The gripping hand

A somewhat interesting article at Nautilus about how much we should (or shouldn't) read into studies showing that grip strength is weakening pretty rapidly in us modern humans.   (Well, Americans in particular.)

I liked this bit of history:

Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.”⁹ Many could do it for upward of a minute.  In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”

Going back further:

As the evolutionary biologist Mary Marzke argues, our hands today were literally shaped around millions of years of using and making tools (our cerebral hemispheres, notes John Napier, author of the classic study Hands, expanded as our tool making did). The human hand became an almost perfect gripping machine. That long opposable thumb, enabling what has been termed the “power grip” and the “precision grip,” looms most obvious. But consider also the Papillary ridges, those tougher, thicker parts of the skin, found on the human heel, but also on the human palm—a vestigial souvenir from our time as quadrupeds. Their placement, as Napier writes in Hands, “corresponds with the principal areas of gripping and weight bearing, where they serve very much the same function as the treads on an automobile tire.” Eccrine glands perfectly line the papillary ridge, Napier notes, providing a grip-enhancing “lubrication system.” This sort of “frictional adaptation” does not kick in until we are around 2, writes Frank Wilson in The Hand (before then, we just grip harder).

Gripping, then, is a deep part of our biology and evolution as a species. It’s also part of a long story in which we have been getting weaker for millions of years, largely because of a decline in physical activity. The human skeleton, for example, is “relatively gracile” (weak) compared to hominoids.¹² Those infants tested by Robinson, stout hangers-on though they may have been, can hardly compete with infant monkeys, who can hang on for upward of a half hour. Why? Because they need to. “Modern infants,” as one researcher notes, “as well as their fairly recent human antecedents, do not need to hang on with their hands and feet from the moment of birth.”¹³

I would have guessed that men not sexually partnering much in countries like Japan or China might have activity which compensates for gripping strength loss from automation, if you get my drift.   But perhaps I am wrong...

Zuck watches

From Gizmodo, I like the understated humour of the last line:

Indicating that the ways Facebook can continue to erode trust in its products are evidently limitless, Bloomberg reported Monday that the social media network has used specialized toolkits to monitor and shepherd the public’s opinion of the company and its top brass. This reportedly involved the use of two programs: one titled Stormchaser and another dubbed Night’s Watch, evidently a Game of Thrones reference.

Citing former employees and internal documents, Bloomberg reported that Stormchaser has been used by Facebook employees since 2016 to track viral content involving everything from “Delete Facebook” campaigns to claims that Zuckerberg is an alien (big if true).

Rainfall intensification noted

There's been a lot of flash flooding in Washington DC area:

Reagan National Airport, an official observing site, saw 2.79 inches of rain in just one hour, beating a 1945 record of 2.05 inches, The Washington Post reported.

That's climate change for you, after 1 degree globally.

Let's throw the dice and see what its like under 2 degrees, hey my stoopid reader JC?

Update:   for anyone who wants to argue about attribution to climate change, as I have recently said in comments, intensification of rainfall is being widely studied and the connection with climate change is clear - it was predicted to increase and it is increasing.  If a place breaks a previous rainfall intensity record by a very high margin, then I don't think there is much to argue about in terms of attribution.  Have a look at this, for example:

Extreme precipitation has been proposed to scale with the water vapor content in the atmosphere. The Clausius‐Clapeyron (CC) relation describes the rate of change of saturated water vapor pressure with temperature as approximately 7% °C⁻¹ and sets a scale for change in precipitation extremes in the absence of large changes to circulation patterns [Trenberth et al., 2003; Pall et al., 2007]. Analysis of observed annual maximum daily precipitation over land areas with sufficient data samples indicates an increase with global mean temperature of about 6%–8% °C⁻¹ [Westra et al., 2013]. However, observational relations between precipitation extremes and temperature (or dew point temperature) show that subdaily precipitation extremes may intensify more than is anticipated based upon currently available modeling and theory [e.g., Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010]. This seems to be a property of convective precipitation and may be explained by the latent heat released within storms invigorating vertical motion. This mechanism is thought to generate greater increases in hourly rainfall intensities [Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008; Berg et al., 2009; Hardwick‐Jones et al., 2010; Westra et al., 2014; Blenkinsop et al., 2015; Lepore et al., 2015], with a stronger response in convective systems than in stratiform systems [Berg et al., 2013]. This suggests that hourly extremes will probably intensify more with global warming than daily extremes [e.g., Utsumi et al., 2011; Westra et al., 2014].

Which is why I would ban music festivals, if I were benevolent dictator

Inspired by this report in the SMH:

Almost all patrons at music festivals take illicit substances, with MDMA the "drug of choice", an inquest into the deaths of six young people was told yesterday.

The coronial inquest heard that NSW Ministry of Health data indicated up to 90 cent of young festival patrons used drugs.

Look, concerts that are done and dusted within 3 hours of an evening, and finish by midnight - that is fine.

Music festivals that last for 24 or more hours, involving crushing masses of people, in the sun, with poor sanitation and leaving huge piles of rubbish:   should be stopped and people sent away to just hang around having fun in smaller groups, like in my day.

Drug flooded music festivals, gay parades that involve celebration of clear fetishes, and people who want all drugs liberalised are examples of the liberalism's tolerance of hedonism gone to excess.   

I don't want any argument from any libertarian reader - I bet Putin doesn't care for music festivals in Russia, and you've got the hots for Putin, so let's agree that he is right on something for once.

Samuelson on Putin

Robert J Samuelson's column in the Washington Post on Putin's "liberalism is dead" comments seems pretty fair to me.

First, he says post WW2 liberalism is strapped for cash, due to slowing economic growth, an ageing population and uncertainty as to how far budget deficits can stretch.   (He probably could have added things like the revival of Lafferism, the race to the bottom in terms of international competition to reduce tax takes, and gigantic companies that play the "hide the pea" shell game to avoid paying tax.)

Secondly, he writes this, which is worth quoting in full (with my emphasis):

We’ve long governed by hope: a better life. In its loftiest state, postwar liberalism was expected to have a cleansing effect on countries’ social climate, liberating people from prejudice and small-mindedness. The liberal appeal spanned the ideological spectrum. In the United States and Europe, centrist governments of the left and right ruled.

It is this promise of a morally elevated electorate that Putin panned. The trouble, professor Putin lectured to the Financial Times, is that many people have lost faith in the liberal idea. They have moved on. Now, Putin and his fellow travelers, including President Trump and others, propose that we govern by fear: a dread of outsiders.

No one should suppose that Putin’s nationalistic substitute for lapsed liberalism will make the world a kinder, gentler or more stable place. The liberal ideal presumed, perhaps naively, that people could be brought together by common interests and common values. The nationalistic alternative takes as its starting point the view that there will be winners and losers.

People feel threatened. Liberal high-mindedness has created a backlash by justifying policies and practices that are unpopular with large swaths of the population — open borders, unwanted immigration, globalization and multiculturalism. Liberal policies “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population,” Putin said.

 

People value their national identities. They generally fear policies and practices that would erode these identities. One question in a 2016 Pew study asked whether increases in the number of ethnic groups, races and nationalities made their countries “a worse place to live.” Large shares of Greeks (63 percent), Italians (53 percent) and Germans (31 percent) said “yes.”

We are straddled between two systems. The daunting task is to salvage the best of postwar liberalism while, at the same time, acknowledging the importance of national identities and sovereignty. It may be a mission impossible.

I tend to think that this is too pessimistic.   I reckon that the West has had a fright over two things - immigration surges from war torn and economically savaged regions, ironically sometimes contributed to by interventions from the West; and the unevenness in global economic growth (also, somewhat ironically, caused by the globalisation as promoted by Western economists as a good thing overall - which it is.)  

It's hard to "cure" continued conflict in the Middle East and within Islam, which has remarkably wide-reaching effects.   But I find it hard to believe that the swing to conservatism in parts of Islam will continue to have long term wins.   And the irony is that increased isolationism internationally of one type (economic) can worsen internal conflict and encourage the unwanted immigration.   It's all very tricky to balance, but I don't see that the retreat into all forms of isolationism can do anything other than hurt.

As for the economic problem - the cure for that is probably more "liberalism" in economics policy, not less - with inequality being addressed by better tax targetting, and (to be honest) reduced expectations of unending growth.   As many on the Right like to point out, most of the poor being poor in the West is not the same thing as it was 100 years ago.   That shouldn't be used as an excuse for not caring about inequality, but it is relevant to the questions of expectations of growth.   (Yes, I know, growth lifts all boats; but ageing and then declining populations change the picture somewhat.)

Desert capital

Another Youtube I saw on the weekend:  I had missed the news that Egypt was building a new capital city outside of Cairo.  I thought the country was economically in the dumps, but the government is spending a lot of money on this, and the army is apparently in charge of building this place.  Quite interesting:



An article at The Conversation talked about it last year:

Built on a site located 45 kilometres east of Greater Cairo, the city will feature a new presidential palace, a new parliament, a central bank and business district, an airport and a massive theme park, alongside housing for 6.5m people.

 

Parts of Australia pretty warm too

From the local Tamworth news:

So far, this winter in Tamworth has been unusually dry and warm.

This June fell well short of the month's long term average rain with just 16.4mm which was only slightly greater than one quarter of the month's mean, 57.7mm.

The city hasn't seen a drop of yet in July; a month which typically brings 45.6mm.

Top temperatures in the middle month of winter are tracking at record highs in 2019.

Thermometers are peaking at 20.7 degrees in July which is 4.5 degrees above the average.

June was a little warmer than usual as well, climbing 1.2 degrees above the standard set in the last 25 years.

Dry and warm winter could likely prolong Tamworth's water restrictions as Chaffey Dam's capacity continues to fall.

The dam, which is currently the chief supply for Tamworth's population, fell to 23 per cent recently.

That's a pretty significant top temperature above average, by the sounds.

All about Jason

Heh.  Not you, Jason.  But this Jason:

After 59 years of service, Jason, the famed science advisory group, was being fired, and it didn't know why. On 29 March, the exclusive and shadowy group of some 65 scientists received a letter from the Department of Defense (DOD) saying it had just over a month to pack up its files and wind down its affairs. "It was a total shock," said Ellen Williams, Jason's vice chair and a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "I had no idea what the heck was going on."

The letter terminated Jason's contract with DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDR&E) in Arlington, Virginia, which was Jason's contractual home—the conduit through which it was paid for all of its government work. So, in effect, the letter killed off all of Jason's work for defense and nondefense agencies alike.

I'm pretty sure I have never heard of this group before.  And the article is a bit odd, in that it calls it "famed" in the first sentence, but the headline calls it "a secretive group".  I suppose you can be both.  Anyway, its origins:

Can a group created during the Cold War's nuclear and missile races, when the U.S. government was keenly aware it needed scientific advice, survive today?...

Jason was created in 1960 by a group of physicists who had summers off and were familiar with government consulting. They also had prestige: Eleven early Jasons—including Charles Townes, Murray Gell-Mann, and Burton Richter—eventually won Nobel Prizes. Their main customer was DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which originally dubbed them Project Sunrise—a name that seemed presumptuous to them. So, inspired by Mildred Goldberger, wife of one of the founding members, they renamed themselves in honor of the mythical Jason, leader of the Argonauts.

The name change was a small but telling example of the group's independence. "I used to tell sponsors from the get-go," says Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas in Austin (UT Austin) and Jason's head from 2005 to 2011, "that we tell people things they might not want to know."...

 In Jason's early decades those problems were physics-related defense questions, like how to detect the infrared signals of an enemy's missile launch or decipher the seismic signals of an underground nuclear weapon test. In an early study for the Navy, Jason devised a communications system for nuclear submarines, first called Bassoon, that bounced low-frequency radio signals off the ionosphere and into the oceans. It operated from 1989 until 2004, when the Navy declared it an unnecessary Cold War system.

During the Vietnam War, Jason designed a forerunner to the electronic battlefield: an anti-infiltration barrier that linked hidden acoustic and seismic sensors on the ground to bombers and artillery. In the mid-1980s, the group invented a way for telescopes to detect and compensate for the jitters caused by atmospheric turbulence, by using a laser to create an artificial guide "star"—a glowing spot high in the atmosphere. The technology, intended for tracking satellites and missiles, remained classified until 1991, when lobbying by Jasons helped convince the Air Force to open it up to astronomers. In 1989, the group reviewed the Star Wars antimissile program called Brilliant Pebbles, judging it technologically unsound; the program was canceled in 1993. In 1995, Jason's study on what could be learned from small nuclear tests—not much—helped convince then–DOD Secretary William Perry to recommend that the United States sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (The Senate, however, refused to ratify it.)

With the end of the Vietnam and Cold wars, Jason members began to branch out from physics and engineering. In 1977, they did their first assessment of global climate models and later advised DOE on which atmospheric measurements were most critical for the models. Since the mid-1990s, Jason has studied biotechnologies, including techniques for detecting biological weapons.

When "the hair of the dog" might really save you..

A report from a Filipino news site talks about recent poisoning there from people drinking cheap gin, probably due to methanol content.  Actually, Googling the topic, I see that 6 people died in Penang recently from it (19 sickened in Malaysia in a recent period), and I think it's still suspected in the recent Dominican Republic tourist deaths.  So, it's a pretty topical subject.

Anyway, the Filipino story explains how this tasteless alcohol works:

Lim said naturally produced methanol is safe. It only becomes poisonous when it is ingested and converted into formic acid and formate in the body.

When mixed with ethanol, methanol doesn’t immediately metabolize. However, Lim explained that ethanol exits the body through exhalation, leaving methanol in the body to break down.

“You wait a bit of time for (methanol) to break down to formic. In our studies, it takes a minimum of 6 hours,” she said.

The formic acid will then seep into the bloodstream and spread throughout the body. “It is very acidic and it damages the eyes,” Lim said.

OK.  Here's the part that surprised me (my bold):

While initial symptoms are similar to regular alcohol intoxication, Lim said people should be alarmed when they are still experiencing a severe hangover after 12 hours.

“If after 12 hours you are still not feeling well . . . You are vomiting, you feel weak and your head hurts, you need to consult a doctor,” she said.

While it may sound counterintuitive, Lim said taking gin or other hard drinks will help a victim if it will take time to reach a hospital, because ethanol contained in those drinks will help slow the breakdown of methanol.

“Even if you’re not sure if the drink has been contaminated with methanol . . . It’s still going to be an antidote (because it has ethanol),” she said.

At the hospital, methanol poisoning patients are then given more ethanol, a bicarbonate to buffer the acidosis then folic acid to convert the toxic formate into carbon dioxide and water.

“But it’s dialysis that will really remove the methanol from your body,” Lim said.

There you go.  I might have saved a reader's life.  Either that or ended a marriage when some spouse thinks their partner is definitely a chronic alcoholic for drinking when really sick with a hangover...

Military cooking

This came up, for some reason, as a recommended video on Youtube this morning, and it was surprisingly interesting.   A New York pizza chef goes on board a (pretty modern looking) US Navy ship to help out in the galley.

Dang, seems I can't embed it.  Here's the link.  17 minutes but it's worth it.

Update:  I can embed from another computer.  Here you go:



Some observations:

*  How extraordinarily young most military personnel on the ship seem to be.  As I asked last week, what would US employment look like if the military was actually sized more in line with your average nation?

*  In the food storage hold, everything just seemed stacked as if it were a land based store.  Not at all sure what would happened to the stacks of crates if the ship was in heavy seas.

*  For a modern ship, the messes and the line up to them still looked kinda cramped.

Dental work in Singapore

I saw this on CNA, but here is a report from Straits Times about it.  It's pretty neat biotechnology:

Patients requiring dental implants often have to open their wallets wide, as well as their mouths.

But a new treatment process developed by the National Dental Centre Singapore (NDCS) could save them at least $2,000 - as well as a considerable amount of time and pain.

Researchers there have developed an enhanced bioresorbable 3D-printed dental plug which promotes bone growth in the jaw, reducing the chances of bone shrinkage after an extraction.

Currently, many patients requiring dental implants have to wait for three months for bone to grow in the tooth socket after extraction.

If too much bone is absorbed and broken down by the body, the patients may need a bone graft, either surgically harvested from their own chin, jaw, skull or hip, or from animal-derived bone - these are expensive and not acceptable to patients with religious restrictions.

With the enhanced 3D-printed plugs manufactured by dental plug manufacturer Osteopore, patients will go through a shorter and less painful treatment process as the plugs are placed immediately after extraction, eliminating the need for bone grafts.

The plug prevents the bone from being absorbed by the body, and facilitates bone growth so that a dental implant can be placed. It then degrades gradually over 12 months, allowing the patient's own bone to fill in over time.

I see that this technology was first reported on in 2016, and this latest report says they are just now recruiting for a large scale randomised trial starting next year.

This biotech stuff sure can take a long time in the testing....

What a difference an accused (and a decade) makes

I love the way that at Catallaxy threads, they are appalled that actor John Jarratt was even charged with a  rape which was said to have happened in 1976 - and are calling on the accuser to be sued or jailed - but when it was Bill Shorten accused of a rape that happened in 1986, they were appalled that he wasn't charged.  

Nothing like consistency, hey?  

For the benefit of a stupid reader

Based on recent comments he has made to my posts about floods, reader JC, who prefers "blog science" over actual science, is plainly still having difficulty grasping that the IPCC has always been saying that climate change means both increased droughts and floods due to a fired up water cycle.

How many times have I had to post on this topic, which ignorant people like Bolt and every single commenter at Catallaxy can never get into their thick heads?    "But Flannery said on TV ...etc" is all they can crap on about -  and I have covered his words, which were more the target of a shallow, wilful misreading than anything elese - years ago. 

Anyway, just to show that talking today about increased floods and droughts in the same breath has always been predicted, here is an extract from the IPCC AR4 report (the volume Climate Change: The Physical Basis) from 2007:

Mean Precipitation

For a future warmer climate, the current generation of
models indicates that precipitation generally increases in the
areas of regional tropical precipitation maxima (such as the
monsoon regimes) and over the tropical Pacific in particular,
with general decreases in the subtropics, and increases at high
latitudes as a consequence of a general intensification of the
global hydrological cycle. Globally averaged mean water
vapour, evaporation and precipitation are projected to increase.
 
Precipitation Extremes and Droughts
 
Intensity of precipitation events is projected to increase,
particularly in tropical and high latitude areas that experience
increases in mean precipitation. Even in areas where mean
precipitation decreases (most subtropical and mid-latitude
regions), precipitation intensity is projected to increase but
there would be longer periods between rainfall events. There
is a tendency for drying of the mid-continental areas during
summer, indicating a greater risk of droughts in those regions.
Precipitation extremes increase more than does the mean in
most tropical and mid- and high-latitude areas.

And:  

Climate models predict that human influences will cause an increase in
many types of extreme events, including extreme rainfall. There
is already evidence that, in recent decades, extreme rainfall has
increased in some regions, leading to an increase in flooding.

And:

10.3.6.1 Precipitation Extremes

A long-standing result from global coupled models noted in
the TAR is a projected increase in the chance of summer drying
in the mid-latitudes in a future warmer climate with associated
increased risk of drought. This is shown in Figure 10.12, and
has been documented in the more recent generation of models
(Burke et al., 2006; Meehl et al., 2006b; Rowell and Jones,
2006). For example, Wang (2005) analyse 15 recent AOGCMs
and show that in a future warmer climate, the models simulate
summer dryness in most parts of the northern subtropics and
mid-latitudes, but with a large range in the amplitude of summer
dryness across models. Droughts associated with this summer
drying could result in regional vegetation die-offs (Breshears et
al., 2005) and contribute to an increase in the percentage of land
area experiencing drought at any one time, for example, extreme
drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by
the end of the century in the A2 scenario (Burke et al., 2006).
Drier soil conditions can also contribute to more severe heat
waves as discussed in Section 10.3.6.2 (Brabson et al., 2005).
 
Associated with the risk of drying is a projected increase
in the chance of intense precipitation and flooding. Although
somewhat counter-intuitive, this is because precipitation is
projected to be concentrated into more intense events, with
longer periods of little precipitation in between. Therefore,
intense and heavy episodic rainfall events with high runoff
amounts are interspersed with longer relatively dry periods
with increased evapotranspiration, particularly in the subtropics
as discussed in Section 10.3.6.2 in relation to Figure 10.19 ...

However, increases in the frequency of dry days
do not necessarily mean a decrease in the frequency of extreme
high rainfall events depending on the threshold used to defi ne
such events (Barnett et al., 2006). Another aspect of these
changes has been related to the mean changes in precipitation,
with wet extremes becoming more severe in many areas where
mean precipitation increases, and dry extremes where the mean
precipitation decreases... 

 Climate models continue to confirm the earlier results that
in a future climate warmed by increasing greenhouse gases,
precipitation intensity (e.g., proportionately more precipitation
per precipitation event) is projected to increase over most
regions ... and the increase
in precipitation extremes is greater than changes in mean
precipitation.

A movie not to watch

There are many reviews floating around about Midsommar - the new horror film by Hereditary director Ari Aster.   Some are good - but some indicate not so much.  (Slate asks openly whether it's OK to laugh at the ending which is "brutal and unhinged", and promptly describe it.  I think the studio is probably really annoyed about that.)   

I thought Hereditary was just awful, and don't understand how it got any good reviews.

The trailer for Midsommar made it look way, way too obvious:  very much like The Wicker Man thematically.   The reviews are pretty much confirming the comparison.  (As it happens, I have never watched much of Wicker Man, but I do know the story and how it ends.) 

I am therefore feeling extremely confident that this is a movie I would hate. 

Quantum computer scepticism

Sabine Hossenfelder, the physicist who thinks a bigger, better particle collider (now that the LHC seems to have discovered just one big thing) would be a waste of money, explains that she has some scepticism about whether quantum computing will ever turn out to be useful, too.

And in the course of that explanation, she comes out sounding sceptical of fusion too. 

So, I'm pleased to have some heavy hitting physicist sharing my scepticism.

That's climate change for you

Axios notes:

AccuWeather is predicting as much as $12.5 billion in damages throughout the Midwest after months of flooding has ravaged the region, according the the Wall Street Journal.

Catch up quick: The first half of 2019 is on its way to becoming the wettest on record due to snowmelt and flooding, largely in the Midwest, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ensuing damage has been extremely costly to Midwestern infrastructure and industries, particularly with agriculture.

• Officials in Iowa are estimating the first round of flooding alone cost the state $2 billion in losses.
• Illinois' state transportation department estimates more than 1,000 miles of road will require cleaning.
• In Nebraska, only 10 of the 21 bridges that had to be closed have reopened, and repairs on the rest may not be finished until fall 2020.

Would be good to know if the economists who did the work on climate change think they adequately took into account the cost of repeated repairs for flood damage in future years.  (Strong hunch that they didn't.)

Rather like Trump, I imagine

Not sure if The Sun is at all a reliable source, but it claims this:

SECURITY chiefs kept top secrets from Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary over fears he couldn’t be trusted, The Sun has been told.

Intelligence bosses were “anxious” about sharing the most sensitive information with the frontrunner in the race for No10 during his two years in the Cabinet.

The nerves were sparked by at least two instances when Boris was accused of revealing classified information by mistake.

The order to cut him out came directly from PM Theresa May, The Sun has also been told.
“Pre-meetings” were held before key discussion forums such as the Government’s COBRA emergency committee that Boris attended for security chiefs to brief the PM on alone.

You would have to strongly suspect that intelligence delivery to Trump is also hedged - how on Earth could they trust the Tweeter in Chief completely??

The stories of Boris's incompetence and unreliability (and dis-likeability) are legion now.  

Movie financing in the news

The Hollywood producer Riza Aziz, stepson of the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, has been arrested on suspicion of money laundering.

Mr Aziz, who produced The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was detained in Malaysia and bailed.

US prosecutors have accused Mr Aziz's production company of misappropriating money from a multi-billion dollar state fund to finance the film.

Mr Aziz's stepfather and mother have both been charged with corruption.

Mr Aziz will appear in court on Friday to face charges, said Latheefa Koya, the head of Malaysia's anti-corruption agency.

Here's the link

More record rainfall in Japan

I pointed out back in 2017 that Japan is now, nearly every summer, coming up with new record rainfalls and bad floods (often, given their landscape, accompanied by landslides and a lot of infrastructure damage.)

It continues in 2019:

More than 1 million residents across the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan were ordered to evacuate Wednesday amid torrential rains and warnings of severe flooding and landslides.

According to the latest weather forecast, the massive downpour, which has already brought record levels of rain over the past 72 hours, is set to intensify over the next 12 hours.

This is real, damaging, climate change in action.

On 50 year anniversaries

It seems to me that the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the month long Pride events, are attracting much more media and pop culture attention than the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.   (Maybe that will change in coming days, but I have my doubts.)

It's a very surprising turn of events, I think, that shows how very hard the job of futurologist must be, especially when it comes to social views and sentiment.      

A typical pattern

I have been pretty busy today, so not much time to get to deleting Bird poop currently afflicting my comments.

Those familiar with Graeme Bird's history as a serial pest in the Australian blogosphere have had a few days' reminder of what he was like, and why he ends up getting banned sooner or later.

[In fact, sorry to tell you Bird, but your ideas seem pretty much stuck where they were a decade ago.  Your primarily anti-Semitic conspiracies, cosmology and "reverse engineered" physics is very stale.]

As I mentioned before, he's been going through old posts of mine and making comments which I notice because copies are automatically emailed to me.  Hence, I found this at the end of one of his comments last night, to one of my posts about Helen Dale, which is typical of the Bird of old - eventually getting angry or weird enough to throw in a line that sounds like it's from a dangerous psychopath:

In my view the problem was with Australia and not with Helen. She can reinvent her own act every second year, set up any number of protective barriers, to protect the girl and the artist, as much as she wants ...... and its really no-one elses business but her own.

Last time I met her, and last time I talked to her, was before I turned anti-Judaic. Jason can verify this, so don't try and condemn her by association, or I'll come around and slit your puppies throat.

(I presume he has noticed the occasional pic of my pup which gets posted here.)

I think that makes it worthwhile just deleting all future comments from you, Bird:  you're very strange, and  the amusement of interacting with you always wears off fast.

UPDATE:   in response to comments -

*  how have you all missed my dog's photos, such as this one from only a month ago?  (She has appeared a few times before, too.)  Zero marks for observation, everyone. 

*  no, I don't worry that Bird really is a psychopathic wannabe killer - you will note I actually responded to him in comments here in mocking tone, which I would not do if I feared he was actually was a danger to me (or my dog).   But it's still off putting to be dealing with anyone who references, just about daily, an imagined violent fate for his imagined enemies.   I think Jason only found a reference to killing a dog funny because he knows Bird's over the top rhetorical history - but no one near normal makes jokes like that, and he shouldn't be rewarded by normalisation via his repetition of conspiracy think that is ridiculously targeted against Jews, and the violent imagery he often spouts along with it.

*  he has "retracted" the comment, which is nice - but he'll lose his temper again soon enough, or make some bad taste or offensive comment of some kind.  

Hence, I'm just deleting him from now on, but if I am busy - like today - they may linger for a while before they go.

Another Ngo observation

I strongly suspect that many who are outraged that some on the Left are taking a "he asked for it" line on Ngo's attack are the same people who speculate after a lone woman is raped on a dark street that, you know, women really need to be practical about this and be careful not to place themselves in danger. 

[That would make for a good tweet if I could be bothered tweeting...]

Space mold is a worry

If you think that going to live in space might be a cure for mundane Earthly problems like too much mold around your apartment - think again.

Science magazine explains that mold is a persistent problem in the International Space Station - they even have a photo of a patch:

[I would presume that one of the big problems is that bleach fumes are not something you want to have to deal with in a recycling air system.]

What's worse - mold spores can tolerate incredible amounts of radiation:

Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) already constantly battle with mold, which grows on the station’s walls and equipment. That mold, of course, is in a protected structure in low-Earth orbit, where radiation doses are low. Outside of the station, doses are higher—and they would be higher still on the hull of a spacecraft going to Mars or beyond.

To find out what might happen to mold there, Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne and colleagues beamed x-rays and heavy ions at a common black mold called Aspergillus niger, which is plentiful in the ISS. The researchers fired “stupid amounts” of radiation, Cortesão says—much more than encountered on a Mars-bound spaceship (0.6 gray per year) or on the surface of Mars (0.2 gray per year). The gray is a measure of the amount of absorbed radiation energy.

The researchers discovered that the spores could survive radiation doses of 500 to 1000 gray, depending on which type of radiation they were exposed to. Humans, by contrast, get radiation sickness at doses of 0.5 gray and are killed by 5 gray. Cortesão also found that the spores survived large amounts of high-energy ultraviolet radiation, which is commonly used as a hospital disinfectant and has been proposed for sterilizing the surfaces of spacecraft.

Cortesão cautions that her research focused only on radiation and did not include all aspects of the harsh outer space environment. But, she says, at least one older study suggests that mold spores resist radiation even better in a vacuum. Meanwhile, one thing is certain, she says: “We will have spores with us for sure in our space travels. Fungi have been forgotten for the past 20 or 30 years, but it’s time to go back to them.”

In an unwise attempt to string out information from someone who thinks Einstein was wrong...

Graeme, my unwanted nutty commenter, made a contribution recently that people might have missed - I invited him to read a good Quanta article last week explaining a lot about how Einstein came up with his ideas, to see if he might re-consider his position (ha!) - and he responded as follows:

"In an attempt, no doubt futile, to at least get you to reconsider the matter of Einstein and his wildly experimental successful theories...."

They are not even successful a little bit. Show me the data where it was proved that gravity is space bending? Think about your butt right now. There is no space between your behind and your chair to bend. Yet you still feel the force of gravity. So the theory is refuted right there. Yet the oppressive psy-op abuses us from childhood every day. What an incredible menace this oligarchy is when they subject you to that level of brainwashing.

Graeme - ignoring for the moment the nonsensical nature of the part that starts "think about your butt right now" - you would surely know about the 1919 eclipse observations?  As this ESA site confirms, the experimental confirmation was not left there - it was refined over the following decades til we get to this point:

After half a century of similar eclipse observations of the shifting stars, critics still said that there could be a 20 per cent error in the results. They were not accurate enough to rule out newer theories of gravity that challenged Einstein's version. Radio astronomers did somewhat better, with Quasar 3C279 which passes behind the Sun on 8 October every year. ESA's Hipparcos satellite (1989-93) provided the emphatic confirmation of Einstein's prediction. Hipparcos charted the positions of stars so accurately that no eclipse was needed to see the effect of the Sun's gravity. Where previous observations of the shifts had been confined to objects seen within a degree or two of the edge of the Sun, where the effect is strongest, the European satellite sensed the bending of light-rays even from stars in the night sky, at right angles to the Sun. According to the Hipparcos scientists, Einstein's prediction is correct to within one part in a thousand.

 A normal person would say this is experimental confirmation of theory.

What does an abnormal person like you say?

A distinct whiff of martyrdom achieved

There's not enough time in the day to be across all aspects of the culture wars - hence I haven't ever read a lot about the (apparently) long standing strange situation in Portland where alt.righters rally and the so-called antifa counter-rallies, many of the latter in their menacing, face masking get up.   This Vice article, as well as lots of ones by Jason Wilson at The Guardian, explain a lot of the conflict.   Right wingers complain that the city has let antifa take over the streets; left wingers complain the police are biased against them, and inconsistent in their policing.

As for Andy Ngo - the anti-antifa journalist who was assaulted on the weekend by antifa - I didn't know of him til now, but I see he had tweeted this before the rally:

I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland antifa rally. They’re promising “physical confrontation” & have singled me out to be assaulted. I went on Tucker Carlson last year to explain why I think they’re doing this: They’re seeking meaning through violence. https://youtu.be/Z28JxLWy820 

And he had reason to worry.  Mind you, in the video of his assault, he does seem to be standing in the middle of the antifa crowd.  I suppose that's how you get photos if you're a photographer, but really, couldn't he have been a bit more discrete?

Post assault, he has his photos up at Twitter (and at Quillette) and moderates on the Left side are getting to complain about fellow Leftists making light of his assault.  Those on the Right are of course taking the same line, in many cases with higher outrage.

So, I agree - those who assaulted him should be identified if possible and prosecuted, and antifa no doubt harbours some thugs out for a fight and don't care about criminality of their actions.

But Ngo's before and after assault behaviour does carry a very strong whiff of martyrdom desired and achieved.   I think it's fair to take that into account when considering the bigger socio-political meaning of the event.

American Made - recommended

American Made, the 2017 Tom Cruise movie which I was tempted to see at the cinema, but it made little money and came and went very quickly,  has turned up on Australian Netflix.  I watched it on the weekend.

It's very well made, and very entertaining - a really good Tom Cruise vehicle.  The director, Doug Liman, also made Edge of Tomorrow with Cruise, and on the strength of those two movies I have to say he's a director to watch, but I see he's been around quite a while, just making movies which I wasn't drawn to.  I've never watched his earlier Mr & Mrs Smith, for example - it looked and sounded pretty silly and over the top in concept and execution - but maybe I should give it a go now.)

As usual, in the case of a "based on a true story" movie, I was expecting it to bear anything from about a 25 to 50% relationship to real life.   And I'm correct - after watching the movie, you can go to this quite detailed explanation of what was and wasn't accurate to real life in the movie.   (An awful lot was really based only on rumours of his contact with the CIA - but then again, certain key aspects were true.)

It's not the sort of movie over which I am going to get uptight about its historical inaccuracies, in that it's clearly not being intended as a biopic.  It's more like a fictionalised famous crime figure story, and I can accept that, when it has such high entertainment value.

Post script:  One other thing.  I realised when thinking about this movie that one reason I might like Tom Cruise action movies is that they do not usually (or ever?) engage in big, blood splatteringly graphic examples of violence - there's no shots of brains being blown out of heads for entertainment or shock value, for example, as is so annoyingly prevalent in a lot of movies and cable TV now.    He seems to share my sensibility or threshold as to what is acceptable in movie violence - fists, stabbing and action is all OK, but not to the level of gruesome.

Or am I forgetting something he's been in?   I don't count the silly OTT scenes at the start of Tropic Thunder - that was meant to be satire of war movies, surely.  (I couldn't get far into that movie anyway - for reasons I have explained before.)

Unwanted publicity

The Washington Post has put up some photos from some Swedish photographer's book about his two year trip taking photos of Bachelor and Spinster Balls in outback Australia. 

They are unrelentingly ugly - and with all the dye or paint stained people on show, do not look much like any other B&S Ball photos I have ever noticed.  (Although I am sure that plenty involved people passed out in various states of undress, and vomit stains, have appeared before.)

Anyway, readers of the paper seem to be recoiling in horror, although several have thrown in the observation that this is how they imagine Trump supporting rednecks party too.  

The Australian Tourism Board would probably find it money well spent to buy up all copies of this photo journal book and burn them.

Bird strike

Readers who look at comments would have noticed that Graeme Bird, a complete nutball who is like Alex Jones but with anti-Semitic conspiracies thrown in (and for whom the sincerity of his beliefs is not tainted by the thought that perhaps it is just a money making act), has noticed my blog and decided to start adding his words of wisdom [sarcasm, of course.] 

As I get notification of comments on my email, I see that Graeme spent the weekend going back through the blog making comments here and there - I haven't counted, but I would guess about 30 comments?   While those with an arcane interest in tracking eccentric and lurid conspiracy thought might plough through old posts hoping to find his comments, it is wildly unlikely that such persons exist, and Graeme is just commenting to himself.

He has his own, now unused blog:  I invite him to re-activate it and people who really want to engage with him can do so there.

Graeme is routinely thrown off Catallaxy: one of the few blog administration decisions that I give Sinclair Davidson credit for.    I didn't think there was any simple way to block commenters on Blogger, but it seems there may be.

I will give it a try, because as you can see, he can't help himself for long.   That is, he sometimes tries to "play nice", but the offensive comments regarding Jewish matters spike every now and again, and it's tiresome deciding which reach a threshold that deserve deletion.

In short - go away, Graeme.

Update:  no, I can't blanket ban him.   What should I do?  Just start deleting every comment as soon as it is noticed?

Update 2:  I mean, look at this that he added to my "rules for life" post:

Rule five. When you don't know every culprit in a conspiracy, move to hang the culpable Jews first. Since their reaction will be to offload and betray their gentile collaborators. Then you can scoop every traitor up pretty quickly.

 JC says he's a harmless conspiracy monger who wouldn't hurt a fly.   In fact, I don't think he ever talks about a "solution" - except he makes reference to "why we have to keep moving them on" in a comment somewhere.   And here is he merely arguing to threaten to hang "the culpable Jews", JC?   But he thinks that "they" are behind all sorts of "slaughter" - do you think he has the best intentions as to what he thinks should be done with Jews generally?

Graeme can come and clarify this himself - it may make the deletion of all of your  comments easier.

No redeeming features

Remember when some people at Catallaxy theorised that the Charlottesville driver who rammed into a crowd, and reversed out at high speed, killing a woman and injuring others, might have just been panicked when some anti protest protesters hit his car?   Read some of the comments at this post, which contained these lines:

A white guy, whom I refuse to label, loses his cool, for reasons only known to him, reverses into a crowd of radical leftists and unfortunately killing a woman and seriously injuring a number of others. This single, indeed appalling incident, has become a hole in the dyke incident for Trump, and he buckled and singled out several white nationalist groups by name in his second address on the issue. Not a single radical left group received a mention: this was an undignified capitulation...

The video showed it to be nonsense at the time, but it is the blog for culture war fools, so one referred to him as "that poor boy" who the crowd wanted to lynch, and another who argued that police always recommend that when surrounded by a mob and are in danger, you just keep driving.  

In sentencing the guy today, for life, we hear that he was a hard core neo Nazi since at least a teenager:

Prosecutors said Fields had a long history of racist and anti-Semitic behaviour and had shown no remorse for his crimes.

They said he was an avowed white supremacist, admired Adolf Hitler and even kept a picture of the Nazi leader on his bedside table.

During the sentencing hearing, FBI Special Agent Wade Douthit said Fields "was like a kid at Disney World" during a high school trip to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Mr Douthit read grand jury testimony from a high school classmate of Fields who said he appeared happy and made the remark: "This is where the magic happened."

The statement provoked audible gasps from the crowd that had packed into the Charlottesville courtroom.

The classmate said when Fields viewed the camp's gas chamber, he said: "It's almost like you can still hear them screaming."

As dinosaurs saw it

I had never thought to ask this before:  where are the oldest landscapes on Earth which are pretty much the same as they were in the days of dinosaurs?  An article in Science answers this:

Scientists have shown that several plateaus in Brazil are likely Earth's oldest known landscapes, surviving largely unchanged for 70 million years despite heavy, erosive rainfall. For decades, geomorphologists have fixated on regions where plate tectonics accelerate geologic change, thrusting up mountains, opening rifts, and creating traps for oil and gas. But armed with new geochemical tools that can measure the erosion history of a landscape, geoscientists are turning on to the charms of the slow parts of the planet. Researchers hope these lands, typically plateaus that have had their surfaces armored by rain-induced chemical reactions, can provide new windows to Earth's deep history.

Hey, what's more - it notes that this is research from University of Queensland:

Climbing to the top of the Urucum plateau, a shock of rust-red land thrust 1 kilometer above the Brazilian savanna, is a journey into Earth's deep past. Despite the region's heavy, erosive rainfall, the surface of the plateau has remained largely unchanged for some 70 million years, making it Earth's oldest known landscape. Walk along it and you're only a few meters below the surface that dinosaurs once trod.

That startling picture emerges from a study published this month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by a team led by Paulo Vasconcelos, a geochemist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Until recently, scientists could estimate erosion only by looking at the sediment sloughed off of a surface. But new geochemical tools developed by, among others, Vasconcelos and his colleagues measure erosion from rock that's left behind. “They all converge to the same story,” Vasconcelos says. “Though it's taken some time to convince people.”

Popular show that escaped me

The Guardian notes something that surprises me: 

The most watched show on US Netflix, by a huge margin, is the US version of The Office. Even though the platform pumps out an absurd amount of original programming – 1,500 hours last year – it turns out that everyone just wants to watch a decade-old sitcom. One report last year said that The Office accounts for 7% all US Netflix viewing.

My confession:  I have tried watching a few episodes, and my son sometimes likes to watch it, but it's just not a show that I find has much appeal to me.  

I assume it's meant to be a bit less intensely cringe inducing than the UK version (of which I'm not sure I've even seen a full episode - I really do not warm to Ricky Gervais, although I did find some episodes of Extras pretty good.)  In a way, I find it hard to put my finger on why I don't much care for it:  I think I find the scenarios are still too much straining for humour?   So I am surprised that it's a really lingering success in the US.  C'est la vie.

And suddenly, he didn't like it

I never came back to say what I ended up thinking about the Good Omens mini series.

I thought it remained pretty amusing and very watchable all the way through.  In fact, it was one of few streaming shows that I wanted to binge watch, rather than spreading out the enjoyment as I usually do, as it did play more as a 6 hour movie than a mini series.   David Tennant was very good, but in a way I was more won over by the prissy angel act of Michael Sheen.  It did, from memory, vary from the book a fair way towards the end, and the resolution to the problem of how to prevent  Armageddon was not all that convincing: but nor was it in the book, really.  

Which brings me to a review in the Catholic Herald which is a little odd: 

Good Omens is a travesty of eschatology

Given who wrote the book, that's hardly surprising, is it?

Anyway, what's odd is that the reviewer seems to have enjoyed most of the show quite a lot, but then suddenly turned against it on something like theological grounds.  This is his last paragraph:

David Tennant is marvellous as Crowley; the scenes of him disguised as Mary Poppins and later of his talking to his plants are priceless. Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale seems too dense and simpering, but one gets used to him; he is, after all, a gay angel. As for Gaiman’s travesty of eschatology, best to take it as just another excrescence of trendy atheism: stupid and ultimately risible. 

On the "gay" point:  I'm pretty sure the book (again, this is going back to memory of one reading in the early 1990's) says that Aziraphale was frequently mistaken as gay, given the way he spoke and that he liked to dance in uninhibited fashion; but in fact his lack of genitalia would have shown people their mistake.   There's no disputing, though, that the series does play up the relationship between Crowley and Arizaphale as looking like a rom-com about unfulfilled gay longing.  (Were they mistaken as a gay couple in the book?  I see one review that says so, but I don't recall.)   Anyway, I don't know there is any evidence in the series that Arizaphale is capable of, or wanting to, act on his enjoyment of  his friend's company in any physical sense, just as in the book.  And the final scene of them enjoying lunch was pretty charming. 

So it didn't bother me, and I would be happy to see another series about their adventures, if a good enough story could be found.   I do get the feeling the series has been a hit - there is a lot of fondness for it being expressed on the 'net.

Conservative Party analysis

I like the title:

How the Tories became a Brexit death cult in thrall to Boris Johnson

The article goes on to explain that it appears something like branch stacking (party stacking?) appears to be the explanation as to why the Conservative Party rank and file have decided that Brexit is worth anything:

Surveys can’t confirm whether this so-called Blukip phenomenon is as real as some of the self-styled victims of it, such as Anna Soubry, have alleged. But what they do seem to show is that well over a third of the current Conservative Party membership joined after the 2016 referendum, which some will take as at least circumstantial evidence and may explain why they care more about Brexit than their party’s long-term survival.

What they also show is that, while no deal wins the support of “only” 60 per cent of those members who had already joined the party by the 2015 election, that figure rises to 70 per cent for those who joined after the 2016 referendum, and to an astonishing 77 per cent of those who became Conservative Party members after the 2017 general election.

In short, attitudes on Europe have hardened among rank-and-file Tories; but part of that hardening is due to the fact that some of those with less strident views on the issue may have left the party only to be replaced by Brexiteer-ultras. That, of course, is democracy. But it’s also bloody good news for Boris Johnson – at least until he risks, as prime minister, having to disillusion and disappoint them.

 

The never ending defence budget spend

On a more serious note, have a read of this really good article at New York Review of Books about the ridiculousness of the American defence budget.  

It starts with one anecdote - how many military bands of full time musicians do you think they have?   Answer:  136, with 6,500 personnel, costing $500 million a year.   (It also says the Pentagon has a 4.5 billion dollar "public affairs" budget.)  A 2016 review ended up deciding the band should stay at current levels.

It also notes that the Army has been wanting to stop buying new tanks, as a basically obsolete platform, for years, but Congress doesn't listen.  They have 6,000 of them anyway.

You know how they say that if America didn't have such a high imprisonment rate, its unemployment rate would be closer to other countries?  I always wonder what the rate would be if it had a more normal sized defence force, too.

My Rules for Life (updated)

I thought I was heading faster towards 12, but I'm disappointed to see I had only achieved 3.    But there is another one that occurred to me this morning, so the list is now up to 4:

1.  Always carry a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket.  Always.
2.  Never buy into timeshare apartments or holiday schemes.
3.  If you have a choice, buy the washing machine with a 15 minute "fast wash" option.

and, ta-dah:

4.  Always buy reverseable belts. (You know, usually black on one side and brown on the other.)

Comics knowledge expanded

Hey, I don't think I knew this before: 

The Gay Ghost (later renamed the Grim Ghost, not to be confused with Grim Ghost) is a fictional superhero in the DC Comics universe whose first appearance was in Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942), published by one DC's predecessor companies, All-American Publications. He was created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Howard Purcell.

A little further Googling in image search brings up some amusing, hardly gay at all, results:

and now I see Cracked did have an article in 2013 that listed him as one of the 5 most absurd superheros, with this quote noted:

As for cringe-y dialogue:

 and this:

I am, verily, amused.

Frankenstein disappoints

The second series of The Frankenstein Chronicles was really quite bad.  Very badly written with nothing explained clearly; too many protagonists with sideburns who looked so alike it was hard to remember who was who; a very silly conspiracy; overly gruesome in some of its violence; and things hinted at still left unexplained at the end.  In fact, I wondered if there was a budget problem that meant a longer series that was originally written had to be compressed down into 6 episodes, abandoning much needed exposition.   

Quite disappointing after the pretty pleasing first season.

Not encouraging from Boeing

From the BBC:

US regulators have uncovered a possible new flaw in Boeing's troubled 737 Max aircraft that is likely to push back test flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it identified the "potential risk" during simulator tests, but did not reveal specific details.

Another very stable genius

Gee, Boris is very, very Trump like in his inconsistency:

Boris Johnson has said the chances of a no-deal Brexit are a “million-to-one against”, despite promising to leave on 31 October whether or not he has managed to strike a new agreement with the European Union.

Johnson, the frontrunner to be prime minister, told a hustings that the chances of a no-deal Brexit were vanishingly small, as he believed there was a mood in the EU and among MPs to pass a new Brexit deal.

“It is absolutely vital that we prepare for a no-deal Brexit if we are going to get a deal,” he said. “But I don’t think that is where we are going to end up – I think it is a million-to-one against – but it is vital that we prepare.”

I also saw on TV last night his interview in which he explained his alleged hobby of making buses from cartons - it was very, very bizarre.  Many people on twitter think he was making it up (for what possible motivation, though?) and one wit said that some flunky who works for him was probably working all night creating some to prove it's not a weird jape. 

A detailed look at whether perovskite solar cells will really make a difference

Interesting article at Nature about this - seems remarkably uncertain whether the boosters of this new form of solar cell will win out.

A perfectly normal hobby for a politician

The only explanation I can see for disclosing this is that Boris really believes that the more eccentric he paints himself, the more people will overlook his lies and inadequacies:

Boris Johnson revealed that he makes buses out of old wine crates to relax.

He says he likes to unwind by painting passengers enjoying themselves on his model vehicles.

The former mayor of London, whose term in office included the introduction of a new 'Boris' bus to the capital's streets, was speaking to TalkRadio.

When no one answers an argument

What with Gillian Triggs coming out and (apparently - I have only seen extracts) making some dubious broad brush statements yesterday about religious beliefs and employment, I note that no one in my last thread about the Folau controversy has answered this point.   So let's bump it up to a post.

Who really thinks that those who are painting this as a right to religious expression would be donating money if it were this:   an Islamic sportsman with a high profile and social media accounts who used them to support things that he argues as a conservative Muslim are genuinely, religiously justified positions with plenty of tradition behind them, such as:  it would be fair enough for the law to allow for gays to be stoned to death - such a scare would help some save their souls from Hell;  that the death penalty for Muslim apostasy is warranted; that physical chastisement of a wife can be warranted and reasonable; child marriage isn't a big deal.

The obvious point is this:  some religiously justified beliefs are readily capable of holding reasonable offence for small or large parts of a modern Western society.   A company engaged in a business which wants broad support from its society should generally not have the right to discriminate on the grounds of an employees personal beliefs expressed in the private sphere, but are culture war warriors really trying to tell me that they think my hypothetical Muslim sportsman should also be free to express all his religiously justified beliefs in the public sphere via social media and it would not risk tarnishing the image of the sport that is employing him?     

Those who are defending Folau on this are simply drawing the line, as it suits their prejudice and background, as to where offensiveness in relation to religious statements about homosexuality should lie.

And yes, I know there are plenty of gay folk who go out of their way to find offence, in an irritating manner too, and most are not concerned that conservative Christians are right about their destination in the afterlife.    But nor do I dismiss the fact that Christian (indeed, even Catholic) statements about the inherently disordered nature of homosexuality can cause some angst to the self image of people (mainly young people) worried about their sexuality, especially if they come from a conservative  background.  

I therefore do not consider it unreasonable that, in these circumstances, a sporting body require that its generously paid players not engage in religiously motivated conservative commentary about the nature of homosexuality in the public sphere.   As I understand it, Folau had been warned along those lines too before signing his current contract, but he chose to do so anyway.

This means it is a contractual matter, and he may or may not win on the contractual merits.   He should not win on the wrong headed grounds that it should be open slather for any sportsman to be able to express any view under cloak of religious freedom.

PS:   I also think quite a few sports and companies are over-compensating on the matter of support for gay folk.  I would really like it if we could move past gay pride weeks and events, and find much of the public demonstration that is "pro diversity" to be an embarrassment, with gay pride parades frequently featuring fetishes, for example.   I am in no way "all in" with support for the state of gay social politics as it is currently in society.   But none of that changes my view on the Folau matter.

A funny Creighton column

Adam Creighton has decided that the big tech companies (Google, Facebook etc) companies have too much power.  He's particularly concerned that they have drained traditional news media of advertising money (true), so much so that he's willing to contemplate direct government subsidy of the news.  

Well, you might think, isn't that what we get with the ABC?   No, that's not enough:

Publicly funded media organisations can’t do as good a job. Private media companies have a powerful incentive to dig out bad news, even if it upsets governments, because it sells.

Huh? I thought Adam's paper has been complaining about the ABC "digging out bad news" (when it is about a Coalition government in power, anyway) for decades, which kinda proves public broadcasters don't have to be in the "selling" business to be interested in "bad news".

Creighton appears in The Australian - a paper for which the content over the course of a year is about 95% pure ideologically driven right wing opinion to 1% investigative journalism.  (And some of the latter is just true crime stuff - hardly matters of national political consequence.)    If he would actually come out and note that about Rupert's pet paper - as well as make some kind of observation about the heightened propaganda machine that is the money making machine known as Fox News - he might have a skerrick of credibility.

How much "investigative journalism" does Fox News engage in so as to be bring in the big money, Adam?   You know the answer - nil.   Your boss has monetised ludicrously biased spin as the way a "news" network can thrive, and you have the hide to argue that private media is better at investigative journalism.

His column goes on to complain that the big tech companies real danger is to democracy - because of the way their search filters sought out the news.   It doesn't take too much to read between the lines that his problem is that he thinks that filtering has a "left wing" bias he doesn't like - Right wingers have been complaining about search engines conspiring against them for years now.   (Because they have trouble understanding that, with the awful "we don't care about the evidence" path the Right has taken over the last 30 years, facts now have a clear Left wing bias.)

Nor does he not mention the true and clear danger from IT companies, which is via the spread of deliberate misinformation and lies (masquerading as news), sometimes via foreign governments interested in seeding political disunity, via social media.   

As usual, Adam's a just a silly lightweight who attacks all the wrong targets. 

He's dumbing you down, Jason.  

More anti Boris

A pretty savage, and somewhat amusing, attack on Boris Johnson by his old boss, Max Hastings.  I liked this line:

Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge.

and this:

Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade. In a commonplace book the other day, I came across an observation made in 1750 by a contemporary savant, Bishop Berkeley: “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.” Almost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him.

More Libra scepticism

At The Conversation.

Rugby culture wars

I'm pretty amused at the Right wing culture war outrage about GoFundMe deciding after a few days that it doesn't want to be the conduit for wingnutty people with too much money to fund the legal fees for a guy who has been earning millions for running around a football field.

They now want Folau to sue GoFundMe! 

As with donations to the IPA, this latest story is another example of how wingnutty people are very easily parted from their money.   They don't care how much money the donee may already have, if they think they are getting to be part of a great and glorious culture war it's a case of "shut up and take my money".   

Update:  here's Mark Latham getting uptight -

This from the man who was wandering around Western Sydney with a microphone in 2017 fretting about Muslim views on hitting women, Sharia law and wearing the burqa.    

Maybe Boris is in trouble?

I opined yesterday that Boris Johnson was probably still assured of the Prime Minister job because he is like Trump - the focus of culture war hopes that overcome any consideration of character and past performance.

But I see on Twitter this morning that lots of people are calling out his comments about how Brexit could proceed was based on a fundamental error/lie;  he is also being called a liar about his past association with Steve Bannon; and now the Mirror is running a story that his argument with his girlfriend was because he actually wants to get back with his estranged wife.(!)

It's hard to know which of those, if any, might turn out to be more important.   But it seems his path to the leadership might be more in doubt than I expected.

A bridge made of grass

If you want to see a photo essay about this:

Every year the last remaining Inca rope bridge still in use is cast down and a new one erected across the Apurimac river in the Cusco region of Peru. 

The Q'eswachaka bridge is woven by hand and has been in place for at least 600 years. Once part of the network that linked the most important cities and towns of the Inca empire, it was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2013.

you can hop over to the BBC.  

Libra scepticism

Axios reckons that everyone may be in a panic (or being prematurely enthusiastic - like the troika of RMIT blockchain conference attendees) about Libra for nothing - because it's likely to never get off the ground.

The reasons they give do sound pretty convincing. 

The ridiculous bag wars

It's a culture war thing for the likes of Adam Creighton that the ban on single use plastic bags in supermarkets is a waste of time.   So he's thrilled today to be able to link to an article in The Australian with the headline "Economy falls through our shopping bags", noting that the paper got its hands on some FOI material about companies complaining to Treasury about this:

However, a slew of companies also complained to the government’s chief economic department about the effect that banning plastic bags was having on slowing activity in the $320 billion retail sector.

“Several firms suggested that the introduction of a ban on plastic bags meant customers reduced their consumption to an amount that they could instead carry, and delayed purchases of heavier groceries,” notes the report, sent from Treasury economist Angelia Grant to Josh Frydenberg and his assistant ministers on April 2.

Contacts also warned Treasury that the poor showing in the retail sector would likely see “continued subdued inflation, with grocery deflation only partly offset by higher power prices”.

To the paper's credit, it does go on (after the sensationalist, tabloid headline) to quote an economist expressing scepticism about these businesses' claim.  Adam seems not to have read past the headline.  Or to have any sensible scepticism.