Drama at home

The ABC is currently heavily promoting a new (what I think is) light drama series "The Newsreader".  Here's the synopsis:

ABC and Screen Australia are thrilled to announce production is currently underway in Melbourne on the six-part drama series The Newsreader.  Produced by Werner Film Productions (Riot, Dance Academy) and created by Michael Lucas (Five Bedrooms, Offspring), The Newsreader is set in the maelstrom of a commercial television newsroom in 1986.

Starring Anna Torv (Mindhunter, Secret City, Fringe) as Helen Norville, a notoriously difficult star anchor determined to build credibility and Sam Reid (Lambs of God, The Hunting) as Dale Jennings, a diligent young reporter, desperate for a shot at the desk. Together, they’ll cover an extraordinary chain of breaking news including the shock of the Challenger explosion, the misbegotten hype of Halley’s Comet and the global terror of Chernobyl. From messy beginnings, a deep bond is formed that will upend their lives and transform the very fabric of the nightly news bulletin.

It looks pretty dull from the trailer.

But it did make me think:   why do I find Australian drama so unconvincing?   

I can find Australian comedy very funny and good to watch - both the sketch comedy (Micaleff continues to have the funniest - and only - political comedy around), and the more whimsical, character based humour of something like Rosehaven or Fisk.  Even some silly Australian sitcoms I can find funny (not many, mind you.)    And that's not to say there are no comedy failures - I have written about how underwhelming I found Benjamin Law's The Family Law, and how my reaction to Please Like Me was to kind of dislike Josh.  (Gay content creators do get a special privileged run in Australian funded comedy, I'm sure.) 

But Australia drama has always left me completely cold.    It never feels very realistic to me.   

I don't feel completely alone in this - because one of the funniest things in Mad As Hell has always been their mocking takes on the ABC's drama series.   

How does this happen?   Do Australian drama writers all go through the exact same training?  Do they all know each other (it is, presumably, a small community.)  Is it the pool of producers is so small all the stuff they are interested in is the same.   But they just seem to have the special ability to write stuff I find doesn't feel like the world I live in.    I don't know how they do it...   

Money wins

No one really trusts that Michael Wolff all that much, but apparently the interviewer agreed that there are several sources to back him up on Rupert hating Trump:

Michael Wolff, the author of Landslide and two other bestselling books about the Trump administration, has claimed Rupert Murdoch “hates” Donald Trump.

“Rupert hates Donald Trump,” the author told CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Hates him – but Rupert loves money.”...

Wolff said Jason Miller, a former Trump spokesman, backed his reporting. He also insisted that whatever Murdoch feels about Trump, he knows where his interests lie.

“At any rate, the Rupert Murdoch thing is I reported that at that point the decision desk got in touch with Lachlan Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch called his father, his father said to go with this report, obviously including quite a fetching obscenity directed at Trump.

“How do I know this? I’ll give you the background here. The fact is that I am Rupert Murdoch’s biographer … who was given enormous access to him. I am well-sourced throughout the company and throughout his family, so therefore I know that this happened. My sources are extremely good and without a doubt on this point.”

The CNN host Brian Stelter, who has also written a book about Fox News and Trump, said “there are a lot of sources of say Rupert despises Trump. So why is Fox still so attached to him? Why do you think he hasn’t changed Fox’s editorial strategy?”

“I think that there are two worlds going on here,” Wolff said. “There’s Rupert Murdoch’s world … [and] the Fox network has moved its business model or the Fox News network to an old Trump model, that’s where the money comes from. Would Rupert Murdoch have an alternative to that, that would supply that much money?

“Rupert hates Donald Trump. Hates him. But Rupert loves money. Those are two warring things.”

 

 

Thailand and ghosts

Even a bad foreign film can sometimes be an interesting experience due to what you learn about that country's culture.   That's pretty much how I felt about Pee Mak, a Thai film on Netflix that was apparently a big hit in its native country and has some respectable reviews.

It's actually not very good - a comedy version of an old and very well known Thai ghost story.    In the first ten minutes or so, I thought the comedy might work, but it gets progressively worse:  it soon devolves into pretty low grade slapstick stuff.  There are occasional laughs still, but I think for Westerners, it's pretty strained.   

But nonetheless, while looking at Thai movies as a category on Netflix, I realised that the country must really into ghost stories in a big way.   It seems like most selections have a supernatural theme.

And yeah, there is a Wikipedia page devoted to Ghost in Thai culture, as well as an article at Vice about ghosts and superstitions around Chiang Mai, which begins:

Belief in ghosts, spirits, and superstitions are rife in Thailand. Concern for keeping supernatural beings happy affects everything from personal practices to politics to the real estate market. Even the country's current leader, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, boasts about his collection of magical amulets, whose power he purportedly relies on for his success.

Most Thais will freely admit that they believe in phi (the Thai word for ghost), and many citizens identify as animist, a belief system that says everything has a spirit—from a rock to a house to a dead person—and that these spirits must be placated, or there will be consequences. 

According to the author interviewed by Vice, it affects Chiang Mai on a large scale:

There are also malicious ghosts, known as ithaygo, the ghosts of bad death. These ghosts are what I wrote my book about and why an entire section of buildings in Chiang Mai are abandoned.

It all started during the 1997 economic crisis. There wasn't enough money to finish buildings being built at the outer edges of the city or to pay the workers, who were mostly Burmese migrants. These projects were abandoned. No one ever officially lived in those buildings—yet they had ithaygo. People saw shadowy figures inside and some got sick just walking past them.

There was talk that the Burmese migrant workers had squatted inside and died. That was where the bad energy came from. Thais still won't live in that part of the city.

So, ghosts affect the real estate market?
Yes, in Chiang Mai this belief formed an empty donut around the city. You have the city itself and the first ring of housing developments that were being built during the '97 crisis. Many of them have never been officially finished or occupied.

The post-recovery ring of developments is outside of that and Thais bought apartments there. Thai people believe they will be unlucky if they live in a place of misfortune. It doesn't even have to be actual misfortune, it can be potential misfortune. To put it in Thai terms, a lack of progress—a project that stalled part way through—will continue to block current progress.

I have been to Bangkok once, just on 2 or 3 days stopover in my 20's.   Maybe I was jetlagged, but there is not much about the visit that I recall now.   Certainly, no sordid action for which the city was famous was sought, or offered, but I do recall it was a pretty nice hotel I stayed in and some of the food was very spicy.    I haven't seen photos I must have taken there for a long, long time.   But, now that I think of it, a framed silk embroided bird which I gave my Mum, but is now back in my house, must have come from that visit.   I was looking at it the other day and thinking it hasn't faded and still looks quite nice.

On boredom

A rather interesting article in the Washington Post, with the headline explaining what it's all about:

Boredom’s link to mental illnesses, brain injuries and dysfunctional behaviors

Amongst other things I learnt from it, I hadn't realised that an increase in proneness to boredom is a common feature of head injuries:

A harrowing personal experience triggered Danckert’s fascination with boredom as a teenager in Australia.

His older brother, Paul, crashed his car into a tree, suffering a fairly severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even as his other injuries began to heal, something in Paul had shifted. Frustratingly, he no longer got any enjoyment out of drumming and other activities that he used to love — to him, they were downright boring.

When Danckert trained as a clinical neuropsychologist years later, he treated a number of young men who had head trauma similar to his brother’s. Out of curiosity, he asked them whether they experienced more boredom now than before the accident. Every single one of the men said yes.

“To me, that added up to something sort of organic that has changed in the brain, something that is making it more difficult for these individuals to engage effectively with the world,” he said. “I was fascinated by that and wanted to try to understand it more.”

In a 2013 study, Danckert discovered that the connection between brain injury and boredom went beyond mere anecdotal evidence. He surveyed 52 patients who had suffered either mild, moderate or severe TBI, finding that the presence and severity of head trauma predicted levels of boredom proneness.

The exact mechanism remains unclear, but Danckert suspects it might have something to do with damage to an area of the brain that helps represent value and reward. The orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the frontal lobe that sits just above your eye sockets, is commonly affected in TBI and known to be dysfunctional in patients with depression.

“It may be the case that, having damaged this area, things just don’t seem to have the same kind of value to patients,” Danckert said. “When things lose value or meaning, there’s a good chance that you will be bored by them.

I guess it's a case of the development of anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - that is behind it?

There are other points made in the article that were interesting:

The poet and philosopher Lucretius described the plight of the Roman rich in his most famous work, “On the Nature of Things,” as he flees from city house to country home to escape a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. In the fourth century, theologian Evagrius Ponticus warned his fellow monks about the “noonday demon,” a passing feeling of exhaustion and listlessness brought on by the monotony of life.

Of course, in the case of monks, I wouldn't be surprised if they had been awake since 4.30 am and really were exhausted by midday!

One (very modern) irony is whether the internet, by making the vicarious experience of everything from sex to travel so readily available, is making people more prone to boredom by reducing their engagement with the actual experiences.  Maybe the vicarious experience isn't exactly boring, but ultimately becomes unsatisfying.

I think I have been lucky to have low boredom proneness:

More recent research has explored boredom as an inherent trait — known as boredom proneness — which has a whole host of negative associations. People who experience boredom more frequently and with greater intensity are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, gamble compulsively, binge-eat, drop out of school, drive recklessly and suffer from anxiety or depression. Studies conducted during the coronavirus pandemic also found that individuals high in boredom proneness had a greater tendency to break the rules of social distancing.

“There’s a distinction between in-the-moment feelings of boredom — what psychologists refer to as ‘state boredom’ — which isn’t good or bad,” said psychologist James Danckert at the University of Waterloo. “If you’re high in boredom proneness, however, there really aren’t any positives to be associated with that. It’s not good for your mental health to have this sort of chronic sense of being disengaged or disconnected with the world.”

The article does not talk about something I think relevant to the topic - the extent to which religious belief may affect proneness to boredom.   I mean, put a highly religious person who believes they can engage at any time with a meaningful communication with (or at least, towards) their deity in solitary confinement, and they may presumably cope much better than a person who thinks they are alone in their mind in the universe.   Worked well for George Pell recently...

Anyway, the whole article is good and worth reading.

 

 

The German/Belgian/Dutch floods

Perhaps the single best collection of incredible flood video I have seen is this one from the BBC - although there are some other good examples around:

 

 All of the climate scientists I have seen commenting on it have been very reasonable - pointing out that they have yet to do the "attribution to climate change" calculation, but they have been warning for decades that the additional water in the warming atmosphere (and the additional heat when its not raining) means both more intense rainfall when it does rain, plus more intense (and rapid, I think) drought.

Of course, climate change denialists can still be readily found to say "They never predicted this.  And what is it - more flood or more droughts - you can't have both."

 

Nuance, but it's all bad

If you are interested, he does comment more after this tweet to explain his attitude towards using "fascism".

Tourist visit noted

A conclusion to that very weird story from last year

People who carefully read this blog might recall a post last year about a young man in Brisbane who decided to provide a castration service to men who wanted it.   (To be honest, it makes me feel a bit queasy just imagining this.)

It turns out he's been in jail for a about a year, waiting for a sentence for "malicious acts with intent", and has now been released on probation for another 3 years.

Two of the guys on whom he had performed this gruesome service spoke up for him:

Judge Jones told the court the two men involved had provided "positive" victim impact statements, with one saying the procedure had been a "great benefit to his health and wellbeing".

Judge Jones read victim impact statements to the court. 

"I am eternally grateful to Ryan for enabling me to enjoy life," he read.

Judge Jones said the younger man had wanted all of his sexual organs removed ever since he was a child because he "wanted to be a eunuch".

 And how does one locate someone willing to help you achieve this end?:

The court was told King met the men, a 26-year-old from New South Wales and a 66-year-old from Victoria, on a eunuch-interest website, and the two surgeries occurred at a motel in Logan and a hostel in Brisbane.

 Am I brave enough to Google that topic?   I presume it might be like those pro-anorexia sites - all people trying to turn a mental issue into something unobjectionable.

Anyway, I had forgotten that in my post last year I had found some 2004 research on what motivates  men who want to be castrated.   You can refresh your memory, too, at the first link in this post.

Actually, I see now that a Melbourne based researcher has studied this too (about a decade ago):

Professor Wassersug is researching the motivating factors behind the modern day voluntary eunuch.

“At the moment there are probably over 600 in Australia and interest in and access to voluntary castration here and around the world is growing because of the Internet,” he says.

 “Some of these men have a non-specific Gender Identity Disorder, others a Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and some have extreme sadomasochistic paraphilias (fetishes),” he says.

“The common theme is that they are opting to change their fundamental identity as male – they wish to be emasculated but do not want to be female.”

Other motivating factors, according to Professor Wassersug who has conducted a review of personal histories from 200 voluntary eunuchs include sexual abuse as a child, having witnessed the castration of animals in their youth, having been threatened with castration in their youth and having a strict religious background that condemned sexuality.

Professor Wassersug’s area of research is providing valuable insight into unfamiliar parts of the human condition and in an area of science that has been too long ignored.

“What we are discovering is a tangle of motivating factors which are not being addressed by the medical profession at all – and it needs to be,” he said.....

 

Wassersug and colleagues have been posting questionnaires on the Internet a to understand more about this little discussed area.

Among 178 castrated individuals who have responded to the questionnaire, only 37% had received surgery from medically qualified professionals.

“We are talking about a highly educated population who want to get sexual urges under control. They don’t actually identify themselves as wanting to be a eunuch.”

‘Many who have undergone voluntary castration are neither informed, nor prepared, for the plethora of additional long-term side effects of castration,’ he added.

“Worse still, because they are not discussing these issues with their doctors, they often seek the services of people who are not medically qualified for free or at costs below those of medically qualified personnel. Some of the would-be eunuchs end up in emergency rooms as a result.

The same survey has discussed voluntary castration with 108 ‘underground cutters’, some of whom are experienced in surgery but are putting their clients at risk because of inadequate equipment and procedures.  

What is even more disturbing is that nearly a quarter of the voluntarily castrated men did their own surgeries,” he said.

Good grief:   surely those 108 "cutters" weren't just in Australia?   What a world.

Brexit and farms

I was a bit surprised by this story on Euronews - not because it shows a bad consequence of Brexit, but more because I didn't imagine you could have such a lush looking capsicum farm in England:

More on Tucker

Why does Rupert Murdoch, who virtually pushed everyone else in Britain out of the way to be one of the first to get a COVID vaccine, let his American wingnut outlet's star continue to talk up vaccine fears, when he too has had it:

Also, Tucker's jumped on the election fraud bandwagon (about Georgia) again this week - with claims immediately thoroughly debunked in the real media.

Rupert Murdoch, who could stop this but doesn't, is an appalling person.
 

The ever non-reliable Tucker

The Washington Post has a profile of Tucker Carlson (one he did not co-operate with), and its take on him is best summarised (accurately in my opinion):

“He has positioned himself as the presentable face of White grievance,” said Joseph M. Azam, who resigned in late 2017 as a senior vice president of News Corp., which, like Fox, was controlled by the Murdoch family, because he objected to the company’s tolerance for what he felt were Carlson’s hateful views and other commentary. “He’s on mainstream media, he’s dressed in a suit, he speaks in a way that people see as eloquent and informed, and he’s super confident in what he’s saying.”

But the one anecdote which I have notice people tweeting about is his lies about his first grade teacher:

His mother had left the family. He was raised in La Jolla, in San Diego, by his wealthy father, Richard Carlson, a prominent Republican who worked in the Reagan administration, oversaw Voice of America and married an heiress to the Swanson frozen food family. From the door of his childhood home, Tucker Carlson overlooked La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, in one of the country’s most expensive communities.

He attended the elite La Jolla Country Day School, where a woman entered his life whom he grew to detest. It was his first-grade teacher, whom he referred to in his book as Mrs. Raymond. He caricatured her as “a parody of earth-mother liberalism” who “wore long Indian-print skirts. . . . She had little interest in conventional academic topics, like reading and penmanship.” He recalled her sobbing theatrically at her desk, saying, “The world is so unfair! You don’t know that yet. But you’ll find out!”

Carlson said he just wanted liberals to “stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics.” Thus, Carlson says, he began his sojourn as a conservative thinker, questioning the liberals who he said were all around him, exemplified by his first-grade teacher.

Which is all rather shocking to Marianna Raymond, 77, who remembers Carlson as “very precious and very, very polite and sweet,” and said she had no idea, until contacted recently by a Washington Post reporter, that her former student had ridiculed her as a key to understanding him.

Raymond said in an interview that she never sobbed at her desk, didn’t wear an Indian skirt and didn’t advocate her political views. She said that not only did she teach Carlson reading at La Jolla Country Day School — with a student body that was “very affluent and White” — but that she also was then hired to tutor him at his home.

“Oh my God,” she said, when informed of Carlson’s attack against her. “That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard.”

No wonder Fox News lawyers argued in a court case that no one should believe what he says - he's just a blowhard.

Carlson is very popular with the white grievance folk over at Catallaxy, by the way.

 Update:  an interesting thread on this on Twitter:

 

Some memeing been done

 

More on fascist friendly approaches to democracy

So, there are a few books coming out about the Trump election loss, and WAPO has run extracts from one on of them in which we learn:

Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f------ guy,” Trump told aides. 

Tick off the narcissism box.   Next:

Around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where campaign manager Bill Stepien and the senior leadership briefed Trump in the conference room. Stepien outlined what to expect that night — when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied and which states would probably have the first projected winners. He explained that because of the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.

Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.

“It’s going to be good early,” Stepien told the boss. But, as he cautioned the president, those numbers would be incomplete and the margins probably would tighten later in the evening.

So, he had full warning of what would happen with the count.   

We get an account of how he went off his brain when Fox News called Arizona for Biden:

“They’re calling it way too early,” Oczkowski told Trump. “This thing is close. We still think we’ll win narrowly — and not just us. Doug Ducey’s modeling people show us winning.” Ducey, Arizona’s Republican governor, and his political team had kept in close contact with Trump’s aides.

That hardly reassured the president. “What the f--- is Fox doing?” Trump screamed. Then he barked orders to Kushner: “Call Rupert! Call James and Lachlan!” And to Jason Miller: “Get Sammon. Get Hemmer. They’ve got to reverse this.” The president was referring to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, as well as Bill Sammon, a top news executive at Fox.

Trump’s tirade continued. “What the f---?” he bellowed. “What the f--- are these guys doing? How could they call this this early?”

Oczkowski again tried to soothe the president. “They’re calling this way too early,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

Giuliani pushed the president to forget about the Arizona call and just say he won — to step into the East Room and deliver a victory speech. Never mind that Meadows had earlier snapped at Giuliani and said the president couldn’t just declare himself the winner.

Talk about your fascist entitlement to power frame of mind - both from Trump and Giuliani.

Does Trump's reaction make any sense, apart from showing how fragile his narcissism makes him?   Getting Fox to reverse the call would obviously make no difference in the long run - either they were right, or would be proved wrong, and Trump could have gloated later.

I laugh at the image of Trump's dimwitted, entitled, sons losing it:

Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room.

“The election is being stolen,” the president’s 36-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”

He yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. ”We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?"

Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.

Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden.

 And then Trump went out and immediately declared it a fraud on national TV.   

Nancy Pelosi's reaction is so accurate:

Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.

“It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level — on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was [as] surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”

David Frum on post election Trump fascism

I think this is an important and well argued article by David Frum that Trump and his supporters are going down a clear fascist path, and it's time to call it that.

Some extracts:

The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.

Is there a precedent? Not in recent years. Since the era of Redemption after Reconstruction, anti-government violence in the United States has been the work of marginal sects and individual extremists. American Islamic State supporters were never going to seize the state, and neither were the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan killers of the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists, the German American Bund, nor the Communist Party USA.

But the post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them.  

I like this paragraph:

Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.

 And towards the end:

In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.

Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.

 Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.

Peter Doherty getting cranky

He makes good points:

 

A town I don't understand

It's been decades since I have visited Townsville, but I always felt it was a bit of an underappreciated place.    I made my first visit there backpacking as a university student, and thought Magnetic Island was a lovely backwater that might do well in future development.  Yet I get the impression it has never really "taken off" - although perhaps I should just go there and have a look.

Anyway, my impression from recent years of reporting about Townsville was that it was suffering economically and had large social problems with some pretty poor unemployed and indigenous families in particular.

Yet today, I read this on the ABC:

A North Queensland family of six has been forced to live in a tent for almost two months as rental shortages reach crisis point in Townsville.....

The Kennison family is among a growing number of residents in Townsville finding themselves homeless for the first time.

With the rental vacancy rate in the city at 1.2 per cent — largely driven by interstate migration and the return of ex-pats to the community — Townsville is not alone.

Across the state, the majority of rental vacancies remain under 2.5 per cent, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ)

The Red Cross in Townsville is supporting more than 200 people every month who are experiencing problems with securing affordable accommodation.

Maybe because it hasn't been doing so well in recent years it hasn't had more housing built?   But you usually associate lack of enough housing with boom towns, not economic struggle towns.

 

As seen on Twitter

Hey there. I have had some internet (NBN) problems at work - and let me say, Optus clearly seems to have bigger issues with their NBN to business service than Telstra.   I have suffered outages at much higher rate than that suffered by the office right next to me on Telstra.   Most of what Optus does seems pretty good to me - but the NBN service I have had from them is, shall we say, problematic.

Anyway, I've been saving some screenshots on my phone, and will dump some here today: 

 

I'm pleased to see today Biden calling out strongly the Big Lie.   The Big Problem, of course, is senior Republicans failing to do so for fear of Trump's brainwashed cult base.

In some rare, obesity positive, news...

Obese patients with a form of advanced prostate cancer survive longer than overweight and normal weight patients, new research has found.  ...

They looked at survival rates in 1,577 patients involved in three different clinical trials, with an average age of 69 and average BMI of 28. They found that BMI was a protective factor in both overall and cancer-specific survival, with 4% higher overall survival probability and 29% cancer-specific survival probability. Even when they adjusted for higher doses of chemotherapy given to larger patients, the team found the protective effect remained. Over 36 months, around 30% of obese patients survived compared to 20% of overweight and normal weight individuals.

Dr. Nicola Fossati, a urologist at San Raffaele University says: "Looking at patients with metastasis of prostate cancer, we found that obese patients are living longer. This means that BMI could be used to predict survival in these patients.

"This obesity paradox has been seen in some other cancers, possibly due to the relationship between tissue fat and cancer genomes, and more research is needed in this area. It's also possible that improved survival may be due to the interaction of chemotherapy with other drugs. Obese patients in this older age group tend to be taking medication for other conditions and we do not fully understand how these medicines interconnect.

Here's a link to the full story.

Expats for China

The BBC has a story up about something interesting I have mentioned before - how China's pro-government (to put it mildly) media network CGTN features pro-China ex pats a lot.  

Question with an obvious answer

 

Nice, low key humour spotted

 

Poor Japan

It's sort of been Japan week here, and to top it off, we now have what was long suspected might happen - an Olympics without spectators.

To make it a good television spectacle in any event, maybe they should be covering all stadium seating with plastic so they can green screen in a full audience?   Do you even need to do that with modern video techniques?  

I guess in 100 years time, the audience could just be robots.  

The new superpower tech war

As usual, the ABC's Foreign Correspondent has done a terrific job at looking at China's decision (prompted by Western bans) to accelerate its own tech infrastructure:

While the US has long had the edge in tech, China is catching up fast, investing heavily in AI, robotics, 5G and 6G, microchips and surveillance technology.

US President Joe Biden is planning a $330 billion package to rev up the US's investment in R&D, having noted its strategic competition with China is nothing less than a battle to "win the 21st century".

I have to say that I am being pretty impressed with China's rapid advances in space technology - although as I have noted before, they don't seem to have been able to replicate it in the aviation industry, generally speaking.   Still not 100% sure why that is...

It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in future.   I find the idea of a government controlling a digital currency by setting an expiry date on its use to be the most fascinating control proposal - and I doubt anyone has a good idea how it would play out in real life economics.

Yet more Japan content

So sue me, I happen to be watching a lot of Japanese content on Youtube at the moment.   

This one is a couple of years old, and is from one of several channels The Guardian has (I didn't know until Google suggested it), and it's a pretty fascinating explanation of how you can get cheaper rent there if you are the first person to live in an apartment or house after someone has died in it.   I hadn't heard of that before, although I did know that housing is treated as more "disposable" in that country than in most of the West. 

 

Who knows - maybe it's easier for Westerners to rent one of these apartments too:   I have seen several  Youtubers explaining that Japanese landlords and letting agents really are not welcoming of foreign renters.   They consider them a high risk of skipping the country with rent arrears, and unreliable tenants generally speaking.   (Japan is a fantastic place, but there are some residual, slightly problematic, cultural issues like that.)

 And speaking of abandoned Japanese residences, Chris Broad and his friends visited a Japanese island which has a population dwindle to (I think he said) 150, but it has scores of apartment blocks from when 10,000 people lived there, now being slowly taken over by plants in a very post-apocalyptic look.  Because people do actually still live there, anyone can go visit on the ferry.   It's apparently near the more famous "battleship island", but you can't go to that one alone.  Fascinating:

Trouble for Pikachu

I stumbled across this on Al Jazeera, and am rather surprised it hasn't gone viral.  Or maybe it has?  Poor old Pikachu in Chile gets roughed up:

 

Stories from Japan

I've been extraordinarily busy at work again, so I've been posting less frequently.  But let me record some stories, all about Japan, as it happens:

*   Sperm cells must be a lot tougher than I would have guessed. This is surely a very surprising story:

A Japanese team of researchers has succeeded in the reproduction of mice using freeze-dried sperm preserved in space for nearly six years, developing what could be a “Noah’s Ark” type of technology to save plants and animals from extinction in the future.

The study published last month in the Science Advances journal said a total of 168 mice were born in 2019 and 2020 after the sperm was brought back from the International Space Station despite exposure to space radiation.

The preservation period of five years and 10 months is the world’s “longest duration that samples have been preserved in the ISS in biological research,” the study said.

The experiment was conducted by a team including researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the University of Yamanashi.

The freeze-drying technique, developed by Teruhiko Wakayama, a professor at the University of Yamanashi, allowed the sperm to be preserved at room temperature for more than one year. It also meant there was no need to install a freezer on the rocket launched to the ISS.

The technique is also expected to be adopted in modern reproductive medicine and livestock breeding.

I guess it makes the panspermia idea of how life spread through the universe a bit more plausible, too;  even though, yes I know, panspermia did not refer to actual sperm.  Turns out maybe it could have?

 *  I feel very sorry for the country and what's happened to the Olympics.  Like, no one cares, do they?   They are now talking about a lot of events having no spectators.

I think they could just turn the opening ceremony into a World Order reunion concert, and I would be just as happy.

 *  Every year, I note how Japan has record rains and disasters resulting from it.  Climate change.  And sure enough, the urban landslide on the news this weekend does seem to have involved record rain, according to NHK:

The active seasonal rain front has brought record rain to Shizuoka Prefecture and the southern part of the Kanto region, which includes Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures.

Weather officials are warning of the heightening risk of mudslides in Atami and elsewhere in Shizuoka, where ground is saturated after the downpour. Landslide alerts are in place in parts of the prefecture.

Atami City, where fatal mudslides occurred on Saturday, received 321 millimeters of rain in the 48 hours through Saturday evening. That is more than the average rainfall for the entire month of July.

*  One of the Japan based Youtubers I sometimes watch put up a video of her visiting the top tourist spots in Kyoto recently, and wow:  it is spectacularly devoid of tourists at the moment:

I also have been meaning for some time to note a couple of interesting Youtube videos, by another Western video creator who lives there, explaining a lot about Shinto. Here they are: 

 

The (formerly) British guy who is the expert in the videos has his own blog on Shinto here.  Seems a little "dry" to me, but some interesting stuff.

 

On the upside, that wall was probably made from Australian iron ore...

Update:   Hey, the exact same joke was made on Mad as Hell last night.  I demand royalties!

A show in decline

I recently finished watching the Netflix cartoon show Disenchantment in its 3rd season, and I have to say, the quality of the writing and humour has dwindled away terribly.  

This was quite an enjoyable show for the first two seasons, although some episodes have always been better than others.  But the overall storyline of this season - it's just meandering and terrible.   

I see that I am not alone:

‘Disenchantment’ season three review: Matt Groening’s swords-and-swigging sitcom loses the plot

Disenchantment gets bogged down in plot and loses sight of jokes in “Part 3”

Disappointing.

What if they said "UFOs are real" and everyone just shrugged

That is, after all, pretty what has happened with the brief Pentagon UFO report.

Jazz Shaw, the right wing columnist who has been (for want of a better term) pro-UFO (and is just one of the Right wing figures who has been talking up this issue for the last couple of years) takes the "glass half full" view:

None of this should be taken to mean that the report was a dud. There were important admissions made by the ODNI on Friday. One of the first was that the vast majority of “UAP” incidents they studied “probably do represent physical objects.” They draw this conclusion from the fact that most were picked up using multiple avenues of sensory data, in addition to testimony from pilots and technicians who watch the skies for a living. So it’s not just swamp gas, “ball lightning,” or birds. And if you’ve seen one, you may not be crazy. (Or if you are, it’s not because of this.)

The next thing the ODNI conceded was that the vast majority of interesting cases they have been studying are truly “unidentified.” Out of 144 incident reports, they were able to conclusively attribute precisely one of them to a mundane event, specifically the downing of a deflating weather balloon. They don’t know what the rest of them are, and they’ve really been hunting for an explanation. Prior to the release of the report, the Pentagon had already stated that what people have been witnessing is not an example of secret United States government technology. (How much faith one places in their claims at this point is entirely up to the reader.) In the report, they went one step further, saying that they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

While some dedicated, skeptical journalists might latch onto the phrase “currently lack,” interpreting that to mean that the UFOs could still turn out to be Chinese or Russian, this reading seems dubious. As the report also notes, most of the reported sightings took place in controlled airspace, in the midst of our naval battle groups and even over military facilities in the middle of mainland North America. If there were the slightest indication that those things came from Russia or China and were showing up over our testing range in Nevada (it’s happened), there wouldn’t be a “concern over possible national security concerns.” We would already have the real-world, military equivalent of Will Smith up there in an F/A-18E Super Hornet shooting them down.

And on the Left - which includes most scientists eager to pooh-pooh the "aliens are watching us" theory - we have David Corn writing an interesting column in which he explains that even though he saw (with others) something that pretty convincingly fits a "true UFO" description as a 12 year old boy, he just can't buy into "aliens are visiting us" any more.    

David Corn's background (as it is with some others I have seen downplaying the Pentagon report) is that, as a child, he was seriously gullible on all UFO stuff - believing Erich Von Daniken's ancient astronaut guff, for example.  (I soon learned the truth about that, even though, like most other kids seeing it the first time, I initially found it a bit spookily credible.)

He's a good example of something I have long felt:  if someone has swung wildly from one side to another in the matter of politics, religion or (as it turns out) belief in UFO's, there's actually good reason to doubt their judgement.    It's not really a matter of saying that people shouldn't ever believe anything  firmly;  but all belief should be tempered by some scepticism of your own certainty.   Those who have swung wildly from one set of beliefs to the opposite - they don't fill me with confidence that they have an appropriate way of assessing their own thinking.   

So, what do I think of the report?    Of course, it is hard to know how to judge some of the cases when the material for them is still classified. And, as I have repeatedly said - I don't find the 3 videos alone all that convincing;  although I am also open to the suggestion that some of the debunking of them is more speculative than concrete.  (I understand that there are some pilots who have disputed some of the Michael West debunking, for example.)

I remain satisfied that the "tic tac" incident is one that is truly mysterious  and "real", and (to my mind) unlikely to explained by earthly technology.  It's been too long since it happened for the technology not to be revealed.  But sure, the "alien drone" theory is a stretch.  

That said, lately I get the feeling that, oddly, there may be collectively much more evidence for "alien drone" than we realise; it's just that when people face a weird incident, if it is only of short duration, they soon put it out of mind and don't press for anyone else to investigate, either.

David Corn's story, for example.   (I have also been impressed by stories I have read over the years of guys who woke up while camping to find their tent or cabin flooded with light from above, but with complete and unearthly silence - which of course means it was not likely to be a chopper or pranksters.  The light stays on for a length of time - making a meteor flash unlikely - and then blinks out in an instant.)   But these sort of incidents are not collected by anyone central.  There is no real  life Mulder.   The stories just turn up years later in magazines or on line when people want to tell of a mysterious life event that they never understood. 

So yeah, it's funny, but probably the government never needed to cover up what it knew in terms of sensor evidence for UFOs, or sightings by military people - it could just rely on people seeing something weird, shrugging, and getting on with life.

It's a theory, anyway.

So, so stupid

Food observations

*   Couscous is an underappreciated food.   I need to learn more about where it came from, how it's made, etc.

*   For a couple of years, I have been curious about the Coles branded pre-cooked lamb shanks in red wine sauce:

I finally tried them recently, and was pretty pleased.   35 minutes to re-heat in the oven, and the sauce was pretty nice.  A large amount of meat on each shank.   They cost $15 for 2 shanks, but cooking them yourself takes forever to get them very tender, and they're not very cheap raw either.  I will buy the pre-cooked ones again - at least if there is only two of us eating dinner.

*  I continue to be annoyed that veganism has seemingly totally replaced vegetarianism in popular culture.  Youtube is continually recommending vegan stuff to me (well, I do subscribe to a few channels, so it is my fault), but when I searched for "vegetarian recipes" on the weekend, the results barely showed two videos before reverting to vegan recipes again.     I want vegetarians to try to re-claim some of the popular imagination again.

But too much wokeness is the real problem in America

Sarcasm, of course:

Good thread

A test

 Is this working? 

That's odd.  Blogger isn't working properly in Firefox.   Did I change some setting?  Didn't think so...

Stop watching trashy reality TV

So Love Island has a particular reputation in England for ruining the emotional lives of participants.

I think the only reality TV format I have ever watched at length is My Kitchen Rules, and that was years ago now before the formula because too obvious and trashy.  I don't think I have ever watched any that involves romantic relationships developing - I have a natural aversion to watching people having such a private aspect of their emotional life broadcast to the world.  Even the more well intentioned ones, like the recent "Love on the Spectrum" - I saw some of it, but I have the same basic objection. 

Really, the format would die if people would not watch it.   But how to encourage people not to watch it?   Make better romantic fictional stories?   

A Big One coming

The ABC does these on line stories with graphics really well.   This one is about the high likelihood that there will soon be another big earthquake - this one centred on the West coast.

I think half of Auckland going under a new volcano would be more spectacular - and that is quite possible too.

Lying flat discussed

The best single column I've read about the Chinese government getting all panicky about the "lying flat" movement is this one by Matthew Brooker at Bloomberg.  Some parts:

It’s ironic (though perhaps inevitable) that, having adopted the methods of a market economy to achieve its goal of creating a moderately prosperous society, China now finds itself beset with an identifiably capitalist affliction. Opting out and doing nothing requires a base level of affluence that would be impractical in a country still trying to drag itself out of poverty. Yet beyond a certain point, material goals cease to satisfy human needs — a syndrome that is familiar in many developed countries.

Capitalism is a perpetual motion machine, driven by an inexorable logic of expansion. The profits of production are invested in more production, which requires ever-expanding markets to consume what is made. This gives rise to the advertising and marketing industries, whose job it is to convince consumers that fulfillment lies in more and better things. All this makes capitalism a prodigious generator of goods and services. It also tends to generate feelings of alienation and anxiety.

That’s because the answer to human happiness doesn’t lie in sating material desires (something that Buddhists have known for thousands of years).....

A Stalinist political system is a perpetual motion machine of another kind, fueled by paranoia. The motherland is surrounded by enemies, and the people must constantly redouble their efforts and unite behind their savior-leader to beat back the existential threats it faces. Having abandoned (or at least postponed) the Communist ideals of equality and solidarity, Xi has turned to nationalism and perceptions of a hostile world to reinforce belief in the necessity of the party’s leadership. “Universal values” such as democracy and human rights are a foreign plot designed to weaken and destabilize China; discussion of such pernicious influences has been banished.

What is intriguing about the “lying flat” wave is that it shows how similar the Chinese experience is when faced with the same conditions as other countries. Political control has its limits. For all Xi’s attempts to foster a sense of Chinese exceptionalism and reinforce Communist orthodoxy, society may develop in unexpected ways. It’s also a reminder that China has other traditions besides the rigid Legalist philosophy that characterizes Xi’s grip on power. Lying flat contains more than a hint of Daoism, which emphasizes harmony with nature. The Daoist poet Li Bai seems to have spent most of his time drinking wine and enjoying the company of friends; he reputedly drowned while leaning drunkenly out of his boat to see the moon's reflection in the river. The Communist press wouldn’t have approved.

 

 

 

About that excessive movie about excess

With reluctance, as I considered there was an excellent chance I would not like it, I watched Wolf of Wall Street on Saturday (on Netflix).   

And (surprise!), I didn't care for it.

That was pretty much going to be a certainty when Matthew McConaughey turned up unexpectedly in the first 10 minutes.   Actually, while this segment was pretty funny for its bizarre aspects, he still lived up to being my personal talisman for warning that the movie will be, at the very least, badly flawed.

My main problems with the movie?:

a.    it's excessively about crass excess - in such a way that it hurt the sense of realism.  I would say it  very often seemed more cartoonish than realistic.  Even apart from the scenes of carnal excess, which (as I expected) were extreme and many, I thought the whole trading floor atmosphere seemed over the top and fake.  Too many people in too small a place; too much noise; too much adoring love for their boss when they thought he was going.   The day after watching the movie, I did see on Youtube some video showing the real lead character (Jordan Belfort), both when the movie came out, and back in the 1990's.   These reinforced my impression that the artistic licence taken in showing this world went too far.  I appreciate that some people would have wanted to see the movie to see how outrageous the life of the rich and crass could be - but to me, it looked too unrealistic too often.

b.  It is way too long - both in so many individual scenes, and overall.   I read David Edelstein's review after watching it, and fully agree with this part:

In interviews, Scorsese’s brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker has said it was hard to cut the film down from four hours. Four hours?! As I watched, I kept thinking that every scene could be snipped at the halfway point, before yet another hot-dog monologue or leering shot of Belfort’s second wife, the startlingly pretty but soulless ­Naomi, the “Duchess of Bay Ridge,” played by Margot Robbie. I figured Leo must have been sitting in the editing room saying, “No, no, don’t cut here — my favorite line is coming up — 30 more seconds — okay, a minute — wait, let it run! It’s my Oscars scene!” But no, this was Scorsese’s design. Overkill is the ruling aesthetic.

c.  While I don't say it had to be more of a morality play, as it does fit into Scorsese's love of stories about corrupt men who think they have it made and then things start falling apart, there is one key scene which is problematic:  the one where the FBI agent (the best played character in the film, if you ask me, and I did think his scene on the yacht - invented for the movie - was well written and acted) is on the subway after seeing Belfort face justice at last.  As Edelstein writes:

The Wolf of Wall Street is three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible. But you’re supposed to envy them anyway, because the alternative is working at McDonald’s and riding the subway alongside wage slaves. What are a few years in a minimum-security prison — practically a country club — when you can have the best of everything?

I think Edelstein is going too far in saying Scorsese wants the audience to envy the characters on screen, but it is hard to interpret the subway scene as anything other than invitation to share a moment of doubt that maybe it's sad that more people don't get to live life to a drug addled, VD infected, lobster eating, full.   As I say, problematic.

d.  A dated gratuitousness to the display of female nudity.   I hesitate to raise this, because I can see an argument that it suits the movies and pop culture of the era in which it was set.   But I just couldn't avoid thinking about it after the scene near the end where the Swiss banker waits for his young lover under his bed sheets, but when she makes her appearance, it's like a deliberate pause for a bit of full frontal nudity before getting under the sheets, which then start flying about in a Benny Hill style caricature of sex.   That just struck me as the way it would have been done in a 1980's flick, but not these days.   Sure, earlier there was Leonardo's butt side on during a (again) pointlessly protracted sex scene, and there was a comedy flash of a (presumably) prosthetic penis; but in retrospect, I think it is fair to say that the whole movie looked dated in the way the flesh displayed was primarily female.   (Although - now that I think of it - was trying to get more gender balance in skin on display the reason for the odd scene in which the college band came into the workplace floor but with the guys wearing no shirts?   That just looked weird in its own way to me - I can't see the uber macho male brokers being impressed, and there were few females working there anyway.)  

So there you go.  My thoughts, in too much detail, probably.

  

 

He's back

Barnaby Joyce isn't smart enough to use a condom while having an affair with a staff member, yet thinks he knows better than scientists about climate change and the environment.   The only people his return will impress is the still substantial climate change denial camp in the National Party. 

And now he's back, to try to drag the Coalition away from doing anything too fast on CO2.   

I don't think Morrison's very sharp either - but perhaps just sharp enough to know that there is no future in being the government of climate change inaction.

Sure, Labor has its own problems in keeping everyone on board re this issue - but it really is the Coalition that deserves to fall apart over it.  Turnbull should have outright called for party schism over this while he was still leader ("if you want to argue the reality of climate change, get out of the Coalition").   While he  (Turnbull) seems a nice enough man, his lack of bravery on the issue at the time he could have forced it into some form of resolution means he was a failed PM.  Sorry.