Dear Entertainment industry: please, stop shooting people in the head for entertainment

It's not just the This is America clip which has brought this to a head (no pun intended.)

I had been noticing over the last couple of months how incredibly ubiquitous the Hollywood/TV/entertainment industry use of "gun shot to one part of the head, blood sprayed out the other side" has become.

I think I can blame Stanley Kubrick, who was the first I remember to show a gun suicide up close with brain spatter on the wall behind the victim, back in Full Metal Jacket.   At least that was, at the time, an R rated movie.   Now, a similar technical device (or perhaps, post production effects?) is used in a widely popular Youtube music video?   Sensitivities have changed incredibly in the space of a few decades.

Other shows which have featured it:   Mindhunter (more a head explosion, in the first 5 minutes);  Mr Robot (Dark Army operatives in particular);  Dirk Gently (Netflix version);  Babylon Berlin (second episode.)

Honest to God, it seems I can't watch a series made for adults which does not feature in pretty close up detail the old gun shot to the head, splatter out the other side.

Is it a case of technology leading art?   Do directors think "we can make this look pretty realistic with Acme Company's patented "Head Splatter for Hollywood" explosive kit.  So let's do it!"

Now, despite my complaint, readers will know I have not stopped watching these shows because of this (with the except on Mindhunter, which was awful in other ways) - I'm not curling up in a corner  worried. 

But I do object to it on both moral and aesthetic grounds and I WISH HOLLYWOOD AND TV WOULD STOP DOING IT.

Here's the moral reasoning:

* surely it's unpleasant for those who have been touched by gun violence, be they ex military with PTSD, the relatives of those recently shot (of whom there must be many in the US, but we have our gunshot murder-suicides in this country too), or police.   And children - surely children who have not yet had the deadening effect of too much exposure to fictional violence feel an unpleasant impact from first seeing this portrayal.  Yes, they shouldn't be watching such adult shows anyway, but still we know they do.  Even free to air TV has incredibly looser censorship standards than it ever did before.

*   surely for the not-quite-mentally-right, it could play into murderous fantasy.  Mind you, I strongly suspect video games with their repeated head and body splattering violence are worse.

*  there's something just "off" about the casualisation of violence when it gets to the extent of comprising on screen maiming for entertainment.   I've never had a problem with a fist fight in entertainment - and I don't think the Three Stooges led to moral decay.    But violence when it depicts bodily maiming - it reaches a line where I just can't see it as something that people should want to see. 

Here's the aesthetic reasoning (although some may argue I've already crossed over to it in my last point):

* it never used to be necessary to made a gun shot a realistic one to make it have emotional impact as part of a story.   In fact, there's a recent example of that in the tense movie 10 Cloverfield Lane.   There is an off screen killing of someone by a sudden shot obviously aimed at his head - and it has more impact than many of the shots complained about above.  Strangely, just because you can show something in fiction that apparently looks realistic, it doesn't necessarily mean you get the most impact by showing it that way.

I've made this point here before, as it was one that occurred to me right back to the suicide scene in Full Metal Jacket:   technically accomplished, overly explicit violence can easily be enough to pull people out of the fictional story, because it heightens your awareness that it is fiction - there's not a guy really being killed for your entertainment - and you can start to wonder about how it feels to the actor to have a explosive with a bag of red jam go off on the back of their head. Why even let part of the audience start to think that way?

Now, anyone reading this will notice that my arguments seem contradictory - if the aesthetic argument is true, shouldn't I be less concerned that the images are disturbing to people who have been touched by gun violence?  

No, I'm not going to concede that:   I don't think that my feeling of being sometimes being distanced from the impact of depicted fictional shooting is a reliable guide to the feeling of those who have lived with the images they have seen or imagined of real people with gunshot wounds to the head.

I just wish there was some sort of revival of moral argument against the depictions of violence from the entertainment industry, but it seems so far from happening....

Wonder Woman Watched

Given that it seems to me that no critics have much liked most DC comic hero movies for many years, and I have trouble taking Batman in any incarnation seriously, I had little interest in seeing Wonder Woman at the cinema, despite the good reviews.  But I caught it on Netflix last night.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.   

First, I wasn't really expecting it to look so good.   Sure, the island of whatever that the Amazons lived on was your typical CGI conglomerate of waterfalls and mountains (still looking more realistic than Lord of the Rings, to my eye), but I was more impressed with the recreations of World War I London and Europe.   It looked like a lot of money had been spent on it, with lots of extras who I don't think were CGI.

Second, I didn't know there would be quite as much "fish out of water" humour of the titular heroine trying to make sense of the human world.   Remember, I do demand a fair amount of humour in my superhero movies, and this one had just enough.

Third, the actors were pretty good.  Gadot is a beauty, and while Pine is an actor who never appears in much that impresses me, he was suitably charming in this role.  I felt a bit sorry for whoever it was who played the mad Scotsman.  Horrendous haircut and a role that only called for him to look daft and crazy eyed in every scene.  Oh well, it's a living I guess.

Anyway, maybe it was also the novelty of a superhero movie set in an era where they normally do not appear, but I thought it was pretty good.

Money, money, money

What an interesting article, explaining about a new high security vault building just outside of Melbourne which is home to all new Australian banknotes.

Sounds like the security measures would be worthy of a Mission Impossible style attack.

The beer you have when not having a beer, I suppose...

Noted at Japan Today:  Suntory to release clear, no-alcohol, plastic-bottled beer.

Here's what it looks like:

To Berlin

For those on Netflix - I've started watching the well reviewed German series Babylon Berlin, and it's a pretty remarkable show.   Based on some crime and corruption novels set in 1929 Berlin, it's apparently the most expensive German TV series ever made, and after two episodes, I can say it sure looks like it.   It looks terrific.

Lots of emphasis on sexual and other decadence in a setting that I suppose is like a supercharged version of Cabaret minus - thus far - the Nazis.   (I'm guessing here - as it happens, I've never watched that movie.)   I'm a bit curious about the accuracy of the dancing in the extended nightclub scene in episode 2 - did the audiences teach themselves to dance together in such a choreographed looking way during popular songs?    I think that's possible, but its nothing like audience behaviour these days.  I also see that some on Reddit think the song and dancing is completely wrong for the period.  It may be, since I have no knowledge of whether such an avant garde style (almost techno sounding, some Redditers say) would have ever turned up in a Weimar cabaret, but the whole scene is so well staged, eccentric and striking that I enjoyed it anyway.

I see when I Google it that the first season (I think there are only going to be two) has a "shocking" ending.   I'm pretty sure it has me hooked.   Perhaps the sordid aspects might start to grind me down, but we'll see.

And just in case anyone hasn't realised it - if the English dubbed version bothers you (as it does me), the settings in Netflix let you watch it in German with English subtitles.   Much better.

Update:    Oh!  Here's a good article at The Guardian explaining how the dance hall featured in the series is indeed based on a real life one that was pretty exotic.   No S&M brothel in the basement, though.   Interesting.

Talking prostates

In the last couple of years, there has been a sudden outbreak of people I know (including three that I am related to) who have had prostate problems - three cases of prostate cancer with surgical prostate removal, one case of some sort of prostate problem that still required surgery.  Admittedly, these are (with one exception) all in men who are about 6 - 7 years older than me, but it does tend to give one the gloomy feeling that such an unpleasant, and medically controversial, disease is likely looking to hit me too.   (I mean, the way every site assures us that virtually all men over 80 who haven't had it removed die with some form of prostate cancer cells helps give that impression too.)

But what are the figures for the number of men who do need to end up having the operation?

A review article from 2008 perhaps gives reason to feel a bit less foreboding:

The probability of developing prostate cancer increases from 0.005% in men younger than 39 years to 2.2% in men between 40 and 59 years and 13.7% in men between 60 and 79 years.^5–7 The current lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer is 16.7% (1 in 6 men). The probability of developing histological evidence of prostate cancer is even higher. Carter and colleagues⁸ showed that 50% of men between 70 and 80 years of age showed histological evidence of malignancy. A lifetime risk of 42% for developing histological evidence of prostate cancer in 50-year-old men has been calculated.^8,9 In men at this age, however, the risk of developing clinically significant disease is only 9.5%, and the risk of dying from prostate cancer is only 2.9%.⁹

Doesn't actually tell me how many have the operation, but still...

A more recent article notes:

Worldwide, more than 1 million men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and more than 300,000 die of the disease¹. Current U.S. statistics show that either 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. With such a high incidence, should we be alarmed? What is a reasonable response to a risk of cancer as high as 1:5?

 One in five is pretty high, I guess - but the odds are still in favour of not ever getting a diagnosis.

But - yes, I have a brother who had it, so that makes things worse for me, risk wise:

• Men with a brother who had prostate cancer had twice as high a risk of being diagnosed as the general population. They had about a 30% risk of being diagnosed before age 75, compared with about 13% among men with no family history.
• Men with a brother who had prostate cancer had about a 9% risk of getting an aggressive type of prostate cancer by age 75, compared with about 5% among other men.

 Well, the odds are still in my favour of not getting it by 75.  

Too much information?

Despite George Monbiot feeling upbeat about what seems to have been a good outcome for his prostate cancer surgery, the unpleasant details he provides about complications he suffered still probably makes for worrying reading for any man about to undergo the surgery.   (I'm not sure I needed to know he is also back to - approximately, and chemically aided - full sexual functioning, but I guess he is providing some hope by telling that part.)

Nice work if you can get it

It's unclear whether (or, probably more accurately, to what extent) Trump or his administration are going to be damaged by the money to Cohen allegations, but it sure stinks of some sort of corruption (and, no, is nothing like open payments made to the Clinton Foundation.)   And what about this (via NPR):

Swiss pharma giant Novartis, which is named in the Avenatti document, confirmed to NPR that it had hired the same shell company created by Cohen to pay Daniels, Essential Consultants.

Spokeswoman Sofina Mirza-Reid said in a statement that Novartis signed a one-year agreement with Cohen and Essential Consultants in February of 2017, after Trump's inauguration. After one meeting, Mirza-Reid said, Novartis concluded that Cohen could not "provide the services that Novartis had anticipated."

Even so, because the contract "could only be terminated for cause," the pharmaceutical conglomerate continued paying Cohen a total of about $1.2 million. In short, it paid him $100,000 per month over the following year even though he was doing no work.

According to an account in the medicine and pharma trade journal Stat, Novartis company officials feared that if they tried to cancel their payments to Cohen, even though they apparently weren't getting anything from them, that might anger Trump.

The company acknowledged it has given information to Mueller's team.

Yeah, swamp really drained, wingnuts.

Don't believe the wingnuts

An article at The Atlantic notes that, despite the best efforts of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of wingnut media, American public support for the Mueller investigation is actually pretty strong:

A Washington Post survey asked: “A special counsel at the U.S. Justice Department, Robert Mueller, has been investigating possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian govt to influence the 2016 election. Do you support or oppose Mueller investigating this issue?” Sixty-nine percent said they supported the probe as of last month.

The same Post survey asked: “Do you support or oppose Mueller investigating Trump’s business activities?” And 64 percent of Americans said that they supported that.

Fox News found something similar: “About two-thirds, 67 percent in the latest Fox News poll, say it is at least somewhat important the investigation continues, and 56 percent think it’s likely that Mueller’s probe will find Donald Trump committed criminal or impeachable offenses.”
A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll got like results.

But you’d never know any of that from the Rush Limbaugh Show, which portrays the Mueller investigation as an outrageous, undemocratic usurpation of the people’s will.

It's good to be reminded that not all of the US has gone nuts - only about 25-30% of them, and about 95% of Republican politicians.

Some of the weirdest politics in the world

I'm talking about Malaysia, not just because of a 92 year old winning, but because of the deal whereby he will let the protege he had framed and jailed for sodomy take over the leadership from him.  Talk about your hard ways to reach the Prime Ministership:

As part of his agreement with Pakatan Harapan, Mahathir will only be prime minister for two years, and then will cede power to Anwar Ibrahim.

Anwar, who was also once Mahathir’s protege, is currently in jail serving a second sentence for sodomy.

Mahathir and Anwar fell out publicly in 1999 and Mahathir was responsible for jailing Anwar, but the pair put aside their differences in their united desire to take down Najib.

The plan now is for Mahathir to have Anwar pardoned so he can take office. “He’ll be released in June,” said Mahathir. “Once he’s pardoned, he’s eligible to be PM again.” Mahathir also announced after his win he would apoint Wan Azizah, Anwar’s wife, as his deputy prime minister.

I heard of this deal in a discussion on the radio last week, but I hadn't realised Anwar was still in jail when the deal was reached.

Does Putin want US in or out of Iran deal?

While Trumpkin conspiracy believers are always thinking that everything Trump does is part of his brilliant game of 4 (or 5 or 6) D chess (because they would rather believe that than Trump not having enough smarts to make decisions on any basis other than an egotistical whim),  when it comes to Putin such an argument (that his true aim is not the one he publicly advocates) seems more plausible.  

So, while Trumpkins are claiming that Trump's decision is proof that he's not in Putin's pocket (because the Kremlin had been urging the US to keep to the agreement),  some are saying that Trump's leaving serves a bigger purpose for Putin:

Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and author of the new memoir From Cold War to Hot Peace, has one more reason to keep the deal: Abandoning it would play right into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s narrative that the US is untrustworthy.

McFaul worked on the Iran deal under Barack Obama. In a phone interview with Quartz, he recalled the lengthy talks held between the Obama administration and the P5+1 (the five permanent UN security council members plus Germany, which allied to negotiate the deal with Iran) to create the deal. Based on the Trump administration’s current lack of “diplomatic enthusiasm” for renegotiation, McFaul predicts the US will walk away from its historic agreement.

“Russia will be fine with that because they will be on the side of the rest of the international community. We—the Trump administration and the United States—will look like the outliers; we will look like the non-cooperative ones and Russia will look they’re like part of international law and cooperation,” he said.

Or, as someone argues at Huffington Post:

As the U.S. puts more economic pressure on Iran, the Islamic republic will find it harder to acquire friends. That leaves Tehran with Moscow. Though the two are uneasy partners, they have cooperated to combat international initiatives that might challenge their own interests. In Syria, for instance, they fight side-by-side and present a united front in global organizations to defend their mutual friend Syrian President Bashar Assad. 

Hard-liners in Tehran want to deepen that relationship. In the process, they seek to boost the sense of righteous resistance to the West that keeps aggressive nationalism strong among their base and ensure that their country remains a Putin-style autocratic society, rather than gaining more exposure to the Western liberties that many ordinary Iranians have clamored for.

A more isolated and paranoid Iran means “the Russians gain geostrategically,” said Reza Marashi, the research director at the National Iranian American Council and a former State Department official.
The United States, he added, is helping reinforce a perception that the Russians want to strengthen: that today Washington may hold sway in the southern half of the Middle East, but the north ― including key areas in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey ― is under Moscow’s influence.

And that plays precisely into what Putin deeply desires ― to make Russia, 27 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, once again look like an equal to the U.S.

Sounds more or less plausible to me...

Update:  noticed this via Twitter -

Two Iranian airlines have signed deals to buy 40 passenger planes from Russia’s Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Company, amid slow progress with orders of western-built aircraft.
Aseman Airlines has agreed to buy 20 of the Sukhoi SuperJet 100 planes while Iran Air Tours, a subsidiary of national carrier Iran Air, has also ordered 20 of the planes. With an average list price of $50.5m each, the orders have a total value of just over $2bn.

 The article does note that Iran already has much bigger orders with Airbus and Boeing, but the planes are coming slowly.  If the US prevents Boeing completing its orders, it's potentially a further win for Russia, and possibly Airbus?

California and big government

Why don't "small government/low taxes always is best" advocates address the matter of how California now has the world's 5th largest economy?   This was in the news a lot last week.  The New York Times explains:

As the state has blossomed, outpacing many others, it has reinforced a liberal narrative about growth, that a state can have big government and a booming economy, too. (Texas is the conservatives’ counterexample: a big, fast-growing economy under laissez-faire government.)

California has strict environmental protections, a progressive tax system and an ascendant minimum wage, now $10.50 an hour and set to rise in stages to $15 in 2023. The state welcomes immigrants, celebrates ethnic and linguistic diversity, and actively tries to combat climate change. And with all that, its economy continues to soar.

“We have raised income taxes and imposed increasingly high fees to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “None of that has overridden the attractiveness of this state for talent and innovation and entrepreneurship.”

California’s economic success underpins the state’s audacity and its defiance of President Trump. It is an invisible buttress when the governor and attorney general harangue the Trump administration, as they did recently at a news conference in Sacramento, for “basically going to war against the state of California.”

 Everyone acknowledges the state does have its problems too.   But one of the big ones (unfunded future liability for pensions) is apparently shared by many other, less liberal states.   

Out of Iran

Vox went and found one not entirely nutty expert who supports the Trump pull out of the Iran deal, but I have to say, I don't find his reasoning terribly convincing, and all of the objections the interviewer raises make more sense to me.

In other Trump pull out/not pulling out news, a lot of people on Twitter are finding very plausible the theory explained at length at the New York Magazine that Trump is the true beneficiary of a (much bigger than Stormy Daniels') affair silencing deal.   If that turns out to be true, I suspect it might be the personal scandal that would start undoing Trump's grip on the Presidency. 

What a suck up

A secular hymn

So, I'm slowly catching up with what the young'uns have long known about technology and music by paying for a family subscription to Spotify.   (It does seem ridiculously good value.)  I'd never used the app before until last weekend.

For someone of my vintage, it's remarkable to think how this digital world really makes previous decades of physically collecting recorded music largely redundant.   Not that I have ever collected much myself - listening to music probably plays a smaller role in my life than it does for the average person.   But still, I can retrospectively now deem my lack of interest in acquiring vinyl and cds as justified by technological changes that I never saw coming.

I say this by preamble of posting a song by Michael Nesmith which I hadn't listened to for years - Harmony Constant.   At the risk of sounding morbid, I've always felt that this would be a good one to play at a (my?) funeral service, as it definitely has a spiritual aspect and is rather uplifting.   I have found a good bit of commentary about the song here, calling it a secular hymn, which seems accurate.   



Update:  Hmmm.   While it's OK seeing Nesmith singing the song, his vocal in that version isn't that great.  I much prefer the album version which can be heard on the next clip, starting at 2min 55sec.   But you should listen to his cheering version of "Different Drum" at the start too.

Fantasy budget time again

David Leyonhjelm likes to do a fantasy libertarian budget every year, although it's hard to see why he bothers, since the details need never change when you're an ideologue who lives by simple rules (government is essentially bad; taxes must be absolutely minimal so that government must be tiny.)

One thing of interest, though, is how his libertarian policy is completely against government foreign aid (other than short term disaster aid), which presumably would mean leaving that field wide open to the big pockets of China - a country with internal policies which are pretty much the complete antithesis of what libertarians like that's actively seeking to spread its influence with foreign aid deals.  Way to step back and let China buy its way into favour with all of our near neighbours, Senator Blofeld.


    

A good idea, I think

It was only back in October last year that I wondered why it didn't make sense for governments (at least in sunny states, like Queensland) to make it compulsory for new house builds to have solar power and battery storage.

It seems I wasn't the only person thinking about it, as California is likely to go down that path (at least for the solar cells, if not the storage):

California may soon be the first state in the nation to require virtually every new home be fitted with solar panels.

The mandate, which would take effect in 2020, is expected to be approved by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday as part of the state’s ongoing push to move from fossil fuels to renewable power.

Under the proposal, all new homes and apartments three stories or less would be required to include solar installations. Exceptions would apply to houses built in shady areas or new structures that include other sources of renewable power.

The proposal is expected to raise the average home cost by nearly $500 annually over the term of a 30-year mortgage, according to state officials. However, homeowners are expected to save nearly $1,000 a year on their power bills, officials said.

I think that this idea would go over well in at least Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.   I'm not so sure about Victoria and South Australia, where cloudier, wetter winters than the northern  States enjoy probably make solar power seem of limited use for several months of the year. 

Time for more climate change whiplash

This article in Nature News:  Can the world kick its fossil fuel addiction fast enough is another in the long line of "climate change whiplash" reporting we've been seeing for a few years.  On the one hand, emissions are clearly still going up when the economy picks up; on the other, past estimates of the decreasing cost and increasing deployment of renewable energy were clearly underestimates, and a lot of renewable energy deployment is in the pipeline.

As to whether market based policy is going to work fast enough, there seems to be increasing doubt:

But politics can also help to bring about rapid change. While Trump is fighting on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry, leaders of other countries are moving in the opposite direction. The United Kingdom and France have both announced plans to ban the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040. And more than two dozen countries have committed to phasing out coal by as early as 2030.

These types of mandate are a sign that energy politics might be shifting towards more brute-force methods, says Michael Mehling, an energy and environmental-policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Economists tend to favour market-based programmes, such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System, but Mehling says there is little evidence that such arrangements will drive the kind of rapid transformational change needed to meet global climate goals. Old-school government mandates might be the last resort, Mehling says. “If the decisions are made at a sufficiently high level,” he says, “they can change the landscape pretty much overnight”.

In any case, as I've been posting for some time, it's not as if those who are supposed to be the Right wing proponents of small government and free market solutions (libertarians and so called "classical liberals") are actually interested in addressing climate change at all:  they are more interested in corporations making money now, and a gormless in principle belief that governments never doing anything is better than governments doing something, such that they will clasp any reason (ranging from entertaining outright denialists to a "it's too late now anyway" defeatism) so as to justify not endorsing any policy action.   They are worse than useless, and just need to be bypassed.  

And to be fair, the Left of politics needs to be criticised for a certain gullibility in the policies and advice they have promoted, too.   At least they are interested in solutions, which is the first step in the process.

But look at the revision now going on regarding the estimates of the social cost of climate change, just in the matter of agriculture.  From this paper's abstract:

Despite substantial advances in climate change impact research in recent years, the scientific basis for damage functions in economic models used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) is either undocumented, difficult to trace, or based on a small number of dated studies. Here we present new damage functions based on the current scientific literature and introduce these into an integrated assessment model (IAM) in order to estimate a new SCC. We focus on the agricultural sector, use two methods for determining the yield impacts of warming, and the GTAP CGE model to calculate the economic consequences of yield shocks. These new damage functions reveal far more adverse agricultural impacts than currently represented in IAMs. Impacts in the agriculture increase from net benefits of $2.7 ton⁻¹ CO₂ to net costs of $8.5 ton⁻¹, leading the total SCC to more than double.

That's some massive change to an input into an IAM, isn't it?

And further to my skepticism that IAMs could have adequately worked out the cost of intense rainfall and sea level rise, I note from a review of a new book on the latter (my bold):

Projections diverge on how fast the inundation will proceed if nations stay on a “business as usual” path in their greenhouse gas emissions. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a maximum of about three feet by the year 2100; James Hansen and colleagues project several times that much over the same time frame; a recent research paper that recalculates the dissolution of Antarctic ice warns of five feet as a median estimate. Sea level rise on such a scale would submerge an area inhabited, just now, by 153 million people. For an indefinite number of decades or centuries after that, the rise would continue.

As former presidential science advisor John Holdren once pointed out, human beings have three options: reduce the amount of climate disruption they are causing, adapt as intelligently as possible to the change they can’t avoid, and suffer. “The question – the issue that’s up for grabs – is what the mix going forward is going to be,” Holdren has said.

Under a “work and hope” scenario – one in which the world cuts emissions with extreme speed and hopes that the more optimistic climate change projections are the accurate ones – sea level rise might be limited to something like two feet. But even that more modest figure would imply worldwide consequences exceeding our ability to comprehend them. “Staggering,” “catastrophic,” and other alarm words have lost much of their voltage. In these busy times, “trillions” are the new “millions” – and thus rather negligible. But two feet of sea level rise is, beyond question, coming.

So, have IAMs been worked out on the "best case" scenario of 2 feet by 2100, when it may be 2 1/2 times  that, and causing the re-location of 153 million people? 

But, again, why should this be taken as a licence to do nothing in terms of CO2 reduction?   Even if it takes 200 to 300 years (instead of 100 years) of increase to reach a 3 metre sea level rise, slowing down the rate surely buys time for (some) cities to respond.  

It's about time I revisited the matter of ocean acidification too.  That is a key area that, I believe, is not realistically amenable to to geoengineering, regardless of what techno-optimists may think can be done temperature wise.  

Oh look, another libertarian do-nothing

For reasons unimportant to this post, I was searching through this blog for past entries about Helen Dale, and was reminded that she had written this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis. 

A year after that, she started her (brief) career as a staffer for David Leyonhjelm, the accidental Senator whose party's policy is still a facade for denialism:

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its existence, sometimes dramatically, and that changes in climate have impacted human civilisation. Much of human history has been subject to the effects of global warming or cooling – the origins of the Sumerian, Babylonian and perhaps also biblical stories of a great flood, for example, are probably due to a massive rise in sea levels following global warming 7,600 years ago.

Global cooling from 1300 to 500 BC gave rise to the advance of glaciers, migration, invasion and famine. The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 AD led to the Vikings establishing colonies and trade routes.

Whether human activity is causing climate change or not, the important issue is whether governments are capable of implementing policies that mitigate it without reducing the prosperity of future generations.

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the Liberal Democrats would favour market-based options.

And Leyonhjelm himself makes denialist quality tweets, such as:

 I also see (from her Facebook page, I think) that Dale is attending the Friedman Conference in Sydney later this month, which as I have already noted, is having climate change denialists Ian Plimer and "Jonova" as speakers.

What's the bet that Dale will not make a scene at the conference about it inviting as speakers only full blown climate change deniers?  

And that Chris Berg will appear on the ABC again and not be challenged about his similar status as fellow traveller with climate change denialism.  

Intense rain, climate change, again..

It's long been a theme here that new records for intensity of rainfall and resultant flooding, due to even the relatively modest increase in the atmosphere's water carrying capacity is likely the first big problem with climate change in many parts of the world.

And it's a hard one to deal with:   sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.


Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by the news of (what sounds like) a new rainfall record in Hawaii, which has caused lots of damage:

A staggering rainstorm on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the latest clue that climate change-related impacts are already threatening the islands. On April 14 and 15, a gauge in Waipa recorded 49 inches of rain in 24 hours. For perspective, the rains from Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches last year, occured over a four-day span.  

The state is still assessing the full extent of damage, and Gov. David Ige recently announced a plan to help farmers who suffered losses during the storm. More than 220 people had to be airlifted to safety by the Army and National Guard as a major road was blocked by landslides. A herd of bison was carried off by the flood waters, with some animals having to be rescued from the ocean.

A group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that investigates extreme weather and climate events is analyzing the storm to  determine whether the storm broke the national record for the most rainfall within a 24-hour period.

The current 24-hour record  is 43 inches, set in Alvin, Texas in 1979.

Setting a new record will be just the latest reminder that as the climate warms,  parts of Hawaii are already experiencing bigger torrential rains and will likely see more frequent tropical cyclones. Pao-Shin Chu, Hawaii’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Hawaii, noted that his research showed that the Big Island has seen more frequent heavy rains in the past 50 years.

“If given a one degree C warming, the atmospheric moisture is expected to increase by 7 percent. With this additional moisture available in the air, it may help trigger heavy downpours if other conditions are right,” Chu said by email.

Of course, the damage caused in a rural area is not even necessarily preventable by better drainage.   It can be hard to retain a hillside if it collapses.

Here's a recent article, too, from DW about extreme weather being validly linked to climate change is increasingly proved by science.  Interesting that it deals with the Roger Pielke Jr claim that that increased costs from weather events is more related to increased building in risk prone areas (and therefore not proof there are more extreme events causing damage.)   The insurance industry doesn't believe it; scientists don't believe it.   And Pielke Jr's continuing contrarianism is fading from influence, anyway.  Good.

A cluster of a rare, unpleasant disease

Ocular melanoma?  Hadn't even heard of it, and for some unfortunate people from a town in the USA, there's a cluster of it for completely unknown reason.

Read about it at NPR.

Pascoe has a point

See his tweet here, about how way low company tax in the UK is not helping their economic growth much.  Read the thread too.   Perhaps I like his point further down more:

Everyone's an expert

Hey, I see via an extract at Catallaxy that Henry Ergas is critical of the Gonski 2 report on education, and this is what he thinks:

No one could sensibly blame the subsequent worsening on ­inadequate funding. Having grown by almost 30 per cent in real terms since 2000-01, public ­expenditure per student is at all-time highs. Nor are there too few teachers: while the number of ­students increased by 25 per cent during the past 40 years, teacher numbers rose 60 per cent, halving the student-teacher ratio compared with the 60s.

What has changed, however, is that how well students do in school no longer matters. University places used to be tightly ­rationed, and tertiary admission depended on the scores students received on completing secondary schooling; now, with 44 per cent of students proceeding to university and that proportion set to rise further, test scores scarcely have any enduring impact.

The contrast with the countries whose performance the report wants us to emulate could not be starker. Although the report seems entirely unaware of this fact, in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese-speaking jurisdictions — which invariably dominate the league tables — matriculation rankings are the primary factor determining students’ long-term prospects. Put in the language of sociology, these systems are sternly unforgiving, offering few or no second chances.

And even in Finland, whose ­approach is less harsh, Amanda Ripley’s widely acclaimed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, concludes that “school is hard, and tests affect students’ lives”, “creating a bright line” that shapes ­future career opportunities.

 He might have half a point here, but has he seen anything about the ridiculous extra curricular tuition system in Korea, in particular?   You can obviously go too far in that direction, making student's lives an absolute misery; but yeah, it'll make your education system's average performance look good internationally.  

And I'm not sure if it is true still, but I understood that the Japanese system used to be mainly about getting into a good university, but the degree of work involved in many of the arts/business university courses once a student got in was pretty easy.   

I also find it hard to be too critical of the "alternative paths" emphasis to get into university now.  I mean, I think it really is clear that some 17 year old students just haven't reached the level of maturity needed to devote themselves to higher education, but that may well change within a couple of years.

I also like the way that medical schools here do check the personality suitability of people to do medical degrees now.  

I don't think our education system is perfect, and it is really frustrating the degree to which teaching is pretty clearly prone to fads and ideas that flow in and out of popularity every decade.   I mean, I thought Naplan testing was a pretty obviously good idea, but didn't really realise that some teachers had opposed it from the start as setting up the system to be gamed by schools that would use the test in ways that were not intended.  The Naplan skeptics seem to have won the day, too.  Or at least, that is my impression.

Currently, when I look at the matter of how teachers are supposed to assess work submitted by my high school attending son and daughter, my overwhelming impression is that the academics are still very prone to overcomplicating the theory of teaching and assessment.   But even then, without my having studied teaching and education, I don't really know whether my gut reaction is right, or whether the assessment criteria they use now are much better than what used to exist.  

So the frustrating thing is that everyone thinks they are an expert, and it is very hard to judge the better way forward.   And it is always treated like a neverending crisis, yet we still end up feeling pretty comfortable that we're making new engineers, doctors and scientists who aren't endangering our lives with their incompetence.   So it can't be that bad, surely.  

The Russians prey on the paranoid streak in the US right

The Guardian reports:

Speculation about a US armed forces exercise that led some Texans to fear that the Obama administration was plotting martial law was stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign, according to a former director of the CIA.

Russian bots were so successful in planting wild ideas during a military exercise called Jade Helm in 2015 that Russian social media bandits launched another offensive the following year, attempting to influence the presidential election itself, Michael Hayden told MSNBC.

“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most – many – Texans that Obama planned to round up political dissidents, and it got so much traction that the governor of Texas had to call up the [state guard] to observe the federal exercise to keep the population calm,” said Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 after serving as director of the National Security Agency.

“At that point I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time.’ And at that point I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process,” Hayden said on Morning Joe on Wednesday.

So, the Trumpkin, wingnut Right don't realise how easily they are manipulated by a foreign nation's BS rumour mill, and when evidence to show that they were manipulated comes out, they have to reject it in order to deny their gullibility.

What a bad state for American politics.

Meet the future incels

A distinct lack of female faces amongst this group of American high school students having a counter protest to the March for our Lives gun restrictions rallies.   And what's the "Saturdays are for the the boys" meme?   Is that the day their divorced dads take them to the range?

Update:  This is the explanation of the relatively recent, US specific, "Saturdays are for the boys" meme.   It says that when it became popular:

Over the next few months, the hashtag took off, as men shared videos of their various acts of drunken debauchery with the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter. 

 So yeah, just what you want a bunch of young gun rights dudes to be hoping to get into - drunken debauchery with guns.

Hitler's bones

Slate talks at length about a new book published in France, in which the authors explain that a re-examination of a bit of jaw held by the Russians re-affirms earlier conclusions that it is from Hitler.   A piece of skull the Russians also hold - that's not so clear.  But the teeth in the jaw allow for some reasonable certainty:

Sognnaes and Ström did not have access to the actual jawbone and relied on testimonies of Hitler’s dentist and physicians, X-ray plates taken after a 1944 assassination attempt, and findings of the Russian autopsy to assert that “Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.” 

Charlier analyzed the teeth with a stereo microscope and was even able to dissect a few particles he involuntarily brought back with him in France, stuck to his laboratory gloves, and concluded that the jawbone presented to him is not a “historical forgery.” He asserts: “We are certain of the anatomical correspondence between the radiographies, the descriptions of the autopsies, the tales of the witnesses, especially those who made these dental prostheses, and what we had in hands.” Brisard and Parshina add, with similar confidence: “We can state that Hitler died in Berlin on April the 30th, 1945. Not in Brazil at 95, nor in Japan, nor in the Argentinian Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific.”

One line struck me as a bit like something out of James Bond, or Mission Impossible:

The description of their investigations makes for a lively tale, full of appointments not honored, rude secretaries, and unexpected twists, like the purchase of a bottle of Armenian cognac to mollify an archivist or a visit to a storage room where all oxygen is expulsed at night to trap any illegal visitors.

Malthus, Thanos and workhouses

Given that the Avengers movie (not very wisely, in my opinion) gives the villain-in-chief Malthusian/environmental motives for laying waste to countless numbers of people across the universe, it's interesting that I just stumbled across a Philosophy Now article that looks at Malthus himself and his specious argument.

I see that Malthus actually changed his views in one key respect, but (so the article argues) his initial pessimism continued to be very influential:

In 1805 Malthus was appointed to the first professorship of Political Economy in England, at the new East India College in Haileybury, where he remained until his death. His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1820, was much more upbeat than the population Essay. Here, in fact, Malthus saw food production sufficient for centuries to come. Yet he did not alter later versions of the population essay accordingly. And those who controlled all the major journals in the field of economics ignored – indeed snubbed – his Principles. Thus when Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics the “dismal science” in 1849, it was due to Malthus’s population theory, not his economic theory....

....when Malthus says in the first Essay that the existing English poor relief laws “tend to increase population,” while doing nothing to increase the food supply, he thinks he is describing the actual world.....In the end Malthus is posing a hypothetical, not an actual problem. And hypothetical problems don’t require draconian solutions.

Besides, it’s not as if the existing Elizabethan Poor Laws, in force since 1601, were generous. Nonetheless the New Poor Laws of 1834 tightened the screws, mandating that workhouses be built in every parish as the sole source of poor relief, and that conditions there be worse than what the poorest free laborers could find on their own. Husbands and wives were separated from each other, lest they continue to multiply, and even from their children. Yet even so, workhouses could be better than life outside.

The situation provided plenty of material for Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate to the poor. “Are there no prisons,” he snaps? “Are there no workhouses?” But “many cannot go there,” he is told, “and many would rather die.” Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As one Dickens scholar remarks, “Malthus hung over England like a cloud.”

The article notes that workhouses did not officially end in England until 1929 - much later than I would have expected.

Which led me to have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on the matter of English workhouses.

It's quite interesting, and includes this photo from 1911 - barely over 100 years ago - of women eating dinner at the St Pancras workhouse:

It's good to have been born in the second half of the 20th century.

An over-egged argument with an element of truth?

He does go on at unnecessary length, but I could see his point, at least in parts:

Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism

Saudi Arabia - sort of joining the early 20th century 118 years late

A good article at NPR about the Saudis feeling some "culture shock" at the sudden attempt at modernizing social views by their new Crown Prince.

I didn't know baby photos had once been banned for religious reasons, for goodness sake:

Comedian Khaled Omar takes the mic and begins his act, lamenting how he has no baby pictures of himself. His parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s, when ultra-conservative religious authorities deemed photographs haram — forbidden, they said, by God...

Omar's punchline gets a good laugh: Now, he says, not only are photos suddenly not forbidden — but all the people who banned or tore pictures up are now happily posing for selfies. He still wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures.

Conservative towns are having a hard time accepting it:

While some rumblings of discontent are apparent in the kingdom's big cities, it's more obvious in smaller towns, such as Huraymila, about an hour's drive north of Riyadh, past plenty of camels and new construction in the desert. The town of wide boulevards and squat, sand-colored buildings has a conservative reputation. You can't buy cigarettes, and music in public remains unwelcome. When the government entertainment authority tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town refused to attend it.

They are also going to be encouraging tourism, for like, the first time ever?:

Consider the changes in April alone: The kingdom rolled out its plans for its first-ever tourist visas, held its first Arab fashion week and opened its first cinema in 35 years.

A 26-year-old man in Riyadh, wearing a thobe, a long white gown, says the changes are nothing short of shocking.

It's about the last country I would be comfortable visiting.  Well, maybe after North Korea. I can just imagine the ease with which one could be framed for doing black magic, or for looking lustfully at a woman, or something weirdly specific to their still antiquated beliefs.  I mean, seriously, this report is just from November 2017:

In the midst of Riyadh’s latest “anti-corruption purge” carried out by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a government body elsewhere was busy giving a course in defeating an alternative form of evil hiding between the walls… black magic.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice concluded a training programme on Wednesday called the "development of scientific skills in the fight against witchcraft."

The course took place in Ramada al-Hada in the city of Taif, located in the Mecca province, southwest of the country.

The 27 participants of the programme were taught how to “scientifically battle witchcraft,” and received certificates of attendance from the head of the Taif Governorate, Sheikh Yahya bin Ali al-Hazmi.

Distressing comedy news

I missed that the ABC has renewed the woeful "Tonightly" with Tom Ballard.

It has been distressing me that it has also leaked like a broken sewer pipe out of ABC Comedy channel (why did they think it was worth doing that - they have been struggling to find enough old and new shows to fill it) onto the main ABC channel.

I dropped in on it last night to see if Ballard was still as bad as I formerly found him.

Yes, he is.  Still swearing like a bogan in a pub (to no effect other than as a sort of repetitive  punctuation), and with a delivery that is pretty much always begging for laughs: half acknowledging that the humour that he just tried didn't really work.   I read someone at Catallaxy, CL I think, described the audience as always giving "pity laughs", and for once, I think he is reading something right.

It's an appallingly underwritten show with an appalling host, and a pretty tiny audience.   I hope it's cheap to make, as I can see no other potential justification for not giving it a mercy killing. 

Low islands and climate change, revisited

Early in the life of this blog, I used to criticise the reporting of politicians and environmentalists claims about sea level rise being about to cause the more-or-less immediate demise of low lying Pacific islands.   The situation, when you looked at the details, was more complex, and this was hardly ever reported.

Move forward, and there was a recent report which climate ignoramus Andrew Bolt seized upon with glee - 

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.
It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

I meant to comment on it at the time, because, I thought, a mere small growth in the area of a low lying island (caused by currents pushing around sand and ground up coral, I believe) tells us nothing about the habitability of the island.   The immediate problem with sea levels that I had seen on some documentary shows was the ground water becoming replaced with salt water.  

An article at Carbon Brief explains this well, and supports my hunch from earlier this year.  A new paper suggests that many low lying atolls will be uninhabitable due to the groundwater issue earlier than expected - perhaps by mid 21st century.

Not everyone agrees - it would seem that New Zealand (which was the source of the "Tuvalu is growing" study) has some scientists who are busy downplaying the issue.   (Given New Zealand's reputation as a lifeboat island for South Pacific islanders, one wonders if there is a bit of a motivation for such studies.)

So, I still think my early criticisms of media gullibility on the issue were valid;  just as my criticism of climate change denialist's complete dismissal of the very same issue is valid now. 

Not just aged in oak, but made from oak

Not at all sure why anyone would bother even trying this, but the Japanese can be pretty innovative:

Discerning drinkers may soon be able to branch out after Japanese researchers said Tuesday they have invented a way of producing an alcoholic drink made from wood. The researchers at Japan's Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute say the bark-based beverages have woody qualities similar to which is aged in wood barrels. They hope to have their "wood alcohol" on shelves within three years.

The method involves pulverising wood into a creamy paste and then adding yeast and an enzyme to start the fermentation process.

By avoiding using heat, researchers say they are able to preserve the specific flavour of each tree's wood.

So far, they have produced tipples from cedar, birch and cherry.

I like this understatement further down:

The institute has a broad mandate for scientific study related to Japan's extensive woods and forests, but Magara acknowledged "wood alcohol" might not be the most obvious application for their research resources.

The blog for the over 50's incel crowd

My internal reaction to 99% of cartoon critic Tom's comments at Catallaxy:  "What a miserable sad sack." 

Made me laugh

What with the bizarre news from Trump's former "Dr Nick" looking doctor (not that people didn't suspect that Trump wrote his own medical endorsement), I was amused by this tweet:

More Avengers

I was reading the comments after a good review at The Guardian for Avengers:  Infinity War.    The great majority were very positive, and when Guardian readers endorse something so American, you know it probably is pretty good.

I also agree with David Roberts' tweet:

And there is amusement to be had in the sarcastic responses to the criticism made by Richard Brody at the New Yorker that you had to have seen the last 10 years of Marvel films to understand this one.  (Actually, as I explained in my previous post, I've missed plenty of Marvel movies, but seen enough that I knew nearly all of the main characters - and a couple of minor Avengers don't get to do much in this one anyway.)  It does seem silly to criticise a movie in a long line of sequels for being a sequel.   

Quite ridiculous

This case of the white Utah student wearing a Chinese dress to her prom, and getting attacked for "cultural appropriation" is quite ludicrous.   It's worrying that so many tweeted in support of the complainant Jeremy Lam.  His take on the matter makes no sense at all - why the heck isn't a white woman wearing the same dress that (allegedly) was a symbol of Chinese female empowerment not seen an endorsement of the (alleged) same positive meaning behind its creation?   And what of expensive European fashion labels having stores in Beijing and Shanghai?  Why isn't cashed up Chinese women buying, I don't know, a beret "culturally appropriating" from the French?  Actually, now that I Google it:

It’s a classic Shanghai sight: older Chinese men sporting rakish berets. The iconic headwear of the French never seems to have gone out of style among gentlemen of a certain age in Shanghai, a legacy formed during the period of the French Concession (1849-1945). Some hypothesize that since famous revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara also favored these practical chapeaux, Chinese men may have felt comfortable wearing them post-1949. Patrick Cranley’s been on the streets of Frenchtown and beyond, documenting the laokele (distinguished Shanghai gentlemen) and their berets.

So both the French and the Cubans should be complaining about cultural appropriation?   They don't?  Because complaining about cross border fashion is a nonsense!

He supports Trump

Evidence of the, um, surprising views held by some high profile Trump supporters.  A full quote from Kayne West:

In a montage of clips released on the site, West dropped in to chat with host Harvey Levin about being so appalled that people are still upset about slavery. An actual quote:

When you hear about slavery for 400 years—for 400 years? That sound like a choice! Like, you was there for 400 years, and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison, because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. It’s like slavery, Holocaust, Holocaust, Jews. Slavery is blacks. So prison is something that unites us as one race … the human race.

Update:  God knows why I should bother, but in an attempt to be "fair" to West, here's what Allahpundit  thinks he was trying to say, in a spectacularly so-unclear-it's-offensive fashion:

I think his slavery point is metaphorical, sort of. Quote: ““When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.” Allowing yourself to be mentally enslaved is a choice. Unless you’re also physically enslaved, in which case, ah, you’re probably going to feel mentally enslaved whether you “choose” to or not.

Kanye West, interesting guy!

Historical pants

From Discover, earlier this year, a brief article all about pants in history:

From far above, the area around Yanghai cemetery looks like a collection of ground-dwelling wasp dens, drilled into a gravelly desert. It gets hot in this region of remote western China — up to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. That’s a hard-knock climate, but it’s perfect for preserving ancient artifacts. And if you zoom in on the region, and dig in, as archaeologists have, you’ll find tombs with well-kept secrets. Inside two of them, scientists found not just human remains but the remains of what covered those humans.

I’m talking about clothes, and not just any clothes: pants. These are the oldest pants (discovered) on Earth — more distressed than any jeans Gap can offer — dating back some 3,000 years. They’re tailored wool, and constructed from sewn-together pieces of uncut fabric. If Project Runway had magically predated television by about 2,930 years, the designer of these leg covers would have had a shot at the win.

Yeah, they are pretty fancy duds for 3,000 years ago:

As to how the fashion caught on, the article goes to explain that horse riding has a lot to do with it:

 “The design of the trousers from Yanghai seems to be a predecessor of modern riding trousers, which, together with other grave goods in the tombs, allows the assumption that the invention of bifurcated lower body garments is related to the new epoch of horseback riding and greater mobility,” says Ulrike Beck, researcher studying the design and construction of early clothing....

While these pants, and their equine-riding wearers, date back to between the 13^th and 10^th century BCE, leg-separating fabric didn’t catch on in Euro-“civilized” (Greek or Roman) culture for a while after that. Only barbarians, those cultured people believed, wore trousers. Take the Scythians, a group of Iranian nomads, or the Hunnu of Central Asia. The Greeks called Middle Easterners’ and Persians’ lower-wear “sacks,” and not in a nice way.

The Greco-Roman fun-making stopped, though, around the time those civilized statue-builders realized that mounted soldiers—cavalry—had a huge advantage over average-heighted people running around on their own two feet. To maintain military dominance, they needed to get atop the equines, to avoid tangling their tunics, and to protect their nether regions. And so, enter pants, which were also warmer as these people expanded northward.

When the Romans wore loose pants, they gave them a nice name: braccae, a word that later became the English “breeches.” And after the Romanics lost their military dominance despite their attire, the people in charge of Europe were full-on horse-riding pants-lovers.

I feel much better educated now...

Update:   This makes a good companion piece to my lengthy 2011 post about the history of cotton (even though the old Chinese pants above are wool.)     I like these self education posts - and have no idea whether anyone else ever does. 

So easily led

Wow.  Steve Kates and the Trumpkin Right wing media show zero interest in the detail of Netanyahu's claims re Iran:  they literally only need to see him flash up "Iran Lied" and they think they know all they need to know.

Surely we have never seen a time of such wilful ignorance on the part of people who think they are smart.

Anyway, this article at The Atlantic fills in the details they are not interested in.  Update:  this Vox article is even better.

Odd addiction news

The BBC has a detailed story about how Nigeria has a serious issue with recreational codeine addiction - taken in the form of cough syrup.

A peculiar Chinese issue

To the extent that traditional Chinese medicine ideas encourage the rapacious use of animal parts for no good reason at all, I wish it would go away.   But I didn't realise the Chinese government has a protective attitude towards it:

A Chinese doctor who was arrested after he criticized a best-selling traditional Chinese remedy has been released, after more than three months in detention. Tan Qindong had been held at the Liangcheng county detention centre since January, when police said a post Tan had made on social media damaged the reputation of the traditional medicine and the company that makes it.

On 17 April, a provincial court found the police evidence for the case insufficient. Tan, a former anaesthesiologist who has founded several biomedical companies, was released on bail on that day. Tan, who lives in Guangzhou in southern China, is now awaiting trial. Lawyers familiar with Chinese criminal law told Nature that police have a year to collect more evidence or the case will be dismissed. They say the trial is unlikely to go ahead.

The episode highlights the sensitivities over traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) in China. Although most of these therapies have not been tested for efficacy in randomized clinical trials — and serious side effects have been reported in some¹ — TCM has support from the highest levels of government. Criticism of remedies is often blocked on the Internet in China. Some lawyers and physicians worry that Tan’s arrest will make people even more hesitant to criticize traditional therapies. 

 He was arrested under something like a defamation law (spreading false information) when he criticised a company's popular health liquor.  You can read about it at Nature.

Another pop culture post..

I find Beyonce very easy to ignore.  Maybe that's an age thing, although I suspect that her appeal is much more American based than with other pop stars.

For what it's worth, with my very tiny exposure to her music and videos*, one thing I've never liked is her fashion sense which has always seemed to emphasise legs with thighs that I personally find too thick to be too attractive.  Is she responsible for the several years we have had of teenage girls/young women wearing very short shorts when going out for fun, regardless of bodily attributes?  Did other  groups popular (I presume) with teenage girls, like Little Mix, get their inspiration for their somewhat trashy fashion from her?

How young women dress and its implications is a vexing issue.   In theory, we all know that being more-or-less undressed does not necessarily have to correlate with messaging of sexual availability:  tribes of topless women and near naked men tell us that.  We can also all agree that extreme conservatism in modesty - such as in Saudi Arabia - shows the ridiculousness of taking the connection between dress and sexual availability too seriously.  

But there's this fine line where the logic hits the biology, particularly when you're the father of a teenage daughter; and you really do wonder, as I was a few weeks ago when seeing a stream of high school teenagers going to an alcohol free concert/dance party thing, that it's kind of odd how the teen guys are all dressed with much more baggy-short-T-shirt modesty than the tight tops and maximum thigh baring shorts fashion that is so "in" with teen girls now.**   Or has a disparity between young male and young female fashion (in terms of apparent sexual signalling) always been a thing?   I guess you could say that a shirtless guy at an outdoor concert or sporting event might be signalling something (maybe, more often, just that they are drunk), but in any event my impression is that straight young men are now much less likely to do that in public than they were in the (say) the 70's or 80's.   And how much of that is that just because of greater sunburn awareness?  

Anyway, this is all prelude to linking to an article at the Catholic Herald, of all places, that takes a somewhat cynical view of the much lauded performance of Beyonce at the recent Coachella festival.   The article notes that, despite the female empowerment theme  coming off the stage from her performance, the festival was noteworthy for the number of groping and sexual harassment complaints from the female attendees.  The article doesn't reference the libertine fashion of many of the young women attending (just Google "Coachella 2018 fashion" for an idea), but it does reference  the conformist liberation vibe from B:

Still, it is illuminating to compare her performance to the music festivals of yore. Woodstock opened with Richie Havens’s improvised performance of Freedom and closed with Jimi Hendrix’s noodling national anthem. Both expressed a sense that liberation was found in individual challenges to authority. Now that the counterculture has gone mainstream, liberation is achieved by conforming to the commands of the new authorities. Cops march in the gay pride parade and suits issue HR directives on diversity.

Beyonce’s brand of lockstep sexiness is the artistic expression of conformist liberation. Rather than an individual improvising on stage, she is the leader of phalanxes in freakum dress uniform, backed by a marching band. It is amazing how many of her lyrics take the form of commands – “Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches” or “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation.” Freedom is now enforced.

I think he has a point:  although the attendees at 60's and 70's music festivals were no doubt also being accused by conservative oldies of conformist fashion, the music performances were (I suppose) more loose and individualistic.   God knows some of the 5 minute electric guitar solos were self indulgent...

So how do I end this ramble?   I don't know - you never want to blame the young women (however dressed, or whichever female performer they like), for being groped, or to excuse the utter jerks who do it to them - and while it seems impossible to not mention concern about sexual signalling in fashion if you're a normal parent, it is next to impossible to do so without it being interpreted as placing an unfair onus on a daughter for their safety. 

I suppose parents have fretted about this forever - or at least over the last 70 years - and it seems no  closer to a really satisfactory resolution.


*  I've just watched bits of several of her songs - I remain completely underwhelmed by her style of music.

**  (My daughter wasn't going there; it just happened that I was having a beer in a bar next door to entry to the teen event that was starting mid afternoon.)

There's something odd about me and tomatoes...

Like all normal people, I like a nice tomato, be it in a sandwich, salad, on a cracker with cheese, or in the form of pizza sauce, paste or canned for cooking stews.  I'm a little bit lukewarm on them heated whole on the plate, as the English like to do with their protein heavy hot breakfasts, although if they are slow baked down further in an oven they are great again.  

But for some reason, I cannot enjoy tomato juice, or any juice combination that is too heavy with the tomato element.   I just bought a combination juice and yes, it has way too much tomato.  I can drink it, but find it unpleasant, like taking medicine. 

I do have another, related issue about them:  some people can eat a ripe one like an apple.   Something about the idea of doing that myself I find off putting.   Even in a salad, I don't like the pieces to be too large, and will often cut a wedge in half.  Maybe it's just that I feel tomato is a flavour that always needs to be with something else?

I think this is a bit odd, as I can't think of any other food that I cannot enjoy in its juiced form, or to have too much of in one bite.   I've never tried a Bloody Mary for this reason.   Maybe I should give that a go as a way of finishing this unfortunately large bottle that I just bought....

PS:  I did, a few decades ago now, once make an observation to someone eating with me how I preferred sliced tomato more than wedges, and he agreed.  Maybe it is more common than I know, although I am basing that on precisely one instance in my life of someone who shared this feeling.   

Were the prison authorities in Batman right?

At NPR there's a report about prison reform (at least for young offenders) in one US state:

In Massachusetts, over half of young adult men released from jails and prisons go back within three years. The state's largest county wants to disrupt that cycle by teaching responsibility.

In Billerica, a suburb northwest of Boston, a select group of inmates at the Middlesex House of Correction and Jail are at this effort's forefront. They're part of the People Achieving Change Together, or P.A.C.T. unit — a program designed specifically for 18- to 24-year-olds who want to make sure that this period of incarceration is their last, like 22-year-old Eric Darden.

"I just kinda want to break the cycle and try to be better instead of coming back," said Darden, who is finishing up a two-year sentence for armed robbery and assault and battery.

Inmates in the P.A.C.T. program reside in the prison's top floor, where the unspoken rules of jail politics fall by the wayside. Inmates and corrections officers have more relaxed, friendly relationships. The floor has a barber shop, a library and a meditation room, and its cell doors stay open all day until 9 p.m. or later.

Besides having a cell all to himself, Darden says the atmosphere in the P.A.C.T unit is distinctly different from the rest of the jail. In his last cell block, he'd always been on guard. Here, he says, "you don't have to worry about looking over your back. If you have a situation, you can talk about it instead of someone trying to hype it up."

You know what I thought of when I read that?   The ridiculing of rehabilitation in jail that used to turn up on the (Adam West) Batman TV series.   I didn't understand it as such when I first saw it as a 7 or 8 year old, but then I watched a bit again as a adult many years ago and recognised the satire of "bleeding heart liberals" in the way they portrayed some villain or other having a great time in jail.  A couple of decades later and it had all turned around with (mainly Republican inspired) tough on crime, three strikes you're out, attitudes, and now it seems the circle might be turning again?

I also find it a bit wryly amusing to see it's Germany that's apparently an example of soft touch rehabilitation as the best model for young prisoners.