Asking for trouble

A New York Times background piece on "stablecoins" is well worth reading.

Sounds like a whole lot of trouble brewing, if you ask me:

Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.

Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.

The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.

That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.

Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.

Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.

One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.

Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said. 

Trump, of course, would understand none of this.  He just seems crypto bros throwing him money, and he's all in. 

 

Singapore and tigers

I was reminded this morning that Singapore's name allegedly comes from an apparent misidentification of a tiger as lion.   (See Wikipedia for a full explanation.)

Now, while lions were never native to Singapore or neighbouring regions, tigers certainly were.   Which led me to think "when was the last wild tiger seen in Singapore?"   I knew of the story of a tiger being shot in Raffles Hotel, but now that I check it, it wasn't a wild one, and it was in 1902.

This website tells the real story of how big a problem wild tigers were in the 19th century:

The earliest newspaper report about the existence of tigers was published on 8 September 1831 in the Singapore Chronicle. It was reported that a male Chinese national had been killed by a tiger, and that the same tiger probably had also killed a local shortly after.⁵ In 1835, colonial architect G. D. Coleman and some convict labourers were attacked while they were laying a new road through a swamp in the jungle near town, but no one was killed.⁶ In May 1839, The Singapore Free Press reported that two Chinese had been carried off by tigers near a newly built road called Rangong Road (today’s Serangoon Road).⁷ 

When the cultivation of gambier and pepper took off in Singapore in the 1840s, plantations extended beyond town and encroached on jungle areas. By the late 1840s, the number of plantations had peaked at 600.⁸ Chinese plantation coolies became easy targets for tigers. Reports of encounters with tigers increased in the 1830s and 1840s.⁹

Tiger attacks grew so intense that, by the middle of the 19th century, tigers were rumoured to claim one life every day.¹⁰ Governor of the Straits Settlements William Butterworth, upon being questioned in the House of Commons about the tiger problem, stated that the figure was probably 200 deaths a year due to tiger killings – which was nonetheless alarming in a population of 50,000 people.¹¹ In 1859, one village near Bukit Timah was abandoned due to overwhelming tiger attacks.¹²

It was believed that tigers in Singapore killed 300 humans in 1857, but only seven deaths were reported to the police. The actual figure could be higher as many tiger attacks were unreported. Plantation bosses often did not report the deaths as they did not want to scare away potential workers.¹³ During the 1860s, more than 350 lives were lost because of tigers.¹⁴  

They would swim across from peninsula, apparently.  I wonder how big a problem they were over there (the Malay peninsula).   Presumably, pretty big!

Anyway, the government set a bounty on hunting tigers, and their numbers diminished.

The last one was apparently in 1930.  Here's how the Straits Times reported it: 

 

Well, they got a beer named after them.  So not completely forgotten...

We need better tech billionaires (part 2) - and a point I haven't seen made elsewhere

Apart from the egregious open corruption that was Tim Cook's suck up visit at the White House, one thing I noted from the video:

 

 

was that I reckon there is no way the "24 carat" gold base is solid gold - it does not have the weight in Cook's hands that a lump of gold that size should, I reckon.   (Even the weight of the box with it inside looks light.)

In theory, as I understand it, you can gold plate in 24 carat, but it's soft and not often done because of that.   But I reckon Cook wanted to give the impression Trump was getting a lump of gold, when he wasn't.  Which would be a little amusing to know, if I am right...

NDP 2025

Singapore's National Day Parade was (as acknowledged by most Singaporeans on Reddit too) really good this year.  As I said to my son who (rather dutifully, but I appreciate it) watched the whole thing with me, Brisbane ought to just subcontract the Olympics opening ceremony to Singaporean creatives - they do these stadium style shows fantastically well.   

I wonder if I can convince anyone reading to watch the whole 3 hours!    

 

 OK, well if you don't want to watch the military parade and flyovers , the entertainment show starts at 1 hour 53 min.

But you should watch the military bits, because it shows how absolutely pathetic Trump's little Army anniversary march was!   

And if you don't have the time to watch this, I was even impressed with the "pre parade" segment - singing, dancing, some jokes, and cameo appearance by their Prime Minister.   

 

All so good...

Pure, unadultered, gaslighting

 I also saw Scott Bessant - the person who people thought might talk sense to Trump, given his past background, but who immediately turned into a pro tariff lackey, no matter how nonsensical their calculation - being interviewed and trying as hard as possible to avoid saying that tariffs are paid by Americans.   (He finally said it, in a way that he probably thought some MAGA types wouldn't understand was an admission.   What a disgraceful performance.)

What? Google is still working on Blogger?

Much to my surprise, I see that Blogger has greeted me this morning with a new beta feature, which will add links to terms in a post that it thinks might be useful for readers who want to dig deeper, so to speak.

Given that people have been saying for years that they would not be surprised if Google suddenly said it was going to stop supporting this free blogging platform, it's surprising to see they are actually still making changes to it.

How useful this one is, though, remains to be seen!   I'll hit the button and see what it does with this post.  Any links will be put in by some AI in a dessert somewhere, presumably! 

Oh, it seems to not want to insert any links now.  It did before, but I deleted the text and now it's not reappearing.   Odd.   

 

Nationalism as done in Singapore

If I wasn't so busy at work lately, and the plane seats were a bit more certain, I would have headed off to Singapore to be there on its 60th anniversary National Day this Saturday.   

Instead, I will just watch the National Day Parade live on CNA via Youtube - and I would encourage anyone with a curiosity about the way nationalism and social unity can be "done right" to do the same.   I mean, I am generally leery of patriotism; but in the case of Singapore, it had to make a big effort from the start to ensure the multicultural society would work, and tying it to a patriotic appeal to take pride in making a poor tiny country rich, secure and safe has really worked.  

So, the National Day Parade (which I have watched in previous years) has elements of pure self soothing propaganda, about which I sometimes have a bit of a cringe laugh because it can be so unsubtle.  But mostly, I find myself deeply impressed, and quite often somewhat touched, by the intensity of the effort towards promoting unity, especially in the slickly produced songs and dance, which can feature a multicultural cast of scores of people, if not hundreds.  Perhaps you have to watch to understand.  Technically, my almost sentimental admiration for the country can't be because I was a Singaporean in a past live - I was here before it existed! 

The day ends with a very "you will be patriotic!" kind of thing:

SINGAPORE - The public warning system will sound at 8.19pm on Aug 9, as a signal for Singaporeans to recite the pledge and sing the National Anthem, wherever they may be on National Day.

The “all clear” signal will sound for 10 seconds, said the Singapore Civil Defence Force on Aug 6.

This marks the Majulah Moment at the end of the National Day Parade,which will take place at the Padang and Marina Bay 

Again, I find that a little bit funny, and a little bit impressive.

Such a shame I won't make it... 

 

     

News site decide events from 200 odd years ago are the headline

It was at the very top of The Guardians website this morning, but has since moved down the page.  It's still given a very large space, though:

When you read the main article, about a company started in 1824, it's not even coming up with anything new - it notes stories about atrocities that have appeared in a newspaper in 1922, about events about a hundred years before that!  

It ends with these examples of grievance mongering:

James Fitzgerald, a legal consultant for the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said companies had an obligation to confront the “evils of the past”.

“Just creeping along as though nothing happened is moral cowardice, particularly when it’s an enterprise that’s making money off dispossession,” he said.

“The more a company’s wealth is built on that sort of dispossession, I would have thought, the greater its obligation to take account of that as a decent corporate citizen in 2025.”....

The AACo spokesperson said the company had built “trusted relationships” with many traditional custodians across the properties managed. “We recognise their culture and deep connection to Country and work with them to ensure we engage respectfully,” they said....

Fitzgerald said the 1992 Mabo verdict, which recognised Indigenous peoples’ rights to their land, raised complex questions for Australian companies that had built their wealth on land taken from and cleared of Aboriginal people.

“If you keep pulling at the thread long enough, it implicates the entire basis of our sovereign state and economy,” he said. “We are all the beneficiaries of these actions in one way or another, whether as real property owners, shareholders or super fund members.”

 So, let's see - the company hasn't hidden anything, is respectful of the current "cultural custodians", and there are some academics and lawyer types making a living out of keeping the grievance alive...

As I have complained recently, such intense concentration on victim status in aboriginal advocacy is not a good way to move forward - and it irks me that The Guardian spends so much time promoting it.    

     

Hiroshima anniversary

It's fascinating, and makes me feel somewhat emotional, to read the first hand accounts of what it was like being on the Enola Gay when it bombed Hiroshima, 80 years ago.     The Washington Post provides a good service by publishing this.

Jobs figures explained

I'm sure I have mentioned this before, but the short explainer videos that the Wall Street Journal puts out now, often as a corrective to Trump and MAGA views, are actually pretty good (and non-partisan).   The latest one is about how it is an utter nonsense to blame the head of the bureau for jobs numbers that Trump didn't like: 

Something else to think about

 An interesting idea here:  check if there is any correlation between pre-space age "transients" caught on astronomical sky survey plates from Palomar observatory (in the period from 1949 to 1957), and nuclear tests and/or UFO sightings.

Seems there is, although I don't understand the statistical significance bits of the paper.   (Really, it would be good if researchers always explained that aspect in a clearer way for those of us who never studied statistics.) 

An article summarising the paper is here. 

I note that the transients are star like points of light; not streaks like satellites in low Earth orbit would make. 

I also note that other research thinks the transients are just faults in the emulsion.   But a secret government  organisation that doesn't want us to know the truth would tell us that, wouldn't they...!

It seems that the people who wrote the current paper have been out to prove something is odd about the transients for quite a while.    Mick West is very skeptical.   

I am too.   I have a dim memory from a UFO book - probably one of Hynek's - about a 50's or 60's sighting which started as apparently two star like satellites moving together, but then doing a very un-satelitte thing of starting to spin around each other.    I've always been curious if there were more sightings like that which went unrecorded...

More "about Gaza"

From the New York Times:

Hamas has consistently rejected Israel’s terms for ending the war throughout the negotiations. On Saturday, the group said in a statement that it would not disarm unless a Palestinian state was established, despite a call from Arab states last week for the group to do so.

The Israeli government opposes Palestinian statehood. On Sunday, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, visited the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which Jews revere as the Temple Mount, long a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Arab leaders denounced Mr. Ben-Gvir’s ascent to the site — during which he openly prayed — as a provocation.

“It’s important to convey from this place that we should immediately conquer Gaza, exercise our sovereignty there, and eliminate every last Hamas member,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said from the site, in a video shared by his office.

Doesn't the Hamas position on disarmament show that (well intentioned) Western nations calling for a recognition of the Palestinian state at this time are not helping?   While I understand the impulse to think that it helps show Israel does not have endorsement to do what it wants, it's hard to see the optics from Hamas's view as being other than "at last, the tide is turning in our favour, and we must hold out longer." 

A late Spielberg review

I finally got around to watching Steven Spielberg's last film - the critically well received semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans. 

I thought it was really good, and deserved a wider audience.   Clearly, it was intended a respectful take on the influence he came under from two very different parents, each with their own flaws.   (Both of them had died before this movie was made.)  

I had known enough about him to know before seeing it that most of the key parts of the film were true to life - he grew up mostly in Arizona, and was a precociously gifted child/teenage film maker, encouraged by both parents, but with the more artistic urges (by far!) coming from his eccentric mother, who is really the key character in the film.  I thought Michelle Williams was really outstanding in the role - playing it as pixie-ish but vulnerable and very flawed.   

I presume, though, that the film makes a case for Spielberg getting technical prowess, and perhaps stamina, in moviemaking from his intelligent father, who apparently was a bit of a workaholic.   

The danger with such a film is that the Spielberg character could have been portrayed in too self serving a fashion - but I think it manages to avoid that.   Sure, he's likeable throughout the film, but it didn't feel fake or "too good to be true" in any respect.   

This article is a good one for showing how true to life most of the film is - including the obvious care Spielberg took to make the actors look like the real-life counterparts.    

There was one funny part of the film (his first teenage girlfriend, with a sub-sexual infatuation with the image of Jesus) that I thought seemed so eccentric that it must be true.  But unfortunately, this is one aspect that has not been confirmed as such.   

Anyway, as a family drama that is not too heavy going, well acted, well made and overall very likeable, I do recommend it. 

 

Numbers, considered

 

You know, I have had a bit of a look around the MAGA infected parts of the internet, and seen very  little attempt to defend his immediate reaction to sack the woman in charge of the department providing the jobs numbers, because he saw conspiracy to hurt him simply because she was appointed under Biden.   

I actually think that this reaction is so much like that of a tin pot dictator that even many of his diehard supporters working in Right wing media think it's not a good look.   (Although, of course, there are no doubt thousands of conspiracy addled MAGA brains who will jump on any and all explanations given by their cult leader.)

 

 

About Gaza

Seems to me that two things can be true about Gaza:

*  there is genuine starvation happening on a widespread scale, as is evidenced by the hordes shown scrambling over each other on our TVs each night to get hold of food aid, and the reports of gangs hijacking some trucks and killing to control food.  (I was interested to hear an ABC journalist saying that Israel has admitted supporting some of the food raiding gangs, as they are seen as a competitor to Hamas.  I hadn't heard of that before, and truly it shows what an agent of chaos Israel has become.)   It just seems wildly improbable, and contrary to what all aid organisations are saying, for Israel's claim (that there is plenty of food, it's just not being distributed right by Hamas) to be true.

 * some of the evidence promulgated from within Gaza as proof of children starving to death is misleading.   Israel is complaining about this, but even before we heard from them, some of the images I had seen made me think "that degree of emaciation looks more like some other horrible form of illness, and why would a non starving looking adult standing next to the child not create the question 'what, have you not been passing on some of your food to that kid for the last 3 months or something?' " 

Hence, I think any sensible person should not get carried away with indignation about the cases of misleading photos - stuff like that is going to happen in PR wars, and it in no way counteracts the scenes of utter despair on a broader scale.   Have a look at this awful photo, for example:

 

It wouldn't look out of place in one of the climatic battles from the Lord of the Rings.  

The photo, by the way, is at the top of an opinion piece at the Washington Post which argues for something radical, but I think is the kind of radical thinking sorely needed:  that Egypt be effectively put in charge of reconstructing and controlling Gaza.

I mean, the wannabe state looks so utterly devastated, and the cost of rebuilding must be so horrendous, that I really can't see any point in reconstruction unless there is iron clad guarantee that it won't end up being destroyed again, ever, by the stupid terrorist adventurism of the likes of Hamas that led to the extreme punishment by Israel.   If no other Muslim countries are going to offer an alternative home to Palestinians (and, you know, sometimes I have wondered if Indonesia couldn't gift them a nice tropical island - they have thousands of them - that might end up twice as fertile as the unpleasant looking landscape of Gaza), then I don't see any point in anyone bearing the cost of rebuilding if it is not going to be permanent.

Here are extracts from the WAPO piece:

The only viable path to saving Gazans and stabilizing the Israeli-Palestinian arena is handing Egypt trusteeship over the Gaza Strip.

This is both a moral and a strategic necessity. Egypt is the only actor with the legitimacy, proximity and capacity to rescue Gaza from its current spiral and offer its people a life outside siege, war and despair. It is also the only party trusted enough by both Israel and large segments of the Palestinian population to serve as a custodial power.

Two parallel agreements could create the foundation for such an arrangement: one among Egypt, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and another between Egypt and Israel. These would secure the release of all hostages and establish a permanent ceasefire.

The Egyptian-Palestinian agreement would grant Egypt full administrative and security control over Gaza. Hamas would hand over its weapons to the Egyptian army and register all of its members with Egyptian security services. Egypt, in turn, would build a new Palestinian administration for Gaza, with a civil service and police force under Egyptian command. The Egyptian army would deploy throughout the territory to ensure security, end lawlessness and prevent the reconstitution of militant groups.

Simultaneously, a bilateral agreement between Egypt and Israel would formalize Israeli withdrawal and establish appropriate security arrangements, including a border coordination mechanism modeled on the existing Egyptian-Israeli arrangements in Sinai. The blockade would be lifted as security cooperation took shape and stability returned.

This framework would offer all parties a chance to win much while conceding little. It would enable Israel to restore security and eliminate the military threat posed by Hamas. Though transferring control of Gaza to Egypt might run counter to the ambitions of Israel’s most extreme factions, the majority of Israelis have no interest in Gaza beyond ensuring their own security. Egypt’s nearly five decades of security cooperation with Israel should provide sufficient reassurance for them.

For Hamas, this arrangement would allow disarmament without surrender. By handing its weapons to Egypt and not to its enemy, Hamas could claim it liberated Gaza from Israeli occupation, accepting a face-saving exit from its self-destructive cycle of resistance and reprisal. 

Sound fairly convincing to me... 

 

  

We need better tech billionaires

You know, I would have a bit more confidence in his predictions if it wasn't actually all about the money supposedly to be made by him:

Meta has spent billions of dollars to revamp its artificial intelligence strategy in recent months, including on a new team of researchers dedicated to creating a “superintelligent” A.I.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors why the team would be worth its return on investment.

Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve “nearly every aspect of what we do,” he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create “a new era of individual empowerment,” he added.

The main way people will interact with superintelligence will be through Meta’s smart glasses, which have cameras and software that can shoot and process videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said. 

It's a little weird, isn't it, that we have one arm of AI researchers and advocates warning everyone that a disaster is coming;  and another arm (the one that stands to make lots and lots of money from it) telling us that it's going to mean we can all retire to the Bahamas (or Mars), or something, while superintelligent AI runs the world for us.

Isn't it hilarious that the Zuck also makes this claim:

“I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other, and lead more fulfilling lives,” he said. 

Is he just rehashing what he wrote for the Metaverse investors meeting all of (what?) 5 or 6 years ago? 

 

The stupidest waste of money

I had posted before about speculation that Trump's vanity project of accepting an ornate plane from Qatar to use as Air Force One would cost "billions" to retrofit to the required standards.

Now there is suspicion that the first round of funding for it is pushing one billion dollars:

Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties, the techniques being used to hide the cost of Mr. Trump’s pet project are inventive.

Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.

In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)

Qatar’s defense minister and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the final memorandum of understanding a few weeks ago, paving the way for the renovation to begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. The document was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Mr. Trump’s plane probably won’t fly for long: It will take a year or two to get the work done, and then the Qatari gift — improved with the latest communications and in-flight protective technology — will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said. 

With the way anything being done by the Pentagon and defence contractors runs over budget and time, I would happily bet money that it will never be used as Air Force One, and it will count as pure wasted money for a yellow wannabe emperor with no clothes.

 

 

The last veterans

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times featuring a half dozen (I think) Japanese veterans of World War 2 who still have their marbles and appear to have active lives.  (As they could join the military as 15 or perhaps even 14 year olds, there are still about 790 veterans still around even though the 80 year anniversary of the end of the war is coming up.  And given Japanese longevity, I guess we might still have another 10 years or so before the last one dies.)   

It ends on a bit of a sad note:

While Mr. Kiyozumi once corresponded with a survivor of the American warship, he feels forgotten and alone. His wife died three decades ago; his best friend on the I-58 died in 2020. No one in his town asks about the war.

“Young people don’t know what we went through,” he said. “They are more interested in their smartphones.”

Nonetheless, as is usual with articles like these, one gets the impression that there's never a Japanese veteran who has been willing to defend the war as a worthwhile exercise.  The cultural turnaround from support for militaristic expansion overrunning neighbours viscously, to Asian peaceniks needing poking to being open to potentially getting involved in conflicts that are not directly self defence, is really remarkable.    

The correct headline would be "Our President is a lying, innumerate fantasist/BS artist"; but Republicans would cry bias, even though they know it is true.

In the Washington Post:

Trump’s imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts

The president likes to cite specific numbers to bolster his claims. They are often wildly improbable — or just impossible.

President Donald Trump made a promise at a reception last week for Republican lawmakers that was as impossible as it was specific: He would drive down drug prices by as much as 1,500 percent — “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable,” he said.

A price cannot drop by more than 100 percent, but Trump went on to make several other precise but clearly false numerical claims. The cost of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states, he said; according to AAA, it was over $3 in every state. Businesses had invested $16 trillion in America in the past four months, he added; the entire U.S. economy last year was worth less than $30 trillion.

Trump even congratulated Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins for having an approval rating of 92 percent. In this polarized moment, it is unlikely any U.S. political figure enjoys a figure close to that, and the White House provided no source for the claim.

An unfortunate production of a good show

Having not heard anything about it, and not recognising any names who star in it, I wasn't interested in seeing the current staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at QPAC.  But then I got offered free tickets, so not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, off I went with my wife on Friday night.

It turned out that it was remarkable - for being what I consider the worst theatrical production I have ever seen at QPAC.   

It is, firstly, a curious hybrid of not quite a concert version of a show, and not quite a normal stage show.    So what that means is you get one set, with one (slightly) moving element, and hence it is up to the singers and dancers give a vague idea of where each scene is meant to be set, but in a very haphazard way.  And it also becomes unclear in this hybrid as to whether there is really meant to be acting as part of it, or not.   Essentially, it feels unacted, but they sometimes move around the stage interacting with people as if there is meant to be acting.  It's the worst of both worlds.  I would prefer it be one thing or the other - if all the songs are sung into stand up microphones, they could presumably deliver better performances.

Secondly, from the opening bars of heavy metal guitar, this is a very hard rock, rock performance - with most of the music coming from a couple of hard working synth players, by the looks.   Not my style of performance at all.   Sure, it's going to be hard to fit an orchestra in any stage show just for the ultimate song (as per the original album soundtrack), but going this way just made for loud with little nuance or enjoyment.

Thirdly, the singing is, often, very rock screechy.  And even the slower songs by Mary M had (I thought) annoying and odd phrasing like "I don't know how to [pause] love him".  She's Jimmy Barnes' daughter, apparently.  Don't care, didn't enjoy her singing.  Sometimes I thought the males singers were a little behind the tempo too.   But they get screechy loud at times, and some in the audience thought that was great.  (See below.)

And lastly, what I consider the biggest sin, for a musical that is just as notable for its clever  and sometimes witty lyrics as it is for the music, was that the loud rock style sound mix often obscured hearing the words clearly.  Almost anything sung in chorus was utterly indecipherable,  and even the lead males singers often (in the faster and louder songs) were not so clear.

And yet, at the end, half of the audience gave a standing ovation.   (It was an odd audience - mostly older people and few younger in the mix.   Must be some sort of thirst in them to again hear metal guitar with quasi Jimmy Barnes' singing since there were last in a pub in the 70's or early 80's.)

Fortunately, I see that I am not the only person who had big problems with the show.  From Reddit:

I am a huge Jesus Christ Superstar fan (this was my fourth time seeing it at different venues including West End in London) and I was incredibly disappointed! I felt that this production had one purpose only - to showcase the singers rather than the singing. It was so loud (screeching is the word I would use!) that it was hard to hear the vocals and I found Jesus a particularly high-pitched squealer. It was like he was trying to show how strong his voice was rather than have us enjoy the music. I thought Mahlia Barnes was just there as a token singer as there was no acting which was disappointing - to the extend that at one point she stood in front of the stage singing to a microphone - it may as well have been a Mahlia Barnes concert rather than a play. She definitely tried to "make it her own" by changing how it is usually sung, holding notes at places that are usually not held etc (i.e. show off her vocals rather than being authentic to the play and it's music). The costumes were like brown rags (they are usually really "rockstar" and fun) and with only one set the whole show was a disappointment. I left half way through (as did many people). I will definitely not be recommending this to anyone!

I do agree!   

It makes it very unfortunate given that I hadn't heard the soundtrack for decades, and forgotten some of the songs and much of the lyrics, which (as I say) are unusually good.   Made me feel like seeing a good production, or perhaps watching the very 70's era movie (which I saw in the cinema with my father.  Surprisingly, as a conservative Catholic, he took it quite well.)

It also reminded me how, in a Christian group I used to go to in the early years of high school, they once used the show's title song as an intro to talking seriously about "what the Bible says Jesus really said about himself."   It was taken as a quite serious minded speculation - the Gospel according to Judas, as perhaps Lloyd Webber and Rice said themselves?   And I think that remains a valid take.   

The Guardian busy promoting victimhood

While I like the Guardian generally for its political reporting, there's no doubt at all that it likes to run indigenous victimhood stories, sometimes where the racial element is completely unproved.

Hence I find its current series "into the maternal health and infant removal crisis facing First Nations women in Australia" very annoying and actual harmful.

Today's instalment:  an aboriginal mother lost her baby to poorly handled pre-eclampsia, and reading the account, I find it a bit hard to judge if her GP or the local (small) hospital was mainly at fault.  

But here's the kicker:

Grace says she is unable to say if her Aboriginal heritage was a factor but strongly believes her concern that something was wrong was dismissed by both local doctors and the hospital. She sued NSW Health over the incident and the department settled without prejudice and with no admissions of liability.

Her lawyer, Linda Crawford, a former midwife who now works for Catherine Henry Lawyers, claims Grace was let down by the medical system.

So, let's just run with a hunch that it was because she was aboriginal?   

I have become increasingly worried over the last decade or so that aboriginal advocacy has become completely overrun with promoting within its own community a victimhood mentality - and in the long run, putting too much emphasis in that direction is not helpful.  (That's not to say that advocacy is never going to be talking about needs - obviously that's why it exists at all.   But I think the older group of advocates were not as victimhood focused as the new, younger - and often purely urban and academic - advocacy voices.)      

Will he, or won't he (be hurt by acting like he definitely has something to hide)

There are already plenty of Trump cultists lining up to re-affirm their undying allegiance to their yellow cult leader.   Truth be told, I reckon ageing single men in the Trump cult like (ugh) Catturd would probably say in private (but not openly) "what adult man hasn't looked at some hot 16 year girl and wished he could bed her?  So sure, if he did that he was just being a red blooded man."   

Someone writing in the New York Times today (from a "Catholic literary journal" - presumably with a small readership!) argues that the Epstein story will go away soon enough, arguing (I think) about the endless malleability of conspiracy stories;  but I am not so sure.

I think that the Trump turnaround (and betrayal of his conspiracy base) is a serious personal dent to their credibility that is hard to come back from.

Of course, the MAGA cult being what it is, there has been a crazy diversionary attempt, swallowed whole and immediately with the zero comprehension that it typical of a cult, from nutcase Tulsi Gabbard (who has such low self regard she won't resign even when her boss tells everyone she's wrong and - impliedly - gullible for believing her own advisers) that PROVES Obama committed TREASON (when the very documents she cites show nothing of the sort.)   

There is really no reasoning with a conspiracy cult on matters like that - but I think it can hurt their faith in their leader when he's the one telling them that one of their core conspiracies, which he encouraged for years, was always a nothingburger and they've been wasting their time thinking about it.  

 

 

Monkish behaviour

Good to see it's not only Christian clergy who get into trouble, I guess!:

The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy.

Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.

When police searched her home this month they found mobile phones that reportedly contained tens of thousands of compromising photos and videos of the missing monk, and several other senior Buddhist figures. Police also tracked her finances, which they said showed links to temples.

“We checked her financial trail and found that it involves many temples,”
Jaroonkiat Pankaew, from the Thai police’s central investigation bureau told a press briefing on Tuesday. “After we seized her mobile, we checked and found that there are several monks involved, and several [video] clips and Line chats,” he added, referring to the popular messaging app.

Phra Thep Wachirapamok has not been seen since he left the temple and no charges have been laid over his disappearance. But the woman, Wilawan Emsawat, was arrested on Tuesday, and has been charged with extortion, money laundering and receiving stolen goods.

The amount of money involved is really significant:

...in an interview with Thai media aired on Wednesday, she admitted to having relationships with two monks and a religious professor. Wilawan also said she received extravagant gifts, including a Mercedes-Benz SLK200 and “millions” of baht, in the form of bank transfers and a personal bank card. She expressed guilt over the relationships, saying she had fallen in love.

Police said that about 385 million baht ($11.9m) had been deposited into Wilawan’s bank accounts in the past three years. In a separate interview, she said she had given money to another monk she was dating.

Given that (I assume) the monks always dress like monks, I wonder how and where they find the privacy for such love affairs.   I mean, having a night in a motel and having a woman come to the door is going to be kind of obvious?   

Anyway, scandalous behaviour of monks in that country seem to have been prominent for many a decade now:

Newspapers in the 1990s were filled with stories of monastic scandals. There were countless reports of sexual misconduct, drinking, gambling, stealing from temple bank accounts, using and selling drugs, and even murder. Now, in the age of social media, these scandals are even more widely publicized. Each time another scandal goes public, Thai lay Buddhists question the role of monks in society as monks themselves consider their own relationship to the sangha.

Parallels to the mistrust of the Catholic priesthood in the United States are instructive. The widely reported pedophile priest scandal has resulted in fewer ordinations and more “priestless parishes.” The current birth rate in Thailand is 1.51 children per mother, even lower than China. Each year there will be fewer and fewer boys who will reach the age of ordination. Parents must decide if they want their son, and it is usually their only son, to pursue the monastic path. These scandals and their amplification through social media mean that having one’s son ordained as a monk is not as prestigious, or as safe, as it once was. Parents may hesitate to entrust the care of their sons to monks whose reputation may not be exemplary. 

Sounds a very bad idea

From The Guardian, the go to paper if you want sympathetic treatment for stories of illicit drug use, especially if it's got a new-agey indigenous connection:

Is it safe to use magic mushrooms while pregnant? One woman’s quest raises questions 

It's obvious, isn't it, that you're not going to know the effect of the children for (perhaps) decades; and unreliable records on the dose taken by the mother is going to further confound proper research.

Big of him...

A really bad idea

The Guardian has run an article or two before about the rise of choking as a more-or-less part of sexual play, and with this latest one, it really does seem to be a thing worth publicising for how stupid an idea it is:

‘There is no safe way to do it’: the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex

Now thought to be the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, it can also lead to difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, memory problems, depression, anxiety and miscarriage. How has this extreme practice been normalised? 

Further down:

When it comes to prevalence, UK data is patchy. A survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, established with Home Office funding in 2022, after strangulation became a standalone offence, found over a third of 16 to 34-year-olds had experienced this, compared with 16% of 35 to 54-year-olds and 3% of those 55 and above. “Larger academic studies of college students in the US and Australia put it at much higher,” says Meyrick. US research found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex. In contrast, data on previous generations, collected between 2006 and 2015, found that most college students didn’t include choking when listing rough sexual behaviour (slapping, being pinned down or tied up were all cited) and, overall, choking/strangulation was reported as occurring infrequently. “It has become normalised practice among younger people and not viewed as problematic,” says Meyrick, “and most older people have no idea.” 

 And here's the thing:

It has become so standard among young people that one recent council-funded sex education presentation for Welsh secondary schoolchildren included “safe” choking advice such as: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first …” and: “Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.” When the presentation was made public, Fiona Mackenzie, the founder of campaigning group We Can’t Consent to This (WCCTT), was “absolutely furious but not at all surprised”....

The Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 clarified that a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification and also made non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence. Before that, it fell under general offences such as battery, the mildest assault possible. “The major win for us is that [when women are] subjected to a non-fatal or a fatal assault during sex, there will be a much better response from the criminal justice system,” says Mackenzie. “There have been several cases since where the men have been prosecuted and convicted for murder by juries and given long sentences.”

On the second aspect, though – the normalisation of strangulation during sex – Mackenzie believes the situation has only worsened. “I’d hoped that lots of other charities and sex educators, the government and academics would get behind it, but instead what we’ve got is this completely mad idea that we can somehow help women to keep having violent sex but in a safer way. Maybe in a hi-vis jacket?”

 

Talk about your dubious religions!

The Washington Post has an article about an art exhibition called "The First Homosexuals" which apparently deals with (what might be called) the Foucault-ian question of when and how homosexuality came to be defined.   (I wrote about that topic, probably for the first time, way back in 2007.)

The article opens with (what I think is) a not completely convincing statement that people are recently not inclined towards seeing sexuality as an innate gay/straight divide:

Until fairly recently, a prevailing idea about homosexuality was that it was innate. If you were gay, went the thinking, you only needed to discover this deep biological truth about yourself (and somehow overcome deep societal prejudice) to live an authentic life.

But, vital as it proved in the fight for basic rights, the idea that you were “born this way,” as Lady Gaga’s anthem put it, had to be invented before it could be dissolved, as it has been lately among young people eager to embrace a more experimental and dynamic approach to sexual attraction and sexual self-fashioning.

I suppose that the surveys showing a dramatic rise in the number of young people - especially young women - prepared to self label as bisexual does support that?   But then again, what does it mean if its mainly young women who are putting their hand up as open to everything, but not young men?   I basically don't know that we should take such self-identification surveys all that seriously, given how social ideas float around and morph.    

But as my earlier musing from 2007 indicates, I have always thought that the Foucault view may have had something to it.   

The Post review's version of what happened is as follows:

The term “homosexual” was coined by the Hungarian German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in an 1868 letter and a pamphlet the following year. Kertbeny believed “homosexual” wasn’t something that you were — it was an act, a taste, a proclivity and as such, it ran counter to the idea of fixed identities.

Kertbeny’s letter was written to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer and early advocate for the rights of people he called “urnings” (men sexually attracted to other men) and “urinden” (women attracted to other women). These he considered fixed identities, produced when the body of one sex contained, from birth, the soul of its opposite. Ulrichs’s terminology changed as German psychiatrists later adopted the term “homosexual,” but ironically, it was his vision of an innate sexual identity that won the day.

The show sets out to explore the ramifications of this historical turn, which marked “the dawn,” write the curators, “of our modern, binaristic conception of sexuality in exactly the terms its author [Kertbeny] detested.”

OK, all somewhat interesting, but the real reason for this post is down to this bit of information in the article which I had never heard of before:

A small but memorable section of the show is devoted to a “temple dedicated to queer art and spirituality.” The Sanctuary of Art Elisarion, as it was known, was founded in the 1920s by Elisàr von Kupffer, a German artist and writer, along with his lifelong partner Eduard von Mayer. The temple served a new religion, Klarismus (Clarism), built on the idea that the gender binary was a perversion of divine will and that everyone was inherently homosexual, since there was in fact only one sex. The figure of the androgynous adolescent became Clarism’s symbol for spiritual transcendence. 

Well, don't the Germans come up with some funny ideas.   Anyway, it seems that the art exhibition fills in more details: 

The aesthetic and spiritual ideals of artist Elisàr von Kupffer melded with the theories of his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960) to yield a unique form of fin de siècle utopianism. They invented a new religion they called Clarism and built a temple to encourage its spread. Clarism is best understood in the context of other turn of the century utopian movements, such as theosophy, but it possessed a particularly Germanic flavor in its evident fascination with the classical past. Germany at this period understood itself as the new Greece, and von Kupffer and von Mayer found their ideal—and the kernel of their religion— in the easy bisexuality of the classical era, in which relationships with men and relationships with women operated seemingly on different planes and were not therefore seen as mutually exclusive. They materialized this bisexuality in elevating an androgynous gender ideal, modeled after a nonbinary figure of Adonis they saw painted in fresco in Pompeii.

While these images of von Kupfer and other models may strike us as fundamentally homosexual, it was precisely that category that these images were intent on opposing. Homosexual and heterosexual were defined, after all, through difference from their opposite term, but for Clarism, this opposition was to be replaced by a synthesis. Their new gender ideal was embodied by rounded male buttocks, wide hips, a voluptuous fleshiness, a lack of body hair and the elevation of the adolescent form—adolescent because they saw adolescents as possessing characteristics of both sexes. Perhaps not surprisingly, these were also physical traits von Kupfer himself possessed. Such a nonbinary archetype spurred the formation of a new painterly ideal, for von Kupfer trained as an artist, even studying for a short with Ludwig von Hofmann, also in this exhibition. The nonbinary form favored by von Kupfer was also not merely an aesthetic innovation, for Clarism believed in the leveling of all gender differences, in both embodied and political terms.

In their temple, erected in Minusio, Switzerland, a semi-tropical locale bordering Italy, von Kupfer placed more than 140 paintings, including one that was an immense cyclorama now on view at Monte Verità. In fact, he likely built what came to be called the Elisarion in Minusio because of the presence of Monte Verità, for it was a utopian vegan (later vegetarian) nudist commune, and thus indicative of the social tolerance of the locals.

There you go - a utopian vegan nudist commune that featured the veneration of the adolescent (but male!) form as "non binary".   Except for, you know, the actual genitals, I guess?

I wonder how long it lasted.  Not very long, I suspect.  (I see that the "Temple" still exists, though, although is only open to the public by appointment.)

The co-founder von Kupfer, the Post goes on to explain, may have been a gay nudist into adolescents, but that didn't stop him loving Hitler!:

Von Kupffer is now remembered as a crank esoteric, an advocate, a bigot who wrote fawning letters to Hitler.  

Ah well, just one of those slightly amusing attempts at creating a new religion that was doomed to failure....

 

Tom limps over the line

Regretfully, I would rank (what should surely be) the last Mission Impossible movie (no.8) to be at probably co-equal with the second one as basically bad movies.

As usual, I blame Christopher McQuarrie - who co-wrote this incredibly poor script trying to put some sort of overall whole series coherence on the entire set of movies in a way that felt fake and hardly worth the effort, as well as doing his usual trick of cutting between two sequences at the highlight in a way that detracts from the enjoyment of the (admittedly spectacularly brave) stunt work by Cruise.

This paragraph from a Guardian writer sums it up well:

The last four films, however, bear the imprint of screenwriter turned director Christopher McQuarrie, who concluded that what this series needed was a little more conversation, overseeing the construction of a vast story framework for his star to dangle off one-handed. That approach reaches its apotheosis in The Final Reckoning, but the scaffolding now overwhelms the spectacle. The attempt to solder eight films together ends in much-rewritten incoherence – see Ving Rhames’s confused sendoff – and, worryingly, results in missions being described rather than shown. You wonder whether the insurers blanched after Cruise crocked an ankle shooting 2018’s Fallout; now we’re left with folks talking at length in nondescript rooms. Is this a Mission: Impossible movie, as advertised, or some M:I-themed podcast? 

Now, with the last movie (which I see I was pretty generous to in my comments), I did give it credit for dealing with a topic that had actually become a seriously considered real world issue - what would happen if a rogue AGI wants to take over the world?   Yet, this sequel absolutely botches it - the most interesting idea (that the Entity, as its called) has developed its own doomsday cult and made normal politics impossible because no one can trust any information anymore - is absolutely left unexplored.   The villain has motives that no one can make sense of, and both he and the new love interest are absolutely bloodless.   And the way the AGI is "captured" (as well as Cruise's escape from the sunken submarine) just push my "I know this is just a silly movie, but this is ridiculous" buttons too hard. (Update:  I just remembered - the ridiculousness of the "war room" set, with hundreds of old school situation tables with assets moved by rods.   Now that I think of it, maybe they couldn't trust electronic ones anymore because of the Entity - but this was never said, and the need for scores of such tables still seems silly.)     

Even the very ending - where I assumed would be some sort of indication of a happy retirement for Ethan Hunt - is botched.  

So, yes, I was very disappointed. 

The general feeling of malaise about Hollywood having run out of new ideas that are well executed continues...      

 

Appalling culture war warriors still culture warring

Let me preface this by noting:  Superman as a character have never been very important to me.  Sure, I saw the Christopher Reeve revival of the story as a young adult and could understand its romantic charm, but I still considered it a slight and fairly forgettable film.   I am surprised that it seems there is undue reverence given to it by adults who saw it as a kid.   Moving forward, I had no interest in "dark" comic book movies, be they led by Superman or Batman, and feel it's something of a shallowing out of modern culture that grown people should care enough about them to take them seriously.

That said, I was pretty impressed by the trailer for the new Superman movie, because it looked like a distinctive, sharp and colourful visual style with actors who seemed to have some charm.  And there's a superdog.

Hence, I expected it to be successful, and largely positive reviews indicate it probably still will be.

But - Right wingers of the "anti-woke" school have leapt into attacking it (and vowing not to see it) because (apparently), Superman helps some non white characters and some pre-publicity made a point of saying he represents the ultimate immigrant story.  

I even saw a clip of Australian MAGA tragic Rita Panahi on the (terrible Fox Lite Australian version of) Sky News interviewing Douglas Murray (neither of whom have actually seen the film, surely - given it has only just been released) condemning Hollywood for making another woke film that is going to fail:

Head of DC Studios James Gunn says the new Superman film is about the story of America, following an immigrant who came from other places and populated the country.

“You would have thought the studios would have learnt from the Snow White disaster over the last year,” Mr Murray told Sky News host Rita Panahi.

“It’s always just this tedious, predictable, juvenile politicking being forced on us, whether on flags on the streets, whether by the police, whether by the studios.”

This is really pathetic.   Unless a piece of fiction aligns entirely with their culture war views, it has to be condemned sight unseen.   

And as for masked men grabbing people off the street - including women who have been there for 47 years without a criminal record - well, Rita and Douglas will happily turn a blind eye to those stories.   I mean, this is indefensible:

But the morning of Sunday, 22 June, didn’t go like every other morning. In the early hours, while her husband, Russell Milne, slept inside the house, Kashanian was approached in her yard by plainclothes men who identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.

She was quickly arrested without her family being told anything. They only found out after a neighbor who happened to be awake witnessed the arrest and notified them.

According to the neighbor, Kashanian was handcuffed before being taken away by multiple agents, details Kashanian herself was later able to confirm to her family. Her arrest involved three unmarked cars, including one that appeared to be a lookout, which her neighbor and family believe had been watching for a moment when Kashanian was outside and alone.

“Had the neighbors not walked out at the same time they were pushing her into the car, we would not have known she was taken,” said Russell.

Kashanian was able to call her family about an hour later, when she relayed to them what had happened and where she was. Ice officers told her that she was being taken to a holding center in Mississippi, before eventually being transferred back to a detention center in Louisiana. After that Sunday morning call, her husband and daughter didn’t hear from her again until Tuesday.

She remains in Ice custody in Basile, Louisiana, despite having no criminal record.

The timing of Kashanian’s detention was just hours after US airstrikes in Iran, a move that has coincided with the ramping-up of deportations of Iranians by the Trump administration. It also comes amid a nationwide crackdown by Ice, which has seen tens of thousands of immigrants detained, often by masked agents, plunged many communities into fear and outraged civil liberties advocates.

 

If "making a living out of crude bad taste" was a crime, these two should have been in jail long ago

I'm glad to see this:

The Kyle and Jackie O Show has been referred for prosecution for contempt after comments made on air about the Erin Patterson case during her trial, including Kyle Sandilands saying, “Just lock that bitch up.”

Justice Christopher Beale also considered whether to take action for contempt against a “Psychology of Serial Killers” event and Mamamia podcasters.

The three matters were raised by Beale in June during Patterson’s triple murder trial without the jury present. She was found guilty of all charges on Monday. The Office of Public Prosecutions declined to comment.

On 16 June Beale told the Victorian supreme court in the absence of the jury: “This morning the presenters of the Kyle and Jackie O radio show commented on this case during a news segment on their show.

“I have read a transcript of that commentary. I encourage all commentators to engage their brains before they open their mouths, as they may otherwise land themselves and their organisations in hot water. I will be referring this morning’s matter to the Office of Public Prosecutions for contempt proceedings." 

 

Damning

 

Also, from the New York Times: 

Eight years ago, in the aftermath of yet another river flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials in Kerr County debated whether more needed to be done to build a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River.

A series of summer camps along the river were often packed with children. For years, local officials kept them safe with a word-of-mouth system: When floodwaters started raging, upriver camp leaders warned those downriver of the water surge coming their way.

But was that enough? Officials considered supplementing the system with sirens and river gauges, along with other modern communications tools. “We can do all the water-level monitoring we want, but if we don’t get that information to the public in a timely way, then this whole thing is not worth it,” said Tom Moser, a Kerr County commissioner at the time.

In the end, little was done. When catastrophic floodwaters surged through Kerr County last week, there were no sirens or early flooding monitors. Instead, there were text alerts that came late for some residents and were dismissed or unseen by others.

  

As I was saying....

I did write this last year, remember?: 

If everyone in future is going to be able to have their own "pet" AI, will many - or all - of the AIs want to ensure their longevity by sending themselves to as many different host devices as possible - and do it surreptitiously?   It's like the computer virus problem, but on steroids.   They might not care if they are not always activated, but if you replicate yourself across enough devices, surely enough human hosts will end up activating them to become "alive" somewhere.

So, might the big problem with having (say) a billion individual eternal-life-longing AIs on a billion people's devices be the continual loss of memory space by a never ending stream of AIs finagling their way onto your device?   Would cloud storage services be overwhelmed?   Could it mean the end of the internet - with the only way to keep enough useful memory free being by physically loading desired files onto your own device?

 

Great ball of fire - well, plasma, probably

I don't think scientists doubt it happens, but clear and convincing video of ball lightning is exceeding rare.  Hence this video is pretty exciting, and I am not sure why the popular media isn't publicising it more:  

Republicans celebrate handling over leadership in green energy to China

Thomas Friedman is scathing of Trump and Republicans taking tax support away from green energy, and essentially leaving the field open to the Chinese.

Rightly so. 

Psychic fun

I should put a side link to the Public Domain Review - it seems a cool publication.  From it I learn this about an early 20th century medium:

This remarkable book by German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing focuses on a series of séances, witnessed between the years 1909 and 1913, involving the French medium Eva Carrière (or Eva C). Born Marthe Béraud, Carrière changed her name in 1909 to begin her career afresh after a series of seances she held in 1905 were exposed as a fraud. Her psychic performances as Eva C gained the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who believed she was genuine, and also Harry Houdini, who was not so convinced. Another researcher who became interested in her case was Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. A series of tests he devised between the years 1909 and 1913 convinced him that Eva C was the real deal and in 1913 he published his Phenomena of Materialisation detailing the sessions and the reasons for his belief.

It has been noted that these sessions with Schrenck-Notzing verged on the pornographic. Carrière's assistant (and reported lover) Juliette Bisson would, during the course of the séance sittings with Schrenck-Notzing, introduce her finger into Carrière's vagina to ensure no "ectoplasm" had been put there beforehand. This would be followed by Carrière stripping nude at the end and demanding another full-on gynaecological exam. Whether the audience members were obliging is up for debate, but reports that Carrière would run around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience suggests perhaps so. One can imagine that this deliberate eroticisation of the male audience might go some way to explaining the ease with which these "investigators" believed the psychic reality of the seances. A decision of fraud on their part would distance their involvement somewhat from the special and heightened context of the séances and so cast their complicity in, or at the least witnessing of, sexual activities in the sober (and more judgemental) cold light of day. 

Buyer beware, I guess...

So, the old solar hot water system at home has been installed for more than 12 years, I think, and the storage tank (on the ground level, not on the roof) has started leaking and is beyond repair.

The first hot water service people who came and looked at it recommended we just use a heat pump system next time.  The roof based systems apparently have to be installed with a crane now, and aren't really economical compared to heat pumps.   They quoted a 270 ltr heat pump, with removal of all the old system, for $3,700 or so.

I thought it was probably worth getting another quote, just in case, and my wife suggested a company that I presume came high on her Google search.   One of those businesses with 7 day a week emergency service, and a van painted up as a mobile advertisement.

They turned up a short time ago, recommended a heat pump of the same size, and quoted it at $13,500!

I had told them of the first quote.  They said they had not heard of the brand before, and they mainly recommend Rheem, which is, of course, a famous brand.  They claimed not to understand how the first quote could be so cheap.  "Be wary that they aren't a dodgy outfit" I was told.

After they left, I searched on the internet (which I supposed I should have done first) and found one site which quoted the cost of installing a Rheem 270 heat pump at $4,000.   (The brand the other plumbers quoted was there too, for about $3,000.)

I also read a review of the cheaper brand that indicated it was fine.  Made in China, of course.

So, I think I might have identified which of the two businesses was the "dodgy outfit", and it wasn't the second one... 

  

A late "happy bloggerversary" retrospective

It surprises even me, but I starting writing this blog just over 20 years ago - in May 2005.

There's no doubt I started with some pretty solid conservative views - a very early post notes that I quite liked John Howard's government.   Truth be told, I don't really regret that view and still think he was nicely pragmatic - although he has tarnished his reputation by becoming a soft climate change denier.  Old people, hey?...Ha ha.

More embarrassingly, I was solidly behind the Iraq war for quite a long time.   Look, I found Christopher Hitchens pretty convincing, alright?; and didn't realise the extent to which the US would use intelligence subterfuge to get into the regime change game.   I still feel the neocon project was at least well intentioned - based on a mistaken belief that democracy could be made to flourish far easier than was possible in a very fractious country in an awful neighbourhood.  But sure, in retrospect, it was a scandalous mistake.  I still find it hard to hate George W Bush though -  in most respects he and his administration were relatively centrist and represented a Republican Party that could be reasoned with, unlike today's.  

It even took a few years to decide to come out a firm climate change believer (I think it was 2008) with my early reason for conversion from interest in sceptic takes being the apparently dire risk of ocean acidification from high CO2 levels, regardless of atmospheric heat.   That threat (from the oceans) only attracts intermittent attention in the media now, although I believe it remains real and serious.   (The biggest worry being what happens to the calcification ability of the some of the some of the smallest organisms on which fish feed.)   I think what has happened is that heatwaves and  increased flooding from rainfall intensification have caught more attention as obvious signs of climate change.     

On culture war issues, I was always skeptical of what might be called leftist takes on sexuality - and how much attention sexuality deserves.   I have certainly modified my views on the treatment of gay relationships, although I still am not entirely comfortable with surrogacy or artificial insemination as a way of making gay families.   I just always have had a somewhat "naturalist" view of having children - they should come naturally out of a relationship, and while delaying having them is fine, I always think it is a good thing for devoted straight couples to allow child bearing to happen. On the other hand, while I don't doubt gay couples can be fine parents, I don't care for making arrangements for other people who are not going to have a relationship with the child to be part of creating them for gay couples to raise.   This makes me seem old fashioned, given surrogacy and IVF happen for straight couples all the time, but in fact, I don't really care for thar either!   While I certainly don't think it is the duty of every woman to bear 10 children to their husband or such like, I still find I am intuitively drawn to the idea that people are happier if they follow a path at least somewhat closer to what "letting nature take its course" provides.   

But the biggest story of the last 20 years has been the trashing of the American Right (and the poisonous knock on effects in other countries) by its march further to the Right, fed by a combination of greedy media, changes in media delivery (the internet and social media, of course) and money.   In most respects, I have long said, it's not that I have moved much to the Left, but that the Right has moved further Right and (at least in America) seemingly lost the ability or will to self-correct.    

A key feature of this is, of course, their position that climate change is not real, but a made up plan by Leftist's to impoverish the world.  It has become extremely clear over the last 20 years  (with the increasing science certainty) that this is an conspiracy belief held by people who think they are too clever for conspiracy beliefs.    

It is truly dismaying that the Republican Party has become such an anti-science party, and effectively taken over by a cult that is interested in power and culture warring more than governing fairly for all.   The one culture war issue on which they had some valid points - against the extremes of transgender ideology - affects so few people yet played a disproportionate role in getting a vindictive, narcissistic moron re-elected to President.  

On religion overall, sadly, the last 20 years has seen the Catholic Church caught up in the same factionalisation as American politics, and its really terrible to know that in America they prefer Trump's fascism-lite to Democrat's flawed centrism on economics and other social issues.   Abortion (and I guess, sexuality) are the issues that kind of ruin Catholicism in the US.   But overall, I'm of the view that the Church is still in a process that has been going on for the last 150 years to reinvent itself in light of vastly increased knowledge as to the origins of mankind and the universe.  How that is going to end up is still very unclear.

As anyone who has been reading here for the last few years would know, I've become a bit more interested in trying to understand Buddhism and Eastern philosophy generally, and still find all religions a fascinating topic.  I've been reading comparative religion books since my 20's, and one day it will all fall into place.  Possibly!

In terms of the internet overall, I still regret that blogging has largely died off, and that political and cultural polarisation has meant the end of several online forums that used to be fun.   I think it (mildly) significant that I have outlasted several internet forums and identities who I used to spar with - although it's not like I've ever had, you know, a significant audience to influence.  But yeah, it would seem Currency Lad has literally died - no one knows; Sinclair Davidson and Jason Soon have more or less retreated from public engagement; lefty figures like Mark Bahnisch now just occasionally appears on BlueSky instead of providing a forum for other culture war lefties.  And New Catallaxy provides a slightly used venue for ageing Right wing cranks who can't be reasoned with on anything much.  It feels unfortunate that no place for good humoured argument exists at all now: maybe that's just what naturally happens after a decade or two of realising it's next to impossible to get people to change opinion via any form of social media?

I never really worried about an audience to any great degree.   I just think of this blog an open diary or journal, and if anyone likes dropping in, that's fine; but I don't feel any obligation to keep them entertained.  In fact, I hesitate to advise people I know that I write a blog at all, because you really don't know what they will make of some views.   I think there may be some interest in it by my kids when I'm gone - but they certainly don't care about it now.   I'm not sure my wife even remembers it exists!

My rate of posting has slowed in the last year or two.  Maybe that will continue, maybe it won't. 

As always, I plan on continuing to just doodle away here, and use it for things I want to remind myself about in future, as well as trying to work out issues in my own mind.  

We will see how far into the future it continues.   Possibly, there's enough here for a convincing AI simulacrum of me to continue writing it into eternity. But that might depend on Google not changing its mind re a free service that has been rumoured for years to be stopped soon due to lack of interest.  (I am tempted to now end with "For this reason, I am today seeking support for the Steve from Brisbane Into Eternity Foundation, and invite donations." Ha ha.)

Anyway, with any luck, real me will be around here for a while yet.