Zero Dark Thirty: another in the series of "Late Movie Reviews"

Watched Zero Dark Thirty, the Kathryn Bigelow directed movie about the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden, last night.  This discussion may contain spoilers, on the assumption that most readers who were interested in it have already seen it.

I think it's very much of a piece with Black Hawk Down, which I happened to watch for the first time last week:  high on military realism, but very shallow on depth of characterisation, and little attempt at character development.   I think the latter is more of an issue for ZDT, because it follows one character (a real female CIA agent who did play a large role in finding Bin Laden) over 10 years.  The film gives you the impression she has no inner life at all.  At the start she seems a friendless workaholic; by the end she's moved on to be an even less likeable obsessive friendless workaholic. 

Yet I see, now that I look up articles about the accuracy of the film, that this might actually be an accurate character portrayal, if this part of a 2012 Washington Post article  is anything to go by:

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Not exactly a generous spirit, by the sounds.  (She was also passed over for promotion, according to the report.)

As to the accuracy of the film overall,  I see from this article in The Telegraph that it is pretty true to life, although (amongst other quibbles) some of the things the SEALs do in the Bin Laden compound raid are not technically correct.   I haven't read whether one thing that bothered me in the film was accurate or not - the way this white, red haired, female CIA operative drove herself to and from work in Pakistan.   Seemed a kind of dangerous thing to do - I would have assumed female CIA agents in that country would have had male drivers and bigger cars.

One small but surprising detail in the film is this (from the Telegraph article), although perhaps I had heard it before:

One of the most intriguing cameos in Zero Dark Thirty is that of Fredric Lehne, who plays the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, referred to only as “The Wolf”. Despite being a key figure in the fight against Islamist militants, when we meet him in his office he is practising Muslim prayer.

As surprising as it sounds, this is true, at least according to a report by the Washington Post in March last year: the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), and the leader of the hunt for bin Laden, really has converted to Islam. Named only as “Roger” by the newspaper, he is in his late fifties and has worked for two presidents, four CIA directors and four directors of national intelligence.

His conversion to Islam came after he married a Muslim woman, but, according to the Washington Post, there is no prayer rug in his office. He is, however, known to clutch a strand of prayer beads.

But what about its portrayal of torture as a sometimes useful undertaking?    I think it's hard to deny that the film works as an apologia for torture, and a disingenuous one at that.   I think it tries to show sympathy to anti-torture advocates in the way it starts with our heroine Maya being disturbed by it, and later the male interrogator who feels he has to get out that line of work for a while because it's doing his head in, too.   Yet the film suggests that, while it doesn't always work, information from some interrogations was useful.

This article in The New Yorker argues that this is where the film falls down:

 In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that “we first learned about ‘the facilitator / courier’s nom de guerre’ from a detainee not in the C.I.A.’s custody.” Panetta wrote that “no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”

Well, yeah, that is a bit problematic for how one should view the film morally, I reckon.

So, overall, it's an interesting film as a bit of slightly fictionalised quasi-documentary, which turns out to have a morally dubious take on a key controversy; but even apart from that issue, I don't quite understand why it received so many completely uncritical reviews.   As with Black Hawk Down, these types of film are very impressive as recreations, but they lack emotional kick and the sort of imagery that really makes a film powerful.  Worth watching, but ultimately, not worth endorsing as great movies either.

Off-putting

So, I'm in the somewhat painful process of trying to work out a holiday, and found this photo, from a Mercure Hotel room...

...and I find it triggers claustrophic feelings just from looking at it. 

It's a seriously off-putting photo.

What's happening to me?

The issue:  the Commonwealth Games is making me feel all warm and gooey towards sports.  This is very much out of character. 

I guess I felt somewhat the same when the Sydney Olympics were on - I think it's partly a weird parochial pride that our country can organise these things well.  

I have to say, the TV coverage by the Seven Network has looked and sounded very professional.  It's pretty remarkable, really, that there are any commentators for some esoteric sports who can sound confident and knowledgeable during live commentary.   Who'd have thought there was anyone out there who could talk up the excitement of, I don't know, a 10m air gun target competition, for example?

I also have liked the way that the paralympic events have just been mixed in between the (what's the politically correct term?) able bodied(?) events.    Makes them seem much more relevant, and it seems to me the Olympics would be wise to copy that, if it was at all possible.  

We all know that the Games will have been a mixed economic blessing to businesses on the Gold Coast.   Yet the images on TV have looked so good, and the Australian medal tally so impressive (especially for swimming, which looked to be in an incredible funk only a short time ago, but is once again full of charismatic, spectacularly fit and good looking young folk) that it's hard to believe that it will not be viewed as a success.   Sure, I understand the Olympics are a gargantuan waste of money for host cities and everyone thinks it needs to be reformed, but a more modest scaled event like this looks, well, just about the right size.

But don't worry, I'm be back to my normal dismissive attitude to each and every sport any day now...

Calm and angry comments about Chris Berg

Oh dear.  I was criticising Chris Berg earlier this week for writing vapid papers on blockchain, now he's contributing a vapid, self serving piece on The Conversation:

Are Australians ready to embrace libertarianism?

Everyone agrees that the answer is "no", but I've been torn as to how angry to sound in this post detailing why.

OK, here's the calm response.    If you missed it last year,  I recommend you look at Will Wilkinson's explanation about why purist libertarianism is a utopian idealistic belief system, and those are not a way to make sound policy. 

And here's the angry response:

CHRIS BERG, YOU WERE HAPPY TO BE PART OF A LIBERTARIAN FRIENDLY THINK TANK, NO DOUBT PARTLY FUNDED IN SECRET BY MINING INTERESTS,  THAT HAS AGGRESSIVELY RUN ANTI CLIMATE SCIENCE PROPAGANDA FOR A COUPLE OF DECADES BECAUSE "OO - ER - WE DON'T LIKE TAXES."  YOU MIGHT NEVER HAVE SULLIED YOURSELF BY SAYING "HA! CLIMATE CHANGE IS A CROCK MADE UP BY CROOKED SCIENTISTS", LIKE YOUR STAGFLATION PREDICTING MATE SINCLAIR DAVIDSON:  NO - YOU WERE AN EARLY ADOPTER OF THE DISINGENUOUS "OH, IT'S TOO LATE NOW - NATIONS WILL NEVER AGREE TO LIMIT CO2" WHILE AT THE SAME TIME WATCHING YOUR OWN THINK TANK - AND MATES LIKE DAVIDSON -  RUN PROPAGANDA BY CRANKS DIRECTED TO POLITICIANS AND THE PUBLIC TO TRY TO ENSURE NATIONS WOULD FACE INTERNAL OPPOSITION TO EFFECTIVE AND SIMPLE ACTION LIKE A CARBON TAX.

YES, YOU WERE HAPPY TO BE PART OF ACTIVELY POISONING THE WELL OF GOOD POLICY DECISION MAKING.

IT MAY HAVE TAKEN MARXISM TO KILL OFF A 100 MILLION OR SO DURING THE 20TH CENTURY BEFORE ITS BUNCH OF IDEALIST UPTOPIAN ASSHATS WERE COMPLETELY DISCREDITED, BUT HISTORY WILL LIKELY SHOW IT TOOK DUMB ASS, IDEOLOGICALLY MOTIVATED LIBERTARIANS TO FLOOD EVERY COASTAL CITY ON THE PLANET, DISPROPORTIONATELY KILL OFF THE POOR, AND PERMANENTLY DISAPPEAR HUNDREDS OF SPECIES.

YEAH, THANKS, LIBERTARIANS.  YOU'RE A BUNCH OF DANGEROUS CRANKS.

THAT'S WHY AUSTRALIA IS NOT "READY TO EMBRACE LIBERTARIANISM".  

Outrageous lying politician poisoning politics in his country

Newt Gingrich on Fox and Friends, about the Cohen FBI raids:

We're supposed to have the rule of law. It ain't the rule of law when they kick in your door at 3:00 in the morning and you're faced with armed men and you have had no reason to be told you're going to have that kind of treatment. That's Stalin. That's the Gestapo in Germany. That shouldn't be the American FBI.

You can imagine a large number of the gullible Trumpers watching this thinking that this reflects reality,  when Cohen himself said:

Trump's personal attorney tells ABC News FBI raids were 'respectful' and 'courteous'

WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen told ABC News Tuesday that FBI agents did not storm in, but simply knocked on the door, as they raided his office, hotel room and home Monday.

There were no SWAT teams, no guns drawn. The operation was "respectful" and "courteous," he told ABC News on Tuesday.

All after, of course, various Republican justice officials went to a judge and got a warrant for this.

I mean, seriously, no matter how loony you think parts of the Left have gone in the US, with its intense identity politics and University political correctness, surely all fair minded people should be appalled that it is a famous Republican political actually poisoning political discourse by such ridiculous and deliberately misleading hyperbole. 

To anyone who thinks Trump's tough guy tweets indicate there's no shady connection with Russia...

...I make the following comments:

*  we all know he's an empty shell with no consistent principles, able to be influenced by the last thing he heard, and his fragile buffoon ego always wants to claim he's a "winner".   It's not surprising that one minute he'll decide to sound tough on Russia/Putin, and the next he'll try to walk it back a bit;

*  that's pretty much what we are seeing now. Look at these tweets and their tone of "Jeez, don't blame me for things being bad with Russia.  If it weren't for those damn Democrats persecuting me I'd have it all back on track and things would be great with Russia":

*  there is also the possibility that his peanut brain is just smart enough to think "I'd better sound tough on Putin so that people don't think I'm under the Russian thumb."

*  tax returns?   A very plausible theory is that Trump is scared of the investigation not because he was closely involved in collusion re Russian interference in the election (although his having some knowledge of seedy contacts by his staff is quite likely), but that the investigation will turn up financial ties to Russians that he does not want to see disclosed.  Again, this would justify a "better sound tough, but still want to be friends with Russia" back and forth in his rhetoric.  

Conversion for politics

Interesting article up at The Atlantic:

Converting to Buddhism as a Form of Political Protest 

Low-caste Indians are leaving Hinduism en masse—partly to stick it to their prime minister.

Sounds a lot

China and clean air don't exactly go hand in hand, and it's reflected in lung health:

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is widespread in China with 8.6 percent of the country's adult population - almost 100 million people -suffering from the chronic lung disease, according to a new Tulane University study published in The Lancet.

The study, which provided lung-function screenings for more than 50,990 participants, is the largest survey of COPD across age groups ever conducted in China, researchers say.

COPD, an inflammatory lung disease that causes obstructed airflow into the lungs, is the third leading cause of death in China. It is caused by long-term exposure to irritants in the air, including cigarette smoke. During the past decade, ambient air pollution has become a major public-health crisis in the country while cigarette smoking remains high, especially among men, says senior author Dr. Jiang He, Joseph S. Copes Chair of Epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine.

Yes, exactly

Just noticed this on Twitter (the bit in red is the main part, but the tweet above that is relevant too):

John Gray on "hyper-liberalism"

There's much of interest in John Gray's piece at TLS on what he calls hyper-liberalism.

Just one part, which I will extract here, is about Marx writing about colonialism:

The complex and at times contradictory realities of empire have been expelled from intellectual debate. While student bodies have dedicated themselves to removing relics of the colonial era from public places, sections of the faculty have ganged up to denounce anyone who suggests that the legacy of empire is not one of unmitigated criminality. If he was alive today one of these dissident figures would be Marx himself, who in his writings on India maintained that the impact of British imperialism was in some ways positive. Acknowledging that “the misery that was inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before”, Marx continued by attacking the “undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life” of Indian villages:

 we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it within traditional rules . . . . England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated by only the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. (“The British Rule in India”, New-York Daily Tribune, June 10, 1853)

 Of course, Marx may have been mistaken in this judgement. Along with most progressive thinkers of his day, he assumed that India and other colonized countries would replicate a Western model of development. But like other progressive thinkers at the time, he also took for granted that this was a question that could and should be debated. He never believed that colonialism was self-evidently damaging in all of its effects.

A modest proposal

So, maybe the Chinese want a military base on Vanuatu?

Well, instead of complaining about it, we've got lots of Northern land not being used.   Maybe not many great harbours, but there's probably an adequate one up there somewhere on Cape York.   Also, some aboriginal settlements with limited economic activity.

My modest proposal:   let the Chinese build one up there.   Benefits:  economic activity in an underdeveloped area of Australia; more people with money to spend in Cairns; our military intelligence has an easy place to spy on to get good knowledge of how the Chinese military operates; if they start misbehaving, we just send in the trained attack crocodiles.  Or our fighters from the "bare base" known as RAAF Base Scherger, near Weipa.  

Downsides:  they'll probably blow up every reef within 100 km just as a precaution.   But we can keep the bond money if they do that.

Come on, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Time to address universal basic income

Readers may, or may not, have noticed that despite it having an increasing amount of publicity in the last year or two, I've never mentioned the idea of a universal basic income.

That's because I always felt intuitively that it just surely can't be a good idea, at this stage of technological development, anyway.

I agree that this Club Troppo post does deal with it well.   It's not a good idea, and my intuition was right.

Quiggin on free market economists

I liked John Quiggin's latest post about the free market economists in the US who have capitulated to Trumpism.   His final paragraph:

The last decade or so has been pretty devastating for the idea of economics as a science or profession. As I argued in my book Zombie Economics, ideas that have been utterly refuted by the evidence of the Global Financial Crisis shamble on in an undead form. The hackery I’ve described here isn’t being produced by marginal figures like Larry Kudlow but by some of the leading lights of the “discipline”. In the end, all their expertise turns out to be nothing more than a fig-leaf for service to financial capitalism. As with evangelicals, libertarians and the Republican base as a whole, the last few years have shown that the most lurid leftwing caricatures of free-market economists have turned out to be understatements.

Smoking vomit

I see the NYT has a story about an increase in a painful vomiting syndrome caused by heavy cannabis use:

“After marijuana was legalized in Colorado, we had a doubling in the number of cases of cyclic vomiting syndrome we saw,” many of which were probably related to marijuana use, said Dr. Cecilia J. Sorensen, an emergency room doctor at University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz medical campus in Aurora who has studied the syndrome.

“C.H.S. went from being something we didn’t know about and never talked about to a very common problem over the last five years,” said Dr. Eric Lavonas, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Now a new study, based on interviews with 2,127 adult emergency room patients under 50 at Bellevue, a large public hospital in New York City, found that of the 155 patients who said they smoked marijuana at least 20 days a month, 51 heavy users said they had during the past six months experienced nausea and vomiting that were specifically relieved by hot showers.

Googling the topic, I see that it has the been subject of many stories in the last few years, but I don't think I've posted about it before.

Apart from this particular problem, I find it hard to believe that such regular users don't have some other effect on their health and lives as well.   (Although heavy users do develop a tolerance to the intoxication effect, if I recall correctly.)

The result everyone sensible expected already here?

Where's Laffer to explain how the Congressional Budget Office is wrong?:

Last month, the federal government spent roughly $371 billion, up $7 billion from February 2017. Tax receipts, meanwhile, fell to $156 billion from $172 billion a year earlier.

Interest payments on the nation's debt, Social Security and Medicare, and outlays by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, are the areas where spending has gone up the most, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO attributed the drop in revenue to higher tax refunds and a reduction in income and payroll tax withholding in the wake of the tax cuts that went into effect on January 1.

For the first five months of this fiscal year, which began on October 1, the country's deficit totaled $391 billion, which is $40 billion higher than the same period last year.

For the full fiscal year, Treasury now projects the annual deficit will near $833 billion, and then $984 billion in fiscal 2019.

The climb back to trillion dollar deficits — a hallmark of the financial crisis — has been hastened by policies put into place in the past several months.

The Americans have the examples of Kansas, Oklahoma and California to show the simple relationship to taxes and deficits, but because laughing Laffer drew a graph on a napkin, it's all going to be OK, according to Republicans.

Get a real job, Chris

I've often said that Chris Berg was the likeable IPA face when he turned up on the ABC to sell its esoteric and unpopular fringe ideas to the public.

But he seems to have thrown his lot so completely in with Sinclair Davidson, whose influence I strongly suspect (if judged by media and ABC appearances) has been deservedly dwindling, that I reckon he's wasting his professional life.

Now, he seems to spend all his time writing science fiction tinged guff about how blockchain is going to change everything (including doing away with money, if you read his latest co-authored campfire story to other science fiction reading libertarians), and writing a book with SD to be published by the right wing cranks' publisher of choice (Connor Court) about how the ABC should be privatised.

I suppose someone (RMIT?) is paying for his musings, but really, I think he would be better off getting a real job. 

Funny because it's true

I'll cut and paste this edition of the New Yorker's Borowitz Report in full:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Fox News Channel announced on Monday that it would decide what Donald J. Trump’s Syria response will be in the next forty-eight hours.

At a press conference at the network’s headquarters, Sean Hannity, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and the “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said that, as the people who have been entrusted with the decision of whether to use military force, they were not taking their responsibility lightly.

“The U.S. military is the mightiest force in all the world,” Hannity said. “However we decide that President Trump will use that force in Syria, we promise that it will be a decision he will be proud of.”

Pirro said that she and her colleagues were taking “full advantage of the entire Fox News brain trust” to craft Trump’s Syria response. “The American people should sleep well at night knowing that we are keeping Tucker Carlson in the loop,” she said.

Ending the press conference on an urgent note, Doocy spoke directly to President Trump. “Mr. President, we’ll have a decision for you in the next forty-eight hours,” he said. “Don’t change the channel.”

Just plain salt

Both Soon and Soutphomasane (traditionally ideological opponents) are swooning on twitter over a story by Liaw regarding the invention of chicken salt in South Australia.

Is this a "Asians who want to be bogans" thing?   Because I don't care for chicken salt at all, and always go for plain.  Preferably the greenish flakes full of ocean flavour from some seaside pond in France, or the metallic tang of Himalayan salt.*

Chicken salt - puh.

*  just kidding - just trying to sound like a Guardian reading salt connoisseur.  We do have the pink allegedly Himalayan stuff now at home though, but I have no idea where it really comes from.

Building and buying global power

Look, China is a worry, given their system of government and rapidly developing high tech population control techniques, but it's still kind of fascinating watching how they're trying to buy their way into total global control, more or less.   It makes for a pretty fascinating contrast with Soviet Union attempts to win control and influence people.   Maybe if smart phones and electronic devices had been invented by the 1960s, it would be Russia that could have become assembly central for the rest of the world and gained riches that way?   Then again, China didn't never had a vodka problem, and Mao apparently dealt with opium...  

Go away, Adam

Hasn't Adam Creighton long argued that the family home should not be exempt from the old age pension assets test?   A truly enormous change that would have very far reaching consequences for many on the age pension.

Yet here he is today, co-writer of an article of the type we will see re-cycled endlessly in The Australian before the next election, taking a sympathetic approach to rich self funded retirees whining about how Shorten's changes to dividend imputation would reduce their income.

Apparently, Creighton has oodles of sympathy for self funded retirees who pay no tax on superannuation earnings, but very limited sympathy for pensioner folk who are the (often inadvertent) beneficiaries of capital gain on a asset which doesn't produce income for them:

Labor’s push to slap a minimum 30  per cent tax on dividends hasn’t only enraged tax purists by tearing up an 18-year-old tax principle, it’s incensed the nation’s million-plus army of self-funded retirees who are increasingly asking “why did we even bother saving?’’

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s policy to cease cash refunds for dividend franking credits should Labor win the election has potentially left up to one million self-funded retirees out of pocket.

John Bolton, a 64-year-old ­retired lawyer from Caloundra, in southeast Queensland, said Labor’s plan to “defraud” him of his retirement savings had made him reconsider a lifetime of hard work, describing the proposed changes as “grossly unfair”.

“I’ve had my children, I’ve raised my family, I’ve done a lot of free legal aid work and made my contribution to society,” Mr Bolton said. He likened Labor’s plans to “playing a game of football and the referee saying ‘that’s no longer a goal because I’ve changed the rules’”....

Despite his effort to put aside enough money to ensure he would not be a drain on public funds, Mr Bolton said Labor’s proposal meant he was seriously considering going on “back-to-back overseas trips until my money runs out so I can seek a pension”.

The former lawyer, who retired earlier than anticipated after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, said he had always adopted a practical financial approach, working 10-14-hour days, weekends and public holidays for most of his working life. “I have planned my life around the rules as they exist,” Mr Bolton said. He said he cried when at 24 he had to sell his boat in order to ­afford his first home, but “it was just what you had to do”.

“Unlike the kids of today who claim they’re priced out of the housing market when they can’t live on Sydney’s north shore,” Mr Bolton said. “We sold our toys and bought a block of land for $8500, about an hour out of town.’’

Yeah, sorry about your wife and all that, Mr Bolton, but telling the story of crying at 24 when you sold your boat to buy a block of land - yeah, I would have held that bit back if you're hunting for sympathy.  Also - there are other ways to arrange your investments to reduce the effect of the change.  But no, you go and spend it all on yourself in a fit of pique that governments sometimes reverse poorly justified policies. 

And Creighton I still think is awful on policy.

Always the legend in his own mind

I see via a Catallaxy cut and paste that Kevin Rudd has written to the AFR and is still keen to defend his legacy by attacking Gillard.   How unpleasant to watch a bitter man doing this.   It was an enormous mistake for Labor to make him leader in the first place.  

In more rodent news...

...it seems that medical scientists may have been keeping lab mice a bit too clean for their (the scientists) own good:

What Pierson is doing breaks the rules. For more than 50 years, scientists have worked to make lab mice cleaner. In most labs today, the animals’ cages are sanitized, and their water bottles and food are sterilized. “We really go to great lengths to keep natural infectious experience out of the mouse house,” says David Masopust, an immunologist at the University of Minnesota who heads the lab where Pierson works. Those efforts have paid off: with the confounding effects of pathogens controlled, mouse experiments have become less variable.

But a raft of studies now suggests that this cleanliness has come at a cost, leaving the rodents with stunted immune systems. In a quest for standardized and spotless mice, scientists have made the creatures a less-faithful model for human immune systems, which develop in a world teeming with microbes. And that could have serious implications for researchers working to usher treatments and vaccines out of the lab and into the clinic. Although it’s not yet possible to pin specific failures on the impeccable hygiene of standard mouse models, Masopust thinks the artificial environment must have some effect. It’s no secret that the success rate for moving therapies from animal to humans is abysmal — according to one estimate¹, 90% of drugs that enter clinical trials fail. “You have to wonder if you might sometimes get misinformed simply because you’re in a clean environment,” says Masopust.

Read the whole thing, at Nature.

A balanced look at Trump and trade

This article at The Lowy Institute's Interpreter blog seems a very balanced one on the matter of Trump and trade and its historical precedents.

Giant rats to the rescue, again

You've probably seen those African giant pouched rats used as landmine detectors before, and it turns out they are good at detecting disease too:

Rats are able to detect whether a child has tuberculosis (TB), and are much more successful at doing this than a commonly used basic microscopy test. These are the results of research led by Georgies Mgode of the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania.

The study, published by Springer Nature in Pediatric Research, shows that when trained rats were given children's sputum samples to sniff, the animals were able to pinpoint 68 percent more cases of TB infections than detected through a standard smear test. Inspiration for investigating the diagnosis of TB through smell came from anecdotal evidence that people suffering from the potentially fatal lung disease emit a specific odour. According to Mgode, current TB detection methods are far from perfect, especially in under-resourced countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia where the disease is prevalent, and where a reasonably cheap smear test is commonly used. Problems with this type of test are that the accuracy varies depending on the quality of sputum sample used, and very young children are often unable to provide enough sputum to be analysed.

"As a result, many children with TB are not bacteriologically confirmed or even diagnosed, which then has major implications for their possible successful treatment," explains Mgode. "There is a need for new diagnostic tests to better detect TB in children, especially in low and middle-income countries."

Previous work pioneered in Tanzania and Mozambique focussed on training African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to pick up the scent of molecules released by the TB-causing Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium in sputum. The training technique is similar to one used to teach rats to detect vapours released by landmine explosives. In the case of TB, when a rat highlights a possibly infected sample, it is analysed further using a WHO endorsed concentrated microscopy techniques to confirm a positive diagnosis.

On Malcolm

Malcolm Turnbull is a disappointing Prime Minister leading a disappointingly shallow and untalented party.

He's almost certainly the best to be leader out of the unimpressive bunch, however.   Also, given the ridiculous ease with which tax reform can be made the subject of a scare campaign, he likely stands a 50/50 chance of winning the next election, after which the country would continue to stumble on in a generally less than satisfactory manner.

I don't have any doubt that it is actually Labor that is (on the whole) doing serious and useful policy reform work on tax and other matters that is more in the long term interests of the nation.    Sure, Bill Shorten has a charisma deficit, but provided he can resist the temptation to increase spending on new ideas (he has enough on his plate funding current ones), he's likely to do more good for the long term budget deficit than Turnbull.  

Labor's instincts on most matters are currently pretty  consistent and reasonable, I reckon;  the Liberals and Nationals, on the other hand, are all over the shop, being riven as they are with undue influence from objectively long discredited American right wing ideologically motivated policy positions.

So, here's to a new Labor government early next year.  I hope.

Radin on magic

Dean Radin has done some pretty "high woo" studies in parapsychology (try "Effect of intentionally enhanced chocolate on mood" for a starter), yet he sounds pretty sensible and rational in interviews, such as this one.

His new book coming out on "real magic", however, may well push his credibility out further than I would like.

On Kevin

I have the urge to weigh in on the Kevin Williamson matter.  First, I should note that it's no wonder I get confused about who is who in American commentary, when the editor of The Atlantic is Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor at National Review.

As most readers would likely know, Williamson has long written diatribes at National Review, sometimes amusingly, and he is a strong "never Trumper", which means I don't disagree with every word he has ever written.  But I did note over the last couple of years that his comments on Obama and Chelsea Clinton were ridiculously over the top:  his supporters claim he can argue powerfully, but I reckon he's often a conservative troll more than anything else.  

So anyway, Jeffrey Goldberg hired him briefly for The Altantic, using the "diversity of opinion" justification, only to sack him a few weeks later when he realised that Williamson had suggested/proposed that women who had an abortion should be treated as murderers, and suffer capital punishment for it - hanging, he has quipped, on more than one occasion.

Williamson's tendency to rhetorical exaggeration no doubt means his anti-abortion (or rather, anti-women who have abortions)  musings shouldn't be a complete surprise.   Certainly, that's what his supporters want us to believe.   Jonah Goldberg says he was "sardonically" suggesting that such women be hanged.   I had to double check the meaning of that ("characterized by bitter or scornful derision; mocking; cynical; sneering: a sardonic grin") and I'm not sure it's apt.  His not so subtle view is apparently that he is generally against capital punishment, so of course he wouldn't argue that American women should hang for abortion, but... Well, here, you read the summary of his more nuanced (ha) view in an article in The Atlantic (Jeffrey Goldberg is a pretty fair editor!) arguing against his sacking:

My own reaction is informed by an interview Williamson gave at Hillsdale College where he was asked by a student if he really argued that all women who have abortions ought to be hanged.

He called that an “intellectually dishonest” accounting of his deliberately provocative viewpoint. “I am generally against capital punishment, I am generally against abortion, I am always against ex-post facto punishment and always against lynching,” he said.

Cathy Young, who is especially clear-eyed about the uncertainty around Williamson’s exact position, probes all the nuances for those so inclined, but as best I can tell, his position is this: if he were writing the laws, abortion would be treated as homicide but homicides would not be punished by death; whereas in places where the law did punish homicide by death, he’d nevertheless favor charging abortions as homicides.

Does he want to execute women who have abortions? No. Would he charge them with homicide even knowing that the state would kill them were they convicted? Yes.

Well, that helps, I say sardonically.   (It doesn't really.)

Here's my take on the whole matter:

*  Goldberg, Jeffrey, was wrong to hire him in the first place due to the high "troll" content of much of Williamson's writing on all issues.   

*  Goldberg, Jonah, is wrong to carry on about him being a "thought criminal".   Take another example and see how Goldberg would run with it - if Williamson had argued (as some in the American conservative Right would still agree) that homosexuality is against the laws of nature and God's laws, and a seriously Christian society should feel fully justified in executing recalcitrant men practising sodomy with other men in the same way that they carry out executions for other capital offences.  You know, provided that everyone knew it was against State law, and the men had plenty of warning but still insisted on carrying on that practice.  

Would Goldberg (Jonah) have then run with "of course that's a logical argument - not a popular one, and he was being deliberately provocative when saying he has no problem with Islamic or Christian states treating sexual morality really seriously by throwing gays off buildings.   Why should The Atlantic condemn him for such a "thought crime"?"  

And might I point out here that Williamson would almost certainly here have a stronger case from a historical perspective - sodomy was a capital offence for three to four centuries in England;  there appears to have been no similar period of consistent dire punishment for women procuring their own abortion in the West in the same period.  (Have a look at the Wikipedia entries here and here, but also this article, the accuracy of which I would not necessarily vouch for.)

So, Williamson is suggesting a more extreme position than anyone in the West has for centuries, and we're just supposed to say oh - we shouldn't expect a liberal leaning publication to sack him for his thoughts?   Get out of here.  

*  It's not a free speech issue - he's free to spout off about this back at any publication that will have him.

*  It is the Right which has moved away from the centre on all sorts of issues, from gun control to their profoundly anti-science attitude on climate change,  not to mention their shrug of the shoulders endorsement of patently authoritarian chants at Trump rallies and the "who really cares?" attitude to his non-disclosure of his personal finances and Russian interference in his election.   No, the Left and the "old" centre does not have to give them respect for their new, nutty and dangerous views and excuse making for things conservatives of only 30 years ago would have found repulsive.   

The One Hour Survivalist

As I was driving out to Mulgowie yesterday, my mind wandered to the scenario of hiding from an alien invasion.   Perhaps influenced by the recent Youtube clips from the US military planes*, it started with thoughts about how electrifying it would be to see a clear-as-day, pulsating UFO cross the sky at low altitude ahead of the car while driving.  I can imagine the heart rate soaring, and my brain exploding with the implications, particularly if the radio confirmed there were UFOs appearing elsewhere, likely leading to a good vomit on the side of the road.

But, more interestingly, what would I think I should do, pending the determination of whether our visitors from the sky were friendly or not?

On returning home, I think there would be a good case to be made for an immediate "bugging out" of large cities, they being obvious targets for any invasion bent on sterilizing the planet for their own purposes, at least until the reason for their visit was known.   Could I sell that to my family?  

The scenario that has some appeal is to go bush for a period, in or near a heavily forested area that may make detection difficult.   Particularly in South East Queensland, we have some pretty thick subtropical rainforest not too far from the city, with lots of water and dense canopy that would surely hide your infrared signal pretty well.   There is Lamington National Park, but it's very up and down, and I imagine most flat sites under cover to be some distance from water.  Instead,  I have one particular State forest area in mind, where I went camping (not entirely legally) in my early 20's.  As far as I know, it remains undeveloped.  The creek is substantial and very clean, and few people have likely have seen much of it beyond the one swimming hole/picnic area, because there are no paths going upstream - you can follow the creek and there are other waterholes further up there, but it's not the easiest of walks, involving as it does going through water and scrambling over boulders.  No, I'm not telling you where this is, because it's my secret, illegal hideout, not yours.

Here's the part that I like fantasising about  more:  if the reason to get out of the city was becoming very clear and urgent (say, reports of major cities in the Northern Hemisphere starting to be nuked), what would I urge the family to collect from the house (and the nearest - perhaps in the process of being ransacked - shops)  if I only had an hour to organise the car being packed for an indefinite period of survival in the bush?   My scenario is a bit like Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, except he had no time at all - the tripods were just a few blocks away.

Hence the title of this post:  what is the best strategy if you suddenly become "the one hour survivalist"?

I was a bit surprised to find that Googling that phrase doesn't produce anything useful, but rather has links to some video games.

I've never spent much time looking at American survivalist websites, but they are (of course) more about years of planning for economic collapse and defending your homestead - lots and lots of emphasis on shooting and having a decade's worth of ammo - rather than people who are suddenly pressed into running away.

I found one web page semi-helpfully entitled The Quickest Way I Know to Get a Family of Four Prepped for the Coming Collapse (Updated for 2018).    (Good to know the author keeps updating it.)   His main recommendation, though, is to be buy a year's worth of survivalist food from America's survivalist food specialist company - Augason Farm.   (Only in America, I would guess, can one make a successful family business out of a perceived need for tasty survival food that has a shelf life of up to 25 years.)   The cost of a year of food seems to have gone up a bit from what that first link indicated - it's now $5,000.   They don't ship outside of America, though - not even to Alaska or Puerto Rico, which seems a bit unpatriotic of them. 

So that link is not as useful as one might hope.

There is the more directly on point article from the (UK) Telegraph - Could you survive an alien Invasion? 8 ways to stay alive if disaster strikes.  Now we're talking.

It does feature UK "Prepper" Steve Hart, who " sees prepping as an “enjoyable hobby” primarily, but knows his meticulous preparations may just help him survive in the unlikely event of evil aliens running riot."

Actually, must of what he says is very similar to the thoughts I had in the car yesterday:

The survivalist likens having an underground bunker stocked up with food to “lasting a bit longer in your own coffin” but explains that he does have three ‘bug out’ locations he can go to in the event of a ‘Doomsday’ scenario....

He adds: “I would only leave my house if the situation was so bad that I feared for my life. There could be a virus or a pandemic moving towards me and you obviously need to put as much distance between you and ‘it’ as possible. It could be that I have some aliens coming towards me, I’m going to leg it and I’m not going to try and stay and fight.

“I have three 'bug out' locations,  these are areas that I go to, regularly, minimally stocked up with enough supplies for a few days … all within three days walking distance of my house, in different directions. That’s how most preppers would work.”

OK, so he takes it much more seriously than me, although I suspect that, if I had to walk, I could reach my "bug out" location within 3 days - perhaps 4.  Generally speaking, though, it looks like British "prepping" is more about bushcraft and skills without guns, unlike US prepping sites which all unduly obsessed with ammunition.


Back to my imagined problem:  the big complication is, of course, not knowing how long you may have to live out of town.   Camping stuff is an obvious start, but should you worry about the folding stretcher bed or folding chair if you just have one car to take?  Probably not.  Any tents and tarpaulins - obviously.  Warm clothes and sleeping bags, yes - might be a nuclear winter coming, and if it's the reverse, it's easy to not wear clothes.  My mind keeps running to knives, lots of knives, and any sharpening method available - I imagine kitchen cutlery can be shaped into good spear heads.  Ropes, strings, fishing tackle, at least one good shovel and any garden saw - all crucial.  As are water containers.  All medicine in the house I would take.  If I could find the big glass magnifying glass, I would definitely take that.

From the food cupboard, I would think going for dry foods (rice or beans, especially) would have to be the priority, followed by anything high fat and therefore high calorie.  (Not that we tend to buy Spam or canned corned beef.)  Based on something I read on some survivalists site - salt.   A very useful product if permanently trying to live off the land, large amounts of it would be one of the first things I would steal from the local Coles.  That and vitamins.   And dried beans.  Matches and fire starters, of course.  Soaps and detergents in pretty high quantity too - they are not going to be easily replaced with something from the wild.

And that's were my imagination starts to dry up.  One of the main things I think would be very useful, and which I don't own, is a solar cell charger for mobile phones and rechargeable batteries.   They are pretty cheap now, but it does seem redundant when you have electricity at home and rarely camp away from power.

I keep getting the feeling I am missing something important in that quick list.  Anyway, doomsday is hopefully far enough off that my mental listing for it may be improved.

We all need a hobby...

Update:   One key thing I think would be useful, provided I had the means of recharging the smartphones and tablets in the house, would be downloading some books on first aid, survival medicine, local bush foods, and off line maps of South East Queensland.   Shouldn't take up more than 10 or 15 minutes of the hour, provided the internet is still up. 

Secondly - you know one thing I can imagine causing the biggest argument:  toilet paper.   It's not as if civilisation is based on it, but I can just imagine everyone else wanting to take every roll in the house, and my arguing for sacks of salt in the space 50 rolls would take up.


*  about which I retain, I should hasten to add, some skepticism arising from how there were released and their limited  context.  But that pilot interview about what he saw - that was more convincing that something was odd.  Even then, though, there should be more willing to talk about his incident, no?


 

Dream jumble noted (and the contents discussed)

Yesterday we drove to Mulgowie for the farmers market where we saw live chickens for sale and one get lose when the seller was trying to pack up;  I watched some of the Commonwealth Games from the Gold Coast, and then (for the first time) Black Hawk Down on Netflix with my son, who at one point said "why do some of the helmets they wear look like bicycle helmets?".

So, naturally (I presume), this morning I woke from a dream which initially featured terrorists being chased by an army on the Sunshine Coast, one of them being Saddam Hussein who had been in hiding, and it segued into a story where a retired, traumatised Army sergeant started working in a studio with other ex army types who were paid to wear bicycle helmets with a single antenna type thing on top (like the Reddit logo) and smile as a group into a camera which would beam their happy faces into chicken farms, it having been worked out that to chickens in captivity, they looked like happy chickens and this had a calming effect on them.

That last bit is nearly as good as the dream I had as a young man in which Michael Parkinson was interviewing a grasshopper in the interviewee chair, and I realised in the dream that this was very odd.

Anyhoo, back to the day's events in more detail:

*  there's someone selling meat again at Mulgowie, which makes the trip all the more worthwhile.  Free range pork from a farm in the area, and we had some particularly nice Italian sausages made from (previously) happy pigs at lunch.

*  the Commonwealth Games - looks to me on TV like they are a success.  True, the opening ceremony was too long, but it's funny how it's pretty much the "daggy games", with sports such as lawn bowling meaning you have quite old competitors in the mix, as well as some very young ones.  (An 11 year old table tennis player, I believe!)   It does make it feel like a more inclusive event, though:  way less intimidating than the Olympics.   The television images of the Gold Coast have looked good (at least when the sun is out), the stadiums have looked pretty full even for the more esoteric events (men's hockey - who normally goes to watch that?), and the fact that world records are being broken at quite a pace makes it seem a relevant sporting event.  So, yeah, I think it will be counted as a success despite the cynicism about why they exist at all.

*  Black Hawk Down:   terrific realism (with only a couple of exceptions), and I was curious as to where it was filmed (a couple of Moroccan cities, as it turns out  - which certainly serves as a disincentive to ever visit them - maybe it's the "magic" of Hollywood, but the urban areas on screen did look awful.)   Clearly, the script pleased the US military enough to have their full co-operation, but watching it now with the benefit of post Iraq invasion hindsight, it's hard to avoid some cynicism towards the "of course we always comply with the laws of war" hard sell that is pretty continuous throughout the film.  (It came out in 2001, a couple of years ahead of the Iraq misadventure.)   I would also say that the film doesn't reach the emotional impact that it seems to be striving for in some parts, but it was well worth watching.

Hard to disagree

Let's all again pause and be gobsmacked about what Trump gets away with claiming, without so much as a shrug of the shoulders from the gormless, "but he's our lying, bullshitting President", Right.

Update:  at the same event, I think:

President Trump said on Thursday, when talking about immigration at a West Virginia event, that women are being "raped at levels that nobody's ever seen before." Trump was in West Virginia for a tax reform discussion. 

And elsewhere at Axios:

President Trump tonight says he's directed the U.S. Trade Representative to consider an additional $100 billion in tariffs on China, and that the administration may take other actions to "protect our farmers and agricultural interests." The White House says it's announcing these new measures "in light of China's unfair retaliation" to an earlier $50 billion in proposed tariffs.

Why it matters via Jonathan Swan: This is exactly what the free traders who formerly worked in the White House feared, Trump in a macho pissing match against Chinese President Xi. Trump has a blunt understanding of leverage and believes the worst thing he can show is weakness. He also believes, as he tweeted, that the U.S. already is so far down on the scorecard with China that he’s got nothing to lose.

By the way, I thought Krugman's column on the China trade war was pretty good and balanced.

Update 2:  the Wisdom of the Elder (that's sarcasm, by the way) from Catallaxy:

We shall see....

Ahahahhahahahaha

Just having a quick scan of Catallaxy to get my blood pressure up, and noted this assessment of marginal media culture warrior Mark Steyn from even more marginal culture warrior CL:

Steyn was just wrapping everything up into an all-you-can-eat meal deal of dazzling polemic. It didn’t work on this occasion. He does this sometimes; he’s still the Chesterton of our time and, people, appreciate him because when he’s gone (cent’anni!) a black hole will be left.

Just ludicrous.

Everybody needs a hobby [Pt 4 in a long running series]

Such as...setting up office in Melbourne as a gynaecologist and fertility expert when you didn't even graduate from university at all, let alone qualify as an actual doctor.   This is something that's apparently not that hard to do:

He saw a further 23 people who were desperate to become parents and who, collectively, over hundreds of hours put their hopes in his hands, at his rooms in Brighton and St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

But it was all a sham. The women weren't pregnant.

In truth Dr Raff wasn't a gynaecologist, he wasn't even a doctor. He was nothing but a charlatan. He had studied at university but never gained any tertiary qualifications....

On top of all this, the aspiring parents paid Raffaele Di Paolo a combined $385,000 over a decade-long con during which he claimed he was a gynaecologist, obstetrician and an expert in fertility matters, with qualifications from Melbourne and Italy.

Di Paolo, 61, is now in jail waiting sentence after being found guilty of fraud, indecent assault and sexual penetration charges following a recent County Court trial, during which he denied the allegations.

How did he do it?  Simples:

Prosecutor Ray Gibson told the jury Di Paolo registered a company named Artemedica and purported to be a properly registered and qualified doctor and gynaecologist, and went as far as hiring a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist to assist him two days a week.  His patients came to him after having unsuccessful fertility treatment elsewhere, although in some cases women were referred to him by chiropractors or osteopaths. One couple was referred to him by a doctor at the Epworth Hospital.

 This is a very strange story.

Dr Phone

Your smartphone may well do some things better than a human doctor:

A smartphone application using the phone's camera function performed better than traditional physical examination to assess blood flow in a wrist artery for patients undergoing coronary angiography, according to a randomized trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

These findings highlight the potential of smartphone applications to help physicians make decisions at the bedside. "Because of the widespread availability of smartphones, they are being used increasingly as point-of-care diagnostics in clinical settings with minimal or no cost," says Dr. Benjamin Hibbert of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Ottawa, Ontario. "For example, built-in cameras with dedicated software or photodiode sensors using infrared light-emitting diodes have the potential to render smartphones into functional plethysmographs [instruments that measure changes in blood flow]."

The researchers compared the use of a heart-rate monitoring application (the Instant Heart Rate application version 4.5.0 on an iPhone 4S) with the modified Allen test, which measures blood flow in the radial and ulnar arteries of the wrist, one of which is used to access the heart for coronary angiography. A total of 438 participants were split into two groups; one group was assessed using the app and the other was assessed using a gold-standard traditional physical examination (known as the Allen test). The smartphone app had a diagnostic accuracy of 94% compared with 84% using the traditional method.

Yet more warnings about e-cigarettes

An assistant professor from Harvard who has been involved in e-cigarette research notes how they have known for years that they can produce formaldehyde:

Nicotine isn’t the only thing e-cigs deliver; they also deliver formaldehyde, a carcinogen. It seems equally fair to call them Electronic Formaldehyde Delivery Systems.

Do manufacturers intentionally put formaldehyde in e-cigs? No, they don’t. But there’s some fundamental chemistry happening that can generate formaldehyde. E-cigs often use propylene glycol or glycerol to help transport nicotine and flavors and to create the big vapor cloud. We’ve known for a long time that when we heat these so-called carrier fluids they can transform into formaldehyde.

Sure enough, when we measure what’s coming out of an e-cigarette, we have found formaldehyde. Sometimes, a lot of it. A letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine caught widespread attention in 2015 when its authors reported that they had found emissions of formaldehyde from e-cigs. There was some initial push back from skeptics who claimed that the e-cig vaping conditions in the research used too high of a voltage (an actual user, they argued, would be deterred from puffing hard enough to generate the excessive formaldehyde because it would taste bad). Of note, one author of that critique receives funding from a group that has accepted money from tobacco companies, and another received money from an e-cig company.

It seems the hired guns were a bit quick to draw, so to speak. Study after study since then has confirmed that e-cigs can deliver formaldehyde to the user. My colleagues and I found, in a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, that under typical conditions the formaldehyde coming out of an e-cig can even exceed what is known as ceiling limits — a level of formaldehyde in the air that is not allowed to be exceeded in the workplace, even for one second.

 

The article goes on to explain that there are other flavouring chemicals in some e-cig liquid which produce different, lung dangerous, compounds.   He does concede that nonetheless, they may be "safer" than cigarettes, but that does not mean "safe":

To be sure, e-cigs may be a useful tool for smoking cessation for those who are addicted to traditional cigarettes. E-cigs are safer than cigarettes, no question. But “safer” does not mean “safe.” And all e-cig users need to be informed about the risks of inhaling these chemicals.

 And as for the concern that they are acting as a gateway to real smoking - yes of course there is good concern they work that way in the US, at least:

Consider this: 22 percent of eighth-grade smokers used e-cigs first. That’s one in five — an astounding number of kids. The addictive nicotine in e-cigs is contributing to the next generation of traditional cigarette users. Will we then recommend that they use e-cigs to help them quit? This is the opposite of a virtuous cycle.

Although many states now restrict e-cig sales for those under 18, it’s clear that kids are finding ways to access e-cigs. And in my opinion, e-cigs are being marketed toward this age group. Who else is interested in puffing on an “Alien Blood”-flavored e-cig?

The groups opposing the legalisation of nicotine producing e-cigarettes in Australia have some pretty good arguments going for them.

Meanwhile, libertarians can continue sucking away unhealthfully instead of just quitting via patches or whatever other aids have long been adequate.    Bit of the old "evolution in action", perhaps?    

That's a lot of black holes

NPR reports:

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy appears to have a lot of company, according to a new study that suggests the monster is surrounded by about 10,000 other black holes.

The centre of galaxies sounds like a very dangerous place to be...

The F word

From a Vox article which notes some interesting facts from the book "Does it Fart?":

The entry on sloths explains that while they eat a lot of plants, they avoid releasing gas through the quirk of their slow digestion. “They only poo about every three weeks,” says Rabaiotti.

If gases accumulated in sloths’ intestines over that long a time, they might get sick — and even burst. So would-be sloth farts are simply reabsorbed through the intestines into the bloodstream. The gases are then respired out of the lungs: literal fart breath.

There are some cases where researchers just don’t know if animals fart or not. Like with salamanders and other amphibians, which “may not possess strong-enough sphincter muscles to create the necessary pressure for a definitive flatus,” the authors write. Gases may ooze out of their bums continually. Is that a fart? Some questions in science are best left to philosophy.

Down the rabbit hole they go

I see the conspiracy obsessed (no) brains trust at Catallaxy is now convinced that Russia has been set up by anti-Trump Western intelligence in the recent nerve agent poisonings:

Putin tells CL who to suspect, and he dutifully agrees.  And he counts BA Santamaria as a hero.  Heh.

Time for more Spielberg love

Stop your whining:  how can you possibly know too much about this nicest of directors?   From an article in The Sun, I learn these things:

*  he could live with Indiana Jones being a woman (cue alt.right horror);

*  he's "long" insisted that his actors and actresses get paid the same;

*  he has deliberately stayed off social media

*  he spent half a day with the Queen when she invited him to screen War Horse (a pretty underrated film, in my opinion) at Windsor Castle.

I warned my daughter recently that when he dies, I'll be wearing black for the rest of my life in the style of Queen Victoria.  Perhaps without the bustle in the dress, but something similar.

Krugman on Trumpland

Krugman's column on the problems in "Trumpland" contains one typo that hasn't been fixed yet, I think (either that or I am reading the sentence wrong), but he notes the big picture regarding income disparity between the US poorer regional areas and the urban rich:

Mississippi isn’t an isolated case. As a new paper by Austin, Glaeser and Summers documents, regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption.

An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors — specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.

So what is the matter with Trumpland?

For the most part I’m in agreement with Berkeley’s Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” is must reading for anyone trying to understand the state of America. Moretti argues that structural changes in the economy have favored industries that employ highly educated workers — and that these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: Their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage.

While these structural factors are surely the main story, however, I think we have to acknowledge the role of self-destructive politics.

That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions — but which they won’t accept. Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill — and would create jobs in the process — are also among America’s poorest.

Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.

Speaking of education cuts, I have been very surprised to read how poorly some US States do pay their teachers:

In fact, the amount teachers make can vary greatly by state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest 10 percent of high school teachers earn less than $38,180 and the highest 10 percent earn more than $92,920. 

And look where the lowest paid teachers are:

1. Oklahoma
Annual mean wage: $42,460
2. Mississippi
Annual mean wage: $43,950
3. South Dakota
Annual mean wage: $44,210
4. North Carolina
Annual mean wage: $45,220
5. West Virginia
Annual mean wage: $45,240

Yes, it all aligns with the argument that the American Right has become obsessed with policy prescriptions that are shooting themselves in the foot.   

Didn't realise I was transgender

Well, according to the way Ottoman Empire used to think about gender, apparently. That's the oddest and most novel thing I learnt from this curiously entitled Aeon article:  What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism.

There's a lot that's not new in there - the Foucault-ian bit about older societies not thinking of homosexuality in the same way we do now, for example.  But this paragraph, explaining what the author concludes after (in his words) "combing through five centuries of Ottoman literary works searching for sexual terminology"* was something new to me:

In particular, it indicates that one can speak of three genders and two sexualities. First, rather than a male/female dichotomy, sources clearly view men, women and boys as three distinct genders. Indeed, boys are not deemed ‘feminine’, nor are they mere substitutes for women; while they do share certain characteristics with them, such as the absence of facial hair, boys are clearly considered a separate gender. Furthermore, since they grow up to be men, gender is fluid and, in a sense, every adult man is ‘transgender’, having once been a boy.   

I don't know: this academic uses "heteronormativity" a bit too much for me to be sure I trust him, and his bio does put one category of interests a bit uncomfortably close to another:

His current research interests are cultural and intellectual history, the arts of the book, gender and sexuality, and human-animal relations, all in the context of Islam and particularly Turkey. 

But if he's right, it seems an odd way for the old Turks to have categorised folk.

* sounds like something a teenager would do if regular porn was not available

A complicated dream

Is there a word for the type of dream from which you half wake, and have trouble stopping as you drift back into sleep again even though you would like it to stop?

Sometimes, though, the effect is the opposite - a dream from which you half wake, recognize as telling a particularly interesting story, and wish you could get going again.

This morning I had such a dream.  It was some vaguely science fiction-y/spy story, with something about aliens and a doomsday machine being built by scientists, who were being shut down for working on such a dangerous project, but someone recognized the need to get it going again because it may be needed to fight off aliens.   There were underground facilities, people being shot unexpectedly, a sense the story had finished happily, only for another key character to be shot and the realisation it hadn't ended after all.   I'm not sure that I was a participating character - it was more like watching a TV show or long movie.

I presume this arose from having watched the end of season 2 of Mr Robot last night - not that I have enjoyed the show as much as the dream.   But yeah, there is a sense of a long, never ending story from watching that show.

Shadow protector

From Japan Today:

Because most Japanese people don’t really like the idea of having a roommate, a lot of these young people end up living alone, including young women. But while Tokyo is much safer than large cities in many other countries, crimes do happen, and criminals often consider young women who live alone to be easy targets.

To help address this problem, and also to put the minds of female tenants at ease, apartment management company Leo Palace 21 has developed what it calls the Man on the Curtain system, which is shown starting at the 1:15 mark in the video below.

Using a projector controlled by/attached to a smartphone, Man on the Curtain throws a silhouette of a man onto your curtains, so that when people outside look at your windows, there will appear to be a guy inside, thus masking that you live alone.

If you’re wondering how that’s better than just putting a cardboard cutout by your window, Man on the Curtain is full-motion, projecting videos of actual actors (in silhouette) for an extremely lifelike look. Currently, the system has 12 different options, including such intimidating routines as a boxer throwing practice punches, a marital artist going through a karate kata, a bodybuilder working out with dumbbells, and a sports fan swinging a baseball bat around.

Since it’d be easy to deduce that a short loop is a fake, each video is roughly 30 minutes long, with a variety of motions. Leo Palace 21’s introductory video doesn’t get into the specifics of how the system is operated, it seems like it’d be easy to program it to cycle from one routine to the next, which would give you about six hours of silhouettes before any footage needs to be repeated.

 Given Japan's national problem with young men failing to put much effort into finding a girlfriend, it might have been more realistic to throw in a sequence with a guy doing..well, you can guess.

Dumb as...

Ha.   Steve Kates posted the viral video of the Sinclair Broadcast Group stations reading out the statement about "fake news" and how they don't do it, all with no apparent insight that it's a conservative, Trump supporting company that has made its news hosts look like robots.

There are scores of comments following which are oblivious to the true point of the video as well.   Then someone says "maybe Kates is criticising all media?", which is extremely unlikely, since Kates shows no sign of getting his American political news from anything other the most biased, one eyed, wingnut sites.   He was even in early on being open minded on the "Q conspiracy."

Even after a couple of commenters have made the point that the video is actually being promoted by the Left to criticise the conservative Sinclair group, you get the information challenged, angry, angry entertainer  saying this:

Man, they are dumb...

A good bit of Spielberg

I often forget to watch The Feed on SBS2, but it's lucky I saw it last night, because it featured a very nice interview between the always likeable host Marc Fennell and Spielberg, as well as the two leads from Ready Player One.  (Not that they have much to say, which is fine by me.)

Ready Player done (and yay for 1941)

Of course you knew I would be off to see Ready Player One this weekend.

I think it shows again that Metacritic is a more reliable guide than Rottentomatoes:  unfortunately, it's more of a 64 than an 76. (Actually, that RT score has come down from 80-something a day or two ago.)

On the upside:  even though hyperkinetic in many parts, Spielberg hyperkineticism is better than that by other directors.  There is still directorial flair there, and I have to say that it puts motion capture to good use to create an immersive feeling to the virtual world.

On the downside:  it's still motion capture in a virtual world.  This does drain the story of real risk and consequences.    I mean, as has already been said elsewhere, it is like watching while someone else plays a game at home:  it may be tense and involving for the player, but after a while, the over-the-shoulder viewer gets less interested because they don't have anything at stake, and they can see that the player doesn't really either, apart from testing their own skills. 

Hence, I quite liked a lot of the inventiveness of the scenario for the first half, but by the last third, I felt no real tension and the imagery became less interesting.   I think the screenplay is a large part of the problem:   despite the bad guys being prepared to kill, they really don't seem to put much effort into it.  There are hints of how it could have been more risky for players - at one point the hero mentions that there is a weapon that can be used in virtual reality that will kill not over the avatar, but the player as well.  (How is not explained, and it doesn't get referenced again.)   I think this is the major issue.

That said, my son liked it more than I did, and it has the benefit of being one of those flawed movies which packs enough content that it becomes interesting to discuss the ways in which it is flawed.   (I'll throw another one in - the acting is pretty curious and questionable as well.)    I think the movie will do well enough at the box office, but won't be a runaway hit.   But then again, I thought the same of Black Panther, so my judgement of young audience reactions is not always correct.

In another Spielbergian aspect to this Easter weekend, I had noticed that his widely panned 1979 film 1941 was about to be taken off Netflix, so I re-watched again for the first time in many years.

I still think it's a very amusing and pretty thrilling movie, and what a contrast to RP1 in that it shows all the benefits of pre-CGI movie making: scores of stunt people involved in doing risky looking things, often not as a joke itself, but just to provide the atmosphere of chaos.   I remember critics disliked it because there seemed to be so much money put into it with (what they thought was) little pay off.  But for some people the excess itself is part of what's funny.  If you're going to make an obvious, corny joke, doing it with a dangerous and real explosion in the background makes it seem funny that they bothered doing it at all.  A very "meta" way to find humour, I suppose, but it works for me.

It still looks terrific, and yet the special effects were nearly all physical - the miniature Hollywood Boulevard and amusement park were enormous, apparently, and because the action was at night, the fakery was much better hidden than would otherwise have been possible.  

And besides, the soundtrack by John Williams is really him at his peak - the march theme I still find stirring, and the dance hall tune to which the great indoor dance/fight happens keeps replaying in my head.       

So, yeah, I still had a pretty good Spielbergian weekend, but not quite in the way he intended...