More pop culture noted

*  I'm officially over My Kitchen Rules and have barely watched it this year.   I still don't mind some of the cooking parts - but the formula for contestant conflict is just too, too familiar.  And it's kind of worrying watching people play their allocated roles in this mock "reality" show.

* Much, much worse, apparently, from a contestant debasement point of view, is Married at First Sight.  I read a twitter thread by someone saying "why for the love of God do some of my otherwise intelligent friends watch this?"   I won't go near it with a barge pole, so I won't learn how bad it is.  But perhaps I can take pride in having a 16 yr old daughter who expresses no interest in it.  I must have done something right.  Or, more likely, just lucked out.?

* As for I'm a D Grade Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here:   I had about a 10 minute watch of it in total this year.  I'm always amazed at how the video quality, the costumes and everything makes everyone look quite physically ugly.  I suppose it's just the loss of makeup and normal studio lighting that accounts for it?   I still can't stand Julia Morris - I saw her doing a stand up bit in 1998 in a Club Med (the one since closed in Noumea), and I disliked her then.  Still dislike her.

* OK, so what do I like on TV at the moment?   We're having a Netflix lull at my house - have finished or are just about to finish several good series and at a bit of a loss as to what to replace them with.  One which is promising and pretty intelligent - the Norwegian series Occupied, in which in the near future, after closing off its gas and oil to Europe, the Russians stage an orderly intervention at the request of the EU to re-open the supply.  As with the comedy Norseman, the Norwegians seem surprisingly good at quality TV.   I've watched two episodes, and it's good enough to keep me going.  The opening credit sequence song is really bad, though.  Just ignore it.

Taking matters into their own hands

Much discussion being had on Twitter about an article on the Washington Post business section (?) about the reduction in the amount of sex Americans appear to be having.   The most discussed aspect of this is this chart about younger adults:

Not entirely sure I understand the increasing gap between men and women.

The list of reasons speculated for young men living without much sexual interaction includes:  dating apps, less economic independence (and much more living with parents), increased rates of depression, internet pornography, Netflix, the MeToo movement, feminism, video gaming - especially Minecraft (really - it was introduced in 2009), and Marvel movies.   OK, so I made that last one up.

I don't know how to feel about this:   on the one hand, I like to think that people should take sexual relationships seriously and most men (or women) these days aren't really ready for serious responsibilities until they are approaching 30 anyway.    On the other hand, as in Japan, it would seem that if people go too long without attempting dating, they just can never be bothered starting and get caught in some strange fantasy worlds of self gratification.

God help us if internet connected, sex simulating body suits ever become a thing.  May as well close up the planet in that case.

A pop culture post

Imagine Dragons inhabit an odd corner of the pop music world - talking about them with my daughter when they were going to be in Brisbane a while ago, one of us commented that there would probably be an unusually large number of Dads in the audience.   (The other person agreed.)  There is something unusually male cross-generational acceptable about them in a way few other young-ish musical acts are these days.

I find I like quite a few of their songs, and this current one Bad Liar strikes me as an exceptionally good break up song.   But that video clip for it - man, it's pretty creepy, isn't it?    And just about perfectly opaque in meaning.   I keep getting a suicide vibe from it - not a good thing to see in pop culture I reckon - and the dancing around him, combined with the song lyric, seems to make no sense at all.  

Didn't I see some goth themed video clip from them for a song recently I didn't hear much?   I wish they would get someone else on board for their videos.  

Old people are killing us ..

Look at this pic from a pro Brexit rally in London:

Look at the average age.  Not to mention the gender and ethnic mix.  How many of them share the same profile as your average climate change denialist?  (Answer: a lot.)

It feels very weird to be living at a time when the cries of the populist youth movement of the 1960's, about which I was cynical when I was young myself,  have actually come to be true. 

Until Rupert Murdoch goes to meet his Maker, hopefully by something ironic like Jerry Hall giving him a shove at the top of a flight of stairs after reading a false rumour from his own tabloid press, this is the world his lust for money and power has created. 

And strangely, whereas we used to get radicals threatening violence against the establishment, now they would prefer to get into a Twitter troll war. 

See, I have found a way to blame both sides. 

The further adventures of Pauline's Flakey Nuts.

If I had cartooning talent, and time, I'd be drawing up a cereal box called "Pauline's Flakey Nuts". 

But whatever.

Some further thoughts from watching Part 2 of Ashby and Dickson in Washington:

*  what an extraordinary, obnoxious, suck-up prat that Steve Dickson continued to show himself to be - the way he started up with the "Jesus" talk when he was with the gun loving Jesus lovers.   I'm suspecting that Ashby kept his sexuality on the quiet while he was playing the room, though.

* speaking of God talk - wasn't it nauseating in both episodes to see how much the NRA brings religion into their work:  the prayer at the start of the NRA electioneering for Trump;  the NRA telling Australians that gun ownership is not just a constitutional right in the US - it is fundamentally a God given right.  Honestly, the degree that a queasy brand of evangelical Christianity is tied into the political views of a large slab of the US Right feels like listening to a soft white bread Christian version of Sharia law, virtually.   It's creepy.

* you could also see how the NRA suggestions as to what lines to run to drum up support in Australia just sounded like complete duds that would not translate to our culture.   The "guns are a God given right" line, for example - will go over like a lead balloon here, but the NRA PR staff just don't appreciate that.   Same with the idea of everyone buying guns for self defence - the vast majority here know its good to have a high confidence that nearly no aggro nutter you pass on the street is likely to be carrying a concealed pistol.  That's better than needing a gun to use yourself.


* I would have loved to have known what the Koch operative said after Ashby explained that all donations would have to be fully disclosed on a website.  She pulled a face that indicated clearly "well, there's your problem right there; and I think I'm wasting my time", and I had the feeling the meeting wound up maybe 5 minutes later.

* The other overwhelming impression - how lazy Ashby and Dickson were.  "Let's ask fake gun rights guy to come up with policy for One Nation to run with.  Yeah, yeah, good idea."   I mean, sure, have expert advice on policy, but I had the feeling Ashby and Dickson just couldn't be bothered putting in the work on what guns policy changes they actually wanted.

Look at me! Look at me! - I'm not a conspiracy theorist

So, David Leyonhjelm denies he's a Port Arthur "truther" - he just thinks there are "questions to be answered":

Former senator and gun enthusiast David Leyonhjelm – now on the cusp of being elected to the NSW upper house – told the Herald and The Age on Thursday there were "legitimate" questions about Port Arthur, though he denied being a conspiracy theorist himself.

"People say 'well what is there to know about Port Arthur'. Well there's actually a lot," he said. "The solution is let's have an inquiry and let some of them at least go away.

"There are a lot of questions that would be resolved by an inquiry. It may well be that there are good answers to them. There are assertions – I'm not asserting these myself – but there are people who say there was more than one shooter.

"There are people who say that people were killed with head shots which would require substantial marksmanship which [Martin] Bryant didn't have.

"There's several other questions that keep coming up. I think they deserve to be answered."

 What a disingenuous, publicity seeking moron.  

Oh look, another surgeon it took for-ever to get suspended

What the hell?   This report at the ABC about a surgeon whose competence and behaviour was doubted by others for over a decade raises pretty shocking questions about how the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons operates.

Why can't we all remember 20 different languages, then?

It seems it takes a surprisingly small amount of memory storage to know how to use English:

A pair of researchers, one with the University of Rochester the other the University of California has found that combining all the data necessary to store and use the English language in the brain adds up to approximately 1.5 megabytes. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Francis Mollica and Steven Piantadosi describe applying information theory to add up the amount of data needed to store the various parts of the English language.

If only the brain was flash memory chips instead of stupid wet cells, then...

The weird, weird, nonsense politics of Brexit

I love the way a bad deal to a bunch of Tories will become an acceptable deal to them provided the woman who put all the work into it promises to resign.  The resignation makes no change to the deal itself, of course:  it's all (I presume) a combination of "if you go, we will be free to immediately blame you for making a deal we don't really want to support", and "Hey!  I could be leader faster than I thought."

It just seems the most perversely mean spirited example of internal power politics due to lack of any relationship to improving a policy outcome.   

Ha ha ha Sinclair Davidson

Sinclair thinks the findings of the Mueller investigation will fuel public distrust of media news.  Today, he's claiming public distrust of Fairfax led to its collapse, and it's "why the ABC needs a $1 billion dollar subsidy."

We'll let slip that ABC news, a mere part of the organisation's role, hardly costs a full billion dollars:  what's more un-forgiveable is that Sinclair lives in a fantasy land unsupported by research which continually shows that the ABC is more trusted by Australians than commercial news.

And honestly, when you see where "news" run purely for commercial profit leads you - the quasi State media relationship of Fox News and Trump, and the nuttiness of Sky News at night here - any person with a brain can see why the likes of the ABC and BBC are trusted and valued.

Not only that, but the US liberal broadsheets have done very well financially in the Trump era:   and the Mueller investigation have revealed enough that, regardless of whether it amounted to indictable offences against Trump personally, the campaign was full of politically disgraceful behaviour.  There is no way there will be a sudden burst of subscription cancellations over the Mueller results.

And would Sinclair like to explain the profitability of The Australian while he is at it?   How many decades has it been subsidised by other Murdoch papers?

It's not a good look to continue building a cage of stupidity one bar at a time, Sinclair.  Close down Catallaxy and give yourself credit for not running a hate site, at least.   It won't help your nonsense on every other issue from climate change to stagflation, but at least I would give you credit for improving political discourse.

Colbert does well

Stephen Colbert's lengthy reaction to the (apparent) outcome of the Mueller investigation was sharp, very funny, and passionate:



While I am at it - is it just me, or is the vibe of Trump himself not quite as jubilant as one might have expected?   Sure, he's been talking about exoneration and looking into those who made claims, etc:  but to my mind there is has been a whiff of exhaustion and resignation about it, rather than energy.  

This might be imagination, but is it possible he feels he will miss victimhood status?  Or even regret that a finding against him might have given him grounds to resign from a job he doesn't really like?   OK, maybe that's going too far, but the fact he fell silent on twitter before the Barr letter indicated something a bit odd - who had convinced him not to tweet?   The other funny thing I have seen speculated is that, feeling relieved, he will soon be making admissions that will throw doubt on the whole obstruction/collusion question again.

Making it up as we go along

Over at the TLS, Phillip Goff has a lengthy go at justifying the practice of religion without believing in it. 

It's an interesting argument, perhaps put better here than I have read previously.  Not sure I'm convinced.

In the meantime, I'm developing my own religion based on some combination of the moral sensibilities of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sense of awe from the films of Steven Spielberg, and the all powerful, all seeing knowledge of Google as the forerunner of the Tiplerian/de Chardin-ian Omega Point.   That last bit explains why it will be crucial for my congregation to use Android, not Apple.

But what heresy is this, with Spielberg appearing in support of Apple yesterday?    My belief system is being tested already....

Quick One Nation takes

After watching the "Party for Sale to the Highest Gun Lobby Bidder" show last night I have some comments:

*  what a deeply obnoxious, redneck jerk that Steve Dickson is.   (Head of Queensland One Nation, apparently.)  And he was a Queensland Minister for something, getting high in his office on his power to make regulations about anything?  Shows the embarrassingly shallow pool that politicians, especially Queensland politicians, are drawn from.  [Update - Wikipedia says he was a minister under Campbell Newman, and is 56.  He he looks like he could easily pass for 70.]

* strangely, it seems the NRA actually recognises the difficulty of arguing against the relative success of the Australia gun buy back.

* plainly, they were telling the NRA they were not just there for tactical hints, but they needed money to get more power within Australia.

* will Mark Latham use this as a reason to leave the party?   As soon as he was elected, people have been asking "has he left the party yet?"[Update:  I am told Latham is defending the Party.  What a joke.]

* like Trump supporters, One Nation voters are too dumb to watch the ABC, will vaguely hear something about how One Nation wanted to relax gun laws, and say "sounds OK to me, I'm voting for Pauline anyway.  She's one of us."   The party base is, basically, too dumb to not support the party.  

The Malaysian problems

An interesting paper is at the Lowy Institute site talking about 4 key problems Malaysia has to deal with.

I didn't realise that 35% of the population was non-Muslim.   (That's a lot bigger figure than I expected.)   Sure doesn't feel that way when you are there these days.

I also see in the footnotes some examples of recent, shall we shall, stupid Muslim activism:

Ludicrous examples of such behaviour include attempts by a laundromat in Muar to ban non-Muslims from using its washing machines arguing that their clothing will contaminate Muslim washing (“Muslim-only Laundromat puts Malaysia in a Spin”, Today (Singapore), 27 September 2017), and complaints that a housing project was promoting Christianity because the roof-top air vents resembled crosses (“Stir over Langkawi Housing Project’s Cross-shaped Air Wells Prompts Developer to Repaint Them”, The Straits Times (Singapore), 29 December 2015).

I watch nutters so you don't have to

The reality distortion field caused by fear of an attractive, articulate and pretty sharp political opponent is absurdly powerful: