Everything you needed to know about medieval parasites

AEON has a fairly long essay up on the above topic, full of interesting details, some of which I have not heard before.  Like this bit about a perceived Jewish custom:

At the same time, the filthiness of medieval people should not be exaggerated. Much evidence shows that personal hygiene mattered to medieval people, that they made an effort to keep clean. Popular advice books recommended washing the hands, face and teeth on rising, plus further handwashing throughout the day. Other body parts were washed less frequently: daily washing of the genitals, for example, was believed to be a Jewish custom, and thus viewed with suspicion by the non-Jewish population.

Hmm.  I would have thought that having smelly genitals might have given medieval folk a clue that the Jews were onto something there (whether or not they really did it); but no, apparently not.

The article spends a lot of time noting how perceptions that parasites just arose spontaneously out of the body meant that people didn't hold any hope of preventing them:  they had no idea that they are "caught":

Children were thought to be particularly vulnerable to intestinal parasites because they were naturally warm and wet. Mothers were advised not to give under-sevens too many phlegmatic and viscous foods, such as fruit and oily fish. Convention held that these types of food impeded digestion and unbalanced infant humours, leaving them vulnerable to worms. The susceptibility of adults also depended on diet, among other things. According to Bernard of Gordon, professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier from 1285, gluttons were particularly prone to worms. When the barber of Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, asked another servant why their master had so many lice, he replied that ‘it happened naturally to some men more than others’.

They would try to remove them, though, with some herbal ideas, and others more dangerous.  (A head lice treatment with mercury in it, for example.   I wonder - is it just the shiny, interesting attractiveness of that element that led people to believe it was good for all that ails us?  It has surely caused a great deal of human suffering over the centuries.)

The final section explains how the one part of society that embraced lice and parasites was the clergy, viewing suffering from them as a sign of ascetic devotion to God:

The most devout Christians not only thought about parasites, but also embraced them as part of their daily lives. Numerous doctors remarked on the clergy’s susceptibility to parasites, including John of Gaddesden, to whom it was clear that the religious were prone to lice because of their lack of grooming. Bernard of Gordon blamed their consumption of phlegmatic and melancholic foods. Medieval literature is scattered with examples of monks and nuns who are troubled by lice. In the 12th-century verse Planctus monialis, a young nun complains about the hardships of her life, and begs a young man to sleep with her. Among her problems were the unhygienic conditions in which she was forced to live: ‘The shift I wear is grim, the underwear unfresh, made of coarse thread … there’s a stench of filth in my delicate hair, and I put up with the lice that scratch my skin.’....

Throughout the middle ages, holy men and women ignored conventional hygiene, and consequently suffered. Laurence of Subiaco, a 13th-century hermit, wore a coat of chainmail that continually ripped his flesh and was ‘full of lice’, while St Margaret of Hungary (a Dominican nun of royal birth) refused to wash her hair so that she would be tormented by lice. The 14th-century Dominican mystic Henry de Suso wore a hairshirt and was often ‘tortured by vermin’; eventually, he took to wearing leather gloves with sharp tacks sticking outwards, so that if he tried to scratch at his bites in his sleep he would claw at his flesh. Even rich and powerful churchmen might embrace this form of suffering, concealing their penitential garments (and the creatures that lived in them) under their splendid vestments. After Thomas Becket was murdered in his cathedral, the monks who prepared his body for burial discovered that he wore hair undergarments, and

This goat hair underwear was swarming, inside and out, with minute fleas and lice, masses of them all over in large patches, so voraciously attacking his flesh that it was nothing short of a miracle that he was able to tolerate such punishment.

The monks interpreted these vermin as a form of martyrdom. During the canonisation inquiry for Thomas Cantilupe, his servants reported that his bedding and clothing were full of lice. One claimed that there were whole handfuls of them. Another said that he had never seen so many lice, either on paupers or on the rich.

I think I had read that about Thomas Becket before (maybe posted about it?), but I didn't know that more generally, the devout held that ignoring lice and other parasites was a good thing to show their holiness.

The 21st century is a pretty good place to be.

The continuing threat (Update: yay, threat gone)

Good to see that David Leyonhjelm, despite having a very high profile maintained by saying immature, attention seeking things in the Senate and on social media, could not manage to get voted into the NSW Legislative Council.   He had, incidently, already declared victory (snort): 

Mr Leyonhjelm prematurely declared himself elected just three days after election day when, with just six per cent of the upper house vote counted, he appeared to be a front runner.

I read somewhere that he could still run for the Senate, though, at this election.  He has time to nominate.

Not only his immaturity annoys me - his doctrinaire libertarianism reminds me of that scene in Hitchhiker's Guide where Zaphod speculates that if you replaced Arthur's brain with a simple electronic one that asks for a cup of tea, no one would notice....

Update:  this statement by Leyonhjelm indicates he is out of politics for good.   It appears that (not for the first time, I think) he can't get on with other people in his own party.  I'm not at all surprised.  

Good riddance, I say.   If you want to remember how many times he has annoyed or appalled me, search his name in my blog search tool. 

Weekend in suburbia, update

* Saw Captain Marvel. Pretty much what I expected - quite OK, but a bit Marvel movie bland.  I said to my son that the visual look of outer space fights in Marvel movies looks too generic now - too many mini spaceships making too much movement.  The screen is way too busy for my liking.   It was particularly a problem for me in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.   (I guess it happened in the first Guardians too, but I was more forgiving because of the novelty.)    Anyway, I thought Aquaman was a bit more enjoyable than Captain Marvel, due to its visual novelty.  Of course, I am very curious as to the reception Avengers Endgame gets.  A three hour run time is a bit of a danger sign for bloat, I think.   Still, it is a sure thing to make a billion dollars in short time, probably regardless of reviews.

*  Cooking.

Had half a roast chicken left, and wanted to try something new to use it up.

Came up with chicken tamale pie - almost like a Mexican pizza on a cornbread base.  (Some versions have the cornbread on top, like a real pie.  But I like things that are cooked in one skillet, and brought to the table to cut. I wouldn't know which version came first.)  Not sure how Mexican it really is (I suspect it's more a Tex Mex sorta thing), but it came out pretty good:

I have to record the recipe here, because I used a combination of two online recipes:

Cornbread base:

One cup of polenta
One cup plain flour
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar (I used 1 1/2 and it was quite sweet.  I think a bit less might be right.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk (some say better to use buttermilk, but I used about 3/4 cup of normal milk and the rest was sour cream)
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
Canned corn kernels.  Not the big size can, not the little size.  The in between size.  (OK, I checked:  300 g can.)

Sift flour, baking soda and salt.  Add polenta and everything else and mix.  Spread batter across oven proof skillet (spray some oil on first).  Bake at 200 C for about 30 minutes.  Top will be light brown.  It doesn't rise much, but that's OK.

Topping:

2 cups of roast chicken
a large Onion
two garlic cloves
Capsicum (or whatever you think goes with Mexican I guess)
Half a can of black beans
1 tablespoon or a bit more of taco seasoning
Chili powder and a bit of salt to taste
a cup or so of Enchilada sauce (although you could use salsa or anything really)

You probably get the idea:  fry the onion and capsicum, and garlic, add chicken and everything else, but keep some of the sauce for the cornbread.

Spread some sauce on top of the cornbread, and then the rest of the topping.  Sprinkle cheese on top and put under griller to melt.  Add sour cream and coriander on top before serving.

Dream noted

It's annoying when the alarm wakes you from a dream you're curious to see played out.

This morning, I was with the family at a theme park sort of place - a bit Disneyland, and rather like EPCOT, now that I think of it - and we were inside listening to someone giving an illustrated talk from a podium about the monument city found on the Moon by the Apollo program, and its subsequent excavation.  There were photos, and everyone was listening as if this was something unremarkable - as if it was something that had really happened.

I said to one of my kids something like "I'm not sure, but I think somewhere here today, we've moved into an alternative timeline universe."   I then had the foresight to ask a woman nearby what year it was.  She answered "1975", and I felt vindicated in my surmise.

Then the alarm went off.

Delmar does Socrates

Gosh.  Tim Blake Nelson first came to my attention with his terrific comedic acting as Delmar in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, but I see from the New Yorker that he's no dimwit in real life.  He's written (and is directing) a 2 1/2 talky play about Socrates. (!)

Hoping it's real

I find this guy pretty funny and likeable.   I kind of hope he makes it to the Senate. 

A bit Romeo and Juliet, with chicken

I've fallen out of the habit of checking on the Times of India for some of the oddest crime and legal reporting to be found on the planet. I'll skip linking to the husband jailed for 10 years for unnatural sex story (it is icky), but this one is pretty oddball, while admittedly tragic:

Couple commit suicide after argument over non-veg dinner during Navratvas

Some details:

According to police, on Tuesday evening, the man came home inebriated and asked his wife to cook chicken for him, but when she refused, he entered the kitchen and started cooking chicken himself. An argument ensued between them and the wife consumed poison. Later, the husband realised his mistake and he, too, ended his life by consuming poison....

According to their daughter, her mother used to keep fast throughout Navratras, and she got hurt when her father forcefully tried to cook chicken in the kitchen.

I've just found that the Times website makes cutting and pasting from their stories extraordinarily difficult.  So it's probably not a habit I'll get into again in a big way.

Update.  Ugh:  it's still a nation where the idea of human sacrifice has a hold in some quarters (allegedly!):

 The poor kid's decapitated body was found in a pond in the village, indicating that tantric magic practitioners aren't exactly criminal masterminds.

When too much Game of Thrones is... too much Game of Thrones

Hey, Media:  did it ever occur to you that there are probably quite a lot of people who have never watched an episode of GOT, and have no interest in the show whatsoever?

You can stop talking about it now, OK?

Update:  that said, I did laugh at the recent GOT jokes (there's more than one) on a Colbert "Meanwhile" segment:

 

In Queensland legal news

A paranormal investigator who abused Virgin airline workers over the phone has avoided jail because of his excessive weight.

He sounds an absolute nutter from way back:

The court was told Jones, who refused to identify himself on the calls, threatened staff with legal action, made racial slurs and refused to believe he was talking to someone based in Brisbane.

“Ma’am, don’t tell me in that Filipino lingo of yours, the thing is, let me tell you what the thing is, I’ve got my legal team here, I’ve got the police on the way,” Jones told customer service staff, the court heard.

“So you may need to get off that little Filipino backside of yours and you may want to get onto your Australian head office.

“And they want to go into crash control because voice recordings of you and your Filipino staff abusing me and swearing at me are about to be handed to the Australian Federal Police.”

The court was told Jones had already been placed on a watch list with the airline, which banned him from flying with them in 2010 after he made a number of calls to the company.

Jones also had been convicted of similar offences on three other occasions dating back to 1998.

During those incidents he told public servants they were “going to hell” and threatened to “break kneecaps”.
In his sentencing submissions, Jones’s barrister Rob Glenday said prison would be too difficult for his client due to his complicated obesity.

 Good to know the world of paranormal investigation attracts such well adjusted people!

Yet more "humans live in the stupidest places"

I was pretty blown away by watching World From Above on SBS on the weekend - the one about Algeria.  Some of the desert scenery was very spectacular:  reminded me a lot of some of surreal imagery of sand dunes in The English Patient which can look like a special effect, until you realise they're not.

I didn't realise how large, intricately built (and isolated, of course) some of the oasis based towns in the middle of the desert could be.   There was also this astonishing city, which I have noted before. 

But, as usual, I am always saying to myself - why the heck did anyone ever decide these were good enough places to stay put in?  Why not move out of the desert and closer to the coast?

It's on SBS on Demand, if you live in Australia.

Wealth and (un)happiness

1.  Is this a recent photo of James Packer?:

It might just be the angle, but it makes him look (with that thick neck) a tad Neanderthal.

OK, I'm being mean and don't really know what his character is like - and he has had an unhappy love life and a bit of a difficult upbringing with a high pressure Dad. [Update:  I may be understating with "a bit".   I had also forgotten treatment for depression last year, quite likely continuing, I would guess.  Do anti-depressants cause weight gain? - yes in about 25% of people taking them, the Web tells me.]    He sure does not look like a happy man, and you suspect if he could have chosen a different, quieter path through life, he would have.

2.   I didn't get to read all of the NYT recent feature length look at Rupert Murdoch and his family, but did reach the point where the dysfunctional family had counselling sessions:

As friends of the Murdochs liked to say, Murdoch didn’t raise children; he raised future media moguls. It had made for fraught family dynamics, with competing ambitions and ever-shifting alliances. Murdoch was largely responsible for this state of affairs: He had long avoided naming one of his children as his successor, deferring an announcement that might create still more friction within his family, not to mention bringing into focus his own mortality. Instead, Murdoch tried to manage the tensions, arranging for group therapy with his children and their spouses with a counselor in London who specialized in working with dynastic families.

I'm waiting for the movie "A Very Murdoch Thanksgiving".  

Quick answers to headlines

*  Can a President be Too Old, asks the Washington Post.

Answer:   Yes, obviously.  Like, duh.  For God's sake Democrats, pick someone under 60.

*  Queerbaiting - exploitation or a sign of progress?  asks the BBC.

Answer:  Neither:  it's a sign of the stupid modern obsessive interest in labelling sexuality as part of identity politics.  Go write about something worthwhile.

* I’m an attractive, heterosexual woman who wants no-strings-attached sex. Where do I find non-creeps for that? (From Slate's routinely awful sex and relationship advice column.)

Answer:  No where.  You've already worked it out, why are you bothering asking?

*  Who does homework work for?   (A letter to The Atlantic).

Answer:  what?  Obviously, the person who came up with that headline needed to do more of it.  (Homework, of course.) 

Lovely people

Latest in the "you do know you are admitting to being an unpleasant, uncivil jerk, don't you?", Cassie of Sydney who comments at Catallaxy:

I actually DO stuff. I have confronted ALP hacks in the street…..to the point where the most recent ALP candidate for Wentworth in September and October would run a mile when he saw me walking on Oxford Street. What an effing scaredy cat. I verbally confronted that slag Phelps at the polling booth about her support from GetUp and the fact that she was the biggest phoney around…..she didn’t take too kindly to that confrontation and I could see the colour fade from her face. I do my bit! I am NOT some little pussy cat who tiptoes around people or issues. 

Thanks, Sinclair, for providing a safe place for uncivil jerks of the Right to out themselves.   It's a real public service you provide.

Now, be a good Professor and out your own clear views on climate change in light of recent year's temperatures, and what government policy should be?  

Update:  today, the perfectly stable Cassie has come down feeling ill:

Zapping your way to a youthful working memory

From Phys.org:

Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a mild electrical current improved a form of memory enough that they performed like people in their 20s, a new study found.

Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementias like Alzheimer's disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.

The treatment is aimed at "working memory," the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it's crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said.

"It's where your consciousness lives ... where you're working on information," he said.

The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it's notable for showing success in older people and because the memory boost persisted for nearly an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.

Only worked for an hour after the stimulation?   It's going to take a lot of repeat zapping if it's going to last all day, then.  Maybe older folk (like me, sooner than I want) can just wear an electro stimulating hat all day.

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.