Once upon a time...there was a very bad movie made

I had never seen the 1980's gangster film Once Upon a Time in America before, although I had a vague feeling (confirmed by looking at Rottentomatoes) that it was reasonably well regarded at the time.   Directed by Sergio Leone, whose spaghetti Western oeuvre is definitely not my cup of tea, but it has De Niro and some other big names, most notably James Woods.  (More about him at the end.)

So, there was at least a chance I would like it, and it has turned up on Aussie Netflix.   At least, one version of it, as I haven't bothered looking into where (if anywhere) the even longer version of it was released. 

But:  the movie is shockingly bad, from every almost aspect, and I am completely puzzled as to how anyone, at the time of release or later, ever gave it credit as a good movie.   

There is exactly one thing that I thought it noteworthy for in a sort of positive way - it seemed that whoever was put in charge of set design and decoration (and putting extras in shots) was given half of the movie budget.  I mean, especially in the first hour or two, every single scene seems to be stuffed to the gills with - stuff.  And people.   In fact, restaurants, nightclubs, the opium den (yes, it features a New York Chinese opium den - something I was not aware of as being a thing back then) and streets are so massively cluttered and busy I started to feel it was over the top, but admittedly in an eye-catching, "jeez they spent a lot of money on the look of this film", way. 

But don't get me wrong - it's still a really bad movie, and let me count the ways:

1.    the overall story:    it's stupid and made no emotional sense to me at all.  And I mean, if you are finding it a bit odd before intermission, just wait 'til the second "half".  (Actually, it's only about a third to go after intermission.)  If this is meant to be some grand picture of corruption running through US 20th century history or something, it's a complete failure.

2.    the dialogue:   never sounded very natural.  It had 5 or 6 writers, which is usually a sign of trying to fix problems, isn't it?   They were never solved.  And by they way, did Sergio make every film with dubbed dialogue, even if the actor spoke in English, or is this just a fault with the print Netflix is showing?   The sound consistently did not quite match the mouth, although I guess I sort of got used to that, eventually.

3.    the acting:   some pretty hammy kid actors; some unconvincing adult acting too.  De Niro is ok-ish, I suppose, in a thankless role.  But really, I wasn't convinced by anyone else.

4.    the characters:   no one is really sympathetic, although you keep getting the feeling that we are meant to feel for De Niro's character.  But he's a murderer (for base motives, not just from a sense of self protection) and rapist - see next paragraph.    

5.    the sexual politics:   come on, I know the 1980's had some terribly sexist treatment of women in movies, but I find it hard to believe that the awful and ridiculous sexual politics of the film wasn't noticed even at that time.    As my son said (he gave up on it by intermission, which was a wise judgement in retrospect) - "this film is really rape-y".   There are two prominent rape scenes, one of which results later in the victim falling for her rapist (happens all the time!);   the other doesn't, but when she meets him again 30 years later, it doesn't get a mention.   And the De Niro rape scene is really protracted and unpleasant.   Yet within a minute of it, we get "Noodles" (the silly nickname the film gives the De Niro character) looking sad beside the beach while the music swells - see next paragraph.

6.    the score!   It's like a romantic score from the 1960's that ended up in the wrong movie.  (Well, at least when it isn't featuring pan flute, which seems, at best, incongruous.)   There's a constant swelling up of strings in places where it just doesn't seem warranted.   I mean, it seemed to signalling sympathy for De Niro after his big rape scene.  It's artistically weird:  the whole movie is!

There are so many things wrong with the movie I feel I have forgotten one of them.   

But I have just remembered one amusing thing about it - James Woods's character keeps getting upset when De Niro calls him "crazy".   Yet Woods did end up a real life pro-Trump wingnut.   De Niro must laugh at the irony of that.

Update:  I remembered one other, minor but noticeable, thing:  the fake blood used in some scenes, but not others, looked exceptionally fake.   This is a movie from 1984 - fake blood didn't have to look so bad by that time.  Did the set decorator blow the budget so badly that they had to go to the paint shop and ask for any left over tins of red for the blood?   

Update 2:   OK, I have read more about the film, including the [SPOILER ALERT] 

fairly well know theory that the ending means that about 1/3 of the film is an opium dream of the future where things are made (sort of) right.  This explains things like the wild improbability of the story, and his childhood sweetheart barely ageing. 

Clever, huh?  Well, no - it might be interesting if the confrontations in the future carried some emotional weight, as dreams can, but they don't.   It makes the movie more of a waste of time than ever, if you ask me.   And it's also a definite cheat, if that was the actual intention, to prominently use a song written in the 1960's on the soundtrack.  Opium doesn't make you dream future songs, does it?   But, the theory does make quite a bit of sense.  Just doesn't make it worthwhile.

 

Unusual local dealer

From Crux:

ROME – On Tuesday police in the Tuscan city of Prato announced that they had placed Italian Father Francesco Spagnesi under house arrest for the sale and import of drugs, including cocaine and GBL, a date rape drug.

Spagnesi, 40, until Sept. 1 was pastor of Annunciation parish in Prato. He was relieved of his duties as pastor and ordered to take a year sabbatical by his bishop, Giovanni Nerbini, who claims to have been partially aware of Spagnesi’s struggles but did not know the full extent of the situation. 

Investigations into him began in August after the arrest of another Prato citizen named Alessio Regina, who is also under house arrest and who was found to be in possession of GBL, also called “liquid esctacy”, which is often used consensually to enhance sexual performance, but which has also garnered a more nefarious reputation as a preferred drug in date rapes.

In the course of their investigation into Regina, Prato police discovered ties to Spagnesi, who was placed under house arrest Tuesday as a precautionary measure while officers continue their inquiry.

According to police investigations, the GBL was ordered online and imported from the Netherlands, and an undisclosed amount of cocaine was obtained through local suppliers. The drugs were then sold to guests invited to a specific house in Prato for parties involving sex and drugs.

"Partially aware"?   

Further to that tweet that lauched a million jokes

Update:

Night noises

I am reliably told, and have been told for some years, that I snore - a lot.   

Curious as to the extent to which I do, and how often it might involve sleep apnea style snoring, in which there are the long and unhealthy pauses in breathing, I decided to look up snore monitoring apps for my smart phone, and there are several to choose from.

But before I first used it, I was slightly worried about what would happen if I found out I mutter wildly inappropriate things in my sleep, or more worryingly, hear something completely spooky, like an unrecognised voice saying my name in the middle of the night?     Surely some writer has used a scenario like that in a scary story?  My daughter thought it very weird that I should even think of this, but I thought it would be something that would occur to most people with an imagination.   Who is right?

Anyway, I now know directly that, yes, I do snore, and almost continuously it seems.  Not always at a high volume, but absolutely silent sleep seems a pretty small proportion of my night.   I also know that I can cough in the middle of the night and not remember it the next day.  I have not yet heard any muttering, or disembodied voices, yet. 

Now, to investigate some snore reduction devices.  I don't think I have serious sleep apnea, but I would like to have clearer sounding night breathing...

Taking "never retire" to extremes

At NPR:

 

Can't we just rent some nuclear submarines and return them when due for servicing?

I haven't had time to read much about what today's defence announcement really means, but I thought nuclear subs didn't need much re-fuelling, and boy, I was right:

The Navy hopes to have the first replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine on duty by 2031. When that vessel is launched, the onboard nuclear power plant is expected to last its entire 40-year service life.

That is seven years longer than the current reactors aboard U.S. submarines.

“Our goal for the new submarines is to have a life-of-the-ship reactor,” said Frank G. Klotz, National Nuclear Security Administration administrator and the Department of Energy’s undersecretary of nuclear security. NNSA is responsible for developing government-owned nuclear power plants...

There are two primary reasons the NNSA is undertaking the new core design, he told reporters in November.

“It is extraordinarily important on cost because one of the largest elements of the total operational cost of a submarine over its life has been replacing the core when that has come due. It is very expensive,” he said.

“The other aspect is that when you go into the deep overhaul that is necessary to replace the core, you’re taking a submarine out of service for a long time. So if you have a life of the sub or a life of the ship core, then you avoid both cost, and you avoid both extensive downtime as you refuel the reactor,” Klotz said.

The savings could be substantial.

Olivia Volkoff, a spokeswoman for the program, said: “Eliminating the refueling through insertion of a life-of-the-ship core allows the Navy to meet the strategic deterrent mission with two fewer SSBNs and saves about $40 billion in ship acquisition and lifecycle costs over the life of the program.”

The Virginia-class attack submarines were the first to have a core reactor designed to last the life of the vessel, which for it, is about 33 years.

So, it's surely not an issue that we need to have a nuclear fuel processing facilities here.   Just pick up a second hand attack sub (or 10) from "Subs R Us" at San Diego, or wherever, tootle around the Pacific for 20 years, and return for every major service.   Routine minor services (the equivalent of a grease and oil change) could, I presume, be done here.

I am not entirely sure how we are meant to find enough people to crew these, though.  Don't we struggle crewing the 2 or 3 that are operational at any one time?

But then again - there's a hell of a lot of Filipino seamen (and ship's stewards) out of work at the moment, due to COVID devastating the cruise line industry.    Just contract them out for 5 years at a time, and problem solved.

Defence problems all solved...

What the General said to who, and when

Well, the General Milley calling up the Chinese and telling them his President was nuts and they shouldn't worry about being attacked by surprise is an entertaining story sending the wingnut Right nuts.

A big part of the problem of knowing what to make of it, though, is the question of whether the reporting of the details of the call is accurate.  In that regard, I thought this post by Allahpundit, considering the possible variations on a theme, covered it well.

One thing seems clear:   there were lots of people listening to the call, and therefore, if there was anything really damaging to the General's credibility, we will eventually know about it.   I strongly suspect that it will turn out that the Woodward account is eventually shown to be an exaggeration in some details. 

Nonetheless, it is a sign of the extraordinary times that such calls were being made.  

Update:  and, I should add, that the real concern should be that Trump was presenting as unstable enough to make another superpower suspect a surprise nuclear attack.   But no, Republicans have become so stupid and tribal as to excuse an unstable nutjob because he was their unstable nutjob. 

 

Suddenly, the vaccines flow...

This was a bit of a Queensland surprise yesterday:   from Saturday, over 60's can get Pfizer if they want.  My wife, who has been a longer hold out for Pfizer than me, is pleased.   She (aged 60) actually asked for it at a hub two weekends ago, and they said "no, we need a doctor's letter saying they recommend it for you, otherwise we'll get into trouble."   We were given the impression, though, that some GPs were happy to write a letter for anyone who was AZ hesitant, without even an appointment!  My wife had an appointment to see her GP this week anyway, but now she doesn't have to test her doctor's attitude towards the AZ resistant.  

My daughter has also been told that there are a lot of "walk in" openings at the South Brisbane vaccination hub in recent days.   She had made an appointment in a couple of weeks time, but now she is just going to try her luck at an earlier walk in.

All of this would indicate that Queensland has a sudden increase in our supply of Pfizer, and it hasn't been all pilfered by those southern cities which aren't as good at controlling outbreaks as dumb old Queenslanders.   I hope Morrison is not getting any credit for this, though.   He deserves none.

 

 

Historian stories

This is interesting, although it's a pity there isn't a detailed explanation of every item:

I asked historians what find made them go ‘wait, wut?’ Here’s a taste of the hundreds of replies

The first part of the "quirky" sounds interesting enough:

Many of those who responded told stories of bizarre (and sometimes amusing) finds in the archives. Some were actual objects, such as Robert Cribb finding “17 tubes of processed opium, ready for smoking, in the Dutch archives from 1946 Indonesia”, Daniel McKay coming across “negatives of an early Australian prime minister naked on holiday”, and “300 love letters from woman to woman around 1760, partly written in blood”, located by Susanne Wosnitzka. 

Come on, we need more details about the nude PM on holidays.  

The Catallaxy diaspora

The end of the Sinclair Davidson Catallaxy blog, and the break up of people who used to regularly comment or contribute there into 3 or 4 separate online spaces (depending on how and what you count) has had the salutary effect of really highlighting what a sad sack of culture war losers and conspiracists the blog had long become home to.

One new incarnation is run by a guy who has little time for moderation of comments, meaning it has been regularly overrun by Graeme Bird, with the usual consequences of it likely becoming of interest to the Human Rights Commission for his ratbag and obsessive brand of anti-Semitism.  No one wants him there, but the blog controller takes days (so it seems - I am not following it closely) to ban him and delete comments, making many (I think) inclined to abandon participation.

The other main competitor (as monty's alternative - the only one I have linked to in the blog roll - already seems to have given up any hope of becoming the heir apparent) is the one run by conservative Catholic dover beach, who I attacked strongly at monty's blog for being a terrible ambassador for the Church, and who promptly moderated me for insulting his depressive contributor Arky, while still letting regulars post comments about "faggots", as all good conservative Catholics are wont to do.  Anyway,  it has become a hive of anti COVID vax sentiment, and conspiracy mongering about e-vil government control of people, as well as general culture war complaint.  It also welcomes contribution by Trump cultist Steve Kates.   The number of people commenting regularly seems a pretty small pool, though.   And it's dull.

Currency Lad, meanwhile (you can link via monty's blog) has started blogging again.   His themes now seem so tired and repetitive, though; and again, resistance to taking COVID seriously is a common subject.  I have said elsewhere that his style of writing has deteriorated over the years;  it's now overworked to such an extent that I can't always see clearly the point trying to be made.  He's become too performative - like a slightly softer version in blog form of that incredibly annoying Paul Joseph Watson.  He needs new ideas and material. 

I said for years that the problem with old Catallaxy was that it gave the regulars a false sense of the extent of like minded support for their increasingly Right wing/wingnutty views - and Sinclair Davidson devoted just enough time in things like weeding out Bird strikes (and those who needed a break for their mental health) to stop it collapsing completely into madness.    It was still extremely disreputable, but having a known public figure performing some gatekeeping role still gave the participants some false sheen of credibility.  

But now, by being cast amongst these smaller enterprises, that has been dissolved, and they just look like somewhat sad but angry (always angry) conspiracy minded losers, complaining in their small groups about lack of influence.

This is a Very Good Thing.  

Monkey problem

In a short NPR article about a book about when animals cause trouble, this anecdote is noteworthy:

Macaques have been known to sneak into swimming pools, courts and even the halls of India's Parliament. One attorney told Roach about a macaque that infiltrated a medical institute and began pulling out patient IVs.

"If somebody was getting, you know, a glucose drip, [the monkey would] suck on the needle like it was a Popsicle," she says.

Eek.

Bernard goes off (and rightly so)

Writing in Crikey today, Bernard Keane goes off:

That Christian Porter thinks it’s appropriate to remain a cabinet minister in the absence of an independent inquiry into much-denied allegations of sexual assault is bad enough, but there can be no doubt he has now spat in the face of any Australian who thinks there should be basic level of transparency and integrity in government.

His declaration of being the beneficiary of an anonymous windfall for his legal costs in his withdrawn legal action against the ABC — where the story revealing allegations of rape by a cabinet minister remains up, intact — is an act of gross contempt for political integrity.

In a way, such arrogant behaviour by this privileged man-child has done us a favour in revealing just how piss weak federal standards of accountability are — standards fit for a tinpot dictatorship rather than a country that feels entitled to lecture others about democracy.

 Pretty much what Malcolm Turnbull said on Radio National, too.

I am curious as to what old Porter pal and (semi?) defender Peter van Onselen thinks about it.  Oh, his tweets are "protected".

The Nazi search for the lost Aryans

I'm pretty sure I have heard of this before, but here's a short account at the BBC about it:

In 1938, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of Germany's Nazi party and a key architect of the Holocaust, sent a five-member team to Tibet to search for the origins of the supposed Aryan race. Author Vaibhav Purandare recounts the fascinating story of this expedition, which passed through India.

...

Adolf Hitler believed that "Aryan" Nordic people had entered India from the north some 1,500 years earlier, and that the Aryans had committed the "crime" of mixing with the local "un-Aryan" people, losing the attributes that had made them racially superior to all other people on earth.

Hitler regularly expressed deep antipathy for the Indian people and their struggle for freedom, articulating his sentiments in his speeches, writings and debates. 

Yet, according to Himmler, one of Hitler's top lieutenants and the head of the SS, the Indian subcontinent was still worth a close look.  

This is where Tibet came into the picture.

Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt. 

All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world".

In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage - to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.

In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation".

 You can read more at the link above.

Update:  I thought it worth showing the photo in the article of the 5 guys on the hunt for Aryan roots in Tibet (so to speak):

 The pants are a bit baggy, but still:  pretty snappy dressers for Nazi scientists.   (And you really do expect Indiana Jones to be lurking somewhere in the background.)

Big floods more often

Some German researchers conclude about climate change and floods:

New research by Brunner and her colleagues shows the occurrence and intensity of extreme flood events will increase, but smaller and more moderate floods will probably decline.

“There is extensive evidence that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events around the world, but much less evidence that flood events have increased over the same period,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California at Los Angeles and a co-author of the paper.

“This new research demonstrates how climate change could actually have divergent effects for very large but rare floods versus smaller but more common floods,” he said.

Swain said additional work would be needed to confirm that this flooding behavior applies more broadly around the world but suspects it probably does....

In line with previous research, the team found that precipitation will increase and intensify in a warming climate. The largest increases in precipitation occurred in the most extreme and rare events.

By the end of this century, the authors found, intense precipitation events that would typically occur two times per century would occur twice as often. Events that would occur once every 200 years would become four times as frequent.

Flooding trends were more nuanced.

In general, they found that moderate flooding events depended on land-surface processes, such as soil moisture or the amount of snow in the watershed.

For instance, if soil moisture was high, perhaps from previous recent rains, then even a small amount of additional precipitation could cause the area to flood. Brunner also said that water falling over impermeable surfaces, such as concrete sidewalks in cities, could cause flooding even from relatively small amounts of rain. Both of these were contributing factors to the disastrous flooding in New York in early September.

All sounds pretty plausible.  And as I keep saying - actually a very expensive and difficult thing to deal with in infrastructure terms - re-engineering storm water drainage for an entire city to expand its capacity by a substantial amount must be very pricey.

 

 

It's a cult

This is such strong evidence of Trumpism being a cult, I wondered if it might turn out to be faked.  Doesn't look it:

 

The end of the Ring

Well, time for my final "I don't really know what I am talking about" review of the Ring Cycle - because I managed to get through Acts 2 and 3 of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, Wiki informs me) on the weekend.

Act 2:  the plot here is fairly confusing - although I think now that I read the explanation on Wiki, it was probably because I wasn't paying close enough attention at the end of Act 1.   So, going back there for a moment:  under the spell of a potion by bad guy Hagen, and the use of a magic helmet called the Tarnhelm, Siegfried took on the shape of Hagen's half brother Gunther and walked through the ring of fire to get to Brunnhilde, snatched the ring (yes, that ring) off her finger and putting it on his [that is, fake Gunther's] hand, making her his [fake Gunther's] instantly, apparently.

In Act 2, Siegfried teleports [uh, Tarnhelm - it's a bit like a Tardis that fits on the head, apparently] back to Hagen to claim the woman he wants - Gunther's sister Gutrune.   (See, he's forgotten all about how he had fallen for Brunnhilde.)  Real Gunther then arrives back with Brunnhilde in tow, with the plan to have a double wedding.   

Things then get all very high conflict, when Brunnhilde realises (by seeing the ring on Siegfried's finger - not Gunther's) that she's been conned, somehow, and as Siegfried still doesn't understand that he's been played by Hagen, he goes off to marry Gutrune anyway. 

[If there is one key feature of the Ring Cycle, it's that falling insanely in love and getting hitched takes place in phenomenally short timeframes!  Maybe all opera is like that - I really wouldn't know.]

While Siegfried and Gutrune are tying the knot off stage, Hagen, Gunther and Brunnhilde all decide that to restore everyone's honour, Siegfried needs to die.   Brunnhilde, obviously, is not a woman lightly crossed.

The best thing about Act 2: a chorus, hurrah - comprising the Gibichung army!   And it's used in (what seemed to me) an unusual way - it talks back and forth with Hagen.  Like: "hey, why did you summons us, Hagen?"  "To come to a wedding."   "Oh, cool.  Whose wedding?"  And so on.  That's not the way chorus's usually work in opera, is it?   I found it a bit amusing.   But I did like hearing a big chorus after after listening to mostly solo voices for the previous 14 hours.     

Anyway, onto the climax:   Act 3.  Spoilers ahead!

Well,  there's not much to tell, really:   Siegfried has gone out hunting and got separated from Hagen and Gunther, unaware they have plans for him.   The Rhinemaidens make a re-appearance, and warn Siegfried that the ring is cursed and if he'll end up dead that day unless he gives it back to the Rhine.   Dumb old (well, young, but usually played by old singers it seems) Siegfried scoffs, and is shortly thereafter shafted - literally - by Hagen.   

Hagen gets him carried home on his shield, to a fantastic bit of music, and lies to Gutrune that her husband of less than 24 hours has been killed by a wild boar.

The truth comes out soon enough, to everyone, including Brunnhilde.  She decides to re-join Siegfried by jumping into his funeral pyre, together with her horse,  and takes the opportunity to torch the Gods in Valhalla pretty much at the same time, in revenge for mucking her around.  (We had been told by someone - I forget who - that Wotan has been moping around in Valhalla, stacking it with a wood pile from the former World Tree, just waiting for someone to light a match, if I understood the implication correctly.)    

Somehow, the ring gets flung back into the Rhine, and Hagen tries to get it but is drowned by a couple of Rhinemaidens. ("Don't cross women" seems to be a major lesson of this opera.}

And, thus (don't ask me how, exactly) the world is redeemed.   I've actually got to go read how this is meant to work - I suppose it might have something to do with the Gods in this universe not being benevolent and wise and all powerful, but instead meddling nuisances who don't really know what they want.  Except a good house:  remember, waaaay back at the start, a lot of Wotan's troubles began as a tradesman dispute over how they were going to get paid for building Valhalla.   But then again, the Rhinemaidens, who seem to have escaped all this destruction, probably shouldn't have taunted ugly dwarf Alberich, causing him to turn all incel and steal the gold (and make the ring) in the first place.    I think there is a fair bit of blame to spread around, here...

So, did this climax live up to my expectations?   Pretty much - the end music is pretty overwhelming.  I don't know why, but my heart rate was up for a while after it finished, and I was just watching and listening on my phone.  (Imagine Wagner knowing this is how someone would be viewing his work a century and a half after he wrote it! He'd be mortified.)

I am satisfied that I will enjoy the live production, whenever it may get to be staged in Brisbane, and now that I know the story, I won't have to concentrate quite so much if my cheap seat doesn't have a good view.

I may have to write more about this, after I read more....

Wingnuttery

Update:. More in this vein:

Lunch

It was like a tasting paddle of food and wine.  I didn't take a photo of the dessert, but it was great.

The threats of the Right inadequately acknowledged

You know what sickens me - when you have Australian apologists for Trump pretending that his (often heavily armed) wingnut supporters are not into threats of violence.   It's all "we all know the true source of violence in America..it's the Left".  

They only get away with thinking this because, (apart from being brainwashed idiots), there is far too little reporting of the types of threats routinely made in America by Trump wingnuts.   Take this, for example - the appalling level of threat against another Republican for not swinging fully behind the "election was stolen":

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) felt queasy last December after dodging a reporter’s question about whether Joe Biden was president-elect. He said he’d seen no evidence of fraud but added that the process needed to fully play out. This was a standard GOP talking point, but Duncan understood how such vacillation gave oxygen to President Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the election.

The lieutenant governor decided he had a duty to acknowledge reality: The president he’d campaigned for had lost. Duncan knew this bit of truth-telling might cost him reelection. “My breathing suddenly became quick and shallow,” he recalls.

Just as Duncan feared, telling the truth about the "big lie" derailed a promising political career. He announced this spring he won’t seek a second term, averting probable defeat in a primary. That’s liberated the former professional baseball player to release a book this week, “GOP 2.0,” that recounts “the six nightmarish months” he spent in a “bizarre Twilight Zone” after the November election.

Trump called him “corrupt” — and threats poured in, via voicemail, email and social media. A website appeared with his face centered in crosshairs, alongside his address and a picture of his home. FBI agents told him Iran was behind that page, according to his book, as part of a broader effort to amplify election disinformation.

When his teenage son Bayler tweeted a family motto, “Doing the right thing will never be the wrong thing,” the lieutenant governor liked and retweeted the post. His wife, Brooke, was “furious” with him because she feared he had just exposed their son to attack, Duncan writes, “and she was right.” State troopers stood guard as he played catch with his three boys in their yard. “Imagine explaining that to your children,” he writes.

Legislators privately told him they admired his courage. Then they publicly attacked. “I found myself on an island — one that was getting pounded by bombs and artillery,” Duncan writes. “Lie by lie, the former president sapped the trustworthiness of every single Republican official.” 

 I would bet my last dollar that there were also many ordinary election workers (those who were seen on video and the subject of invented claims of fraudulent handling of votes) who received threats for months afterwards - but we hear nothing about that.

And hey - now that I Google the topic - yes: here is a special report that turned up on Reuters only yesterday detailing how :hundreds" of threats against election workers has only resulted in a handful of arrests.  Some of the reasons why are just astounding:

The death threats brought Staci McElyea to tears. The caller said that McElyea and other workers in the Nevada Secretary of State’s office were "going to f------ die.” She documented the threats and alerted police, who identified and interviewed the caller. But in the end, detectives said there was nothing they could do – that the man had committed no crime.

The first call came at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 7, hours after Congress certified Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential vote. The caller accused McElyea of “stealing” the election, echoing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. “I hope you all go to jail for treason. I hope your children get molested. You’re all going to f------ die,” he told her.

He called back three times over the next 15 minutes, each time telling her she was “going to die.”

McElyea, 53, a former U.S. Marine, called the Nevada Capitol Patrol and sent the state police agency a transcript of the calls, according to emails Reuters obtained through a public-records request. An officer contacted the man – who police would later identify as Gjurgi Juncaj of Las Vegas – and reported back to McElyea that their inquiry “might have pissed him off even further,” the emails showed.

A week later, state police concluded that Juncaj’s threats were not criminal, characterizing them as “protected” political speech, according to a summary of the case. Juncaj was never arrested or charged. Asked about the calls, Juncaj told Reuters he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong. “Like I explained to the police, I didn’t threaten anybody,” he said.

The case illustrates the glaring gaps in the protection that U.S. law enforcement provides the administrators of American democracy amid a sustained campaign of intimidation against election officials and staff. The unprecedented torrent of terroristic threats began in the weeks before the November election, as Trump was predicting widespread voter fraud, and continues today as the former president carries on with false claims that he was cheated out of victory.

What a country.

 

The dog that caught the car

I thought this Slate column on why the Republicans (and Australian Right wingnuts) have been fairly muted in their excitement over the Texas effective ban on abortion was pretty good.  Key parts:

Despite the Republican Party’s decades long crusade against Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of GOP politicians declined to celebrate, or even note, Roe’s functional demise. Why?

The most obvious answer is that Republicans are now the dog that caught the car, fearful of the political ramifications of their own victory. Indeed, it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts. After all, hundreds of similar laws were blocked by the courts for years. Their decision to downplay this victory should upend the conventional wisdom about Roe not just politically, but also from a constitutional perspective.

For years, conservative lawyers have argued that the Supreme Court should not uphold pro-choice precedent because it is unsettled, unstable, and unworkable. As evidence, they cite the fact that red states continue passing all manner of abortion restrictions to contest the legitimacy of Roe as settled precedent. But the GOP’s reaction to the Texas law suggests that this analysis has it backward. What if Republicans only continued to pass abortion restrictions because they knew the laws would get struck down? What if the passage of these laws proves that Roe is such a settled, stable, and workable precedent that legislators think they can pretend to defy it without worrying about the consequences?

The rest of it, talking about the history of Republican tactics, was interesting, too.

Feminism and pornography

There's an interesting review in The Atlantic of three feminist themed books on the current (Western) attitudes to sex, and there are some interesting passages:

Porn consumption is now such a fixture of modern life—there is no chance the American government will take your smut away—that space has opened up to question its effects without being dismissed as a wannabe censor. Which isn’t to say that admitting to reservations about current sexual trends is easy. For Clark-Flory’s 30-something generation (which is also my generation), being Cool About Sex is a mark of our impeccable social liberalism. If two or more adults consent to it, whatever it is, no one else is entitled to an opinion.

Yet here is the conundrum facing feminist writers: Our enlightened values—less stigma regarding unwed mothers, the acceptance of homosexuality, greater economic freedom for women, the availability of contraception, and the embrace of consent culture—haven’t translated into anything like a paradise of guilt-free fun. The sexual double standard still exists, and girls who say no are still “frigid” while those who say yes are still “sluts.” Some men still act with entitlement, while others feel that, no matter what they do, they are inescapably positioned as the “bad guys” by the new sexual rules. Half a century after the sexual revolution and the start of second-wave feminism, why are the politics of sex still so messy, fraught, and contested?

More specifically on pornography:

In The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan confesses her reluctance to cover second-wave criticisms of porn in the feminist-theory course she teaches at Oxford. She is Cool About Sex, after all, and assumed that her students would be bored by the question of whether porn oppresses women. She also assumed that the reputation of “anti-porn feminists,” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had been fatally damaged by their alliance with the religious right to pass laws restricting access to pornography. What self-respecting member of Generation Z would want to line up alongside Jerry Falwell Sr. and Phyllis Schlafly, particularly when the other side is selling a fantasy of libertine pleasure?

Yet her class was “riveted,” she observes in “Talking to My Students About Porn,” the longest essay in her collection. Their enthusiasm was so great that it made her reconsider her own diffidence. The exchange is worth quoting at length:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically … My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission.

Well, it's good to see such things being admitted;  I guess it's also something of a sign of the scale of the sexual revolution that you can have a class of (presumably) young adults in Oxford so keen to share with their teacher their views of their own sexual experiences.   Not exactly a scene you'd expect in CS Lewis and Tolkien's day!

There is also this aspect of pornography, which I guess I hadn't thought much about before:

But how much do culture and politics shape those wants? Porn-aggregator sites, to take one example, use algorithms, just like the rest of the internet. Pornhub pushes featured videos and recommendations, optimized to build user loyalty and increase revenue, which carry the implicit message that this is what everyone else finds arousing—that this is the norm. Compare porn with polarized journalism, or even fast food: How can we untangle what people “really want” from what they are offered, over and over, and from what everyone else is being offered too? No one’s sexual desires exist in a vacuum, immune to outside pressures driven by capitalism. (Call it the invisible hand job of the market.)

Ha ha.

I think it's good to see serious, non religious, discussion of the downside of ubiquitous easy access to pornography;  but it is difficult how you can ever see a solution without in some way being censorious.  Let's not shy away from that, I say:   people should feel OK with saying "I really think pornography that depicts practice X, Y or Z really ought not be available." 

 

Still not 100% sure

Another study indicating that the warming Arctic region is helping cause freak cold winter spells in North America, due to the polar vortex breaking down and causing cold air to spread south:

In their study, published this week in Science¹, Cohen and his colleagues compared 40 years of satellite observations of atmospheric conditions over the Arctic with experiments based on computational climate models. The models probed how a decline in Arctic sea ice and snow cover would affect airstreams in the region. Since ice and snow reflect a large fraction of incoming sunlight back into space, whereas the darker ocean and land surface absorb more radiation, this decline is known to drive Arctic warming.

The researchers found that episodes of polar-vortex stretching have markedly increased in the past few decades, and that their models reproduced this behaviour well when they included the effects of Arctic warming.

But some climate scientists are still not sure:

...the idea that Arctic warming might be responsible for cold spells in mid-latitude regions is still hotly debated among climate scientists. At first glance, it might seem obvious that winters will generally tend to get milder in a warming world. But climate models that are commonly used to study complex links between the different components of the climate system diverge on the issue of how strongly Arctic warming might influence mid-latitude winters, and state-of-the-art models do not accurately replicate observed trends in the behaviour of the polar vortex. It remains to be seen whether the models are missing something, or whether the observations of polar-vortex stretching merely reflect natural climate variability, says Daniela Matei, a climate modeller at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

I don't know:  seems a bit of an odd co-incidence for it to be "natural climate variability" at a time of clear and rapid Arctic warming...

A voter fraud conspiracy for every election

It seems that the Democrat concern that California's governor will lose the recall election is much reduced.    Hence this:

Tweets on life extension

Was waiting for a tweet like this...

...but Jason spotted it first:

Agreed.  I mean, the guy looks like he should be retired, too.
 

Update:  I posted that before I even watched the video.  Now that I have seen half of it - I definitely do not want this guy as my pilot.  Not only that, it sounds like he has been barely psychologically stable enough to be a pilot for much of his career - he recites a litany of personal problems he's experienced.  

Pilots can be nuts, too.

Libertarian follies at sea

He's talking about this long piece in The Guardian, in which I was surprised to learn that a P&O cruise  ship that used to operate out of Brisbane (and with a bit of a dubious reputation, I think) had been sold to cryptocurrency guys who thought it could be the start of some mini seasteading operation.  

It all failed.

How very Trumpy

France 24 reports:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions including the Supreme Court.  

Anti-Bolsonaro protesters also gathered for huge demonstrations in cities across the country, making the annual national day festivities a high-risk event, with just over a year to go to elections that polls currently put the far-right president on track to lose.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity is at an all-time low, is seeking to fire up his base and flex his political muscle in the face of a flagging economy, soaring unemployment and inflation, and a series of investigations targeting him and his inner circle.

With hardline supporters urging a military intervention to give Bolsonaro unfettered power, there are fears the day's rallies could turn violent, with echoes of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump -- to whom Bolsonaro is often compared.

The main difference, and main worry, seems to be that he has the military on side.   Trump never did; at least at the higher level.   (Loose nuts like Flynn excepted, of course.)

 

Tough on COVID

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

While on COVID:  there seems to be some online fighting going on about whether that Bangladesh study into the effect of mask wearing is really a well designed and statistically convincing one, or not.  I read this guy's take on the matter and I am inclined to think it is significant.   And yeah, even though the effect was only to reduce infections by 10%, in context:

While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.

"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.

And:

The study’s authors — led by principal investigators Abaluck, Laura Kwong, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice, emphasized that this did not mean masks were only 9.3 percent effective.

“I think a big error would be to read this study and to say, ‘Oh, masks can only prevent 10 percent of symptomatic infections,’ ” Abaluck said. The number would probably be several times higher if masking were universal, he said.

Yeah, seems to me to be good evidence for mandating mask wearing, at least in some scenarios.  (Schools, I would expect.)

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

Smart people can be nuts

I had noticed Trumpy Right wingers citing the opinion of the (now dead) inventor of the PCR test as proving that it's useless or misleading as a COVID test.  I never looked into it in detail:  obviously, culture warriors of the Right are gullible and cling to anything, no matter how stupid, that they think supports their "independent thinking"; and the actual medical authorities saying that PCR is really the test to use were just always likely to be right.

So yeah, I didn't really realise how nutty the inventor of PCR had gone, until I read this article.  Highlights include an encounter with a glowing talking raccoon (probably an alien using a screen memory), and having his life saved by an astral travelling woman he later met for a sexual hook up.    

All very, very plausible.

For those waiting for my last Ring review...

[...hi Tim, although I'm not even sure if you care.  :)]

 Anyway, this last weekend I only got through Act 1 of Götterdämmerung and didn't have time to finish.

The story has taken a turn I wasn't quite expecting - with the new love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde (literally, just one night old) the subject of interference by the very oddly named (even by Wagnerian standards) Gibichungs.   

I really liked the orchestral bit when Siegfried sets off on the Rhine -  it's back to the first theme in the first opera, of course, and elaborated at some length.   And, as people said in their commentary on watching the whole cycle, by this stage, you really start to enjoy recognising the prior themes popping up, even briefly, and being mixed up.   

I hope the end of the world in flames lives up to its hype...

The Chinese puzzle, continued

Noah's substack piece about what on Earth China thinks it is doing with its attack on its own successful tech industries was really good, a few weeks back.  I think I forgot to link to it?  Here it is...

Believe it when I see it

I smell a strong whiff of Murdoch-ian playing both sides of the fence for economic gain in this potentially (kinda, sorta, maybe) big news today reported in the SMH:

News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions....

From October 17, the company will run a two-week campaign that will advocate for a carbon net zero target to be reached by 2050, which is expected to focus heavily on jobs in a decarbonised economy, particularly blue-collar industries such as mining, resources and agriculture. The campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they are confidential, said it will be fronted by news.com.au columnist and former Studio 10 host, Joe Hildebrand.

Several sources said Sky News will support the cause that will feature across the metropolitan tabloid mastheads. The Hildebrand-led campaign will not appear in the national masthead, The Australian, they said, but the newspaper will continue to temper its editorial stance on the issue.

The Australian wingnut Right already doesn't think Hildebrand isn't one of them - any campaign by him will be readily ignored. 

The far, far bigger issue is this:

A plan has been devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators, who will be expected to reframe their political arguments both in print and on its subscription news channel, which is now broadcast across regional Australia on free-to-air on WIN.

Well, it's impossible to imagine Bolt, Jones and the idiot show that is Outsiders "re-framing" their climate science denial in any meaningful way.   If the Murdochs successfully muzzle them on the issue, well and good.  But I can't see it happening.

 

Odd things seen last weekend

I accidentally ended up at a country athletics meet.  This was an unusual thing for me - to be at something involving sporting competition - so it warranted photographic proof:

(I was actually at the Mulgowie farmer's market.  The athletics meet on the same field was not something that had attracted me.   Fantastically good corn was purchased, by the way.  And a truck on the side of the road at Gatton - not so far away - was selling 20kg of potatoes for $20.  We passed it twice, but my wife wouldn't let me buy a sack.)  

 

The next day, it was fake Italy on the Gold Coast:

To be honest, I don't mind Disneyesque fake environments in terms of buildings, at least. I could do without the imitation art though, in the form of the nude dude.  That's pushing it too far.

Some interesting tweets on China and socialism

Sunday deep thoughts

By the way, that Oklahoma story is so intensely attention grabbing for anyone who believes the Right has been driven nuts by the culture wars, I have been suspecting it might be too good to be true.  Not seen it debunked yet, though.

Update: yes, it would seem the doctor who made the Oklahoma claim was, at the very least, exaggerating.  (I am curious to know the number of cases of Ivermectin poisoning there are, though, whether in that State, or elsewhere.)  Still, my sense of "too 'good' to be true" seems to be working well.

Well, when you put it that way...

Some further tweets from the thread:

Record intense rainfall causes flash flood...again

My prediction for years that flooding will be a key factor in convincing people and governments that dangerous climate change is real seems to be getting vindicated repeatedly this year:

Why is my screenshot not always capturing the image in a tweet now?  It's annoying.

Stare into the robot's eyes

One of the most surprising bits of research of recent years has been that about the effect of people staring into eyes.   

It seems that robot gaze even has an effect:

In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals, and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the way people strategically reason in a social decision-making context. Specifically, participants played a strategic game with the robot iCub while we measured their behavior and neural activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were slower to respond when iCub established mutual gaze before their decision, relative to averted gaze. This was associated with a higher decision threshold in the drift diffusion model and accompanied by more synchronized EEG alpha activity. In addition, we found that participants reasoned about the robot’s actions in both conditions. However, those who mostly experienced the averted gaze were more likely to adopt a self-oriented strategy, and their neural activity showed higher sensitivity to outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that robot gaze acts as a strong social signal for humans, modulating response times, decision threshold, neural synchronization, as well as choice strategies and sensitivity to outcomes. This has strong implications for all contexts involving human-robot interaction, from robotics to clinical applications.

Update:   hey, this reminds me - I recently got around to watching the modest budget, but pretty good, science fiction movie Ex Machina on Netflix.  Staring into a robot's eyes is a key part of that movie.   I recommend it.

That Texas abortion law is a really bad way to deal with the issue

I find it hard to believe that anyone of moderate Conservative values (say, Douthat), can run a credible defence of the Texas anti abortion law as being good for society when it operates by enabling private actions against abortion.   From Axios:

Details: Texas' Senate Bill 8 does not provide any exceptions for rape of incest. It also allows for people to sue anyone suspected of helping a person to obtain an abortion, regardless of whether they have a direct relationship with the person or not.

• Those who are successful can be awarded at least $10,000.
• Texas Right to Life set up a "whistleblower" website where people can submit tips on individuals that they believe are violating the law... 
  

  Texas' abortion ban is hard to challenge because the state is not the one enforcing the law, private citizens are.

• "The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals," Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, told TIME.
• "That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights," Tribe added.

And this:

 This is real serious culture war stuff:   enabling those with pretty fundamentalist views of the morality of abortion to sue others who do not agree with them.

True observation