Early emotional scars, and future sexual behaviour

Over at AEON there's an autobiographical essay by an English woman prompted by her strong reaction when a new friend says he is in a polyamorous relationship (she reacts strongly against the idea because she had a father who cheated on her mother on an apparently massive scale):  

My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car.

After he finally left his wife and 2 children, he made a return with a surprising proposal:

He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people.

On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said.

 But the main reason I thought it worth posting about the  essay is this part of it:  

‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow.

In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein.

From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right.

I have always thought that boarding school from a young age would be emotionally harmful, but I have never felt sure whether I was just projecting from what I am sure would have been my own poor reaction if ever it had been proposed that I had to leave home for schooling.  I wonder if it has been more broadly studied, or if that book is the only one on the topic?
 

Most controversial comment about Parasite

Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones wrote:

First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.

This sounds, of course, like he's saying that he prefers dubbing to subtitles.

And that is a controversial opinion, with this Tweet, which (shall we say) succinctly expressing disbelief that a writer (let alone one from a liberal publication) could say that, now having 9,000 retweets and 46,000 likes.

Even my teenage kids agree that dubbing is awful (in live action movies at least - it passes adequately in animation) and they always turn on subtitles for foreign content on Netflix, even if I am not watching it with them.

Kevin Drum needs re-education camp, or something...

Rule of Federal law optional in Trump's America

As someone down further in the thread says, with intended sarcasm I assume:

Revenge of the pangolin?

Pangolins only came to my attention back in 2014, although there has since been a David Attenborough narrated documentary which publicised their plight as victims of Chinese traditional medicine.

If the current coronovirus problem leads to Chinese not eating any, or as many, endangered wild animals for imaginary health benefits, that will at least be something good to come of it.  See this:

Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?

Movie reviewed: Parasite

I missed Parasite at the cinema, where it was still on at some arthouse places only a few weeks ago, it seems; but found on the weekend (to my surprise) that it was already available as a $7 rental on Google Play.  Cool.  I feel a bit sorry for the cinema owners, though.   Mind you, it would cost at least $30 for just me and my son to go see it at a cinema.   But I digress.

I think it's a good to very good movie, but perhaps didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I might.   I think it made me feel too anxious from too early in the movie as to how the whole scenario was going to unravel, as it was clear that it couldn't last.

I am also a little surprised as to how widely praised it has been, not because it deserves criticism as such, but because it seems so Korean-centric in its social commentary.   I mean, it is a very peculiar country - its susceptibility to cults; its torment at having a madman leader with brainwashed public support just to their north;  the crushing school system with students bearing a pressure like no other nation I know of.   (Yet, the movie indicated, overqualified university graduates abound.)   Even the enormously successful entertainment industry that is K Pop is notorious for its "dark and tragic underbelly".  Recently it was in the news that 75% of young Koreans would love to leave the country.   This article on the survey actually makes the case that things are not as bad in terms of inequality as the youth seem to think.   Maybe it's another Korean speciality - to complain that things are worse than they are?

The movie made me want to read up more on the social problems of the country, but I have had no time so far.   I also want to now read in detail reviews about the movie, as I resisted doing that because I didn't want too much in the way of spoilers to be accidentally revealed.

My son, by the way, said he loved it;  but then he, like many young people, thought Joker was great too.  (He went by himself - I have no interest in it.)   I am a little worried about what it says about the world when dark movies are so popular, but at least Parasite has a veneer of plausibility and isn't one that you have to worry about incels feeling endorsement.

I will probably update this later when I have read more about it...

Update:   did the movie remind anyone else of the Morlocks and Eloi from HG Wells' The Time Machine?

Update 2:  it has won best picture, best director and 2 other awards?   Seems a bit excessive, if you ask me.  Mind you, I haven't seen seen 1917 yet, so I don't know how it compares...  

Update 3:  I see that it's in fact the first foreign language film to win Best Picture.   Just occurred to me that I would have preferred Roma, which I found a mesmerising pleasure to watch, to be able to claim that title.   

The disinformation campaign

Oh look, another detailed, serious article on the appalling use of social media as the most effective propaganda/disinformation tool we've ever seen.

It's a good and important read.

As someone on Twitter said, in response to this article, and as a summary of how the Republicans got to where they are today:

The Republican Senators who said "he will have learnt a lesson" should be ridiculed until election day

When psychiatrists go nuts

Oh, so this is why "QAnon" is trending in Australia:

A Sydney psychiatrist who posted “bizarre” alt-right conspiracy theories he claimed were the directives of US President Donald Trump to his practice’s official website has been struck off the medical register.

The Dee Why doctor Russell Everard McGregor claimed Trump had taped evidence of a global Satanist paedophile network, that 9/11 was faked, and that the ABC was part of an international deep state network covering up the crimes of the elite.

Many of the 300-plus posts from 2018 onwards related to the debunked QAnon conspiracy that suggests Trump is leading a crusade against “deep state” forces who protect satanic paedophile rings.
“Fight with your keyboard, knowledge and pen,” McGregor wrote in one post in January 2018.

“Follow Q breadcrumbs on 8chan.

“The evil truth will be hard for most to bear. Be brave. Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.”

Minister completely uninterested in who invented figures in his office

It is basically ridiculous that Taylor will not admit that the evidence clearly points to an invention of figures by someone in his office.

Taylor has “unreservedly” apologised to Moore for relying on the falsified figures but has denied consistently that either he, or anyone in his office, altered the City of Sydney document to inflate travel expenditure. Taylor has said the document with the incorrect numbers was obtained from the council website.

But the council has produced evidence showing that its publicly available annual reports has only ever contained accurate figures. Metadata and screenshots from the council’s content management system showed the annual reports on its website had not been changed since they were originally uploaded.

As I said last week, Ministers used to be forced to resign for mere accidents that they were still held responsible for;  now, they think they can ride out actual fraudulent behaviour within their office if they say "sorry about that".

The Chaser has a funny tweet about this:

Killing animals not a great way to make a living

I had wondered about the psychological effects of working in an abattoir.  An article in The Conversation confirms a suspicion that it is not great for mental health:

The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers

view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.

There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.

Another study noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....

Surprisingly, Flinders University research has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender differences.

The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes

the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced, shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once again, finally coming to a close.

Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

If you ask me...

....political commentators who are centrists (or outright sympathetic to Democrats) are hyperventilating way too much about how much of a "disaster" the intra party tabulation of votes in one State really is.

It is very reminiscent of the media's intense concentration on how much of a political problem Hillary's emails were going to be.   Don't they realise their role in making these things self-fulfilling prophecies?

Yay Mitt

A few key paragraphs in Mitt Romney's speech:

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did....

The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The president’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect." No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values.

Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the ugly conservative

The fact that he has lung cancer should be no excuse for not observing that Rush Limbaugh has been a pig of a broadcaster for decades, and a major player in corroding the tone of mainstream conservatism in its American (and to some extent, Australian) incarnation to one which is every bit as obnoxious as any extremism in language and tone to be found on the Left.   It's worse for the Right, though, as it is meant to be part of a Christian landscape where they are supposedly taught to be better than their political enemy. 

It should be an embarrassment to the Republicans that he was endorsed so early on (I had forgotten that his fandom goes right back to Ronald Reagan), and nothing he did - no name calling, no factually wrong claims, no false rumour endorsed, no racist or misogynistic "jokes", ever caused serious estrangement from their circle. 

Should he be cut some slack for some rhetorical hyperbole if he is an "entertainer"?   No - you can only hide before the clowning for a limited time:  everyone knows there is genuine sentiment behind (say) racist tinged jokes if they are repeated often enough.

I see that he has been married four times and has no kids.   (Why are so many prominent American conservatives so bad at keeping spouses, I wonder as a half rhetorical question.)   He should be swimming in money, though - the internet says a net worth of half a billion dollars.     I hope he leaves a lot of it to charities, and not just political ones.   

But overall, politics will only benefit from the ending of his continued corrosive influence.  

The 18th century rabbit hoax

Can't say I knew of this (rather unpleasant) 18th century hoax, as explained in a book review at Literary Review:

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of rabbits – a number of them, over a period of several weeks. None of the rabbits, not even a ‘perfect’ one, survived their birth, but the surgeon bottled them up and declared his intention to present them as specimens to the Royal Society. A report in the British Gazeteer furnished readers with the woman’s explanation. Some months earlier she and other women working in a field had chased a rabbit and failed to catch it. She was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she pined to eat rabbit and had been unable to avoid thinking of rabbits.

The story was a sensation. It was not only the poor who believed a pregnant woman’s thoughts could affect the workings of her body – hence the arrival of the eminent surgeon at Toft’s bedside (the truly strange news would have been that an agricultural labourer had such care at all). More serious scientific men followed. Local people came in droves to stare. Excitement grew. King George I himself took an interest in the case. Could it be that something marvellous was about to be revealed? Toft was moved to London to be closer to the king and his doctors. Once lodged in a bagnio in Leicester Square, Toft found the delivery of rabbits – for, spoiler alert, the whole thing was a hoax – more problematic. The bagnio porter eventually admitted he had been told to go out and buy rabbits. Cut, skinned, only occasionally whole, rabbits had been introduced into Toft via her vagina in order to be found. Local women – a knife grinder’s wife, her own mother-in-law – seem to have masterminded the hoax, with the collusion of her husband. They promised her that she would ‘get so good a living’ from it that ‘I should never want as long as I lived’.

By December, a justice of the peace had been called in and Toft was arrested. She spent four months imprisoned in the Bridewell, doing hard labour. But no crime could be fastened on her and she was released.

The State of the Union is on...

Supermarket announcement voice:  "Box of tissues to Catallaxy.  Box of tissues to Catallaxy." 

Update:   True:

Trump "learning a lesson" re-visited

I've already derided this in a previous post, but some tweets backing me up:

My very reasonable assessment of the Iowa caucus

*  Of course, the optics of a party not being able to tally its own results quickly due to technical problems is not ideal.

*  Of course, for Trump supporters or excusers to claim that this shows the Democrats "can't run the county if they can't a caucus" is ludicrously ignoring the extreme and obvious dysfunction that has been the rapid and continuous turnover of Trump staff in the White House and the leaking of examples of incompetence of Trump from insiders that has happened from the start.  It is clearly the most shambolic White House we have ever seen in the modern era;

* That Republicans would immediately start with conspiracy theory about what happened is typical - it is all part of the alternative, post-truth reality which they have built for themselves.  (Of course, it doesn't help if some Democrats mutter darkly about dirty tricks, as well.  But the Republicans truly own the title of post-truth party.)

*  I have no problem with Biden looking like the clear loser in the results - he is looking old with no fresh ideas and his popularity with centrist type Democrats is very puzzling to me.   I have, though, no idea whether it is possible that Americans get past a massive "Socialist!  Communist!" scare campaign against Sanders, should he win.   I mean, the polling showing he does reasonably well with the general electorate seems a bit surprising to me too, given his history, age and use of the "S" word.   (Let's be honest, it's a word politicians of the Left avoid in Australia, too.)

* That said, I don't know that a combined Sanders/Warren ticket would be a bad thing.   I tend to think they will be better at attacking and ridiculing Trump than Hillary was.  (She had decades of conspiracy theories to overcome.   The Republicans don't really have the same imaginary dirt on Sanders/Warren to play with.)

* I don't know that anyone knows what to make of Buttigieg doing well, if not winning.   (Full results are  not out as I write this.)   As I have said before, it seems that many of the American political tweeters who I like find him very annoying, but I don't spend time watching Democrat debates so I am not sure why.   On the other hand, I think it would be interesting watching how Trump and his deplorables would deal with the homosexuality issue - surely they could not resist offensive jokes, signs and takes on that.  But given where American culture is at the moment*, I think that would carry a very real risk of backfiring.   It amuses me to think of Trump advisers realising that and trying to continually convince him that he really, really shouldn't try to make a joke about his sexuality.

Update:  I should have mentioned, I am somewhat convinced by the reasoning in Paul Krugman's recent op-ed:

Does It Matter Who the Democrats Choose? In terms of actual policy, probably not very much.
 

*  support for gay marriage polls is at least as 63% - has been as high as 67%.

If I ruled the world...

I noticed, once again via Twitter, this story which escaped my attention last year:

Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found.

In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatonnes of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined.

And yesterday, Vice really put the boot into SUVs, arguing that even electric ones are a waste and, basically, that people who buy cars bigger than they need are jerks:

The Hummer, in all its militaristic aggressiveness, is the very embodiment of the wasteful excess that contributed to the climate crisis in the first place. Cars are inherently about projecting a self-image, and hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to project one of profound, pathological selfishness. The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an asshole. 

I have to say, when driving around the city I routinely have very similar condemnatory thoughts about SUVs and (sorry to say) their owners; especially when in a car park.  

I can't fathom why, as an important part of climate change policy, it isn't obvious that they should be taxed into something that only people who really need them will buy.  

Countries like the US and Australia need to get the average car size much smaller.   And fewer cars overall.  

Time to attack a different culture

I'm giving China/East Asia a break from cultural criticism, and going to one of the last countries on Earth I am ever likely willing to find myself:

In Pakistan, keeping lions or tigers at home is a growing trend, flouting rules and safety regulations. The wild animals are seen as a status symbol in the country. Politics and lions often go hand in hand, with politicians buying big cats to symbolise their power. But now, even ordinary citizens are latching onto the craze for keeping wild lions as pets, often putting the animals in cages.

That's just ridiculous.

But, to be fair, is it worse than this example of wannabe powerful men (or at least, entitled men) using a big cat to bolster their masculinity?:

Pathetic.

Timbo has an attack of the vapours

Has Tim Wilson been watching too much Sean Hannity?  There's very much a Trumpian tone to this reaction to Adam Bandt's rise in the Greens:

Update: 

Some pleasingly direct words from the "Marxist!" are going to be hitting the right spot with everyone who can't stand Tim and his shonky government:

A depressing line of work

As reported at Science, another large scale vaccine failure for HIV:

The failure-ridden search for a vaccine that can stop the AIDS virus has delivered yet another frustrating defeat. The HIV vaccine that had moved furthest along in human testing does not work, and the $104 million trial in South Africa evaluating it has been stopped early. “There’s absolutely no evidence of efficacy,” says Glenda Gray, who heads the study and is president of the South African Medical Research Council (MRC). “Years of work went into this. It’s a huge disappointment.”

The efficacy study, which began in October 2016, is known as HVTN 702. It enrolled 5407 sexually active, HIV-uninfected men and women between 18 and 35 years of age at 14 sites across the country. Researchers randomly assigned half of the participants to receive a pair of HIV vaccines used in a one-two punch called a prime boost, whereas the other half received placebo shots. The trial was supposed to last until July 2022. But on 23 January, an independent monitoring board that takes scheduled, sneak peaks at the data to evaluate safety and efficacy, informed Gray and the other leaders of the study that it was “futile” to continue. There were 129 infections in the vaccinated group and 123 in those who received the placebo. “I was catatonic,” Gray says.

No evidence exists that the vaccine caused harm, as happened in a different large HIV vaccine study that was abruptly halted in 2007. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-chaired that earlier sobering study, congratulates her colleagues in South Africa for conducting a scientifically rigorous, complex trial. “The trial was incredibly well done and we got a definitive answer, and that’s what science is about,” says Buchbinder, who is the chair of a multicountry trial, Mosaico, that now is the most advanced large-scale HIV vaccine study underway.

It's sort of hard to imagine a more depressing end to years of research work on making a new vaccine (or drug) only to find it's completely ineffective.

I also note this:

In the halted trial, funded by MRC, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the “prime” was a harmless canarypox virus that carries genes for HIV’s surface protein and two of its other structural proteins. 

Not that I am saying that Bill Gates wasn't good to fund this attempt, but it goes to show that his Foundation doesn't always back winners.   His devotion to advanced nuclear might face a similar outcome.  

Fortune telling history

Interesting article at The Conversation on the rise of fortune telling as a popular, if technically illegal, pursuit in the first couple of decades of the 20th century in Australia. 

I thought spiritualism was supposed to have received a popularity boost due to the First World War (perhaps more in England than here), but did not appreciate that more generic fortune telling was popular in the same period.

Bad habit

How good is chewing betel nut?  Presumably, it must make for quite a good feeling, because of the obvious awful side effects people put up with to keep using it:

Betel nut black market boom in Australia has experts warning of devastating health impacts 

The tropical nut is chewed widely across South-East Asia and the Pacific and often mixed with lime powder (calcium hydroxide) to produce an addictive paste that stains the teeth and mouth a vibrant red.

It can also cause bad breath, tooth wear, gum recession, bleeding gums, and mouth cancer in regular users.

Ms Groves stopped selling betel nut when authorities cracked down on the product in Cairns, but said regulations had resulted in a booming black market for the product.

"[People] now just sell it at home," she said.

The Queensland Police Service said one person had been charged for possessing betel nut in 2019.
Australian Dental Association oral medicine specialist Professor Michael McCullough said the product was readily available in Melbourne where dentists are reporting a large increase in the number of concerning presentations associated with the product.

Have a look at two of the photos in the story:

The Big Questions

Why do country people think Barnaby Joyce is great?   What do they see in him that I don't?

Remembering that I used to see some appealing self deprecation in him, his personal image deserves to be strongly hit by a few things:

* he seems increasingly bitter, despite having had the benefit of a media covering up his infidelity during an election;
* apart from the relationship with a former staffer, there was the allegation of apparently serious level, drunken sexual harassment for which the National Party returned "no verdict";
* he gives the impression of drinking more now;
* at a time when he has just established a second family, and (if I recall correctly) having previously given the usual "it's so hard for a marriage, being a politician who has to be away from family so often" comments before he left his family, he is now deciding to increase his time on the job with his second set of kids;
* he gives the impression of doubling down on the "climate change and drought and bushfires - no connection" meme, at a time one would like to think that at least some country people might be starting to have doubts.

On the last point though - how many rural people are stupid?   Quite a lot, seems to be the increasing lesson of election results.

China and speed building

My first reaction when seeing, merely days ago, a field full of excavators preparing the grounds for a new Wuhan hospital was that it looked like a con: there were so many and they didn't look particularly well organised.   They seemed as if they were just pretending to be busy.  And besides - were they even the right bit of gear with which to be preparing the ground?  

But reporting from the BBC seems to indicate that the building has gone up in 6 days.  I didn't even think the concrete would be set solidly enough in that time.  Apparently, a similar "instant hospital" project was done in Beijing in 2003, taking 7 days.  Slackers.

It's hard to tell, but from some photos at the last link it looks like it might be a modular style construction.  Is that the only way it could be done?  Modular buildings can be assembled very quickly. 

Of course, getting a building up is one thing - having it properly plumbed and wired and safely finished is another.

I would like to see a walk through of the place in another couple of weeks time, just to see how it looks on the inside. 

Trump chastised - as if

There have been a few Republicans saying that things like "yeah, we know what Trump did was concerning, but it was not the sort of thing you remove a President for, and I like to think he will feel he has learnt something from the experience."

The "Trump will learn from this" aspect is a complete and utter, evidence free, crock of a take, and I would say there is an extremely high chance that Trump will utterly ruin their fantasy in his State of the Union address.

After all, Trump views everything in the most narcissistic way possible, and he knows his "base", with their self induced blindness and cult membership, thinks he did absolutely nothing wrong and that Joe Biden is the one who is shown to be corrupt.  They (encouraged now by most of the Republican Senate) are simply impervious to the objective reporting that there is no evidence that Biden was pushing to have Shokin sacked in order to help his son.   


Here's Axios reporting:

Trump's sense of invincibility 

President Trump often says he's the smartest person in the room on virtually every topic. Now, after taking several risks on what he privately calls "big shit" and avoiding catastrophe, Trump and his entire inner circle convey supreme self-confidence, bordering on a sense of invincibility.

The state of play: Three years into Trump's presidency, their view is the naysayers are always wrong. They point to Iran, impeachment, Middle East peace. Every day, Trump grows more confident in his gut and less deterrable. Over the last month, 10 senior administration officials have described this sentiment to me. Most of them share it....

Between the lines: Over the past month, Trumpworld's sense of being unbeatable has only grown. This is partly because the president sometimes defines victory in narrow terms, like pleasing the base and juicing the markets.

FDR re-considered

Noah Smith had some tweets over the weekend in which he discusses the comparisons that people like to imagine there would be between FDR and a Bernie Sanders presidency.  This included linking to an article in The Atlantic earlier this year that explained how FDR's policies were, in many cases, not "big government" ideologically driven, but combined pragmatic ways to get both government and the private sector involved.

I thought it very interesting:   

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

 It's worth clearing your browsing history to read!

A Soviet mountain mystery, and the conspiracy worlds shared by Russians and the American Right

The Atlantic has an article about a Russian mystery from 1959 that has sparked many conspiracy theories:

Precisely 61 years ago, a band of skiers trekking through the Ural Mountains stashed food, extra skis, and a well-worn mandolin in a valley to pick up on the way back from their expedition. In a moment of lightheartedness, one drew up a fake newspaper with headlines about their trip: “According to the latest information, abominable snowmen live in the northern Urals.” Their excess equipment stored away, the group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened.

Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.

Today, the “Dyatlov Pass incident,” named after one of the students on the trek, Igor Dyatlov, has become Russia's biggest unsolved mystery, a font of endless conspiracy theories. Aliens, government agents, “Arctic dwarves”—and yes, even abominable snowmen—have at various points been blamed for the deaths. One state-television show regularly puts self-appointed experts through a theatrical lie-detector test to check their outlandish explanations.

The article notes that Russian has a very, very long history of conspiracy theories coming from the top down, going back at least to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and makes this surprising claim about how widespread belief in conspiracies remain:

An unsolved mystery such as the Dyatlov Pass incident would no doubt rile up truthers in the United States, but the Russian obsession with the incident is above and beyond American internet-forum debates on Area 51 and the chupacabra. Whereas U.S. conspiracy theories often develop on the fringes of public life—a line that has admittedly been blurred in the Donald Trump era—conspiracy-mongering is mainstream in Russia, a country in which 57 percent of the population believes the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.

Which is interesting - the Trump supporting, Wingnut Right in America now has moved to a similar world of conspiracy belief,  with the conspiracies not so much originating from the top, but created or vigorously promoted for profit (see Rupert Murdoch, and the alt Right corporate and private media universe) and then being adopted by the top for cynical political benefit.    But they have both ended up in the same place regarding a post-truth world of politics.

Communists in the kitchen

This NPR story is from 2014, but I saw someone tweet about it yesterday, suggesting he would like to see communism and the return of apartment blocks with shared kitchens. (It was not serious, I think, but nonetheless scores of comments followed expressing horror at the suggestion, based on their experiences with multi-person shared kitchens). It's pretty interesting, anyway:

How Russia's Shared Kitchens Helped Shape Soviet Politics 

Some (lengthy) highlights:

In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, most people in Moscow lived in communal apartments; seven or more families crammed together where there had been one, sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. They were crowded; stove space and food were limited. Clotheslines were strewn across the kitchen, the laundry of one family dripping into the omelet of another.

As the Soviet Union industrialized from the 1920s to the 1950s, and millions poured into Moscow from the countryside, one of the goals of the new government was to provide housing for the workers. It started putting people into apartments that had been occupied by the rich or by aristocrats who had been driven out by the new regime.

"The communal apartment was like a microcosm of Soviet society," says Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. "People from all walks of life, sometimes absolute class enemies, living next to each other. The expression was 'densed up.' The allotment was 9 square meters per person."

 Gregory (Grisha) Freidin, professor of Russian literature at Stanford University, grew up in a communal apartment of 10 families about five blocks from the Kremlin in the 1940s. "On one side of my room was the man who washed corpses at the local morgue. There were two rooms where the mother and father served in the KGB. Then there was the woman whose husband was serving a sentence for stealing bread from the bread factory where he worked."

In Freidin's kitchen, every family had a small kitchen table that housed a few pots and pans. There were two four-burner stoves. Everyone cooked their own food — cabbage soup, borscht with beets, potatoes, buckwheat groats, boiled chicken.

Kitchens became a source of tension and conflict....

But there was apparently some very Orwellian motivation for the shared kitchens:

"Communal kitchen was a war zone," says Alexander Genis, Russian writer and radio journalist. "During the Stalin era [1928-1953] it was the most dangerous place to be — in the kitchen."

Shenderovich agrees: "Communal kitchens were not places where you would bring your friends. I think that was one of the ideas for creating a communal kitchen. There would be a watchful eye of society over every communal apartment. People would report on each other. You would never know who would be reporting."
But Anya von Bremzen remembers there was camaraderie as well. "There was always a grandmother to take care of the kids, and share a bit of cutletta or salat Olivier. And when they began to disband the communal apartments, the communal kitchen was an institution that many people actually began to miss."

The reason Soviet authorities considered kitchens and private apartments dangerous to the regime was because they were places people could gather to talk about politics.

"The most important part of kitchen politics in early Soviet time was they would like to have houses without kitchens," says Genis. "Because kitchen is something bourgeois. Every family, as long as they have a kitchen, they have some part of their private life and private property."

The article then goes on to note that there was an early idea that communism would set up cafeterias where most people would eat most meals, freeing Soviet women from the tyranny of cooking, so they could concentrate on self fulfilment.   Of course, it never happened, and the country soon faced mass starvation instead.  

And I guess I had not realised how thoroughly you could blame Communism for the poor reputation of Russian food:

"Bolsheviks were not into food. [Vladimir] Lenin was not a foodie," says von Bremzen. "They saw it as fuel; they had to feed the workers. The Bolsheviks kind of wanted to eradicate privacy. And private hearth, private stove becomes very politicized."

Following the civil war, the shortages and the famine of the 1920s devastated whatever was left of the Russian kitchen. Stalin's industrialization program included the industrialization of food. Completely new, mass-produced food appeared — foods like canned and processed soup, fish, meat and mayonnaise.

"The whole of the Soviet Union, all 120 different ethnic groups were suddenly being served exactly the same stuff," says Grisha Freidin. "Choices for this or that food, the tastings, took place at the politburo level. The kinds of candies that were being produced was decided in a special meeting with Stalin and [Vyacheslav] Molotov."

Fascinating.   

Ian McEwan looks back at Brexit

The take in this op-ed in The Guardian by Ian McEwan sounds entirely right to me.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

It’s done. A triumph of dogged negotiation by May then, briefly, Johnson, has fulfilled the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands. The rest of the world, presidents Putin and Trump excepted, have watched on in astonishment and dismay. A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause. We must pack up our tents, perhaps to the sound of church bells, and hope to begin the 15-year trudge, back towards some semblance of where we were yesterday with our multiple trade deals, security, health and scientific co-operation and a thousand other useful arrangements.

The only certainty is that we’ll be asking ourselves questions for a very long time. Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion”. How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.

Yes, this last aspect makes a mockery of the stupid arguments put by conservative and libertarian Right alike (and, for reasons I could never follow, also endorsed here in comments by Homer!) that not going ahead with Brexit after the referendum would be some sort of heinous travesty of democracy.   

While I am attacking my readers, I should add that I don't think I have ever seen Jason point to any analysis (outside of the self-serving pro Brexit campaigners, who we know were lying about numbers) to show that it would actually be a benefit in the long run for England.   I sometimes look at Helen Dales's tweets too, and read some of her commentary.  Same thing can be said about her.

So basically,  the people who would like to think of themselves as moderate Right, whether as classic liberals, or those with a stronger libertarian bent like Sinclair Davidson, simply supported it for the simplistic, ideological, belief that a multinational organisation means more "red tape", which = bad, regardless of any actual or serious analysis of the efficiencies the organisation achieves.

Not sure who to blame for this one

I like to attack traditional Chinese (or Asian) medicine ideas that lead to endangered animals being killed or mistreated for their imaginary health benefits; but I have another Eastern mystical idea that deserves rubbishing - that men holding back from ejaculation during sex is fantastic for their health.  (Not sure whether to blame the Chinese or Indians though - it appears to be endorsed both in yoga and in Taoist ideas.  It also appears to have had the famous Zen Buddhist Alan Watts on side.)

I'm talking about this because of this article at AEON, which takes a somewhat cynical, but still  open minded, attitude to the topic.

I just think it's very silly.   Oooh - semen is magic and holding onto it makes dudes live almost forever.   I mean, really.   Sure, if some couples want to have stationary sex and if it makes them feel good, go right ahead, don't let me stop you.   But this mystical overlay...

Besides, given the nature of the prostate and studies about ejaculation and prostate problems, it's hard to believe that it is healthier than normal sex.  

Here's an amusing part of the article, where the author describes a conference in Thailand he went to (with his wife) in 2015:

To be frank, my first impression of the Tao Garden’s conference was that it could have made a delicious subject for another Huxley satire, à la Brave New World. The clinic offered every kind of New Age therapy imaginable, including blood irradiation with strange blue light, Ayurvedic massage, colonic irrigation, full-body cupping, and a very painful treatment where so-called granules in the blood vessels of your anal canal and testicles are squeezed flat by muscular Thai grandmothers. The ecstatic screams of Tantra’s female acolytes were so loud at night that nearby condo owners threatened to call the police. My wife sensibly spent most of her time sunning herself by the swimming pool, sipping pineapple drinks, and watching the well-muscled tantrikas do laps in their G-string briefs, while I attended lectures and demonstrations in such subjects as ‘Preserving the Yang Element’, ‘Nine Sexual Secrets’ and ‘Awakening the Goddess’.  

The next section gets explicit:

The highpoint of the conference was a public demonstration of ejaculation control training for which a young man among Muir’s followers had volunteered. (At lunch that day, the same young man had told my wife and me that he was torn between dedicating himself to Tantra and becoming a dentist as his parents fervently wished.) The demonstration took place in a large room whose only furnishings were floor mats. As the young man disrobed and lay down, Leah Alchin Piper, Muir’s former lover and now business partner, opened her shirt and began ....

 Interested readers can go to the article to finish reading the description.  :)  It does have its amusing aspects.

What does Andrew say?

Two observations from looking at Andrew Bolt's blog:

*  Here's how he talks about the Morrison government's "sports rort":

MCKENZIE'S SPORTS RORT IS AN INSULT TO AUSTRALIA'S VOLUNTEERS

When Morrison's blathering attempts at excuse making are not convincing Andrew Bolt, it's time for Scotty from Marketing to give up and sack someone.

*  He's downplaying the seriousness of the coronovirus outbreak.   ("Hasn't killed anyone outside of China yet".)  

Given he doesn't have a clue about sound judgements on risk (see climate change), this probably means we should really start to panic now.

A mental problem to avoid

I didn't know that OCD could manifest as intrusive and unwanted sexual thoughts:

My doctor mistook my OCD for paedophilia 

but yeah, seems this can be a thing.   And I can understand how uncomfortable it must make other people feel (and how uncertain as to how to react) when they know someone is suffering from this.   

You know it's a stupid idea...

....when both my rather apolitical wife (like all sensible people, though, she thinks Trump is a joke and complete embarrassment) and someone at Catallaxy says word to the effect "this idea of putting Australians flown out from China into quarantine on Christmas Island seems unnecessary and over the top".

And the reasons are that it is just ridiculously expensive to use Christmas Island, and is surely likely to put the Australians at unnecessary risk of not being able to get the best treatment and drugs should they be needed.

I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea of quarantine per se - but is the government seriously suggesting there is no where suitable on mainland Australia near a capital city (or large rural centre with a major hospital) where the quarantining can be done?

Update:  The Chaser take on it probably has an element of truth behind it - the government is probably itching to get more people into a facility it is already spending money on unnecessarily:

Update:  and here's some support for my take:

Christmas Island is ill-prepared to receive a planeload of Australians from the coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan, with its medical facilities inadequate if somebody falls seriously ill, Australia’s peak medical body says.

Head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Tony Bartone, said Australia was ranked among the most capable countries in the world at containing the spread of infectious diseases, but that Christmas Island, chosen for its remoteness and because it has a detention centre, was ill-conceived as a health quarantine location.

But I see that Labor has decided to not rock the boat - which seems ridiculous.   I just do not believe that this could not be done cheaper and more effectively on Australian soil:

The Federal Opposition is backing the decision to use Christmas Island to quarantine Australians returning from Wuhan.

Plans are underway to evacuate as many as 600 Australians from the epicentre of the Coronavirus outbreak in Hubei Province.

  

Not something you really want to read at the airport

Boeing Dreamliner production problems threaten the aircraft's safety, former quality manager warns

The very strange case of Bettina Arndt

With the completely ridiculous Right wing trolling that was Bettina Arndt getting an Australia Day award for helping gender equity, there has been a surge of renewed interest in her dubious career.

New Matilda.com reported on the way she has, for decades now, never corrected any publication, interviewer or media outlet which gave her credentials as "psychologist" or "clinical psychologist".  (Or even "Dr", apparently.)    It had actually been my understanding that anyone could call themselves a psychologist anyway, but it appears more complicated than that.  And she does have a Masters of Psychology from way back.

But certainly, to me, "clinical psychologist" suggests experience with with face to face counselling to those in need of psychological care and aid.   And it would seem she has never done that.   Doing an interview with a convicted sex offending teacher who bragged about how good the sexual encounters were with his 15 year old student?  Yes - oh, and good call, Bettina.    

You see, until reading another NewMatilda article from 2007, I had forgotten how long she has been someone who really is best ignored, with her repeated opinion pieces from that period arguing that some sex offenders are not doing as much harm that people think they are.   Most fondled girls or boys will be fine, she argues (with no actual clinical psychology experience, mind you.)   Rape as a social problem is being exaggerated is a long standing theme - although we still have a society in which I have to fret about my teenage daughter not walking too far at night, even in my relatively safe, middle class suburb.

Bettina hates people embracing victim-hood too strongly - and to be honest, there are cases where that's a reasonable response.   (That discrimination case against QUT students brought by the aboriginal staffer, for example.)

But in the matter of sexual offending against children - the Royal Commission into it gave some stark evidence of the commonly occurring, dire long term effects of it.   It's really a topic on which her past assertions have been made to look like a really inappropriate call.  

The puzzling thing about Arndt is that her media work in the 1970's on promoting an open attitude towards sex and sex education made her seem a Left wing, pro-feminist, character, as supporters of sexual revolution of the prior decade invariably were.    Yet she is now aligned with the Men's Rights movement, which is as Right wing and anti-feminist as it gets.

I see from Wikipedia that, after her years editing Forum and getting her head on TV to titillate women watching the Mike Walsh Show about how they could have better sex lives, her first husband died and she remarried to an American lawyer.  Did he turn her into a Right winger, either of conservative or libertarian persuasion*?   It would hardly be surprising if his family was very  conservative, as her NYT wedding notice read:

The bridegroom is the son of Lieut. Gen. Willard W. Scott Jr, Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and Mrs. Scott of West Point, N.Y. The Rev. Edmund Campion, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony at the Australian Naval Memorial Chapel in Watson's Bay, Sydney.

So did she even become an obnoxious Right wing Catholic, of the kind that blights Catallaxy?   Perhaps.  It would help explain the later path of her career.

In one other article, I see that one of her other jobs was this:

Next Bettina spent five years working as an online dating coach, giving advice to men and women on online dating, helping with writing their profiles and increasing their chances of meeting the right match. See more about her coaching experiences here.

Gee.  She also has been very interested in the topic of erectile dysfunction (my bold):

The diarists recorded the interaction between the couples when men use the new drugs such as Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and Caverject. These can be miraculous treatments yet there’s a mystery – almost a half of all men who start taking these drugs give up on them.How much of the problem is women’s indifference to the rejuvenated penis? Bettina’s earlier research showed many men flying high on their new lease of sexual life are brought swiftly to earth by sexually disinterested partners.  There are many women who are delighted that their men are being forced to hang up their spurs – women who are not at all happy about this miraculous rejuvenated penis.  Bettina’s book, What Men Want, includes five chapters on erectile dysfunction.

No wonder the male dominated, somewhat ageing, members (ha!, a pun) of the Coalition government gave her a gong.

But it seems clear that Bettina has become increasingly annoyed at women not playing the role she thinks women should.   She's now aged 70, I see.   Surely has made enough money, can't she just retire?

 

*  Are we sure she has never been a member of the libertarian friendly IPA?  She appears on the podcasts, I see.  She certainly has had a touch of nutty ageing Robert Heinlein about her - wanting women to be strong, but not like feminist strong; knowing-when-they-need-to-service-their-men type strong.

The culinary Maginot line of Europe

So I saw a Rick Stein show on SBS Food last night, from 2015 I think, in which he made a trip into Germany with the stated intention of showing that their national cuisine was interesting and didn't deserve the low regard in which most of his English friends seem to hold it.

Well, it was pleasant watching as travelogue (as his shows always are - there is not a more likeable chef on television), but it completely failed in his stated aim of improving the image of German food.

The meals he highlighted were (with one exception) your usual stodgy, meat heavy examples of simple cooking with little flair.  The near liquefied  corned beef turned into gloop with potato and butter looked particularly unappealing.   (Apparently, it's a famous dish, but I hadn't heard of it before.  And I have nothing against corned beef, but not done like that.)

Yes, he highlighted their fondness for white asparagus with hollandaise, but that's hardly interesting cooking per se.   One young cook showed his herring salad dish which featured mango - so it was like an international fusion more than anything traditionally German.

And this brings me back to my strong opinion that in Europe there is something like a culinary Maginot line between the nations with interesting cuisine and those with bland, uninteresting or otherwise dubious cuisine.    Sure, even those on the Eastern dark side of the line might do one or two things well - everyone likes a good bratwurst, for example - but overall, they are failures at interesting flavours and interesting food histories.

Did I do a map like this once before?  I think I might have, but perhaps I didn't include Morocco.   Leaving out Greece may be considered controversial by some, but as I have explained before, it's recipes are too simple to be too interesting, although if last night's show is any guide, it ranks better than Germany:

Poland is a worry

Wow, there is some really worryingly Right wing authoritarian stuff going on in Poland at the moment regarding the judiciary, according to Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic.

Too much to post about...

Hey, work is busy, and the appalling state of politics has so much to complain about at the moment.  Such as:

*  what absolute pieces of work and jerks are those still willing to work for Trump, particularly Pompeo and Barr.   With Pompeo, the NPR reporter was completely vindicated in the emails released showing her intentions were clear, and the obvious problem was Pompeo's staff not passing on what they knew she wanted to cover.   Yet here is Trump and his bunch of obnoxious cult followers giving him congratulations:

With Barr, it looks like Bolton will say he also worried about Trump, but cult loyalty overcomes everything.

*  The impeachment looks like it might get Bolton as a witness after all.   That will be real popcorn eating viewing, for sure.   Of course nearly all of the cult followers won't budge in their view regardless of what Bolton says - because as always predicted, they have changed their position  from "of course it would be concerning if the President did that, but he didn't do it"  to "the President 100% did the right thing".  And they will maintain that even when someone they formally thought was a great appointment well matched to the Trump priorities says "no, you can't run foreign relations like that. It's wrong and corrupt."

Any and all Trump supporters have self-gaslite themselves into not being able to recognise truth from fiction.   It's what cults do.   One feels this cannot go on forever - but it is distressing that it has gone on for as long as it already has.   (And really, it is a pre-Trump phenomena that has been building over more than a decade.)

*  In Australia, is it a case of the Morrison government thinking it can bluster its way out of an obvious scandal, following Trump's lead?    There is a case for saying Ministerial standards used to be too tough, back in the day;  but it is ridiculous that Morrison is trying to bluff his way through this sports grant scandal.   

Bats and racism

A few points about China, coronavirus, and racism:

*   does Sinclair Davidson not mind at all that his blog for old fools is crammed with comments using "chinks" for Chinese since the outbreak of the coronavirus.   He certainly doesn't care enough to insert his own objection into threads or posts - not that I can see.  Update:   doesn't he teach at a tertiary institution that has lots of high fee paying Chinese students?    Wouldn't RMIT find this lack of control over his own blog concerning (remembering that commenters are forever complaining that certain words are on a "ban" filter that stops their whole comment ever being published.)  In other words, he could stop the casual and repeated use of a word almost universally regarded as offensive/racist if he wanted, but he doesn't.  Why?  

*  I had missed this about the "bat video":

As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China.

There was just one problem. The video wasn’t set in Wuhan at all, where bat isn’t a delicacy. It wasn’t even from China. Instead it showed Wang Mengyun, the host of an online travel show, eating a dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation. Sampling the bat was simply an addition to the well-trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

That's from a Foreign Policy opinion piece, that needs a subscription to read the rest of the article, which goes on to talk about how the idea of Chinese being dirty disease carriers has a long racist history.  Unfortunately, though I cannot read the whole article.

*  I have made comments over the last couple of years about how I wish that the Chinese (and other nearby Asian cultures) could get over the traditional medicine ideas that eating certain animals carries certain specific health benefits, usually (I think) based on the perceived spirit characteristic of the animal.   The harm I referred to, though, is to the endangered wild animals caught up in this quasi magical belief system.  I don't really care if people eat something wild that is not endangered (insects or rats, for example), although I guess I have a general bias towards the idea that eating farmed animals generally is a safer thing to do from a "risk of catching exotic disease" point of view.  (Even then, a lot depends on the hygiene in the farms too, I guess.)

In any event, I don't see an objection to the eating of endangered animals for a fanciful health benefit is a racist thing:  just in case anyone was going to throw that at me.

An interview worth listening to?

I missed this on Radio National this morning, and they don't do transcripts of interviews, but I have to listen to the audio at the link.  Can't do that now, but perhaps later:

A lightweight start to the week - what I've been watching on Netflix

For one reason or another, I still haven't managed to get to the cinema this summer.

But on Netflix, been enjoying the following:

Sacred Games - quality crime, corruption (and mysticism?) in Mumbai.   I only found this via a recommendation in some newspaper article, but it's really good, and I see from online review sites that it is well regarded by critics and viewers.  And the Indians are still doing the thing that amazed me so much in the much sillier Typewriter series - moving in and out of English (sometimes mid-sentence) so easily that it hurts and embarrasses my pathetic monolingual brain.

Dracula - the short series just released by the Moffat/Gattis team that brought us Sherlock.  Only saw the first episode last night, but it was very witty, and certainly interesting enough to continue watching.   I am not sure I am completely convinced by the wisecracking Dracula lead actor, and also questioned the deliberate use of very retro looking special effects sometimes; but as I say, a pretty high hit rate with amusing lines.   I did wonder early on whether vampirism was being played as an allegory for AIDS, which would be unusual given the very gay-friendly writers (Gattis is actually gay, I see), and I wonder if anyone else got that impression.

The Meg - yes, the 2018 megashark movie is indeed like a B or C Grade monster movie with hammy acting and script (and D grade science),  but done with an A grade budget and production design.  Gee, I enjoyed it, though.   The perfect movie to watch at home instead of the cinema so that you can make jokes out loud about who might be eaten next,  and the silliness of many of the decisions the characters are making.   I loved the mini "glider" subs; I would have killed for a toy version of one of them as a 9 year old:

Perhaps I liked it a lot because I could sense how even more intensely I would have liked it as a 10 year old?   Anyone, a lot of fun, very competently made.

Not enough environmental disaster for you yet?

In the SMH today:

The threat of mass fish kills is emerging across the Murray-Darling Basin as low river flows and the influx of soil and ash from bushfires reduce water quality.

In recent days, fish deaths have been reported in the Macquarie River near Dubbo and the Macleay River east of the Dividing Range in NSW, while a "wall of mud and ash" is moving down the Upper Murray.

"Fish are just rolling over dead everywhere, it's a double-pronged disaster," said Lee Baumgartner, a fisheries expert at Charles Sturt University.

Professor Baumgartner said a NSW Fisheries team arrived near Tumbarumba in southern NSW to rescue endangered perch, only to witness sludge moving down the river "with the consistency of cake mix".

"They didn't rescue a single fish," he said. "It's just horrible."

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority revealed the scale of the threats to the health of freshwater ecosystems on Wednesday, with the release of a map showing almost all the major river valleys faced problems.

These ranged from "almost certain" algal blooms and low dissolved oxygen levels to high salinity and bushfire contamination.

A touch of nudity

Oh, this should be interesting:

Since classical times the naked figure has impressed, titillated and offended viewers. In a new BBC Two series Mary Beard examines why nudity holds a key place in western art

It's called "The Shock of the Nude".

Which reminds me, as I always find the topic of the social nudism movement in the 20th century interwar years in Europe amusingly peculiar, I was a tad surprised to read recently that men in England were being arrested in the mid 1920's for sunbathing shirtless:  

 I did establish, in a photo in another post, that in Brisbane by 1935, at least some men were going "topless" at the suburban beaches, in front of women too.   So I suspect that a male torso being exposed in a park might not have been quite the scandal here that it apparently was in 1927 England.  
Or am I wrong?  Was the decade from 1925 to 1935 the period in which men's bare chests in public suddenly transitioned into being acceptable?  Actually, in England, yes it does seem the crucial decade:

The craze for sunbathing changed bathing costumes out of all recognition. It would simply not have been possible to get a tan wearing the cumbersome costumes of the Edwardian age. The classic male costume, a one piece affair in cotton with legs and sleeves, often decorated with horizontal stripes was laughed out of existence. Men's costumes now had shorter shorts and straps replaced sleeves, but the torso was still covered. In the 'twenties plain colours were generally preferred. Black, navy, maroon or royal blue were the norm. In the early 'thirties the top was often a different colour to the shorts and occasionally striped. Men in continental resorts in the 'twenties began to wear trunks and gradually the trunks became shorter, although still of the mini shorts style. By the 'thirties, trunks became acceptable in England, although some resorts still did not permit bare chests.