Down Mexico way: watching Roma

I have to write about watching the Netflix film Roma last night, so I can get it out of my head.  On waking up this morning, I kept finding I was already half composing my take on it, and getting black and white imagery floating through my head, in the way a good film can infect your sleep.

It's quietly compelling:  a visually beautiful, fly-on-the-wall type of experience of an eccentric, troubled  country (and family) circa 1971.

My first observation (one I am often making these days, because I can't get over how production values on so many Netflix shows look like that of expensive cinema of old): the visual recreation of the era is completely convincing (admittedly, not that I am familiar with the streets of Mexico City then or now.)   I was often wondering if some street-scapes were digital or if the city is easy to dress up as looking 50 years older than it is.  It looks great and makes you feel you are in the era - it's almost worth watching for this alone.

As a drama, it doesn't have that much of a narrative arc:  it's a more of the European/Aussie film tradition in which merely showing a slice of life of unhappy, hopeless people, with no sense of anything much learned at the end,  is considered enough of a justification for a movie.  But the family and main character - their poor maid Cleo - in this case is more sympathetic than that, and the key tragic event in the film is upsetting to watch. 

It's also true that there is very little in the way of dialogue from Cleo that expresses her feelings and character:  that's why I described it as more "fly-on-the-wall" than your usual family drama story.  I see now that Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker*, strongly criticised the film (one of the very critics to do so!) for making a cipher of the key character:

He not only fails to imagine who the character of Cleo is but fails to include the specifics of who Libo [the real life character writer and director Alfonso Curaron devoted the film to] was for him when he was a child.

In the process, he turns the character of Cleo into a stereotype that’s all too common in movies made by upper-middle-class and intellectual filmmakers about working people: a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type, deprived of discourse, a silent angel whose inability or unwillingness to express herself is held up as a mark of her stoic virtue. (It’s endemic to the cinema and even leaves its scars on better movies than “Roma,” including some others from this year, such as “Leave No Trace” and “The Rider.”) The silent nobility of the working poor takes its place in a demagogic circle of virtue sharing that links filmmakers (who, if they offer working people a chance to speak, do so only in order to look askance at them, as happens in “Roma” with one talkative but villainous poor man) with their art-house audiences, who are similarly pleased to share in the exaltation of heroes who do manual labor without having to look closely or deeply at elements of their heroes’ lives that don’t elicit either praise or pity.

That effacement of Cleo’s character, her reduction to a bland and blank trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness and his own, is the essential and crucial failure of “Roma.” It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.

That's really harsh - but I guess as I don't have a history of watching art house films of the type he describes,  I don't find it all that compelling.  

Brody goes on to list all the things the film does not expand on, or explain properly. And he's right: you're not going to get any idea of what the student riots or general unrest in the city was about from the film.   But readers of this blog would know that I quite like the way a movie can prompt me to go reading about the era it depicts, and with Wikipedia it's never been easier.   Brody's criticism seems to be more about the film not being of a kind he thinks it should be, and while my generic criticism of European art house films noted above could be said to the same thing, I find it all forgiveable in the case of Roma.  It is what it is, I feel like saying to Brody.


There are some flashes of humour  - mostly based on eccentricity - and I can partly agree with Brody that it would have been possible to allow Cleo to open up more via dialogue.  It reminds me a little of The Tree of Life - without being as spectacular and affecting in direction (and certainly without the mystical edge) - but as a powerful visual experience based around family, it has similarities.  

It's a pretty great film that I recommend.


*  Please note:  I strongly recommend not reading his review before seeing the movie - he gives way too much of the plot away, and while it is well worth reading after seeing the film, I think it is important to see this film not knowing anything about the events it depicts.  

Some significant climate modelling

Here, at Real Climate, is some more modelling of past climate suggesting 3 degree climate sensitivity is very close to the mark.

It's hard to understand how people can think what happened to the globe in the past with higher CO2 won't happen again.

The backside of Art

I learn via Literary Review that someone has published an entire book centred on Renaissance art which heavily featured the male backside:   Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art

The review could be better, but this part, talking about one painting which does sound pretty ridiculously butt focussed - The Massacre of the Innocents by van Haarlem - is pretty amusing.   Here's the description:

Take The Massacre of the Innocents by Cornelis van Haarlem, which dominates one of the magnificently refurbished galleries of the Rijksmuseum. Painted in 1590, it is a scene of tumultuous violence, anchored formally by the massive nude figures of four soldiers in the foreground, one striding towards us from the right with a dead baby under his arm, one flat on his back on the left, overcome by a group of mothers, who gouge out his eyes. Counterpoised in the centre are two soldiers seen from behind, one standing, the other, biggest of all, down on one knee as he cuts a child’s throat, his colossal backside not only in the viewer’s face but also inches from the face of the child’s desperate mother. The heroic scale of the picture, some eight feet by twelve, adds to the interpretative puzzle for a modern eye: why make a vast male arse the focal point of a major religious painting? It’s impossible, too, not to wonder if the Dutch, whose art embraces the everyday, the suggestive and the downright lewd, kept a straight face about it, then and afterwards.

And here is the painting, which does, indeed, seem to comprise some very oddball composition:

Why, exactly, the rampaging soldiers are nude, and flesh coloured, while the mothers appear alien grey, must be another puzzling question for art historians.

I wonder how impolite it is for adults to giggle at this when viewing it in the art gallery?  Pity the school teacher taking groups of kids to see it, too. 

A new battery with some promise?

I heard about this on The Science Show a few weeks ago - Sydney University is apparently commercialising a new, safe, gel battery which (it is envisaged) is so safe and reliable it could be incorporated structurally within building walls.

Surely they don't last forever, though?   I would think it useful to still make them reasonably accessible for ultimate replacement.

Still, the University sounds very upbeat about it.

Read the Science Show story here, and the University's PR blurb here.  (I'll add an extract):

The zinc-bromide chemistry used by Gelion operates safely without the need for active cooling and uses 100 percent of the battery’s capacity. Further, its electrode surfaces can be rejuvenated remotely, using state-of-the-art battery management systems, without the need for on-site servicing – making it ideal for stationary energy storage applications in all areas, including remote sites.
About Gelion

Gelion Technologies Pty Ltd (‘Gelion’) was founded in April 2015 as a spin-out of the University of Sydney. The company’s novel battery technology provides a low-cost, safe and long-life energy storage solution. Gelion is owned by Gelion UK, a joint venture between management and Armstrong Energy, who oversee the corporate governance and funding of the business, as well as assisting in long-term strategic planning. Gelion is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
For more information visit: www.gelion.com and www.gelion.com/video

America and pain

Oh.  NPR has a 44 min audio up about America having a long history of problematic use of opioids:

A record number of Americans have died from opioid overdoses in recent years. But how did we get here? And is this the first time Americans have faced this crisis? The short answer: no. Three stories of opioids that have plagued Americans for more than 150 years.

Sounds like something worth listening to...

Politics

*  Tim Wilson has no idea about how not to come across as trying too hard.  Have a look at heightened outrage acting in his twitter summary of his faked up inquiry into the franking credits reform proposed by Labor.  I think he and PM Morrison share a lot in common - more interested in PR imagery than sincerity, and people pick up on them being lightweights because of that.

* Look, I know that lots of people have an emotional reaction against Bill Shorten, and for reasons that they can't articulate and which I don't understand.   My feeling about him is "mostly harmless" - quite neutral, really.   But from the bits I saw of his budget in reply speech last night, I thought he seemed to striking exactly the right tone.   Positive, emphasis on fairness, not at all shrill.   I will be extremely surprised if he is not the next PM, and would not be surprised if his public approval improves when he is in the role.

* I've written plenty of strong criticism of Christopher Pyne over the years (use my side bar search to check), and I had forgotten how much he has behaved very, very badly in the past.  So yeah, it's funny to see now how journalists and other politicians have treated his departure with such apparent kind regard for him personally.   Look, I will give him credit for one thing - his comments in his speech yesterday about Australia being a great country because of politicians for all sides doing their best was at least a non-partisan acknowledgement that no one side of politics has all the good ideas, or is pure evil incarnate.   That is a good thing to hear, especially when the biggest worry in watching politics is how part of the Right has convinced itself over the lase decade that all evil has always come from any party to the Left of them.

Ooh. Now he's doing "Angry Panda"

Ok.  Angry reverse panda:

What is going on with women close to conservatives?

OK, so I am basing this on only two examples - Tony Abbott's daughter and now Barnaby Joyce's ex wife - but it still seems some kind of weird that both of these women who have been close to conservative, climate change denial politicians have turned to competitive body building for fun. 

Do such male politicians emit too much testosterone into the air around them?  

Is it an overreaction to the sort of conservatism that has a 1950's views of a woman's role in life? 

Or are they turning into wingnuts who have fantasies about physical power and domination - just like how Catallaxy has been headed for years now by Sinclair Davidson's selection of pictures showing battles and military power, or the wingnut titles to videos that read with umpteen variations on alleged victory - you know, like "D'Souza utterly destroys liberal student".     

It's weird whatever it is.   I suggest hormone treatment.  Especially for Catallaxy.

The past as a guide to the future

While small government/libertarian types spend all their time in fantasy land fretting about lowering taxes and government spending (seriously, why does the LDP keep putting out ridiculous "alternative" budgets that would be as revolutionary as a Communist re-ordering of Australian government and just as likely to happen?), scientists point out things that are of much greater importance:

Trees growing near the South Pole, sea levels 20 metres higher than now, and global temperatures 3C-4C warmer. That is the world scientists are uncovering as they look back in time to when the planet last had as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it does today.

Using sedimentary records and plant fossils, researchers have found that temperatures near the South Pole were about 20C higher than now in the Pliocene epoch, from 5.3m to 2.6m years ago.

Many scientists use sophisticated computer models to predict the impacts of human-caused climate change, but looking back in time for real-world examples can give new insights.

The Pliocene was a “proper analogy” and offered important lessons about the road ahead, said Martin Siegert, a geophysicist and climate-change scientist at Imperial College London. “The headline news is the temperatures are 3-4C higher and sea levels are 15-20 metres higher than they are today. The indication is that there is no Greenland ice sheet any more, no West Antarctic ice sheet and big chunks of East Antarctic [ice sheet] taken,” he said.

Vaping and seizures

Oh.  This isn't a good look for the pro-vaping side:

The Food and Drug Administration is investigating whether nicotine-induced seizures are a potential side effect of vaping.

In the past decade, the agency has received at least 35 reports of seizures — sudden and uncontrolled disturbances in the brain — following e-cigarette use. The cases were picked up by poison control centers across the country, and through the FDA’s adverse event reporting system, a database of voluntary reports from patients, product manufacturers, and health professionals. 

“While 35 cases may not seem like much compared to the total number of people using e-cigarettes, we are nonetheless concerned by these reported cases,” FDA head Scott Gottlieb said in a Wednesday press release. “We also recognize that not all of the cases may be reported.”

The FDA says it’s too early to know for sure if the seizures were caused by the e-cigarettes since there was no clear pattern among the cases. While some involved first-time users and just a few puffs, others were experienced users. A few of the cases were people with a history of seizure diagnosis, and marijuana and amphetamine use.

The agency did not give the ages of the people, but it noted that “some people who use e-cigarettes, especially youth and young adults, are experiencing seizures following their use.”

Tim Wilson: reverse panda

He's long had an issue with dark rings under his eyes, but in this screenshot I just took from a self promotion video (the only kind he knows how to do) on Twitter, he's now looking full on "reverse panda":

Mate, hire a make up person.  Or lighting person.  Or even better, keep your face off the internet for a change.

The bunker was weirder than I thought

Hey, here's an entertaining account of the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was given the post WW2 task (as a young intelligence officer) of quickly sorting out the truth as to whether Hitler really had died.

The rumours of his survival at the time were more lurid than I knew:

In the months following the German surrender in May, rumors spread that Hitler was still alive. He had escaped from besieged Berlin and was living on a mist-enshrouded island in the Baltic; in a Rhineland rock fortress; in a Spanish monastery; on a South American ranch; he had been spotted living rough among the bandits of Albania. A Swiss journalist made a deposition to testify that, to her certain knowledge, Hitler was living with Eva Braun on an estate in Bavaria. The Soviet news agency Tass reported that Hitler had been spotted in Dublin, disguised in women’s clothing (perhaps his mustache had betrayed his identity). If anyone was in a position to know what had happened to him, it was the Russians, who had taken Berlin. But Stalin said that Hitler had escaped; and in the Soviet Union, what Stalin said outweighed evidence to the contrary.

The myth of Hitler remained potent. He had captured the imagination of the German people; so long as the possibility existed that he might still be alive, the stability and security of the occupied zones could not be guaranteed. This man had been responsible for the most destructive war in the history of the world, causing the deaths of tens of millions; the slightest chance that Hitler might return, as Napoleon had done, was too terrible to contemplate. The ghost haunting Europe had to be laid to rest. The uncertainty about Hitler’s fate was poisoning the fragile relations between the victorious Allies. The Russians were now accusing the British of secretly harboring him.

 As for what Hugh found about Hitler's last days:

The dramatic possibilities of a study of the last months of the Third Reich had occurred to Trevor-Roper the previous summer, when his interrogation of a captured German general had provided barely credible details of that disintegrating regime in all its exotic strangeness. Hess would only eat vegetables planted at full moon; Hitler was an insomniac, prone to such wild attacks of rage that he was known as Teppich-beisser, carpet-biter; at times he would lie on the floor and snap like a dog. Best of all was Göring, who now dressed completely in white silk: on his head he wore St Hubert’s stag, with a swastika of gleaming pearls set between the antlers.

Dogged optimism

Nature has a comment piece summarised in the headline:

Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

Plans to triple the area of plantations will not meet 1.5 °C climate goals. New natural forests can, argue Simon L. Lewis, Charlotte E. Wheeler and colleagues.

They argue that there is a lot of potential for natural forest restoration.   It features a cute photo, that should make dog lovers go all "Aw":

A trained dog scatters tree seeds in a forest in Chile that was devastated by fire in 2017.

My dog, photographed recently, is more:

Aw.   She's not going to be saving the globe from climate change any time soon, though.

UFOs from the future

I like the idea but I don't think it has ever turned up in a movie or TV series (yet):

BUTTE – Many people believe UFOs visit Earth from other planets far, far away. A Montana Tech professor believes UFOs are much closer to home.

“The phenomenon may be our own distant descendants coming back through time to study us in their own evolutionary past,” said Michael P. Masters.

Masters writes about this theory in his newly released book, “Identified Flying Objects.” With a doctorate in anthropology from Ohio State University, Masters uses science to explain why people who report close encounters with aliens always describe them the same way.

“The extra-tempestrial are ubiquitously reported as being bipedal, upright-walking, five fingers on each hand and foot, bi-lateral symmetry that they have two eyes, a mouth a nose, they can communicate with us in our own languages,” said Masters.

"Extra-tempestrial"?   Kinda clumsy name, I reckon.

Wrapping up Umbrella Academy

I kept wanting to like it more than I could.  It was a big narrative mess that relied on eccentricity in characters and set up more than anything else.

Main problem:   the series was very stop/start and kept running out of any sense of urgency.  This is a  very strange thing for a show which set up a "only days away" coming crisis in the first episode.   What a weird decision it was in the penultimate episode, for example, to have a character whose death was meant to avert the apocalypse killed already, so no one then knows if the end of the world is still on or not.  

Other problems:  as I wrote before, the male characters were much more interesting and sympathetic than the female, yet one of the latter was crucial to the series plot.  And it had to be Ellen Page, didn't it?  She with the enormous forehead, mopey face and limited acting range.  Good thing she had those contact lens to tell us when she was going into an end-of-the-world-by-Goth-power fugue state.

I don't think the Hazel and Cha Cha characters were half as cool or interesting as they were meant to be, either.

And that ending - that was a really lazy opening to a second series, wasn't it?    "Can you do that Five?"   "I don't know, but I think I can."  Jeez, couldn't the writers at least try a bit of foreshadowing that it might be possible before then?  

It has been renewed for a second series.  I'll still watch it, to see if they can fix the obvious problems of the first series.  

The Uniqlo conundrum

I've liked Uniqlo for a long time - I would easily have 7 or 8 casual shirts in my wardrobe from them (cotton shirts worn only on weekends take many years to wear out!), and a couple of pairs of shorts.   They tend to be better value in Japan than in Australia, though, and even in Singapore I bought a couple of things on special for cheaper prices than you see here.   I find H&M, its competitor here and elsewhere, seems to cut clothes on the assumption everyone is a weedy vegan - so for the, ahem, more mature clothes purchaser, nothing on display even looks like it is even worth trying on.   But Uniqlo - the may have skin tight jeans which I won't bother with, but the cut of the shirts always has been acceptable.

Apparently it doesn't have much of a presence yet in the US, which means The Atlantic has an interesting article up about its philosophy and hope for expansion:

“Clothing in the West, it’s associated with status, with rank,” Hirotaka Takeuchi, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the brand, told me. In Japan, clothing has traditionally been more standardized. Until the end of the 19th century, when Western influence became more prevalent, kimonos were commonly worn by Japanese people of varying ages and classes. The garment would differ depending on the wearer’s ability to afford fine fabric or embroidery, but compared with the West, where the wealthy telegraphed their status with elaborate styles of dress, such signaling was far more subtle. Takeuchi sees Uniqlo as bringing this old Japanese view of fashion to the U.S. market.

The company is a major success, even without America:  

Its owner, Tadashi Yanai, is the richest person in Japan. Its parent company, Fast Retailing, is among the five largest clothing retailers in the world.

But it had a bad start in the US, apparently due to sizing issues:

...as Uniqlo learned when it arrived on American shores, first impressions can be hard to manage. The three original U.S. stores were in New Jersey malls, where the company soon encountered several hurdles, including fit. (American customers, on average, are taller and fleshier than Japanese shoppers.) It closed the stores within a year.

Gawd:  how does H&M survive there, then?

But - here's where I'm feeling a little conflicted about the company now:  there has been publicity in Australia about it being a terrible company to work for:

Former Australian Uniqlo employees have spoken out about the “weird, awful, abusive” culture at the Japanese fast-fashion giant, where they claim bullying is rife and everyone leaves with “some form of PTSD”.

Earlier this month, former HR manager Melanie Bell sued the retailer, alleging in an explosive $1 million claim that she had been bullied and discriminated against due to her “caucasian heritage”.

According to three former colleagues, Ms Bell’s experience was not unique.

Each worked in different locations and different roles — a sales assistant, a visual merchandiser and an assistant store manager — but all shared similar stories of a deeply toxic work environment.

“It was like a cesspool of all bad Japanese culture squished into one place,” said the sales assistant, who worked at the MidCity store in the Sydney CBD for three years...

“It’s a really nasty culture, not just the Japanese managers. To be honest all retail is like this but Uniqlo is exceptionally bad.

“It’s the Japanese work culture, you’re made to feel bad if you go home on time. I was doing anything from 60- to 80-hour weeks. I would start at 7am and leave at 8pm.

“One day I stayed until 1am. The registers weren’t reconciling and I was expected to stay until they reconciled. My dad had to come to the store. He said, ‘You’re leaving, now.’

“One of the managers, she was basically bats**t crazy, she would just scream at people non-stop for no reason. People would cry, they were terrified of her.

“You can work at Coles or another retailer and stand behind a counter, it’s really easy. At Uniqlo everything is timed — this task should take you this amount of time.

“They have these giant books which break down the SOP (standard operating procedure) for literally everything, from how to use the till to how to fold clothes.

“You’re supposed to fold seven shirts a minute.”

Hmm.   That's pretty detailed criticism, and it does sound bad.

I don't like to support companies with terrible work practices - I'm not sure I'll ever buy anything from Amazon.

But I don't want to give up on Uniqlo.   Are their work practices bad in every single country they operate in?   Do I only buy from them in Japan?  Or Singapore?

First world problem, I guess...

Krugman on the Trump "Boom"

I was interested to read Paul Krugman's explanation as to why lower US corporate tax rates do not result in significant changes to capital investment in the US:

The Trumpist theory — which was, I’m sorry to say, endorsed by conservative economists who should have known better — was that there was a huge pile of money sitting outside the U.S. that companies would bring back and invest productively if given the incentive of lower tax rates. But that pile of money was an accounting fiction. And the tax cut didn’t give corporations an incentive to build new factories and so on; all it did was induce them to shift their tax-avoidance strategies.

As Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations points out, a casual glance at the data seems to suggest that American companies earn a lot of their profits at their overseas subsidiaries. But a closer look shows that the bulk of these reported profits are in a handful of small countries with low or zero tax rates, like Bermuda, Luxembourg and Ireland. The companies obviously aren’t earning huge profits in these tiny economies; they’re just using accounting gimmicks to assign profits earned elsewhere to subsidiaries that may have a few factories, but sometimes consist of little more than a small office, or even just a post-office box.

These basically phony profits then accumulate on the books of the overseas subsidiaries, rather than the home company. But this doesn’t affect their ability to invest in America: if Apple wants to spend a billion dollars here, it can always borrow the money using the assets of its Irish subsidiary as collateral. In other words, U.S. taxes weren’t having any significant effect in deterring real investment in the U.S. economy.

When Trump cut the tax rate, some companies “brought money home.” But for the most part this had no economic significance. Here’s how it works: Apple Ireland transfers some of its assets to Apple U.S.A. Officially, Apple Ireland has reduced its investment spending, while paying a dividend to U.S. investors. In reality, Apple as an entity has the same total profits and the same total assets it did before; it hasn’t devoted a single additional dollar to purchases of equipment, R&D, or anything else for its U.S. operations.

Not surprisingly, then, the investment boom Trump economists promised has never materialized. Companies didn’t use their tax breaks to invest more; mainly they used them to buy back their own stock. This in turn, put more money in the hands of investors, which gave the economy a temporary boost — although for 2018 as a whole, one of the biggest drivers of faster growth was, believe it or not, higher government spending.

 Sounds pretty plausible, no?

Poland is weird

I don't know:   I've just always had the feeling that Poland was a weird society.   I don't think I trust any national culture on mainland Europe (by which I am not including Scandinavia) east of Germany:

Catholic priests in Poland have burned books that they say promote sorcery, including one of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, in a ceremony they photographed and posted on Facebook.

Three priests in the northern city of Koszalin were pictured carrying the books in a large basket from inside a church to a stone area outside. The books were set alight as prayers were said and a small group of people watched on. A mask, various trinkets and a Hello Kitty umbrella were also visible in the pictures of the makeshift bonfire.

The Catholic evangelical foundation SMS From Heaven posted the photographs to its Facebook page, which has 22,000 followers, accompanied by fiery emojis and Old Testament quotes decrying sorcery and idolatry.

Seen in The Guardian.

App based suicide prevention

From STAT:

Digital health apps, which let patients chat with doctors or health coaches or even receive likely medical diagnoses from a bot, are transforming modern health care. They are also — in practice — being used as suicide crisis hotlines.

Patients are confessing suicidal thoughts using apps designed to help them manage their diabetes or figure out why they might have a headache, according to industry executives. As a result, many digital health startups are scrambling to figure out how best to respond and when to call the police — questions that even suicide prevention experts don’t have good answers to.

“To be honest, when we started this, I didn’t think it was as big an issue as it obviously is,” said Daniel Nathrath, CEO of Ada Health.

The European company built a chatbot to provide smartphone users with possible explanations for their medical complaints. Since the app launched in late 2016, people around the world have used it to complete more than 10 million health assessments. In about 130,000 of those cases, users have told Ada that they’re struggling with suicidal thoughts or behaviors, the company said.

That's a lot of suicidal thought confession!   Why do people feel so free to tell an app this?:

The phenomenon is, in some respects, no surprise: There’s a large body of research showing that people are more willing to confess potentially taboo thoughts to a computer than to a fellow human a few feet away.

But as the article goes onto explain, there is no good research on how best to intervene if an app is told by a patient that they are feeling suicidal right now.  

Perhaps a premium app service in future could send in a drone with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit for starters.   Then one of those faked up videos faces (of a psychiatrist in a white coat?) so good it's hard to know if it's real or not offering some kind words?

Sinclair Davidson's Nut Watch

What's this?   I see many mutterings at Catallaxy threads that auto-moderation for certain words (like "Islam") is way, way up.   Is Sinclair trying to actually stop extremist comments appearing due to heightened concern that alt.right style rabid religious hatred is to be found in so many of the comments of his readership?

Well, he will have to work hard to stop weirdo comments like this one from old timer CL, whose paranoia and conspiracy obsessions are well out of control:

I'm not entirely sure how the imposition of a "Queer Revolution" is meant to be an example of "the left's murderous tyranny".  

I mean, I don't care for LGBT identity politics either, but seriously, it has become the nutty project of the Wingnut Right to cite Left wing politics as the source of all evil in the world. 

More pop culture noted

*  I'm officially over My Kitchen Rules and have barely watched it this year.   I still don't mind some of the cooking parts - but the formula for contestant conflict is just too, too familiar.  And it's kind of worrying watching people play their allocated roles in this mock "reality" show.

* Much, much worse, apparently, from a contestant debasement point of view, is Married at First Sight.  I read a twitter thread by someone saying "why for the love of God do some of my otherwise intelligent friends watch this?"   I won't go near it with a barge pole, so I won't learn how bad it is.  But perhaps I can take pride in having a 16 yr old daughter who expresses no interest in it.  I must have done something right.  Or, more likely, just lucked out.?

* As for I'm a D Grade Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here:   I had about a 10 minute watch of it in total this year.  I'm always amazed at how the video quality, the costumes and everything makes everyone look quite physically ugly.  I suppose it's just the loss of makeup and normal studio lighting that accounts for it?   I still can't stand Julia Morris - I saw her doing a stand up bit in 1998 in a Club Med (the one since closed in Noumea), and I disliked her then.  Still dislike her.

* OK, so what do I like on TV at the moment?   We're having a Netflix lull at my house - have finished or are just about to finish several good series and at a bit of a loss as to what to replace them with.  One which is promising and pretty intelligent - the Norwegian series Occupied, in which in the near future, after closing off its gas and oil to Europe, the Russians stage an orderly intervention at the request of the EU to re-open the supply.  As with the comedy Norseman, the Norwegians seem surprisingly good at quality TV.   I've watched two episodes, and it's good enough to keep me going.  The opening credit sequence song is really bad, though.  Just ignore it.

Taking matters into their own hands

Much discussion being had on Twitter about an article on the Washington Post business section (?) about the reduction in the amount of sex Americans appear to be having.   The most discussed aspect of this is this chart about younger adults:

Not entirely sure I understand the increasing gap between men and women.

The list of reasons speculated for young men living without much sexual interaction includes:  dating apps, less economic independence (and much more living with parents), increased rates of depression, internet pornography, Netflix, the MeToo movement, feminism, video gaming - especially Minecraft (really - it was introduced in 2009), and Marvel movies.   OK, so I made that last one up.

I don't know how to feel about this:   on the one hand, I like to think that people should take sexual relationships seriously and most men (or women) these days aren't really ready for serious responsibilities until they are approaching 30 anyway.    On the other hand, as in Japan, it would seem that if people go too long without attempting dating, they just can never be bothered starting and get caught in some strange fantasy worlds of self gratification.

God help us if internet connected, sex simulating body suits ever become a thing.  May as well close up the planet in that case.

A pop culture post

Imagine Dragons inhabit an odd corner of the pop music world - talking about them with my daughter when they were going to be in Brisbane a while ago, one of us commented that there would probably be an unusually large number of Dads in the audience.   (The other person agreed.)  There is something unusually male cross-generational acceptable about them in a way few other young-ish musical acts are these days.

I find I like quite a few of their songs, and this current one Bad Liar strikes me as an exceptionally good break up song.   But that video clip for it - man, it's pretty creepy, isn't it?    And just about perfectly opaque in meaning.   I keep getting a suicide vibe from it - not a good thing to see in pop culture I reckon - and the dancing around him, combined with the song lyric, seems to make no sense at all.  

Didn't I see some goth themed video clip from them for a song recently I didn't hear much?   I wish they would get someone else on board for their videos.  

Old people are killing us ..

Look at this pic from a pro Brexit rally in London:

Look at the average age.  Not to mention the gender and ethnic mix.  How many of them share the same profile as your average climate change denialist?  (Answer: a lot.)

It feels very weird to be living at a time when the cries of the populist youth movement of the 1960's, about which I was cynical when I was young myself,  have actually come to be true. 

Until Rupert Murdoch goes to meet his Maker, hopefully by something ironic like Jerry Hall giving him a shove at the top of a flight of stairs after reading a false rumour from his own tabloid press, this is the world his lust for money and power has created. 

And strangely, whereas we used to get radicals threatening violence against the establishment, now they would prefer to get into a Twitter troll war. 

See, I have found a way to blame both sides. 

The further adventures of Pauline's Flakey Nuts.

If I had cartooning talent, and time, I'd be drawing up a cereal box called "Pauline's Flakey Nuts". 

But whatever.

Some further thoughts from watching Part 2 of Ashby and Dickson in Washington:

*  what an extraordinary, obnoxious, suck-up prat that Steve Dickson continued to show himself to be - the way he started up with the "Jesus" talk when he was with the gun loving Jesus lovers.   I'm suspecting that Ashby kept his sexuality on the quiet while he was playing the room, though.

* speaking of God talk - wasn't it nauseating in both episodes to see how much the NRA brings religion into their work:  the prayer at the start of the NRA electioneering for Trump;  the NRA telling Australians that gun ownership is not just a constitutional right in the US - it is fundamentally a God given right.  Honestly, the degree that a queasy brand of evangelical Christianity is tied into the political views of a large slab of the US Right feels like listening to a soft white bread Christian version of Sharia law, virtually.   It's creepy.

* you could also see how the NRA suggestions as to what lines to run to drum up support in Australia just sounded like complete duds that would not translate to our culture.   The "guns are a God given right" line, for example - will go over like a lead balloon here, but the NRA PR staff just don't appreciate that.   Same with the idea of everyone buying guns for self defence - the vast majority here know its good to have a high confidence that nearly no aggro nutter you pass on the street is likely to be carrying a concealed pistol.  That's better than needing a gun to use yourself.


* I would have loved to have known what the Koch operative said after Ashby explained that all donations would have to be fully disclosed on a website.  She pulled a face that indicated clearly "well, there's your problem right there; and I think I'm wasting my time", and I had the feeling the meeting wound up maybe 5 minutes later.

* The other overwhelming impression - how lazy Ashby and Dickson were.  "Let's ask fake gun rights guy to come up with policy for One Nation to run with.  Yeah, yeah, good idea."   I mean, sure, have expert advice on policy, but I had the feeling Ashby and Dickson just couldn't be bothered putting in the work on what guns policy changes they actually wanted.

Look at me! Look at me! - I'm not a conspiracy theorist

So, David Leyonhjelm denies he's a Port Arthur "truther" - he just thinks there are "questions to be answered":

Former senator and gun enthusiast David Leyonhjelm – now on the cusp of being elected to the NSW upper house – told the Herald and The Age on Thursday there were "legitimate" questions about Port Arthur, though he denied being a conspiracy theorist himself.

"People say 'well what is there to know about Port Arthur'. Well there's actually a lot," he said. "The solution is let's have an inquiry and let some of them at least go away.

"There are a lot of questions that would be resolved by an inquiry. It may well be that there are good answers to them. There are assertions – I'm not asserting these myself – but there are people who say there was more than one shooter.

"There are people who say that people were killed with head shots which would require substantial marksmanship which [Martin] Bryant didn't have.

"There's several other questions that keep coming up. I think they deserve to be answered."

 What a disingenuous, publicity seeking moron.  

Oh look, another surgeon it took for-ever to get suspended

What the hell?   This report at the ABC about a surgeon whose competence and behaviour was doubted by others for over a decade raises pretty shocking questions about how the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons operates.

Why can't we all remember 20 different languages, then?

It seems it takes a surprisingly small amount of memory storage to know how to use English:

A pair of researchers, one with the University of Rochester the other the University of California has found that combining all the data necessary to store and use the English language in the brain adds up to approximately 1.5 megabytes. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Francis Mollica and Steven Piantadosi describe applying information theory to add up the amount of data needed to store the various parts of the English language.

If only the brain was flash memory chips instead of stupid wet cells, then...

The weird, weird, nonsense politics of Brexit

I love the way a bad deal to a bunch of Tories will become an acceptable deal to them provided the woman who put all the work into it promises to resign.  The resignation makes no change to the deal itself, of course:  it's all (I presume) a combination of "if you go, we will be free to immediately blame you for making a deal we don't really want to support", and "Hey!  I could be leader faster than I thought."

It just seems the most perversely mean spirited example of internal power politics due to lack of any relationship to improving a policy outcome.   

Ha ha ha Sinclair Davidson

Sinclair thinks the findings of the Mueller investigation will fuel public distrust of media news.  Today, he's claiming public distrust of Fairfax led to its collapse, and it's "why the ABC needs a $1 billion dollar subsidy."

We'll let slip that ABC news, a mere part of the organisation's role, hardly costs a full billion dollars:  what's more un-forgiveable is that Sinclair lives in a fantasy land unsupported by research which continually shows that the ABC is more trusted by Australians than commercial news.

And honestly, when you see where "news" run purely for commercial profit leads you - the quasi State media relationship of Fox News and Trump, and the nuttiness of Sky News at night here - any person with a brain can see why the likes of the ABC and BBC are trusted and valued.

Not only that, but the US liberal broadsheets have done very well financially in the Trump era:   and the Mueller investigation have revealed enough that, regardless of whether it amounted to indictable offences against Trump personally, the campaign was full of politically disgraceful behaviour.  There is no way there will be a sudden burst of subscription cancellations over the Mueller results.

And would Sinclair like to explain the profitability of The Australian while he is at it?   How many decades has it been subsidised by other Murdoch papers?

It's not a good look to continue building a cage of stupidity one bar at a time, Sinclair.  Close down Catallaxy and give yourself credit for not running a hate site, at least.   It won't help your nonsense on every other issue from climate change to stagflation, but at least I would give you credit for improving political discourse.

Colbert does well

Stephen Colbert's lengthy reaction to the (apparent) outcome of the Mueller investigation was sharp, very funny, and passionate:



While I am at it - is it just me, or is the vibe of Trump himself not quite as jubilant as one might have expected?   Sure, he's been talking about exoneration and looking into those who made claims, etc:  but to my mind there is has been a whiff of exhaustion and resignation about it, rather than energy.  

This might be imagination, but is it possible he feels he will miss victimhood status?  Or even regret that a finding against him might have given him grounds to resign from a job he doesn't really like?   OK, maybe that's going too far, but the fact he fell silent on twitter before the Barr letter indicated something a bit odd - who had convinced him not to tweet?   The other funny thing I have seen speculated is that, feeling relieved, he will soon be making admissions that will throw doubt on the whole obstruction/collusion question again.

Making it up as we go along

Over at the TLS, Phillip Goff has a lengthy go at justifying the practice of religion without believing in it. 

It's an interesting argument, perhaps put better here than I have read previously.  Not sure I'm convinced.

In the meantime, I'm developing my own religion based on some combination of the moral sensibilities of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sense of awe from the films of Steven Spielberg, and the all powerful, all seeing knowledge of Google as the forerunner of the Tiplerian/de Chardin-ian Omega Point.   That last bit explains why it will be crucial for my congregation to use Android, not Apple.

But what heresy is this, with Spielberg appearing in support of Apple yesterday?    My belief system is being tested already....

Quick One Nation takes

After watching the "Party for Sale to the Highest Gun Lobby Bidder" show last night I have some comments:

*  what a deeply obnoxious, redneck jerk that Steve Dickson is.   (Head of Queensland One Nation, apparently.)  And he was a Queensland Minister for something, getting high in his office on his power to make regulations about anything?  Shows the embarrassingly shallow pool that politicians, especially Queensland politicians, are drawn from.  [Update - Wikipedia says he was a minister under Campbell Newman, and is 56.  He he looks like he could easily pass for 70.]

* strangely, it seems the NRA actually recognises the difficulty of arguing against the relative success of the Australia gun buy back.

* plainly, they were telling the NRA they were not just there for tactical hints, but they needed money to get more power within Australia.

* will Mark Latham use this as a reason to leave the party?   As soon as he was elected, people have been asking "has he left the party yet?"[Update:  I am told Latham is defending the Party.  What a joke.]

* like Trump supporters, One Nation voters are too dumb to watch the ABC, will vaguely hear something about how One Nation wanted to relax gun laws, and say "sounds OK to me, I'm voting for Pauline anyway.  She's one of us."   The party base is, basically, too dumb to not support the party.  

The Malaysian problems

An interesting paper is at the Lowy Institute site talking about 4 key problems Malaysia has to deal with.

I didn't realise that 35% of the population was non-Muslim.   (That's a lot bigger figure than I expected.)   Sure doesn't feel that way when you are there these days.

I also see in the footnotes some examples of recent, shall we shall, stupid Muslim activism:

Ludicrous examples of such behaviour include attempts by a laundromat in Muar to ban non-Muslims from using its washing machines arguing that their clothing will contaminate Muslim washing (“Muslim-only Laundromat puts Malaysia in a Spin”, Today (Singapore), 27 September 2017), and complaints that a housing project was promoting Christianity because the roof-top air vents resembled crosses (“Stir over Langkawi Housing Project’s Cross-shaped Air Wells Prompts Developer to Repaint Them”, The Straits Times (Singapore), 29 December 2015).

I watch nutters so you don't have to

The reality distortion field caused by fear of an attractive, articulate and pretty sharp political opponent is absurdly powerful:

Geothermal woes

Gee - it turns out it's best not to play around with geothermal energy in earthquake prone places:

A South Korean government panel has concluded that a magnitude-5.4 earthquake that struck the city of Pohang on 15 November 2017 was probably caused by an experimental geothermal power plant. The panel was convened under presidential orders and released its findings on 20 March.

Unlike conventional geothermal plants, which extract energy directly from hot underground water or rock, the Pohang power plant injected fluid at high pressure into the ground to fracture the rock and release heat — a technology known as an enhanced geothermal system. This pressure caused small earthquakes that affected nearby faults, and eventually triggered the bigger 2017 quake, the panel found.

The quake was the nation’s second strongest and its most destructive on modern record — it injured 135 people and caused an estimated 300 billion won (US$290 million) in damage.

Russian collusion

Maybe no more posts about Mueller after this one.

At The Atlantic, an argument that the investigation was a stunning success in revealing corruption (which, of course, Republicans refuse to acknowledge):

The Mueller investigation has been an unmitigated success in exposing political corruption. In the case of Paul Manafort, the corruption was criminal. In the case of Trump, the corruption doesn’t seem to have transgressed any laws. As Michael Kinsley famously quipped, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.” Lying to the electorate, adjusting foreign policy for the sake of personal lucre, and undermining an investigation seem to me pretty sound impeachable offenses—they might also happen to be technically legal.

Through his investigation, Mueller has also provided a plausible answer to the question that first bothered me. Trump’s motive for praising Putin appears to have been, in large part, commercial. With his relentless pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow, the Republican nominee for president had active commercial interests in Russia that he failed to disclose to the American people. In fact, he explicitly and shamelessly lied about them. As Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen implied in his congressional testimony, Trump ran his campaign as something of an infomercial, hoping to convince the Russians that he was a good partner. To enrich himself, Trump promised to realign American foreign policy.

 This is the very definition of corruption, and it provides the plot line that runs through the entirety of Trump’s political life. The president never chooses to distinguish—and indeed, may be temperamentally incapable of distinguishing—his personal interests from the national interest. Why has he failed so consistently to acknowledge Russian interference in the election? Because that interference was designed to benefit him. Why did he fire James Comey and, let’s use the word, obstruct the investigation into election interference? Because he wanted to protect himself from any investigation that might turn up material that reflected badly on him and his circle. (And whatever Mueller’s ultimate conclusion about collusion, his investigation has proved to be an unending source of damning revelations about the president and the men who constituted his closest advisers. )

 David Corn has written in much more detail along these lines.  I didn't even recall we knew this in detail:

Let’s start with Trump. Shortly after he leaped into the 2016 contest, Trump began pursuing a grand project in Moscow: a sky-high tower bearing his name. It could reap him hundreds of millions of dollars. His fixer,  Michael Cohen, was the Trump Organization’s point man in the negotiations.

Trump signed a letter of intent, and the talks went on for months through the fall of 2015 and the first half of 2016. At one point, Cohen spoke to an official in Putin’s office, seeking help for the venture. And throughout this period, Trump the candidate, when asked for his opinions on Russia and Putin, issued curiously positive remarks about the thuggish and autocratic Russian leader.

Trump also claimed throughout the campaign that he had nothing to do with Russia—no business there, nothing. And when he was asked whether he knew Felix Sater, a wheeling-dealing developer and one-time felon who was the middleman for the Moscow project negotiations, Trump claimed he was “not that familiar with him.”

That was a lie.

The Moscow deal did fizzle at some point, but Trump had engaged in the the most significant conflict of interest in modern American politics. He was making positive statements about Putin on the campaign trail, at the same time he needed support from the Russian government for his project. Yet he hid this conflict from American voters and lied to keep it secret. (After the election, Cohen lied to Congress about this project to protect Trump, and that’s one reason Cohen is soon heading to prison.)

  It’s deplorable that a presidential candidate would double-deal in this manner and deceive the public—insisting he was an America First candidate, while pursuing a secret agenda overseas to enrich himself. But Trump’s duplicity also compromised him.

Cult follower comfortable with jailing disbelievers, apparently

RMIT's worst walking advertisement in the history of their academia (Steve Kates) continues his cult longings at their second worst advertisement's hate blog: 

Trump added that if he has his way, those who investigated him will themselves be investigated.
“Those people will certainly be looked at. I’ve been looking at them for a long time and I’m saying why haven’t they been looked at? They lied to Congress. Many of them, you know who they are, they’ve done so many evil things,” he said.

Trump also said he wants to make sure that what he’s endured never happens to another president.

 “Lock her up” was the mantra during the election, and it might soon apply to a number of those who worked with and supported Mueller. As Emerson said: “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Same may go for Presidents.

That last paragraph is Kates's own words. 

Some relevant tweets about the Mueller investigation

In the pre-Cult days of America...

....regardless of the question of whether it amounts to criminal conduct, it would have been non controversial that it should be terribly politically damaging for:

*  a Presidential candidate's family and campaign staff to be running off to meetings with sleazy Russian characters indicating that dirt on Hilary might be available to them;

* a Presidential candidate at a rally to invite Russia (or any foreign power) to help him by providing Hilary's emails;

* a Presidential candidate, and a President, to laugh and cajole supporter rallies in chants of locking up the candidate who lost to him at the election;  

* a President to fume openly about an investigation into the Russian assistance, and to publicly take the word of Putin over that of his intelligence community;

* a President to sack his FBI director for not toeing his line.

But we are living in the days of the weirdest political cult America has ever seen, so this behaviour is considered innocent by its members.

Some curious stuff about the Mueller report

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person to be startled at how quickly Barr made his decision after receiving the report.  From The Atlantic:

In less than 48 hours, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who supervised Mueller for most of his investigation—“concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offence.” Though Barr emphasized that he and Rosenstein had been involved in evaluating the status of the investigation for months, and that they consulted the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department of Justice experts, this conclusion reflects startling and unseemly haste for such a historic matter.

Crucially, we don’t know whether Barr concluded that the president didn’t obstruct justice or that he couldn’t obstruct justice. Well before his appointment, Barr wrote an unsolicited memo to Rosenstein arguing that Mueller’s investigation was “fatally misconceived,” to the extent that it was premised on Trump firing former FBI Director James Comey or trying to persuade Comey to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser. Barr’s memo was a forceful exposition of the legal argument that the president cannot obstruct justice by exercising certain core powers such as hiring or firing staff or directing the course of executive-branch investigations. So although Barr’s letter to Congress says that he and Rosenstein found no actions that constituted “obstructive conduct” undertaken with the requisite corrupt intent, we don’t know whether he means that Trump didn’t try to interfere with an investigation, or that even if he did, it wasn’t obstruction for a president to do so. Democrats in Congress will want to probe that distinction—as they should.

And elsewhere in the magazine, David Frum writes, with nice sarcasm:

Good news, America. Russia helped install your president. But although he owes his job in large part to that help, the president did not conspire or collude with his helpers. He was the beneficiary of a foreign intelligence operation, but not an active participant in that operation. He received the stolen goods, but he did not conspire with the thieves in advance.

This is what Donald Trump’s administration and its enablers in Congress and the media are already calling exoneration. But it offers no reassurance to Americans who cherish the independence and integrity of their political process.

Update:   another lawyer (who helped draw up Mueller's terms of reference) is directly critical of Barr's previous memo which apparently expresses a controversial take on the matter.

A look at Norilsk

BBC Culture has a gallery of remarkable photos and short videos about the Russian city of Norilsk - which is 400 km north of the Arctic circle.  That means no sun at all for 2 months, and a winter that lasts for 9 months.  

Humans really do live in stupid places.  

Paranoia unbound

I see Steve Kates having an outbreak of paranoia (again) about the fact that there was an investigation into Trump and his campaign's dealings with Russia, a country which we know intervened in the election in his favour.

These people should terrify you

Why are these lefty idiots so upset about Mueller not intending to indict the President? Why aren’t they relieved that there was no conspiracy to subvert their democracy? Because they are dishonest swine who care not a whit about truth, justice or the democratic order. Here’s the answer.
ALL BECAUSE DEMOCRATS COULDN’T ACCEPT AN ELECTION RESULT:
They stand for nothing other than power. No decency, no morality, nothing but the raw assertion of power. 

He's a deep believer in the Deep State conspiracy theory - everyone who wanted an investigation - doesn't matter if they were Republican figures or not - were just out to get his hero Trump. 

The Wingnut Right has become the new Manicheans - everything in politics has to fit into a dichotomy and battle between Good (them and - ha ha, I know - Trump) and Evil (Democrats - a.k.a. Socialists - who are as bad as Hitler because he was a socialist,  Muslims, Mexicans, Europeans and any foreigners who think that Trump's an idiot and embarrassment).

It's astounding, and will be written about by historians for centuries.


Anyway, Sinclair Davidson's sheltered workshop for the paranoid and obnoxious continues on its merry, nutty way. 

I think the Olympic Games are safe from this competition...

Headline of the year so far at NPR:

Headless Goat Polo Is A Top Sport At World Nomad Games

Two bare-chested men on horseback wrestle. The goal is to pull your opponent off the horse so a part of his body touches the ground.

Three dogs chase a dummy clad in a fox or hare skin to see who's fastest. Biting an opponent is grounds for disqualification.

And then there is this sport: "Each team seeks to throw as many goat carcasses as possible into the tai kazan (goal) of the opposing team."

They're definitely not Olympic sports but they are a part of another global competition: The World Nomad Games, held in Kyrgyzstan last September.

Some photos of the action at the link, too.

Wow, she's good

It seems Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared a couple of days ago on Seth Meyer's show, and this is probably the first time I've watched her in this format.   No wonder she scares Republicans and Fox News - she's incredibly relaxed, charming and polished as a media performer, and also appears as sharp as a tack.   





I particularly liked the part where she ridicules the Republican who asks the same stupid question at every committee hearing "Are you a capitalist or a socialist."

Is there lead in the water of the American Right at the moment?   I just don't understand how stupid it's become.

Disclaimer:  first impressions don't always count - I was impressed with the first big media appearance of  Sarah Palin, to my perpetual embarrassment now.  But AOC has actually been doing the work, asking good questions, and appearing astoundingly confident, but also quite modest.  I don't think I'm wrong this time, although of course all politicians will have mis-steps of one kind or another over time.

Apropos of nothing much - Gray on Hayek and Keynes

John Gray is usually interesting, if sometimes obviously wrong.   I just stumbled across a piece he wrote in 2015 which gives some brief but interesting biographical details and analysis about Hayek (what he got right and wrong.) 

Unpleasant twits

One of the participants at Catallaxy threads calls himself "Percy Popinjay": in the same tradition, I suppose, of others there who go under names like "Confused Old Misfit" or "Knuckeldragger":  the attempted ironic humour doesn't work as their comments show it's an accurate description.

I am continually gobsmacked at how so many people who comment there do not realise what deeply unpleasant, viciously intolerant and arrogant personalities they have on display.  Here's Percy, talking about his time at the voting booth in Sydney yesterday, handing out how to vote cards for Australian Conservatives:

People continually confused the AusCons HTV with that of the Gliberals. I ended up having to change my script to “Conservatives, they’re not the liberals”, or “Conservatives, the sensible alternative to the liberals”.

About the closest I came to being abused was when some ol’ smartarse had a good look at the HTV and then dramatically recoiled, stating, “I’m not a conservative”. Had to bite my tongue so as not to reply with “so, you’re an unthinking brainwashed imbecile”.

That smarmy ol’ mayor also made an appearance at the booth. The greenfilth HTV distributors were exactly what I expected – smug hypocritcal middle aged white boomer scumbags.

The name and the attitude puts me very much in mind of Monty Python dealing with "upper class twits".  Any of these could be our man Percy:

I think the Australian Conservatives only ran in the Upper House, and I don't think any figures are available for them yet.  (Nor for David Leyonhjelm's run either?)   I may well be amused when the voting numbers are out, to see if twit Percy's efforts counted for much. 

Update:  Percy himself has read the post and thinks I don't get that his name is his attempt at a "pisstake".  He's not very bright.  

Earth instruction manual sent to the Moon

What a neat idea.  Having a lunar lifeboat repository in case the planet gets smashed or nukes itself into near oblivion has always appealed.  Now, we have the start of one:

A 30-million page library is heading to the moon to help preserve human civilization.

The massive archive is aboard Israel's Beresheet spacecraft. 

From the article itself:

Included in the Lunar Library’s more than 200 gigabytes of data are the entire English-language version of Wikipedia; tens of thousands of fiction and nonfiction books; a collection of textbooks; and a guide to 5,000 languages along with 1.5 billion sample translations between them.

All of that information is etched onto 25 stacked nickel disks, each just 40 microns (about 1/600th of an inch) thick.

Since people of the far future will presumably not have a DVD player handy, and might not speak any language now in use, the top of the Lunar Library’s disc is engraved with tiny images of books and other documents explaining human linguistics, along with instructions about how to read the library beneath. The introductory layers can easily be viewed when magnified 100 times under a simple microscope. Then it’s up to our crafty descendants to build the player so they can read the rest of the Library....

The Lunar Library is shielded by a protective layer and insulation, as well as the structure of the Beresheet lander itself. All of that should help safeguard it from micrometeorites that strike the moon on a regular basis. Even so, it may not have anything like the 6-billion-year lifetime that Spivack is targeting. “These objects will not survive for a billion years un-degraded, but they might be intact and unburied after 10 million years, maybe 50 million years,” Davies said.

Me and podcasts; and a movie genesis

My flu-y type sickness made me rest all day Friday, and yesterday, but I am starting to feel better, thanks for asking.

Lying around the house led to me dropping back into Podbean, a podcast app that sees as good as any other.   I had used it to listen to some podcasts on the flight to Singapore and back at Christmas, given that Scoot has absolutely no in-flight entertainment system.  Ah, who needs it on an 8 hour flight if you have a phone with a battery that lasts that long? 

Even though there are so many podcasts available, on lots of topics which I find potentially interesting, I think I have mentioned before that I have trouble getting into this internet phenomena.  Not doing anything other than listening to one feels wrong, and I'm not sure why.   I guess it's like listening to talk radio - I never sit down to just listen to it live, but it's perfectly fine while shaving and ironing and getting ready for work;  or driving.  Yes, a lot of my Radio National listening has happened while driving.  

So, lying in bed and trying to listen to one just doesn't work for me.  I also don't much enjoy ones where there are too many people interjecting - I tried listening to How Did This Get Made, in which a room full of people, including the quite funny Jason Mantzoukas, take apart movies which raise the titular question.   It was too much, for too long.  (It did convince me, though, that the 2018 movie Skyscraper is a real dud in all respects.)  

But then, I had to go pick up my daughter last night and was listening to The Good Place podcast, episode one (it's hosted by the actor who plays the devil Sean in the series) and it quite enjoyable.  It was more just a protracted one on one interview, and it was fine, especially as I was driving at the time.

I also tried the Scriptnotes podcast, by two genuine Hollywood screenwriters with significant credits to their name.   The content seems very directed towards fellow writers, and it sounded like their industry advice was practical and likely very helpful for those trying to get a foot in the door in that business. Not sure that I am going to listen to them that much, but I did listen to an old one they did in which they analysed Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Which led to me to the transcripts of the meeting between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan in which the ideas for the movie were fleshed out from an outline created by Lucas.

Maybe I had read before, in 2013, that the transcripts were available online - it did attract some attention that year.  But I don't recall going and reading them before.

It's all very satisfying, listening in, as it were, as to who came up with what idea.   It's clear that an awful lot of what ended up in Temple of Doom came from those sessions too.  (Essentially, they had too many ideas for one movie.)   

Some of it sounds kind of racist by today's standards, and some a bit weird.  George suggesting that Marion was only 12 when she fell in love with Indy, for example:

Lucas: He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older.

 Anyway, the full transcripts go for many, many pages, and I didn't read them all.

Still, it's nice to know they are there.

Is there a mild flu going around?

..because if there is, it sure feels like I have it.   Light headed; feet and calves a bit achy even though I have done no special exercise; nose not blocked but some drip in the back of the throat; and tired.  Stomach not feeling great either.

Not just a cold, I think.  I am going to bed.

What a country...

Sometimes, you have to wonder why there isn't an immigration crisis involving people wanting to get out of the USA, when you read stories like this:

Antivaxxers used to mainly be hippies, but put a dumb Wingnut President in charge, and you get governors happy to announce they gave their kids chickenpox:

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) turned heads this week after saying on a radio show that he had intentionally tried to get his children infected with chickenpox and that he did not support the state’s mandatory chickenpox vaccine.

Bevin, appearing on a radio station in the state, Talk 104.1, said that every one of his nine children had come down with chickenpox — on purpose.

“We found a neighbor that had it,” the first-term governor said. “And I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it and they got it. And they had it as children, they were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.”

As many in comments say, his kids will really thank him when they come down with shingles later in life.  

Then guns.   The figures here for the number of kids killed by them are just extraordinary:

Results of the study, just published in the American Journal of Medicine, show that from 1999 to 2017, 38,942 firearm-related deaths occurred in 5 to 18 year olds. These included 6,464 deaths in children between the ages of 5 to 14 years old (average of 340 deaths per year), and 32,478 deaths in children between the ages of 15 to 18 years old (average of 2,050 deaths per year).

"It is sobering that in 2017, there were 144 police officers who died in the line of duty and about 1,000 active duty military throughout the world who died, whereas 2,462 school-age children were killed by firearms," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., senior author, first Sir Richard Doll Professor, and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine.

The whining Right doesn't want to own its past commentary

Big God theory

At The Conversation, a discussion of the historical evolution of the idea of a "Big God":

When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.

Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being....

One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.

What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions. Maybe it would also increase trust among traders.

So, looking at a big data base, their conclusions thus far:

One of the earliest questions we’re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies. We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralising gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later.  

I'm not sure how Jewish belief fits into that - I didn't think their society was all complicated at the relevant time.

Taking it into the future:   seems to me there's a good case to be made for Google being the new Big God - certainly it's all seeing.   If only it had a way of punishing people, we'd have the Real Thing.

Back to cannabis and psychosis

A new study that found that daily use of cannabis (or use of high potency cannabis) greatly increased risk of "first time" psychosis.   Hardly seems surprising, really, but it's another reminder of how medical understanding can take a long time to catch up with lay persons' real life observations:

Dr. Robin Murray, senior author of the study and a professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London, said that "15 years ago nobody thought cannabis increased the risk for psychosis." 

 

Only gradually has evidence come out and shown that to be true, he said. Gradually, too, other explanations have been chipped away, he said: For example, some people might say that perhaps a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia led some people to use cannabis and this is the reason for higher rates of psychosis. But a study from Finland rules this out, said Murray: "There may be some genetic component but it's not the major reason."

Not for the first time, I wonder out loud:  if governments are going to legalise it, why can't they also regulate for potency too?  If you can't (for good reason) hold a liquor licence and pour spirits into the open mouths of customers due to it being a dangerous way to consume alcohol, why can't you legislate for the potency and likely dosage of cannabis too?