Technical issues after all

It seems I have to humble brag, again, but there's an article up at The Guardian about the technical issues with the troubled Sun Cable project which indicates that my hunch that this idea wasn't likely to fly was correct:

The problems are technical, economic and even geopolitical. Giving some observers solace is the presence of David Griffin, Sun Cable’s founder and chief executive, who is a veteran of the renewable industry. “He’s very competent at these kinds of things,” said one industry insider. “He loves obstacles, he loves challenges.”

Griffin will have many of these. Georgious Konstantinou, a senior lecturer in energy systems at the University of New South Wales, said the length of the cable alone makes the project “extremely ambitious”.

Konstantinou said a global desktop study done three years ago researching the feasibility of building power links between different regions was not promising for Sun Cable.

“It ended up with the Australian connections being way more difficult and way costlier than any of the other links that you would have around the world,” he said, adding the depth of waters to be crossed – such a 2km deep Timor trench – was a key issue.

“So when Sun Cable says ‘we can actually do that’, it makes you think what are the differences do they see compared to what everyone else is thinking?”

Konstantinou estimates energy losses even with the best high voltage direct current technology would be at least 15%. Boosters would also be needed to ensure voltage is maintained for the end users, such as Singapore.

Singapore itself is yet to commit funds or sign up as a customer. Sun Cable would need to offer the island nation an ultra-low price if it’s to rely on one supplier for 15% of its electricity, not least because it would need back-up in case of sudden failure, Andrew Blaker, an energy expert at the Australian National University, said.

“If you, in the space of half a second, took out 15% of Australia’s electricity supply, Australia’s grid might have a few problems,” said Blakers, who describes himself as “cautiously sceptical” of Sun Cable’s prospects.

Singapore’s Energy Market Authority declined to comment on Sun Cable’s administration. A spokesperson, though, told Guardian Australia the authority had “received more than 20 proposals to import electricity from countries including Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand”.

“We remain on track to meet our imports target of 4GW by 2035,” she said.

Blakers said Sun Cable’s going to face “very stiff competition from similar projects located in northern Indonesia or on hydroelectric reservoirs in Borneo because they are within 50 to 500 or so kilometres across the shallow sea from Singapore”.

While the solar resource is “not quite so good” in those regions compared with the Northern Territory, “it’s still pretty good”, he said. “I just wish they would turn the cable around and send [the power] south” to markets in southern Australia.

Dylan McConnell, an energy expert also with UNSW, said the estimated cost and timing of the venture of $30bn seem unrealistic compared with projects being developed in Australia.

The proposed Marinus Link, for instance, involves a 250km HVDC link across Bass Strait at an average depth of about 60m. The combined capacity in two stages would be 1.5GW with a total of more than $3bn. Stage 1, at 750MW, would be built by 2028 on current plans.

“Sun Cable, on the other hand, is set to be almost 17 times longer, about twice as much capacity , and is through the Timor Sea,” McConnell said. “It’s also between two countries and through Indonesia’s territorial waters, and was apparently targeting ‘first delivery ‘ to Singapore in 2027.”

“It’s difficult to imagine how you might deliver that, alongside about 20GW of solar and about 40GW-hours of storage for [$30bn],” he said.

OK, so it seems the project is looking technically and/or economically dubious.

Which raises the question, how reliable is the judgement of Infrastructure Australia, which ticked off on it 6 months ago:

Infrastructure Australia has provided its endorsement for the economic benefits of the Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPowerLink), which would export solar power from the Australian outback to Singapore via a submarine transmission link.

The endorsement ensures that the project can advance to third-stage, “investment-ready” status on Infrastructure Australia's priority list, opening the door for government funding.

   

 

 

   

An interesting take on George Pell

There's a very interesting personal take on Cardinal George Pell by John Allen, a journalist at the Catholic website Crux.

It's hard to summarise - but Allen obviously liked him, despite being fully aware of his combative character and being on the receiving end of criticism on more than one occasion.  Some extracts:

The last time I spoke to Pell was about three weeks ago. He’d called in part to see how I was doing in my recovery from esophageal surgery last fall, but, more to the point, to chide me for a recent article I’d written. I’d called Pope Francis “decisive,” and Pell was livid – the pope’s problem, he thundered, is that he routinely fails to act, with his dithering about the German “synodal way” the latest case in point.

Having done everything but call me brain-dead, Pell concluded by saying, “Well, take care of yourself … we need your voice. Even if you do sometimes muck it up, at least you’re paying attention.” He then hung up without waiting for me to reply.

(Following the normal rules of polite telephone interaction seem to be something Pell didn't feel obliged to follow, then.)

More:

I’ve known Pell since his days in Sydney. If memory serves, I think my first interview with him was during the “liturgy wars” in English-speaking Catholicism in the 2000s, when Pell led a new commission created in Rome to supervise the translation of liturgical texts into English.

I remember being stunned at how blunt he was, using peppery adjectives to describe a few of his opponents that would never see the light of day in a family newspaper. From that point on, we struck up a sort of symbiotic friendship – Pell loved getting the latest Roman gossip, and I always enjoyed his assessments of people and politics.

So, I take it that he was blunt and sweary in the discussion of his perceived enemies.

Some years later, Pell’s return to Rome after his legal battles in Australia more or less coincided with my return to living here full-time, which gave us the opportunity to see one another more frequently. Over conversations in his Vatican apartment – which, he informed my wife Elise and I, he had swept regularly for electronic surveillance, because the Vatican in his view has become a “police state” – or over meals at our house and in favorite Rome restaurants, Pell would share his ever-colorful assessments of personalities and issues, not to mention his often disparaging take on whatever I’d just written or said.

As the saying goes, George Pell was sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.

We can add a bit of paranoia to the later Pell character?  Mind you, in the Vatican, I suppose it might be deserved.

During one of our recent exchanges, Pell speculated that Pope Francis was suffering from an undisclosed illness related to his colon surgery in 2021 and that we’d have a conclave before Christmas. Since the holidays are over, I’d been meaning to call Pell to rib him about getting that wrong – sadly, now I’ll never have the chance.

To sum up, the George Pell I knew was brash, hilarious, opinionated and tough as nails. I never worked for him, but I know plenty of people who did, and they say he could be equal parts a bull in a China shop and the most caring father figure you’d ever meet. With Pell, literally, you got strong doses of both the bitter and the sweet.

Pell thought in “us v. them” terms, and it always irritated him that I try not to. Yet despite that, he took a genuine interest in my life and career … he was one of the first to call when I was in the hospital in October, and I was especially glad to have his prayers.

And finally:

Of course, I realize that Pell was strong medicine, and he wasn’t everyone’s cup of coffee. With such a polarizing figure, it’s hard to say anything that’s unassailably objective, but here’s my stab at it.

No matter what else one might conclude, from here on out Roman Catholicism is going to be just a little less interesting, a little more gray and dull, because George Pell isn’t around. He will be missed … by many, many, people, and certainly by me.

I think it fair to say from this description that:

a.    he can hardly be said to have a saintly character;

b.    he played (very human) power games, hard; and

c.    I would not have liked him if I had met him.    

More broadly, it is understandable how he is already the "patron saint", so to speak, for conservative Catholics who refuse to think that the Church needs any reform, at all, and yearn for the same power it used to hold over its members until the second half of the 20th century.

Not unexpected, but bad news nonetheless

As noted in The Guardian:

The world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, demonstrating the profound and pervasive changes that human-caused emissions have made to the planet’s climate.

More than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed in the oceans. The records, starting in 1958, show an inexorable rise in ocean temperature, with an acceleration in warming after 1990....

Prof John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and part of the study team, said: “If you want to measure global warming, you want to measure where the warming goes, and over 90% goes into the oceans.

“Measuring the oceans is the most accurate way of determining how out of balance our planet is.

“We are getting more extreme weather because of the warming oceans and that has tremendous consequences all around the world.”

Prof Michael Mann, at the University of Pennsylvania, also part of the team, said: “Warmer oceans mean there is more potential for bigger precipitation events, like we’ve seen this past year in Europe, Australia, and currently on the west coast of the US.” He said the analysis showed an ever-deeper layer of warm water on the ocean surface: “This leads to greater and more rapid intensification of hurricanes – something we’ve also seen this past year – since the winds no longer churn up cold sub-surface water that would otherwise dampen intensification.”

 

 

Yglesias gets the blogging star treatment

Gee, a lengthy article at the Washington Post about the successful career of Matt Yglesias.

He's OK, I think, and I do follow him on Twitter, but I would have preferred to read about the even more eccentric centrist Noah Smith.

Was I right?

It was barely 6 months ago that I expressed surprise that the very ambitious plan to send electricity from Australia to Singapore via undersea cable was apparently going to go ahead.

Today, the news:

Sun Cable, the company behind a massive solar farm and power export project planned for the Northern Territory, has gone into voluntary administration.

Mind you, the reasons for this seem a bit unclear, and perhaps are not due to technology issues?:

The company, whose major investors include billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, provided a vague statement about why it collapsed:

"The appointment followed the absence of alignment with the objectives of all shareholders," it said. 

"Whilst funding proposals were provided, consensus on the future direction and funding structure of the company could not be achieved."

But there is this:

The ABC understands that Sun Cable's major investors, Mr Forrest and Mr Cannon-Brookes, had disagreements about the funding and direction of the company.

These included the significant amounts of cash that Sun Cable was spending, and its failure to achieve certain milestones — as required by its venture capital funding agreement.

I hope something successful arises from the financial ashes.

Moving on (Catholic Church edition)

So, with Cardinal George Pell dying suddenly, as well as Pope Benedict, it seems that the ageing doctrinal/social conservatives are being pushed out of the way by the inevitable march of time.  Mind you, I don't know that you can really call Francis significantly doctrinally different - he perhaps just gives the impression of being less judgemental in the application of doctrine.

I've been rather distracted with work and things, but it did seem to me that Benedict's funeral attracted a lot less media attention than your average passing of a Pope.  Seeing his body being carried around St Peters made the whole proceedings look a tad more, um, medieval? than I expected.   (I can't remember anything of the last Papal funeral, though.   I guess they just are never ratings winners.)   

As for people talking about Pell post mortem, there's going to be lots of embarrassing or dubious stuff said on both sides of the culture wars, for sure.  First off the rank, Tony Abbott:

"His incarceration on charges that the High Court ultimately scathingly dismissed, was a modern form of crucifixion; reputationally at least a kind of living death."

I have a hunch that Pell himself would not have liked the comparison to crucifixion - seems a bit trivialising of the travails of Christ.

As for the general state of the Church - we have the very curious problem that the US Culture Wars (and the permanent hot button issue there of abortion) has turned the local Church - apparently both clergy and the remaining practising lay members - more socially conservative than since about the 1960's (or so it seems to me.)  There was this recent report:

Research on Catholic clergy by the Austin Institute has found that younger Catholic priests and priests ordained in more recent years tend to be noticeably more conservative than older priests on a host of issues, including politics, theology and moral teaching. The Survey of American Catholic Priests has found that since the 1980s, successive cohorts of priests have grown more conservative, according to a 2021 summary report.

When asked for their convictions about a number of Catholic teachings (for example the Catholic Church’s “prohibitions of contraception, masturbation, homosexual behavior and suicide, the impossibility of women’s ordination to the priesthood, and the necessity for salvation of faith in Jesus”), Rocca wrote, “each successive 10-year cohort of priests supports church teaching more strongly than the one before it,” the Austin Institute found. “Those ordained in 2010 or later are the most conservative of all—and the least happy with Pope Francis, with roughly half disapproving of him….”

 The total number of priests in that country is, of course, still sliding downwards:

 As for the number of regularly practising Catholics:

So, the "increasingly conservative young priest" cohort is obviously not doing much to encourage Catholics to actually attend church and listen to them.

The problem in Australia, I expect, is not that there is the same level of conservative resurgence in young priests from here (and certainly not amongst the bishops), but the unintended importation of social conservatism via the use of priests from other (often developing) countries:

In order to make up for the shortfall, Australian bishops have adopted a policy of recruiting priests from dioceses and religious institutes mainly in West Africa (+80), India (+185), the Philippines (+93) and Vietnam (+88). Furthermore, it would be reasonable to assume that most of these priests have been brought to Australia on 3-5 year, possibly renewable, 457 ‘skilled worker’ visas.

That was written in 2018:  I wonder how many imports we still have?

Anyway, as is clear from the Right wing conservative Catholics who blog, they don't care that their Church is numerically diminishing, as long as they can be in charge of an anachronistic club that considers purity of doctrine more important than things like caring for people.  Hence the cruelty of Trump and Australian Right wing politicians to the likes of immigrants (or women) doesn't phase them.  It's why they don't like the current Pope, too: he's in danger of sounding too soft. They prefer the "Christian hard man" model, even to the extent of not being overly bothered by one of them (Putin) invading another country with the help of obscenely violent vigilantes.

They are blind to the long term reputational harm to the Church from their attitudes.    

So where the Church goes from here, it's extremely unclear.   I can't see that the mood is really right over the next decade for any changes that might make a difference - I mean, even the relatively modest step of allowing a married priesthood doesn't seem close to being on the cards, and rather than pressing for such changes in the West, a lot of people just chose to walk away instead.

Of course, as I have always also pointed out, denominations that flip the switch to progressivism don't find themselves surging in numbers either, and share a diminishing social influence.  

I keep wondering if there is some way to walk the fine line between integrity with most historical belief, with an appropriate modernisation in doctrine necessitated by the explosion in our understanding of the universe since (say) 1860; and would like to see the Catholic Church be the one to do it.

Can't see it happening any time soon, though.   

 

Simple but funny

This tweet today:

 

A bit of woo for you

Harry's recent disclosure of apparent mediumship type messaging from his late Mum reminded me that I had never mentioned a study recently published in the cheerily named "Omega - Journal of Death and Dying" which tried some "triple blinding" testing of non-professional mediums.  (The idea is to try to exclude the mediums source of information as being the sitter, either by direct clues from them, or from the theoretical possibility of mind reading.)

You can read the whole paper here.  This is the abstract:

The accuracy of information obtained by 28 self-claimant mediums related to 100 readings obtained with a triple level of blinding was examined across three indices: percentage of correct reading identified by the sitters, global score of readings and percentage of difference between correct and incorrect information.

All three indices showed statistical differences of the intended versus the control readings: correct identification 65%; global score: intended readings, mean = 2.4, SD = 1.5; control readings, mean = 1.7, SD = 1.2; percentage difference between correct and incorrect information: intended readings, mean = −7.9%, SD = 38.7%; control readings, mean = −27.3%, SD = 38%.

 

Our results using a very large sample, confirm previous results, supporting the hypothesis that self-claimant mediums are able to retrieve correct information about deceased people without knowing and interacting with the sitters having access with only to the deceased persons’ first name.

Trying to understand how it was done is much harder than it should be, however.  If I have it right, the  the "sitter" does not directly communicate with the medium, who is asked by a researcher to give two readings - one for a deceased person (identified only by a first name) and one "control" reading.    The researcher dealing with the medium doesn't know anything about the deceased person (or the sitter, I think). The sitter is later provided the two sets of information given at the reading (as categorised by the researcher) and rates their accuracy.

As indicated in the abstract, the result was that 65% of the time the sitter correctly identified the "intended" reading from the control.

But the thing that I don't quite understand is how the "control" reading works:

The mediums were contacted for the consultation by research assistant A (raA) who acted as proxy-sitter. On the day of the consultation, raA contacted the medium via either Skype or WhatsApp and gave her only the deceased’s first name (without the surname) as sent by raB. Italian first names did not convey any information about age and ethnicity.

The medium was required to provide oral information relative to the deceased, related to physical description of the person during life, any other information pertinent to the deceased’s identification by the sitter, and anything the deceased wished to communicate to the sitter. At the conclusion of the reading, raA electronically recorded each detail into a column, excluding generic information, for example “I love you” or “Don’t worry about me”, “I’m well”, etc., and sent them to raB. 

In a session, each medium was always asked to contribute two readings of pairs of deceased individuals of the same gender, male or female as the only common characteristic.   

So, I guess, the proxy sitter says "give me some identifying information for [real deceased] Jack" and then "can you give me another reading for another deceased male"?   But do they ask for exactly the same identifying type of information, or is there something different about what they ask for from a the "control" reading.   Because that would seem to me to be one way in which you could get a difference between control readings and the one directed to a named person. 

Or does the way they operate hide which reading is the control?   I mean, it could easily, if they just asked for a reading for (real deceased) Jack, and a reading for (not real) James.    

If I knew exactly how it was done, there is (shall we saw) at least the potential to be impressed - it does seem, as a gut reaction, that correct identification of the "intended" reading 65% of the time is pretty high above random guessing.

But I would really like some psychic skeptic to be observing the whole show before being satisfied there isn't some ready explanation. 

Friday miscellany

*  It's pretty depressing reading about the wild success of Covid anti-vax misinformation swirling around the internet.   This thread on Twitter, for example.   

* James Hansen and his research buddies think that climate sensitivity is worse (higher) than 3 degrees, and aerosols are giving a false sense of security (that's my paraphrase).  The paper is currently only a pre-print, and I haven't noticed much commentary on it yet, but it sounds a worry.    (If he is correct, it really makes it sounds like geo-engineering by putting more aerosols high in the atmosphere might be unavoidable, in the long run.)

* Joe Rogan continues to be a force for misinformation.   

* I can't help it - even I'm getting a tad interested in the Harry melodrama.   This latest bit, about a visit to a California medium, is interesting because it sounds like what has happened to quite a few people - amongst a lot of generic comfort messaging, there is one detail given which sounds convincing because of its peculiar specificity.  Unless, of course, the woman had been fed that story beforehand.  

I really like this short exercise movement

We just seem to keep hearing news stories about how short bursts of exercise are surprisingly effective.  Here's the latest one, in the Washington Post:

Here’s an easy and effective way to add physical activity to your daily routine during the new year: turn your exercise into a snack. New research shows exercise “snacks,” which consist of brief spurts of exertion spread throughout the day, can improve metabolic health, raise endurance and stave off some of the undesirable changes in our muscles that otherwise occur when we sit too long. “It’s a very practical approach” to physical activity, said Daniel Moore, an associate professor of muscle physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada, who led a 2022 study of exercise snacking and muscle health. The physiological benefits of activity snacks can rival those of much longer sessions of brisk walking or other, traditional workouts, the science shows. And they come in multiple flavors, from stair climbing to unobtrusive chair squats in your office. Such “snacks” require no gym membership, special shoes or other equipment; office attire is optional but okay, and the time commitment is minimal.

I will gift link the article.   

There was also this article in The Conversation, with a message I liked:

It’s OK to aim lower with your new year’s exercise resolutions – a few minutes a day can improve your muscle strength

These articles brought up an old memory - an episode of (1970's TV version) The Odd Couple in which Felix did an isometrics exercise, pushing his clasped hands back and forth, and said to Oscar that this worth more than the exercise he got from playing something or other.

Through the wonders of Google, and obsessive people who have done a podcast purely about reviewing a popular sitcom from the 1970's, I have quickly established that this was from an episode called "The Odd Decathlon" in which they got into a fitness challenge, brought on because Felix found out that Oscar's health insurance premium was half of his (despite Felix just having passed a health check with flying colours.)   (Oh, and the exercise Oscar claimed keep him fit was softball.)

I'm impressed with two things:

a.    that I remember an episode of a show that I probably last watched in the mid to late 1970s; and

b.    that Felix was probably right!  

Now excuse me while I stand up and down rapidly for 100 seconds.

Something about the universe watching itself

I see that the currently dysfunctional Twitter is still getting some interesting tweets.  This one, for example:

The comments following included a link to this tweet:

The paper linked to there is new, and here is the (not easy to follow!) abstract:

We recently showed that if a massive (or charged) body is put in a quantum spatial superposition, the mere presence of a black hole in its vicinity will eventually decohere the superposition. In this paper we show that, more generally, decoherence of stationary superpositions will occur in any spacetime with a Killing horizon. This occurs because, in effect, the long-range field of the body is registered on the Killing horizon which, we show, necessitates a flux of "soft horizon gravitons/photons" through the horizon. The Killing horizon thereby harvests "which path" information of quantum superpositions and will decohere any quantum superposition in a finite time. It is particularly instructive to analyze the case of a uniformly accelerating body in a quantum superposition in flat spacetime. As we show, from the Rindler perspective the superposition is decohered by "soft gravitons/photons" that propagate through the Rindler horizon with negligible (Rindler) energy. We show that this decoherence effect is distinct from--and larger than--the decoherence resulting from the presence of Unruh radiation. We further show that from the inertial perspective, the decoherence is due to the radiation of high frequency (inertial) gravitons/photons to null infinity. (The notion of gravitons/photons that propagate through the Rindler horizon is the same notion as that of gravitons/photons that propagate to null infinity.) We also analyze the decoherence of a spatial superposition due to the presence of a cosmological horizon in de Sitter spacetime. We provide estimates of the decoherence time for such quantum superpositions in both the Rindler and cosmological cases.

The paper itself talks about the cosmological horizon being a Killing horizon:

The event horizon of a stationary black hole is a Killing horizon [ 16– 18 ], so spacetimes with Killing horizons encompass the case of stationary spacetimes that contain black holes.  However, there are many cases of interest where Killing horizons are present without the presence of black holes.  One such case is that of Minkowski spacetime, where the Rindler horizon is a Killing horizon with respect to the Lorentz boost Killing field. Another such case is de Sitter spacetime, where the cosmological horizon is a Killing horizon.

One of the other authors thus tweets:

His thread perhaps gives a more general explanation of the potential importance of the idea:

And here are another series of tweets trying to explain:

Of course, I can't tell how much merit or significance there is to this idea.  I would guess Sabine Hossenfelder will get to it on one of her videos soon.   

Update:  it just occurred to me - does this mean that proximity to a black hole has an effect on quantum experiments?   If one is passing through your solar system, does it matter to a lab experiment?

Isn't two to three hours in dark crime world enough?

Hey it's my blog and I'll get to bleat about this again.  

We recently subscribed to Binge, which seems to have a surprisingly large range of the "classic" criminal underworld series of the last couple of decades, including The Wire and The Sopranos.  My son likes this genre, and sometimes I try the shows, sometimes I don't.

So that's how I found myself watching the first episode in the first season of The Wire last night.   Can't say I was overly impressed.  

Once again, my overall question is "why do people want to spend so much of their mental life in such depressing worlds?  Isn't watching well done movies featuring dank criminal underworlds once or twice a year enough?"

My secondary question is:  if the writers have not worked directly in the police or FBI, how can you really know how accurately they are portraying the atmosphere of the such workplaces?   Sure, anyone can go to a court and then know how to write a courtroom scene, but if you haven't worked in Baltimore police for several years, are people giving the show too much credit for atmospheric accuracy.

So who involved in the show had such real life experience?   According to Mental Floss:

The Wire had several writers whose work extended well beyond the television world. George Pelecanos, one of America’s most successful and well-respected crime fiction writers, wrote eight episodes of The Wire and served as a producer on season three. Richard Price, who has writing credits on five episodes, was already an accomplished writer before getting hired for the show, having written several novels and screenplays, including the critically-acclaimed 1992 crime novel Clockers, as well as the script for Spike Lee’s 1995 film adaptation of his book. Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone writer Dennis Lehane wrote three epsiodes.

But there is also this:

Probably one of the main reasons why The Wire rarely struck an inauthentic note was that producers David Simon and Ed Burns didn't have to fake their knowledge of the worlds they were exploring. Before breaking out with his book-turned-TV-show , Simon was a longtime crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun, which gave him an intimate knowledge of not only crime and institutional dysfunction in America's inner-cities, but also the troubles facing the newspaper industry. Burns, on the other hand, served as both a police detective and public school teacher in Baltimore before working on The Wire.

Oh - I see from IMDB that Ed Burns worked for 20 years as a Baltimore detective - so I can't fault him for lacking knowledge.   But even so - insiders, when they turn to fiction, can still exaggerate for dramatic effect.   So, I don't know - I'm still a bit dubious about this aspect of the show.

Anyway, I don't think I will watch more - maybe one more episode?  But really, I don't see the appeal of the show.    

So, so true

Molly Jong-Fast gives a succinct and accurate explanation of what the Republican party has become:

Republicans created a cult of personality around Trump. And now that Trump is off the main stage, the cult no longer has a personality. It’s just a cult with lots of zealotry but no actual tenets or beliefs. And even if McCarthy does eventually prevail, the chaos gripping the House GOP is just a symptom of a larger problem. The Republican Party isn’t really a governing party anymore. It’s an incubator for right-wing celebrities. Republicans didn’t even bother writing a new convention platform in 2020, relying on its reality television host’s demented charisma. And when that didn’t work, and Joe Biden decisively beat Trump, the majority of House Republicans tried overturning the election.

It’s not just Trump who Republicans are expected to take marching orders from, but right-wing media figures as well. After McCarthy failed three Speakership contests, Punchbowl’s Max Cohen tweeted, “Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, who’s poised to be chief deputy whip, on what could possibly swing the 19 Jordan voters: “We’ll see what happens when Tucker and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro start beating up on these guys. Maybe that’ll move it.” Here’s a Republican Party so broken that it needs Tucker Carlson to help them whip votes.

This intrinsic weakness in the GOP allowed the base to run wild, embracing everything from anti-science stupidity to paranoid conspiracy theories. Perhaps, in 2015, Trump led the base. But by 2020, Trump had lost control of the monster he created. The base decided to reward social media stunts with small-dollar donations. Fox News and the right-wing internet ecosystem created a world of mini Trumps, little congressional bomb-throwers like Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. More motivated by fame than governing, these members seem to want what Real Housewives want: to build their brands. These congressional Kardashians don’t have a governing principle beyond obstruction and attention, of which they’ve all been getting amid this week’s party meltdown. 

 

BTS as government conspiracy

Here's a somewhat amusing column by a writer who inadvertently started a conspiracy idea about K-pop, and has regretted it ever since:

I hope the fact that the South Korean government basically forced the band [BTS] to retire will put to rest the persistent rumor that K-pop in general, and BTS in particular, is funded by the Korean state as part of a cunning plan. A rumor that I am constantly asked to address. A rumor that I may have started.

Here’s the back story: In 2014, I wrote a book on the origins of Korean popular culture. BTS was barely a thing then. At the time, the only Korean performer the Western world knew was Psy, the guy who did “Gangnam Style” and whose video was the first to get a billion views on YouTube. Many people considered his success a fluke. I wanted to alert the world of the Korean pop cultural tsunami that was on the way.

One — just one — of my theses was that starting in the 1990s, Korean government officials mobilized to increase the soft power of their country by becoming a global pop culture exporter. South Korea was a pioneer in wiring a whole nation for broadband, with the aim of making Korean entertainment shareable with the world. A new subdivision within the Ministry of Culture was devoted to K-pop and other aspects of the Korean wave. In the early days, the ministry subsidized projects like paying for Korean dramas to be dubbed in other languages.

Immediately upon the book’s release, that idea — just one of many in the book — started to grow fangs. People heard what they wanted to hear, which was that the Korean wave was nothing more than a Potemkin wave: Korean deep state propaganda and a flimflam.

A website headline for a radio chat show misleadingly said that I — or rather “Euny Kong,” per the host — would be discussing how South Korea “manufactured cool en masse.” Another article claimed that according to Euny Hong, the popularity of all things Korean was government-fabricated.

Why did people latch onto this narrative? The answer is best encapsulated by something an editor told me when he rejected my book in 2013: The “Gangnam Style” video, he said, didn’t really get a billion views. The Korean government had hired 10,000 people to click on the video 100,000 times, he insisted. Like many other people I have encountered, he recoiled at the idea that a tiny, formerly destitute Asian country could have pulled off a global cultural coup without some kind of shenanigans.

And for every person who used me to gleefully take K-pop down a peg, there was at least one K-pop stan who wanted my head on a spike.

 

 

 

The worst of all possible approaches?

For all of the complaint and infighting about how many Western countries responded to Covid, can we at least agree that China has dealt with it in a way in which is pretty much "the worst of all possible worlds":

Most scientists believe China’s decision to end its zero-COVID policy was long overdue. But now they have a new worry: that the country is collecting and sharing far too little data about the rough transition to a new coexistence with the virus.

China abruptly dropped virtually all controls a month ago, after protests, a sagging economy, and the extreme transmissibility of the virus’ latest variants made clinging to zero COVID untenable. Now, “SARS-CoV-2 has an open goal in front of it: a population with very low levels of standing immunity,” says evolutionary biologist Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney. But how the epidemic is unfolding is a mystery because the country has practically stopped collecting basic epidemiological data.

And more:

As to the death toll, China’s reporting had long been inconsistent, Huang says, with some regions reporting all fatalities in which SARS-CoV-2 was a factor, as most countries do, and others excluding people who died from other conditions, such as heart attacks, even if they had COVID-19. In early December, China’s government decided the narrower definition should be used nationwide.

Even then, the official count is astonishingly low: just eight deaths for the entire last week of December, which is “not matching media reports and what is being seen on social media,” says Louise Blair, who tracks China’s COVID-19 outbreak for Airfinity, a London-based health analytics firm that estimates about 9000 people were dying of COVID-19–related causes every day in late December. Also missing are data on case fatality rates, the average number of new infections stemming from each case, and hospital and intensive care admissions. “These are critical data” that would help health authorities get a handle on the surge and further the world’s understanding of the pandemic, says Xi Chen, a public health scientist at the Yale School of Public Health.

A major worry is that the wave will breed a new and even more troublesome SARS-CoV-2 variant. “It’s possible that something might be emerging, because there is such a big population in China,” says George Gao, who in July 2022 stepped down as head of China CDC but is now helping track circulating variants. But, he told Science, “There are no novel mutants—yet.” At a 20 December press briefing, Xu Wenbo, head of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, explained that the BA.5.2 and BF.7 Omicron subvariants, which are now causing most infections globally, are also dominant in China. BQ.1 and XBB, which have recently been spreading in Europe and North America, have turned up in limited numbers in several provinces.

Experts are split on whether China is looking closely enough. Three designated sentinel hospitals in different cities in each of China’s 31 provinces, municipalities, and regions are supposed to sequence and analyze samples from 15 outpatients, 10 severe cases, and all deaths every week. “I’m afraid [that] sample size is too small,” Chen says. A stronger plan would consider province size and population density, instead of picking three cities in each, and adopt other sampling approaches, says Elizaveta Semenova, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. Semenova is a co-author of a study of how well 189 countries have detected new variants, published in November 2022. It concluded that effective surveillance requires sequencing about 0.5% of cases, with a turnaround time of less than 21 days. China’s plan is unlikely to come close to that percentage.

In light of this article, I find it difficult to understand our Chief Medical Officer's decision to not endorse our government following other countries in requiring Chinese arrivals to have a negative Covid test, at least for now:

Professor Kelly advised in the absence of any "specific threat" from a COVID-19 variant and with high vaccination rates in the country, any restrictions or additional requirements on China were unnecessary. 

But, as explained above, there is a lot of doubt as to how long it would take China to find and report a new variant. 

A graph getting a lot of attention

 I have noticed this graph, which appeared in Financial Times a few days ago, attracting a lot of comment on Twitter:

I think I saw someone on Twitter say it's the same in Australia, more or less.

And it made yesterday's headline in the Australian even more hilarious:

It really does look impressive

I'm not saying I'm ready to jump on a plane to China yet, or that I wouldn't be a tad nervous about the intense State surveillance system, but this relatively short video of places different Westerners in China recommend as scenic or interesting really does paint a picture of a country that could do very well from tourism, if only it didn't seem quite so intimidating:

 

I never did have an interest in yoga...

Interesting article at NPR about how some yoga teachers find it easy to move into Qanon conspiracy belief. It starts:

QAnon — the baseless conspiracy theory that claims that a cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking elites control politics and media — is closely identified in political circles with some supporters of former President Donald Trump. But it also has a toehold in yoga and wellness circles.

Themes like everything is connected, nothing happens without a purpose, and nothing is what it seems are central to both yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking.

"If you've been practicing yoga, these are going to be very familiar ideas to you," said Matthew Remski, a former yoga teacher and journalist who hosts a podcast about conspiracies, wellness and cults called Conspirituality.

During the pandemic, many yoga teachers began to speak more openly about their belief in conspiracies, to the point that there is now a term to describe this phenomenon: the "wellness to QAnon pipeline."

Further down:

Of course, many people practice yoga without believing in conspiracy theories. However, yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common, Remski said, making it easy to slide from the former into the latter.

In both circles, there is an emphasis on "doing your own research" and "finding your own truth." And many people who practice and teach yoga distrust Western medicine, preferring to find alternative solutions or try to let their body heal itself.

"The relativism around truth, which has so long been a part of wellness culture, really reared its head in the pandemic," said Natalia Petrzela, an author and historian at The New School. "This idea that 'truth is just in the eye of the beholder' is something which can feel kind of empowering when you're sitting in yoga class, but when it's the pandemic, and that kind of language is being deployed to kind of foment, like, vaccine denial or COVID denialism, it has the same power, because we're all steeped in this culture ... it can be used for real harm."

QAnon, in particular, may have a particular resonance for yoga practitioners, according to Ben Lorber, a researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors right-wing movements, because both communities share the idea of a higher truth accessible to a select few.

 

 

The subdued gloating is well deserved

 This is from DW, and there seemed to be to quite a sense of "ha ha, told you" just behind the veneer:

Mind you, there's also an article from The Spectator about Brexit regret, too.  This bit was interesting:

Labour is right to recognise that the mood is changing – and not simply because some of Britain’s Leave voters have morphed into Rejoiners. Indeed, the number of actual converts is modest: fewer than one in five Brexiteers admit to buyer’s remorse. Far more significant is the fact that people who chose not to vote in the original referendum – and young people who were too young to vote in 2016 but are now flooding into the electorate – are heavily against Brexit. Of the 18-to-24-year-olds of Generation Z, who came of age during the turmoil marked by the rise of Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK, as well as the prolonged and polarising gridlock over Brexit in Parliament, no less than 79 per cent say they would vote to rejoin the EU.

 

Inequality considered, by the ever optimistic Noah Smith

It would seem that Noah Smith has made his latest substack post free, looking at whether Piketty was right with his prediction of ever increasing inequality (unless some big policy changes were made.)  Noah thinks that recent figures indicating that inequality is decreasing a little, recently, and hopes that this might be a trend that continues and shows the self correcting nature of Western capitalism.

While he does indicate that it is too early to tell how much of a trend this is, I tend to agree with some of the comments following the article that he seems to be placing an awful lot of positive emphasis on a pretty minor blips in the graphs.   

On the upside

 Nicholas Kristof cites some positive (or at least, it's not as bad as it could be!) news regarding the state of the world.   (It's a gift link to the NYT.)

(Sort of) lucky Europe

A combination of the American winter blizzard, Australia's rather cool and wet spring (and summer?) and Elon Musk revving up ignorance on Twitter means that it seems climate change "skeptics" think they are are having a resurgence.

I haven't noticed them commenting on this, though:

As 2022 turned to 2023, an exceptionally strong wintertime heat dome pounced on much of Europe, producing unprecedented warmth for January. As temperatures soared 18 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 20 Celsius) above normal from France to western Russia, thousands of records were broken between Saturday and Monday — many by large margins....

On New Year’s Day, at least seven countries saw their warmest January weather on record as temperatures surged to springtime levels: Latvia hit 52 degrees (11.1 Celsius); Denmark 54.7 degrees (12.6 Celsius); Lithuania 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius); Belarus 61.5 degrees (16.4 Celsius); the Netherlands 62.4 degrees (16.9 Celsius); Poland 66.2 degrees (19.0 Celsius); and the Czech Republic 67.3 degrees (19.6 Celsius).

Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks global weather extremes, called the event “totally insane” and “absolute madness” in text messages to the Capital Weather Gang. He wrote that some of the high nighttime temperatures observed were uncommon in midsummer.

It’s “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” Herrera wrote. “Nothing stands close to this.”

Guillaume Séchet, a broadcast meteorologist in France, agreed, tweeting that Sunday was one of the most incredible days in Europe’s climate history.

“The intensity and extent of warmth in Europe right now is hard to comprehend,” tweeted Scott Duncan, a meteorologist based in London.

Of course, it will turn cold again, but still, I bet that politicians are welcoming any exceptionally warmer weather as a means of ensuring they are going to get through the winter without running out of gas.

On the death of a Pope

Rather than start afresh, I really don't see much reason to revise anything I said about Pope Benedict on his retirement in 2013.   Please read, if you are interested.

I see that Phillipa Martyr, the likeable lay catholic who was wise enough to stop hanging out at Catallaxy, has written this about the late Pope:

Then came the magisterial The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000). 

A cosmic theology

This was truly revolutionary for my own spirituality. I’ve never been able to look at the Book of Exodus in the same way since. You’ll need to read it for yourself to see why I say that. 

I freely admit that I am only ever about two stiff drinks away from total paganism. This is why I am so very down on the current trend towards eco-consciousness as a substitute for most of the other Christian virtues. 

But thankfully Ratzinger taught me how and why the whole cosmos, seasons, moon, stars, sun, and earthly cycles are drawn into the Redemption. It’s no more than I would have expected from someone deeply steeped in the mind of the Church – but also an unrepentant cat lover.

This reminded me, as is noted in my 2013 post, that Benedict had commented sympathetically about Teilhard de Chardin, and I thought that was encouraging.  That pathway towards a theological modernising of the Church has gone nowhere, though, under Francis.  And if anything, the concern is that the only people willing to go into the Church as priests in recent years are social conservatives who will not care that their ideology will make for an increasingly isolated, and internally fraught, club.   

I also, by happenstance, watched a good Ted talk video by a sociologist recently about the increase in secularisation in the world, and how it was (in his view) irreversible.  I will add that to this post later.

 

Update:  here is the video, which is from 7 years ago, but I am sure that, if anything, surveys since then have further confirmed the secularisation process:

A very decent man

Read this remarkable article about an AIDS activist's personal experience of Anthony Fauci, and feel your blood pressure rise at the stupidity of the way the American Right has demonised him.  

A new year

*  I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, but I think I will try for one this year: reinstate only reading books when going to bed at night.  I mean, it was impossible not to doomscroll endlessly while Trump was President.  But now that's he gone (and as I have said, I don't think he's coming back), I'm pretty sure that it's better for my dreams to read fiction (or narrative history) before sleep.

* Matthew Yglesias tweeted about this comment piece in a psychiatry  journal urging research into the role social media plays in spreading self diagnosed psychiatric conditions.  The abstract:

There has been an increasing recognition among both medical and psychological professionals, as well as the public media, of a concerning trend for child and adolescent users of audiovisual-based, algorithmic social media platforms (e.g., TikTok) to present with or claim functional psychiatric impairment that is inconsistent with or distinct from classic psychiatric nosology. In this short communication, we provide a detailed historical overview of this transdiagnostic phenomenon and suggest a conceptual model to organize thinking and research examining it. We then discuss the implications of our suggested model for accurate assessment, diagnosis, and medical-psychiatric treatment. We believe there is an urgent need for focused empirical research investigation into this concerning phenomenon that is related to the broader research and discourse examining social media influences on mental health.

It gives as its main example the upswing in young people thinking they have developed a Tourette's tic after watching Tourette's sufferers (some real, some fake) on Tiktok.  Even though I meant to, I don't think I have posted previously about that phenomena, but there was an article about it over a year ago in Psychology Today, and I see that it also featured on 60 Minutes, and a couple of times in The Guardian.  

The article only mentions "gender identity related conditions" once, in passing, but people commenting on Yglesias's tweet often raise it, for obvious reasons.  Someone posted a Tiktok video of a teenage girl publically coming out as "a guy", something she said she only realised two days before, and getting hugs and endorsement immediately.  She also talks about how hurtful it will be to hear the wrong pronouns at home, so it's a case of instant victimhood as well as instant membership of a new friend club.  (I don't know the context, but it looked something like a high school queer support group.).  

Anyway, just as I was thinking that it's good to see there is likely to be support from some psychiatric professionals about the likely role of social contagion in the sudden upsurge of teenage girls thinking they can only be happy as "a guy", I had a look at Twitter feed of one of the authors, JD Haltigan, and it's a worry.  He has very Trumpy attitudes on many issues - including hating the MSM, a huge covid policy critic, and retweets Glenn Greenwald and Musk with approval.  In other words, I wouldn't trust him on a lot of issues, and he's not the type of person who I would hope was not into "culture war-ing" so that he could be seen as a politically neutral critic.

One of the other authors is also on twitter and doesn't tweet about politics at all.  She's a Tourette's and OCD researcher.  No reason to doubt her credibility, although why she has "warrior in training" in her Twitter profile is unclear!

Anyway, interesting stuff.  

* I watched, so you don't have to, Xi Jinping's 15 minute New Year Address  on CGTN.   Fortunately, Taiwan only got fleeting mention, which I took as some indication that an invasion is not high on his priorities.  

Apart from that, it's pretty incredible to watch how, when you're a dictator, you can just power through complete reversals of vital policy (I'm referring to the abandonment of zero covid) with nothing reassembling apology, or acknowledgement of any form of mistake by anyone.   

From the general gist of topics on CGTN today, I do get the impression that Xi wants to re-engage with the world again, and not just Putin.  In fact, wouldn't you love to know what Xi really thinks of Vlad's call for them to unite against the West, when Ukraine makes him look both weak and morally degenerate.

Youth justice reform advocates do a terrible job of proving their case

With the shocking case of two teenage (aboriginal, it would seem) past offenders, staying at a local "half way house", stabbing a couple of neighbours (and killing one) in what was probably a thwarted attempt to steal their car (or Christmas presents) on Boxing Day, some of the media has been giving space for prison reform advocates who have criticised the Premier's immediate promise to increase sentences, make bail harder to obtain, etc.

Their common cry is along the lines that research shows that incarcerating youth actually increases the chances of them re-offending.   Instead of building youth prisons, more money should be put into "addressing the root cause" and early interventions before kids go completely off the rails.  Research shows that actually works best.

I saw one such advocate, Mindy Sotiri, from a group called Justice Reform Initiative, interviewed on TV, and she at least acknowledged that this was a hard sell when the public legitimately had a concern for safety.   She did acknowledge that reform of what was done within youth prisons was part of the picture - she wasn't just one of reflexive "never prison" so-called experts.

But look at the typically airy fairy response from a Greens politician, for example:

What an easy peasy bunch of issues to "address", hey Stephen?

And what about this contribution:

Maggie Munn, an Indigenous rights campaigner for Amnesty International Australia, said further penalties would disproportionately affect First Nations people.

“This is not what commitment to justice looks like; this is what failing our children looks like,” Munn told Guardian Australia.

“More than half of the kids in detention on remand are [from] First Nations and the government wants to fast-track their sentences.

Um, how about an acknowledgement that what happened a few days ago was something that happened when the offender was being diverted from remand prison into a suburban half way house???  

What I find particularly galling is when someone like semi-high profile prison reform (more like prison abolish) advocate Debbie Kilroy not only fully supports criticism of prison for youth, but also is apparently against stern government intervention within the problematic, dysfunction families which most youth crime no doubt comes from.  Here she is again, today:

Look, I am sure that when criminologist types talk about (some type of) prisons being good at making people criminals, I don't doubt that they have research that supports them.

But honestly, when the matter is swirling around the complicated social issue of aboriginal youth crime, if they have the compelling examples of the specific type of non-prison intervention schemes that have been deemed clear successes, then put them out for all of us to see, and to see how much it costs, whether it really scales up, and sell the case with full details, not just sentiment.

I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn of some programs in some locations that might have been successes.   But what scale were they on?  Were they dependent on the happenstance of a few aboriginal families in that locality that were particularly stable and willing to be involved in the reform of kids?   (I certainly presume that such programs are heavily dependent on being run by aboriginal participants.)  Did the families the kids came of get over their drug/alcohol/domestic violence issues that their children probably suffered under?  How long have such diversion programs been tracked?

And seriously, don't advocates for prison reform as far as it concerns aboriginals ever think that promoting an intense sense of grievance over historical injustices is counterproductive if you want to stop property crime and the deaths that are incidental to it?      

Mythical Poppins

I have only slight memory of the Mary Poppins movie from my childhood - and no wonder, as I see that I must have been only 4 or 5 when I saw it (unless it had some return run when I was older?)   My vague memory of it was that it was a tad melancholy in some of the songs and themes (Feed the Birds, in particular), and I wasn't exactly a sucker for fantasy as a kid, although a few years later I did enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang quite a lot.  (It was the techno excitement of a long distance trip in an open flying car that did it, I'm sure.)  

So, I've never given the movie much thought as an adult, until now.   

The reason - my wife got relatively cheap tickets to the stage version currently showing at QPAC in Brisbane.  It's been playing around Australia for much of 2022.

My impression of the stage show (since confirmed on my reading this morning) was that it must have drawn more heavily on the book(s) than did the movie, as I was pretty sure there were features in it that didn't appear in the film at all.   And it got me thinking about the peculiarity of the whole concept, and why it didn't grab me as a child.  I think (rationalising with nearly 60 years of hindsight!) that I didn't like the lack of an origin story, or even origin hints, as to the magical title character.  

The stage show, on the other hand, with its repeated featuring of Greek classical park statues come to life, and the kids being interested in Greek gods' relationships, gives a greater sense of the story having strong mythological undertones.   I'm still a bit puzzled as to the nature of the relationship between Bert and her, though:  I mean, if it followed Greek mythology too closely, there would probably be some weird carnal episode between them on every visit.  But instead we get the notion that she appears to him out of the blue when she wants a bit of chaste fun, with a sort of hint of some important role she plays in maintaining his unusual cheerfulness over the years.   A kind of a muse, perhaps?  Maybe it is further explained in the books, but I am not that keen to look it up.

Anyway, I was thinking along these lines when I Googled up this morning a few articles about the author, PJ Travers.  Yes, I already knew a little bit about how she was born in Queensland, had a cantankerous relationship with Disney and the studio, and didn't like the film.  But I've never bothered watching Saving Mr Banks:  my interest was not that high.  

I am pleased to see from this 2018 article, though, that my guesses about the author's intentions and interest in mythology were spot on.   This was written by a guy who met her, although in which decade seems unclear - he says she was in her 50's, but she was born in 1899, making that the 1950's.  The context of the article suggests it was after the movie was made, hence the 1970's.  Doesn't much matter:

I first met Pamela Travers 10 years later when she was in her 50s. This was shortly after she had been a visiting writer at Radcliffe and Smith colleges, but before she had taken up the great passion of her later life — composing meditative essays for Parabola, a magazine “devoted to the exploration of the quest for meaning as it is expressed in the world’s myths, symbols, and religious traditions, with particular emphasis on the relationship between this store of wisdom and our modern life.” That mission statement also amounts to a description of Travers’s life.

Travers was the wisest woman I’ve ever met. She was the second Western woman to study Zen in Kyoto, part of the inner circle of the famous mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and did yoga daily (an exotic practice in the 1970s). One afternoon in her Manhattan apartment, we had a conversation that would later appear in Paris Review. She spoke about the meanings of Humpty Dumpty, how her book “Friend Monkey” had been inspired by the Hindu myth of Hanuman, the Zen expression “summoned not created,” the sacredness of names in aboriginal cultures and a spiritual understanding of the parable of the Prodigal Son. And as for linking “this store of wisdom and our modern life,” she led me step by step through parallels between the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the myth of Persephone. It was one of the richest afternoons of my life.

As she often did, Travers emphasized that she “never wrote for children” but remained “immensely grateful that children have included my books in their treasure trove.” She thought her books appealed to the young because she had never forgotten her own childhood: “I can, as it were, turn aside and consult it.”

Of Irish descent, Travers grew up in the Australian Outback and moved as a young woman to England in 1924 to pursue her dream of being a journalist and poet. By great good luck, she was taken in and encouraged by leading figures of the Celtic Twilight, including William Butler Yeats.

Then, further down, this explanation:

But what is most important is that Mary Poppins comes from the world of myth, where she is a magnificent and significant figure. In the world of myth, she is the Great Goddess, but comically reincarnated as a nanny who “pops in” to turn-of-the-century London. In the Disney version, her mystic and mythic story becomes music-hall song-and-dance. As Travers said in a letter to writer Brian Sibley, “It is as though they took a sausage, threw away the contents but kept the skin, and filled the skin with their own ideas, very far from the original substance.”

Take, for instance, the heart of the movie, where the children step into a sidewalk drawing and join Mary and Bert in a make-believe world, ride on a merry-go-round and hear the song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The heart of the book, on the other hand, is a scene where Jane and Michael Banks go with Mary to the zoo — on the one night of the year when all of the animals dance together — and a wise snake tells the children about the unity of all life. That chapter reads like one of the animal fables from the ancient Indian epic “The Panchatantra,” set in a modern era.

When you read the original book, you enter a world of mythological thinking, where scholars have found references to the Bible, Greek deities and Sufi parables; and in commenting on Travers, critics have reached for parallels in the works of William Blake, Zen Buddhism and beliefs about the Hindu goddess Kali. Indeed, to the informed reader, “Mary Poppins” is a modernized collection of ancient fables and teaching stories. That’s what makes it an extraordinary children’s book.

Almost makes me want to check out the books, after all!

As for the stage show:  regardless of what you think of the story, or some of the music, it's one of those productions where the staging and enthusiasm of the cast make it pretty much impossible to dislike.  (The massive changing sets are nearly worth a ticket alone.)  I also thought it unusual, for a stage musical, in that I think most shows end the first half on a production number high, but this one doesn't.   The second half really does "wow" the audience more, in my opinion.   The climax (I don't think I am giving anything away) featuring a high wire ascent back into the heavens over the audience is just, well,  theatrically thrilling - and really makes you wonder how on earth the performers get used to doing it without being nervous wrecks.   

As for who of my handful of regular readers might be interested in a post like this:  Tim Train, I at least expect a comment from you!  

The demise of (most) cheap aftershave, noted

For many years, I have used Japanese aftershave.  There are a few common brands, often found in hotels (or in good onsen), and while I think they are mainly a thing for the older male (hey, that's me now!), it seems enough older males must use it for the product to be readily available in supermarkets, pharmacies, etc. (For the younger male, the skin care and hair care product range is much broader than it is in Australia, and there are some very mild versions of aftershave, not obviously alcohol based, for them, too.)  The thing I like about that country's aftershave is that they are not overpowering - even the initially stronger smelling ones are definitely not lingering, but give the nice, bracing astringent sensation that leaves the skin feeling very clean, especially in summer.  (In winter, I might moisturise instead - at least if the weather is super dry.)

But - I didn't realise until this Christmas just how comprehensively the "cheap-ish alcohol based aftershave" market has collapsed in Australia.   This may sound odd, but I thought I would buy my son a bottle of some "classic", since he has never used after shave. (OK, I suppose I could gift one of my Japanese bottles - but that's already mine!)  

As far as I can tell, after visiting Chemist Warehouse, a couple of supermarkets, and a couple of independent pharmacies, about the only "old school" brand of aftershave still more-or-less available is Blue Stratos.  I'm not even sure how old it is - an internet search first indicated that an Australian company has been making it since 2002, but elsewhere someone says it was released in 1976.   (It is, by the looks, made by different companies around the world.)  

Now, sure, you can get at the supermarket a few brands of after shave "balms", but if you live in a humid climate, the alcohol based end to a shave is far more desirable.   Whatever happened to plain old Old Spice, for example?   It's not be found anywhere on the shelves.  I see now that I can buy it online from Chemist Warehouse, but I am sure it wasn't on the shelf.   I saw something of (ugh) Brut in a pharmacy, but it was always crassly overpowering, and I didn't even check if it was aftershave or something else. 

Now, yes, I am aware that Chemist Warehouse has a substantial section of men's colognes, and amongst them there is one or two which are sold as aftershaves.  But they are more expensive European brands, and anything in that entire section is always overpowering in the "hairy man who wants to be smelt from across the room" kind of way.   I mean, what do they put in these colognes that make them impossible to remove even after a couple of washings with soap?   This time, I thought that surely a company like Reebok wouldn't sell a cologne that was too strong, but I sprayed a tiny spray (from a tester bottle, of course) onto the back of my hand and then was still smelling it there 4 hours later after several hand washing attempts to remove it.  Awful.

I would presume Australia is just following the lead of other Western nations, America in particular?   Oddly, given the number of varieties of Lynx deodorant/body spray on the supermarket shelf, which I think is the local equivalent of the often joked about Axe body spray in the US, the problem seems not to be young men don't want to smell - it's more that they want to smell too much.   At least after exercise, or something?   But, I don't know, I still associate strong male cologne smells with men of my age (or older) - I don't really recall noticing such a smell from a 20 something guy.  Then again, it's not that I am ever socialising with them.  Maybe if I went to a nightclub I would learn.

But yeah, I used to use Old Spice, maybe not daily, but often, as a young man, and its attraction was the mildness of the smell.  I really can't remember now when I stopped using it.  Maybe about 23 years ago, when I first went to Japan?    

By the way, there is probably a story to be told as to how men's aftershave came to be popular in Japan at all - given that I have noticed in other Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia) that any form of male aftershave is virtually non-existant.   One might think that the relatively less expansive amount of facial hair to be found on many Eastern Asian men would be the reason (as shaving might not be a daily necessity for all) - but of course, Japanese men can have the same feature.  Was it the American post war occupation that set them on the path of aftershave?  And what is the situation in Korea, I wonder?   (Even more intense preoccupation with young men's skin and hair care than Japan, I presume, but what about aftershave?)  

Anyway, I bought the (very cheap) Blue Stratos aftershave, and, as I recall, it's not a bad smell (although I don't think I ever used it myself; just smelt it in the past and thought it was OK.)   He's used it and seems to thinks it's OK, but is wondering how it will affect his moisturising regime.  Young men these days!

Time she made another appearance

This was Christmas Eve...

Christmas greetings

I see that Wikipedia has an interesting entry on the history of the Nativity in art, and that's where I get this early Roman example, from the 4th century, indicating that the gift giving part of the season has been key for a long time!

The unimportance of importance

A recent philosophical article takes a view that I would have thought is obvious to those of most religious faith, but it probably bears repeating:

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life.

That's the abstract.  The whole thing is here.

(Also, it reminds me of the Warren Zevon life advice "enjoy every sandwich", which I think of often, especially while eating.)