The Pentecostal PM

I see that Jason has retweeted a James Morrow tweet having a go at those mocking the PM for the shots of his Pentecostal style Easter worship because they would never have a go at Muslim's prostate form of worship in the same way.

OK, let's agree that there is often a Lefty double standard in terms of all Australian Muslims getting a "hey, we respect all of your faith beliefs, save for the extremists who want to blow up people, of course; but we understand they are not true Muslims" versus a conservative Christian  getting a "you and your Church's  condemnation of gay marriage and attitudes to women absolutely appals us and is so medieval and disrespectful."   I get that.

BUT:   the simpler issue here that I would bet is behind a lot of Twitter criticism of Morrison is Australians' dislike of the ostentatious use of religious worship by any politician.

James Morrow ("Prick with a Fork" - he's like those Catallaxy commenters who think they are being amusingly self depreciating in name choice, without realising that most readers just find it accurate)  is from America, I think, where ostentatious worship is still a political thing.  (Curious as to how long it will last, though, given the dramatically reducing faith of the American public as a whole.)

But the Australian standard is to roll our eyes at seeing a politician even just walking into or out of Church when it electorally suits them.  We know most politicians are not regular Church goers and it's only for show, particularly during election campaigns (like Bill Shorten yesterday).  But even for those who do regularly attend (which I think includes the PM?), it's still cringeworthy to see them trying to get self serving publicity by being happy to have the media there as they enter or leave.  Remember Rudd's regular use of that?  It was pretty sickening, especially once the full extend of what a jerk of a boss he could be came to light.

Taking it a step further and getting the cameras inside to watch the PM participation is at another level of cringeworthy.

A dignified politician at most lets cameras show them going in or out, and does not want private worship turning up on the news.

The only good thing about it is that Morrison, who deserves to lose big time, might not realise that it probably hurts more than it helps in public perception?   I think his PR smarts are very lacking.  

Update:   typically, Sinclair Davidson can't understand why many Australians have a problem with Morrison allowing photos of him inside his church to be used during an election campaign.

But he has all the political judgement of a libertarian - which is close to nil.

Hey Sinclair, can you do me a favour and start pressing for more publicity about how many Liberal Party members like the idea of privatising (or "giving away") the ABC?   There's a good chap.
  

News out of Singapore, again

Once again, I feel like recommending Channel News Asia for really interesting news and current affairs content on Singapore and all of South East Asia. 

There is a lot of content on their smart TV app, which I find an easy way to enjoy it.

This story, about the role of social media in the Indian election, is something I found particularly interesting this morning. 

Update:  I also recommend this episode of their "Get Real" program, talking about how social media was used by political parties in the run up to the recent Indonesian election.  

Movies seen

*  Hereditary (on Netflix):   this apparently had a cinema release last year, and received enthusiastic reviews but didn't make much money.  (Although it looks pretty modestly budgeted. and probably was profitable.)     I thought it was a terrible, terrible screenplay:  intended as a spooky/horror family drama, it inspired no tension or frights at all in this viewer, and moved very, very slowly for nearly the entire thing.  The climax became just sillier and way more over the top than necessary.  I said to my son that if he wanted to see a movie that properly built up a sense of mystery and dread as to whether something malevolent is going, he should watch Rosemary's Baby, and when I checked the negative reader reviews on Metacritic,  a few said exactly the same thing.  The one professional critic listed at Metacritic with whom I agreed was Rex Reed - he really disliked it too.

*  Shazam!   Pretty enjoyable, but the more I think about it, the more I realise how much was derivative of other movies and stories.   Like the last Spiderman movie, it featured an overweight Hispanic student (I would be complaining about Hollywood if I were Mexican) and ended with a Ramones song over the credits.  The doors into other dimensions were rather Narnia, as was the ultimate role of the foster family.   The bus falling over the rail had a sequence that was well done, but very reminiscent of the second Jurassic Park movie.  At least the debt owed to Big was wryly acknowledged with a brief floor keyboard bit.  I also thought that some scenes were probably a bit too violent for young kids for whom the movie seeming intended as part of a family audience.   Kids of all ages can handle characters having their head bitten off these days, apparently.   I have to say that some of the human/CGI interactions looked pretty unconvincingly done, too.

Sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but I did for the most part.   I think it could have been better, but had enough laughs to keep me going. [Update:  I also kind of liked that there was one key aspect of the story which was not sugar coated - which was a bit of a novel approach, I thought.]

Some Mueller commentary I liked

Frank Bowman at Slate as to what the report as a whole shows:

The picture of the current president painstakingly etched in the Mueller report is of a man with three dominant characteristics.

First, his narcissism overwhelms all other considerations. Even a more balanced and self-aware person would have found the Russia inquiry politically and personally troublesome. But one cannot escape the feeling (to which Mueller obliquely alludes) that a primary factor in Trump’s desperate efforts to squash the investigation was the fragility of his ego—a manic determination that the epic achievement of his election not be tarnished by even a hint that forces other than Trump played a role. 

Second, Trump believes that, having been elected, the powers of government are to be wielded for his personal and political benefit and the law exists only as a tool to serve his ends. No institution, no law, no set of traditional norms, no professional standard, certainly no moral consideration deserves any deference if it stands in the way of his immediate wishes. 

Third, the thread running through the entire report is Trump’s essential falsity. Mueller confirms that Trump not only lies constantly as part of his public act, but does so privately among his advisers and intimates, and he expects others to lie for him on command. Among the most revealing vignettes is Trump’s effort to convince Don McGahn to lie about the fact that Trump ordered him to secure Mueller’s firing. McGahn, to his credit, refused and showed Trump his notes documenting the order. Trump exploded in astonishment that “lawyers don’t take notes. … I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.” That a subordinate might have personal integrity and be unprepared to sacrifice it on Trump’s command had seemingly never occurred to him....

Whether Donald Trump violated a particular federal obstruction statute is in the end a peripheral matter. The fundamental lesson of the Mueller report is simply that he is fundamentally unfit for office and presents a persistent danger to the integrity of the American legal system. That is the question that Congress and the country must now address. 

Also at Slate on the matter of why Trump denies Russian interference:

The Mueller report also indicates that the president didn’t much care if the results of the Russia investigation made him seem unethical, greedy, or treasonous. He was only worried that any corroboration of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election would undermine the flattering connotations of his victory: that he won America’s popularity contest all on his own. “Several advisors” told the special counsel that Trump believed it would detract from his election triumph if people thought Russia had propped him on top of a few phone books to help him reach the dinner table. 

 Ezra Klein has a very detailed look at the question of impeachment based on the Mueller report (he is against it, but on well considered grounds.)

David Frum summarises what the report finds (particularly of interest to the matter of Julian Assange too - weird anti-Hilary Lefties like Greenwald believe everything Assange asserts):

Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election with the conscious and articulated intent to help elect Donald Trump? Yes.

How important were these interventions to the outcome? Large, possibly decisive.

Did the Trump campaign know that Russia was doing the intervening? From the beginning, cybersecurity experts said Russian hackers had obtained leaked Democratic emails. The Mueller report decisively refutes Julian Assange’s alternative explanation—the lie that WikiLeaks had an “inside source.”

American under a leadership cult

Allahpundit still strikes me as the most sensible conservative commenter at Hot Air - not that I agree with him much of the time, but he's under no illusions about the nature of Trump and his followers.  Here he is talking about Ann Coulter, a nut who has at least retained enough grip on reality to get dismayed at Trump's lying on her pet issue, who has pointed out that Hilary Clinton would have handled the immigration problem better:

She’s overstating her case in the clip below to get under Trump’s and his fans’ skin but a few realities are undeniable:

1. Trump will lie and lie about progress at the border (and everything else) and his more cultish fans will believe anything he says. A Democrat “couldn’t just tweet something out and have everybody say ‘yay,'” an annoyed Coulter notes at one point in the video. For months she’s tweeted sarcastically to counter Trump’s border reassurances. “NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO,” she wrote in a column last month titled “Trump By The Numbers.” There’s not a shred of doubt that a Democratic president presiding over the crush of phony asylum seekers Trump is coping with right now would be rhetorically shredded by border hawks every day, just as there’s no doubt that obstruction allegations about a Democrat like the ones Mueller laid out in his report yesterday would have Republicans demanding impeachment. A Democrat would need to show progress on the border, not merely claim it.

2. The partisan flip side of the argument in point one is that rank-and-file Democrats would have been muted in their criticism of tougher border enforcement measures implemented by a Democratic president. ...

3. It’s possible that Trump’s tough talk about the border without commensurately tough action is actually making the border stampede worse. Various news reports about migrants traveling north from Central America have noted how coyotes and other traffickers have tried to take advantage of Trump’s policies, warning would-be immigrants back home that the border is closing soon so they’d better act now. Trump’s recent “threat” to dump illegals on sanctuary cities might also be backfiring:

Still seems to me that although he understands the nature of the Trump cult, he is way too willing to downplay the disturbing nature of any personality cult in politics and the shocking willingness of Republican politicians to play along because it delivers them power which they fear losing if they contradict the cult membership  "base".   

And what strange bedfellows such American conservatives have - some on the Left, and the libertarian right, who hated Hilary Clinton so much (for reasons I still find pretty puzzling) that they also have developed a shrug-shoulders response to the most impulsively authoritarian, dumb ass President and barely functioning administration by nincompoops we have ever seen.     

Which leads me to the Mueller report:  in all likelihood the Cult of Trump will protect Trump from impeachment, even though there's no doubt that in their heart, a large slab of Republican politicians think it is deserved and would be greatly relieved to see Trump out of office.  (And as soon as he is, there will be yet more stories of his appalling statements and behaviour in private from such politicians suddenly seeking to distance themselves from him.)   But what do Democrats do in the meantime? - they can't really deny that impeachment is deserved, but they know a cult is a cult and that it has all Republicans cowered.

Also, I suspect that the average politically un-engaged American who still sometimes votes sees impeachment as a pretty time wasting exercise almost regardless of the reason, and as such there is risk of it turning them off due to the relative proximity of the next election.    

I strongly suspect that the cowardice of the those Republican politicians who ride on the Cult of Trump's tailcoats will be the great historical takeaway from this weird political era.   

Why never a neat, short-haired Jesus?

We're in the Easter season, so let's talk about it.

I watched some of a documentary Jesus - Countdown to Calvary the other night, hosted by that actor Hugh Bonneville.   It was of some interest, although they kept inserting some pretty cheesy looking  re-enactments with a Jesus played by an actor whose physical appearance was all scruffy helmet hair and anger.   Here:

I mean, does this look like a charismatic bloke?  And the (I think) apostles behind him look like they walked off the stage from the latest production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  
Sure, I suppose Hitler looked a dork yet persuaded millions, but really, I'm getting rather sick of long haired Jesus.

Why?  Because there is a good chance he was pretty short haired, perhaps with a short beard, or maybe with none at all:

When early Christians were not showing Christ as heavenly ruler, they showed Jesus as an actual man like any other: beardless and short-haired. 

But perhaps, as a kind of wandering sage, Jesus would have had a beard, for the simple reason that he did not go to barbers.

General scruffiness and a beard were thought to differentiate a philosopher (who was thinking of higher things) from everyone else. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus considered it "appropriate according to Nature".

Otherwise, in the 1st Century Graeco-Roman world, being clean-shaven and short-haired was considered absolutely essential. A great mane of luxuriant hair and a beard was a godly feature, not replicated in male fashion. Even a philosopher kept his hair fairly short.

A beard was not distinctive of being a Jew in antiquity. In fact, one of the problems for oppressors of Jews at different times was identifying them when they looked like everyone else (a point made in the book of Maccabees). However, images of Jewish men on Judaea Capta coins, issued by Rome after the capture of Jerusalem in 70AD, indicate captive men who are bearded.

So Jesus, as a philosopher with the "natural" look, might well have had a short beard, like the men depicted on Judaea Capta coinage, but his hair was probably not very long.

If he had had even slightly long hair, we would expect some reaction. Jewish men who had unkempt beards and were slightly long-haired were immediately identifiable as men who had taken a Nazirite vow. This meant they would dedicate themselves to God for a period of time, not drink wine or cut their hair - and at the end of this period they would shave their heads in a special ceremony in the temple in Jerusalem (as described in Acts chapter 21, verse 24).

But Jesus did not keep a Nazirite vow, because he is often found drinking wine - his critics accuse him of drinking far, far too much of it (Matthew chapter 11, verse 19). If he had had long hair, and looked like a Nazirite, we would expect some comment on the discrepancy between how he appeared and what he was doing - the problem would be that he was drinking wine at all.

I did post briefly on this topic back in 2011, but it would seem no matter how many times people with knowledge of the era point out that neat hair was common back in the day, we just never get movies or re-enactments which depict him and the apostles that way.

Time for this to be rectified. 

Not hard to imagine why, at all

An article at The Atlantic asks:

Why Are So Many Teen Athletes Struggling With Depression? 

“The professional consensus is that the incidence of anxiety and depression among scholastic athletes has increased over the past 10 to 15 years,” says Marshall Mintz, a New Jersey–based sports psychologist who has worked with teenagers for 30 years. As one 2015 study by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association found, “Many student-athletes report higher levels of negative emotional states than non-student-athlete adolescents.” Though parents and coaches are often best positioned to remedy the problem, they also often make it worse.

Gee, I don't know:  who'd have thought that intense pressure to perform and the enormous amount of time that training can involve at the cost of normal teenage socialising could possibly be harmful? 

Satellite temperatures in the news

As explained in the Washington Post:

A high-profile NASA temperature data set, which has pronounced the last five years the hottest on record and the globe a full degree Celsius warmer than in the late 1800s, has found new backing from independent satellite records — suggesting the findings are on a sound footing, scientists reported Tuesday.

If anything, the researchers found, the pace of climate change could be somewhat more severe than previously acknowledged, at least in the fastest warming part of the world — its highest latitudes.

“We may actually have been underestimating how much warmer [the Arctic’s] been getting,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature data, and who was a co-author of the new study released in Environmental Research Letters.

The satellite record in question is called AIRS, and raises questions about the accuracy of Roy Spencer's UAH record.   But I thought I had seen that UAH did incorporate some Aqua 2 (the satellite) information?   Could be wrong about that, and no time to check.  Spencer will no doubt be weighing in with some criticisms soon.

More from Sinclair Davidson's nut haven

Just when I thought that scenes of (presumably) religious Catholic Parisians walking through the streets singing hymns and lamenting the damage to Notre Dame may have given the conservatives of Catallaxy some heart, I read ageing prat "Percy Popinjay":

The French are quite possibly the most vile people to have existed in human history. Never, ever forget that.

People really need to be more careful with social media

Look at this:  a Democrat (!) politician makes a tweet about something a friend in Paris claims he heard, quickly deletes it, but it's too late. Already it is grabbed by Infowars and nut sites and a key part of a Notre Dame "truther" conspiracy.

Have you ever seen a more intense desire by those on the nutty Right to discover an incident was Islamic terrorism?  

I blame Donald Trump

An unusual topic gets a run in Nature news:

The number of children in the United States who swallowed coins, toys and other small objects nearly doubled between 1995 and 2015, an analysis shows. Some of these objects can cause serious harm when ingested, and possibly even death.

In 1995, an estimated 22,000 children under the age of six visited hospital emergency departments across the country after swallowing items such as marbles, buttons or rings. In 2015, the number had risen to about 43,000, an average annual increase of 4.4% over the two decades. Researchers published their analysis¹ on 12 April in Pediatrics....

Coins were by far the most common type of object swallowed (62%), followed by toys, jewellery and batteries. And between 1995 and 2015, there was a 60-fold increase in the proportion of children ingesting batteries, from 0.14% to 8.4% (see ‘Small objects’). Button batteries — used in watches, remote controls and electronic toys — were the most common type swallowed. These small, flat objects can damage or even puncture the walls of the oesophagus if they become stuck.

Yeah, the cases of kids dying from a swallowed coin battery can be really tragic.  

Cult member in state of panic

Steve Kates seems to have missed the news that the Cathedral is not entirely lost:

Kates, surely Australia's leading academic member of the Cult of Trump, is (like all of the conservative and alt. Right) in a constant froth that All of the Great and Glorious Western Civilisation is About to Collapse.   I am sure if I bother looking back that he was in a huge panic that Islamic State was going to sweep in from the East and be burning down the Vatican within mere years.   (He's not even, as far as I can tell, particularly religious.  A lot of the nutty Right seems to be like that - ex practising Christians who nonetheless think the Christianity is crucial to the ongoing moral and financial health of the globe.)

I see that even one regular at Catallaxy gives Kates a "pull yourself together" slap in the face:

Nice sarcasm!

Count me as amused

Notre Dame and my slidebox

I visited Notre Dame in about 1986, and was very impressed.   On the same trip, I had found the cathedrals of England too light inside to give any great sense of age, and their role felt more as  architectural tourist destination than living place of worship.   But Notre Dame was darker, had the haze of incense in the yellowish light, and held masses which gave a real sense of reverence.   Its atmosphere was distinctly medieval, or how I felt medieval should be, at least.  

I must have some photos of it in the slide box.  I do have a slide scanner that I haven't used for many, many years, and probably gives a much lower quality than what you can get now. 

Still, this gives me motivation to scan some and see what I can "save".  

Meanwhile, I see that its partial destruction is like catnip to alt.right conspiracy theorists.   I'll link to stuff later.

And finally, if ever there is a company which ought to contribute to its reconstruction, it would be Disney.  It is planning a live action version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, and almost certainly it would have been a complete CGI creation anyway.   The company should make the movie and donate all profit to the re-construction.   Given that could easily be several hundred million dollars, it should go a long way towards the task.