Sort of like the prisons in TV Batman

As a child, I wasn't the biggest fan of TV's Batman, and I still don't care for anything related to the character.   [I've thought of a new way to explain why he does nothing for me - it's the equivalent of the uncanny valley in animation.  By being a purportedly more realistic superhero who just relies on strength and technology, yet still dressing stupidly and with villains that are also costumed up, it perversely feels less realistic to me than the semi mythical or silly physics superheroes like Thor, Aquaman or Superman, where I find suspension of disbelief comes easier.]

Anyway, one thing I do recall from TV Batman was the occasional dig they had at allegedly super liberal rehabilitation prisons:  you know, a super villain being allowed to live with his entourage almost exactly the same as if he were free.  It was a fairly sophisticated joke for a show with a large children's following, really.

So it's remarkable to read of the genuinely super-liberal sounding approach to prisons in Norway that seems to work:

It could be a yoga class at any holistic health retreat anywhere in the world but the participants here at Norway's maximum security Halden Prison are rather far removed from the usual yummy mummy spa clientele. Barefoot murderers, rapists and drug smugglers practise downward-facing dog and the lotus position alongside their prison officers, each participant fully concentrating on the clear instructions from the teacher.

"It calms them," says prison governor Are Hoidal approvingly, as we watch from the sidelines. "We don't want anger and violence in this place. We want calm and peaceful inmates."

Tranquillity does not come cheaply. A place at Halden Prison costs about £98,000 per year. The average annual cost of a prison place in England in Wales is now about £40,000, or £59,000 in a Category A prison.

A uniformed prison officer on a silver micro-scooter greets us cheerily as he wheels past. Two
prisoners jogging dutifully by his side, keep pace.

Hoidal laughs at my nonplussed face.

"It's called dynamic security!" he grins. "Guards and prisoners are together in activities all the time. They eat together, play volleyball together, do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them."

Having had a prison guard once living in the rental house next to mine, who was loud, often drunk, and offered to have his daughter's ex boyfriend's legs broken, I think we might have to scrap all of ours and start afresh if we wanted to follow this approach.

Anyway, back to the big Norwegian turn around:

When Are Hoidal first began his career in the Norwegian Correctional service in the early 1980s, the prison experience here was altogether different.

"It was completely hard," he remembers. "It was a masculine, macho culture with a focus on guarding and security. And the recidivism rate was around 60-70%, like in the US."

But in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms "revenge" and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled.

"Not 'guards'," admonishes Hoidal gently, when I use the term. "We are prison 'officers' and of course we make sure an inmate serves his sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are role models, coaches and mentors. And since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!"

In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.

Even the architecture is chic:

The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents' sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature - in fact the prison, which cost £138m to build, has won several design awards for its minimalist chic. Set in beautiful blueberry woods and peppered with majestic silver birch and pine trees, the two-storey accommodation blocks and wooden chalet-style buildings give the place an air of a trendy university campus rather than a jail.

Here's a cell:

 There is a lot more of great interest in the article at the BBC.

A French peculiarity

Is France the only country where homoeopathy has a genuinely large popular following?   For a country that is pretty modern and capable of high tech stuff, this feature of the place is very peculiar:

In a country where nearly 60% of the population uses homeopathic remedies, the French ministry of health’s decision to slash reimbursements for the alternative remedies has sparked outrage among users of alternative medicine.

For the 38 million people in France who depend on homeopathic remedies to cure insomnia, backaches and other medical conditions, getting a good night’s sleep just became a little more difficult. 

“Homeopathic medicines do not provide sufficient public health benefits to justify their reimbursement by the federal government,”the ministry of health announced in a statement released on Wednesday.

Time to talk turbulence

I've never experienced really severe turbulence in an aircraft, but incidents like this one sound really frightening.   

Last year, there was considerable publicity to a study that said global warming will make turbulence over the Atlantic routes, at least, worse by mid century. 

Today's story made me think - do we know whether turbulence is getting worse already?  Major incidents certainly seem to come up in the news more often, but this must be a very tricky topic due to several complicating factors:

*  the increase in global aviation generally
*  whether the increase is happening on routes more, or less, naturally prone to turbulence
*  the active steps airlines, and airline manufacturers, may be taking to avoid the risk of running into it (for example, I presume that modern aircraft radars might be better at detecting danger areas ahead).

It seems there is some research indicating it has already increased:

There is evidence that clear-air turbulence (CAT) has already risen by 40-90% over Europe and North America since 1958 and studies by researchers from the universities of Reading and East Anglia in the UK have shown that as a consequence of climate change, the frequency of turbulence on flights between Europe and North America could double by 2050 and the intensity increase by 10-40%. The same researchers have since extended their previous work by analysing eight geographic regions, two flight levels, five turbulence strength categories and four seasons, and found large increases in CAT.

Not sure if I have posted about this before or not.

Still, an interesting topic, and a somewhat worrying one for the future for the slightly nervous flyer.

Hurricanes getting wetter

Seeing that increased flooding under global warming is a theme here this week, I was interested to read this NYT article:  

As Climate Changes, Hurricanes Get Wetter

In recent years, researchers have found that hurricanes have lingered longer, as Barry is expected to do, and dumped more rainfall — a sign of climate change, said Christina Patricola, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a co-author of a study that found that climate change is making tropical cyclones wetter. (Tropical cyclones include both hurricanes and tropical storms, which are hurricanes’ less speedier kin.)

Researchers have been studying the effects of climate change on tropical cyclones because those sorts of storms are driven by warm water. Water in the gulf is 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer, according to Dr. Prein, who said: “This is really increasing the likelihood of a hurricane to form in this basin. And it will increase the intensity of the hurricane as well.”....

The researchers used climate models to simulate how tropical cyclone intensity, or wind speed, and rainfall would change if hurricanes like Katrina, Irma and Maria had occurred absent climate change and under future climate scenarios. They found that for all three storms, climate change increased rainfall by up to 9 percent.

This study is not the first to find that climate change is causing tropical cyclones to have more rainfall. Studies on Hurricane Harvey found that climate change contributed as much as 38 percent, or 19 inches, of the more than 50 inches of rain that fell in some places. Dr. Patricola’s study broadens the research by using global climate models and analyzing a large number of storms.

 My stupid reader JC will say "don't talk to me about models", probably while New Orleans goes under.   Again.

Own your own crime scene

I see via Washington Post that Michael Jackson's former home, Neverland Ranch, is for sale for $31 million.  (Used to be on the market for $100 million.)

It's..kinda ugly in parts:

And doesn't do much for me in others (that ceiling looks so heavy and oppressive):

But, it is on a pretty nice looking piece of land:

You would think that if it wasn't for the icky associations, it could be made into some high class accommodation.  But good luck with that, buyers.

The jokes write themselves

From Dezeen, the jokes one can make from this are just too easy:

Pratt Institute graduate Garrett Benisch has proposed using biosolids, the organic matter derived from treated sewage, to produce a compostable ballpoint pen and its ink.

Benisch, who just graduated from New York's Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design, created the Sum Waste pen for his thesis project.

The curvy, translucent writing instrument made from biosolids was featured in the university's year-end design show and won first place in a national competition organised by research group Healthy Materials Lab.

Populist governments and their disregard for expertise

Just as the Trump government has a solid reputation for disdain of expert advice on topics ranging from environmental issues to trade and international treaties, it seems that the populist government in India likes to tell its followers what it wants to hear.  See this (pretty angry) article at Foreign Policy, mainly about India's terrible air pollution, but also other topics:

Speaking from the headquarters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on May 9, the cabinet member Nitin Gadkari promised a rapid elimination of air pollution. “Delhi will be free of air and water pollution in the next three years,” he said. Gadkari is now the minister of road transport and highways now, but in the years before Modi first became prime minister in 2014, Gadkari was president of the BJP. He said he expected that the air would clear because of the achievements of his political party, which “has done 100 percent corruption-free, transparent, time-bound, result-oriented, and quality work.”

Bringing air pollution down to acceptable levels—not just in New Delhi, but also throughout north India—would indeed be a tremendous accomplishment. But promising to do so within three years is absurd. China, for example, has successfully directed policymaking efforts toward reducing particle pollution, after decades of catastrophic pollution in the north and public pressure once air quality data became easily available online To do so has taken China several years (more than three), has certainly not eliminated pollution altogether, and has required facing unpleasant facts. Central Chinese officials held local governments to account for improving pollution—and moved to address the problem when statistical analysis showed that local bureaucrats were manipulating the numbers. But Gadkari’s unbelievable numbers are coming from the top.

Such absurdities have become commonplace. Gadkari’s promise echoes Modi’s claim the government could eliminate open defecation from rural India by 2019. (Open defecation rates improved, but it remains dangerously common, as independent demographic data shows.) Both numerical deadlines combine wild ambition and a good cause with needless quantitative precession and the absence of any plan that could achieve the result. 

And more about the general attitude of "we know better than experts":

 Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond the environment. Increasingly, many of India’s leading economists and statisticians have spoken out about the dismantling of India’s systems of official statistics and expertise. Respected statisticians—including an economist whom I know personally from my time at the Delhi School of Economics—resigned from the National Statistical Commission in January, in protest of the government’s refusal to release credible unemployment data.

The government’s top economic advisors and policymakers report being as surprised as everyone else when in 2016 the prime minister, in a move remembered as “demonetization,” suddenly declared that a large fraction of India’s notes no longer counted as currency. In my own field of child health, the Economist reported that UNICEF suppressed data on child stunting because the prime minister’s home state scored poorly. I do not think any of my colleagues in sanitation research seriously believe the government’s response to a December 2018 parliamentary question, which was to insist that sanitation coverage in rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh is 100 percent.

Nice of them...

Searching that Samuel Gregg who Helen Dale re-tweeted (he's one of those irritating conservative Catholics who like small government because God wants people to suffer - see how easy it is to argue like him!) led me to a conservative Catholic site which had this news item of some interest:

The Russian Orthodox Church is debating an end to the practice of blessing large scale weapons, including nuclear missiles.
 
Last month, a committee on ecclesial law met in Moscow and recommended ending the practice of blessing missiles and warheads, and suggested that priests should instead bless only individual soldiers and their personal weapons.

According to a report by Religion News Service, Bishop Savva Tutunov of the Moscow Patriarchate said that it would be more appropriate to bless only the warrior who is defending their country, and their own personal weapon–instead of bombs.

“One can talk about the blessing of a warrior on military duty in defense of the fatherland,” said Tutunov.

“At the end of the corresponding ritual, the personal weapon is also blessed — precisely because it is connected to the individual person who is receiving the blessing. By the same reasoning, weapons of mass destruction should not be sanctified,” he said.

The proposal to end the blessings for larger weapons has yet to be approved by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Weapons systems, including Topol-class intercontinental ballistic missiles, are frequently blessed by members of the Russian Orthodox clergy during military parades and other events. These blessings are seen as a way of spiritually protecting the country.

The ridiculous technique

What's the name for this type of bad faith, nonsensical style of argument, whereby your opponent says X and you claim that this must mean they want Y, while surely knowing Y is a wild exaggeration and caricature of their point?  

Ironically, those on the Right rally against SJW's for using it when talking about gender and sexuality (for example), but they deploy it themselves when it suits.

Drives me nuts, whoever uses it.

Gives me mixed feelings

I mean, who wouldn't want to see the IPA staff, membership, 98% of commenters at Catallaxy, and all hosts on Sky News at Night rounded up and forced into re-education schools in which they are all taught to dance, paint and give up all radical ideas (as defined by me.)  Of course, it would have to be conducted in what would look more like an aged care facility than a young person's school, but still, it's a pleasant dream:

A short history of the "we didn't go to the Moon" conspiracy

This article at The Guardian isn't bad, and reminded me that Fox News - that unique source of the dumbing down of America - revived it with a "documentary" in 2001.

Stand proud, Rupert Murdoch, and all who support him.

Yet more "as I have been saying"...

I recently noted how I have been posting for a while about how solar power expansion should be looking at not replacing otherwise useful uses of land (like agriculture), but working within it.   (Including being deployed on water storage dams and reservoirs.)

Today I read of some paper that says the same thing:

A study released today provides the most complete list yet of the advantages of solar energy—from carbon sequestration to improvements for pollinator habitat. The paper offers a new framework for analyzing solar projects to better understand the full suite of benefits.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, was conducted by researchers from the University of California, Davis; Lancaster University in the United Kingdom; the Center for Biological Diversity and 10 other organizations.

It suggests a framework for understanding more completely, and ultimately quantifying, the benefits of solar energy, identifying 20 frequently overlooked advantages. For example, solar panels paired with native plant restoration can add habitat while also increasing panel efficiency.

And more:

In the report, the authors:

• Suggest a model for engineering solar energy systems that maximizes both technological and ecological benefits.
• Create a framework for characterizing 20 benefits of installations on different spaces, including rooftop solar; solar on contaminated land; solar over functional bodies of water like reservoirs, water treatment areas and irrigation canals; and solar co-located with agriculture and grazing.
• Make the case for understanding that as renewable energy development is ramped up to address the climate crisis, it shouldn't create unnecessary negative impacts, especially when technology and resources are available to maximize positive effects.
• Suggest how this framework might be useful in policy and regulatory decision-making in order to ensure a sustainable energy transition.

I'm glad my common sense suggestions eventually get taken up in universities, eventually...

A very stupid idea

I'm pretty sure that gender reveal parties started in the USA, although I see they have now spread to Australia too, if this story is anything to go by.

I think they are just the silliest idea, objectionable from both liberal and conservative perspectives, and I do  not understand at all why people would want to have them.

Just be thankful if you're getting a healthy baby of any gender, even intersex for that matter, for goodness sake.

Gunshot wedding noted

From Gulf News, about an unfortunate incident in India:

Patna: A groom was killed in celebratory gunfire during a wedding in Bihar moments after the exchange of vows....

As per the itinerary, a wedding procession reached the house of the bride on the scheduled day and this was followed by the garland exchange ritual.

While the groom was walking towards the wedding venue after the garland exchange ritual, his elder brother whipped out a pistol and started firing in celebration.

Witnesses said the brother fired thrice but the gun got stuck. As he tried to clear the bullets, they fired one by one, hitting him as well as the groom. Both sustained seriously injuries in the incident and were immediately rushed to a nearby hospital. The groom succumbed to his injuries on Monday afternoon while his brother is battling for his life.

“Who will marry my daughter now? Now everyone will call her doomed,” said Kumari’s father Bhuletan Rai, sobbing inconsolably.

Wow.  An idiot brother-in-law kills the groom, and the worry is that the bride will wear the long time consequences?  

What's more, this is a recurrent problem in that part of the country, apparently:

Celebratory gunfire go on unchecked in Bihar despite the authorities putting a ban on them. It has claimed many lives during the wedding season over the years. According to a report, 15 people have been killed or wounded in celebratory gunfire in the past six months.

A wild actor

To be honest, I thought that Rip Torn had stopped appearing in Men in Black movies because he had already died! 

But now that he really has, I see that he had a "colourful" life, continuing into old age:

In 2010 he was arrested after breaking into a bank branch in Connecticut and was charged with carrying an unlicensed firearm, burglary, trespass and carrying a firearm while intoxicated. Police said Torn had broken into the bank thinking it was his home.

After pleading guilty to a number of charges surrounding his possession of a loaded weapon while drunk, he was given a two-and-a-half-year suspended jail sentence in 2010.

Torn also infamously fought director Norman Mailer during the filming of counterculture film Maidstone. In an improvised on-camera scene, Torn — playing Mailer's brother — attacked Mailer with a hammer and attempted to strangle him. Mailer bit Torn's ear in response.

The scene made it into Maidstone's final cut and was apparently planned, but the blood shed by both actors was very real. Torn was reportedly angered by Mailer's direction.

I have a feeling I probably read about the 2010 incident at the time, but it sure didn't stick in my memory.

All about palm oil

At the Jakarta Post, a couple of lengthy, detailed articles about growing palm oil, and whether EU attempts to influence its production are counterproductive, or not.

As I've been saying...

The New York Times writes, after this week's flash flooding in Washington:

WASHINGTON — When almost a month’s worth of rain deluged this city on Monday morning, turning streets into rivers and basements into wading pools, it showed just how vulnerable cities with aging water systems can be in the era of climate change. 

The rainfall overwhelmed the capital’s storm-water system, much of it built almost a century ago to handle a smaller population, far less pavement and not nearly as much water. 

“We’re still approaching this 21st-century problem with 20th-century infrastructure, and it’s completely inadequate,” said Constantine Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “And it’s only going to get worse.”

Updating that infrastructure will be enormously expensive, experts warn, not just in Washington but around the country. That’s not only because upgrades are required. In many cases, cities are facing huge backlogs in general maintenance.

Spiderman viewed

Went to see Spiderman: Far From Home last night.   It's very enjoyable.  Tom Holland remains ridiculously charming;  the special effects featuring destruction in locations we don't normally see destroyed were a bit different from the standard Marvel look*; and it is very funny.   (Actually I was laughing a bit more than other members of the audience at some of the silly romance bits between Ned and what's-her-name.)  

I keep telling my son that I am glad Tony Stark is dead - Marvel is lighter and funnier and better off without him. 

*  Sort of a spoiler comment here:   when first watching Mysterio flying around trailing a lot of green smoke I thought of the witch in Wizard of Oz, but I was pleased that later in the movie the theatricality of the look made sense.   Some of his stuff also looking a bit "Dr Strange", who I am very keen see return.

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.”