Jews in comedy

Some interesting takes on modern American comedy and its dominance by (largely secular) Jews in this review of a book at the TLS.  Some extracts:

In the latter half of the twentieth century, American comedy just was Jewish comedy, even if the Jewishness had to be tamped down to appease mainstream audiences. It was often said of Friends that it was written as if for six old Jews, and then cast with six young attractive people. In Seinfeld, that most Jewish of sitcoms, there was only one codified Jewish character, but that’s simply because the extremely Jewish Elaine and absurdly Jewish George were handed other ethnic identities (WASP with “Shiksappeal” and Greek, respectively) to keep the networks calm....


Instead, Jewishness in comedy – what, in other words, is actually Jewish about the comedy of these secular Jews – is elusive, a bit like Judaism’s conception of the afterlife. Sahl, when first approached with the idea that his act was pervasively Jewish even though he rarely drew on his ethnicity directly, is quoted as saying, “If the role of the Jew is to rock the boat and to be inquisitive – intellectually curious, that is – fine. Classic role”. It is an interesting concept: that Jewishness in comedy is subversive but also something that can be identified in comedians whether or not they wear it on their sleeve...

The complexity is the point: so, too, the obscurity. Dauber talks of how Seinfeld, created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, with its endless discussion of the invisible rules of life – “what are the boundary lines in nebulously defined situations? What consitututes the limits of social acceptability? When does this status change to that one?” – was described by Larry Charles, the show’s producer, as “a dark Talmud”. Except dark is possibly the wrong word: Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, it was a show about small things, about the minutiae and microscopia of everyday, modern life, and as such the one thing Seinfeld never was, was dark. Because dark means weighty, deep, gravitas-achieving. Jewish comedy depends on bathos, on bringing things down to earth – which specifically tends to be the Jewish earth: whether it be with a well-chosen Yiddishism, or a comic-sounding Jewish name, or a reference to the mundane worlds of work, food, money, sex and, well, Jewishness. A joke with a four-word punchline that is quoted by Dauber neatly bears this out: when the Dalai Lama meets his mother she tells him, “Sheldon! Enough is enough”

To come back, then, to what appeared to be a passing, but was not, point about the afterlife: Christianity, and most other religions, are all in the clouds, in the great hereafter – Judaism tends to concentrate on the here and now, and indeed its rules. But in minutiae, there is humanity: it is in reaching after the grandiose things in life that civilization gets skewed. To be microscopic, comically, is to create engagement: these people, the joke says, are like you, because like you, they sweat the small stuff.

Calling John Bolton

I have a solution to this Australian Cricket Team cheating business, which seems to be occupying about 98% of the nation's attention:  invite John Bolton to arrange a tactical nuclear strike on the team, and any outpost of cricket administration.  We know he wants to nuke something, and no one in Australia (or any other cricketing nation) is possibly going to object.   (Or so it seems.)

It may also rid the nation of the most tedious sport ever invented, at least until the cockroaches learn how to hold a bat. 

[Disclaimer:  of course, I have to acknowledge that loving a tedious game does not per se make a cricket fan a bad or deficient person in any respect.   That would require loving both cricket and Frozen, and a short course of treatment involving electrodes would be worth a try...]

Theatre critic time

Went to see Alladin last night at QPAC.

I reckon plenty of adults not normally attracted to Disney "princess" stories saw the movie in the 1980's because of Robin Williams as the genie; but to be honest, it was probably the start of my assessment that his shtick was overrated.   I was underwhelmed.

As a stage show, however, mounted on a large scale with additional songs, it's impossible to actively dislike.   It's very enjoyable, in fact. 

Struggling to find something to analyse, I would say, however, that the resolution at the end seems rushed.   But, now that I think of it, My Fair Lady (the last musical I saw) suffered the same issue.   I guess there is something about the structure of a Broadway musical that is unavoidable - the expectation that the first half will contain the killer highlight, then the second half has to have another peak well ahead of the ending which, at most, contains a short reprieve of the main songs.  

Something of an exception, perhaps, now that I think of it, is the musical version of Hairspray (which I have only seen as a movie.)   The protracted set piece at the end really is the highlight of the movie, which, however, is too long overall.  

Anyway, one thing I will never see is the stage version of Frozen, which has just started in New York.   That girl power material that plays, let's face it, as a warning to young girls to not only never trust men, but also encourages using passive males for advantage,  remains (to my mind), only capable of great endorsement by girls and gay men, both of whom suffer from a peculiar fondness for schmaltzy power ballads.  

Fake meat fun

Yeah, while I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with it, I do share this guy's interest is seeking out fake meat products that are satisfyingly meat-like:

I’m obsessed with mock meat and I’m not even a vegetarian

And the best products do tend to involve fungi - particularly shiitake mushrooms, which can be made with the firmer "bite" that a lot of fake meat products lack.   (Quorn is too soft, and expensive, in my opinion.) 

Sounds premature

This article seems to involve a little too much self-promotion, but if true, it's good news:

A Vancouver-based research team led by Canada's most cited neuroscientist, Dr. Patrick McGeer, has successfully carried out studies suggesting that, if started early enough, a daily regimen of the non-prescription NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) ibuprofen can prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This means that by taking an over-the-counter medication, people can ward off a disease that, according to Alzheimer's Disease International's World Alzheimer Report 2016, affects an estimated 47 million people worldwide, costs health care systems worldwide more than US$818 billion per year and is the fifth leading cause of death in those aged 65 or older.

It actually goes on to talk more about testing saliva to see if people are likely to develop Alzheimer's, rather than the protective effects of ibuprofen.  Seems very PR department written, if you ask me...

Things never cooked

Inspired by seeing a can of ghee for sale in my local Coles, I started mentally listing things I've never cooked/cooked with:

Ghee
celeriac
jerusalem artichokes
real saffron
livers from any creature
kidneys from any creature

My Mum used to cook lamb's fry (liver) in a pressure cooker when I was a kid, and I didn't mind it in small quantities.  I seem to recall it make for a particularly delicious gravy.  She also did steak and kidney stew, and again, kidneys in small amounts were OK.   But can't say I have had much inclination to try eating them again (pate excepted.)

I haven't been paying close attention to My Kitchen Rules this season - I agree with some critic somewhere who said that the "drama" element of the show has been pumped up more and more every season, and it's now more the point than the cooking.   From some advertisement I half watched last night, it looks like the show will soon feature a disaster of some kind - was that a contestant or two  lying on the yard with an ambulance in attendance?   Come on, this is getting very silly.

Anyway, I did see part of it recently where, once again, the cooks were served bone marrow as an entry.

Don't know why, but I find the idea of eating the jelly like, fatty substance by itself just really off-putting.  Even though, when cooking ossu bucco, it is probably the melted marrow which makes the surrounding stew so good.   Some cooks love it, though.

Must mean something to someone

An abstract at arXiv:

The ability to control multidimensional quantum systems is key for the investigation of fundamental science and for the development of advanced quantum technologies. Here we demonstrate a multidimensional integrated quantum photonic platform able to robustly generate, control and analyze high-dimensional entanglement. We realize a programmable bipartite entangled system with dimension up to 15×15 on a large-scale silicon-photonics quantum circuit. The device integrates more than 550 photonic components on a single chip, including 16 identical photon-pair sources. We verify the high precision, generality and controllability of our multidimensional technology, and further exploit these abilities to demonstrate key quantum applications experimentally unexplored before, such as quantum randomness expansion and self-testing on multidimensional states. Our work provides a prominent experimental platform for the development of multidimensional quantum technologies. 

Facebook and your call history

Look, privacy concerns don't rank very highly with me, given that I work on the theory that anyone who uses the incredible useful Google products should just assume that the company knows everything about everyone and hope that the flood of information is what inadvertently protects your privacy.  (And besides, most people's private life is not that interesting anyway.)

But  even I can see how this is pretty outrageous:

Facebook logs texts and calls, users find as they delete accounts

I've never held Facebook in high regard, and I imagine that it is a much easier hacked source of private info than Google accounts.   I hope the company gets hurt out of this.

Update:   have a look at this Twitter thread for some more details on the amazing amount of data retained by Facebook and Google.

Jumper song

I've been enjoying Moone Boy on Netflix (before it disappears on 30 March), and thought I should look up the origin of the short theme song.  Wikipedia told me it's part of a song that was well known in Ireland.

Here it is - the very silly "Where's Me Jumper":

Hardly surprising

I see that Newspoll shows only 33% support for Labor's new "no more cash rebate if you pay no tax" policy re dividend imputation, and 50% opposed and 17% undecided.  (Sorry, no good link for that.)

This is hardly surprising, when the Right has been continually claiming it's going back to "double taxation", and Labor (and journalists) have been slow to call them out.  See Gerard Henderson on Insiders yesterday as an example.

While it's clear that there are ways of seeking to defend the current policy (all bad, and many disingenuous, I reckon), the accusation of "double taxation" is not one of them - because it isn't, simple as that.

In any event, Labor is still not looking bad in the polls, with primary vote up to 39%.  I think the old rule of thumb still applies - a major party has to aim be at 40% of primary to be feeling reasonably confident of a two party preferred win, but with Liberals on 37%, I would rather be in Labor's shoes.

But at the end of the day, it will probably still be a pretty close election though, I suspect.

And now for something completely different - a link to a Breitbart article

I was only over there to see any update on their desperate and bizarrely nonsensical "ignore those anti-gun rallies - there were being political" line when I saw a link to an article attacking Bill Maher for attacking the late Andrew Breitbart.  Fortunately, all the article does is explain Maher's attack, and it is pretty funny.

(To summarise - both Breitbart and Bannon tried to break into Hollywood, and as a result of their rejection, decided to go on all out attack on liberals.)   Some parts:

He also said that the same thing happened to Andrew Breitbart, “who admits he came to Hollywood, ‘with the hope that I’d eventually become a comedy writer.’ And to his successor there, Steve Bannon, also a showbiz reject, who didn’t have the talent to cut it here, and so, spent the rest of life hating, Hollywood, and by extension, all liberals.”

Maher further stated, “In his memoir, Breitbart mentions Reagan 6 times, and me 34 times.” Maher also stated that Andrew Breitbart’s criticism of cocktail parties on the Westside is “funny, because, you know, for years, you know who I’d always see at cocktail parties on the Westside? Andrew Breitbart. Oh, he hated Hollywood, hated it, hated it, hated it, mostly from his home in America’s heartland, Brentwood.”

Maher’s monologue continued, “As for Bannon, George Clooney remembers him as ‘a schmuck who literally tried everything he could to sell scripts‘ including, this is true, a rap musical of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus.’ … But trust me, if Bannon could’ve sold a screenplay or Breitbart a sitcom, they wouldn’t have ended up ranting and raving about cocktail parties on the Westside, they’d be attending them. And in Bannon’s case, finishing the drinks people left on the table, including the ones with a cigarette in them.”

Nuttier than I thought

It took a bit of Googling, but I finally turned up an accessible copy of Helen Dale's opinion piece in the Weekend Australian, about the #MeToo movement.    (I was alerted to its existence by Sinclair Davidson posting about it with approval - with Dale, it's always with his approval - at Catallaxy.)   I'm not sure if it will work for you, but here's the link that got me to it.

The piece starts with a bit of lightweight autobiography (let's assume it's true, even though many have questioned some other autobiographical claims) which seems largely irrelevant to the #MeToo movement:   it's about her regret that workplaces have "lost something" by virtue of not being able to feature female nudey pics on the wall any more.  She says that when she was nearly 15 she was working at a place where her "first boss" had, amongst other sexually explicit things on the wall, a Pirelli calendar.   Years later when she visited again these were gone because it was by then "illegal" to have then in the workplace.

This, Dale regretted (and apparently still does?) because, well, she didn't mind them and, presumably, the rest of (not queer) young women who might work there should just suck it up.   Bizarrely, she doesn't seem to make allowance for the fact that her own open queer status meant that she would be an unlikely workplace male target for sexual favours, and as such could afford to take a more carefree attitude to a sexualised workplace where males could feel free to drool and joke about the naked women on the wall.    And let's not pretend the Pirelli calendars were subtle - here's one from 1986, which should match the year she says she was working at this place.  No pubic hair allowed, but apart from that, of course they should not be a on workplace wall.    On the wall in some wannabe Hugh Hefner's den, sure.  The workplace - no.

Then we get to the core nonsense of her criticism of the #MeToo movement:  it's got a large element of slut-shaming, apparently!:

I have a similar sense about the recent #MeToo movement, much of which seems to be so very high school: all the pretty girls from good families are congratulating each other for “bravely speaking out” about the advances they refused, while the women who made a calculation and opted to get their knees dirty are wisely keeping quiet.

There’s a smugly slut-shaming flip side to the solidarity: wearing black to the Golden Globes, telling stories about who touched whose knee, applauding Oprah Winfrey’s speech.  ...

....Women who accede to male entreaties — those who get their knees dirty — can be written off as sluts (something women do to other women far more frequently than men do to women), which burnishes the refusers’ reputations.

This, it seems to me until I see some evidence to the contrary, is entirely a matter from Dale's imagination.   She also seems to suffer from silly overuse of "get their knees dirty".

And to illustrate the degree to which she's wrong, one of the key controversial pieces in the #MeToo movement was that essay published by a young woman about a date that went wrong with Aziz Anzari.   The complainant had dinner, went back to his apartment, partook in some foreplay, but found his insistent manner that they now proceed to intercourse off putting, and she left and wrote a column about it.   Aziz later said he thought everything had been consensual - she apparently thought he could read her mind that she didn't like some of his "moves".   You can read here a piece critical of this woman's attitude.

There was much debate over this essay, and I do not recall any of it from the feminist, #MeToo supporting side involving  "slut shaming".  Sure, from the conservative side, some men in particular might have said "jeez, this was just a first date hook up that you decided to back out off after happily starting with sex.  Boo hoo."  But a #MeToo supporter who called her a slut for doing that?  Not that I've seen.

I don't recall anything in #MeToo involving women "slut shaming" other women - in fact, if you discount (as everyone does) nutty Dworkin style "all intercourse is rape" theorising, it's just not something feminism does.

If Dale has got some examples of women saying "so, actress Y says she slept with director X to get a role - shame on actress Y!"  I'd like to see them.

This is all not to say that the #MeToo movement is beyond criticism - just that Dale's criticism seems to me more fantasy than reality.  For one thing, if all women who (gawd) "got their knees dirty" are "wisely keeping quiet", how does Dale even know what they think about their decision?   

The piece is, perhaps, just Dale's attempt to get more publicity for her novel, which, as far as I can tell, has hardly set the literary world alight with attention or sales.   But does she have to mount such a silly argument to do so?

Update:  I haven't even addressed the bit in her article which upset the Catallaxy crowd - where she notes that a mutual willingness to "slut shame" helps account for a claimed "now-common alliance between feminists and religious conservatives — including, bewilderingly, Islamic conservatives",  but it is just as silly as the rest of her article.  Yes, some feminists make excuses for elements of Islamic practice which separate women as being empowering to the women who want to be separated.  (It's not a million miles from the idea that women joining a nunnery in centuries past was empowering compared to being a husband's chattel.) But feminists supporting Islam because they think Western women are slutty sex addicts - come on, show us the examples, Helen.  

But they're being political!

It looks like the anti gun marches across the US have been a huge (at least numerical) success.

The pathetic American Right, which keeps stumping me with its stupidity, can only react with:   "Don't pay them any attention - they're being political!  This was supposed to be about safety - but instead they're being political!"   

Look at this, for example, at Breitbart (I won't bother linking):

The thousands of people who took part in the March for Our Lives protest along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, on Saturday carried signs revealing their anti-gun, anti-Trump, and pro-left wing agenda.

Well, duh.

Even at Hot Air, we get this as a subheading to a Jazz Shaw post:

So much for school safety. This was about politics

And in his post: 

Wait a minute. I thought this was a rally to end gun violence in schools? Or at least a more generic call to “action.” When did the focus of the entire thing become “gun control?” Ah, well. Nevermind, I guess. This is CNN.

Well, double duh.

I mean, honestly.  While Democrats are not all pure of heart on gun control, as if the main legislative blockage to serious reform isn't Republicans.    

European towns can be ridiculously pretty

Found this on Reddit this morning:

It's Colmar, France, near the German border, and I've never even heard of the place.

Look who's alienated now

This essay at Aeon is a bit of a hard slog in the middle, but I think the basic argument sounds right.

It's about how the concept of "alienation" as an explanation or description of modern psychic malaise rose and then fell away over the course of the 20th century.

I think the argument can be summarised roughly as this:  the concept inherently put value, or assumed that people put value in, cultural unity and personal fulfilment through meaningful and creative work, which modern capitalism broke down.   However, in recent decades the Left (perhaps partly enabled by the wealth increasing success of capitalism) moved away from thinking that uniformity in community has inherent value - in other words, the rise of identity politics has meant that many people now (in a sense) seek or value "alienation".   Therefore, contrary to (say) the 1960's when people would say someone complaining of alienation was a Leftist hippy, those who feel alienated now are on the Right.

Here are the concluding paragraphs:

...For all its potential to sow division, identity politics might still reflect a justifiable search for roots and community. But it’s also true that many now celebrate the freedom to alter identities rather than meekly accept them, and that post-identitarian multiplicity is enjoying a renewal. Such discourses repudiate or at least complicate a simple denunciation of alienation from wholeness.

This change is most clearly registered in political terms. In the heyday of Marxist Humanism, alienation could be understood in terms of the capitalist mode of production, which thwarted the possibility of unalienated labour. But eventually the Left came to de-emphasise class, for better or worse, and substitute questions of culture for those of production. When Leftist politics embraced tolerance of difference, it grew wary of stigmatising the alien – including the alien within. Rather than yearning for ‘well-rounded wholeness’ or a comforting immersion in the warm bath of communal uniformity, this political shift meant recognising the virtues of protean personal identities and diasporic dispersion.

Hostility to the alien ‘other’, both without and within, has now migrated to the populist Right. Those who most loudly broadcast their alienation today, infusing it with rage and resentment, are likely to be from once-comfortable and hegemonic segments of the population. They feel threatened by the growing erosion of their status in a society that they remember – or at least claim to remember – as homogeneous, integrated and settled. Religious, ethnic, national and gender identities become more rigidly defended against perceived erosion. Many people panic when faced with fluid selves that embrace rather than bemoan the ‘alien’ within – expressed, for example, in their passionate resistance to transgender identity. And they are even more unnerved by the literal arrival of non-citizen ‘aliens’, legal as well as illegal, who threaten their alleged ethnic purity and cultural unity. For them, ‘hybridisation’ is really ‘mongrelisation’. Attempting to restore past ‘greatness’ or fend off ‘pollution’, they agitate for walls to keep dangerous others out, fearing that every newcomer is inherently a threatening intruder.

In short, alienation in the second decade of the 21st century has not actually faded away as a descriptor of human distress. Rather, it has become most visible in the anxiety of those who bemoan the transformation of a beloved homeland into an unrecognisable nation of aliens.

I think the argument, concentrating as it does on Marxist and other arty philosophers influenced society, does overlook the role of science from 1850 in changing cultural self understanding, at least in the West.

But it's still an interesting essay.

OK, so the American Right is stupider than I thought..

Two defences of appointing Bolton as National Security Adviser have appeared overnight - one from Hugh Hewitt, who I think is a lightweight twit, but another from David French at National Review, which I find a bit more surprising.   I guess I didn't realise the extent to which Bolton kept contacts with Right wing punditry.

Both articles contain some pretty inane comments.  Hewitt in particular has to go back to 2007 to find one line which he latches onto as evidence of Bolton's reasonableness:

Critics charge that Bolton likes war — a ridiculous assertion. As he told me in one especially memorable two-hour interview back in 2007: “Nobody should want a war on the Korean Peninsula.” Chew on that, critics.

It's like he's writing for his high school paper.

At least David French tackles head on Bolton's recent musings:

Even one of the pieces that the New York Times cites to justify its alarm — Bolton’s 2017 Wall Street Journal article analyzing military options in North Korea — contains this key sentence: “The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons.”

This is a sensible statement, indicating both the desire for agreement with key allies and the necessity of national self-defense...

A sensible statement?   Given that it implies Bolton thinks that a pre-emptive strike on North Korea is something the US could consider, and do so even if South Korea says "what, are you out of your mind?  We're the ones who are going to suffer the consequences in tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties":  no, it's not a "sensible" thing to say.

If you want an article detailing the time - a little over a decade ago - when Republicans could see the danger and problem with Bolton's dishonesty and behaviour in government, have a read of this column at the New York Times.

The answer is "Yes"

At the Atlantic:

Can Electrically Stimulating Your Brain Make You Too Happy?

Uh oh

NPR puts it this way:

Trump National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster To Resign, Be Replaced By John Bolton

....But if Trump liked that vision, he apparently grew to dislike McMaster.

According to inside accounts, the two men clashed when McMaster's cerebral briefings crashed into Trump's more freewheeling style.

Places in the world where much of the population's general anxiety just bumped up a few notches:

South Korea
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Japan
Taiwan
USA

I think only the wingnuttiest of wingnuts will be pleased with this.   I will be curious which right wing sites positively support it. 

Autism and transgender

Slate has an article discussing something I didn't know:

“We have enough evidence, across multiple studies internationally, to say that autism is more common in gender-diverse youth than in the general population,” said John Strang, a neuropsychologist and founder of the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington. Strang authored a 2014 analysis that found that more than 5 percent of autistic youth sampled for his study also displayed some level of desire to be the other gender, according to parental reports. (He cautioned that it’s too soon to say what the exact percentage in the overall population may be.) Another widely referenced study found that 7.8 percent of young people being treated for gender dysphoria at a clinic in Amsterdam had a confirmed diagnosis of ASD.

I wonder if this has anything to do with some rather nerdy professions - IT and engineering, for example - perhaps being disproportionately over-represented in transgender numbers?  (I'm not 100% sure that they are, but I have a vague feeling that I have read something indicating that.)

Brexit analysis

This ex-politician's analysis of several authors' take on Brexit is pretty good, and witty as well.  Roger Scruton is described as "a kind of mystical Brexiteer";  Corbyn gets mentioned this way:

Following the thinking of Jeremy Corbyn is also difficult, owing to its apparent absence, but from the leader himself down to militant Guardian columnists the anti-migration sentiments of voters are denied, played down, or avoided.

As for "brains for Brexit":

The “brains for Brexit” camp voiced little or no concern over immigration, a silence that impugned the judgement of the voting masses. Playing the populist defender while being sniffy about popular thinking is an inglorious intellectual posture.

Go read it all.

The unknown China

Quite a remarkable article at Foreign Policy about the extraordinary difficulty (or impossibility, perhaps?) of knowing what's really going on inside China on any issue at all.

How cheap can film making get?

I'm surprised to read that Steven Soderbergh's latest film was shot completely on an iPhone (!).   This article says it makes for some "harsh and uncompromising" visuals, but it suits the story.  

Just saying...

...if the Austin bomber had been a Muslim instead of a home schooled Christian, conservative wingnuts would be bouncing off the walls right now, and would continue doing so for days.

Instead, because it appears his apparent conservative views would fit right in with those expressed by most commenters at Catallaxy, they are expressing next to no interest in the matter at all.    

De-hyping the last paper

Just in case you've noticed any headlines about Stephen Hawking's last paper and how it says something remarkable about how we may detect other universes, you need to read Sabine's post debunking such reporting.   An extract:

Allow me put this into perspective.

Theoretical physicist have proposed some thousand ideas for what might have happened in the early universe. There are big bangs and big bounces and brane collisions and string cosmologies and loop cosmologies and all kinds of weird fields that might or might not have done this or that. All of this is pure speculation, none of it is supported by evidence. The Hartle-Hawking proposal is one of these speculations.

The vast majority of these ideas contain a phase of inflation and they all predict CMB polarization. In some scenarios the signal is larger than in others. But there isn’t even a specific prediction for the amount of CMB polarization in the Hawking paper. In fact, the paper doesn’t so much as even contain the word “polarization” or “tensor modes.”

The claim that the detection of CMB polarization would mean the multiverse exists makes as much sense as claiming that if I find a coin on the street then Bill Gates must have walked by. And a swarm of invisible angels floated around him playing harp and singing “Ode To Joy.”

In case that was too metaphorical, let me say it once again but plainly. Hawking has not found a new way to measure the existence of other universes.

Stephen Hawking was beloved by everyone I know, both inside and outside the scientific community. He was a great man without doubt, but this paper is utterly unremarkable. 

Reminds of something...

I'm talking about this cringe worthy picture I saw today at Vanity Fair:

Took me a few minutes, and then I realised - it looks as if it was lifted from a Zoolander movie.

(I did watch the second one recently on Netflix - it was funnier than I expected.)

Someone likes Spielberg

Ready Player One is receiving some good, some not so good, reviews; but the guy who writes BBC Culture reviews is a Spielberg fanboy who loved it, and I endorse his take on the director:

It’s dazzling stuff. Recently, a generation of directors has been paying homage to Spielberg’s popcorn films (in Super 8, Jurassic World, and Stranger Things, for example), but with Ready Player One he proves with stunning aplomb that no one does Spielberg quite like Spielberg. No one has more empathy with pasty American kids from broken homes. No one packs scenes with so much information, or elaborate action set pieces with so much energy, while ensuring that you always know what’s going on and why.

Exactly.   Contrast the complete mess of the action fights of Black Panther.   (That movie seems to be doing an Avatar - a film that I really don't doubt will be seen in only a few years as being puzzlingly popular given its inherent quality.)  

Anyway, this is not to deny that I might be cool on RP1 myself - not coming from a big gaming background, I may not care for all of its cultural references.  But I should get back into viewing VR stuff on my phone and cheap headset - I think there is a chance that the movie will make that past time more popular, and I want to be "cool" ahead of the rest.  :)

New reason not to go down to the woods today...

This sort of thing, if it turned up on some American crime show, would probably make you think  "how unlikely is that!":

A secret "gingerbread house" deep in a forest sounds like something from a fairy tale, but investigators in Seattle say the one they found was anything but. Now, 56-year-old Daniel Wood faces charges of possession of depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, according to the Seattle Times. 

An employee for Washington's Department of Natural Resources discovered bedding, food and a large amount of child pornography in an elaborate treehouse cabin in the Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest about 50 miles east of Seattle in Nov. 2016.

This set off a months-long federal investigation, that eventually led to Wood.

Forest Service employees had known about the treehouse for about seven years, but nobody knew exactly who had built it. The last time it had been inspected was nearly three years ago, and no photos of the cabin existed....

The employee with the DNR heard rumors of the cabin and decided to try to find it. He looked for it on five separate occasions, and then finally found the treehouse and its cache of pornography.

It looked like a gingerbread house on the outside. The cabin was "dark brown in color and built approximately 8 feet off the ground," according to FBI's Seattle office. "There was a porch around the structure, a front door, and windows on the side, as well as a pitched roof, and a ladder from the ground to the porch.

But, when he looked inside, the employee found something startling.

"On all four walls were framed pictures of fairy-like figures or of what appeared to be young girls, approximately 8-12 years old," per FBI reports.

 Here's the "house":

A hormonal post

There's quite a detailed, balanced and interesting article up at The Guardian: 

Does testosterone make you mean?

The answer seems a definite "it's complicated."

It does note one experiment I don't recall reading about:

Because women are more responsive than men to supplemental testosterone, they were used in one of the key studies into how testosterone essentially removes the burden of empathy from moral decision-making. It’s known as the “trolley car experiment”. Picture a runaway tram hurtling down the tracks towards five unsuspecting workers. There’s a lever that would divert the tram to another track, but there’s someone working on that track, too. “You have to kill somebody to save five others,” says Ryan, and you have to act fast.

The researchers at Utrecht University gave some of the subjects a shot of testosterone the night before presenting them with the dilemma. “The number of respondents who were willing to kill in order to save people, and their confidence in carrying out the act were enhanced,” says Ryan. “And the equivocation they demonstrated was significantly reduced.”

Based on this, I diagnose Chidi in The Good Place as suffering from low testosterone!

(By the way, I've nearly finished Season 2 of that show, and it continues to be a delight.  I see that it has been renewed for a 3rd series, which gives me some concern as to how the creativity of the show can continue to be sustained.) 

Another tax cut fail

I've noted many times how the Laffer inspired and endorsed tax cut experiment of Kansas had been a failure, but I think I had missed that Oklahoma had gone down a similar path to similar failure.  From a report in February this year:

Riding high on the oil boom of the late 2000s, the state followed the Kansas model and slashed taxes. But the promised prosperity never came. In many cases, it was just the opposite.

Around 20 percent of Oklahoma's schools now hold classes just four days a week. Last year, Highway Patrol officers were given a mileage limit because the state couldn't afford to put gas in their tanks. Medicaid provider rates have been cut to the point that rural nursing homes and hospitals are closing, and the prisons are so full that the director of corrections says they're on the brink of a crisis.

In her State of the State address Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin expressed the state's frustration.
"We have two clear choices," she said. "We can continue down a path of sliding backwards, or we can choose the second path, which is to say 'Enough is enough! We can do better! We deserve better! Our children deserve better, too!' "

Many of the tax cuts and subsequent revenue failures have happened on Fallin's watch. Now she wants to fix it, and she's gotten behind a large coalition of business leaders who have come up with a plan to raise taxes and enact reforms.

Where's the "tax cuts always work" crew on this? 

Can someone explain?

Judith Sloan makes this claim re dividend imputation, and while she seems to claim that this should be obvious to commentators, if not us poor plebs, I just don't get how it makes sense:

When an individual earns less than $18,200 and pays no tax, then the individual receives a cash ­refund of 30 per cent. This is only fair. Without cash refunds, the ­effect on very low-income earners would be a tax of 30 per cent on dividends.

Why?   How is it that paying no tax on the dividend and not receiving a cash rebate for tax not paid has the effect of a tax of 30 per cent on dividends??

She seems so apparently confident on the point that I don't know whether it is a problem with my English comprehension, or maths comprehension, or am I am simply being gaslighted??

Go 5-2

I really need to diet again, and once again I will probably try the 5-2 diet, from which I fell off the wagon last time because of apparent reflux issue that started to develop.   I think that's sorted.  Next time, got to get onto 6-1 as a maintenance diet.

Anyway, the diet seems to do good things with the way the body processes fat in the blood.  Sounds good:

In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Surrey examined the impact of the 5:2 diet on the body's ability to metabolise and clear fat and glucose after a meal and compared it to the effects of weight-loss achieved via a more conventional daily calorie restriction diet. Previous studies in this field have predominantly focused on blood risk markers taken in the fasted state, which only tend to be, in for the minority of the time, overnight.

During the study, overweight participants were assigned to either the 5:2 diet or a daily calorie restriction diet and were required to lose five per cent of their weight. Those on the 5:2 diet ate normally for five days and for their two fasting days consumed 600 calories, using LighterLife Fast Foodpacks, whilst those on the daily diet were advised to eat 600 calories less per day than their estimated requirements for weight maintenance (in the study women ate approx. 1400 calories, men ate approx. 1900 calories/day).

Under the expert guidance of the team, those on the 5:2 diet achieved 5 per cent weight-loss in 59 days compared to those on the daily calorie restriction diet who took in 73 days. 27 participants completed the study, with approximately 20 per cent of participants in both groups dropped out because they either could not tolerate the diet or were unable to attain their 5 per cent weight-loss target.

Researchers found that following weight-loss, participants who followed the 5:2 diet cleared the fat (triglyceride) from a meal given to them more efficiently than the participants undertaking the daily diet. Although there were no differences in post meal glucose handling, researchers were surprised to find differences between the diets in c-peptide (a marker of insulin secretion from the pancreas) following the meal, the significance of which will need further investigation.

Self involved? Moi?

It's a testament to the dearth of decent conservative writing available in Australia today that Quadrant has run a tedious book review by Catallaxy inmate "lizzie" - the one with the obsessional need to tell everyone what a fabulous lifestyle she leads with the fantastic husband who adores her, after having risen above a poverty stricken childhood in the West from a family with its fair share of mental illness.   (As is typical with the commenters at that blog, she is apparently a reformed "lefty" who has found the true path of political righteousness.  Climate change is, of course, in her and her allegedly smart husband's view, part of the grand conspiracy of socialist domination of the world.)

As is her wont, the review is roughly 50% about herself. 

Strangely, some at Catallaxy think her circuitous, enormously self-involved and self promoting writing style is very readable.   It is, in fact, the opposite.   She's like the conservative mirror image of Helen Razor, now that I think of it.

Unwanted movie review: Road to Perdition

Finally got around to watching the all star cast (Hanks, Newman, Law, Craig) in the Sam Mendes directed 2002 gangster film, Road to Perdition.

First:  what a fantastic looking movie.   I've only seen a few other Mendes films, and while I don't think American Beauty was particularly memorable for its cinematography (or for anything, really, other than a very unconvincing plot contrivance), I did think Skyfall was a remarkably great looking film.  With Road, it's just every single shot is gorgeous - a combination of fantastically detailed art direction, a cinematographer who I should probably look up, and good direction.   (It's always a bit unclear to me who to credit most between director and cinematographer as to the look of a film, but I assume the director tells the latter what he/she wants and checks throughout that he/she is getting it.)

As to story:  a bit thin and unconvincing in terms of exposition.   One key fortuitous event is left completely unexplained (anyone who has seen it probably knows what I mean), and it's a bit puzzling that more care was not taken to explain why or how it happened; or for that matter, why a more convincing motivation of the crucial killing that sets the story going is not really given.   The movie is based on a graphic novel, and it seems easy to blame that as the reason.    I think it fair to say that I haven't ever seen a film of such origin that has completely convinced me.  

Despite this, I thought Hanks was surprisingly good in a less than entirely sympathetic role.   All of the actors were pretty good really;  the whole movie just suffered a bit from a screenplay inadequacy that prevented it being truly great. 

Definitely worth watching, though.

About that white guy/black guy dance thing...

The controversy over whether and why (American) black guys are just natural "movers" on the dance floor compared to white dudes can look at this for a bit of evidence.   (Yeah, sorry, they just are.   Wakanda and the secret deployment of vibranium into black communities probably has something to do with it.)

Update:  further, perhaps better, evidence along the same lines:



This has also brought up a memory, but I forget which movie it's from:  the one where some older white guy - an authority figure - unexpectedly and in overt racist stereotype fashion tells the black guy to dance, it's in his blood.   What movie am I thinking of?     

An unobjectionable Cohen

Look, Nick Cohen did recently get, shall we say, somewhat carried away with apparent enthusiasm for authoritarian solutions to obesity and lifestyle induced ill health.   All well intentioned, no doubt, but over the top.

Anyway, all can be forgiven with his latest column:  Cranks have turned the world upside down, it's time to fight back.      (Subheading: Conspiracy theories were once a fringe interest. In the era of populists, they’ve now gone mainstream.)

I don't think there's anything in there worth objecting to.  

What's happening?

With Trump going on a twitter storm about the unfairness of the Mueller investigation, everyone's expecting that he's either building up to, or (possibly) testing the water for Republican support of, sacking Mueller.   I don't know that he's rational enough for testing the water; I think he's just waiting for Sean Hannity to tell him to sack Mueller or it's a crisis. 

Because, as Jonathan Swan at Axios says:

On this issue, Trump is dug in and angry. He views the leadership of the FBI as arrayed against him. And that red line he drew in the interview with the N.Y. Times last year — where he said he wouldn’t stand for Mueller prying into his family finances — still stands.

• One crucial variable in all this is Fox News. Trump feeds off the moods of his favorite hosts. If Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine Pirro turn it up a notch, saying the deep state is out to get him and Mueller is out of control, there’s no telling what Trump will do.

Don't Trump cultists see anything suspicious in their soiled political saviour freaking out when his finances are at risk of coming under scrutiny?    (Ha!, there I go again, thinking that cultists can think for themselves.) 

And isn't it a truly shocking state of affairs that Trump is so beholden to a handful of media commentators - experts at nothing other than beating up stories towards a biased conclusion - at Fox News?   

Which leads to the mystery of what is going on in the head of Rupert Murdoch:  he would obviously see the power that a handful of staff have over Trump.   Why wouldn't he want to give out subtle directions as to which way he would like Trump to jump?      If he doesn't want the turmoil that sacking Mueller would entail, why doesn't he pull strings on Hannity and that ridiculous "Judge" Pirro in that regard?     Or is it a case that he just doesn't care as long as he can count the money coming in from higher ratings?   Is constitutional quasi crisis good for his business, so he doesn't care?

It's a really bizarre situation....

Well, duh

Time magazine has a profile of Fox News's Shepard Smith, the who sticks out at the network like a sore thumb for his sometimes effective criticism and debunking of Trump.   (He's also gay, in a place renowned for straight men behaving badly.)  But how's this for the biggest understatement of this century (my bold):

Despite being the cable-news ratings leader, Fox News’ audience is also old. The median Fox News viewer in 2017 was 65 overall, the same as MSNBC, and 66 in primetime, the highest of all cable news networks. “I think that our audience skews conservative. We learn about our audience through research and data,” says Smith. A 2014 study by Pew Research Center indicated Fox News was the most-trusted news source for “consistently conservative” viewers, edging out the Wall Street Journal, Breitbart, and the Drudge Report.

How to annoy Russia

Someone at New Statesman, talking about how Britain should react to Russian assassinations on British soil, concludes:   If we really want to annoy Russia, we should cancel Brexit.   Makes some amusing sense:

So: economic sanctions are hard, war is bloody stupid, and we probably don’t want to get into the habit of trying to knock people off in Moscow restaurants. What we really need is a non-violent action that will definitely undermine Russian interests, doesn’t require US leadership and, ideally, doesn’t cost any money.

Over on Twitter, Jonnie Marbles, who you may recall from his sterling work in the field of hitting Rupert Murdoch with pies, has come up with the perfect idea: cancel Brexit. It’ll make us less dependent on the whims of Donald Trump. It will, if anything, strengthen the economy. And we all know that steps towards European unity annoy the hell out of Putin.

What’s more, the response to the events in Salisbury that's come from Brussels has been far, far warmer than the one that’s come from Washington. Earlier today, the European Parliament’s Brexit supremo Guy Verhofstadt tweeted that, “An attack against one EU & NATO country is an attack on all of us.” It’s like we’ve been beaten up, and the only one who gives a shit is the ex we just dumped in the most humiliating possible way. 

Bowling ball theory

It seems to have taken a surprisingly long time to work it out, but it does sound very likely that Politifact has correctly identified how Trump mangled a legitimate safety test into a "bowling ball" test, misunderstanding and misrepresenting its point completely in the process. 

How did he even know about this, though?   It must have been rumbling around somewhere on a wingnutty site as unfair to American cars, surely?

Of course I negotiate in bad faith - funny hey!

Even the cultist idiots, the wingnut defenders of Trump, aren't putting much effort into defending his open admission that he negotiates in bad faith - just making up claims when he had no idea if they are true or not.

Isn't it incredible that Trump admits this?  Did he do so because he thinks his guess was later vindicated?  I found that part of the quote in the initial report hard to follow.

Clarification can be found at Hot Air, which remains about the only conservative site worth visiting, explaining as follows:

Is that true, that we “lose” $17 billion a year to Canada? It is, just like you “lose” every time you go to the grocery store and hand over cash for food. But if you look more closely at the numbers, you’ll see that Trump is cherry-picking: We “lose” only if you’re comparing exports and imports of goods. If you look at the total trade balance between U.S. and Canada, which includes goods and services, we “win.” In 2016, our trade deficit with Canada in terms of goods was $12.1 billion but our trade surplus in terms of services was $24.6 billion, with exports of $54.2 billion versus imports of $26.9 billion. Even by Trump’s own strange metric of trade “winners” and “losers,” America comes out ahead overall in the relationship by about $12.5 billion.

But even if it was Canada that ended up with the surplus, the volume of trade between the two countries is so enormous that it’d be bananas to risk the relationship over a rounding error like $12.5 billion. Total trade between the U.S. and Canada in 2016 was $627.8 billion, with exports supporting more than a million American jobs. Last year, the $282 billion in goods that the U.S. sent north across the border was the largest amount of exports to any single nation on Earth. Even using Trump’s own math, the trade deficit in goods is a measly three percent of total U.S./Canada trade, which probably explains why Trudeau was insisting “we have no trade deficit.” Effectively, we don’t. And as I say, when you include services, there’s *really* no deficit. It’s a surplus for the U.S.

Slate puts it more bluntly (my bold):

Judging America’s trade performance based on goods alone would not make any sense, mind you; exports are exports, whether you’re talking about cars or financial services. But perhaps Trump heard that number, and mistakenly took it to mean that the U.S. has an overall trade deficit with Canada.

If that’s the case, it would still be a cause for concern. Trump is trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, and being misinformed about basic trade statistics makes it even less likely that he will make rational decisions about the future of the pact. 

It’s also possible that Trump is surrounded by yes-men, one of whom fed him a misleading statistic in order to confirm his own mistaken assumption. That would also obviously be cause for concern. 

But in the end, this is all just a reminder a broader problem: Our president lives in a solipsistic fantasy world, where facts mostly exist to confirm his own intuitions, and his staff either aren’t capable of correcting him or don’t want to. When it comes to legislation, that ignorance limits him to making nonsensical demands of Congress, because he simply doesn’t understand the issues. But when it comes to issues like trade, where he can unilaterally change U.S. policy with the stroke of a pen, his ignorance is an immediate menace. 

Changing a policy that never made sense

A couple of comments on Labor's proposed policy change on tax credits being able to be converted to cash for people who never paid tax anyway:

1.   How did the policy ever make any sense anyway???    It really doesn't make sense as a tax policy.   As John Kehoe writes (with my bold):

My self-funded retiree father complained during a phone conversation this week about Labor's "tax grab" on refundable dividend imputation credits.

I shot back asking why asset-rich retirees should get away with paying negative tax rates for owning shares, when younger workers like me front up at the office each day and lose 30-50 per cent in tax?

2.   Is this why it hasn't (as far as I know) yet been condemned by any of the economists who hang around the IPA and Catallaxy?

3.  It is pretty hilarious some of the examples appearing in the Murdoch press as to how it will affect people:

Update:   Davidson and the IPA were slow off the mark, but of course as the policy leaves more money in the hands of government,  they are against it.  Got to strangle tax so as to be able strangle size of government, after all.   I think there will be other economists willing to put the boot into the way Sinclair tries to spin this:

Labor’s problem is that they are being too clever by half. They want to increase taxes without clearly saying so. That is profoundly dishonest. Receiving a tax refund is not welfare. In the same way receiving your change from the supermarket isn’t corporate charity – it is a return of your own money. Millions of Australians overpay their tax liabilities each and every year and receive a refund from the government. Labor proposes to stop paying refunds to older Australians – both now and in the future....

Permanently wrong

Wow.  Look at all the examples Jonathan Chait has quickly provided about the wrong predictions of Larry Kudlow.   The article opens:

A dozen years ago, I wrote a book about the unshakable grip of supply-side economics upon the Republican Party. Supply-side economics is not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes, but a commitment to the cause of low taxes, particularly for high earners, that borders on theological. In the time that has passed since then, that grip has not weakened at all. The appointment of Lawrence Kudlow as head of the National Economic Council indicates how firmly supply-siders control Republican economic policy, and how little impact years of failed analysis have had upon their place of power.

The Republican stance on taxes, like its position on climate change (fake) and national health insurance (against it), is unique among right-of-center parties in the industrialized world. Republicans oppose higher taxes everywhere and always, at every level of government. In 2012, every Republican presidential candidate, including moderate Jon Huntsman, indicated they would oppose accepting even a dollar of higher taxes in return for $10 dollars of spending cuts. They likewise believe tax cuts are the necessary tonic for every economic circumstance.

The purest supply-siders, like Kudlow, go further and deeper in their commitment. Kudlow attributes every positive economic indicator to lower taxes, and every piece of negative news to higher taxes. While that sounds absurd, it is the consistent theme he has maintained throughout his career as a prognosticator. It’s not even a complex form of kookery, if you recognize the pattern. It’s a very simple and blunt kind of kookery.

 Yes, it is a faith, and one in which incorrect predictions are never, ever cause for revising the belief.   (The reason being, as I only realised relatively recently, that there is always so much going on in the world that can contribute to economic outcomes, there's a permanently moving feast of  information that can be twisted to make some kind of excuse for failed prediction.   Thus it's never the theory that's at fault.   And yet, ironically, it's typically the same supply side believers who claim - completely without merit - that climate change is a case of "unfalsifiable" science.)   

I see that Krugman has re-tweeted DeLong's take:

Larry Kudlow has not been an economist in at least a generation. Rather, he plays an economist on TV. Whatever ability he once had to make or analyze or present coherent and data-based economic arguments is long gone—with a number of his old friends blaming long-term consequences of severe and prolonged drug addiction.

The right way to view this appointment is, I think, as if Donald Trump were to name William Shatner to command the Navy's 7th Fleet.

That said, probably little damage will be done. The major day-to-day job of the NEC Chair is to coordinate the presentation of economic policy options to the President, and to try to keep the agencies and departments on the same page as they implement policy. Kudlow has negative talents in either organizing and presenting alternative points of view or in controlling bureaucracies. Therefore the agencies will each continue marching to its different drummer, and there will be no coherent presentation of policy options to the President. But that will not be new.

And yet JC from Catallaxy, who doesn't seem to bother making snark comments here much anymore, thinks he's a great choice.    Yeah, sure.   

On Hawking

As I hoped she would, Sabine Hossenfelder has a post up looking at the scientific legacy of Stephen Hawking, and it's larger than I would have guessed.    Roger Penrose's great obituary in The Guardian is the other essential read.

As it happens, I was going to post last week about the last bit of media attention he was getting::

Hawking's answer to the question "What was there before there was anything?" relies on a theory known as the "no-boundary proposal."...

According to TechTimes, Hawking says during the show that before the Big Bang, time was bent — "It was always reaching closer to nothing but didn't become nothing," according to the article. Essentially, "there was never a Big Bang that produced something from nothing. It just seemed that way from mankind's point of perspective."

In in a lecture on the no-boundary proposal, Hawking wrote: "Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang."

This isn't the first time Hawking has discussed this theory. He previously delivered lectures on the topic and starred in a free documentary about it, available on YouTube.

I think it's worth noting that Hawking himself didn't really believe his own PR, or perhaps to be more kind, the PR sometimes foisted upon him.  I posted a link in 2014 to this article - Hawking: Is he all he is cracked up to be?  and it still seems a fair take.   I suppose one may question why he was happy to insert himself into popular TV shows that pandered to an inflated view of his scientific importance, but I would presume it was well intentioned to help give science itself a high and "cool" cultural profile.  And probably fun for him too, and it would seem churlish to complain about what a person with such disability should do for a bit of amusement. 

Finally, I just stumbled across this talk his gave on his website:  Godel and the End of Physics.

It's aimed at a general audience, and was delivered in 2002, but I don't recall reading it before.  It's pretty good, although I don't know if he subsequently modified his views later. Certainly, Peter Woit, while not dissing him, regrets that Hawking did start promoting a multiverse view which Woit has spent years arguing is not really scientific.

Update:   I don't really want this to be the "final word" on the post, but I just can't help illustrating again the spectacular way in which a middle aged, conservative Catholic former blogger doesn't know what he doesn't know:

In search of Ancient India (and the elephant man)

Reuters has an article up about this:

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appointed a committee of scholars to prove that Hindus are descended from India's first inhabitants. Members of the country's Muslim minority worry the government wants to make them second-class citizens.

Of particular interest to me is the part which is strikingly similar to what Creationist Christians like to do:

Culture Minister Sharma told Reuters he wants to establish that Hindu scriptures are factual accounts. Speaking of the Ramayana, the epic that follows the journey of a Hindu deity in human form, Sharma said: “I worship Ramayana and I think it is a historical document. People who think it is fiction are absolutely wrong.”  The epic tells how the god Rama rescues his wife from a demon king. It still informs many Indians’ sense of gender roles and duty.

Sharma said it was a priority to prove through archaeological research the existence of a mystical river, the Saraswati, that is mentioned in another ancient scripture, the Vedas. Other projects include examining artifacts from locations in scriptures, mapping the dates of astrological events mentioned in these texts and excavating the sites of battles in another epic, the Mahabharata, according to Sharma and minutes of the committee’s meeting.

In much the same way that some Christians point to evidence of an ancient flood substantiating the Biblical tale of Noah and his ark, if the settings and features of the ancient scriptures in India can be verified, the thinking goes, then the stories are true. “If the Koran and Bible are considered as part of history, then what is the problem in accepting our Hindu religious texts as the history of India?” said Sharma.

It gets even more extraordinary:

 During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.

Gosh.   But apparently, it's not hard to find scholars who think Indian culture pretty much pre-dates humans.  It's reminiscent of Creationists with their men riding on dinosaurs:

Nine of 12 history committee members interviewed by Reuters said they have been tasked with matching archaeological and other evidence with ancient Indian scriptures, or establishing that Indian civilization is much older than is widely known. The others confirmed their membership but declined to discuss the group’s activities. The committee includes a geologist, archaeologists, scholars of the ancient Sanskrit language and two bureaucrats.

One of the Sanskrit scholars, Santosh Kumar Shukla, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Reuters he believes India’s Hindu culture is millions of years old.

 

Frum's right

I reckon David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, is right in his interpretation of Trump's reluctance to point the finger at Russia:

“As soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.”

That is not support for Britain. It is the direct opposite.

Britain and the United States share intelligence information fully, freely, and seamlessly. It’s inconceivable that the U.S. government has not already seen all the information that Theresa May saw before she rose in the House of Commons to accuse Russia.

If the U.S. government had a serious concern about the reliability of that information, it would have expressed that concern directly and privately to the U.K. government before May spoke. But the U.S. had no such concern—that’s why the now-fired secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom both endorsed May’s words. When Trump raises doubts about the facts, about American agreement with its British ally, about the accuracy of the British accusation against Russia, Trump is not expressing good-faith uncertainty about imperfect information. Trump is rejecting the consensus view of the U.K. and U.S. intelligence communities about an act of Russian aggression—and, if his past behavior is any indication, preparing the way for his own determination to do nothing.

It echoes the approach he took toward Russian intervention in the U.S. election to help elect him in 2016: Feign uncertainty about what is not uncertain in order to justify inaction.

The U.S.-U.K. response to the Russian nerve gas attack should have been coordinated in advance. It was not. The U.S. statement of support for Britain should have arrived on the day that the prime minister delivered her accusation. It did not. The retaliation—if any—should also already be agreed upon. It plainly has not been.

The United Kingdom does not find itself deprived of U.S. support because of some British mistake or rush to judgment. Most of the U.S. government shares the British assessment of what happened—as attested by Tillerson’s statement in support of Britain, which would have relied on U.S. intelligence agency reports. Only Trump stands apart, vetoing any condemnation of Russia and perhaps punishing his secretary of state for breaking ranks on the president’s no-criticizing-Putin policy.

Other support for not blaming Russia for Russian double agents (and British civilians) being killed/seriously endangered by nerve gas invented by Russia:   "strong man" fan CL:

Pondering Xi and Putin, and their nations

With Xi getting China's top job for as long as he likes, there's a lot of commentary around about how much the rest of the world should be concerned about it.  Chris Uhlmann, who makes a side living in professional China fretting, wants Australia to "challenge" the country.  Yeah, right.   (I also assume that he's not planning on holidaying there any time soon, given some of the more inflammatory parts of that commentary.)

But how much of a worry is China compared to Russia?    Jason Soon will probably roll his eyes, but to my mind, there is something so personal about the tracking down of ex double agents for assassination by Russian authorities that the ruthlessness of Putin's Russia puts me at more unease than the actual potential global economic domination of  Xi's China.  Sure, China might soon be wanting to shoot at ships or planes testing their stupid mid-ocean territorial claims, but that feels more like regular military business, by comparison.

Let me expand on this.    No doubt I am far from well informed, but every show I see lately about life in Russia fills me with pessimism about the Russian character and the future of the country.   For example, despite the occasional bit of protest, it still appears that Putin is ridiculously popular with your average young Russian.  The Washington Post reports:

According to a December survey by independent polling firm Levada Center, 81 percent of adults approve of Putin as president — including 86 percent of Russians 18 to 24 years old. Among the age group, 67 percent told Levada they believed the country was going in the right direction, compared to 56 percent of the general public.

The most internationally connected generation in Russian history, with access to more information than any of their predecessors, is now helping Putin solidify his authoritarianism.

  Rather than dwell on Putin’s crackdown on his opponents, young Russians draw a sense of personal liberty from those freedoms they do enjoy — a mostly open Internet, an open job market and open borders. Many of them reject state TV as propaganda but nevertheless repeat its central tenet — that Russia needs Putin to stand up to U.S. aggression. And perhaps most important, these Russians seem shaped by a collective history they never knew — by fear of a return of the crisis-stricken 1990s or the stifling Soviet era.

Potentially, it would seem, there is a bigger chance of democracy changing things in that country compared to China, but it seems culturally to be very much like a Trumpocracy - as if the wingnuts of America had been  transplanted to an empty land where they get to continually re-affirm via a quasi democracy the power of the "strong man" who they think will re-instate their nation's former greatness.    It's a very backwards looking sentiment; blind to the actual problems, and always putting more emphasis on perceived slights and propaganda than facts.  (The only difference in Right wing propaganda being that Rupert Murdoch makes it for profit in the US; in Russian the poor government has to pay for its own.)  Even how they treat themselves has similarities - Russian perpetual dissatisfaction leads to early death by alcohol in huge numbers;  in Trumpkins, it's opioids.   

So, it's easy to see Russia as playing the role of belligerently dangerous loser in the future of global geo-politics, lashing out with resentment at their lack of success and always wanting to blame other nations for their shortcomings.    A bad psychology for a nuclear power to hold.

Now, while I feel I have no detailed knowledge of Chinese run propaganda, I currently find it hard to be as pessimistic about the psychology of the Chinese.   Sure, nationalism is riding high (although perhaps not quite as high as it sometimes seems), and the level of technologically aided State surveillance is getting to be mind-blowingly powerful, but here's my current perception broad brush perception of the Chinese:

On the downside:   too many people too concerned with making money,  leading to a remarkable level of potential corruption and public hazards, such as the food contamination and environmental degradation of recent years, and at the cost of family life (with economic internal migration like nothing we've seen in the West.)   On top of this, of course, lies a State which has exercised fascistic control over the most intimate details of life and death, such as the one child policy, and using prisoners as a smorgasbord for organ supply to those who could pay.   Not to mention my great dislike for Chinese willingness to cast a swathe through wildlife to feed the fantasy belief system that is traditional Chinese medicine.  They seem, by culture, to be about  the least environmentally conscious people on the planet. 

On the upside:   well, to take those last few points in reverse order -

*  the dire industrial pollution near major cities has perhaps reached a tipping point, whereby the government is recognizing that they just can't keep poisoning the air to the extent they have allowed thus far.  When it comes to global warming, it's bizarre to find that a Communist nation actually acknowledges scientific reality while the science idiocy of the current American administration does not.  

* it's reported that younger Chinese are developing a conscience of Western style when it comes to wanting to preserve wildlife internationally (and even regarding the love of domestic animals);

*  the one child policy and use of prisoners for organs - which would surely have to count as the ultimate examples of State interference in free lives (short of actual genocide, I suppose) - have been wound back.   Hopefully, this means the State is recognizing some limits, or at least, some unintended consequences (such as the massive gender imbalance) to such control.

There is also the prospect that materialism is being somewhat modified by the growth of religion (Christianity) and philosophy (Confucianism), although I see that there is good reason to view the government endorsing the latter with cynicism.  


Even with their current activities in ingratiating themselves with African and other third world nations, obviously with self interest in access to resources and global control as motivation, I find it hard to take too much offence at this revival of economic colonialism.   I mean, it (for now) feels less exploitative than the West's colonialism of the 19th and 20th century, and given the way many post-colonial nations have struggled, I am tempted to view Chinese investment as a case of soft exploitation that a lot of these nations need. 

And besides, let's face it - they have become fantastically good at making stuff the rest of the world wants.   I mean, even the most pro-Russian Western communist much have struggled with enthusiasm for driving a Lada, but everyone genuinely loves the wonders of high tech equipment coming out of this other communist regime.

Am I being swayed too much in my (guarded) optimism for how China will develop because I really love my smartphone?  Maybe.   But the country is devoting a lot of enthusiasm for research and development of all kinds, and is getting close to the same GDP spend on this as the US and other Western nations.    For techno-optimists, it's easy to suspect that some huge breakthroughs might come out of China; whereas the ridiculous anti-environmental science of the Trump administrative  gives me cause for pessimism. 

So, have I made out at least a plausible case for why I feel vaguely optimistic about China?   I think so.   And Putin deserves a date with some of his own nerve gas.

The appendectomy in history (subtitle: now is a pretty good time to be alive)

Via Dr Beachcombing's site, this link discusses briefly the history of the appendectomy:

In 1735, Dr. Claudius Amyand performed the world’s first successful appendectomy, at St. George’s Hospital in London. The patient was an 11-year old boy whose appendix had become perforated by a pin he had swallowed. The first successful operation to treat acute appendicitis was performed soon after, in 1759 in Bordeaux.  General anesthesia was not available until 1846, so these operations required many assistants to restrain patients during what were undoubtedly very painful procedures.

Surgical treatment for appendicitis began in earnest during the 1880s. Although doctors struggled to decide who should undergo the knife – some patients would recover on their own without surgery – surgical technique and anesthesia had improved outcomes to such an extent that surgery would rapidly became the gold standard approach. By the end of the 20th century, laparoscopic surgery replaced open surgery in most cases, and laparoscopic appendectomy is now considered one of the safest, lowest-complication surgical procedures performed today.

I didn't know that it could often be successfully treated with antibiotics:

More recently, researchers are revisiting the question of whether antibiotics are just as effective as surgery for treatment for acute appendicitis. In the 1940s and 1950s, doctors in England began treating patients with antibiotics – with excellent results. During the Cold War, men on submarines received antibiotics instead of an appendectomy, as the submarines could not surface for six months or more, and patients reportedly did well with this approach.  And five recent European studies reported findings consistent with those anecdotes: 70% of patients recovered using antibiotics rather than surgery in these studies. In light of this evidence, a new study in California will attempt to verify whether antibiotics may be as good as surgery and offer a less invasive approach to the treatment of appendicitis.

 

Psychopaths considered

A somewhat interesting piece by Ed Yong on some recent research on psychopaths.  (The suggestion being that they can see things from other people's perspectives, if they try, but they don't do it automatically like your normal person.)

The details of the study described, though, does give another idea of the very airy fairy, "open to interpretation" nature of a lot of psychological testing.  (As I was complaining about recently when it comes to violence in gaming studies.)

A likely hit?

Spielberg's Ready Player One - a movie about which I have no particular expectations, given that I was never a gaming nerd - seems to have largely gone over well at its first nerd screening.  (Some  nerds, being nerds, weren't happy, but that was probably always on the cards.)