” In other words, Apple will keep buying stuff from other U.S. companies. This is not a patriotic act of charity. Apple is literally saying it will continue business as usual. That alone accounts for $275 billion of its $350 billion forecast.

As for the rest of that total? In a mystifying bit of self-aggrandizement, the company is counting its $38 billion repatriation payment as another “direct contribution” to the U.S. economy. This is money they are required to pay by law. “A payment of that size would likely be the largest of its kind ever made,” the company helpfully notes. This is only true because Apple spent years making money hand-over-fist while doing everything in its power to avoid taxes. 

Finally, we get to the company’s actual plans to invest in the U.S. Here, we learn that “Apple expects to invest over $30 billion in capital expenditures in the US over the next five years and create over 20,000 new jobs through hiring at existing campuses and opening a new one,” which will initially “house technical support for customers.”

PPS:  I know that tax, especially (it seems) the US tax system, is complicated, and it's likely I'm missing something significant.   It is just "rough figures" after all...

Catching up on some links

Some stuff that interested me over the Christmas period:

*   Tim Lott at The Guardian complained that modern writers of "literary fiction" no longer interest him because they are bad at plot and basic storytelling.   I suspect there is something to that.

*  Did you see the story ABC TV news was running over Christmas about the terrible situation with potable water in Jakarta?   It was startling how bad the situation was in the city, and now I can't find the link.  Must be there somewhere, I would expect.  But Googling around shows me that the situation has been bad for a very long time, with the problem being pinned by some on the water utility being privatised 20 years ago.  That has now been undone due to litigation, and it's the government's direct problem again.  Private companies don't always do it better, it seems...

*   Good advice:  Don’t listen to Gwyneth Paltrow: keep your coffee well away from your rectum

*  Yet another The Guardian link:  about a trend to keep bodies of deceased loved ones at home for a period of mourning and how funeral directors help facilitate it.   (There's a cold plate the body is put on.)  It's a bit of a tribal thing for many, but I think it does make some psychological sense that it would help the mind process the loss.

*  I sort of like folk Catholicism for its liveliness and its cultural interest, but does it have to be as dangerous as a photo essay at The Atlantic (showing a massive procession in the Philippines from a couple of weeks ago) indicates?  Two examples:

Thought this was the case

I had thought that this was the case - as so many friends and relatives have been to Japan in the last decade, whereas it had not seemed to be that big a destination for Australian tourists 25 years ago. 

Here's an article at the ABC putting numbers on my suspicions, and confirming them.   Australian and Japanese tourist numbers have changed dramatically:

Well before China's economic growth drove its citizens to seek out Australian beaches and koala cuddling sessions, it was Japanese tourists filling the pockets of operators in the 1980s and '90s.

The peak was in 1997 when more than 814,000 made the journey south.

Two decades later, in 2016, the number was basically half, with only 417,900 making the same trip.

By comparison, in 1997 some 101,460 Australians made the trek to Japan, of which just 41,520 were tourists.

By 2016 the number had sky rocketed to 445,237 — of which 398,193 were tourists. That's a 959 per cent increase in the number of Australians taking a holiday in Japan over just two decades.

Do NOT let this guy on Fox News Breakfast

So, some dude from the University of Waterloo (where?  Ontario I see) has an article on The Conversation seemingly advocating that the next year is a good time for the US to carry out a "surgical" nuclear strike on North Korea:

Properly used, nuclear munitions can result in a minimum of radioactive or long-term contamination, or mass destruction —far lesser consequences than if North Korea actually detonated one of their crude nuclear weapons.

Do us a favour, Rupert, and don't get him on Fox News morning show and have Steve Doocebag nod approvingly.  

So, it's just intense personality and character defects, then?

Surely I can't be the only person to be somewhat disappointed that Trump isn't on the way out due to cognitive issues?   (Come on - it's not like I'm wishing ill on a saint - or even your average sinner.  He's an obnoxious, racist, dumb, narcissistic, serial adulterer from way back.   Willing to pay off his casual sex partners just before an election, too.  It's rumoured there were many other payments made.)  Mind you, the test he underwent is the simplest one (which is of the kind I saw the doctor give to my Mum when she was developing dementia):

At the president’s request, Jackson said that he reviewed a number of cognitive tests and then administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment during Trump’s first presidential physical exam on Friday afternoon at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The 10-minute exam is designed to detect mild cognitive impairment, generally in older patients. Trump answered all 30 questions correctly, Jackson said.

The test includes asking a patient to name several animals, draw a clock with the hands at a certain time, copy a cube and recall a short list of words, among others. Jackson said he has “no indication whatsoever that he has any cognitive issues.”

I can't get to comments at the Washington Post, but I wonder what other doctors are saying about the test as a general reliable guide to mental functioning...

Galaxy positioning system

Oh my - seems like only a year or so ago that I was posting about pulsars being proposed as a sort of GPS system for spaceships in the solar system or beyond - but it was 2012!

Last week, in Nature, it was reported that they can indeed be used that way:

From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space. Spacecraft could triangulate their location, in a sort of celestial Global Positioning System (GPS), using clockwork-like signals from distant dead stars.

Last November, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) spent a day and a half looking at a handful of pulsars — rapidly spinning stellar remnants that give off beams of powerful radiation as they rotate. By measuring tiny changes in the arrival time of the pulses, NICER could pinpoint its location to within 5 kilometres.

It is the first demonstration in space of the long-sought technology known as pulsar navigation. One day, the method could help spacecraft steer themselves without regular instructions from Earth.....The team plans to repeat the experiment in the coming months, hoping to reduce the margin of error to one kilometre or less.

My favourite recent anti-Trump reading

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks in Trump conversation in the media.  

Here are some recent passages and links that I thought rang very true:

*  Mike Allen at Axios made the case that, even though Fire and Fury is a book very high on "truthiness" rather than pinned down journalistic accuracy (and fellow Axios writer Jonathon Swan has complained long and hard about that aspect of the book), it does paint a big picture which Allen and other journalists fully accept as accurate.   How could it not be so when so many people in the White House were leaking against Trump to the press right from the start of this woeful presidency?:

...there are two things he gets absolutely right, even in the eyes of White House officials who think some of the book's scenes are fiction: his spot-on portrait of Trump as an emotionally erratic president, and the low opinion of him among some of those serving him.

But read the whole thing, if you missed it.

 * David Frum's summary of why Trump has supporters at all is spot on:

In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.

What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative-media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the culture wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.

*  Also in the NYT, Nicholas Kristof summarises Trump's threat to democracy, which has always been clear to those not blinded by culture war point scoring and conspiracy think:

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

We tend to assume that the threat to democracies comes from coups or violent revolutions, but the authors say that in modern times, democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Poland and Peru.

Kristof says he is not saying that he thinks American institutions won't successfully thwart Trump's anti democratic tendencies, but he does worry:

It matters when Trump denounces the “deep state Justice Department,” calls Hillary Clinton a “criminal” and urges “jail” for Huma Abedin, denounces journalists as the “enemy of the American people” and promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who “beat the crap” out of protesters. With such bombast, Trump is beating the crap out of American norms. 

True.

And the most distressing thing about Trump is the demonstration of how many people for selfish and often shallow reasons (Ha! look at how he sticks it to Leftists) will happily live - and even endorse - such anti-democratic rhetoric and behaviour in the so-called leader of the free world.  

*   I was surprised about the extent of some of the relatively moderate commentator push back arising from the deficiencies as journalism of  Michael Wolff's book:  in particular David Brooks in the New York Times actually coming to Trump's quasi-defence, noting that many people have had meetings with him where he at least came across as something less than a drooling madman.   Great!   Jonathan Chait makes a somewhat snarky, but accurate, response:

Four days ago, David Brooks broke the news in the New York Times that President Trump is actually a sober-minded and competent public servant. “People who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised,” he reported. “They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.”

It is safe to say that this column has not aged well in the short time since its publication.

Chait goes back over the remarkable story of how Trump demonstrated with certainly how he takes his lead on issues from Fox News, when he tweeted against his own administration's policy when someone on Fox News breakfast encouraged him to do so.  

How absurd and dangerous is this?   The only good thing to be said about Trump's tweeting habit, I suppose, is how the public knows directly what an empty headed, easily manipulated, narcissist person he is.  No need for historians to tell us.
 
 Chait also notes the many bizarre claims in Trump's WSJ interview of last week, including claims of treason for an FBI agent having political views.  Chait concludes:

It is obviously true that, in a large country, a broad spectrum of opinion will inevitably produce excesses on every side. Even a president as deranged and racist as Trump will be talked about, by somebody, in excessively harsh terms. Yet Brooks’s conclusion that Trump critics have on the whole exaggerated his flaws, that Trump is in fact reasonably well informed, affable, and sane, does not seem to be a reasonable conclusion at all. Instead it is an expression of Brooks’s unavoidable tendency to impose a sheen of normality on a political party that is anything but.

*  William Saletan made the obvious point in Slate about Trump's boasting of his intelligence:

 What Trump doesn’t understand is you don’t convey intelligence by asserting it. You convey it by demonstrating it. The more you talk about it, the more suspicious people become. They wonder why you’re vouching for yourself instead of doing your job and letting others vouch for you. And they wonder why you feel the need to keep talking about it. The real message of your constant boasting isn’t that you’re smart. It’s that you’re insecure.

*  Saletan is pretty good on Trump being a bigoted racist, too.  Lots of other writers have written a similar sort of piece, citing many examples from Trump's life.  But Saletan does it with many more links and in greater detail than most. 

An invention worth noting

I just found a link I had saved but, it would seem, never posted.  From 2013, in Slate, a short history of airconditioning.   It's a pretty hot weekend where I am in Brisbane, so it's topical.

The first modern, properly air conditioned building was apparently this:

It was introduced to the public on Memorial Day weekend, 1925, when it debuted at the Rivoli Theater in Times Square. For years afterward, people piled into air-conditioned movie theaters on hot summer days, giving rise to the summer blockbuster.   

So modern aircon is less than 100 years old.  Huh.

A holiday 23 million years in the making...

Well, perhaps not a holiday exactly:  more a short break over Christmas for 5 days to Mount Tamborine, barely an hour from where I live, and up behind the Gold Coast, so usually 2 to 4 degrees cooler than Brisbane or the coast.  We never stayed up there before, but I couldn't be away from work for too long this year, so we went there instead of a beach holiday.

We stayed at a holiday rental house in the streets behind the very touristy (and not that interesting, really) Gallery Walk at Eagle Heights.   I had never driven in the residential streets behind Gallery Walk before, and what a pleasant surprise they are.   The houses are a mix of old and new, but many are are in a cottage style, and cooler weather gardens are very common, as well as tree lined streets, some with spectacular views to the coast.  Some examples:

This isn't actually the house we stayed in, but just an example of a charmingly done cottage style house and cottage garden of a type you virtually never see in Brisbane, but of which there are many up at Tamborine.

This is the inside of the one we stayed at, and it was  the nicest holiday rental house we have ever been in.  Heaps of good cooking equipment in the kitchen (handy if you are doing a Christmas dinner), plenty of money spent on furniture, fully ducted airconditioning, beautiful bathrooms (I should have taken a photo), and for winter, a big central fireplace.   It's called The Maple and The Nest (booked through Stayz, not Airbnb), and I recommend it.



 
These doors:

which featured in my Christmas greeting post,  led to this wisteria covered courtyard - can you imagine how this would look when the wisteria is in flower?

Anyway, Mt Tamborine is sort of a plateau area, with a population of around 7,000, I think I read, with residential development around some small but still pretty national parks.   General photos of the area:

 A house with a view to the coast.

 The view to the west.

And some typical national park scenery:

 Strangler figs:  lots of strangler figs.

The other things Mt Tamborine does well:   craft beer, pizza with beer, cheese, avocados, and bread.

I think the Fortitude Brewing Company (which is big enough that some bars in Brisbane have it on tap - including my favourite bar, the Paddock Bar at Rydges next to the Brisbane showgrounds) is just the most consistently pleasing SE Queensland craft brewery, and its home is at Mt Tamborine.  The bar there does great pizza too, and the local cheese place (which is really high quality as well) is in the same complex.  We bought a "growler" and took some hoppy IPA home - it was great.

Around the corner from where we staying there was a small bakery, but it make some distinctive and fantastic sourdoughs, and was open every day over Christmas.  It's in a group of local shops that is off the main road, and hardly anyone seemed to ever be there, but it was a very pleasant surprise to find such high quality bread - try the German beer bread, you'll like it.

There are many small farms on the plateau, and avocados are plentiful, and they are often left on "honesty system" road side stalls.  We had some very good quality ones,  and some great red rhubarb and cucumber, but I suspect in other seasons the range of veges would be higher.   Stuff left out on the roadside in the middle of summer probably has a limited life.

There are tourist attractions based on tree top walks and flying foxes and the like, but they do seem pretty expensive and we didn't bother trying them.  Just lazing around instead, and the kids had their bikes to get around a bit, but it was still pretty hot and the ducted aircon was always attractive.   It was a pretty pleasant stay.

So, why the title to the post?

Well, the small Tamborine Heritage Centre (worth a quick visit, to learn a bit of local history) had this picture which caught my attention:

If you can read it, towards the right, they have marked a plateau area as "Tamborine Mountain".   What I didn't realise before was that this entire area had, 23 million odd years ago, all been under a huge shield volcano, the central remnants of which are the present Mount Warning in the Tweed Valley area, about 55 or so kilometres to the south as the crow flies.

Now, I could have guessed from the shape of Mt Warning, which looks very similar to the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane, that it was, like them, the central core of an eroded volcano.  (I think most people from Brisbane with vague geological interest know that about the Glasshouse Mountains?   I mean, one in particular - Crookneck:

 ...looks very much like a central volcanic plug.)

But I had no idea that Mt Warning was the centre of such a huge volcano in height and extent.   And that, if you look at the geography of the area now, the eroded caldera is clear:

And here's a NASA image of the same area:

As the NASA website says:

Australia, the only continent with no current volcanic activity, is home to one of the world's largest extinct volcanoes: Tweed Volcano, shown in this 3-D stereo image pair. Eruptions here ended about 20 million years ago. Twenty million years of erosion have left this landform deeply eroded yet very recognizable as a caldera with a central peak--the erosional stub of the central pipe that carried magma upward to Earth's surface.

I feel I should have know this before, even if I didn't do geography or geology in high school.





And what was Australia like 23 - 20 million years ago?

Well, it seems it had broken off from Antarctica by then and was still heading north.   (Antarctica was cooling because of its new surrounding southern ocean, although the ice sheets had not yet formed - that was only about 14 millions years ago.)

According to the Australian Museum website, the early Miocene (23 to 16 million years ago) featured this:

Vegetation

• Northern Australia was covered in lush rainforest.
• The Miocene was a time of enormous richness and variety of plant and animal life in Australia, equal to that found today in the rainforests of Borneo and the Amazon.

Animals

• In Australia the early relatives of many of familiar present-day animals had evolved including possums, kangaroos, koalas, bats, crocodiles, snakes, lizards, frogs, millipedes, beetles and many kinds of birds.
• Many less familiar animals also lived in Australia during the Miocene such as, marsupial lions, flesh-eating kangaroos, cleaver-headed crocodiles, thunder birds, horned turtles and strange 'thingodontans'.

Land of the flesh eating kangaroos, and a giant shield volcano not far from where I live now.  How interesting!

Speaking of ancient living things, a public park at Tamborine has a few bunya pine trees planted, which are a magnificent tree except for this problem:

That's a pretty good reason for their relative lack of use as a park tree.  I really only recall seeing some in their natural habitat up in Bunya Mountains National Park, when I was a teenager.












Here's one the cones at Tamborine, with my pale looking foot (and starting to look old) ankle for scale:

And how long have they been around?   Well, relatives like it has been around since the Jurassic (175 million years ago), apparently, so I presume it is likely that they were here pretty much in their current form when the Tweed volcano was spewing lava a mere 20 million years ago.

So there you:   I went on a holiday and learnt something about prehistory I didn't realise before.

Remarkably few in my family (read - none) find this as fascinating as I have....

A minor observation...

I've been meaning to opine on this all summer - and last summer too, when I think he also had the job.

Hamish Macdonald, the young-ish journalist who sits in for Fran Kelly as host of Radio National Breakfast over summer, is actually better at the job than Fran.   I don't dislike her, but Macdonald is often more direct and blunt with interviewees, and the show just feels, I don't know,  livelier?

Gradually building up to activity...

Not convinced this is a good mannequin look

As spotted in Sydney,  last year.   Don't think I ever posted about that weekend trip..

More mildlife

This summer's possum lodger is a very laid back customer.   Last year's would hiss and resent offers of fruit; this one takes it gently from the hand.   Nice...

Yet another holding post

Still busy

I didn't intend a blogging halt lasting this long, but I've just been exceptionally busy at work, and to a degree, at home.   And what a lot there is to link to at the moment re Trump, climate change, aliens (or lack of them), volcanoes, beer, cheese, bread and avocados.   (The last 5 topics will be dealt with in my first proper return post - there is a connection.)   But back to work again for the moment...

... and a Happy New Year

I'll be posting again soon,  but for now:

Christmas Greetings 2017

Policing the internet

Japan takes trying to intervene in suicide talk online pretty seriously:

In the wake of the recent high-profile killings and dismemberment of people who expressed a desire to commit suicide, the government announced measures on Dec. 19 to help those posting such thoughts on social networking services.

The Internet Hotline Center Japan (IHC), which is under contract with the National Police Agency, is expected to monitor such comments related to suicide beginning in January 2018 at the earliest.

Currently, the IHC monitors illegal data publicized on the Internet including obscene images, child sexual abuse images and advertisements on controlled substances and reports them to police.

Comments from those who express a desire to die will be included in the items reported to law enforcement.

Furthermore, the government will entrust other private organizations to keep close tabs on such postings on the Internet.

When such comments are posted and specific information including the date, time and place of the suicide attempt is learned through such measures, police will contact the poster and encourage them to talk with staffers who can provide support.

What's going on?

I see that Last Jedi criticism seems to be coming disproportionately from Right wing sites - even Ross Douthat is having a go at it!   Is the "fan backlash" influenced by the current culture wars?

But because I don't know when I can get to see the movie, I can't read into this yet.  I'm just looking at the start of articles...

In today's conspiracy news

Poor old CL:   he used to write well crafted conservative commentary at his blogs (since deleted).   Then he started living only in Catallaxy threads, the mutual support network for increasing stupidity, which has eaten into his brain, and lets him say what is really rattling around in his conspiracy laden head:

I've noticed this yearning evident in the conservative Catholic commentary lately for an actual violent physical fight over what is essentially a culture war.   Or at least, as evidenced in the recent writings of Philippa Martyr, a desire that "true" Catholics will soon start to be physically persecuted, so they can show their real mettle and die (or spend their time in jail?) defending the Catholic teachings that most Catholics have in fact moved on from.

It's a very strange time.

Didn't expect this...

MANILA – Firebrand President Rodrigo Duterte has said he wants same-sex marriage legalized in the Philippines, a move that would bring him into conflict with the dominant Roman Catholic Church.

Duterte, a longtime critic of the church which counts about 80 percent of Filipinos as followers, made the remarks in a speech before the LGBT community in his southern home city of Davao late Sunday.

“I want same-sex marriage. The problem is we’ll have to change the law. But we can change the law,” he said to wide applause.

“The law says marriage is a union between a man and a woman. I don’t have any problems making it marrying a man, marrying a woman or whatever is the predilection of the human being,” he added.
Divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage are still illegal in the Philippines due largely to the influence of the Catholic Church.

But Duterte, who took office in mid-2016, has actively attacked the church, accusing the clergy of sexual abuses and hypocrisy.

Spotted in The Japan Times.

Just another day in a Republican household

Truck dispute, handgun: throw in an unwanted pregnancy and you'd have the perfect cliche for a high profile redneck fight:

The elder son of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been charged with assault and burglary in a violent confrontation with his father in which the two men struggled over a handgun at his parents’ Alaska home, court records showed on Monday. 

According to the criminal complaint and supporting documents, Track Palin, 28, broke through a window of the house in Wasilla, Alaska, and scuffled with his father, Todd Palin, on Saturday night in a clash that stemmed from a family dispute over a truck.

This is annoying

So many people have already seen The Last Jedi that lots of websites are opening up spoiler discussion threads.   And I see there are some articles saying that some fans are reacting against the film.  But I don't know why.

I can't read any of this yet, for fear of spoilers.  I'm not even going to look at Reddit until I have seen the movie.  

What's a President to do when his top two advisers are in conflict?

That's from the Washington Post, by the way.

Impulse control

And you thought people getting gastric band operations was a pretty extreme way to fight obesity:

Picture this: While reaching for the cookie jar — or cigarette or bottle of booze or other temptation — a sudden slap denies your outstretched hand. When the urge returns, out comes another slap.

Now imagine those "slaps" occurring inside the brain, protecting you in moments of weakness.

In a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford neuroscientists say they've achieved this sort of mind-reading in binge-eating mice. They found a telltale pattern of brain activity that comes up seconds before the animals start to pig out — and delivering a quick zap to that part of the brain kept the mice from overindulging.

Whether this strategy could block harmful impulses in people remains unclear. For now the path seems promising. The current study used a brain stimulation device already approved for hard-to-treat epilepsy. And based on the new findings, a clinical trial testing this off-the-shelf system for some forms of obesity could start as early as next summer, says Casey Halpern, the study's leader and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He thinks the approach could also work for eating disorders and a range of other addictive or potentially life-threatening urges.

Look, if the only way this could work is putting electrodes into the brain, it's not going to be a common operation.

More detail on a credible UFO sighting

On the weekend, when I posted about the Pentagon UFO research story, I should have linked to this associated report at the New York Times in which a former Navy pilot explains the very strange UFO sighting in 2004.   It appears that it was visual and radar - just about the most interesting UFO encounters there are, as well as the pilots thinking it was affecting the water beneath it.   The video of the aircraft camera is not as impressive as one might hope, though, in that the object looks a bit fuzzy edged.  But then right at the end, it seems to zip off at high speed.  

I see some people are saying that the sighting was over the Pacific but not so far from a "Skunk Works" base, meaning they suspect it is advanced, human made, propulsion technology.   Could be, I suppose, but very fascinating even if that is the explanation.

I had thought when I posted initially that the two videos had been released before, but seems I was wrong about that.   I really want to know more about them.   Why does the second video in the article, this one:



end so abruptly?   In fact, I'm not even clear what year this one was.

A hoax of some kind remains a possibility, but the pilot speaking to the NYT and having his photo in the article makes that seems pretty unlikely.
  

I could have danced all night...

Cadavers in the ballroom

That's a headline you don't see every day.

It's at Reuters, and it is a rather surprising story:

Big names in hospitality, from Disney to Hilton and Hyatt, have a little-known sideline: They rent space to physicians who train on cadavers and body parts. There is scant regulation, and some public-health specialists warn of biosafety risks. 

More detail in the opening paragraphs:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida – Just outside the operating theater, the organizers of a medical conference wore Minnie Mouse ears.

Inside, as doctors practiced on three cadavers, blood from one of the human specimens seeped through a layer of wrapping.

“They leak,” a lab technician said of the bodies.

The sessions, held last month and attended by a Reuters reporter, weren’t at a hospital or medical school. They were part of a so-called cadaver lab – and the setting was a Florida resort. It was one of scores of such events over the past six years that have been held at a hotel or its convention center.

In this case, doctors practiced nerve root blocks and other procedures on cadavers in one of the Grand Harbor ballroom’s salons at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts convention center. Online, Disney refers to its ballrooms as “regal and resplendent.” They’re often used for wedding receptions. 

Disney did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Mickey has blood on his shoes?

Easily thrilled

From an Australian perspective, this is a very odd headline and story at Gulf News:

Hailstorm thrills children in Dubai

Students of GEMS Our Own Indian School in Al Quoz were thrilled to see pellets of hailstones falling down all over their campus, the school’s principal Lalitha Suresh confirmed to Gulf News.

"Yes. The kids were really enjoying the hailstorm," she said.

 Many children were out in the school ground for the sports day selection procedures when it started raining.

"We were having our shotput finals. It was drizzling. Suddenly hailstones started pouring down. We were so excited. I was able to collect some hailstones in my hands. Then we were told to disperse and rush to class," said Julie Francis, a grade eight student.

Suresh said the sports day selection was postponed due to the rains.

"Kids started playing in the water also. You know they never get to play in water. We really had to manage the children. Anyway, we didn’t have any damage in the school."

I guess a tornado would thrill them even more...

Douthat trying too hard

Ross Douthat really tries too hard sometimes to find something like what he thinks is "balance" - such as today's column saying the defeat of ISIS is a Trump "win", and then criticising mainstream media for not acknowledging this.

The flaws in the argument are within the column itself - and many comments ridicule Ross:

And yet, there are a few comments from Trumpkins who think that Donald really won the war by unleashing the power of the American military, or some such guff.   They live in a world created purely by their own bubble of right wing punditry.

Long term problem for Bitcoin and blockchain

I wondered over the weekend whether the development of quantum computing was going to be a problem in the long term for Bitcoin, and the answer seems to be "yes".   See this recent article at MIT Technology Review, but there are others.  (They do suggest that changes can be made to make it "resistant" to quantum computing, but I wonder if quantum computing is going to win the race in the long run.  Which would make all the energy being used on current mining a true waste.)

Speaking of Bitcoin and blockchain, I noticed this amusing tweet on the weekend:

Galactic empires discussed

Via Peter Whiteford's fantastic twitter feed, a link to a review (a few month's old, but still) of a John Scalzi book, which is most interesting for its opening description of the common theme of galactic empire science fiction:

ACCORDING TO Donald A. Wollheim, Golden Age science fiction typically imagined the future would unfold according to a certain pattern:

1. humans explore and colonize the solar system;
2. humans explore and colonize extrasolar planets;
3. a Galactic Federation/Republic/Empire emerges;
4. the Empire enjoys a peak period characterized by a stable metropole in the galactic center (however constituted) and ongoing exploration at “the Rim”;
5. this peak period is followed by decadence and collapse;
6. the collapse is followed by a Dark Age (of whatever length);
7. a second Empire is established that is imagined to be perfected and permanent;
8. and, finally, the people of the future undertake The Challenge to God: sometimes this literally culminates in overthrowing some sort of malevolent God Thing, while at other times it involves innovating some way to survive the heat death of the universe (or evolving into energy beings of pure light, et cetera).

From Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas (and on and on), one discovers this basic narrative recurring over and over again in science fictional narratives about the human “destiny” to inherit the stars. 

[Speaking of reviews and science fiction-y writing, I also saw that The Australian yesterday put on its twitter feed a link that actually worked to a review of Helen Dale's Kingdom of the Wicked: the first mainstream media review I have seen.   (At Amazon, women who writes at The Spectator sometimes, as does Dale, complains that reviewers are deliberately ignoring the book because they are all Lefties still wanting to punish her for the Hand That Signed the Paper hoax.)    Anyway, the review is not good.
 Update:  I see now that a short, negative, review has also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.  I found that via a tweet on Dale's own twitter feed.  She also indirectly referenced The Australian's review.  Yet I am sure she said somewhere that she doesn't read mainstream reviews, after her experience with HTSTP.] 

Listening in from a distance

Readers probably have already seen the various reports that some scientists decided to turn a radio receiver towards that elongated asteroid now heading out of the solar system, just in case it was a spaceship or something artificial.

I meant to post this part of that story, because it says a lot about the sensitivity of radio telescopes:

Breakthrough Listen announced Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.

And here's a report on the first results:

The first batch of four observations ran from 8.45pm UK time on Wednesday until 2.45am on Thursday morning and spanned a frequency range from 1 to 12 GHz. While the search for alien signals has so far found nothing in the 1.7 to 2.6GHz range, the rest of the data is still being processed.

Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley Seti Research Center, told the Guardian that a review of all four bands observed Wednesday night had come up blank. “We don’t see anything continuously emitting from ‘Oumuamua,” he said. “We’re now digging into some of the intermittent candidates, and trying some new machine learning-based techniques we have been working on. We expect our next observation window to be scheduled for Friday or Saturday, when we should get a view of additional phases of ‘Oumuamua as it rotates.”