The case for sunny nihilism?

Interesting piece in The Guardian arguing that nihilism doesn't need to be a downer - you can have "sunny" nihilism, and there seems to be an upswing in that attitude amongst today's aimless youth.

Count me as unconvinced.  I don't dispute that nihilism can be the subject of much humour - the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy proved that quite some time ago.

But there is no reason why, as a philosophical approach to life, it should lead to this:

One of the many criticisms of nihilism is that it opens the door to unchecked selfishness. It’s a logical next step if you think there’s nothing to gain from life except personal happiness and pleasure. Yet for the people who have absorbed this message, the trend isn’t towards greed, but community-mindedness.

Skjoldborg urged his audience to solve problems. Gupta sought to build his own meaning. Tolentino’s whole book is an argument against self-serving, neoliberal systems that crush people lower down the economic ladder than you.

In the months since discovering I’m worthless, my life has felt more precious. When your existence is pointless, you shift focus to things that have more longevity than your own ego. I’ve become more engaged in environmental issues, my family and the community at large. Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock itself.

It can just as easily lead to the opposite - the view that no other lives have inherent worth and are, basically, disposable.  

Mitchell was right

Someone on Twitter has pointed that David Mitchell's piece in The Guardian in June looks very prescient in its discussion of Corbyn and the likely outcome of an election.  

He is as smart as his comedic persona suggests.

Maybe they plan on putting on a really big buffet for Him?

Mormon Church Reportedly Amassed $100 Billion Fund For ‘Second Coming Of Christ’

"It'll be an electoral disaster" seems a tad unlikely to me

As David Graham writes at The Atlantic:

The cynical read on the impeachment of President Donald Trump is that it hasn’t changed anything: Here we are, weeks into the process and on the eve of a House floor vote, and there’s scant movement in public and elite opinion to show for it. Notwithstanding the mountain of new evidence uncovered by the House Intelligence Committee, the battle lines remain the same: Most Democratic House members will vote to impeach the president, while acquittal in the Senate is a foregone conclusion.

But maybe the most salient fact about impeachment is how little something else has changed. Impeachment is incredibly popular, especially given the polarized environment.

A Fox News poll released yesterday found that a full 50 percent of Americans support impeaching and removing Trump—one point up from October. The Fox poll has always been one of the worst for the president on impeachment, but FiveThirtyEight’s polling average finds plurality support for removal—47.7 percent for, 46.4 percent against as of this writing—a finding that tracks consistent, slim support. (The site finds even broader support for the impeachment proceedings themselves, at 52.3 to 41.9 percent.) RealClearPolitics’ average, which is noisier, shows a small plurality opposing removal at this moment, though it was the opposite yesterday. The Economist finds clear plurality support for impeachment as well.

It’s worth dwelling on this for a moment: Roughly half the country not only disapproves of Trump’s job as president, but believes he ought to be removed from office, a sanction that has never been applied before. And that support comes at a time of (mostly) peace, with the economy (mostly) strong. There’s more support for impeaching Trump now than there was at the equivalent stage in the Watergate scandal—right after articles of impeachment were approved by the House Judiciary Committee. Rather than face impeachment, Nixon resigned. (Nixon, however, had far lower approval ratings than Trump does now.)....

Trump’s most likely path to reelection has always been to repeat his 2016 feat of losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College. That path remains open, but the past two months has made the chance that Trump could win a plurality or majority of the popular vote even smaller.
The matter is fairly simple: Impeachment is popular. The president is not.

Old people (mostly men) are killing us

You've probably seen the demographic breakdown of voters for Trump, Brexit and Johnson - all heavily, heavily weighted to the over 55 set.   Climate change denial (or desire for inaction) is the other big issue that, on average, owns the oldies.  

Now, I know I belong in the group I'm criticising, but I still find it very remarkable, and worrying.

I was thinking this morning, the whole inter-generational situation is so, so similar to the social dynamic during the late 60's regarding the Vietnam War and the peace movement.   American (and Australian) politicians were un-swayed by youthful protest marches, and the older generation would claim that the protesters were naive, self interested and needed to get a job and a haircut and let those who understood things more clearly (such as the threat of communism) work it out.    (Isn't it funny - in a sad sort of way - that with climate change denial, a core dismissal tactic is the very same thing used in the Vietnam War - "you young people, you just don't understand the danger of communism/socialism, and climate change is all a socialist plot.")

Yet, of course, in the long run, who does history judge as having had a better take on the situation, in the big picture, regardless of the educational attainment or naivety of many of the protesters?

I think we're seeing exactly the same thing happening with much of the reaction to Greta Thunberg and the youth protest movement around climate change (as well as in the marches we saw against Brexit in Britain.)   Sure, the protesters are not making any immediate gains, in terms of swaying politicians to action, and it's easy to say "but what is their actual plan?"  (Well, in the case of Brexit, that was pretty simple - just don't do it.)

Yet what's the bet that in the long run, history will judge the protesters as being right, in the big picture.   Climate change denial and inaction will be deeply regretted, as will (I am betting) Brexit. 

And I really don't understand why people - men in particular - who are old enough to remember (or even know about) the social situation in the late 1960's don't see that they are playing the same, ultimately losing, role in their cynical reactions to Thunberg and her popular youthful following.    

Update:  I now claim this in support:

The Irishman and Scorsese

I found The Irishman on Netflix a bit of a mixed bag:   the first hour or so is pretty great film making, and to me felt like the work of a younger director out to make a name for himself.   The middle section, basically the Jimmy Hoffa story, was slower but interesting (as I knew next to nothing about Hoffa), and I thought Al Pacino was really good and entertaining.  (As for de Niro and Pesci's performances: they are fine, but I didn't feel they had to put in much acting effort, given that the limited range of emotions the screenplay needed them to show.)

The last third (or perhaps quarter) slows down further, and ended leaving me feeling much the same way most Scorsese movies do - mostly entertaining, but with no lingering emotional effect, and therefore no desire to re-watch.

I have no doubt explained this before - Scorsese is talented enough in putting a movie together and he knows what looks good on the screen.  But I have never understood the obsession with chronicling gangster/mafia life.  Lots of critics note his interest in Catholicism (and I have seen The Last Temptation of Christ), but despite the ending of this latest movie, I don't think you can really say that redemption is major theme through his work.  Sure, he often shows what his characters lose by getting into crime (which makes him a more moral director than, say, Tarantino), but I still don't think there is much emotional depth or impact to the stories.  

Anyway, this one was worth watching, but it is really long.  I guess that does make it suited to Netflix, as several breaks are warranted.

By the way, despite what many have said, I thought the "young face" effect on the main characters worked pretty seamlessly.  My son didn't think it look noticeably fake, either.  Yay for technology.  

The usual over-reaction by both sides

I do tire of reactions after large and comfortable majority wins by one political party which hyperventilate along the lines of "this is a disaster for Party X and changes everything forever"; despite the fact that very often, within a decade, everything has reversed.

People might say "well with Brexit now happening, everything changing forever really is true for Britain", but I'm talking just about political control at the moment.

I mean, these are the figures for yesterday's election:

So the Labour, Liberal Democrat, Scottish Nationalist and Green combined vote was 50.4%, as against Conservative [Clown] Party at 43.6%.   I know you can't claim all Labour voters as remainers; but there is no doubt at least a smidgen of Conservative voters who are.   Hence, I doubt the election result really convincingly tells us much about how a second referendum would have gone, had the opportunity arisen. [For much more educated guessing about this by yours truly, see the update below.]

More broadly, see how first-past-the-post pans out?   43.6% of the vote gives the Conservatives 365/650 = 56.1% of the seats in parliament.   That...doesn't seem right.

Yet Imre Salusinszky, who I was thinking is a relatively sensible centre-right person, come out with this:

when asked why:

Yeah, not only win, but gain a 6% of the seats buffer, hey?    Imre's being saying a lot of things I don't agree with on Twitter lately, so I have to downgrade my opinion of him to "pretty stupid like most Conservatives these days."   I assume he is still a pal of Tim Blair, so what could I expect?

Anyway, the puzzle with Johnson is actually where his opportunistic brand of political views will take him.   What happens to Brexit now?  Is a soft one still the way forward, or is hard Brexit more likely?   No one seems to really know, but this BBC site explains that once it's started, it's still a process that has a long way to go.  What's the bet that the ageing Brexiteer in the high street has any clue about that?  

People say that his time as London's boss show Johnson as wanting to be a broad based populist:  he may be a lying, womanising, narcissist like Trump, but he is not going to let himself be beholden to the culture wars as are the American (and parts of the Australia) Right.    Or perhaps it's more a case that "culture war" means something different in Britain to what it does across the pond - with Brexit being Britain's culture war/identity issue -  but it doesn't seem to extend to things such as climate change denialism or gay marriage panic in the way American brand conservatism does.    And that, at least, is something to be grateful for.


[Update:  I've looking up some numbers to try to see what they suggest about what the election result means for Leave/Remain numbers if a second referendum was held.

I wasn't sure about the estimates for the number of Leave voters at the Brexit referendum who were Labour voters.  It seems the estimates are around 25 - 30%.  However, some of those at this election must have gone to the Conservatives already.  Also, it is a better informed electorate on what Brexit means, so presumably some former Labour Leave voters would have re-considered their position.   Hence, the proportion of those who voted Labour this time who would still want Leave remains very unclear.    Let's say 20% of Labour voters this time were still adamant Leavers.   That would put one fifth of the 32% Labour vote into the "leave parties" column - roughly 6% of the total vote.  So Tories and Brexit parties combined total of 45.6% of the vote would get boosted to 51.6% - almost identical to the Referendum outcome.   But it doesn't take account of several things if a second Referendum were held:

*  a leakage  of Conservative voters to Leave - this interesting article argues that 13% of "strong Remain" identified as Conservative in 2017, but at this election, they remained loyal to Conservatives because they would prefer to leave the EU than see a socialist Corbyn government.  That sounds pretty plausible to me, and suggests that (say) 5 to 10% of the Conservative vote yesterday could have moved to the Remain column on a second referendum - that's 2 to 4% of the total vote, and even at the lower estimate, could be decisive;

*  a likely greater turnout of Remainers, some of whom were presumably swayed by polling that they didn't really need to go and vote at the original referendum.  The turnout at the referendum was 72%; at this election 67% - it appears that the high 60's is now common for turnout at their general elections in recent decades, but it did hit 80% in the 1950's.   Thus a higher than 72% turnout in a second referendum would not have been out of the question, and I think there is every reason to expect it would have favoured Remain;

*  it's even been argued that demographic decline (that is, oldies dying off) amongst the original Leave voters might even have been influential in favour of a Leave win.

I think, therefore, that there is a pretty convincing argument that the election result is not the overwhelming endorsement of the will of the people on Brexit, at all.   Of course, Johnson would claim it as such, but anyone who factors in the British first past the post system and its inflation of seat numbers, as well as looking at the evidence listed above, should not make such claims.  Brexit got through its referendum on a 1.9% majority on a turnout that was big, but no where near a record for past elections.   There is reason to think that on a re-run, even despite yesterday's outcome, it could have lost.

Feel free to point out the error in my arguments, anyone, because I'm giving myself a pat on the back for this post.]

The Chinese are bad news for donkeys

That's not a headline I was expecting in Science magazine: Donkeys face worldwide existential threat.   (That is the headline in the magazine itself - it's not used in the article at the link for some reason.)

Anyway, the problem is once again silly Chinese traditional medicine, of which I have complained before as just about the worst cultural feature to come out of that country:

Over the past 6 years, Chinese traders have been buying the hides of millions of butchered donkeys (Equus asinus) from developing countries and shipping them to China, where they’re used to manufacture ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine. The trade has led to an animal welfare nightmare, along with a threat to donkey populations, the severity of which is only now emerging. Without drastic measures, the number of donkeys worldwide will drop by half within 5 years, according to a 21 November report by the Donkey Sanctuary, an international equine welfare charity based in Sidmouth, U.K. The crisis threatens many of the world’s rarer donkey breeds and a vital means of transport for the poor....

Ejiao, in use for thousands of years, purportedly treats or prevents many problems, including miscarriage, circulatory issues, and premature aging, although no rigorous clinical trials support those claims. The preparation combines mineral-rich water from China’s Shandong province and collagen extracted from donkey hides, traditionally produced by boiling the skins in a 99-step process done at specific times of the year. Once reserved for China’s elites, ejiao is now marketed to the country’s booming middle class, causing demand to surge. One producer, Dong’e Ejiao in Liaocheng, China, touts it as “a creation of heaven and earth” that’s now passing “from the royal tribute to the home of ordinary people.”

Despite government incentives for new donkey farmers, farms in China can’t keep up with the exploding demand, which the Donkey Sanctuary currently estimates at 4.8 million hides per year. Donkeys’ gestation period is one full year, and they only reach their adult size after 2 years. So the industry has embarked on a frenzied hunt for donkeys elsewhere. (Importing hides is not illegal in China, and the import tax was lowered from 5% to 2% last year.) This has triggered steep population declines. In Brazil, the population dropped by 28% between 2007 and 2017, according to the new report.

Thrown into a volcano

Hope this isn't insensitive to the recent horrible deaths and injury that happened in New Zealand, but it was just a coincidence that I found this video last night.

I've taken to watching some Youtube travel bloggers - mainly ones who are based in Japan - and marvelling at the high quality videos they can produce.   (Modern video equipment is minor miracle, I reckon.)

One of them is a woman from Brisbane, who has been posting videos for quite a while under her channel Currently Hannah.   She seemingly now makes a living from this alone, and her videos have covered trips to various overseas places, not just Japan.  

I think she is quite likeable, but is inclined to be too dramatic and too talky at times.  Her Japanese boyfriend seems good natured, but I do wonder if they will last.

Anyway, last night I was watching one of her videos she made in Indonesia, where she goes to a volcano and sees a festival in which possessions are thrown into it in the hope of some good luck or benefit in return.   Yet, it's also accepted for people to go somewhat done into the volcano and try to retrieve what's thrown into it.   (And that includes chickens, which seemingly survive the ordeal, but also at least one goat, which seemed to have survived too.  They all benefit from people not being able to throw them far enough out from edge of the volcano.)   It's really weird.  Have a watch:



I quite like Poalo from Tokyo as a video blogger too, although his are all pretty much all based in Japan.  He seems a ridiculously happy and upbeat type of guy - his family from the Philippines originally but he grew up in California and then moved to Japan.  His life story is really quite interesting, if you have 25 minutes to spare to listen to him explain it.

My British election outcome explanation

Old people like clowns.

(Explains USA as well, although there it expands to "young, dumb, old and paranoid people like clowns.)  

Must be time for another "Rule for Life"

This is, I would have thought, an obvious one, even though I know it is routinely breached in the name of fitness.   And it sprung to mind because of this story: 

The day after I wrote in the Guardian about how my life as a female cyclist, and Paralympian, led to me having reconstructive surgery of my vulva – all because saddles are not designed for women – a book arrived in the post.

The rule:

*  If an activity hurts a lot and causes inflammation - stop doing it.  Permanently, if it keeps hurting.

What am I up to?  6?

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.)
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. 
6.  If an activity hurts a lot and causes inflammation - stop doing it.  Permanently, if it keeps hurting.

Just reviewing some of my past posts, I think I thought about adding another, but never officially did.  It's good and valid, though:

7.  If a potential boyfriend or girlfriend says, with intended irony, that they know that they can be a bit of a creep (or difficult) - don't believe the irony.   Just don't get into a relationship of any kind with them.

Ho hum

I seem to getting particularly blasted with Christmas songs around my workplace this year, and I think it's turning me off the entire season.  Certainly, any TV Christmas special in which the people start singing carols is getting me a bit queasy. 

Look - a not so weathy African nation going big on renewables

Well, I didn't know this.  Morocco, a nation not exactly known for its wealth, but with plenty of sunshine and (I presume) empty land (like Australia, and with a population in the same ballpark too) is aggressively installing renewable energy, with apparent success:


Climate Policy that Actually Works: How Morocco is Meeting its Clean Energy Goals

A big solar thermal plant has just recently opened:

Morocco Lights the Way to More Solar Power Production

Their goal is 52% of installed capacity to be renewables by 2030.  That's not actual electricity used, but capacity.  

Still, seems quite a goal, and seems a good example to use against those who argue that poorer nations just much use coal (or nuclear) to get ahead.

Prediction: this will not penetrate into the Right wing's alternative reality

Horowitz has been talking at Congress:

In response to Democrats on the panel, Horowitz said his office "certainly didn't see any evidence" in FBI or Justice Department files that former President Barack Obama asked the U.S. government to investigate Donald Trump's campaign, as Trump has charged.

Nor, Horowitz said, was there any evidence that the Obama administration tapped Trump's phones at Trump Tower.

Horowitz also reaffirmed that the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of partly unverified reports about then-candidate Trump, "had no impact" on the bureau's decision to open the investigation.

Two (OK, sort of three) crazy things about how other countries do elections

*  I guess this current UK election has caused some discussion of change to their first past the post system, but I still can't see why it isn't the subject of a continual, large scale reform campaign.   (I saw that Antony Green was over there, saying that Britain insists on a result on the election night, and if they stick to that, they are never going to get reform to any sort of proportional/preference system.  Farage, of all people, is pressing for change, but really you need the 2 major parties to talk about it.)   Why don't (more of) the English see the unfairness in first past the post when you have more than 2 substantial parties??

* Why does any country hold elections on a work day?   Especially when voting is not compulsory and you have to depend on people finding the time to get to the ballot box?   Yeah, sure there is postal voting, and I think it is overused in Australia.  But countries that rely on people getting out to vote - then making as easy as possible is just an obvious thing to do.

* And let's not get into American electoral system craziness, with each State running their own systems for eligibility to vote in Federal elections.

Worst Attorney General in American history?

I don't know American history with much intricacy, but I reckon Bill Barr is looking good at going down as America's worst, most partisan, culture war motivated Attorney General ever.   Some extracts from a Vox article about his appalling comments on the IG report:

But the most unbelievable line came when Barr attempted to cast the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign staff in 2016 as “the greatest danger to our free system” — because in his mind, that constituted the government abusing its powers to influence an election. Yes, really:

From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.

This is just not an accurate description of what happened in 2016. There is no credible evidence that the FBI investigation was an attempt to intervene in the election, which is a conspiracy theory that doesn’t even pass the most basic smell test. The existence of the Trump-Russia investigation wasn’t officially confirmed until March 2017 — and the most prominent leak during the campaign was pro-Trump, resulting in an iconically false New York Times headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Why would the FBI keep its evidence against Trump secret until after the election, if it was trying to influence the outcome?

But setting aside the falsehoods, the sheer chutzpah of Barr’s comments is staggering. Again, according to Barr, “The greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state ... in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” 

What president might be doing something like that, right now, and getting impeached for it? 

In all seriousness, though, Barr’s move here is disturbingly Orwellian. He correctly identified the abuse of power to influence elections as a threat to American democracy, but then argued that the people who investigated Trump are the ones who are actually guilty of it. The criminal becomes the victim, the authoritarian the guarantor of our freedoms. You heard a similar refrain from Republicans during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing on Monday, when they repeatedly accused the Democrats of being the real threat to democracy.

Barr’s embrace of this kind of truth-annihilating strategy is particularly interesting. He’s an establishment Republican with long credentials in the party, but one who has emerged as one of the most capable and willing defenders of Trump and the ideology for which he stands. Barr’s reasons for this, as my colleague Ezra Klein explained, stem from a deep sense of persecution, a belief that conservatives and Christians are under siege from ruthless progressives, an existential battle that must be waged if America as we know it is to be preserved.

Under these circumstances, a lot becomes justifiable — even the kind of assaults on the idea of truth more commonly seen in various types of authoritarian regimes (North Korea’s formal name, for example, is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). It’s a way of emptying words of their content, of transmuting ideas like “democratic” to mean “in the interests of the ruling faction.”

 

All true and accurate, I reckon.

Update:

The peculiar fate of Catallaxy

Sinclair Davidson made a comment in a thread yesterday that both Leftists and conservatives have shown themselves to be "Statists".   Yet the blog, today featuring prominently:

*  a photo of a dead, drowned toddler by Trump cultist Steve Kates (and, by the way, endorsement of a thorough authoritarian and wannbe fascist like Trump is an endorsement of the purest form of Statism - the kind where the leader embodies the State and is above control and accountability); and

* Sean Hannity level hack commentary on American politics by the uber Catholic conservative (not that he wants the title) Currency Lad;

is yet again confirming itself as the most intensely conservative political website in Australia.

Don't pretend otherwise, Sinclair.  You now oversee a conservative blog that yearns for the special kind of Statism that comes with authoritarianism. 

Update:  I should have mentioned the reactionary hyperbole that Kates engages in about that drowned toddler photo:

This image allowed millions of “refugees” to enter Europe, changing Western Civilisation forever, and leading to its possible demise within a century.

Yeah, sure.  Idiot.

Thinking about sacrifice

Don't ask me why, but I started thinking in the shower last night about the ubiquity of sacrifice to the gods as a key religious impulse around the world.   What do academics think is the motivation for lots of people around the globe having started to believe that gods need or desire sacrificial offerings?

Which led me to review again what Freud thought about this, and I was reminded about his obsession with boys wanting to displace their fathers sexually.   (Seriously, has anyone ever psychoanalysed Freud as to why he would think this was a universal feeling?   I mean, really:  just how many men in this modern era of on-line, public, anonymous, confession ever said they felt this way.   Or would Freud say that it's an unconscious desire, of course most boys and young men don't recognise it?)

Anyway, I read an essay by someone who pointed out Freud being influenced by a contemporary writer, William Robertson Smith, who wondered a lot about the idea of sacrifice in early societies.  Here's a key part of the essay:

In “Totem and Taboo”, Freud followed Smith’s argument closely but focused more explicitly on the killing of the totem animal, interpreting this not only as the symbolic murder of the god but as the derivative of a primal group parricide motivated by the desire of the young males to gain sexual possession of the females of the clan, who all belonged to the father (as the dominant male) and who were necessarily their mothers. Freud was indeed reiterating a principle first articulated by Smith himself (albeit in a footnote) — that there existed a double taboo which was breached in the primal sacrificial act: not to kill one’s fellow clansman and not to commit incest. Smith had written:

“I believe that in early society (and not merely in the very earliest) we may safely affirm that every offence to which death or outlawry is attached was primarily viewed as a breach of holiness; e.g. [sic] murder within the kin, and incest, are breaches of the holiness of tribal blood, which would be supernaturally avenged if men overlooked them.” (15)

This principle was to lie at the heart of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. The abiding interest lies in its use as by Freud to explain the origins of morality, culture and religion. The totem meal was “perhaps mankind’s earliest festival” and was thus “a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginnings of so many things — of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion” (16). Ambivalence both motivated the killing of the father and induced remorse:

“…we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too… A sense of guilt made its experience, which in this case coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been… They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for the father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They this created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos became guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned itself.” (17)

I don't know, Freud may be almost nuttily wrong about the whole Oedipus complex, but before I read this essay (that is, while I was still in the shower), it did occur to me - is part of the unrealised motivation for animal sacrifice to gods an ambivalence about killing animals for food in the first place?

I mean, it would seem that the closer modern urban people get to seeing how the animals we eat are raised and killed, the more they sense guilt about the process.  In older societies, slaughter wasn't hidden in the way it is now, and people surely (like us) thought young animals in particular were cute and endearing.  Yet people gotta eat, and lamb tastes better than mutton, and so eat animals they did.

Is part of the unconscious motivation behind the idea of sacrificing animals to God or gods that it's a way to deal with the guilt of killing animals to survive?   If the gods take part in the meal as well, then who can blame humans for having to do this to survive?

It's an idea, anyway.  Perhaps an eccentric modern one, since I don't know that anyone has really detected an ancient sense of regret in killing animals for food.   The idea of respect for a wild animal killed, yes.  Or maybe people just haven't been looking for it.  And I can use the Freudian trump card - it's an unconscious thing, but it was still there!

Reading more broadly on sacrifice, it's interesting to see that anthropological and psychological consideration of this is still a pretty active field.   I found two broad surveys of the topic that were pretty good:  one, the Encyclopaedia Britannica  entry Theories of the Origin of Sacrifice;  and another is a good essay by a Jungian psychoanalyst:   The Psychology of Sacrifice.   (I don't find the Jungian comments all that helpful really, but the survey of what others have theorised is very succinct yet comprehensive.)

All grist for the mill for my forthcoming Guide to Life for Aimless Young Adults.

Update:   I feel I should give a shout out to Buddhism for being the big religion for which, from the start, animal sacrifice was criticised and banned.  According to one Buddhist website:

One of the central rites of Brahmanism during the Buddha's time was the sacrifice (yàga)  which sometimes included the slaughter of animals. The Vedas describe in detail how these sacrifices should be conducted if the gods were to find them acceptable.  Some of these rites could be very elaborate and very expensive. The Tipiñaka records one sacrifice conducted by a brahmin named Uggatasarãra during which `five hundred bulls, five hundred steers and numerous heifers, goats and rams were brought to the sacrificial post for slaughter' (A.IV,41). The Buddha criticized these bloody rituals as being cruel wasteful and ineffective (A.II,42). He maintained that those who conduct sacrifices make negative kamma for themselves even before they have set up the sacrificial post, ignited the sacred fire and given instructions for the animals to be slaughtered (A.IV,42). He repudiated the killing of the animals, the felling of trees to make the sacrificial posts and the threatening and beating of the slaves as they were driven to do the preparations `with tear-stained faces' (A.II,207-8). He also made a plea for such sacrifices to be replaced by charity towards virtuous ascetics and monks (D.I,144).

But I see that animal sacrifice still happens in Tibet, due to the co-existence of old Shamanism with Buddhism:

The issue of animal sacrifice – the “red offering” (dmar mchod) performed in some Buddhist communities across the Tibetan cultural area in the Himalaya – has received considerable critical attention. Surveys such as that conducted by Torri (2016) have shown that, according to common belief, local deities prefer red offerings such as blood and meat1. In Sikkim – a former Buddhist kingdom and now an Indian state in the southern foothills of the Himalaya – nearly every mountain, hilltop, lake and river is said to be populated with supernatural beings. They play an important role in daily life, and need to be worshipped. Some of these entities were tamed and converted to Buddhism by Tibetan masters (Balikci-Denjongpa 2002 and Balikci 2008, p. 85). However, of course the taming of supernatural entities has not only been a feature undertaken by Buddhist masters who came to this region, but is also an important task of village religion itself. Village people often consult a Buddhist master and a shamanic expert simultaneously. As Balikci notes: “The Sikkimese shamans are the ritual specialists in charge of keeping good relations with the households’ and the lineages’ ancestral gods”  

And it seems that one of most excessive animal sacrifice festivals (not counting Eid, I suppose) happens in Nepal, but as a Hindu thing:

Despite outcry from animal rights groups, a festival widely considered to be the largest mass-slaughter of animals on Earth happened in Nepal this week, according to the Guardian. The two-day Gadhimai festival has been held every five years for the last 260 years in the village of Bariyarpur, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Kathmandu, where it attracts  thousands of Hindu worshippers from Nepal and neighboring India. Amid tight security, the festival opened on Tuesday with the ritual slaughter of a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and a pigeon, as a local shaman also offered blood taken from five points on his body. After this initial killing, around 200 butchers brandishing sharpened swords and knives entered the festival arena, a walled area larger than a football field, leading in several thousand buffalo. In the days prior, Indian authorities and volunteers seized dozens of animals at the border from unlicensed traders and pilgrims, but this effort failed to stop the massive flow of animals to the festival.

 Update 2:  Maybe I read this before, and perhaps even posted a link to it?, but Haaretz in 2016 gave an explanation of how Judaism came to stop doing Passover animal sacrifice after the destruction of the Second Temple, which was the site for a lot of ritual killing:

Jewish families made their way to Jerusalem from throughout Judea and beyond. Once they arrived, they purchased their sacrifice from one of the city’s many baby goat/sheep vendors and waited for Passover. On Passover eve, a representative from each family took their purchase to the Temple. At the appointed time, the gates would open and the representatives – each with bleating sacrifice in hand – filed in and lined up in front of one of the many priests, who themselves were lined up in rows in the Temple courtyard. Once the courtyard was full, the gates were closed and the mass slaughter began.

Each representative handed his goat or sheep to a priest who killed the animal, carefully collecting its blood into a bowl. Once the bowl was full, it was transferred to the priest beside him. From him it went to the one beside him, until, like a conveyor belt, it reached another priest who doused the altar with its bloody contents. After the blood has been completely collected, the priest handed the now-dead animal to the representative, who took it and hung it on a hook. Levites came over and removed the skin and innards, which were taken to the altar and burned. Once this was done, the representatives each took their dead goat or sheep and left the Temple compound to find their families. Then each family roasted the meat on a pomegranate branch and ate it in a festive night barbecue.

Since the Temple compound – about the size of 15 football fields – wasn’t large enough to fit all the pilgrims in at once, this process was repeated three times....

The task of adapting Judaism to its new Temple-less reality fell to Rabban Gamaliel II, head of the Jewish Assembly – the Sanhedrin. With regard to the Passover sacrifice, Gamaliel decreed that the sacrifice should continue in family homes, with each family sacrificing its own goat or sheep. 

However, other rabbis believed that the Passover sacrifice, like all the other sacrifices, could only be conducted by the priests in the Temple and that, like the other sacrifices, should not be conducted until the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt. 

Some Jews followed Gamaliel and continued to sacrifice goats and sheep in their homes on Passover; others didn’t and saw the practice as apostasy. 

Within about two generations, the practice ceased when the anti-sacrifice camp assumed control and threatened to excommunicate those who practiced it. So, sometime in the second century C.E., Jews stopped the practice of sacrificing baby goats and sheep on Passover. Until recently, that is. 

Don't worry, teenagers - it will all become (sorta) clear in 40 years time!

Further to my recent post about how to motivate aimless seeming teenagers, I noticed this (arguably) less-than-useful article last night:

Scientists pinpoint the age you're most likely to find meaning in life 

Guess what the answer is:

Interviews with 1,042 people aged 21 to more than 100 years old reveal that people tend to feel like their lives have meaning at around age 60. That’s the age at which the search for meaning is often at it’s lowest, and the “presence” of meaning is at it’s highest, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Clinical Psychiatry.

 

If you’re a twenty-something ruminating about your life’s purpose, that may seem like a long time to wait. But take heart: If this study tells us anything, it’s that the ennui-fueled search for meaning in your early life is normal, and, even after 60, it doesn’t actually ever end. Instead, people may readjust how they derive purpose as they age.

Well, I'm looking forward to next year now, when I peak in life meaningfulness...

Good tweet, Adam

The next Olympics could be...problematic

By the way, has Trump yet tweeted sympathy and support for Russia in light of their ban?

A "Guide to Life" for young adults?

Well that's a co-incidence:  I have been wondering lately the very question posed at Slate:  What to say to motivate your aimless teen.

I wouldn't be the first parent to wonder - why does my teenager seem to be feeling uncertain and not have any passionate interest in anything?   Even what's she's talented at doesn't really move her much.

Why doesn't she know more fundamental general knowledge about the history of the world?   At least my son read books for a while, before his phone took control; and he watched Horrible Histories and has some knowledge of the big wars and revolutions.   [As a (perhaps sexist) generalisation, do girls have less interest in history because they don't enjoy imagining themselves in the midst of dangerous adventure in the same way that boys do?]   And don't speak to me about religion or philosophy - of the latter she knows nothing, but she's had exposure to Christianity of both Catholic and Protestant hue, and even still sometimes accompanies a friend to one of the "let's put on a show!" brand of evangelical suburban church.  But she openly says at home that she suspects there's nothing behind the curtain, so to speak.

I suggested last night that she should try the ideas in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason:   she said I may as well have just said that in a foreign language, for all the sense it made.

So yeah, I'm feeling the need for a Guide for Life type book for this type of young adult.  Of course, this is what Jordan Peterson's recent career is made out of, but he's full of waffle and rubbish such as curing his depression by eating just meat - he's not someone I trust to be imparting information and common sense.

And it can't be long - it needs to be relatively succinct.

If I can't find one, and I doubt that something that would have my seal of approval exists, I should write it myself. Getting teenagers to read it would be the challenge.   It would have to come in multimedia format for a phone, too...

Climate change and fish

News from Alaska (and sorry the extract is long, but it's important to understand it is not an overfishing problem per se):

In an unprecedented response to historically low numbers of Pacific cod, the federal cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska is closing for the 2020 season.

The decision, announced Friday, came as little surprise, but it's the first time the fishery has closed due to concerns over low stock.

"We're on the knife's edge of this over-fished status," North Pacific Fishery Management Council member Nicole Kimball said during talks in Anchorage.

It's not over-fishing to blame for the die-off, but rather, climate change.

Warming ocean temperatures linked to climate change have wreaked havoc on a number of Alaska's fisheries in recent years, decimating stocks and jeopardizing the livelihoods of fishermen and locals alike who rely on the industry.

A stock assessment this fall put Gulf cod populations at a historic low, with "next to no" new eggs, according to Steven Barbeaux, a research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who authored the report. At their current numbers, cod are below the federal threshold that protects them as a food source for endangered steller sea lions. Once below that line, the total allowable catch goes to zero. In other words, the fishery shuts down.

Up until the emergence of a marine heatwave known as "the blob" in 2014, the stock of cod in the Gulf of Alaska was doing well. But the heat wave caused ocean temperatures to rise 4-5 degrees. Young cod started dying off, scientists said.

"A lot of the impact on the population was due to that first heat wave that we haven't recovered from," Barbeaux said during an interview last month. Following the first heat wave, cod numbers crashed by more than half, from 113,830 metric tons in 2014 to 46,080 metric tons in 2017.
The decline was steady from there.

Too close to Christmas...

I'm going to be really busy the next couple of weeks, which means I should post less, or at least at night rather than during the day.  But the world is such a hot mess at the moment (literally, and socio-politically), it's hard not to read and be appalled by the news. Such as this:

*  the warning about rapidly increasing, low oxygen dead zones in the oceans got a lot of publicity, which is good.   I think one report noted that some sea creatures do OK in naturally low oxygen waters, such as squid.  "Well", I thought "that's probably good news for sea turtles."  But then I remembered that their gender mix is being changed hugely by increased heat around the eggs, so maybe things aren't even great for them...

* I saw Insiders yesterday, and they spent a lot of time on how this Morrison government considers itself unaccountable - if they don't want to answer a question, they just refuse to answer and move on, and journalists pretty much give up and move on too. 

This is very true, and a part of the increased authoritarian bent of the Right - but it all started under Tony Abbott and the refusal to disclose anything about how boats on the high seas were being dealt with.  And that was Scott Morrison too, citing "operational matters."  

He got away with it then, and he's getting away with it now.   A Newspoll overnight at least shows he has a negative approval rating (48% disapprove to 45% approve), which is something to at least be grateful for; but the government overall is at 52%/48% TPP, in a period where I think it's looked pretty crook.  Mind you, I still think we are in a "let's ignore politics" period still after the last election.

Oh - and Labor is still looking internally terribly conflicted on climate change and coal.   It needs to get a grip on that issue fast.

*  Republicans continue to be disgusting alternative reality nutters  taking lines they are specifically told are false and dangerous by their own national intelligence services.

For one of my stupider readers

I bet it was JC who made an anonymous comment here recently that current models couldn't be accurate because models in the 1970's said there would be global cooling.

Obviously displaying the continual self-imposed ignorance of a "it'll all be OK" lukewarmer/denier, it would appear he has never read the 2008 paper in the American Meteorological Society which explained exactly what was going on in climate research at the time, a field which was in its absolute infancy.   It contains this graph:

There was, basically, exactly one year in the early 1970's in which "cooling" papers were dominant;  and some of the very same people who featured with cooling warnings quickly realised their mistake.

Stephen Schneider's explanation appeared in a autobiography he wrote, but this is it in a nutshell:

Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, recalls those stories well. "I was one of the ones who talked about global cooling," he says. "I was also the one who said what was wrong with that idea within three years."  Schneider coauthored a 1971 article in the journal Science about atmospheric aerosols—floating particles of soil dust, volcanic ash, and human-made pollutants. His research suggested that industrial aerosols could block sunlight and reduce global temperatures enough to overcome the effects of greenhouse gases, possibly triggering an ice age. But he soon realized that he had overestimated the amount of aerosols in the air and underestimated the role of greenhouse gases.  "Back then this science was so new, so theoretical, it was really hard to sort it out," he says. He and other early climate researchers say they did not predict a global cooling trend but simply suggested the possibility. Evidence suggests that average worldwide temperatures did decrease between the 1940s and the 1970s. Some climatologists partially attribute the temporary cooling trend to industrial smog, which has since been overcome by the effects of growing greenhouse emissions and, ironically, by clean-air laws that have reduced atmospheric particulates. "Science is a self-correcting institution," Schneider says. "The data change, so of course you change your position. Otherwise, you would be dishonest." 

Having said this, I do agree with the mainstream climate scientists who are concerned with the exaggerations of Extinction Rebellion and others.   Mind you, lukewarmer/deniers already claim a long list of "failed predictions" (including, of course, global cooling) which you have to be completely ignorant to claim as failure at all, so it's completely understandable that some don't want to give any quarter to denialists by siding with them against ER.  After all, exaggeration or not, climate scientists would nearly all want ER to be politically successful in their aim for urgent action.   But the reality is, if you are concerned with accuracy, you really do have to point out exaggerations when they appear. 

There was a good thread about this on Twitter, starting here:

A bit of floating solar boosterism

Grist has an article about a floating solar cell array on a retention pond in New Jersey, and talks about other places where floating solar is being used.

It is not that big an array, as it is a pretty small body of water, yet it is still said to be America's largest.

I presume America's great lakes are far to susceptible to wild ocean-wave like conditions to consider floating solar on them, but they must have lots of other smaller lakes and dams where it is possible.

I still say it is an obviously good idea.

Good catch

In news from Jakarta...

Not sure we're likely to hear a current Australian politician say such a thing anytime soon:

In a candid podcast, Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo said he liked watching porn and that there was nothing wrong with it.

"If I watch porn, what is wrong with that? I like it. I am an adult. I have a wife,” he said during an interview with YouTube personality Deddy Corbuzier published on Wednesday.

But it's still, you know, Indonesia: 

The politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said it would be wrong, however, if he shared pornographic videos. “What is not allowed is to share [the videos] because sharers can be charged under the Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE),” he said.
Watching porn is still generally frowned upon in Indonesia and the government has made it difficult for citizens to access pornographic content.

The Ministry of Communication has banned pornographic websites. It has also banned websites not principally concerned with erotic material, such as Tumblr and Vimeo, due to the presence of erotica on the platforms.

This does remind me, though, of Gough Whitlam and Margaret heading off to watch that Swedish sex movie at the cinema in the 1970's.  (The Language of Love?  It's proving surprisingly hard for me to turn up the photo of them outside of the cinema that I recall.)

Has anyone debunked this yet?

This study, it seems to me, should have already been debunked by now, if it contained genuine big flaws:

Offshore windfarms 'can provide more electricity than the world needs' 

Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours.

Asking for friend who thinks nuclear is the only thing possible to remove power emissions ...

Good reason he's not trusted

The moderate Democrat/centrist types who I follow on Twitter (like Will Wilkinson, and some others I can't recall now) have often said that they find Buttigieg's performance during the Democrat debates off putting and annoying.   He's now handed them some real clear grounds to say his take on things is way, way off:

I don't watch Democrat debates, of course, so I don't know how he comes across.  But this was a really ridiculous thing to say.

HIV still a big problem

Was surprised to read on France 24 that the HIV transmission and death problem in Kenya is still so big:

The Kenyan government is battling the spread of the HIV virus with a nationwide campaign, but infections remain rampant: In 2018, 46,000 people tested positive, including 8,000 children under 15 years old.

With 1.6 million Kenyans living with AIDS, the eastern African country is the third most affected nation in the world.

Transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from mother to child is still common and extremely difficult to contain, mainly in the capital Nairobi's low-income neighbourhoods, and babies are often infected during breastfeeding.

“Education, education, education for the young people is key on prevention of HIV to the children once they get pregnant,” says Faith Kungu, a nutritionist at the Lea Toto clinic in Nairobi.

Despite free healthcare, 4,000 minors died of HIV-related causes in 2018. An HIV positive status is still a taboo and can lead to exclusion from society. Some women opt out of taking medicine to avoid suspicion.

Sad news for a Friday...

Let's list some stupid people (in particular ways)

*  Elon Musk - why the hell would a man worth $20 billion (but not in cash, poor diddums) not settle a defamation action by the guy he called a "pedo"?   Would be a better look than the humiliating evidence that is coming out in court:

During his testimony Mr Musk also played down other tweets, which were also later deleted, including one where he replied "bet ya a signed dollar it's true" to a follower asking about the "pedo" comment.

Mr Musk also acknowledged in court that he paid $52,000 (£40,000) to a man posing as a private detective to dig up dirt about the British diver after it became clear he would be sued. The investigator turned out to be a conman, Mr Musk said.

Under questioning on Wednesday, Mr Musk estimated his net worth to be about $20bn but insisted most of his wealth was held in stock.

"Sometimes people think I have a lot of cash. I actually don't," he told the court.

*  Angus Taylor:  has been revealed as a complete bullshit artist, both in his completely inadequate response to him and/or his office's involvement in inventing figures for political gain (insisting against all evidence that the Council itself had put the figures on its website), and for having implicated Naomi Wolf in a culture war story that happened in Oxford when she was in fact living in another country.    (Sure, a lot of people don't care for Wolf, too, but I can understand her being peeved about being mentioned in Parliament this way.)

He needs to be dumped.  Soon. 

* Scott Morrison:   a flim flam PM, now trying to make a name for himself by re-inventing the wheel of Public Service arrangements.   As Bernard Keene wrote, this stupid cycle of rearranging departments and amalgamation and de-amalgamation just goes on and on and on:

and as people wrote following his tweet:

Yes, the amount of energy put by governments into rearranging the public service chairs is ridiculous and wasteful.

Waddayaknow? Climate models have been making accurate predictions all along (pretty much)

As explained at Real Climate, even some of the first climate models, when properly assessed (which means, taking into account when they got emissions and some other forcings wrong - which is not something you can blame them for)  they have been pretty accurate.

Actually, I find the lengthy Twitter thread explanation by co-author Zeke Hausfather, which starts here, is better than the Real Climate post at explaining what they did.

Quick takes

*   I think the new James Bond trailer looks good.   And I still think the new Q looks like they really had Richard Ayoade in mind, but the producers were worried that his fans would just fall about laughing for 5 minutes as soon as he appeared on screen.

*  Richard E Grant is in the new Star Wars film and says its fantastic.  All actors in these films say that, though, don't they?    Is it possible that they have made a Star Wars film that doesn't include a big, new supa-dupa planet killing version of the Death Star?  Will they have sorted out the unsatisfactory explanations of the nature of the Force?   Gee, I'm sounding like I'm over Star Wars;  but no, I will still likely see this one.

*  What the heck?  Just days after I say I might move to an OPPO phone because I like a pop up selfie cam, there's news that my current brand Motorola has just brought out a mid-range phone with the same feature (and same memory):

 

Big if true

Sabine Hossenfelder has a couple of good posts up - one generally explaining "dark energy", and a follow up post about a paper that has just come out which says that one key measurement that was taken to prove the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is wrong, and hence dark energy doesn't exist.   The local movement of the relevant galaxies may explain the redshift of the light from certain supernovae.

This is, potentially, really big news.  At least if you're an astrophysicist, or general observer of big science ideas.  

He hates government spending, until it's directed towards his pocket (or at least, his workplace)

Chris Berg announces government funding for yet more of RMIT make-work for economists who can't get their heads on ABC TV much anymore, and look who's part of it:

At Announcement

---

• Funding: $423,540.00

• Investigators:
  • Prof Jason Potts (CI)
  • Prof Sinclair Davidson (CI)
  • Dr Christopher Berg (CI)

• Organisations:
  • RMIT University

The research:

Public Finance and Cryptocurrencies. This project aims to analyse the impact of cryptocurrency technology on taxation and the provision of public goods in Australia. The project will identify the historical relationship between money technologies and public finance, examine the impact of cryptocurrencies in relation to the modern state, and investigate the potential of utilising cryptocurrencies in the provision of public goods. The outcomes of the research will expand theoretical and practical understanding of public finance in a world of cryptocurrencies. The project findings will provide guidance to Australian and international policymakers to prepare for potential disruptions to taxation and public goods provision.

Hey, Federal government, I can tell you what the conclusions of this troika will be before you pay a cent:

*   Cryptocurrencies are great, cool, disruptive things and we really like them (because they have the potential to make governments collecting tax even harder);
*   Our government should lead the way in facilitating the adoption of cryptocurrencies as soon as possible, because that way, it makes our waffly research look important.

Now send me $200,000 (not in Bitcoin, thanks), and you're $223,540 ahead.

Update:  I have altered the heading to the post, because I don't know how such research funding works.   I would presume it may involve economics minions (post grad students?) being paid to do some work for the report, and travel or some such, so I don't know if the troika personally make money from it.

What other world leaders have to put up with...

Look, honestly: if Macron and Merkel took Trump to a side room, and he was later found to have "fallen" out of its fifth floor window, the rest of the European leaders would say "Who pushed him?  More to the point, who cares?"  

The kinda depressing "big picture"

If this graph in this tweet is correct:

what's been happening is that wind, solar and other renewables have only been replacing another source of emissions free power - nuclear.

That would help explain why, despite big deployments of non-nulcear clean energy, emissions are not going down. 

That we have to junk coal as a priority is obvious.

Well, that's weird

I don't know that I trust Hot Air contributor Jazz Shaw on anything much, but he has an interest in UFOs and occasionally talks about the Navy "tic tak" videos that have everyone puzzled.

He's interviewed a young physicist (? not sure that's right, given what follows) before about UFOs, but I hadn't read it.

Today, he's put up a post wherein said scientist (Deep Prasad) has explained that earlier this year he had an alien/otherworldly visitation (of sorts).  They were trying to blast a lot of information into his brain, apparently.   (Fortunately for Deep, anal probe was avoided.  They seem to have gone out of fashion now as part of UFO alien abduction/visitation lore.) 

You can read about it here, at Hot Air.

It puts me in mind of the sort of experiences Philip K Dick claimed to have had.  But unlike Dick, I would hope Deep is not a massive drug user.

I'm not sure about him, nonetheless.  Shaw links to a 2014 article in a University of Toronto paper in which they asked whether "first year undergrad" - on an electrical engineering course -  Prasad "could be the next Einstein".   But the big idea he discusses is - generating electricity from using your keyboard.   This does not sound promising...

Gopnik on James

Oh - Adam Gopnik's column on Clive James is very interesting (he knew him) and well written. 

The irony

To be honest, I think the White House Christmas decorations are at least better this year than the blood red theme that Melania chose last year (and which many mocked as resembling something from the Overlook Hotel):

But the funniest thing in the White House produced video (which gives the impression Melania personally sets this all up) is the bit where it shows a tree decoration reading "Be Best".

That the wife of the appallingly "Be Worst" tweeting President should have chosen that as a theme for her "everyone, be nice to each other" campaign is just irony run amok. 

Sordid

Well, this is a headline you don't see every day:

War and pissoirs: how the urinals of Paris helped beat the Nazis 

Unfortunately, most of the article is about how the Paris "pissoirs" came to be installed and then widely used by men for illicit sexual encounters.   I find that very surprising, given that I would have thought that the open air design of these things, whereby you can see who and how many are using the facility, would have meant that this protected them from such use. 

But there you go.

It is interesting that the opening anecdote is this:

At 11pm on 6 December 1876, policemen patrolling the Champs-Élysées discovered a well-to-do bourgeois in a public toilet, engaged in what they described as “indecent exposure” with an 18-year-old labourer. The older man, it turned out, was the prominent Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny, a bastion of the reactionary right who railed against the government’s secular tendencies and advocated a society based on family, religion and a return to monarchy.

The press immediately called out Germiny’s double standards. Despite his protests – he claimed his adventure was merely “research” – he became a magnet for satire, his political opponents making much of his hypocrisy. The writer Gustav Flaubert described the scandal as a “comfort that encourages the will to live”. Germiny was sent to jail and went into exile on release.

That put in mind of certain high profile "family values" Republicans in America caught out in toilets or with male staff over the years. 

And on the straight sex scandal side, this recent one shows another Trump supporting Republican with low grade morals:

Mr. Hunter is accused of spending more than $200,000 [of campaign funds] on personal expenses. The indictment, which was released last year, detailed spending on lavish family vacations to Hawaii and foreign countries, large bar tabs, and grocery purchases for his family. 

Mr. Hunter was also accused of using campaign dollars to fund several extramarital affairs between 2010 and 2016, including one with a member of his staff. Prosecutors also alleged that the congressman, a Republican elected to represent a Southern California district in 2008, attempted to pass off some of those expenses as charitable contributions to veterans.

Until Monday, Mr. Hunter had remained steadfast that he was innocent of the charges, at one point calling it a “deep state” conspiracy. Despite the allegations, Mr. Hunter won re-election to his seat in November 2018.

On a Polish question

A couple of links for a friend, if he happens to visit, and put here as a result of a conversation on Saturday night:

Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over

And in The Atlantic:

The Truth About Poland's Role in the Holocaust

Remarkable phones

I've been very happy with my Moto phone, but am very tempted to buy an OPPO phone when I can next justify an upgrade.

I convinced my son to buy the Reno 2Z at JB Hi Fi yesterday.  As usual, I am blown away by the increasing sophistication of newer phones in the mid range market.   And this phone was on sale for (I think) $455 - when I had only been looking at it recently at its normal price of $599.  (In fact, looking online, this does not seem to be a nation wide catalogue sale price - do JB Hi Fi do local store sales too?)  

The specifications for the phone are remarkable - especially at under $500. 

6.5" AMOLED 1080 x 2340 screen
128GB storage
8GB RAM
16MP front facing camera
48MP/f1.7 + 8MP/f2.2 + 2MP/f2.4 + 2MP/f2.4 rear cameras
Bluetooth v4.2
4000mAh battery + VOOC 3.0
Hidden Fingerprint Unlock 3.0

And I really like the pop up selfie camera, which avoids the whole issue of a camera lens cut out at the edge of a screen.  (I presume people get used to that, but it still seems an annoying feature of new phones to me.)

Of course, I might be doing my part to support a worrying wannabe world dominating nation by going for a Chinese brand over a Korean or Taiwanese one - but they make such cool stuff.  

Someone thinks Boris is not doing so well...

A really vicious take on Boris Johnson's campaign performance from someone writing (where else?) in The Guardian:

...with Boris Johnson we are in the political wild west. A one-man amoral no-go zone, whose prime motivation is his own survival and who can only talk in staccato bursts of white noise – an incoherent stream of unconsciousness designed to run down the clock in any public appearance.

Quantity theory breaks down with Johnson. The longer the election campaign goes on, the more bloated and pneumatic he becomes. Yet the more space he inhabits, the more distant he seems. Day by day, there is less to him than meets the eye. He neither looks like a prime minister, nor sounds like one.

Johnson used to at least be able to give a passable imitation of being Boris Johnson. Now he can’t even manage that. The gags and the mannerisms that used to be his calling card, now just fall flat. A one-trick pony whose one trick everyone knows. The surface has been stripped bare to reveal a core of molten need. Someone who craves attention and fears he wouldn’t exist without it. Someone whose narcissism leaves him devoid of empathy. Incapable of either giving or receiving love.

I must say, from the other side of the world, it is very hard to see why he is as successful as he is in Britain.  It would be a bit akin to, I don't know, some eccentric like Bob Katter being taken seriously as Prime Minister material here.

A recent daily visitor

It's been cute finding a wallaby having a rest at the side or front of our suburban house each recent morning, but it does cause the dog to go berserk:

By the way - that side of the house is a mess, but it can't seen from the street, and we have no reason to go there either.  Still, yeah, it should be cleaned up.