Bird banned

Graeme, you have obnoxious and offensive beliefs which you insist on repeating.   I'm not here to assist the broadcast of those.  

All new comments I see from you, on any topic, will be deleted, sooner or later.  

Go be an obnoxious, insulting nutter on your own blog.

Peaked early, maybe

I feel a bit mean making this observation out loud, because it's possible he is a fragile character who Googles himself looking for affirmation.

Anyhow - I saw Josh Thomas on ABC Breakfast this morning, and I have to say that I find him more "mannered" than ever.   Maybe he's naturally nervous all the time, but he sure didn't come across as natural - it feels like it's all a performance.

They played a clip from a series he has made in the US, which is apparently another comedy/drama like Please Like Me (the charms of which escaped me), and his acting in it seemed to be a severe case of trying too hard to look awkward.   I wonder how the critics are going to take it.  

Thomas is also about to embark on a stand up tour, and he seems to be indicating that it is going to be yet another case of a stand up comedy act that is an attempt at self confessional therapy after a "difficult period".   (He's been single for a year or so, after having 3 different relationships in his 20's.  Yeah, a real tragedy.)   I don't know why this has to be the basis of so much comedy now - I don't think it's psychologically healthy, and I thought Hannah Gadsby had confirmed that for everyone who didn't already realise it as a matter of common sense.

In any case, I don't wish him failure - I just have trouble seeing what his fan base sees in him.

Sinclair Davidson - celebrating the dumb and inane for, what, 15 years now?

Yeah, because if you're going to devastate trillions of dollars of ocean side investment and infrastructure, it's better to do it as rapidly as possible with maximum inundation. 

The animating underclass

I haven't seen much of the content of the Youtube channel Asian Boss - but a lot of it does seem interesting.

I watched this one in full, and was really surprised at the terrible pay and conditions for the (I assume) thousands of animators upon which so much Japanese TV (and movie) content depends:

Big day for an Emperor

From the Japan Times:

Clad in a dark orange robe only worn by emperors on special occasions, Emperor Naruhito will proclaim his enthronement Tuesday at the Imperial Palace, offering a speech atop a canopied throne followed by banzai cheers from guests.

The 59-year-old monarch — who ascended the throne on May 1 following the abdication of his father, Emperor Emeritus Akihito, the previous day — will formally announce his enthronement from an elevated dais within the palace in Tokyo. The event will be attended by some 2,000 guests from Japan and about 180 countries and international organizations.

The Sokuirei Seiden no Gi enthronement ceremony at the Seiden State Hall will start at 1 p.m. in the Pine Chamber (Matsu no Ma) state room, with the emperor ascending to the 6.5-meter-high canopied takamikura throne. Empress Masako will be seated on the adjacent michōdai throne during the ceremony.

Hope we get to see it on TV.

The exact form of the ritual is still a little controversial:

The Imperial House Law only states that an enthronement ceremony is held when an imperial succession takes place, and does not detail how to stage the rite. The previous rite, held in November 1990 for Emperor Akihito, followed the example of the enthronement ceremony of his father, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa. That was based on Tokyokurei, a 1909 order on the formalities of the ceremony. The directive was abolished after World War II.

The government has decided to follow precedent despite criticism that doing so contravenes the postwar constitutional separation of state and religion, as well as the sovereignty of the people, by having the emperor proclaim his enthronement from a high place as the prime minister stands below.

About Chile

Will Wilkinson has a thread about Chile on Twitter that is worth reading.  It starts with this:

Whip it

Yesterday, after making pumpkin scones for (possibly?) the first time*, I whipped some cream by hand - definitely for the first time.

It was not so hard.  Sure, I wasn't sure if it was working at all, but then you get that satisfying sudden transition from thick liquid to stuff so thick it's standing up by itself.   I only needed a small amount, so a small metal bowl and medium sized whisk did it fine. 

Given that this woman had trouble whipping, I'm pleased it worked for me first time.


* Not entirely sure they are worth the effort - it seems a common complaint, derived from the uncertain water content in mashed pumpkin, that recipes make for too sticky a dough to which a lot more flour has to be added.  That happened to me, too; but then again, I did add more pumpkin than called for in the recipe I was sort of following.

Automation and Yang

I missed this rather good article at Slate last week that criticises Andrew Yang's automation unemployment apocalypse views as lazy and not well justified when you look at all studies on the topic.

Did Japanese parents tell their kids this as a campfire story?

The catastrophic Johnson

Well, I did enjoy this Nick Cohen column on Boris Johnson, who reached a "new deal" Brexit by doing a complete turnaround on key one point within a fortnight.  He paints a picture of him in the following context:

In his classic study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon analysed British generals who had led their men to pointless deaths from Crimea to Arnhem. How familiar his diagnosis feels. Dixon identified “overweening ambition dedicated to one goal – self-advancement” as a persistent fault; and that sounds familiar. Catastrophic men equated “war with sport”, he continued, and one thinks of Theresa May’s warning in 2016 that “politics isn’t a game.”

She surely had Johnson in mind. For him, it is a game and winning is all. Last year, he told the Democratic Unionist party that a border in the Irish Sea “would be damaging to the fabric of the union”. He jutted out what passes for his jaw and with a Churchillian boom thundered: “I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

Last week, he signed up to “such an arrangement” because betraying his allies wins him the game of politics. Dixon noticed “an underestimation, sometimes bordering on the arrogant, of the enemy”. And one thinks of Dominic Cummings, so lost in his deluded machismo that he told EU countries that they “will go to the bottom of the queue” if they dared challenge the mighty Britain. A mere fortnight later, Johnson capitulated to Brussels so thoroughly the EU will no longer has to worry about the Irish border and can adopt the toughest of stances when and if trade negotiations begin.

No one should be surprised. It is an essential part of the catastrophic character that catastrophists do not learn from their mistakes or realise they are making them.

On the small matters as well as the large, political incompetents mirror military incompetents. Generals who display “a love of bull, smartness, precision and strict preservation of the military pecking order” are prone to lead regiments to disaster, Dixon wrote. Remember Jacob Rees-Mogg’s semi-literate instruction to his civil servants that they must address untitled men as “esq” when the practice is archaic. Or his insistence that they never use “hopefully” in his presence: even though the adverb has stood in for “I hope” for centuries and no serious linguist has the smallest problem with it.

There seems to be a feeling about that, despite this current (apparent) delay, Parliament will sooner or later pass this deal, in large part because they are utterly sick of having to deal with it as a problem.  We'll see.

Some interesting comments on economics here

From The Guardian:

World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King

Past crashes spawned new thinking and reform but nothing has changed since 2008 banking meltdown, says former Bank of England boss

Kidneys for sale

Today on CNA, I learned about poor Filipinos selling their kidneys through social media (the report fingers Facebook, which says it's against their rules, but they don't know what's going on til someone tells them.)



Interestingly, it seems the story has sparked some racism comments on Youtube:

Is that sarcasm at perceived Singaporean racism?  Or actual racism?

And what about this comment?:

One other thing about watching CNA - I know that Singapore doesn't work like your normal, messy democracies, but when you see government ministers talking on CNA, my goodness they seem so, so reasonable and smart and sensible compared to 90% of the politicians in most Western nations.

Saturday jacarandas

A nice line of blooming jacaranda trees at St Lucia:

Not even scientifically accurate

I meant to give a Muntz-ian "ha ha" when I noticed this story a week or so ago, but forgot.

Turns out Interstellar, which I consider awful, is not so scientifically accurate after all.

Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole? 

Short answer: almost certainly not.

And I don't even like horses

7.30's story last night on the thoroughbred racehorse business and it's pretence that it really takes care to avoid having failed, even relatively young, horses ground up into greyhound mince, was a gruesome expose of a sham industry that was really hard to watch.

The treatment of the horses at the abattoir at Caboolture was awful, and the attitude of the men who worked there woeful.   If any man has to make a living that way, I have no respect for them unless they have some at least some empathy for the animal.   There was zero on display last night.

But the whole show reinforced my prejudices against the whole racing enterprise - the alleged sport of kings that has expanded on the back of (mostly) saps with a gambling problem, as well as those who occasionally like to play dress ups and get conspicuously drunk while ignoring the inherent cruelty of breeding far too many horses and disposing of them as soon as they are too expensive to care for.