Beyond the burger

Last weekend I went to burger outlet Grill'd and found that they had a new vegetarian burger being heavily promoted.  It was the Beyond burger - which I had read about in articles that usually talked more about how fantastic the Impossible burger is, with Beyond being mentioned as a good (but not as good as IB) alternative.   I still don't know that we can get Impossible here, but they supposed to be expensive in the US and would presumably even more costly here.

So I had one.

Certainly, in appearance it's a totally convincing replica of your standard beef burger made with very finely ground beef.   (Commercially made burgers always seem to be like that  and have little of the coarser quality of a home made burger patty.)  The internal texture was a bit softer than a meat patty, though.

As for taste:   pretty good, actually.  But I was a bit confused as to whether some of the grilled meat like flavour was as a result of it being grilled on the same surface as real meat patties?  I was half tempted to ask the staff if they did grill it separately, as I can imagine it would upset some vegetarians if they didn't, but in the end I didn't bother.  

Interestingly, I see that one American thinks the Impossible burger is over-praised, finding it usually has a mushy centre, and prefers Beyond.   

I am prepared to have another one, perhaps from a different burger outlet, and see if tastes the same. 

What was I saying about Poland? (It's weird)

When not busy burning Harry Potter books, it seems that Catholics like to turn Easter into an uncomfortably anti-Semitic fun time:

Polish Judas ritual 'anti-Semitic' - Jewish congress

The finger pointing Uhlmann

Chris Uhlmann complains in Michael Rowland's piece about nasty twitter criticism of journalists:

While the hyper-partisans are alert to any perceived "bias", Uhlmann believes one side is way more offensive than the other.

"While one of the memes of the early 21st century is the rise of the aggressive right, the emergence of what I would call the "post-Christian left" is much more of a worry," he said.

"They are the moralisers-in-chief and can be absolutely vicious."

Chris has a long standing problem with the Left:   he has a history of sounding like a climate change denier.   Climate change advocates were using it as a substitute religion, he claimed years ago, and with that "post-Christian left" comment, it's clear that he still brings some dubious (and conservative) analysis to modern politics.

As I used to complain, he was always a soft Abbott/coalition interviewer on 7.30 Report when he hosted it.   I just don't think he is very good as a journalist.

I am skeptical of his take that the Left are much more "vicious" than those on the Right.    I suspect there may be more Left leaning attack Tweets just because I think it's a forum more likely used by a younger demographic.   The nasty older wingnut is more likely to use other outlets - Catallaxy, ringing Alan Jones, etc.   Or they can write about their violent death fantasy about people on an ABC show in Quadrant. 

Ooooh...

The first twitter responses to Avengers Endgame are out and all very positive.

Cinemas may as well run it 24 hours a day for the first 4 days here.   It will be that popular.

Some other things that were "Socialism!"

I see that the history of the American Right decrying US government actions as "Socialism!" is longer than I realised.  Have a look at this thread by Kevin Kruse listing some of its ridiculous use in the past.  (Free polio vaccine, for God's sake.)  

What's the current ludicrous revival about?   Probably due to the intractable nature of properly fixing the American health system and the talk of single payer systems, as well as the "success" amongst dimwits of Jonah Goldberg's rebranding of Hitler and Nazis as dedicated socialists from start to end. And, of course, the intellectual rot of the Right caused by Fox News and social media generally.

That difficult "12 years to act" issue

Myles Allen tries to clarify what climate activists should be saying, rather than some of the sloppy sloganeering they are currently using: 

My biggest concern is with the much-touted line that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have 12 years” before triggering an irreversible slide into climate chaos. Slogan writers are vague on whether they mean climate chaos will happen after 12 years or if we have 12 years to avert it. But both are misleading. 

Using the World Meteorological Organization’s definition of global average surface temperature, and the late 19^th century to represent preindustrial levels (yes, all these definitions matter), we just passed 1 degree Celsius and are warming at more than 0.2 degrees C per decade, which would take us to 1.5 degrees C around 2040. 

As the relevant lead author of the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C,” I spent several days last October, literally under a spotlight, explaining to delegates of the world’s governments what we could and could not say about how close we are to that level of warming.

That said, these are only best estimates. We might already be at 1.2 degrees C and warming at 0.25 degrees C per decade—well within the range of uncertainty. That would indeed get us to 1.5 degrees C by 2030: 12 years from 2018. But an additional quarter of a degree of warming, more or less what has happened since the 1990s, is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers (the striving taxpayers of 2030). And what will they think then? 

I say the majority, because there will be unfortunate exceptions. One of the most insidious myths about climate change is the pretense that we are all in it together. People ask me whether I’m kept awake at night by the prospect of 5 degrees of warming. I don’t think we’ll make it to 5 degrees. I’m far more worried about geopolitical breakdown as the injustices of climate change emerge as we steam from 2 to 3 degrees. 

So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half-degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5 degrees C, beyond which lie climate dragons. 

What about the other interpretation of the IPCC’s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a 1 in 2 to 2 in 3 chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn’t mean we have 12 years to act: It means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.

And if we don’t halve emissions by 2030, will we have lost the battle and just have to hunker down and survive? Of course not. The IPCC is clear that, even reducing emissions as fast as possible, we can barely keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees C. So every year that goes by in which we aren’t reducing emissions is another 40 billion tons of CO₂ that we are expecting today’s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.

Some ridiculous things coming out of Mueller

*   How do the members of the Cult of Trump rationalise to themselves that their leader did not have a guilty conscience over something when his first reaction to the news of the investigation was that it was a disaster that would end his Presidency.   I mean, honestly, how can that possibly be interpreted as the words of an honest man who feels he has nothing serious to hide?  

*  I do not understand why there is any debate over Sarah Sanders keeping her job.  She completely made up story to give her boss some credibility, not once but twice.   Shouldn't every reporter's response to her future unsourced claims now be "how do we know you're telling the truth this time, Sarah?"   Her keeping the job is just untenable.

*  Rudy Guiliani - what a hyper partisan joke.  Seriously, how could any Republican hold their head up and say "well, if Hilary had sought to benefit from hacked emails being provided from Russia via an intermediary, we would have said that's fair enough too."  As Jennifer Rubin writes:

Let’s not gloss over what Giuliani in essence is saying: Yeah, why not let a foreign power help him win?! (Someone should ask Trump if he intends to ask Russia to help him out again in 2020.) No, in a democracy we — not a foreign dictator — get to pick our leaders. (In case you think this might have been a slip of the tongue, Giuliani repeated this argument on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He told Jake Tapper that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”)

The Sri Lankan terror attacks

I just had a look at the Wikipedia entry on the history of terror attacks in Sri Lanka, and as I suspected, while it has plenty, they have nearly always been directly political/sectarian in nature and mostly to do with the civil war.  There seems to be no significant history of Islamic terrorism, and at barely 10% of the population, it's not as if they could possibly have ambitions of taking over the place.

So it appears to be one of those particularly pointless examples of extremist Islam attacks which are more like childish tantrums:  "if we can't run the place like we would, we're going to blow you up."   (It might be that the Church specific bombings were in "retaliation" for the Christchurch killings - but that hardly explains the attacks on hotels.)  

I mean, this is what's so frustrating about Islamic terrorism when it happens in nations for which there is no chance of it actually achieving anything for radical Islam.   I can see a bloody-minded point in, say, terrorism within Islamic nations if they think it will weaken a moderate Islamic government and give their brand of Islam a better chance of taking power.  But attack within nations with a small Muslim population?   It's ridiculously pointless.

And as for Sri Lanka's pre-knowledge of likely terror attacks and then doing (apparently) stuff all about it?  It would cause political heads to roll here (sorry, perhaps not the best metaphor on this topic) but will it there?

I think I'll be giving the place a miss as a tourist destination for the next few years.

The Pentecostal PM

I see that Jason has retweeted a James Morrow tweet having a go at those mocking the PM for the shots of his Pentecostal style Easter worship because they would never have a go at Muslim's prostate form of worship in the same way.

OK, let's agree that there is often a Lefty double standard in terms of all Australian Muslims getting a "hey, we respect all of your faith beliefs, save for the extremists who want to blow up people, of course; but we understand they are not true Muslims" versus a conservative Christian  getting a "you and your Church's  condemnation of gay marriage and attitudes to women absolutely appals us and is so medieval and disrespectful."   I get that.

BUT:   the simpler issue here that I would bet is behind a lot of Twitter criticism of Morrison is Australians' dislike of the ostentatious use of religious worship by any politician.

James Morrow ("Prick with a Fork" - he's like those Catallaxy commenters who think they are being amusingly self depreciating in name choice, without realising that most readers just find it accurate)  is from America, I think, where ostentatious worship is still a political thing.  (Curious as to how long it will last, though, given the dramatically reducing faith of the American public as a whole.)

But the Australian standard is to roll our eyes at seeing a politician even just walking into or out of Church when it electorally suits them.  We know most politicians are not regular Church goers and it's only for show, particularly during election campaigns (like Bill Shorten yesterday).  But even for those who do regularly attend (which I think includes the PM?), it's still cringeworthy to see them trying to get self serving publicity by being happy to have the media there as they enter or leave.  Remember Rudd's regular use of that?  It was pretty sickening, especially once the full extend of what a jerk of a boss he could be came to light.

Taking it a step further and getting the cameras inside to watch the PM participation is at another level of cringeworthy.

A dignified politician at most lets cameras show them going in or out, and does not want private worship turning up on the news.

The only good thing about it is that Morrison, who deserves to lose big time, might not realise that it probably hurts more than it helps in public perception?   I think his PR smarts are very lacking.  

Update:   typically, Sinclair Davidson can't understand why many Australians have a problem with Morrison allowing photos of him inside his church to be used during an election campaign.

But he has all the political judgement of a libertarian - which is close to nil.

Hey Sinclair, can you do me a favour and start pressing for more publicity about how many Liberal Party members like the idea of privatising (or "giving away") the ABC?   There's a good chap.
  

News out of Singapore, again

Once again, I feel like recommending Channel News Asia for really interesting news and current affairs content on Singapore and all of South East Asia. 

There is a lot of content on their smart TV app, which I find an easy way to enjoy it.

This story, about the role of social media in the Indian election, is something I found particularly interesting this morning. 

Update:  I also recommend this episode of their "Get Real" program, talking about how social media was used by political parties in the run up to the recent Indonesian election.  

Movies seen

*  Hereditary (on Netflix):   this apparently had a cinema release last year, and received enthusiastic reviews but didn't make much money.  (Although it looks pretty modestly budgeted. and probably was profitable.)     I thought it was a terrible, terrible screenplay:  intended as a spooky/horror family drama, it inspired no tension or frights at all in this viewer, and moved very, very slowly for nearly the entire thing.  The climax became just sillier and way more over the top than necessary.  I said to my son that if he wanted to see a movie that properly built up a sense of mystery and dread as to whether something malevolent is going, he should watch Rosemary's Baby, and when I checked the negative reader reviews on Metacritic,  a few said exactly the same thing.  The one professional critic listed at Metacritic with whom I agreed was Rex Reed - he really disliked it too.

*  Shazam!   Pretty enjoyable, but the more I think about it, the more I realise how much was derivative of other movies and stories.   Like the last Spiderman movie, it featured an overweight Hispanic student (I would be complaining about Hollywood if I were Mexican) and ended with a Ramones song over the credits.  The doors into other dimensions were rather Narnia, as was the ultimate role of the foster family.   The bus falling over the rail had a sequence that was well done, but very reminiscent of the second Jurassic Park movie.  At least the debt owed to Big was wryly acknowledged with a brief floor keyboard bit.  I also thought that some scenes were probably a bit too violent for young kids for whom the movie seeming intended as part of a family audience.   Kids of all ages can handle characters having their head bitten off these days, apparently.   I have to say that some of the human/CGI interactions looked pretty unconvincingly done, too.

Sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but I did for the most part.   I think it could have been better, but had enough laughs to keep me going. [Update:  I also kind of liked that there was one key aspect of the story which was not sugar coated - which was a bit of a novel approach, I thought.]

Some Mueller commentary I liked

Frank Bowman at Slate as to what the report as a whole shows:

The picture of the current president painstakingly etched in the Mueller report is of a man with three dominant characteristics.

First, his narcissism overwhelms all other considerations. Even a more balanced and self-aware person would have found the Russia inquiry politically and personally troublesome. But one cannot escape the feeling (to which Mueller obliquely alludes) that a primary factor in Trump’s desperate efforts to squash the investigation was the fragility of his ego—a manic determination that the epic achievement of his election not be tarnished by even a hint that forces other than Trump played a role. 

Second, Trump believes that, having been elected, the powers of government are to be wielded for his personal and political benefit and the law exists only as a tool to serve his ends. No institution, no law, no set of traditional norms, no professional standard, certainly no moral consideration deserves any deference if it stands in the way of his immediate wishes. 

Third, the thread running through the entire report is Trump’s essential falsity. Mueller confirms that Trump not only lies constantly as part of his public act, but does so privately among his advisers and intimates, and he expects others to lie for him on command. Among the most revealing vignettes is Trump’s effort to convince Don McGahn to lie about the fact that Trump ordered him to secure Mueller’s firing. McGahn, to his credit, refused and showed Trump his notes documenting the order. Trump exploded in astonishment that “lawyers don’t take notes. … I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.” That a subordinate might have personal integrity and be unprepared to sacrifice it on Trump’s command had seemingly never occurred to him....

Whether Donald Trump violated a particular federal obstruction statute is in the end a peripheral matter. The fundamental lesson of the Mueller report is simply that he is fundamentally unfit for office and presents a persistent danger to the integrity of the American legal system. That is the question that Congress and the country must now address. 

Also at Slate on the matter of why Trump denies Russian interference:

The Mueller report also indicates that the president didn’t much care if the results of the Russia investigation made him seem unethical, greedy, or treasonous. He was only worried that any corroboration of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election would undermine the flattering connotations of his victory: that he won America’s popularity contest all on his own. “Several advisors” told the special counsel that Trump believed it would detract from his election triumph if people thought Russia had propped him on top of a few phone books to help him reach the dinner table. 

 Ezra Klein has a very detailed look at the question of impeachment based on the Mueller report (he is against it, but on well considered grounds.)

David Frum summarises what the report finds (particularly of interest to the matter of Julian Assange too - weird anti-Hilary Lefties like Greenwald believe everything Assange asserts):

Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election with the conscious and articulated intent to help elect Donald Trump? Yes.

How important were these interventions to the outcome? Large, possibly decisive.

Did the Trump campaign know that Russia was doing the intervening? From the beginning, cybersecurity experts said Russian hackers had obtained leaked Democratic emails. The Mueller report decisively refutes Julian Assange’s alternative explanation—the lie that WikiLeaks had an “inside source.”

American under a leadership cult

Allahpundit still strikes me as the most sensible conservative commenter at Hot Air - not that I agree with him much of the time, but he's under no illusions about the nature of Trump and his followers.  Here he is talking about Ann Coulter, a nut who has at least retained enough grip on reality to get dismayed at Trump's lying on her pet issue, who has pointed out that Hilary Clinton would have handled the immigration problem better:

She’s overstating her case in the clip below to get under Trump’s and his fans’ skin but a few realities are undeniable:

1. Trump will lie and lie about progress at the border (and everything else) and his more cultish fans will believe anything he says. A Democrat “couldn’t just tweet something out and have everybody say ‘yay,'” an annoyed Coulter notes at one point in the video. For months she’s tweeted sarcastically to counter Trump’s border reassurances. “NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO,” she wrote in a column last month titled “Trump By The Numbers.” There’s not a shred of doubt that a Democratic president presiding over the crush of phony asylum seekers Trump is coping with right now would be rhetorically shredded by border hawks every day, just as there’s no doubt that obstruction allegations about a Democrat like the ones Mueller laid out in his report yesterday would have Republicans demanding impeachment. A Democrat would need to show progress on the border, not merely claim it.

2. The partisan flip side of the argument in point one is that rank-and-file Democrats would have been muted in their criticism of tougher border enforcement measures implemented by a Democratic president. ...

3. It’s possible that Trump’s tough talk about the border without commensurately tough action is actually making the border stampede worse. Various news reports about migrants traveling north from Central America have noted how coyotes and other traffickers have tried to take advantage of Trump’s policies, warning would-be immigrants back home that the border is closing soon so they’d better act now. Trump’s recent “threat” to dump illegals on sanctuary cities might also be backfiring:

Still seems to me that although he understands the nature of the Trump cult, he is way too willing to downplay the disturbing nature of any personality cult in politics and the shocking willingness of Republican politicians to play along because it delivers them power which they fear losing if they contradict the cult membership  "base".   

And what strange bedfellows such American conservatives have - some on the Left, and the libertarian right, who hated Hilary Clinton so much (for reasons I still find pretty puzzling) that they also have developed a shrug-shoulders response to the most impulsively authoritarian, dumb ass President and barely functioning administration by nincompoops we have ever seen.     

Which leads me to the Mueller report:  in all likelihood the Cult of Trump will protect Trump from impeachment, even though there's no doubt that in their heart, a large slab of Republican politicians think it is deserved and would be greatly relieved to see Trump out of office.  (And as soon as he is, there will be yet more stories of his appalling statements and behaviour in private from such politicians suddenly seeking to distance themselves from him.)   But what do Democrats do in the meantime? - they can't really deny that impeachment is deserved, but they know a cult is a cult and that it has all Republicans cowered.

Also, I suspect that the average politically un-engaged American who still sometimes votes sees impeachment as a pretty time wasting exercise almost regardless of the reason, and as such there is risk of it turning them off due to the relative proximity of the next election.    

I strongly suspect that the cowardice of the those Republican politicians who ride on the Cult of Trump's tailcoats will be the great historical takeaway from this weird political era.   

Why never a neat, short-haired Jesus?

We're in the Easter season, so let's talk about it.

I watched some of a documentary Jesus - Countdown to Calvary the other night, hosted by that actor Hugh Bonneville.   It was of some interest, although they kept inserting some pretty cheesy looking  re-enactments with a Jesus played by an actor whose physical appearance was all scruffy helmet hair and anger.   Here:

I mean, does this look like a charismatic bloke?  And the (I think) apostles behind him look like they walked off the stage from the latest production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  
Sure, I suppose Hitler looked a dork yet persuaded millions, but really, I'm getting rather sick of long haired Jesus.

Why?  Because there is a good chance he was pretty short haired, perhaps with a short beard, or maybe with none at all:

When early Christians were not showing Christ as heavenly ruler, they showed Jesus as an actual man like any other: beardless and short-haired. 

But perhaps, as a kind of wandering sage, Jesus would have had a beard, for the simple reason that he did not go to barbers.

General scruffiness and a beard were thought to differentiate a philosopher (who was thinking of higher things) from everyone else. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus considered it "appropriate according to Nature".

Otherwise, in the 1st Century Graeco-Roman world, being clean-shaven and short-haired was considered absolutely essential. A great mane of luxuriant hair and a beard was a godly feature, not replicated in male fashion. Even a philosopher kept his hair fairly short.

A beard was not distinctive of being a Jew in antiquity. In fact, one of the problems for oppressors of Jews at different times was identifying them when they looked like everyone else (a point made in the book of Maccabees). However, images of Jewish men on Judaea Capta coins, issued by Rome after the capture of Jerusalem in 70AD, indicate captive men who are bearded.

So Jesus, as a philosopher with the "natural" look, might well have had a short beard, like the men depicted on Judaea Capta coinage, but his hair was probably not very long.

If he had had even slightly long hair, we would expect some reaction. Jewish men who had unkempt beards and were slightly long-haired were immediately identifiable as men who had taken a Nazirite vow. This meant they would dedicate themselves to God for a period of time, not drink wine or cut their hair - and at the end of this period they would shave their heads in a special ceremony in the temple in Jerusalem (as described in Acts chapter 21, verse 24).

But Jesus did not keep a Nazirite vow, because he is often found drinking wine - his critics accuse him of drinking far, far too much of it (Matthew chapter 11, verse 19). If he had had long hair, and looked like a Nazirite, we would expect some comment on the discrepancy between how he appeared and what he was doing - the problem would be that he was drinking wine at all.

I did post briefly on this topic back in 2011, but it would seem no matter how many times people with knowledge of the era point out that neat hair was common back in the day, we just never get movies or re-enactments which depict him and the apostles that way.

Time for this to be rectified. 

Not hard to imagine why, at all

An article at The Atlantic asks:

Why Are So Many Teen Athletes Struggling With Depression? 

“The professional consensus is that the incidence of anxiety and depression among scholastic athletes has increased over the past 10 to 15 years,” says Marshall Mintz, a New Jersey–based sports psychologist who has worked with teenagers for 30 years. As one 2015 study by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association found, “Many student-athletes report higher levels of negative emotional states than non-student-athlete adolescents.” Though parents and coaches are often best positioned to remedy the problem, they also often make it worse.

Gee, I don't know:  who'd have thought that intense pressure to perform and the enormous amount of time that training can involve at the cost of normal teenage socialising could possibly be harmful? 

Satellite temperatures in the news

As explained in the Washington Post:

A high-profile NASA temperature data set, which has pronounced the last five years the hottest on record and the globe a full degree Celsius warmer than in the late 1800s, has found new backing from independent satellite records — suggesting the findings are on a sound footing, scientists reported Tuesday.

If anything, the researchers found, the pace of climate change could be somewhat more severe than previously acknowledged, at least in the fastest warming part of the world — its highest latitudes.

“We may actually have been underestimating how much warmer [the Arctic’s] been getting,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature data, and who was a co-author of the new study released in Environmental Research Letters.

The satellite record in question is called AIRS, and raises questions about the accuracy of Roy Spencer's UAH record.   But I thought I had seen that UAH did incorporate some Aqua 2 (the satellite) information?   Could be wrong about that, and no time to check.  Spencer will no doubt be weighing in with some criticisms soon.

More from Sinclair Davidson's nut haven

Just when I thought that scenes of (presumably) religious Catholic Parisians walking through the streets singing hymns and lamenting the damage to Notre Dame may have given the conservatives of Catallaxy some heart, I read ageing prat "Percy Popinjay":

The French are quite possibly the most vile people to have existed in human history. Never, ever forget that.

People really need to be more careful with social media

Look at this:  a Democrat (!) politician makes a tweet about something a friend in Paris claims he heard, quickly deletes it, but it's too late. Already it is grabbed by Infowars and nut sites and a key part of a Notre Dame "truther" conspiracy.

Have you ever seen a more intense desire by those on the nutty Right to discover an incident was Islamic terrorism?  

I blame Donald Trump

An unusual topic gets a run in Nature news:

The number of children in the United States who swallowed coins, toys and other small objects nearly doubled between 1995 and 2015, an analysis shows. Some of these objects can cause serious harm when ingested, and possibly even death.

In 1995, an estimated 22,000 children under the age of six visited hospital emergency departments across the country after swallowing items such as marbles, buttons or rings. In 2015, the number had risen to about 43,000, an average annual increase of 4.4% over the two decades. Researchers published their analysis¹ on 12 April in Pediatrics....

Coins were by far the most common type of object swallowed (62%), followed by toys, jewellery and batteries. And between 1995 and 2015, there was a 60-fold increase in the proportion of children ingesting batteries, from 0.14% to 8.4% (see ‘Small objects’). Button batteries — used in watches, remote controls and electronic toys — were the most common type swallowed. These small, flat objects can damage or even puncture the walls of the oesophagus if they become stuck.

Yeah, the cases of kids dying from a swallowed coin battery can be really tragic.  

Cult member in state of panic

Steve Kates seems to have missed the news that the Cathedral is not entirely lost:

Kates, surely Australia's leading academic member of the Cult of Trump, is (like all of the conservative and alt. Right) in a constant froth that All of the Great and Glorious Western Civilisation is About to Collapse.   I am sure if I bother looking back that he was in a huge panic that Islamic State was going to sweep in from the East and be burning down the Vatican within mere years.   (He's not even, as far as I can tell, particularly religious.  A lot of the nutty Right seems to be like that - ex practising Christians who nonetheless think the Christianity is crucial to the ongoing moral and financial health of the globe.)

I see that even one regular at Catallaxy gives Kates a "pull yourself together" slap in the face:

Nice sarcasm!

Count me as amused

Notre Dame and my slidebox

I visited Notre Dame in about 1986, and was very impressed.   On the same trip, I had found the cathedrals of England too light inside to give any great sense of age, and their role felt more as  architectural tourist destination than living place of worship.   But Notre Dame was darker, had the haze of incense in the yellowish light, and held masses which gave a real sense of reverence.   Its atmosphere was distinctly medieval, or how I felt medieval should be, at least.  

I must have some photos of it in the slide box.  I do have a slide scanner that I haven't used for many, many years, and probably gives a much lower quality than what you can get now. 

Still, this gives me motivation to scan some and see what I can "save".  

Meanwhile, I see that its partial destruction is like catnip to alt.right conspiracy theorists.   I'll link to stuff later.

And finally, if ever there is a company which ought to contribute to its reconstruction, it would be Disney.  It is planning a live action version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, and almost certainly it would have been a complete CGI creation anyway.   The company should make the movie and donate all profit to the re-construction.   Given that could easily be several hundred million dollars, it should go a long way towards the task.

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