Merton and the post War religious surge

Harper's Magazine has an article looking back at the life of Thomas Merton, the catholic convert who became a monk and wrote lots of books and was quite a Catholic star back in the 50's and 60's.  I've never read him, actually.  Turns out his private life was not as monk-like as one might like of the devout.  More on that below.

But what initially caught my eye is this section near the start of the article, because I hadn't really thought of the post WW2 period in quite this way:

It [the success of Merton's autobiography published in 1948] was in fact one of many signs of a feverish religiosity following World War II—a time of religious conversions, bulging seminaries, national revivals, and interfaith goodwill increasing among what Will Herberg called “the three great faiths” in his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955).

Polls in 1947 indicated that the most-respected leaders in America were ministers, priests, and rabbis. In 1954, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 “In God We Trust” became the national motto. Billy Graham became “pastor to the presidents,” and Monsignor Fulton Sheen became a television star. Religious conversions—whether to Protestantism (channeled by Graham) or to Catholicism (channeled by Sheen)—were everywhere. Even Dwight Eisenhower heard the call and was baptized by a Presbyterian minister in 1953, his first year as president. That same year, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later the National Prayer Breakfast) was instituted. Around this time, the term Judeo-Christian became a common description of America’s traditions.

In this period of heated piety, Catholics seemed the most successfully devout. Norman Podhoretz, with his interest in who was “making it,” said that Catholics were having their moment, and Lenny Bruce called Catholicism “the only the church.” In what was called “the Catholic Renaissance,” many Catholic intellectuals turned from modern commercialism toward eternity, or to the thirteenth century as a plausible substitute for eternity. They took up Gregorian chant, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the work of French Catholic literary stars—Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Pierre Teilhard du Chardin, Henri de Lubac, Georges Bernanos, Henri Ghéon, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Simone Weil. Many of these authors were translated into En­glish for the publishing house of the Catholic Renaissance, Sheed and Ward.

I guess you can also throw in the ascendency of the Kennedys to political power too as a positive Catholic story, given that the public did not know of  JFK's appallingly incontinent sex life at the time.

So yeah, the diminishing cultural influence of Catholicism now perhaps needs to be considered in the light of an unusual "high tide" of influence of the post War period.

As for Merton himself, he started resenting the attention his fame brought to his abbey:

After Merton published The Seven Storey Mountain, and people started showing up at his abbey as postulants to become monks or as “seculars” making weekend retreats, Merton’s books began to earn real money for Gethsemani, funds needed to handle the flood of applicants and visitors he had inspired. His output now had to match this influx. His otherworldly superiors, meanwhile, suddenly had a crass stake in his popularity—it brought the abbey fame, recruits, and money. In time he would begin to resent this, saying the publicity made him feel “cheap”: “I am sickened . . . by being treated as an article for sale, as a commodity.”

He became depressed and sour about what was happening to the abbey. It was staging itself, in a kind of “liturgical vaudeville,” which heightened the flow of people he was bringing in—“all those guys, some solid, mostly half-wits I think, who are nevertheless good, well-meaning people and honest in their way, and many of whom are here on account of me.”

The abbey tried to make Merton more than an ornament of its establishment, giving him responsible roles such as the novice master. But he preferred to devote himself to his writing, and he let his fellow monks know in an open letter that he would not serve as the abbot, should that office come open, not wanting to spend the rest of his life “arguing about trifles with 125 confused and anxiety-ridden monks.” The brothers could not publicly express discontent with that insult. He was their source of the world’s respect.

As he distanced himself from the monks, he was amassing an adoring fan club, corresponding feverishly with peace and civil-rights activists who looked to him for moral confirmation of their cause.

This engagement with civil rights causes got him into trouble with his order, being told at one point to stop writing about the nuclear threat.  Surprisingly (for me), Merton was really into the pop protest culture of the day:

He was reading James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X, and listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Joan Baez. He worked through two contacts to get a visit from Baez, and they commiserated with Dylan in a stressful time for the singer. 

 The article goes on to explain that by 1966, he was seeing a psychiatrist for depression, and fell in love with a student nurse.   It was more than spiritual love, too:

Later Merton wrote: “I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s, and it haunts me.” In his poems to her, he would write of their “worshiping hands” and how “I cling to the round hull / Of your hips.” She was twenty-five; he was fifty-one.

He used trips to the airport for meeting literary friends as excuses for seeing her. She also met him in a woods by the abbey, bringing a picnic basket and a bottle of sauterne, where, he wrote, “[we] drank our wine and read poems and talked of ourselves and mostly made love and love and love.” 

The affair only lasted 6 months, and the article does not explain what happened in his life after that.

Oh.  Wikipedia explains that only a couple of years later (1968) he died in somewhat odd circumstances in Thailand::

On December 10, 1968, Merton was at a Red Cross retreat center named Sawang Kaniwat in the town of Samutprakarn near Bangkok, Thailand, attending a monastic conference.^[35] After giving a talk at the morning session, he was found dead later in the afternoon in the room of his cottage, wearing only shorts, lying on his back with a short-circuited Hitachi floor fan lying across his body.^[36] His associate, Jean Leclercq, states: "In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock."^[37] Since there was no autopsy, there was no suitable explanation for the wound in the back of Merton's head, "which had bled considerably." ^[38] Arriving from the cottage next to Merton's, the Primate of the Benedictine Order and presiding officer of the conference, Rembert Weakland, anointed Merton.^[39]
 
In 2016, theologian Matthew Fox claimed that Merton had been assassinated by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. James W. Douglass made a similar claim in 1997. In 2018, Hugh Turley and David Martin published The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, questioning the claim of accidental electrocution.[

Matthew Fox is, I think, a bit of a nut.  But still, it does seem a curious and abrupt end to a complicated life.

Socrates got around

An essay at Aeon notes that there is reason to suspect that Socrates had a much more complicated love life than Plato let on (or knew about?):

The enduring image of Socrates that comes from Plato is of a man of humble background, little education, few means and unappealing looks, who became a brilliant and disputatious philosopher married to an argumentative woman called Xanthippe.  Both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ other principal biographer, were born c424 BCE, so they knew Socrates (born c469 BCE) only as an old man. Keen to defend his reputation from the charges of ‘introducing new kinds of gods’ and ‘corrupting young men’ on which he was eventually brought to trial and executed, they painted a picture of Socrates in late middle age as a pious teacher and unremitting ethical thinker, a man committed to shunning bodily pleasures for higher educational purposes. ....

Plato’s pupil Aristotle and other Ancient writers provide us with correctives to the Platonic Socrates. For instance, Aristotle’s followers Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli preserve biographical snippets that they might have known from their teacher. From them we learn that Socrates in his teens was intimate with a distinguished older philosopher, Archelaus; that he married more than once, the first time to an aristocratic woman called Myrto, with whom he had two sons; and that he had an affair with Aspasia of Miletus, the clever and influential woman who was later to become the partner of Pericles, a leading citizen of Athens.

The man child President, continued

Lots of reporting about how Trump and his Homeland Security boss fell out over the matter of whether the government agency has to follow the law.  (Guess which one thought it could be ignored.)

Now, his Secret Service head is going too.  Vox notes (emphasis on the last paragraph):

The Secret Service said in a statement after the incident that it was Mar-a-Lago, not them, who decides who and who does not get into the property. Trump just last week said that he “could not be happier” with the Secret Service, which has “done a fantastic job from day one.”

CNN reports that Alles’s ouster is not related to the Mar-a-Lago incident, and an official told NBC News that it “was not based on any single event.” The Times, however, reports that Trump sought Alles’s resignation “in part” because of the incident.

The Times also reported Trump had “soured on” Alles and that the director had been told about 10 days ago to come up with an exit plan for himself and devise a timeline. According to the report, Trump made fun of Alles’s appearance and called him “Dumbo” because of his ears.

Terrible politics noted

The Coalition, which by rights should come out of the forthcoming federal election with a mere handful of seats and be rebuilt from the ground up, knows how to run a dishonest populist scare campaign and is out and running with one early.

Labor needs to be countering this ASAP - sad to say, but populist lies of this type lodge in brains early and can be near impossible to displace.   Here are some amusing tweets about it today:

Seekers remembered

Australian Story last night gave a quick history of The Seekers.  I had forgotten how relatively briefly they had been together.   Also how young Judith Durham was when they started (she was 19 when they left for England.) 

Their heyday was when I was in primary school, but you know, I never cared for them.  There is something folk melancholic about their sound which infects all of their songs, even the ones which are meant to be more upbeat. 

They seem to be nice enough people, though.

Things that are getting way out of hand

1.   Vegans.   Yeah sure:  holding up city commuters, and running onto farms you don't like is really going to convince meat eaters that they ought to stop.   And I say that as someone who has been musing about animal welfare lately.   Really, their behaviour is just that of anti-social jerks, and serves no educative or persuasive role at all.  

2.   Reality TV, particularly Married at First Sight.   Lots of people seem very perturbed about this show and its puzzling popularity.   (Michael Rowland of ABC breakfast starting a lot of complaints.)  Should just be banned as entirely unethical.

3.   Nationalist leaders blowing up satellites to show how modern macho strong their nation is, and thereby pointlessly increasing the dangerous cloud of orbital debris that risks the safety of all spaceflight in future.  It's such a stupid thing to do.

Just how smart is Keith Windshuttle?

I see from a scan of Catallaxy that Keith Windshuttle from Quadrant has taken the extraordinary step of claiming that the George Pell accuser fabricated his complaint by copying one from the US.   I won't link to the Windshuttle claims.

This seems extraordinarily foolhardy when the matter is undergoing an appeal which could, quite possibly, decline to set aside the conviction.   Windshuttle thinks the stories are so similar that it is self evident that the latter is copying the former - I would bet that many people (even one at Catallaxy has said so!) do not see it as so clear cut at all. 

Furthermore, Windshuttle acknowledges we have not read the full testimony of the complainant - making him attempting a comparison an unwise exercise in the extreme.

Maybe I am missing something here, but why wouldn't the Windshuttle story be a case of defamation if the appeal upholds the conviction?   Is he simply relying on the complainant not wanting to go through the public exposure of a defamation action?   Again, seems a very, very unwise thing for Windshuttle to assume. 

Drugs, culture and meaning

I've been seeing quite a bit about the US opioid drug problem lately:   a recent Foreign Correspondent episode, mainly based in San Francisco, I think - showed the level of homelessness and filth in that city caused by the epidemic;  a bit of a Louis Theroux show from 2017 on Huntington, Virginia (called "Dark States - Heroin Town"), where he was talking to some high guy living in a tent by a river; a post at Reddit with a photo showing one young guy injecting another in an alley behind someone's suburban house (with commenters quickly guessing - correctly - that it would be in Ohio.  Some other commenter said he lived in San Francisco and would be lucky to only see 4 people a day shooting up.)

I have always trouble getting my head around how people get into addiction of this kind.  Sure, there has been a large element of "accidental" addiction via the over prescription of opioids in the US, but how people with no medical need for an opioid choose to try such a notoriously addictive drug and risk addiction - and not recognise the warning signs of a serious addiction problem early in its use - seems to cry out for an explanation even while another part of my brain says "no, you will never be satisfied that anything about this makes sense."

There is the strong temptation to look at meta social/culture explanations, and the best recent example of the genre is Andrew Sullivan's lengthy piece in New Yorker Magazine that's a year old now.   I've only just read it in full, though.

It's a good very piece, I think, giving a lot of background history both of the recent American experience, and some of the history of opiate use in both England and the US as well.

And he does indeed go all meta-cultural and meta-economic at the end:

It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.

This was always a worry about the American experiment in capitalist liberal democracy. The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone. The American project always left an empty center of collective meaning, but for a long time Americans filled it with their own extraordinary work ethic, an unprecedented web of associations and clubs and communal or ethnic ties far surpassing Europe’s, and such a plethora of religious options that almost no one was left without a purpose or some kind of easily available meaning to their lives. Tocqueville marveled at this American exceptionalism as the key to democratic success, but he worried that it might not endure forever.

And it hasn’t. What has happened in the past few decades is an accelerated waning of all these traditional American supports for a meaningful, collective life, and their replacement with various forms of cheap distraction. Addiction — to work, to food, to phones, to TV, to video games, to porn, to news, and to drugs — is all around us. The core habit of bourgeois life — deferred gratification — has lost its grip on the American soul. We seek the instant, easy highs, and it’s hard not to see this as the broader context for the opioid wave. This was not originally a conscious choice for most of those caught up in it: Most were introduced to the poppy’s joys by their own family members and friends, the last link in a chain that included the medical establishment and began with the pharmaceutical companies. It may be best to think of this wave therefore not as a function of miserable people turning to drugs en masse but of people who didn’t realize how miserable they were until they found out what life without misery could be. To return to their previous lives became unthinkable. For so many, it still is.

If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people.

That sounds pretty convincing - but it also sets up a sort of hopelessness towards the issue if no one knows how you go about recovering the type of communitarian values, support and sense of meaning the loss of which this theory argues is the reason why so many turn to drugs. 

I also tend a bit towards scepticism when thinking about how addiction to alcohol, if not opiates, has been a serious problem in the past in societies where, on the face of it, adherence to religious practice was still important.

I have to think about this some more.  And read some more.

Update:  Good grief, Sigmund.   From this rather interesting article "Historical and cultural aspects of man's relationship with addictive drugs", I get this quote:

Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Kraepelin, laid the ground for the psychological approach to addiction. Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess in 1897: “...it has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ”primal“ addiction and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc - come into existence.”²⁰

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