Worrying about my food

I noticed this tweet via Andrew Revkin over the holidays:

I'm starting to get worried that I'm starting to develop a guilty conscience over meat eating.

I'm not entirely sure of the metrics I use to avoid worrying about animal life and suffering.   Can 7 weeks as a broiler hen in a shed ever be called a happy life?   Should I worry too much about what a hen would like to be doing, given that left alone, they'll spend a lot of time fighting other hens anyway (depending on living conditions, though, I guess.)   But what about the rooster chicks in the egg industry who get conveyor-belted into a grinder while they are still cheeping because they were born with the wrong genitals?  Is that more or less "tragic" than  being fed in a shed for 6 weeks purely to put on weight and having bodies that couldn't cope in the wild anyway?   

And 65 billion chickens a year killed to satisfy our fried chicken lust?  Seems a bit, well, excessive.  I mean, we do factor in numbers in assessing degree of tragedy involving death - should that also apply in some complicated fashion to working out if the egg industry or the broiler meat industry is the "worst" in terms of least justified termination of animal lives?

Look, I don't think I am ever in any danger of worrying about interfering with the life (or life enjoyment) of a prawn, or fish.   But when it comes to mammals and chickens, it's starting to feel complicated. 

Perhaps I should feel more sympathy for relatively smart creatures like cattle fearing what's coming at the abattoir, but at least they have gotten "more out of life" by having lived in the sunshine for a number of years before meeting their fate.   (At least in this country.) 

But back to the other hand - in terms of environmental impact, I think it's pretty well acknowledged that chicken does way less harm than big mammal farming.

And if I concede on chicken, there is a danger I'll start to fret about certain things further down the evolutionary scale - I recently saw this at the back of food market in Chinatown, Singapore:

Now look, I don't even like frogs, but looking at a bunch piled up, some peering out of the cage; one with its little, um, hand on the wire:

...and I felt sorry for them.   Of course, they are probably big enough that they would eat a small mouse given half a chance, and I like mice a lot more than I like frogs, so that would change my feelings again. 

Anyway.

I remember reading an essay by Paul Johnson in a collection he put out a decade or so ago, written probably in his 70's, in which he said ageing had made him feel more sympathetic to all life, and that he found himself even giving flies a chance to escape out of the window before reaching for the spray. 

I'm getting a bit worried I am heading the same way... 

This is really bad news

The number of really dangerous irukandji mini-jellyfish stings is really up this year in South East Queensland, and the warnings are that they are only likely to continue heading south.

If people, in 20 years times, are going to be worried about stings requiring hospitalisation from swimming at, say, my beloved Noosa Heads, it will be pretty bad for tourism.

From the Guardian:

Twenty-two people have been hospitalised this summer with Irukandji stings – which are so severe they can cause brain haemorrhages and a debilitating sensation of impending doom, known as Irukandji syndrome....

....the potentially fatal Irukandji stings – especially near Queensland’s Fraser Island – are sparking the most concern.

Prof Jamie Seymour from James Cook University said the density of Irukandji, a species of box jellyfish, and the rate of stings had been steadily growing in southern Queensland as sea waters warmed.

“We published a paper some years back looking at Irukandji syndrome in Queensland and we had a look at the number of stings,” he said. “Fifty years ago the southernmost sting for Irukandji was in the Whitsundays, and now the southernmost sting is Mooloolaba beach. And if you look at the number of stings at Fraser Island, they are steadily increasing. More and more animals are getting down there....

“In Queensland alone, we put more people in hospital due to Irukandji stings than shark attacks, crocodile attacks and snake bites combined. This is something that we need to address now. I can see a time when we have to shut major beaches on the Sunshine Coast. It is going to happen.”

He added that the current spate of stings at Fraser Island was due to “a perfect storm” of conditions: warmer water, more Irukandji and more people in the ocean during the Christmas holidays.

“You have hot water down there which is 29 or 30C, which is unheard of,” he said. “The animals love that sort of thing. The people being stung are on the western side of Fraser Island, where it is nice and calm, and this has coincided with the Christmas break where you have more people in the water.”

The new socialists

Of course, I think the rise of American youth and politicians labelling themselves as "socialist" is mostly a function of the American Right going nuts and so stupid and extreme that it has made the use of the formerly dubious label look reasonable in response.    (Part of this being the way the Right itself, using it foolishly as a boogeyman scare word - whereby other Western nations' health care systems are "socialist medicine"  for example - have drained it of its historical meaning,  and the reaction tends to be "if that's socialism, count me in!")

But it would seem that Jacobin magazine, which I have noticed being tweeted by respectable people like Peter Whiteford, might be able to claim some of the credit too.   

Here's a lengthy article, which I must admit I haven't read carefully yet, about its creator.

  

Trans, gay and snowflake all in one day

I've been watching SBS/Viceland a lot lately, and I don't think that it is conceivably possible for the network to give any greater promotion to that British "we've got a transgender boy/girl and we have to fight for his right to stop puberty" drama, Butterfly.    (I have the read the synopsis, and that is indeed what it is about.)   It's hard to believe that people who have seen the same ad about 5,000 times over the space of a few weeks could possibly still want to see the actual show, such is the annoyance factor of such intense repeat exposure.

It's also extremely hard for me not to see the show as assisting to promote at least some degree of social contagion of the idea that gender issues are at the heart of many emotionally fragile children's unhappiness.   And it's coming from Britain - which, I am sure I have noted some years ago in one of my more "cranky conservative" sounding assessments - seems to have transformed in the space of 50 years from the nation that used to go out of its way to unnecessarily punish gay men, to the one which is the most intensely celebratory of everything gay/transgender.    Is it all down to the public school system?   There must be some explanation.  

And when SBS is not running the Buterfly promo, it's likely showing the other extreme high rotation advertisement, the one for a new series of  Benjamin Law's slight autobiographical comedy The Family Law.   While Law himself seems witty and smart when I occasionally see him on TV,  this show about a younger version of himself is dull, not very funny, and barely worthy of a light comedy budget -  even though it may give some deserving Australian Asian actors a badly needed income.   The latest series seems to have the young Law coming out to his family, dressing gayly, and screaming as his mother opens the door while he's doing - something.   Gee, never seen something like that gag before.  The ads make it look very tired and past its use by date. 

That said, it's no where near as bad as some past SBS "home grown" content -  anyone would have to admit, Housos made The Family Law look like Altman in comparison.  I have no idea what goes on in the comedy commissioning mind of SBS - but it's not good.

And back to Britain:   that PR campaign for the Army would have to be the most ill conceived and readily mocked advertising idea since - doh, I'll get back to you as soon as I think of a more atrocious advertising idea.  Apparently, the "snowflake" soldier is threatening to quit, and the someone from an advertising agency (who I like to hear in the voice of Rick in The Young Ones)  gives some delightfully British wanky defence of it all:  

Although, for Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive and founder of creative shop Creature of London the ads have "got everyone talking".

"It also looks beautiful. I make no apology for applauding that," he wrote in The Drum.

Responding to criticism on Twitter that the campaign copy had been written "by an old man", Shute added: "I don’t believe you have to be the target audience to write about the target audience. I know that’s a slightly contentious belief to hold nowadays, but I stand by it.

"It’s our job in advertising to understand people brilliantly, and then to craft compelling stuff that makes them think, act, or feel differently.

Yeah.

To be honest, the campaign is an embarrassment but in an interesting way.  It's like you can hear the pitch for it in the boardroom:   "we need to reassure the self involved, overly sensitive, short attention span, annoying youngsters of today that we can see what's good and worthy deep inside of them"; but in execution it's impossible not to read the posters as meaning just "Hey, if you're an annoying young prat, like the arrogant jock pictured here, come work for us. We love arrogant prats."

Amuses me

Headline at The Onion:

Hillary Launches Campaign To Raise $100 Million Or Else She’ll Run For President

Opium wars revisited

While not knowing a lot about it, I have always wondered why the West, generally speaking, doesn't seem to spend any time feeling at least a bit guilty about the Opium War of the 19th century.

There's a handy summary of what led to it, including opposition to the idea in Britain, in this review at TLS.   Good to know that it was controversial in its day.   For example:

And as news of opium seizures and rumours of war reached the British public, which previously had little knowledge of the business, a vocal movement against opium and conflict with China quickly mobilized. The strongest, and best-organized, opposition came from working-class activists and the Chartist reform movement, which recognized the parallels between opium use abroad and gin abuse at home as methods of capitalist control. After Elliot’s convoy opened fire on a fleet of Chinese war junks while repairing from Macao to Hong Kong – the preliminary battle of the Opium War – an editorial in The Charter condemned “this contemptible category of businessmen and politicians . . . who behave like thieves and bullies gloating over the prospects of the bloodshed”.

Some critics feared that Britain was risking its entire future trade for the vaguest, most impetuous goals, as national self-regard consumed long-term strategic thinking. Others focused on the military consequences of engaging the Chinese, warning that it wouldn’t be as easy an affair as pro-war advocates like Jardine had argued. Platt quotes the opinion of an English captain of the Hyderabad army, who conceded that in the short run a small British expedition could invade China, but “what then would be gained?” other than provoking the Qing dynasty into mobilizing its vast resources and turning itself into a formidable power against which “the combined nations of Europe would hardly compete”.

When Parliament finally took up the question of war in April 1840, those opposed to attacking China were scattered throughout the benches. Some, like the former Whig-turned-Tory MP James Graham, conjured the Sinomania of the eighteenth century, designating China a civilized part of the earth, where language, laws and feelings of pride had been transmitted without interruption for centuries, and whose people boasted “of their education, of their printing, of the civilisation, of their arts, all the conveniences and many of the luxuries of life existing there, when Europe was still sunk in barbarism, and when the light of knowledge was obscure in this western hemisphere”. From the other side, the Secretary at War and arch promoter of empire, Thomas Macaulay, countered that the Chinese were brutes slowing the inexorable tailwinds of History. Perhaps the most surprising intervention came from George Staunton, who as a young boy had accompanied Macartney’s ill-fated mission to China in 1793, during which he had spoken briefly with the Emperor. He was Britain’s leading Sinologist, and had done more than anyone to promote respectful opinions of China. But he was a patriot, too, and a great believer in British prestige, which, in the end, countermanded his Oriental sympathies. As he saw it, the Empire was held together by force of opinion, and any show of weakness in China could ripple out and distress the foundations of British rule in India. Lin’s provocations harmed British trade in China, he said, but they also challenged the imperium as a whole.

MPs voted 271 to 262 in favour of war, a “lukewarm” blessing in Platt’s words. The irony was that most of the Canton trades didn’t much care about the events of 1839, and the showdown between Lin and Elliot. They just wanted to be compensated for the opium they had lost, something Elliot promised the British government would see to. But there were those among them for whom British force served grander commercial aims, including free access to ports and the coastline, as well as favourable treaties that boosted trade. Jardine worked sub rosa to ensure that a war for reparations became a war that would crack China open to commerce.

Read the whole thing, though.

Time and physics

Two arXiv papers that have caught my attention:

*  From someone working in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this one is hard to follow after the introduction, and I have no idea whether there are any grounds to suspect a "compactified special time co-ordinate" really exists.  Still, sounds interesting:

*  Sometimes I read arXiv papers which I think are likely to be considered important - even though it seems I am not often right.  [I still want to know what other physicists thought of this paper from China that I noticed nearly two ago, as it seemed to say something important about quantum mechanics fundamentals.  But I have read nothing about it.] 

Anyway, here I'll take a stab at another paper that seems to have a potentially important idea:  Time Dilation as Quantum Tunneling Time. 

The abstract doesn't do it justice.   The point seems to be that (although I think this is perhaps a controversial point) experiments have shown that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous, and this may have big implications:

 Tunneling times of 80-100 attosecs were measured for their system. Tunneling can in some sense be understood as the collapse of a superposition of two spatial location for a particle. The wave function represents the probability that a particle can exist in various locations. For a particle with a finite barrier interposing itself on the wave function, some of those locations will be outside of the barrier and some inside. Thus it can be said to exist in a superposition of being behind the barrier and outside of it. The collapse of this superposition is what is measured when tunneling time is measured. Given this, one might expect that the collapse of a state function for entangled states also wouldn’t occur instantaneously. Generally this could imply that the update to quantum mechanical state information requires a non-zero time. The question of non-zero collapse time for an entangled pair can and should be settled by experiment as it was done for quantum tunneling time. If this is true then we have a mechanism which could explain the microscopic relative behavior of time in a higher mass-energy location.  ....

They then have a go at suggesting they can derive the mass energy time dilation formula based on the quantum tunneling time, and they seem to come up with a plausible result. Here's the discussion at the end:

This attempt to derive the mass-energy time dilation equation using the tunneling time formula from quantum mechanics has the appeal that one can recover a believable quantum correlation distance proportional to the causal light cone. As well as a vacuum energy density consistent with older and higher estimates is also recovered. This might be significant since a large issue in reconciling quantum mechanics with General relativity has been accounting for the large vacuum energy density predicted by quantum mechanics. Here the large energy density follows, as a natural consequence of this derivation.

Starting with the gravitational time dilation equation one should be able to re-derive Einstein’s field equations. Here the governing idea is that mass-energy slows the update of quantum states due to the finite time it takes to update quantum correlations in parallel. It is this differential in time updates which drives the emergence of the force of gravitation.

But whether this is just another theoretical physics mis-step - who knows?

  

A very, very late movie review - Barry Lyndon

I had noticed ages ago that Barry Lyndon was on Netflix, and I've lived in fear for months that I would check again when finally deciding to watch it only to find it had been removed.

But happily (sort of), I have been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days and decided yesterday to really rest properly, which presented the perfect opportunity to spent an afternoon in front of the TV.

In short, I reckon it's very good; much lighter in tone and more enjoyable than I expected.

Down memory lane for a moment - I think at the time it came out (1975) my mother might still have bought some long defunct movie magazine and I may have first read about it there.   (She didn't go to the movies all that often, but I think it was more a case of really liking to see photos of her favourite stars - such as Paul Newman and [especially] Robert Redford.)   So I have long known its reputation for painterly composition and leisurely pace.  The technical innovations that allowed for a lot of scenes to be shot in natural candlelight I perhaps read about later.   I also have long known it didn't exactly attract a big audience on first release.

It is considerably better than that reputation - although I can see how the downbeat ending (which I presume comes from the book) may have left audiences feeling a bit underwhelmed.  (Actually, the Wikipedia entry on it says that critic's views of the film have been revised upwards since it first appeared, so my positive feeling towards it is not alone.)

Most significantly, I think it's Kubrick's most realistic depiction of human character.   I've long said he seemed to have real trouble writing normal human behaviour and character, not that it meant his films could not be great for other reasons.   But there does seem to me to be a lot of ordinary humanity in much of Barry Lyndon, and it's pleasing to see.

One very obvious thing that keeps happening in the film (especially in the first half - or did I just stop noticing it so much in the second half?) is a gradual zoom out to show the larger vista.  I'm not sure what the thinking behind the repeated use is, but it is not displeasing.

Oh, that's right - now that I Google it, I think I might have watched this Youtube commentary (I'll link to it at a Reddit thread devoted to the topic) about this aspect of the movie years ago, and it has a really good go at explaining the significance of its use.   Sounds pretty convincing to me, and also makes me glad I'm not a student of film having to come up with my own interpretations of cinematic language and intent!

Other things the movie made me Google:

*  whatever happened to Ryan O'Neal?   I didn't  think he was too bad in the movie, even though it seems many critics felt the acting could have been better.  I had forgotten entirely what a troubled personal life O'Neal has had.  He's 77 and still with us, but both he and at least his son has had frequent trouble with drug use, sleeping around a lot and generally dissolute behaviour.   Looking back, it's actually easy to argue that he has followed something like a downwards trajectory of the character in the movie.

*  what about those stick on beauty spots wore by both women and men in the film?     There are several websites which explain their history and context:  this one is pretty good, and this shorter blog entry mentions that, apart from velvet, they could be made from mouseskin (!), and it also gives the secret code behind facial placement:

the middle of the forehead - dignified

the middle of the cheek - bold

heart shape to the right cheek - married

heart shape to the left cheek - engaged or committed to a lover

touching edge of lower lip - discreet

on nasolabial fold - playful

near corner of the eye - on the look out for a new 'friend’

beside the mouth - will kiss but go no further

And so on….

I wonder what the source of that information is, and whether obsessive Kubrick was ordering placement of the spots on his actors with some knowledge of its code.   (He was such a detail nutter, it would be no surprise if he was.)

*  I see from this lengthy essay that Kubrick cut down the book a lot, which apparently contains much more farcical and roguish behaviour of the title character than appears in the movie. 

So, go watch it if you've missed it and have Netflix.

Catholics in comedy

I seem to have missed last month a column in the Catholic Herald that noted comedians from America who are Catholic (or at least, of Catholic background):

In any case, one area where Catholics have excelled is comedy: Fred Allen, Dom DeLuise, John Candy, Chris Farley, Bob Newhart, Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Kevin James, Jay Mohr and a host of others have all practised the Faith with varying degrees of intensity. Bob Hope converted late in life after decades of marriage to his devout wife, Dolores, and endowed two statues of Our Lady of Pontmain: at the parking lot outside his parish church in North Hollywood, and with an accompanying altar and chapel at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. Naturally, that particular apparition is also called “Our Lady of Hope”.

Well, there are a lot of names there that I did not know had a Catholic background, and although I don't know the work of all, I would have to say that, overall, that list seems to comprise a bunch of quite likeable actors/comedians.   (Did the author cull from the list any that I would find offensive, I wonder?) 

Anyway, just goes to show the value of Catholicism - it might make for nicer comedians.  :)

Economic genius

As he had done previously, Trump tweets as if it is other countries that have to pay tariffs to the US:

I would love to know the percentage of his "base" which thinks this is how tariffs work. 

I would also love to know how any economist (hello, Trump cultist Steve Kates) manages to excuse such lack of knowledge which is, well, about as basic a fact of economic and trade policy as you can get.   Can't any economics adviser get it into the Trump skull that he's making himself look foolish by continually giving the impression that he thinks other countries pay the tariff?

In other, tariff related news, I was interested to read Yglesias's column at Vox suggesting that Apple's problems in China are perhaps not all that tariff related:

Of course, this assumes that Trump’s saber-rattling and tariffs are the real source of Apple’s China sales woes.

There’s some reason to doubt that. After all, in May 2017, before any of this trade stuff was heating up, technology analyst Ben Thompson predicted Apple would suffer iPhone XS sales problems in China, not because of trade but because of WeChat. Chinese people use WeChat for everything, which makes smartphone operating systems less important:

Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz tried to explain in 2015 just how integrated WeChat is into the daily lives of nearly 900 million Chinese, and that integration has only grown since then: every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online but also off is conducted through a single app (and, to the extent other apps are used, they are often games promoted through WeChat).

There is nothing in any other country that is comparable, particularly the Facebook properties (Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp) to which WeChat is commonly compared. All of those are about communication or wasting time: WeChat is that, but it is also for reading news, for hailing taxis, for paying for lunch (try and pay with cash for lunch, and you’ll look like a luddite), for accessing government resources, for business. For all intents and purposes WeChat is your phone, and to a far greater extent in China than anywhere else, your phone is everything.

Whether you own an Android phone or an iPhone, if you’re in China, you are using the same WeChat app to do basically everything. Outside of China, Apple’s sales proposition is phone hardware and a unique operating system. In China, it’s really just the hardware. Thompson predicted this would spell trouble for Apple whenever it tried to market a phone in China that didn’t look new. And right now Apple is trying to market the iPhone XS, a phone that looks identical to the iPhone X.

I did notice on my short holiday to Singapore and Malaysia that Samsung and (more surprisingly) Oppo had a very big store front presence in those countries.  Lots of posters for a new Huawei phone in the Singapore MRT stations, too.  

Yes, it seems Apple has lost the innovation edge.

Update:  a slightly more detailed explanation of the effect of tariffs from Business Insider, just so I can't be accused of not understanding that tariffs may affect Chinese trader's profits indirectly:

“A tariff is a tax on imported goods. Despite what the President says, it is almost always paid directly by the importer (usually a domestic firm), and never by the exporting country,” Gleckman wrote. “Thus, if the US imposes a tariff on Chinese televisions, the duty is paid to the US Customs and Border Protection Service at the border by a US broker representing a US importer, say, Costco.”

Facing a higher cost for the imported goods, US importers can decide to either absorb the increased costs into their margins – thus lowering profits and possibly forcing cost cuts elsewhere – or pass on the cost increases on to consumers to make up the difference.

“A business will, if it can, pass its higher after-tax costs on to consumers,” Gleckman wrote. “Thus, the price of Chinese TVs sold in the US may rise rapidly.”

So while the Treasury Department may be collecting more tax revenue because of the tariffs, most of the money is ultimately coming from US businesses and American consumers, rather than from China.

Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, highlighted this problem in a December note to clients after Trump’s tweet in which he dubbed himself “Tariff Man.” The economist said some Chinese exporters may be forced to take lower margins to get their product to the US, but also asserted that American consumers would be the biggest losers.

“Tariffs are a tax on consumers, primarily, though some of the hit might be borne by Chinese exporters, forced to accept lower margins. But for the president to boast that the U.S. is ‘taking in billions’ on tariffs makes no sense at all,” Shepherdson wrote. “The ostensible objective of the tariffs is to force China to negotiate a new trading relationship with the US, not to raise money – from U.S. consumers! – for the federal government.”

Ergas and immigrants

I see, via some extract of it at Catallaxy, that Henry Ergas has written a column in The Australian highlighting a new estimate of the number of unauthorised (well, he uses "illegal") immigrants in the US that is much higher than previous estimates.  Here's what he says:

The conventional wisdom sets that number at 11.3 million; according to the researchers, who applied more accurate estimation methods to recently released data, there are now at least 16.7 million, and more likely 22.1 million, illegal migrants in the US, up from barely 3.3 million in 1990.

That would be a surprisingly large estimate change, which (it's true) did not seem to attract much media attention last year.

So I did a Google search "demographers estimate of number of illegal immigrants in the US" and this came up at the very first link - an abstract of a commentary paper expressing great doubts about the accuracy of the new estimate.   I'll paste it in full:

“The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990–2016” by Fazel-Zarandi, Feinstein and Kaplan presents strikingly higher estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population than established estimates using the residual method. Fazel-Zarandi et. al.’s estimates range from a low or “conservative” number of 16.7 million unauthorized immigrants, to an “average” of 22.1 million, and to a high of 27.5 million. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated the population at 11.3 million in 2016, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated it at 12.3 million. The new method shows much more rapid growth in unauthorized immigration during the 1990s and a substantially higher population in 2000 (13.3 million according to their “conservative” model) than Pew (8.6 million) and DHS (8.5 million). In this commentary, we explain that such an estimate for 2000 is implausible, as it suggests that the 2000 Census undercounted the unauthorized immigrant population by at least 42% in the 2000 Census, and it is misaligned with other demographic data. Fazel-Zarandi, Feinstein and Kaplan’s model produces estimates that have a 10 million-person range in 2016, far too wide to be useful for public policy purposes; their estimates are not benchmarked against any external data sources; and their model appears to be driven by assumptions about return migration of unauthorized immigrants during the 1990s. Using emigration rates from the binational Mexican Migration Project survey for the illegal border-crosser portion of the unauthorized population, we generate a 2000 unauthorized population estimate of 8.2 million—slightly below Pew and DHS’s estimates—without changing other assumptions in the model. We conclude that this new model’s estimates are highly sensitive to assumptions about emigration, and moreover, that the knowledge base about emigration in the unauthorized population during the 1990s is not well enough developed to support the model underlying their estimates.

Now, I've only read extracts of Henry's article posted at Catallaxy, but I get the impression that he likely didn't mention the doubts over the methodology of the new estimate, as he does say in the extract above that it was a "more accurate estimation", despite the doubts that were so easy to Google up.

But if I am wrong about Henry looking lazy, let me know....

Another bad idea endorsed by Facebook

Turning up on Twitter yesterday - a lengthy NBC report about the rise of vigilante groups in the US that "catfish" adult sex predators (of children/ teens) and then publicly shame them.

I hadn't heard of this phenomena, but in concept it's been around for a while - even NBC itself apparently doing it a decade ago!:

POPSquad is one of dozens of similar online groups across the country unified by what they say is a mission to expose and shame people they allege are or could become sexual predators, according to an NBC News review of these groups on Facebook. The idea isn’t new — the NBC News “Dateline” show mined the same territory in its special series, “To Catch a Predator,” from 2004 to 2007. Ratings soared, and the network described it as a public service, but in three years the series was over, after drawing negative news coverage, advertiser wariness and a lawsuit from the family of a target who killed himself, which was later settled, with both parties saying only that it had “been amicably resolved."

There have been several copycats of “To Catch a Predator,” including Ontario construction worker Justin Payne, who ensnared dozens of men by 2015. In British Columbia, Ryan LaForge made a name (and a criminal record, pleading guilty to two counts of assault) with his group, Creep Catchers, and in Michigan, Zach Sweers caught potential predators under the name “Anxiety War” until 2016, when he settled two civil lawsuits from targets.

Now, thanks in part to social media, these groups have multiplied rapidly in recent months, propelled by a rabid and growing fanbase, according to law enforcement officials and Facebook data.

The NBC News review found more than 30 similar operations on Facebook across 23 states. Most have formed in the last year, finding an audience and influence on Facebook, where hundreds of thousands of users like and follow them, watch videos of their stings and support their efforts with donations and the purchase of branded merchandise.

Gawd, American media comes up with some patently bad ideas at times.

I have always disliked the idea of vigilante justice, and this is no exception.   While I have no objection at all to police forces setting up on-line predators, I think it is very clear that the motivation of those heading these private groups is one in which they get a power (and publicity) thrill from their activities, and that is obviously a dangerous thing. 

A criminologist quoted in the article goes a bit more high minded about it:

These online hunters are tapping into a hunger for vengeance, said Steven Kohm, a cultural criminologist at the University of Winnipeg.

“Criminal justice used to be emotional and participatory,” Kohm said. “Over the last 100 years, it’s become mostly hidden and dominated by professionals. People are yearning to reconnect with the punitive emotional core of the justice system. These groups focusing on the pedophile, a universally reviled category, helps them connect with the lost aspect of the justice system.”

Maybe:   I'm more inclined towards my own theory.

I mean, look at the background of the guy who started the POPSquad:

Erdmann, who is thin and covered in tattoos, runs POPSquad from an abandoned factory in Bristol, Connecticut. He and four volunteer team members work in an office lit by black lights and security monitors to catfish potential predators, edit videos and maintain the POPSquad website.

A former self-described “hustler,” and staple of the early-aughts Connecticut rap scene, Erdmann later hyped WakeUpNow, a Utah-based multilevel marketing company that targeted the hip-hop community. He is currently on probation for an unrelated 2016 felony drug conviction and now makes money from selling original music along with POPSquad hats and sweatshirts, and soliciting donations from his followers.

“I've been an entrepreneur for a long time,” Erdmann said. "I’m using the same entrepreneur skill sets that I was when I got into trouble, but not the same products. I create the product now."  

Yeah, great motivation I can see there.

What's worse, look at the mealy mouthed justification Facebook gives for hosting these groups:

Facebook told NBC News that it is aware of these groups and does not ban them outright, although much of what they do appears to violate Facebook’s rules against shaming or cyberbullying.

“We want people to use Facebook and our products to raise awareness about threats to public safety, including those who may pose harm to children,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News. “However, we do not want people to use Facebook to facilitate vigilante violence. That’s why we have policies against threatening real-world harm and to protect people’s privacy if they are being publicly shamed. We will remove content that violates these policies when it is reported.”

Facebook does not allow posts that “reveal personally identifiable information" or amount to cyberbullying, the spokesperson said. The company reviews posts when they are flagged.

After an inquiry from NBC News, Facebook temporarily suspended several predator hunter accounts, removed some individual posts and deleted at least one group entirely. Some groups voluntarily removed their own pages to escape what they saw as a purge. POPSquad appeared to be unaffected.

Facebook really is the pits.

First physics post of 2019

Gee, Bee Hossenfelder feels pretty triumphant about how arguments from "naturalness", which predicted the Large Hadron Collider would surely find some sign of new physics, have hit the wall hard since it appears very likely that that only thing the LHC will be good for is finding the Higgs boson. 

Here's her post: How the LHC may spell the end of particle physics. 

I see she has also just posted against panpsychism - the somewhat silly idea that all matter is conscious, just some of it more conscious than others.  Not a bad read.

Before Christmas, I noticed a paper on arXiv called Non Locality versus Modified Realism: Convivial Solipsism. 

I see that the author - who I have never heard of before - has been plugging away at this idea for some time now.   It's a somewhat intriguing proposal, I think - hard to describe, but much of the paper was able to be followed.   I may be wrong, but I had the feeling that it was more sensible than Many Worlds interpretation - although still weird.  This particular paper was about its usefulness in restoring "locality" to quantum mechanics.    The abstract:

A large number of physicists now admit that quantum mechanics is a non local theory. EPR argument and the many experiences (including recent loop-hole free tests) showing the violation of Bell's inequalities seem to have confirmed convincingly that quantum mechanics cannot be local. Nevertheless, this conclusion can only be drawn inside a standard realist framework assuming an ontic interpretation of the wave function and viewing the collapse of the wave function as a real change in the physical state of the system. We show that this standpoint is not mandatory and that if the collapse is no more considered as an actual physical change, it is possible to recover locality.

Spider-verse reviewed

Perhaps not worth spending too much time on this, but here goes:

*  yes, the animation is continuously impressive, and very clever in concept and execution.  This is the main reason for an adult to see the movie.

*  The story is OK:  I do get the feeling, though, that American critics really go a bit overboard for the father-son reconciliation themes that seem to be a speciality of Phil Lord, who wrote the (also somewhat overrated) Lego Movie.  Rottentomatoes give this 97% though?   A bit extreme.

*  I think the very silly additions (the anime Spider girl, and Spider-ham) were a bit funny, but I think the movie would have been better tonally without them.

*  The worst aspect, by far, was the ridiculous character design of Kingpin; especially when his family was portrayed in the same realistic human fashion as all other characters (Spider-ham and anime girl excepted.)   His wife and son were shown driving in a car which he would have had trouble getting one buttock into.  I really do not understand this decision - it broke any sense of semi-realism in every scene in which he appeared.

* Some of the climatic fight animation was too cluttered for its own good.

*  This post sounds crankier than intended - I don't regret seeing it at all, as I do get quite a kick out of gorgeous, innovative looking animation.  (Unfortunately, the novelty does wear off - Pixar style semi-realism was, for a while, a big motivation to see anything they put out.   That's no longer the case.)     There was also plenty of genuinely good humour in a movie that, like all Spiderman movies really, are good-natured at heart.   So, I don't want to discourage anyone who might be interested from seeing it - it's just that I like to think about how I would improve movies (or TV series.)  And I really did dislike the Kingpin design.

Two returns

Happy New Year, all.

I've been on overseas holiday, hence the blog hiatus.    A holiday post will follow soon - I like writing them, as a form of (hopefully) digitally permanent on-line diary.    I guess other people might use Facebook for that, but here I get to protect privacy to some extent.   

As for another return, I have been reading about the comedian Louis CK.   

I know next to nothing about his style of work, except that I suspected  that I would not like it for the usual reasons I dislike most modern stand up comedy:   the puzzling expectation that a torrent of swearing you would not tolerate in your home (or even at a bar) is funny; the introspection that often embarrassingly discloses a troubled personality beneath the jokes.   I did see him interviewed on Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars show, and he seemed relatively normal, but I still had my doubts.

Anyhow, the first news stories about his surprise "set" at a comedy club were about him mocking the Florida school kid advocates for gun control.  I listened to the recording (via a Twitter link) and found it more about mocking young adults for being too serious about everything today:  that they don't know how to have fun like in his day when he was doing drugs, sleeping around and other stupid stuff.  That's what youth is meant to be about, you know?  What's more, they try to tell others how to speak too, with identity politics probably a bigger target than gun control advocates.

The swearing and crudity of it was beyond my (not optimistic) expectations, and I found it completely unfunny.  As many on Twitter were saying, he was sounding more like a coarse Right wing comedian (maybe an extreme version of PJ O'Rourke's old writings celebrating in a libertarian spirit his youthful stupid behaviour - and certainly unoriginal.  Many in twitter noted the similarity to a set on Youtube by some other male - I think Right wing - comedian I had never heard of with the same "kids of today - what's wrong with them, they're so annoyingly against fun" shtick.)   

But, I thought later, is it possible that Louis was not really "punching down" - as many on Twitter accused him - but mocking his own "old man" attitude?   Some said that his old act always did involve coarse attacks, but in a self aware way.   I don't know, I'm not going to research his old work to find out - but I doubt this explanation.

Today, and the primary reason for this post, is that I read a Slate article which excerpts much more from this stand up set, and it really shows that it was appalling in its entirety.  

Because I don't like repeating swearing on this blog, it's hard to cut and paste anything from the article quoting Louis, but I find the analysis completely convincing, and am utterly puzzled as to how any audience could find him funny.   Has the sudden disclosure of his weird exhibitionist behaviour towards women broken his comedy mind?   But what excuse does the audience have?

Go read the Slate article if you want to be appalled at what some people will laugh at today.

Update:   The Atlantic explains some of the nature of his old comedy act/persona, and is equally appalled at the nature of the leaked "new" Louis CK.  A key section:

Over the years, C.K.’s comedy evolved, as any comic’s will, but at their best and most well known, his jokes were about interrogating himself as a means of interrogating American culture. As C.K. shuffled uncomfortably on stages and sets, clad in rumpled T-shirts and slouchy dad jeans, he served as his own act’s useful idiot: C.K., author and character at once, played the privileged guy who—he’d be the first to admit it—didn’t fully deserve his privilege. It was classic observational humor, bending its lens to examine the warped terrain of C.K.’s own psyche, and while it was winking and postmodern and self-hating and self-elevating, it also contained an implied transaction: Hearing C.K.’s confession would offer, for his audience, its own kind of reconciliation. His performed selfishness could seem, in its twisted way, generous.

But while offense, in that sense, has always been an element of C.K.’s comedy—offense as a means of inflicting discomfort, and thus, the promise went, of illuminating awkward realities—offense, now, is all there is. The layer of alleged truth-telling is entirely missing from the new material. C.K.’s new set, according to its leaked version, doesn’t merely punch down; it stomps, pettily, to the bottom. None of it is smart or brave; it is simply cruel. And yet it tries to justify itself by suggesting that C.K. himself has been the recipient of cruelty. One of the key moments of the leaked set comes when someone, either by walking out or by shooting him a look, seems to question C.K. as he complains about being unable to use the word retarded. C.K. responds with a rant:

    What’re you gonna take away my birthday? My life is over; I don’t give a shit. You          can, you can be offended—it’s okay. You can get mad at me. Anyway.

It’s an old story: The guy who abused others, claiming his own victimhood. 

Merry Christmas, Reader/s

That's what happens when you elect a fragile narcissist

The WAPO sums it up:

Trump has shown time and again that he cares way more about his supporters and his good standing with them than he does about the Republican Party. That has made him an impossible negotiating partner.

When it seemed as if Trump might cave, the right-wing media piled on. Ann Coulter called him “gutless,” and Breitbart News noted Trump’s walk-back of promises from the 2016 campaign (like the fact that “the big, beautiful wall” is now concrete slats). Moreover, Trump’s loyal foot soldiers on Capitol Hill are urging him to reject the spending deal, warning of the major damage it would cause Trump with his base and his 2020 reelection bid. In fact, the leaders of the Freedom Caucus are going to the White House on Thursday afternoon to deliver that message.

Adoration from his base is Trump’s lifeblood. The threat of losing his supporters' affection is enough to make him throw the rest of the GOP and the federal government under the bus. As soon as he started getting criticized by them, he yearned to appease them.

A similar dynamic played out over immigration earlier this year when Schumer offered Trump a deal: funding for his border wall in exchange for a path to citizenship for “dreamers,” the undocumented immigrants brought to America as children. Schumer believed Trump was on board, but as soon as Trump received pushback from his supporters, he turned down the deal.

Which, in a way, is how we got here. Trump never sticks with one line of thinking. His positions are constantly shifting, and he doesn’t provide any lawmakers on Capitol Hill any guidance of where his head is at any moment. The Senate passed a short-term funding bill Wednesday night believing he would sign it and woke up the next morning to find out he wouldn’t.

To be or not to be (in Syria)

One of the great things about not being an American is that I can shrug my shoulders and say "I dunno" on the matter of when it is or isn't right the right time for the US to get out of wars in the "always in conflict" parts of the world. 

Hence, I really don't know if it is a good idea for Trump to be pulling out troops from Syria. 

Sometimes I wonder why your average Australian wingnut thinks they know enough to have a solid opinion on this.  But that's the nature of wingnuttery - it's not as if they have good reason to justify 90% of their opinions, so why should they be well informed on this one too?

Anyway, given Trump's general unreliability (to put it mildly), it certainly wouldn't be surprising if it was a bad plan.

Max Boot, former conservative who has turned big time against Trump, and the American Right generally, thinks it is a big mistake.  His piece starts:

A few weeks ago, I attended the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., where panel after panel of defense experts dutifully discussed Important Issues such as gray zone warfare, the defense industrial base and the future of U.S. policy toward Syria. It all seemed disconnected from reality, as if the defense cognoscenti were living in an alternative universe where they can generate policy options in the expectation that a wise and well-informed president will choose the best of the lot. That is not the situation we are in. We are at the mercy of an ignorant and impetuous president who, as Jeffrey Toobin quipped, “is unfit to run a charity in New York State but fit to control nuclear weapons that could destroy the world several times over.”

At one time, the world hoped that an Axis of Adults could constrain the juvenile in the Oval Office, but such naive expectations have been dashed repeatedly. Syria offers the latest example of the futility of expecting that lower-level officials can consistently save the world from the commander in chief.

Of course, ever since Vietnam, everyone has grounds for wondering whether Generals' advice about these matters is always wise.

Let's see how it plays out.

Brexit and democracy

I have been arguing in comments to my post earlier this week about how it is ridiculous to argue that having a second Brexit referendum, now that people understand the choice properly, would be a "betrayal of democracy".

I am pleased to read this morning a lengthy post by Simon Wren-Lewis arguing that the matter of how the country got to its present position has, in fact, been a circumvention of democracy.

I think Homer likes most of his commentary.  What's wrong with his argument on this topic?

Into the Red Room

OK, time for the spoiler filled commentary on the Red Room - the key aspect, really, of the final episode of the Haunting of Hill House.

My take:  I quite liked the idea, but am a little dubious about the execution.

The key thing that makes little practical sense is this:  how did the children not recognize the room from its location within the house?   The problem is that it is shown as having one door, at the end of a corridor - yet Steve (for example) in the final episode still seems to say that it was the door that had never been opened; yet he was also in there a lot of the time as a child.

The obvious and simplest way around this would be to show the room having a second entry, and then only reveal the distinctively shaped red door as the alternative entry in the final episode.  That would leave some plausibility, would it not?, that the rambling layout of the house meant that the kids found their own entry into the room, and possibly without ever realising that it was the Red Room that their Dad could not enter.  Or, they might have recognized it as the Red Room, but have liked it for its privacy.

The more complicated explanation, which I think the storm episode perhaps sort of established, was that the house could deceive the occupants as to its own layout, and hence have provided access to the room for the kids without them realising where they were.   But that seems to me to be more elaborate than was really necessary.

Why don't I have a job as a script doctor, hey?

Anyway, I don't want to sound too negative.   Overall, I quite liked the final episode.  I particularly liked some of the twists - the way it first looked worrying like the whole series could have been just Steve writing another book; and the reason why the sister was so sensitive to her husband's potential adultery. 

Once again, the subtlety of some of the creepiness was very pleasing - I am thinking in this episode of the way the Tall Man ghost bends down to peer into the face of Steve, while he looks away.

I did like how the series still leaves open the possibility that the black mould is the source of madness within the house.  And the whole idea that it was recognised by the caretakers wanted it preserved as a place where they could keep visiting their poor daughter - that sort of made sense (and added some of the bittersweet aspect that was to be found in The Orphanage.)  

So yeah, overall, it ended up being pretty satisfying.   Well worth watching.

Netflix reviews

*   As everyone else on line who has talked about it has already said, the third season of The Good Place got off to a shaky start, particularly with Australian audiences cringing at the attempts at our  accent.  But by episode 4 or 5 (I forget which) it regained its mojo and has some very funny writing again.   (And, co-incidentally, left Australia.)

I don't really understand how anyone could not like this show.   Terrifically smart, very funny, and a charming cast. 

*  Fargo, second season.   I've finished it and the big question is:  how did I feel about the UFO?   In a way, it didn't bother me - its re-appearance was foreshadowed often enough.  But it certainly did make for an oddball conclusion.  To be honest, I thought that part of the last episode was way, way too close to Raising Arizona (with its dream of the future),  so that I feel that the peak episodes were closer to the middle of the series.   Despite feeling a slight let down with the ending, overall, it was really great viewing, and I'll watch the third season too.   (My son watched the first season alone, and says he thought it was a bit better, but I find it hard to believe I could find any episodes better than some in this series.)

* Norsemen:  have finished watching the second series.  Still very funny.  I see that a third series is being made.  Good.   Have more people found it yet, I wonder?

* Am wanting to finish the last, apparently controversial, episode of Haunting of Hill House before Christmas.  The show has sucked me in, despite its flaws.   Expect a review of the ending soon.

*  I wrote recently that Jason Momoa seems so likeable on TV chat show appearances that I am tempted to see the kind of ludicrous Aquaman, and I did try watching the first episode of Frontier, a Canadian series in which he stars.   It had some exceptionally badly written exposition dialogue within the first 10 minutes; so bad that both my son and I said "this is not good" and chose to discontinue.   Maybe it gets better?

American politics, yet again

This is a pretty good exchange between Ezra Klein and of the guys who has written a book about this:  

“Of the many factors that make up your worldview, one is more fundamental than any other in determining which side of the divide you gravitate toward: your perception of how dangerous the world is. Fear is perhaps our most primal instinct, after all, so it’s only logical that people’s level of fearfulness informs their outlook on life.”

That’s political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, writing in their book Prius or Pickup, which marshals a massive trove of survey data and experimental evidence to argue that the roots of our political divides run so deep that they make us almost incomprehensible to one another. Our political divisions, they say, aren’t about policy disagreements, or even demographics. They’re about something more ancient in how we view the world.  

Hetherington and Weiler call these worldviews, which express themselves in everything from policy preferences to parenting styles, “fixed” versus “fluid.” The fixed worldview “describes people who are warier of social and cultural change and hence more set in their ways, more suspicious of outsiders, and more comfortable with the familiar and predictable.” People with a fluid worldview, by contrast, “support changing social and cultural norms, are excited by things that are new and novel, and are open to, and welcoming of, people who look and sound different.”

What’s happened in recent decades, they argue, is that politics in general, and our political parties in particular, have reorganized around these worldviews, adding a new, and arguably irreconcilable, difference into our political divisions. That difference is visible in everything from what we think to where we live to how we shop, but it’s particularly apparent in how hard it is for us to understand how the other side views the world.

It's undeniable that the Trump campaign was based on ludicrous fear-mongering;  but Klein is still  skeptical about some of how this is meant to work, asking twice why this has happened when the world has actually become safer.   (And that's objectively true too, given that we don't live in a Cold War of the kind we did in the first half of my life, and the murder rate has dropped dramatically in so much of the world.)

I didn't find the answer completely satisfying.  You can go read them yourself.

But I did think the authors are right on this point -

The problem starts with conservative leaders.

The simple fact is that Republican leaders more often traffic in falsehoods than Democratic leaders do — climate change denial, birtherism, suggesting voter fraud is rampant, and more. These are not positions of the conservative fringe. The president of the United States himself has embraced all these falsehoods. If Democratic leaders were similarly likely to push false narratives, more Democrats would believe them.

Conservative media amplify these falsehoods. This is what links what leaders say and do to what the public believes. Liberals tend to rely on a range of liberal and mainstream news sources. Conservatives tend to rely on a much smaller number of highly ideological sources. According to a 2014 Pew study, consistent conservatives expressed the same level of mistrust of ABC News as consistent liberals did of Sean Hannity.

Hence, conservative Americans are more likely than liberals to believe falsehoods about the other side. For example, Democrats were about 12 points more likely than Republicans to say that the Bush administration directed flooding to parts of New Orleans during Katrina. But Republicans were 34 points more likely to believe Obama was born in Kenya than Democrats and 32 points more likely to believe that Obamacare included “death panels.”

That doesn’t mean that there is no biased thinking among liberals. They, too, are more willing to support or oppose a policy because it is or isn’t being carried out by their team. But skepticism about basic facts does, in fact, differ markedly by party and ideology.

Charles the worker

Pretty much by accident last night I saw about 20 minutes of Prince, Son & Heir: Charles at 70 on the ABC. 

He came across as down to earth (for a monarch in waiting), and very hard working.   His sons talked about how he eats dinner very late (although I did not hear how late), and then works at his desk often til midnight, and sometimes falling asleep on his papers, waking up with one stuck to his nose.   They obviously think the world of him, and their main wish seems to be that he could slow down and spend more time with their young families.  (Yeah, I know, Harry doesn't have a kid just yet.)

He drives the much of the Right nuts for his environmental concerns, and somewhat quaint interests in organic food and (I suppose) older styles of living. 

But he certainly seems smart and passionate, self-effacing and as such, very likeable.  Pretty much what you need in a future monarch, I think.

Brexit prediction

John Quiggin's post (and the following comments) predicting a revocation of Brexit early in 2019 makes for interesting reading.

Does sound plausible to me.

I again heard Theresa May on the radio this morning saying that another referendum would be a betrayal of democracy, or some such nonsense. 

I still can't get my head around how politicians like her can't get their head around how context matters.   The people would actually understand what is at stake now.  They obviously did not at the time of the first referendum.

And no Homer, you're just wrong on this one.

All about cement (and its CO2 problem)

This is more interesting than you might first expect - a very good explanation at the BCC about concrete (including its history) and its problematic nature vis a vis CO2 production.   I mean I knew that using it created a lot of greenhouse gases, but not this much:

Cement is the most widely used man-made material in existence. It is second only to water as the most-consumed resource on the planet.

But, while cement - the key ingredient in concrete - has shaped much of our built environment, it also has a massive carbon footprint.

Cement is the source of about 8% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, according to think tank Chatham House.

If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world - behind China and the US. It contributes more CO2 than air fuel (2.5%) and is not far behind the global agriculture business (12%).

Box office observed

I haven't been much motivated to see any movies recently, and I've noticed that a few major releases have had so-so reviews.  Bohemian Rhapsody has 48% on Metacritic.   The latest Harry Potter prequel 53% (but only 38% on Rottentomatoes.)    I was curious to see how they have fared at the box office.

Well, Box Office Mojo seems to indicate that Harry Potter movies are virtually critic proof, at least for international box office - it'll end up making more than $600 million internationally, which must be enough to turn a profit even with a $200 million budget.  (Not much, though, given that I think the rule of thumb is still that most movies have to make more than 3 times budget cost before getting into clear profit.)    But there is still rental and streaming money to be made from it.

Every woman who has seen it thinks Bohemian Rhapsody was fantastic, and box office would indicate a lot of men have seen it too - $635 million and still making $4 million last weekend in the US alone.  All on a $52 million budget?   That's a hugely profitable hit.   I was never a big fan of Queen's music - I remember thinking when it came out that the titular movie song and video was kind of kitschy, but some other songs were OK.   I think Freddie's life was interesting and a bit sad, but I don't feel I need to see a movie about it. 

Speaking of movies big with females in particular:  A Star is Born has made nearly $200 million in the US, but only $177 million overseas.   With a $36 million budget, that's still a solid hit, and one I have no interest in.

I see the Dr Seuss movies are ridiculously popular in the US - $239 million just in the US for the latest Grinch movie. 

Anyway, I am slightly embarrassed to say, but the latest animated version of Spiderman has received such good reviews that I am now inclined to see it.   I am also toying with seeing Aquaman when it comes out - it would seem to have a fair bit of the humour I find essential for enjoying a superhero movie, and really, that Jason Momoa has such a ridiculous amount of charisma in any of his TV appearances, I sort of want the movie to succeed to reward his likeability. 

But we'll see... 

Dubai as the airconditioned city

This article from Business Insider, talking about what future cities may start looking like as temperatures continue to rise, gives Dubai as an example.   Apparently, a huge amount is already interconnected, airconditioned buildings and shopping malls, and it's going to get bigger:

Dubai is getting so good at simulating the outdoors inside that its next megaproject is dedicated to just that. Dubai Square, set to become the world’s largest mall, is built around a four-lane “boulevard” that mimics a wide city street, a piazza, and an entertainment center for concerts and theatre shows. It will even have the Middle East’s largest Chinatown.

This is what its supposed to look like:

Um, that looks ridiculously difficult to aircondition efficiently, even if the roof has got some heat reflective film on it.  (It must, surely?)   But even if it does, isn't there a risk of it frying some other buildings, or otherwise raising already hellish temperatures in the outside of the city?

Update:  this article, also at Business Insider, I visited outlandishly wealthy Dubai, known as the 'city of gold,' and was surprised by how much fun you can have even without billions,  makes Dubai sound like not a bad place for a tourist to visit at the moment.   Not sure I am entirely convinced...

Update 2:  this helps explain why I am still leery about visiting the place - Man arrested for bringing witchcraft items into UAE.   My rule of thumb is "Do not visit countries where the government  believes in black magic, witchcraft or sorcery.  It is too easy for anyone there who you look at the wrong way to claim you are a sorcerer and must be arrested." 

More Mary legends

At the risk of sounding like I am on anti-Catholic, anti-Marian binge this Christmas, given my recent cynical post about Mary's house being flown to Italy:  this article, from The Daily Beast of all places, actually seems pretty accurate.  

But it does come up with some legendary Marian stories which I had not heard of before, and some of it is surprising.  (Not the first part, about the rumour of a Roman soldier - that is pretty well known.  The last story though - wow.)

From the time of the early Church, there were those who questioned Mary’s virginity. Some rabbinic and ancient Roman sources suggest that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. According to these early critics, Mary concocted the story of the virgin birth in order to conceal the fact that she cheated on her betrothed with a member of the oppressive military force that was subjugating her people. The particular explanation is actually pretty unlikely, if only because as a resident of Nazareth Mary would have rarely (if ever!) come into contact with Roman soldiers; nevertheless ancient Christian readers took it seriously.

A second-century story known as The Protoevangelium of James fills in a lot of the gaps in Mary’s biography. It tells us about Mary’s childhood, that she had special status as a dedicated virgin, and that she was 16 when she conceived Jesus. In this version of the nativity story Joseph doesn’t just accuse her of disgracing herself, he responds to Mary’s statement that she hasn’t “known” a man by asking her, “Where did this thing in your womb come from then?”

But Joseph is a believer in comparison to woman named Salome. Salome, who meets a midwife who examined Mary, declares, “As the Lord my God lives, unless I insert my finger and investigate her, I will not believe that a virgin has given birth." Mary prepares herself for the gynecological exam and Salome performs the test. Her hand literally catches on fire, and it takes the appearance of an angel (as well as some strong statements of contrition from Salome) before she is healed.

The rest of the article, about the idea of the Immaculate Conception, is pretty good too.

Update:  it just occurred to me, that story of Salome and her burning hand could form the basis of a very novel Christmas card illustration... 

Sensitive vegans

Nothing gets a vegan more uptight than being told that their diet runs a very real risk of malnutrition.  

Have a read of this article from The Conversation:  Vegan diets are adding to malnutrition in wealth countries, and the comments from upset vegans following.

Actually, I didn't realise that Vitamin B12 was such an issue for vegans and vegetarians.   Or this problem with veganism:

Bone health is a concern for long-term vegans. Vegans are consistently reported to have lower intakes of calcium and vitamin D, with resultant lower blood levels of vitamin D and lower bone mineral density reported worldwide. Fracture rates are also nearly a third higher among vegans compared with the general population. 

I reckon that the most I could ever tolerate would be a pescetarian diet, and despite disliking aspects of the milk and egg industry, I couldn't give them up.   

Brisbane more dangerous than I knew...

I would never have guessed that there are this many venomous snake bites around Brisbane:

Many people living in Queensland's capital may assume they're far away from a dangerous snake encounter, but the numbers suggest they're more likely than their country cousins to suffer a snakebite.

According to figures released by Queensland Ambulance, Brisbanites are more likely to be bitten by a snake than residents in the outback.

A total of 156 people were bitten by venomous snakes across the Metro North and Metro South areas, which make up the Brisbane region, in the 12 months to November 18 this year.

There were 96 on the Sunshine Coast, while outback areas such as the North West region had 11 cases, and the South West just four instances.

More people live in the south-east corner of the state than in other regions, but even as a proportion of population Brisbane is over-represented in snakebites.

University of Queensland snake expert Bryan Fry said in addition to more people, Brisbane and south-east Queensland have more semi-rural areas, which are perfect for brown snakes.

"Brown snakes thrive in disturbed habitat, so you can find more brown snakes around semi-rural habitation than you can in the wild," Professor Fry said.

I suppose it's (sort of) good news that you rarely read of anyone dying of venomous snakebite around here - but that is still a hell of a lot of people being bitten.

An improbable, vaguely Christmas related miracle

An article at The Catholic Herald caught my eye:  Did angels really carry the Holy House of Mary to Loreto, Italy?  So did the photo accompanying it:

As you might expect, that's not the house itself, but an excessively ornate, um, housing for a house.

Inside, the "real thing" looks like this:

which, I dunno, looks a little more solid than I expected from a 2,000 something year old house from Israel.

The bright looking figure in the first interior is the Our Lady of Loreto statue, which is a bit more famous than I knew.  You can watch this rather pious video about the house, and the statue, here:



As to the matter of how the house got there, the Catholic Herald article (and the video) indicate that the house might have been by boat, not by Angel Air, by a family with an a name which contributed to the legend:

In 1900, the pope’s physician, Joseph Lapponi, discovered documents in the Vatican archive, stating that in the 13th century a noble Byzantine family, the Angeli family, rescued “materials” from “Our Lady’s House” from Muslim invaders and then had them transported to Italy for the building of a shrine.
The name Angeli means “angels” in both Greek and Latin.

I am suspicious: it sounds too much like a late rationalisation. 

As for the air borne house tradition, it has been depicted variously as looking like this:

or this:

I don't know the artists behind either depiction, but the second one puts me in mind of Dorothy's house crushing the Wicked Witch, because at first glance I assumed the guy underneath was a devil.  But on second thoughts, he looks like he's just helping out, except for some reason he's nude.  If he is an angel, I didn't realise Heaven was "clothing optional" for them.

Anyhow, this is the second time this week that I have been contemplating the rather idiosyncratic fervour European Catholics can hold towards Mary and statues representing her.   The first example was Mary Beard talking on Civilisations about the annual ceremony around a statue in Seville:



I'm interested in the matter of why some European countries, particularly those with the Romance languages, seemed to develop centres of intense Marian devotion, and often around statues which are treated as holy.  (It's also interesting to contemplate why it also spread readily to countries like Mexico and the Philippines, too.   Remember the photos of the crazily dangerous looking procession I posted earlier this year?  It was centred on a statue of Jesus, admittedly, but still a case of statue centred fervour.)    I always get the feeling there are sociological reasons for it which I don't know about.   My general impression is that England and Germany, pre-Reformation, were just not into it in that big a way.  Or was an uptick in Marian worship something of a reaction to the Reformation?

Anyway, the first video above says that the flying house story is the reason why Our Lady of Loreto is the patron saint of aviation:

Yes, she is the patron saint of pilots, airmen and flight attendants as per declaration of Pope Benedict XV on March 24, 1920. The pontiff approved a special blessing: "O merciful God, You have consecrated the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the mystery of the Word Incarnate and placed it in the midst of your children. Pour forth your blessing on this vehicle so that those who take an aerial trip in it may happily reach their destination and return safely home under Mary's protection."

That seems a pretty weak reason to get a "patron" job, if you ask me.  By now, hasn't there been any pilot or flight attendant who has attained sainthood after a career in, you know, actual flying? 

I've no handy way to end this post, except to note that, in English speaking countries, this type of worship seems increasingly odd and hard to understand, especially given the rapid decline in the importance of Marian worship in our version of Catholicism over the last 60 odd years. 

Non

Sounds like a case of a prediction too far:

Abu Dhabi: In 10 years, we’ll be able to learn French by swallowing a pill, claims Dr Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab.

“We are looking for ways to interact directly with the neurons, reaching the brain from within and not through the eyes, which have become outdated instruments,” the man who invented the touchscreen and predicted the most important technological revolutions of recent years, told the audience at the majlis of His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, on Wednesday.

The 75-year-old co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and its director of over 20 years, said that over the next decade, we will increasingly see direct brain interaction. It will emerge in two and very different ways: from the outside and the inside of the head.

The climate changes

Hey, this is pretty good!:

When someone tells you, “The climate is always changing,” show them this cartoon

In praise of Micallef

I think that the latest season of Mad As Hell (it finished last night) was just about the funniest I can remember.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again - it's a really crack team of comedy actors (and writers) on the show at the moment.  

I always enjoy their jabs at the ABC itself too - their little parodies of ABC television drama always strike me as accurate and funny.   (Well, I rarely dip my toe into ABC drama, but I have found it pretty awful whenever I did.)  

Climate change in the age of the stoopid, populist Right

I know that articles about it do keep appearing in the media, but I really get the feeling that the current era of the Stupidest, Most Narcissistic President in History, and the Dumbest, Most Shoot-Itself-in-the-Foot Economic Idea Britain Ever Had (Brexit) keeps sucking the oxygen away from really serious public attention to climate change.   Here's Foreign Policy, for example:

Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for Everyone

I mean, it is impossible for the media and the public to not get sucked into talking about Trump trying on reality TV meetings with Democrats; his never ending stream of idiotic tweets; his looking completely out of depth at international meetings;  leaks still confirming that he's impossible to brief properly; his campaign associates going to jail; the prospect of impeachment or at least post-Presidential term charges; even his wife thinking dark red Christmas trees look cool (and not like something out of The Shining.)   It's the most idiotic and chaotic trainwreck of an administration that anyone has ever seen or is likely to see again, I reckon.

And as for Brexit - a complete populist Right fantasia that, like Trump, barely got over the electoral line, but since it did, has been like a black hole sucking all interest away from the crucially important matter of climate change.

Of course, the populist Right is popping its head up elsewhere too - from Brazil to Eastern Europe - but I just don't see that there is any long term future in it as a movement.   All of the leading politicians are some sort of combination of buffoon and fascist lite; all tend to be culture war obsessives and interested in blaming as many problems as possible on immigration.  But it's at heart a reactionary movement, and not one with a credible long term intellectual or policy basis.

So, I predict it will all fizzle soon enough - but it's an incredible distraction that is, literally, endangering the planet.    

The big(foot) conspiracy

Vox has an interview with a journalist (Laura Krantz) who did a podcast episode this year about Bigfoot, and apparently it's pretty good.  (I am slow to get into listening to podcasts - I think it's because I can decide quicker visually if an article is of interest, and I don't like having to wait for 10 or 15 min before deciding if an audio presentation is really worth continuing with.)

Here's part of the interview:

I keep coming back to the eyewitness accounts, the firsthand accounts that people have had. A lot of the people that I ended up talking to about their experiences were pretty sober, upstanding citizens. They’d spent a lot of time in the woods. They’ve worked for Fish and Wildlife. They worked for the Bureau of Land Management.

These are people who are accustomed to being outside, and had a lot of experience and expertise with wildlife. And then they had this experience of being scared, shocked, just blown away by something they’d seen. Those were very, very hard for me to dismiss. I still can’t dismiss them, because it’s clear that they saw something that really rattled them. 

The thing that I’ve been most dismissive of — it’s hard to be completely dismissive because I wasn’t there, I didn’t see what was going on, but people talk about seeing Bigfoot “cloaking,” or vanishing into the ether. And those kinds of accounts I’m a little more like, “Erm... I don’t know about that.”

She explains later, she really can't give the spooky Bigfoot idea any credence:

 I did steer clear of the Bigfoot as magical, paranormal, supernatural stuff, because that was a lot harder for me to come at objectively. And my feeling was that if I couldn’t address it objectively, I shouldn’t do it.

Yeah, sounds like I should listen to the show.  Even though if there is no DNA evidence, the paranormal route is really the only one you can take, isn't it? 

But the other thing I learned from this article was the Bigfoot conspiracy, which I don't think I knew of before:

The flip-side of that is that there’s this conspiracy theory that the logging industry knows that Bigfoot is real, has seen Bigfoot, and goes out of its way to make sure bodies are disposed of, and that any knowledge of it is kept buried. Because if Bigfoot is seen to be real, it’s gonna make the stuff that happened with the spotted owl [in which logging in some areas was halted to preserve an endangered owl’s habitat], look like a picnic. 

 Sounds like there could be a fun movie plot in there somewhere!

Foreigners in Japan

The BBC talks about Japan's process of opening up to foreign workers.