A very cool video

Sky Magic Live at Mt.Fuji : Drone Ballet Show by MicroAd, Inc. from Sky Magic on Vimeo.

Nietzsche and his mum

From a review of new book about Nietzsche (and the reviewer, incidentally, in other parts of the review, is no anti-Nietzsche critic):

In fact, Nietzsche spent a good deal of his early years composing just such books. He completed his first memoir when he was just 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. They weren’t written to record his academic achievements (negligible), much less his prowess on field or track (non-existent), but, rather, according to Blue, as a ‘mirror’ in which, abstracted from history and environment, his ‘latent self’ would come into focus. ‘Autobiography’ was what Nietzsche wrote ‘in order to see who he was’.

On the evidence adduced here, what he was was a mummy’s boy. As late as her son’s undergraduate days, Franziska Nietzsche was still lecturing him on what coat and trousers to wear in the rain. And whenever a more metaphysical storm broke, mum was always Nietzsche’s first port of call. Even when he was called away from his studies for military service, he was granted a dispensation that posted him in his hometown — and allowed him not only to live at home with Mum, but to lunch and dine with her every day of the week. Blue, who seems to have read everything ever published on Nietzsche (and translated much new material hitherto available only in the German), doesn’t mention Joachim Köhler’s Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nonetheless, he does an awful lot to endorse Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche was a repressed homosexual.

Well, he was at the very least, rather eccentric from an early age.

More on Trump not winning

Donald Trump just threatened to cause an unprecedented global financial crisis - Vox

Scott Adams presumably thinks that things like this don't hurt the path of a "master persuader" to the Presidency.  Well, I have just checked on his blog, and all he seems to think Trump needs to do is this:

To be fair, Trump scares the pants off of about one-third of the public.
So “risky” will hit home for those voters. The problem for team Clinton
is that Trump has complete control of his persona. All he needs to do
is act less risky for a few months to prove his campaign persona was all for effect. That process is well underway.

I am completely unconvinced.  I think Adams himself is just a showman, milking this for all its worth.

Company tax cuts, again

I see Bernard Keane and Crikey are continuing the case against company tax cuts leading to increased investment.

Interesting.

Not so much furious as incredulous

That was my reaction at watching Fury Road last night.

Look, post apocalypse movies are not generally my thing; nor are movies based on car crashes and violence.  (Chases are OK, of course, but the Mad Max movies - I gather, as this is the first I have watched - are all about the revving engines and the grinding sound of metal upon metal, often with human flesh squished between it.)

So, it's not as if I was ever destined to like it.  But really, the utter, utter ridiculousness and perverse lack of thrills I was experiencing did mean I kept watching it.  It doesn't reach the "so bad it's good" level, although I strongly suspect that there must have been a substantial part of the cinema audience like me - incredulous at the inanity of what they were watching. Seeing it after knowing it was strongly reviewed, nominated for and had won several Oscars, and made a reasonable amount of money at the box office, only added to the incredulity level.

Let me be specific about a few points:

*  I did not consider it well directed at all.  Good action directing lets you know who (or what) is where in a scene; this quality seemed to me to be distinctly lacking in most of the action sequences.  How Miller got nominated for a directing Oscar indicates something quite worrying about the current crop of Hollywood directors: they don't know good action direction when they see it. 

*  The film was supposed to be one that used little CGI.  Yeah, sure.   I'm not sure how many bodies I saw face plant into sand at about 80kph - it seemed at least a few dozen - but every time one did, of course it was obvious CGI was involved.   It reminded me a bit of the publicity about the much maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which also claimed low CGI in its action sequences, but clearly there was plenty.  (Not that I minded much.  Unlike Road, it was a movie with a plot, after all.)

*  Of what little dialogue there was, I still had trouble understanding some of it, both audibly and narratively.   Was I alone in that?

*  What an embarrassing enterprise for adults to be involved in making; Miller in particular.  As someone writes at IMDB (where there is a bit of a backlash underway in user reviews, it seems):

 So what is this film's targeted demographic? I'm not sure. I can imagine that if you are a 13-year old boy, really into cars/trucks/slipknot, pretty redneck, and probably a little slow, this movie may seem pretty cool. I mean it does have ridiculous cars/trucks outfitted with lots of weapons, spikes, flame-exhausts, (breast-milk?) and guys playing "cool" guitar riffs for no apparent reason. There's also lots of explosions and fighting. And scantily clad women. And tornadoes. And skulls.

Exactly.  I said something more particular to my son as we watched it:  it's like it was written by a 13 year old boy - one who has grown up with aging heavy metal parents, still into Iron Maiden, who took him to every demolition derby and monster truck show in town since he was a toddler.  That Miller made the first couple of Mad Max films when he was a relatively young man is one thing; that he should want to wallow in this world with ever greater improbable visuals, scale and scenarios I have difficulty interpreting other than as an embarrassing sign of immaturity at heart.

*  The one thing I found vaguely interesting:  there was one, not very major, character who I suspect bore a deliberate physical resemblance to Philip Adams.  Adams famously loathed Mad Max, and wrote scathingly of it as violence porn.  (I suspect his reaction was actually a bit overblown, but that it still bore some truth.)   I am curious whether I am right about this being a deliberate joke on Adams on Miller's part. 


In any event, I see now that the movie was not quite the box office smash that its critical reputation suggests.  In the US it made a respectable but far from outstanding $153 million, and $378 million world wide.  

As I'm guessing that 1/4 to 1/3 of the audience actually didn't think highly of the film, I think I can fairly call it not that big a success after all.  Good.

Cheaper for youngsters

So, something interesting happens to weed after it’s legal - The Washington Post

In case you don't want to click - it becomes cheaper.

As the article says:

Falling pot prices create winners and losers. Because state taxes are
based on a percentage of the sales price, declining prices mean each
sale puts less money in the public purse. On the other hand,
bargain-basement prices undercut the black market, bringing the public
reduced law enforcement costs, both in terms of tax dollars spent on
jail and the damage done to individuals who are arrested.

For consumers who enjoy pot occasionally while suffering no adverse effects
from it, low prices will be a welcome but minor benefit; precisely
because they consume modest amounts, the price declines are only a
modest win. On the downside, young people tend to be price-sensitive
consumers, and their use of inexpensive pot may rise over time, as might
that of problematic marijuana users.

Of course, I choose to emphasise the downside...

Never too much when it comes to Nazis...

First, there's a review of a book about the diary of a key Nazi figure who I can't say I recall hearing about before.  (No explanation about the name, though.)  Anyway, worth reading the review.

And from Literary Review, an anecdote about Hitler being funny:

Was Hitler ever – intentionally – funny? The answer, surprisingly enough, is yes. After hosting Mussolini in Berlin in September 1937, the Führer helped his entourage let off steam by mounting a full-scale parody of the Duce: ‘His chin thrust forward, his legs spread and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto and basta.’ For a dictator who only spoke German, the act exceeded Hitler’s ordinary range and the court architect, Albert Speer, noted that the laughter was more than polite: the performance ‘was indeed very funny’. 

Of course!

Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot | City Journal

The subheading from this article:

Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.

The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...

Adams is wrong

I see that Jason Soon has tweeted to a WAPO article giving publicity to the Scott Adams argument that Trump will win "in a landslide" because he's a "master persuader."


I doubt very much that JS actually agrees with Adams, but I have been meaning to note since I first read that Adams was running this line that he is a very eccentric character who is way overconfident in his understanding of humans.  (I posted years ago about his mysterious loss of voice, which he overcame.  He is very big on hypnosis, which is not exactly a practice to dismiss, but not one to tie your credibility to, either.)  

In the meantime, I see there is much laughter on the internet today about this tweet from Trump:

I can't see anyone disputing that it's real, so, yeah, what a "master persuader".  /sarc

My complaint about young(er) people

I see on Twitter and around the place that younger than me, lefty sort of people find the ABC's iView comedy "The Katering Show" hilarious.   Having watched a few episodes, I can see the potential - it's a funny concept, and while not exactly the original short form food/cooking porn parody (see England's rather funnier Posh Nosh from 13 years ago) the women are pretty funny actors.

But seriously, too much of the humour is from the cheap and simple device of a sudden outbreak of swearing, usually as part of a sudden outbreak of "honesty".

It doesn't appear in a natural context, either.   It's way too obvious.

The humour in Posh Nosh was more subtle and naturalistic and better for it.

Young people who find this technique hilarious - you're wrong and encouraging lazy comedy writing.   [Because I say so.]

Stable bugs

Our personal skin microbiome is surprisingly stable

I guess I am not surprised.  It probably explains why unfortunate people who have a skin biome which results in really strong body odour (or, on the other hand, the lack of it) are stuck that way unless they make a very major attempt to change it.

Bill on the rise

I don't normally pay attention to the Budget Reply, but the status of this one as effectively the first major election campaign speech meant it was worth watching.

And I'm glad I did.  Shorten clearly did well, sounding confident and reasonable and, well, rather like a Prime Minister.   I don't actually agree with all of his policy positions, but he is sounding good....

Is the true situation "nobody knows"?

Adam Creighton has another one of his peculiar columns up where the headline position doesn't seem all that well supported by the details.  It says in the opening paragraph that Treasury has "hit back" at claims a tax cut for companies will hurt Australia, but the details of the analysis don't sound all that convincing.

For example:

Labelling it a “tax on foreign capital”, the analysis said a company tax cut to 25 per cent would increase employment in the long run by 0.1 per cent, equivalent to about 12,000 jobs, and boost real wages 1.1 per cent.

0.1% is supposed to be impressive??

Creighton then goes on to note one dissenter:

Janine Dixon, a researcher at Victoria University, last month challenged the orthodox view, finding gross domestic product and workers’ wages would rise but not by enough to make up for the transfer of government revenue to foreigners, which could no longer be spent on public services.

“The right indicator of national benefit is the impact of a company tax rate cut on national income and that’s clearly negative,” she said.

Of course, there is the fact that Ken Henry was a supporter of a company tax cut to 25% to make us "more competitive with Asia."   On the other hand, the US doesn't exactly seem crippled by its corporate tax rate, although no doubt there is the argument that big corporations find motivation for their off shore tax shenanigans in the relatively high tax rate.

I reckon the truth is that no body really knows how good an idea it really is.

Climate change and Canadian fires

Did climate change contribute to the Fort McMurray fire?

It's a short article, but some surprising figures in there for the increase in the area of Canada burnt in bushfires over recent decades.

Agreed

Donald Trump isn’t going to be president.: Donald Trump begins the general election with a huge deficit in head-to-head polls, deep unpopularity, and major demographic headwinds. Unless he wins unprecedented shares of black and Latino voters, or, barring any improvement with nonwhite voters, unless he wins unprecedented shares of white voters, he loses. And he has to do this while running as the most unpopular nominee in 30 years of polling. He has to do it while running against a Democratic Party operating at full strength, with popular surrogates (including a former president) crisscrossing the country against his campaign. He has to do it with a divided Republican Party. He has to do it while somehow tempering his deep-seated misogyny and racism. All this, again, in a growing economy with a well-liked president—solid conditions for a Democratic candidate.

Donald Trump has to become a radically different person to win.

Donald Trump isn’t going to win.