It's all in the editing (and the understanding)

It's pretty funny to read how Right wing political punditry think the Mueller testimony was a disaster for Democrats (and it's true that quite a few on the anti-Trump side gave bad reviews to his performance as well), yet when you see on TV the key parts done as a 60 second highlight reel re-iterating the scandal that was the Russian interference, the welcome use by Trump of stolen emails, the lies of those around the campaign to cover it up, and Trump's trying to shut down the investigation, it doesn't look dire at all.  

Of course, others have made this point too:

As has been clear all along, this historic scandal is a case of Republicans gaslighting themselves about what went on and preferring fantasy Deep State conspiracy over reality.    All fed by their fawning to a President whose intense narcissism means that he cannot admit reality because he thinks it erodes the legitimacy of his narrow win.  (And in truth, it does.)

Republicans already look like fools - I can't imagine how bad they are going to look with the clear perspective of history.

The good balm

Another "if only I was an 'influencer'" post:   this product is ridiculously expensive (I think $45 for a tube) but if your spouse is taking hints as to what you might like as a birthday or Christmas present, you could suggest this:

It's a nice smelling "aftershave balm" that I find particularly good to use in the dry winter weather in Brisbane, when shaving does sometimes cause dry, sore patches near the corners of my mouth.  Or is that because I was dribbling in my sleep?  Who knows.

Anyway, it's moisturising but not in a heavy or oily way.  A little goes a long way, so the price is not as bad as it initially might seem.

I don't use it in hot, humid weather, when the cooling brace of an alcohol based aftershave is called for.   But for at least a third of the year (in Brisbane) it's great.

Thank you.

L'Occitane, please send me money, or a trip to Provence, at the very least.

A telling tale of the United States

So, the US could get him to the Moon and back, but couldn't assure safe surgery under their health care system?

Either that or I am being unfair and it was not the hospital's/surgeon's fault, but what about the ridiculous litigation infested US system that was unfairly used to enrich a white family that probably had money to spare?

Either way, I can turn it into a Lefty attack on the modern US.

Maybe he can tell us about Harry's Dad?

Well, what an odd story:

A television personality in Australia says that his four-year-old son has made a number of inexplicable and eerie statements which suggest that he was Princess Diana in a past life. The bizarre revelation reportedly came by way of a magazine article written by the boy's bewildered father David Campbell. He explained that the strangeness began two years ago when the youngster first pointed to a picture of Diana and declared "look, it's me when I was a princess."

According to Campbell, the boy continued to make spooky comments about what appears to be his past life, such as saying that he had two boys that he called his 'sons.' While the confounded dad initially dismissed these statements as fanciful talk from the toddler, he really took notice when they began to become more detailed. In particular, Campbell says that his son was able to name a site in Scotland where Diana frequently stayed and can describe the interior of the residence known as Balmoral.

Chillingly, the child has even allegedly made mention of Diana's tragic death, saying "one day the sirens came and I wasn't a princess anymore."

As might be expected

Over at Quillette, a profile of Boris Johnson has some lurid passages.  Here is a memory of him from 1983, debating at Oxford:

With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:

You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.

Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:

The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.

Update:  following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:

Brexit was won with an impossible promise that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100 days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.

As they chunter in their think tanks and newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the elite. By anyone but them.

As if a rush to Mars wasn't nutty enough

Axios says that Robert Zubrin, who has spent a lot of time trying to promote a complicated way of getting to and from Mars, and a couple of other "space evangelists" got caught up in the excitement of the Apollo 11 celebrations by saying that actually, colonising Titan is a better long term for humanity.   By 2069.  

Ha ha. 

I will write a post about the continual confusion about the aims of a space program sometime soon.

But what's really important

What a tosser:

Yeah, because the fear of the white male (and the occasional Asian one) being so oppressed that they can't talk about how annoying they find the cultural Left is the major danger to the world at the moment.  

Actually, last night I was thinking:  people like Latham and his latest acolytes from Catallaxy past and present (he is big at Catallaxy at the moment, which people should take as a bad sign) complain that the cultural Left is all about "feelz" - claiming victim status, seeking out offence whether it intended or not, etc.    But their reaction against it has exactly the same over-emotional colour - how else can you inflate the matter of "PC-oppression" into such a large scale, crushing problem of global proportion?    You're into the "feelz" just as much as they are, Latho. 

Sounds all above board [sarcasm]

I really like the spaghetti diagram of Adani's financial set up in this article which lists these key points:

 Key points:

• The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
• The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
• Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

Woke mining executive

The chief executive of the world's largest mining company has endorsed drastic action to combat global warming, which he calls "indisputable," and an emerging crisis.

"The planet will survive. Many species may not," BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a business breakfast in London on Tuesday.

"This is a confronting conclusion but as a veteran geologist once said, 'you can't argue with a rock.'"

The link is here.

A pod of pea brain opinion writers for The Australian are drafting their pooh-poohing columns in response as I write.

Domestic violence of the American kind

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy — though an FBI spokeswoman later clarified the percentage is smaller.   ......

At a congressional hearing in May, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division testified that the bureau was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases and that of those, about 40 percent involved racially motivated violent extremists. Most in that group, he said, were white supremacists.

That's from the Washington Post.

But the real problem is that a journalist/opinion writer who knows he gets up the nose of Leftist thugs stood in the middle of a protest involving some of them and got beaten up, hey Jason.  

Some Guardian funnies

Author John Marsden has a piece at The Guardian in which he complains about over-parenting and the harm he sees it doing to kids education these days.  (He apparently now runs a couple of private schools in the bush where physical activity is far from discouraged.)

Anyway, I thought this comment was not too far off the mark, but the follow up comment was a bit funny nonetheless:

Yeah, sure

Axios headline:

Top 2020 Dems would punish China over mass detentions of Uighurs 

Had missed the support that China has received from some countries:

Context: Earlier this week, 37 countries — including North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia, among other mostly-authoritarian states — signed a letter defending China's policies in Xinjiang.

• This came shortly after 22 other countries formally condemned China's abuses in the region.

The bottom line: Most of the world has been largely silent on this issue due in large part to China’s economic clout and penchant for lashing out over criticisms of its internal affairs. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized China but not acted on concrete proposals to impose costs on Beijing.

I don't think anyone can do much about it anyway.

I think it will be very interesting to see if such an attempt at compulsory mass re-education to love your authoritarian government can actually work.  

An unusual form of dark matter detector

At Science, an article explaining that scientists think they can rule out one form of dark matter, because if it existed, " people would be dying of unexplained ‘gunshot’ wounds". 

The idea boils down to this: If a certain type of dark matter particle existed, it would occasionally kill people, passing through them like a bullet. Because no one has died from unexplained gunshotlike wounds, this type of dark matter does not exist, according to a new study....

A less mainstream dark matter candidate, known as macros, would form heavier particles. Although macros would be much rarer than WIMPs, any collisions with ordinary matter would be violent, leaving an obvious trace. The new study explores what those traces might look like if the macros hit people.

Glenn Starkman and Jagjit Singh Sidhu, theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, were originally searching for traces of macros in granite slabs when a colleague made a suggestion. “Why can’t you just use humans as a detector?” they recall Robert Scherrer, a co-author and theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville saying. “The energies you’re talking about, these things would probably at best maim a person, at worst kill a person.”

The team forged ahead with the idea and modeled macros that would have a similar effect to a fatal shot from a .22 caliber rifle. Such particles would be minuscule, but very heavy, and thus release the same amount of energy as a bullet as it passes through a person. Their calculations focused on the millions of people living in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe over the past decade because researchers say these countries have more reliable data on how many people died and from what causes.

In this sample, scientists would expect to see a handful of reports of unexplained deaths from invisible dark matter “bullets.” But there were none, the researchers report this week on the preprint server arXiv. These deaths would not go unnoticed—they would leave victims dead or dying with a tubular wound where their flesh was vaporized.

Good thing it doesn't exist, I guess.

Ups and downs (global warming is not as simple as some want it to be)

Well, that's interesting.  And Graeme will be along in comments today to say that he's taken time off from contemplating space cows on Ceres, unlimited electricity in space, water oceans on the Sun,  and ancient greenhouses on Mars to say "try science, Steve."

 Climate-related risks are dependent not only on the warming trend from GHGs, but also on the variability about the trend. However, assessment of the impacts of climate change tends to focus on the ultimate level of global warming¹, only occasionally on the rate of global warming, and rarely on variability about the trend. Here we show that models that are more sensitive to GHGs emissions (that is, higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)) also have higher temperature variability on timescales of several years to several decades². Counter-intuitively, high-sensitivity climates, as well as having a higher chance of rapid decadal warming, are also more likely to have had historical ‘hiatus’ periods than lower-sensitivity climates. Cooling or hiatus decades over the historical period, which have been relatively uncommon, are more than twice as likely in a high-ECS world (ECS = 4.5 K) compared with a low-ECS world (ECS = 1.5 K). As ECS also affects the background warming rate under future scenarios with unmitigated anthropogenic forcing, the probability of a hyper-warming decade—over ten times the mean rate of global warming for the twentieth century—is even more sensitive to ECS.

Here's a press release type report about the same study.

Mayor Pete and the loss of well written, politically topical novels

Slate has an article up looking at a Pete Buttigieg speech in which he referenced the Graham Greene novel The Quiet American (but, in Slate's view, somewhat misread its message.)   I see that the book came out in 1955 (I thought it was a bit later than that.)

All very interesting, and a great reminder that this is what we seem to have lost in recent literature - authors who are widely travelled, well read, and can write really well with a distinctive perspective  about the current, complicated, state of the world.   

 Instead, modern literature seems to have become intensely navel gazing and way less interesting for it.

I should really go read more of Greene.  (I think I have read 4 or 5.)  I think even some of his lesser known works have key parts that have lodged in memory due to their distinctiveness.

Moon telescopes

Once again, I wonder: why hasn't there ever been a decent science fiction novel (that I know of) about the far side of the Moon?   I mean, there are good astronomical reasons for having a base there, but if orbiting communications satellites stopped working, it would be about the loneliest place in the local corner of the universe.   Surely the potential isolation could be a good setting for a story?  

Anyhow, that's all by way of preamble to noting that Science magazine has an article about possible astronomical uses for the far side, from low frequency radio telescopes:

Charting the dark ages' 21-centimeter radiation “is essential. It has to be done at some point,” says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works on the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a vast radio telescope spread across northern Europe. The problem is that after 13 billion years of cosmic expansion, photons from the dark ages arrive at Earth stretched to frequencies below 50 MHz, where they not only have to contend with the ionosphere, but also with confounding signals from ham radio, aviation, and long-distance communications. LOFAR, for example, has struggled to detect the 21-centimeter signal from that epoch (Science, 7 November 2014, p. 688). The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, which Hewitt and others are building in South Africa, may have a better shot. But Falcke and others are looking to the Moon.

Burns's 35-year campaign for a lunar radio telescope won him NASA funding in 2008 to form a team called LUNAR to work out how to build it. The researchers designed a lunar telescope array that would include hundreds of simple dipole antennas laid flat on the ground. They demonstrated how autonomous rovers could lay out strips of conducting film to act as antennas. In a 2013 experiment, astronauts on the International Space Station remotely guided a rover that laid out antenna strips on a simulated moonscape at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to show how a future crew onboard NASA's proposed Moon-orbiting Lunar Gateway station could supervise construction.

 to optical:

One solution, proposed by a NASA-funded team last decade, is to build a liquid mirror. The idea is simple: Construct a large shallow circular dish, fill it with a liquid, and set it gently spinning. Centrifugal force will pull the surface into a parabolic shape. Liquid mirror telescopes on Earth use mercury, which is naturally reflective. The biggest so far was the 6-meter Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia in Canada. That testbed telescope, built in 2003 and now decommissioned, paved the way for the 4-meter International Liquid Mirror Telescope, which will take its first view of the sky from the Devasthal Observatory in India later this year. Although a liquid mirror is limited to looking straight up, the rotation of Earth—or the Moon—scans it across the sky.

Mercury won't work on the Moon—it would evaporate in the lunar vacuum and is too heavy to transport from Earth. In its place, the NASA team came up with a class of organic compounds called ionic liquids, essentially molten salts, that would remain liquid in the frigid lunar night. Ionic liquids are not reflective, but could be glazed with silver to make an ideal reflecting surface. Superconducting bearings could levitate the dish and keep it spinning frictionlessly. “In principle there is no limit on the size,” says team member Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. “This would be totally impossible in space, but not that expensive on the Moon.”

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) followed up the NASA study by looking at the practicalities of building such a scope. “There were no showstoppers and the mechanical tolerances were more relaxed than for a space telescope,” says Paul Hickson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A 20-meter telescope, CSA concluded, would require no more than 3.5 tons of material to be transported to the surface. An even larger instrument, as big as 100 meters across, “would be in a class of its own,” Hickson says, able to study the very first stars that formed and coalesced into galaxies at the end of the dark ages.

No beer burps in space

At NPR, they have an article talking about the way astronaut food has changed over the years, and end on this point (my bold):

Astronauts must go without many popular foods and beverages on the International Space Station, including soda — the carbonation goes wacky in space and could wreak havoc on the digestive system; perishable items, because food poisoning would be pretty terrible in space; and alcohol, because it could damage water recovery equipment and impair astronauts' judgment.

And some have been staples since the early missions. Tang, a beverage nearly synonymous with spaceflight, remains popular among astronauts today. What you won't hear about as often — shrimp cocktail. "Shrimp cocktail has almost forever been [one of] their favorite foods," Bourland says (and Kloeris agrees).

New Scientist once had an article on beer in space, and noted:

Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.

“That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have carbonated beverages on the space menu,” NASA spokesperson William Jeffs told New Scientist.

Burping got coverage in another article, which explained: 

You can't burp in space - at least not like you do here on Earth.

"You can't burp in space because the air, food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles," Hadfield replied on Twitter.

"If you burp, you throw up into your mouth. So guess where the trapped air goes?"

But you can try to time your burps right:

If you do end up going to space, there was one enterprising astronaut who found a way to belch without bomiting. According to the book What's it Like in Space? by Ariel Waldman, NASA astronaut and physicist Jim Newman, who has spent 43 days in space, developed what he called the "push and burp."

"He found that by pushing off a wall, he could create a force in lieu of gravity that kept his food down in his stomach, giving him a brief chance at expelling gas without consequence," Waldman wrote.

Ultra violence as entertainment

Yesterday, my wife had put on John Wick 2 on Netflix but proceeded to spend all of her time looking at her phone, while I occasionally saw bits of it from the kitchen. 

I once started watching the first one, but left it before the violence started.   (I think I thought some of the acting was bad, and wasn't interested in a revenge over a dog story anyway.)

Well, the tiny amount I did see of JW2 I thought was pretty dismaying regarding the desensitisation of society to graphic violence.  It was what, back in 1969 (in the news this weekend for obvious reasons), would have been called shocking ultra-violence.   It's still ultra-violence, but now people watch it for entertainment.

I really do not like the way this incremental change happened to society, and continue to be  dismayed at the lack of critical thought applied to the question of the depiction of violence.

I would also add that while Keanu Reeves get all this adulation for being such a nice guy, to my mind he has no taste for being in these movies.  

Serious Catholics who do not have a problem with the film (such as this guy) need their head read.   

Raw

Guess what I ate for the first time on Saturday? 

Steak tartare.  It was at a French cafe at South Bank which my wife and I quite like; and no, I didn't order it for myself, but my wife had it as a main and there was too much for her.

The idea of the dish has never appealed to me (I am not even that keen on seafood sushimi), but it was pretty nice.  I expected a raw meat flavour but the seasoning overrides all of that.

See, all of you with an electric cook top can now cut your electricity bill substantially by eating the way lions do, and help save the planet from CO2 emissions.   (This line designed to annoy Jason.)

The (lack of) clear memory of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 post

I write this knowing that at this exact  time 50 years ago I was keenly watching Armstrong step onto the moon.  But as I have confessed before, despite my great interest in all space related news as a child, my 8 year old brain did not record permanently enough whether I was watching at school or at home. 

I know I saw some Apollo stuff at school, but I am pretty sure the lunar step was not the only time they got the TV out.  I also am pretty sure I watched some of the lunar walk at home,  and what might have happened is that I saw the first part at school and the rest at home, having been allowed to go home early.  Even staying at school all afternoon, I might have caught the tail end at home.  Or did they allow us to go home when there was some uncertainty, I think, as to when they would leave the module?  I have an idea that someone complained about how long it was taking for them to get out, but was that my Mum or a nun?  (I'm leaning towards Mum.) 

There are two people from my class that year that I could probably track down.  One was a best friend that I lost all contact with  from the age of perhaps 16 or 17.  He went to a different high school and (so I was told by the other person I could probably contact, as I met her again 10 or 15 years ago) had become a bit of a wannabe, or actual, Lothario as a teenager.  People change, obviously; but I was pretty much the opposite, so it may have a case of a hormonally induced loss of friendship even if I had seen him much as a teenager.

So, this post has gone off a bit more personal than intended!

Anyway, I am pleased to see how much attention the anniversary did eventually attract.  A pity Armstrong himself didn't live to see it.  

Modern technology should address the memory uncertainties I discuss here.  Any kid watching today would probably have at least some selfies showing him or her watching it.  That's at least one advantage of the way technology has evolved that is perhaps under-appreciated.

Update:   I was somewhat surprised to hear a man on ABC News saying that he was in Britain, working on a satellite project, at the time of the moon walk, and despite his great interest, was asleep at the time of the moon walk because it happened there in the "middle of the night" (yes, I checked - started just before 4 am) and he thinks the BBC has closed for the night and didn't carry any live telecast anyway!    I had sort of forgotten about TV ending overnight and, even on this occasion, apparently refusing to break that rule.   I guess that would not have seemed odd at that time if it had happened similarly in Australia, but the 24 news cycle - and even 24 sport -  we have all become used to now makes it seem a very antiquated world.

Update 2:   going back to the topic of the fallibility of memory, I remember being particularly amused by Spike Milligan, in one of his WW2 memoires, talking about a particular incident in which he couldn't remember a detail, leading him to ring his old mate who had a completely different recollection of the incident in total.  Spike then joked about what this might mean for the real history behind some of the Bible, giving a comedic example.   That did strike me as a good point, and that one should be cautious about recollections, be they your own or someone else's.   In fact, it started to bother me that scepticism of their own memories is not very common amongst people, when psychological studies, and incidents like Milligan's, teach us that we should be.    

A great Boris explanation

Turns out I was way more accurate than I realised when I opined here that Boris Johnson seemed to have the same rank political opportunism of Tony Abbott.  As explained in detail in this great read from New York Review of Books, Boris was very equivocal on the matter of whether he would support Brexit or not, finally settling on the pro side almost by accident (despite having played a key role in writing the often inaccurate tabloid level "the EU is bureaucracy gone mad" press stories for years):

To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself,² had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.”³ While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain.

Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”) Then, early on Sunday evening, he texted Cameron to say that he was about to announce irrevocably that he was backing Leave. But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, at the time, Johnson added two remarkable things. One was that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed.’” The other was staggering: “‘He actually said he thought we could leave and still have a seat on the European Council—still making decisions.’”⁴

The expectation—perhaps the hope—of defeat is telling. Johnson’s anti-EU rhetoric was always a Punch and Judy show, and without the EU to play Judy, the show would be over. But the belief that Britain would keep its seat on the European Council (which consists of the leaders of each member state and makes most of the EU’s big political decisions), even if it left the EU, is mind-melting. Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since World War II, but he was unaware of the most basic consequence of Brexit. Britain had joined the Common Market, as it was then called, in 1973 precisely because it was being profoundly affected by decisions made in Brussels and was therefore better off having an equal say in those decisions. Johnson’s belief that Britain would continue to have a seat at the European table after Brexit suggested a profound ignorance not just of his country’s future but of its entire postwar past.

This ignorance is not stupidity—Johnson is genuinely clever and, as his fictional alter ego Barlow shows, quite self-aware. It is the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class whose manners and attitudes Johnson—in reality the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois background—thoroughly absorbed. Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess.

 Incredibly, Asian Latham Jason seems to think this is the kind of flim flam person who will make a good Prime Minister.

My rules for life (updated, again)

This is proving a slow process.  My book based on this will be out by 2030, at this rate.

Attentive readers (ha!) will remember I am up to 4, but something occurred to me today that is worthy of being rule 5.  The first four:

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

And now, number 5:

5.  The best souvenir when on a good holiday is a distinctive cup or mug, which is to be used semi-regularly on your return.  (Don't get in the rut of using the same mug daily for years - you need to rotate through all of them.)  Use will prompt good memories and make you happier.  

[My rabbit patterned cup from Okunoshima, and my mug with Julia Gillard's face on it from Canberra, both make me happy.]

Kippergate

Boris Johnson is, according to the BBC, just flat out wrong on one of the tabloid level "EU red tape is outrageously holding us back" examples he just used.

He'll still be PM, apparently, because people fall for bluster and don't care about details.

Spot the difference?

(Trump has long reminded me of the mugging speech performances of Benito, and it struck me again this week after seeing the rally in which he tried hard, really hard, to stop the "send her back" chant.)

Update:   the Colbert discussion of the rally is pretty funny - and it is incredible to see other parts of the rally and how dumb he truly comes across:

Great reviews for Thiel

Reason takes a bat to Thiel's speech that my "Asian Latham" reader Jason thinks was "a good thought provoking speech"*:

Thiel used to be roughly identified, including, at times, by me, as a libertarian. One reason was his decision to fund what started as a libertarian-rooted wild idea, Seasteading. Another indicator was his big-money support of an ultimately feckless Ron Paul-oriented SuperPac. These decisions made his warm embrace of Trump back in 2016 confusing, but he has now made it clear he has, and wants, nothing to do with the idea that human liberty is overall good and enriching.

Instead, Thiel has some interests and some enemies, and he wants to use the power of the state as a weapon to help one and harm the other. The main enemies are Google, China, and the U.S. university system. He advocated vigorous police actions against the first and third, and a trade war (at least) against China.

One of the comments following the article contains a handy list of things Thiel's President buddy has done:

You probably can’t but try to imagine how fast Obama would have been thrown out of office and probably arrested if he had done and said the a 10th of things Trump has said and done in office. Whether it’s threatening people, paling around with dictators, using the public office to enrich his businesses, spending $100 million dollars playing golf, putting his children in positions of authority, lying everyday, inviting foreign help in his election, engineering a disaster on the border for political gain, encouraging police to beat people up, encouraging his supporters to commit violence, the obstruction of the special counsel investigation, the attempt to rig the census, singlaling out certain states for punitive attacks such as withholding disaster aid or writing a tax law designed to damage states that didn’t vote for him and more. I can’t help but chalk up the double standard to racism but maybe it’s partisanship which probably comes from the same place in the brain as the racism. Anyway one day a future generation is going to look and this time from a detached perspective and they will recoil in horror at the madness of it all just as we do so now at the madness that existed in our past.

*  Yeah, I would agree if the thought provoked was "what an outrageous and dangerous nut, using his influence on the dumb-as Trump to try to incite investigation of a rival company."

Zen terrorist discussed

Aeon has an interesting article up, talking about a Zen Buddhist terrorist who sort of kicked off the military/imperial power period in Japan that led to World War 2.

I didn't realise that things were quite this dire in that country in the 1920's - 30's:

Following his father’s death in 1926, Emperor Hirohito had ascended the throne at a time of great social and political domestic instability. Across Japan, banks were closing, and the government was arresting Left-wing activists, accusing them of harbouring ‘dangerous thoughts’ as defined by the Peace Preservation Law.

The Great Depression that began in the United States in 1929 greatly reduced both demand and prices for raw silk, Japan’s single largest export product. At the same time, Japan’s population was increasing by nearly 1 million people a year. Its workforce was growing at an annual rate of approximately 450,000 people, all seeking jobs in a shrinking economy.

In addition, successive poor harvests in the early 1930s, especially in the northern prefectures, brought widespread starvation to many parts of the country. Rural debt rose rapidly, leading to delinquent tax payments, and more and more farmers either lost their land altogether or were forced to take desperate measures, such as selling their daughters into prostitution. Japanese society was in a state of crisis that in many people’s eyes required immediate and drastic remedies.

The article goes on to note that Nissho Inoue, the Zen terrorist, saw his revolutionary role as entirely consistent with Buddhism:

Inoue threw himself into the work of training a small group of about 20 young people. He drew on a variety of Zen training methods, including meditation practice; assigning koans (Zen riddles) and conducting private interviews with his disciples, all to create an intrepid group of volunteers with a ‘do or die’ spirit.

At first, Inoue planned to train young people for legal political activism. However, by 1930, under the pressure of events and young civilian and military activists, Inoue decided to take more resolute measures. ‘In an emergency situation,’ he wrote, ‘emergency measures are necessary. What is essential is to restore life to the nation. Discussions over the methods for doing this can come later, much later.’ Inoue fully expected that his political actions would lead to his death: ‘We had taken it upon ourselves to engage in destruction, aware that we would perish in the process.’

In his previous Zen training, Inoue found the basis for his commitment to destruction. Drawing on the lessons of a 13th-century Zen collection of koans known as the Mumonkan, or ‘The Gateless Barrier’, he claimed:

Revolution employs compassion on behalf of the society of the nation. Therefore those who wish to participate in revolution must have a mind of great compassion toward the society of the nation. In light of this there must be no thought of reward for participating in revolution. 

In other words, in the violently destructive acts of revolution one would find the mind of Buddhist compassion.

And there is more:

In October 1930, Inoue and his band shifted their base of operations to Tokyo. From there, he recruited more young people, including some from Japan’s most prestigious universities. One of Inoue’s band members later explained: ‘We sought to extinguish Self itself.’

Inoue’s band chose assassination as their method of revolution. Assassination, Inoue explained, ‘required, whether successful or not, the least number of victims’. He also thought it ‘was best for the country, untainted by the least self-interest’. He and his band members were prepared to die in the process of the revolution. By being prepared to sacrifice themselves, they believed they could ensure that as few people as possible would fall victim to revolutionary violence.

Well, that was big of them.  

Anyway, read the whole thing.

 

Comedy analysed

An opinion piece at the Washington Post notes that some prominent Hollywood comedies have not performed well at the box office, regardless of whether well reviewed or not.

He thinks comedy as a movie genre may be suffering because of the culture wars, and he might be right.

But he ends on a good point - which ties in with my take that I only like Marvel films if they are funny enough:

Still: I’m not entirely sure big-screen comedy is as bad off as some suggest. Indeed, it may be flourishing. You just have to squint a little. The biggest comedies in the world right now come wrapped up in spandex and armor: What is the Marvel Cinematic Universe but a series of spectacularly done (and spectacularly successful) action comedies?

“Spider-Man: Far From Home” is almost entirely a teen rom com wrapped up in a superhero bow: My audience was rolling at the mentions of “Peter Tingles” and polite Dutch hooligans and the amateurish high school news program explaining life after Thanos. “Captain Marvel” is basically a buddy comedy with a dreadfully dull straight woman and her wacky S.H.I.E.L.D sidekick. (This is among the reasons that movie didn’t really work, but I digress.) And “Avengers: Endgame,” with its Fat Thor and Smart Hulk, is almost an existential action comedy, a darkly comic look at how to deal with tragedy that culminates in a lot of punching.

The staff room chat must be interesting

What's this?   An economist at RMIT, who presumably runs into Sinclair Davidson from time to time, has an article up at The Conversation finding this:

Wholesale prices in the National Electricity Market have climbed significantly in recent years. The increase has coincided with a rapid increase in the proportion of electricity supplied by wind and solar generators.

But that needn’t mean the increase in wind and solar generation caused the increase in prices. It might have been caused by other things.

Colleagues Songze Qu and Tihomir Ancev from the University of Sydney and I have examined the contribution of each type of generator to wholesale prices, half hour by half hour over the eight years between November 1, 2010 and June 30, 2018.

We find that, rather than pushing prices up, each extra gigawatt of dispatched wind generation cuts the wholesale electricity price by about A$11 per megawatt hour at the time of generation, while each extra gigawatt of utility-scale solar cuts it A$14 per megawatt hour.

Surely she knows that Sinclair runs Catallaxy, which campaigns relentlessly on the alleged cost disaster of renewables?   Doesn't that annoy her?   I hope she is at least sarcastic and condescending.

The strange Thiel in the news again

Axios has some questions for Peter Thiel which are nicely sarcastic:

Peter Thiel doubled down last night on his "Google has maybe been infiltrated by the Chinese government" claim, which was eventually picked up by President Trump. When (lightly) pressed for evidence, Thiel simply said he was "asking questions."

Why it matters: You don't propose that someone deserves to face a firing squad without at least a single receipt.

So a few questions for Mr. Thiel:

1. Have you shorted Google stock or is Palantir currently competing with Google for a major U.S. government contract?
2. You've said on the record that you're "not a vampire." Are you able to provide independent verification of this claim? Because, were you a vampire, it could pose a national security risk given your ties with senior U.S. officials.
3. Is it because you're actually a vampire that you deny being a vampire? And would that not be seemingly treasonous, in that the generally accepted societal punishment is death (albeit by wooden stake, in this case)?

He remains a weirdo.  

Yeah, that was cool

Mind you, any real soldier doing this anywhere near a battlefield could not be a bigger target.  But yeah, looks cool.
 
His next feat:

Zapata, who first developed his device flying above water, says that the flyboard has the power to take off and reach speeds up to 190 kilometres an hour (118 mph) and run for 10 minutes.

He is now eyeing a crossing of the English Channel which, for the first time, will require a refuelling in mid-flight.

Zapata aims to make the crossing on July 25, 110 years to the day after pioneering aviator Louis Bleriot made the first airplane flight across the Channel.

Big solar, big battery

In Science magazine:

This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world's largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That's cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel.

"Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear," Mark Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, tweeted after news of the deal surfaced late last month. "Because of growing economies of scale, prices for renewables and batteries keep coming down," adds Jacobson, who has advised countries around the world on how to shift to 100% renewable electricity. As if on cue, last week a major U.S. coal company—West Virginia–based Revelation Energy LLC—filed for bankruptcy, the second in as many weeks.

The new solar plus storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project is expected to create a 400-megawatt solar array, generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually, enough to power more than 65,000 homes during daylight hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store electricity for after the sun sets, reducing the need for natural gas–fired generators.

The article goes on to note that the battery storage is only good for a few hours, but I guess if it deals with the evening peak, it might have a disproportionate effect on emissions.

There is a long, long way to go with solar and battery storage - and I have my doubts that lithium batteries will end up the key player for grid level storage.   But solar with some form of storage is some very sunny places - such as California (and the Northern half of Australia) seems to have a lot of potential.

Late to the aviation party

Google doesn't seem all that wise about what to recommend to me on Youtube, otherwise I would have known about aviation and travel blogger (and vlogger) Sam Chui before now. 

Anyway, he popped up on recommendations last night, and I watched his recent 22 minute video in which he takes an 8 hour flight that costs $20,000, on Etihad's "Residence" - in which you get your own bedroom, private bathroom and even caviar and champagne breakfast in your double bed.

I felt at one point that the butler was so obsequious that he was going to offer "extras" in the same way as might a massage therapist, but it doesn't go quite that far.  Right up to the line, but not that far.

The service from the flight lounge on is so ridiculously over the top it's pretty funny - but I suppose at $20,000 a flight, the airline can buy a lot of cigars, caviar, champagne and grovelling.   Watch it if you will:

Do news editors read the article before they write the headline?

News.com.au ran an article yesterday with this headline:

Plastic bag ban: Critics warn it isn’t helping Australia reduce waste

The major supermarkets’ bag ban has kept billions of single-use plastic bags out of landfill in the last year, but critics say the policy isn’t working.

Yet the actual study by the economist (from America, but now in Sydney) showed this:

Using quasi-random policy variation in California, I find the elimination of 40 million pounds of plastic carryout bags is offset by a 12 million pound increase in trash bag purchases—with small, medium, and tall trash bag sales increasing by 120%, 64%, and 6%, respectively. The results further reveal 12–22% of plastic carryout bags were reused as trash bags pre-regulation and show bag bans shift consumers towards fewer but heavier bags. With a substantial proportion of carryout bags already reused in a way that avoided the manufacture and purchase of another plastic bag, policy evaluations that ignore leakage effects overstate the regulation's welfare gains.

So a net benefit of 28 million pounds less plastic in bags thrown out in California is meant to be showing us the ban isn't working here??  

And if people want to argue about the thickness of resuseable bags being an environmental problem in waste tips - I find this remarkably ironic, given that the same people are likely the ones who have recently taken to arguing that recycling any plastic is all a crock and we should just bury it all.

I think it extremely likely that thicker bags are not so readily going to end up in the ocean, which is where the great concern over lightweight bags, which are more easily windblown and resemble food to too many sea creatures, has been coming.  Thicker bags, simply by the way they are going to be re-used for groceries until they break, are more likely to end up in the tip, and stay there.   That would be my strong, common sense, hunch, at least.

If you want a genuine study as to the environmental impact of the change, you would need to be looking at whether it has made a difference to beach, river and ocean pollution, and where the thicker bags are ending up.

Britain in safe hands

A harsh, but somewhat amusing, take on a TV debate between Johnson and Hunt:

Brexit dominated the first 45 minutes and as expected neither man had any answers. But then a lack of realism has been the default position of both Boris and Hunt throughout and they weren’t about to change now. Brexit was something that would happen providing you believed in it enough. What had been missing was someone who would look the EU in the eyes and tell them we were mad and self-destructive enough to trash the entire country to get things done. Of course there would be casualties along the way, but true patriotic Brits should be prepared to lay down their lives so that everyone who survived could be made poorer.

On and on the nonsense went. Both men unilaterally ditched the Northern Ireland backstop and put their faith in alternative border technologies that did not yet exist. Boris even promised to take back control by increasing immigration. Not exactly what many Brexiters had voted for, but trust in politics is now so low that no one really cares what anyone says. Coherence is a state to which no one now even aspires. Lying is now truth.

Johnson was just as confused on a trade deal with the US. This time he had at least read clause 5(c) of Gatt 24 but he still hadn’t bothered to mug up on clause 5(d). Details, details. Asked to condemn President Trump’s tweets about four Democrat congresswomen, Hunt said that his three children were half-Chinese. Boris avoided talking about his children. Mainly because he can’t always remember how many he has. Or what their nationalities might be. Both men couldn’t bring themselves to say what they thought was racist about the racist tweet. That’s the strong type of leadership that’s on offer. Britain standing up to the US by lying down.

Against Assange

A collection of links showing the carelessness and endangerment inherent in the Wikileaks enterprise, and the flakeiness of Julian Assange:

The Wiki leak is more and less important than you think

Private lives are collateral damage in WikiLeaks' document dumps

WikiTargeted

That last link is to a story summarised in a Vox article.   This is worth extracting in full (and Graeme, your comments about this are bound to be deleted.  Don't even bother.):

Shamir, who has gone by six names over the course of his life, was born Izrail Schmerler, in Russia. He converted from Judaism to the Greek Orthodox Church later in life, and turned viciously on his former co-religionists. He has denied the Holocaust, called Jews “a virus in human form,” and, in 2010, published a book titled Breaking the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.

“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”

The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly. He then offered to sell access to them to the highest bidder, David Leigh and Luke Harding write in the book Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

But what he did next was exceptionally curious. Shamir traveled to Belarus, a country ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko and perhaps Putin’s staunchest ally in Europe. Shamir was a fan of Lukashenko; in a 2010 piece, he called Belarus “the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development.”

In Belarus, Shamir shared State Department cables pertaining to the country with government officials — in unredacted, unedited form.

In January 2011, Belarusian state-run media began publishing what it said were US diplomatic cables from Shamir’s cache, alleging that Lukashenko’s opponents were funded abroad. According to several Belarusian dissidents who spoke to Tablet, the names in the cables were also used to identify lower-level dissidents.

“The extent to which WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir have endangered the lives of pro-democracy activists in Belarus will become chillingly clear as innocent men and women continue to disappear,” Kapil Komireddi, author of the Tablet piece, writes.

WikiLeaks issued a weak public disavowal of Shamir’s Belarusian caper in February 2011, saying “obviously it is not approved.” But according to Ball, the internal discourse on Shamir was somewhat different.

“Assange shamefully refused to investigate [the Belarus incident],” Ball recalled in his Guardian piece. “The two [Shamir and Assange] remain close.”

Next link:  a lengthy piece in The Atlantic, containing amongst other stuff a claim about Assange's attitude to release of names of Afghan informants:

I might further direct you to Assange’s own unique brand of journalism, when he could still be said to be practicing it. Releasing U.S. diplomatic communiqués that named foreigners living in conflict zones or authoritarian states and liaising with American officials was always going to require thorough vetting and redaction, lest those foreigners be put in harm’s way. Assange did not care—he wanted their names published, according to Luke Harding and David Leigh in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. As they recount the story, when Guardian journalists working with WikiLeaks to disseminate its tranche of U.S. secrets tried to explain to Assange why it was morally reprehensible to publish the names of Afghans working with American troops, Assange replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” (Assange denied the account; the names, in the end, were not published in The Guardian, although some were by WikiLeaks in its own dump of the files.)**

It is very clear that Assange lied about matters during the Trump campaign:  hence lying about this is not hard to imagine.  (He claimed he would sue The Guardian, he never did.)

  

The strange world of American evangelical "heaven tourism"

Slate has a long, sad story about a book that sold well amongst  US evangelicals, but the guy at the centre of the story denies that it was true.  (He was in a bad accident and the book was about his journey to heaven and back.)

As I don't keep up with the peculiar world of American evangelical circles, I did not know about this:

The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven sold more than 1 million copies and spent months on the New York Times’ bestseller list. It was also on the leading edge of a boomlet of “heaven tourism” stories in Christian publishing, including Heaven Is for Real, a memoir about 4-year-old Colton Burpo’s experience that came out later in 2010 and was eventually adapted into a movie starring Greg Kinnear. Time magazine published a cover story in 2012 titled “Rethinking Heaven,” opening with Burpo’s story—even more detailed than Alex’s—about seeing a rainbow horse and meeting the Virgin Mary. Other such books included 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004, car accident), Flight to Heaven (2010, plane crash), To Heaven and Back (2012, kayaking accident), and Miracles From Heaven (2015, fall into a hollow tree, made into a Jennifer Garner movie). After the Malarkeys’ success, “all Christian publishers were looking for the next heaven book,” said Sandy Vander Zicht, a former editor at Zondervan, a large evangelical publisher based in Michigan.

Until things came crashing back to earth. The cover of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven calls the book “a true story.” But the boy himself now says it was not true at all. Four years ago, Alex sent a letter to a conservative Christian blog dramatically renouncing the book. “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven,” he wrote. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. … People have profited from lies, and continue to.” Alex’s retraction also became a sensation, with reporters unable to resist the sudden, hilarious perfection of his last name: Malarkey. 

Although The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven has been off shelves for years now, yanked by the publisher after Alex’s disavowal, the drama around it has quietly continued to roil. Last year, Alex filed a lawsuit against Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher based in suburban Chicago, accusing the company of defamation and exploitation, among other charges. He’s seeking a payout at least equal to the book’s profits. Alex, who recently turned 21, now lives with his mother. He was valedictorian of his high school, but he has been a quadriplegic since the accident and requires full-time care. Kevin and Beth divorced last year, and Beth says she has no idea what happened to the money Kevin earned from the book. The suit alleges that she and Alex are “on the verge of being homeless.” Alex was a minor when the book was published, and claims he was not a party to the contract. (Tyndale says in court filings that Kevin entered into an agreement on his own and Alex’s behalf, and that while Beth was not party to the contract, she “consented as a matter of fact” to the book’s production by helping to arrange interviews and supplying family photos.) A judge has dismissed most of the lawsuit’s counts. The next court date is in August.

More generally, the article is of interest for the way it describes how some evangelicals frequently think they are sensing the presence of angels or demons.  Some really do live in a world of high imagination. 

Back on the domestic front

In another of my "I am a wannabe 'influencer' but I am a complete failure at it" posts, I endorse the following products, having consumed them this last weekend:

The "tacos" in this are soft tortillas, and they are best heated up in a hot fry pan.  The "flame grilled BBQ taco sauce" in this kit is not like your usual bland taco sauce, and is very delicious.   I fried an onion and red capsicum with the steak strips, and threw in a drained can of black eyed beans at the end, too, which extends a relatively small amount of steak into enough for 4. 

This is the best of the pre-made butter chicken sauces out there.  Some fresh cream added at the end probably makes all the difference.  Add carrots, and beans (and even some red capsicum) to make a more balanced meal.  Having no naan bread handy, I tried heating up some ordinary wraps in the dry fry pan last night, and they still puffed up a bit and were a decent substitute.

I should have been a home economics teacher. 

A rare, pro-scooter, opinion piece

I still haven't been on one.  Still tempted.  But someone writing at the Washington Post now loves using them. 

Crud

I found a surprising amount of sticky, brown crud stuck in the front loading washing machine today, behind the mould affected rubber seal and in a hard to reach crevice on the outside of the drum.   

I suspect it may be to do with rarely running the machine at the top temperature of 60 degrees.  (Or perhaps to do with using fabric softener, which I recall a plumber/repairman telling us never to use.  But for towels, it really needs something, and vinegar does leave a bit of a smell and doesn't do much softening.)

Anyway, I ran the machine at 60 degrees with a cup vinegar, after removing as much crud as I could with a sponge and my finger.  Hopefully, this has cleaned it all out.

I love the front loading washing machine, but it is an interesting challenge to keep clean.

That is all in today's edition of "The Domestic Life of Steve".  Thank you.

Update:  Yes.  The brown gunk build up in front loading washers is a well discussed problem on the 'net.   Glad it's not just my household...

The weird crisis of the image and perception of masculinity - on the Right

There's a funny column by Marina Hyde at The Guardian that points to something pretty obvious:

Ruining a country near you soon: the beta males who think they’re alphas 

After a week in which paddle-less Britain has found itself once more caught in dangerous transatlantic currents, it’s clear that there are two kinds of political men. Strong men and weak men. Which one is our most likely next prime minister? I’m afraid Boris Johnson is the worst kind: he’s a weak man who thinks he’s a strong man. See also selective antiracist Jeremy Corbyn, whose unshakeable conviction that he hasn’t been wrong in several decades has left him stubbornly incapable of being the bigger person. See also gratefully submissive Donald Trump fanboy Nigel Farage, who has spent much of the past three years hanging wanly around Washington on the off-chance of a half-hour 6pm burger with the alpha male to his beta. And see also Donald Trump himself, the leader of the free world, who spent about 48 hours this week tweeting like some homicidal 11-year-old Justin Bieber fan about the leaked comments of the British ambassador. Who, apparently, we now let him pick. More on toxic insecurity’s poster boy shortly.

This whole talk of alpha males brings to mind the changing popular image of masculinity in my lifetime:   it is genuinely weird, is it not, that the progression of popular perception of strong masculinity went from, if Hollywood was a guide, the "gentle but strong" masculinity of characters played by Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman and Robert Redford (most of whom were, I think, liberals in politics in real life) to the fathead, muscle bound, shoot-their-way-out-of -trouble image of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and perhaps even Mel Gibson.   What exactly was going on in the 1980's into the 1990's?   A last hurrah for over-the-top masculinity that the ageing support base for Donald Trump still longs for now?   I felt it was weird at the time - how even toy manufacturers came out with muscled up versions of cartoon or movie characters (muscle bound Luke Skywalker, for God's sake.) 

And the funniest thing is how the wingnut Right's figureheads for a return to the good old days of generic national strength and masculinity are both overweight, buffoon haired, patently bad husbands that are nothing like what normal people used to associate with an image of confident masculinity.  

As for Boris Johnson, Marina writes:

Great leaders show, rather than tell, their skills. Yet Johnson never lets up with telling people that he is not “defeatist”, that he will “put some lead in the collective pencil”, that “energy” is needed, that what the EU really fears is a big strong man like him. Mm. I hear they talk of little else in the 27 European capitals. “O Fates, please spare us the dreaded ‘positive energy’ of a guy internationally ridiculed as the worst foreign secretary in memory; and the unplayable charm of a surprisingly indifferent orator who knows the Latin for ‘can we just take out the backstop?’”

 And Johnson does know Latin, as he never misses a chance to remind us. No one could accuse him of wearing his learning lightly – or, indeed, wearing any of it lightly. Witness his excruciating promise to reach out to something he pointedly referred to as “Oppidan Britain”. To which the increasingly despairing response has to be: YES YES! I KNOW WHAT SCHOOL YOU WENT TO! I KNOW WHAT HOUSE YOU WERE IN! I KNOW YOU GOT A SECOND CLASS CLASSICS DEGREE! I KNOW THIS SOMEHOW ENDS WITH YOU CONSIGNING OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY TO THE CATACOMBS THEN BEATING US TO DEATH WITH YOUR RELATIVELY MIDDLEBROW ACHIEVEMENTS! But mate: you are 55 – FIFTY-FIVE – years old. How, how can you possibly still be wanking on about any of this, in public, as though it was still the best thing you’ve ever done? Can it really be because it was? [Spoiler: yes.]...

...He may use longer words, but Johnson’s sledgehammer self-admiration does not differ materially from the US president’s diurnal reminders that he is a strong, good-looking and very stable genius.

Because I don't see as much of Boris Johnson, I don't have any clear idea of how insecure he comes across, but Marina makes a good argument that he is as bad as Trump.

Trump's insecurity, narcissism and lack of knowledge on so many issues is plain to see to everyone except (apparently) his base base.   Or, as might be more likely, it's a case that perhaps half of his base see it but nonetheless celebrate it.   Just as he embodies a poor person's caricature of what it would be like to live rich (gold toilet - cool), his Tweeting behaviour might be seen as ridiculous on one level, but they get a proxy thrill at seeing a jerk being able to say anything and no one can stop him.  You sense this celebratory attitude at Catallaxy all the time - along with their admissions that they comment there specifically in order to say things they cannot say in front of their spouses, or at work without getting into trouble (for being obnoxious).     

As I have said before, this is actually a sign of frustration at being losers on issues they identify as part of a culture war - on matters of changing attitudes to sexuality, gender roles, masculinity and environmentalism.  Unfortunately, though, it is at the cost of good government and policy for everyone.

And before I go, some funny comments that followed that Guardian column:

The juxtaposition of Trump MAGA guys banging on about masculinity and Trump is so funny.

They spent eight years throwing a fit at Obama being effeminate because he drank a Cafe Latte, but Obama was probably a pretty good example of what an "alpha male" would look like, if such a thing existed.

Trump, meanwhile, is a guy who has the personality of a bitchy cheerleader from a dated romcom, tweeting all day about how Anna Wintour's party was soooooo lame since he wasn't invited, or bullying Rosie O'Donnell for being fat.

But you have all these men saying "oh yeah, so good to have a Real Man in charge doing Real Man stuff. Finally!", as their hero obsessively messages Robert Pattinson once more imploring him not to take back Kristen Stewart.

And this: 

Worth noting that every second one of these "alpha" guys is in hock to some "masculinity" guru like Peteron who is is selling their followers some sort of masculinity supplement, masculinity guide, special diet to make them more masculine or all of the above. This is what alpha males do, you see: buy books on how to be manly and take snake oil diet pills.

As women, we find it irrestistible when men are constantly whining about how they're disempowered by feminism, somehow. Even hotter is when they spend all day online and have obsessive faddy diets. So manly. Grrrr...

Funny because it's true - from Alex Jones to Ben Shapiro with the "diet supplements".

I'm surprised Sinclair Davidson hasn't endorsed his own range of supplements, now that I think of it. 

A handy list

Found via the Anomalist, a very basic web page that looks like it might be from the 1990's, but with interesting link content:

Every Insanely Mystifying Paradox in Physics: A Complete List 

(I have heard of Cliff Pickover, who made that page, before, and I see that he has a very active Twitter account too.  Worth following, I think.)

Growth down

Singapore certainly seems to be ahead of the "slow down" curve:

SINGAPORE: Singapore’s economy grew by a meagre 0.1 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter, the lowest in a decade, according to official estimates released on Friday (Jul 12).

That widely missed economists' forecasts of 1.1 per cent and was the lowest since the second quarter of 2009 when gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 1.2 per cent, according to Bloomberg data.

and this:

Retail sales in Singapore decreased 2.1 per cent in May 2019 as compared to a year ago, according to figures released by the Department of Statistics (Singstat) on Friday (Jul 12).

The estimated total retail sales value in May 2019 was about S$3.7 billion, with online retail sales making up about 5.3 per cent. 

Dear Graeme

Did you have trouble following the rules at school?

I've told you what the rules here are:

*  Any inane, slanderous comment to do with Jews - which is 99% of all comments you make which reference them - will be deleted.   No ifs, no buts.   Just deleted.

*  Swearing at me (or anyone else) will also cause deletion. 

And yet you continue to break them.

Re-activate your own blog if you want to slander Jews and publicise your nutball anti-Semitism and eccentric cosmology.

I also encourage you to start a GoFundMe page devoted to raising enough money to have Elon Musk shoot you towards Mars where you can take happy snaps of the ancient glass farms and prove us all wrong.   It would give me great relief if this was you in the spacesuit:

Update:   If I provide you with a link for a profound new idea, will that make you go away while you research it for a year or two?: 

Tall Aliens May Be Humans Altered By Living for a Time on Mars

"Not at all" says Barnaby Joyce

At the ABC:

With the long-term decline in fertility rates among western men, how worried are you about you or your partner's sperm?

Hence the title to the post.  Back to the article:

Up to now, getting sperm tested has involved going to a clinic and navigating embarrassing scenarios while avoiding eye contact with receptionists
.
The tech world claims it has the answer: A wave of startups are offering home-testing technology that's almost as easy as taking a photo of your semen and uploading the results.

Mail-order kits containing a clip-on phone microscope and transparent slides test both sperm count as well as motility - the wriggliness and vitality of the little fellas.

The results for some products have been tested as 97 per cent accurate.

But back to Barnaby.  Apart from crapping on in climate change denial, I see that he has been musing about other big picture things:

With both chambers in a fortnight’s recess, the ASX in blackout period and school holidays in full swing, the sultan of the non-sequitur declared that “if you want zero emissions but you don’t want nuclear power, you should shut up” and “if New York can live with two senators, why does Sydney get nine?”

This latter remark informs his wish to reconstitute the Australian Senate into 38 constituencies, from its existing eight. “Instead of having 12 senators per state, you have two senators per region. By its very nature … it will most definitely represent Aborigina­l people in a better way.” Marvel as, in one utterance, Joyce whitesplains Indigenous constitutional recognition and appropriates it for agrarian socialism.

The plan, like its author, is predictably daft and self-serving. Subdividing the Senate further into geographical zones would be to duplicate the House. 118 years and 46 parliaments in, how has that representative premise served Australia’s first peoples?

The Beetrooter’s semblance of reconciliation imperative evaporates in his real gripe: that “the Senate was supposed to represent the geographic diversity of Australia but all it’s really done is re-entrenched the power of the capital cities, where overwhelmingly all the senators live”. But if nine of 12 senators elected to represent New South Wales live in Greater Sydney that’s probably because 5.2 million of their 7.9 million constituents live there, too. And if you want your inland rail but don’t like the system funding it, you should shut up, right?

The poor fallen hero thinks he’s cooped up on Elba, scribbling riding orders and smuggling them by pigeon to the front line. Funny, 'cos his ideas do emanate that syphilitic whiff of madness.

Joe Aston in the Fin Review wrote that.  He really does not care for Barnaby.