Only the best speechwriters

Seems to me that, although they are obviously hitting his super fragile ego with their tweeting about his ramp walking abilities (honestly, it was not that bad), anti-Trumpers should be making more of a point of this embarrassing reference in his actual speech:

Update:  Fred Kaplan at Slate gives a review of the terrible speech, which seems pretty obviously only held at all for Trump to be able to use in election ads.

Google continues to educate me - this time about the ISS

I was aware that the International Space Station used gyros to adjust its position in orbit, but I never understood how complex maintaining the space station is.   You certainly don't get to put one in orbit and just let it continue on its way without lots of monitoring.    

This video gives a good explanation:



I also liked this little detail about the computer that monitors it:

The attitude control computer (GNC MDM) contains the software that does all of the necessary calculations for attitude control. It takes in the actual attitude and subtracts the commanded attitude to determine the error it needs to correct. It knows the rates of the ISS. That is very sensitive, so sensitive that we can tell when the crew wake up by watching the behavior of the CMGs as the crew start to move around the vehicle. The software also needs a set of user provided parameters such as the vehicle mass properties and inertia tensors. These are located in data slots called CCDBs (controller configuration databases). We have a stockpile of these CCDBs for different vehicle configurations. For example, if a Progress cargo vehicle arrives and docks to the Russian Segment, we will have a CCDB slot designed for that configuration. When it leaves, we will swap to another one.

Recipe tried

Yes, this recipe which I posted about before for future reference:

is really nice.  Not exactly a main evening meal on its own [what vegan recipe ever is :)], but I liked it a lot.  I even bought  a $4.50 pomegranate and felt that the dish really did need its sharpness.   (My wife grumbled about the fruit's cost, but with sweet potatoes at only $2.50 a kg at the moment, we could afford it.)  I also reheated half a potato in the microwave today for lunch [power level 7 for 2 minutes] and it came out nice, again.

I wish my family all liked it as much as I did.  It's one of those dishes where they go "yeah, it's OK", but with insufficient enthusiasm that indicates they would not welcome it being made again any time soon.

Bad blood(s)

I recently posted a favourable review of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, so I was pretty keen to watch his Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, especially seeing it seemed to be getting very strong reviews.

It doesn't deserve them.

A four word description kept coming to mind while watching it - way too heavy handed.  Practically everything in the movie can be so categorised:  the history lessons (although no doubt worthy); the score (you'd swear it was a Spielberg-esque John Williams one at times); the amount of blood spray any bullet wound seems to cause (I still suspect gaming culture has caused Hollywood to go over the top in blood sprays); the other bits of violent dismembering (hard to speak more of that without being a bit of a spoiler); the dialogue which often feels less than naturalistic.  Even the portrayal of the Vietnamese (and French!) felt a bit off to me.

It also feels as if the movie has been made 10 or 20 years too late.   As one reviewer has noted, it would have made a lot more sense (in terms of how hard the guys must have expected their task to be) if they were doing it as younger men than the 70-odd year olds that they must be to have the movie set in the present day.  Is it a screenplay that has been around 20 years waiting to be produced?  That could explain it.

Having said it all this, it's one of those movies that is obviously so well intentioned that it feels mean giving it a strongly negative review.   And I can say it never bored me;  it is well filmed and looks like it had a significant budget; and I liked the aspect ratio changes to reflect different eras.  But I just kept thinking - this is so heavy handed.   And imitative in ways that seemed unnecessary and more distracting than useful.  

It's very clear to me that the movie is getting strong reviews more for its (extremely) topical politics than its intrinsic success as a movie.   And (even allowing for racists and contrarians giving it a zero), the audience reviews on websites I have seen are reflecting this, as they are on average well below the marks given by professional reviewers.  I expect that this will continue, as more viewers rate the film on line.  I've noted on Rotten Tomatoes that one reviewer predicts that it will not age well, and I strongly suspect that's right.

I don't agree with this bad review's complaint about how slow it is - as I have indicated, that didn't bother me - but overall, it still rings closer to my perceptions than the glowing reviews.

And you know why I have some confidence in my assessment - my son seemed to agree with any critical comment I made while watching it.   

One final point - I often complain about violence in movies, but it isn't really at the heart of my dissatisfaction here, partly because I often felt it looked so overdone as to not be realistic.  I do wish, however, that Lee did not put in the full clip of that famous Saigon street execution at the start of the film.   He initially cuts away from it, but then goes back to show the full aftermath.  My son seems to think that if that can be used in a movie or documentary, then no one ever has any reason to complain about movie violence of any kind.   In a way he is almost right - but the answer is, no, it should not be used in movies.



   

Another unfortunate English childhood

I was reading a review of a new book about Charles Dickens by the (extremely prolific) writer AN Wilson, and was struck by this part near the end:

In his final chapter, he remembers first encountering episodes from Dickens at the age of eight or nine at his private school, which was “in effect a concentration camp run by sexual perverts”. The teacher who introduced him to Dickens was himself utterly sinister and Dickensian, the skill with which he impersonated Fagin and Squeers “all too convincing”. The shards of Dickens sustained his spirits among the privations and abuse visited on him by the paedophile headmaster and his monstrous wife, uninhibited sadists in Wilson’s vivid, detailed account.

Wilson is 10 years older than me, so we are talking of a dire schooling situation in the 1950's, not from earlier in the 20th century.

I see that Wilson wrote a column in 2011 in the Guardian about what the headmaster and his wife did, and how he escaped.  It was appalling treatment, but it sounds as if he was not one of the boys sexually touched, even if tormented in other ways.

As Wilson came out of the experience to have a very successful life, is it OK to say that I find it blackly amusing to hear, once again, of the terrible reputation of what went on in British private schooling in the first half 20th century.   I am reminded of the startling passage in Evelyn Waugh's autobiography about the brazen teacher who made an open statement of what he did with a student, only to leave the school shortly thereafter to continue a career of bouncing from school to school with sudden departures after preying on boys.    (That's one thing the internet has, to its credit, help prevent.)

Why was this such a British thing?   And one which the well-to-do were seemingly prepared to risk exposing their kids to by packing them off to boarding school?   Well look here, it seems someone has written a whole book about that:  Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class.   The Google preview of the book (I found it by googling Evelyn Waugh and pedophile teacher) contains this provocative explanation by his son Auberon written in the Spectator in 1977 (and one which I suspect his editor would not let him write today):

Well, good for Auberon, I guess.   But I'm rather glad I was born here and not in an English family wealthy enough to consider boarding school.

Update:  because I feel a bit guilty about this post, I'll add a link to another article at The Guardian about some anti-boarding school campaigning (not only for its poor reputation for sexual assault, but its general psychological harm to do with a feeling of parental abandonment) from 2014.

In other American cult news (apart from the Trump one)

This sex and nudity cult is called "Carbon Nation"??  And what's this about "refraining from bathing"?  Even nudists like to shower, don't they?

This happened in Hawaii:

Police have arrested 21 individuals in a pair of sweeps in Puna subdivisions related to Gov. Ige’s COVID-19 emergency proclamation....

Social media posts have claimed that members of the “Carbon Nation” are on the Big Island. The group is referred to in numerous media accounts as a cult that has been kicked out of Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.

Police confirmed the group’s leader, Eligio Lee Bishop, a 38-year-old self-professed cult leader known as “Nature Boy,” was among those arrested Thursday in HPP, but didn’t give the Tribune-Herald the names of the others arrested on the second day.

According to a Dec. 6, 2019, story in the Costa Rica Star, Bishop refers to himself as “God,” and the group “believes in nudism, polygamy, and refraining from bathing.”

The Costa Rica news outlet’s story also said Bishop “allegedly requires cult members to surrender all their money, credit cards, bank accounts, and pin numbers, in order to worship with the group.”

Googling more about "Nature Boy", I see from a 2017 article that his move into cult-dom was a relatively late career choice:

In 2009, he was arrested for forcible entry in Georgia. Two years later, he faced charges of theft and was arrested for aggravated battery. No charges were laid in the latter incident, he said. He was a model and an exotic entertainer, confessing in a Facebook video to having sex for money.

Attempting to avoid furthering a life of crime, Bishop attended school to become a barber. He filed for a business licence in 2014, opening his own shop in Georgia.

He also claims to have worked on the Mo'Nique Show — a talk show hosted by the Atlanta comedian of the same name.

In a Facebook post from June 2016, Bishop posed with a backpack, writing "the Ascension journey has begun." He was heading for Honduras, urging commenters on the post to let him be their "guide out of the hell realm."

His following grew over time. Now, he has more than 17,000 on Facebook.

Another site called "Cult News" goes into a lot of detail about this nutter and his beliefs:

Nature Boy preaches that the “end times” are near, and that he is the messiah. His rhetoric includes a theory about people of color living close to the equator. According to him, this is imperative for maintaining health and peace of mind. One must leave what he calls “Babylon” (America) and live a natural lifestyle in the Tropics. There, people must eat his version of a B6 diet, and defecate at the base of trees. There will be no need for a doctor or medication. In the world of Nature Boy, all disease is psychological. 

There's more, but it still seems that he into cult leadership mainly for the sex.  As are most of the women followers, I assume.  Although they do have to put up with men who don't wash.  

Update:  good grief, he has had a surprisingly big presence on Youtube as well as Facebook for years.  An absolute rambling nut.

Some dinner

Looking at the 'real' reason for Trump's Dallas trip...

....you have to suspect that some of those half mill donors must be worried about getting value for money.   Even the betting markets have finally turned against him.

Chait on illiberal liberals

I think Jonathan Chait's column "The Still-Vital Case of Liberalism in a Radical Age" sums it up pretty well:

The preconditions that permitted these events to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left. My own writing output reflects this enormous disproportionality. It is also true that the intended (if not always actual) target of the left’s illiberal impulses — entrenched systems of inequality — remain an oppressive force in American life, and that the cause to dismantle them is just.

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant. One can oppose different evils, even those evils aligned against each other, without assigning them equal weight.

Both American public opinion and many institutions have moved left on race and gender during this time. It is a positive change opening humane new possibilities for reform, but it has come along with some illiberal side effects. Over the last few weeks, as protests against the murder of George Floyd produced outrageous brutality against protesters, the good primary effect and the bad side effect seem to have advanced rapidly in tandem.

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

Working from these premises, many reactions by the left that might seem bizarre to somebody unfamiliar with this world (say, an older or more moderate person who doesn’t work in academia or the progressive movement) can make perfect sense. Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety.

 I could probably be accused of saying that the issues of illiberal colleges is one of "trivial hijinks of some college students" too, and I am happy to be gently reprimanded for that.

But presumably Chait would agree with me that, in the bigger picture of world problems (*cough*, climate change; *cough* economic policy) it is a relatively small issue.

We're having a moment

People, people:  let's calm down a bit.

It's always tricky, judging where righteous anger turns into counter-productive acts of mere symbolism which start to ostracise maximum public support for worthwhile reforms.

But some of the things going on at the moment are starting look like they are tipping over that edge.


Update:  on Aboriginal issues - I just managed to read Henry Ergas's column today in the Australian (you can get to it behind the paywall if you go to the link on his tweet.)   I think he's going to cop some criticism for the way he gets to an end position that I have suggested many times.

Look at these paragraphs:

It was not indigenous Australians who destroyed thousands of Aboriginal jobs in country areas by suddenly raising the wages of cattle station labour in 1965; it was the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Nor was it indigenous Australians who decided, just as the commission’s judgment was having its devastating effects, to massively subsidise remote Aboriginal settlements, condemning generation after generation to inadequate housing, an education scarcely worth having and a future shorn of jobs and hope; it was the Whitlam and Fraser governments.

And it was not indigenous Australians who removed the prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol by, and the sale of alcohol to, Aboriginal people that had been in force throughout Australia since 1929.

It was state and territory governments that, in keeping with the 1960s zeitgeist of self-determination, repealed those controls and decriminalised public drunkenness, plunging fraying Aboriginal communities into a spiral of alcohol-fuelled violence and helping to ensure that indigenous offenders are nearly three times more likely than non-indigenous offenders to be intoxicated when they commit their crimes.

This annoys even me - someone who has never managed to find much interest in aboriginal culture. (So sue me: I find cities and technology of any kind more interesting than low tech hunter/gathering, or even low level farming if you want to believe Pascoe.)

I just think it's counterproductive and insulting to suggest that following "the zeitgeist" of self - determination was the wrong thing to do over the last 70 years.   I think it's even wrong to broadly suggest that government was wrong to support at least those substantial settlements where people did want to keep a connection to land.

But at the end of the day - yes I think it is fair to say that the problem is that living in a location, or even a cultural milieu (such a family with a long history of welfare dependence, even if within a town) with little or no chance of having a strong connection to the economy (not just in a financial sense, but in the broader human sense of the opportunities for a broader range of life experiences) causes boredom and a sense of lack of purpose.   (Which leads to drug abuse, higher crime, and continues in a cycle.)   But the trick is how to encourage people to get out of the situation, and the balance between self determination and policies to encourage people to make the choice to try something new.

This is a challenge for all indigenous peoples in the modern world.  Cultural pride (and our respect for their mistreatment in the past) can take some a certain distance to self respect and good functioning in the modern world; but to be honest, the evidence is that, at least for the Australian situation, it's not going to be a universal panacea to their problems.   I do wish well intentioned people would stop thinking that it is. 

Yay for the pangolin

The Guardian has reported:

Pangolin scales have been removed from an official 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine in a move lauded by animal protection groups as a key step in stamping out trade in the scaly anteater, the world’s most trafficked mammal....

The news of the delisting from the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pharmacopoeia, reported by China’s Health Times newspaper, comes after the country’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration (SFGA) raised the protected status of pangolins to the highest level last week, with immediate effect.

“I am very encouraged,” said Zhou Jinfeng, secretary general of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), who has long pushed for better protection of pangolins and for stopping the use of their scales. “Our continuous efforts for several years have not been in vain.”

In February, China’s National People’s Congress pushed forward a ban on the consumption of meat from wild animals, though there has been uncertainty as to what wildlife will still be allowed for use in TCM and the fur and leather industries.

Nice photo the article ran, too:

JK explains

JK Rowling writes a detailed explanation of her interest in, and concern about, transgender issues.  It's well written, and to my mind, well reasoned and convincing.

The rabid attacks on her are undeserved.   She deserves more support from some prominent folk, and hope she gets it.

Some quick takes

*   Yeah, this business of attacking statues:  it's starting to get a bit too much of a "cultural revolution 2" vibe about it.   It's not the end of the world if some ill deserving historical figure gets his bronze dumped in the river; but it's not as if it ultimately does much to achieve social reform, either.   Moving Confederate hero statues in an orderly manner, though - that's OK.   But kids - getting out and voting is much, much more important.

*   Speaking of Confederate - the NASCAR decision to ban the flag is, I reckon, going to drive the wingnut Right berserk.   Honestly, I would not be surprised if there is some nutter who goes on a shooting rampage over this.   I have opined before that it's pretty incredible that it has taken this long for Americans to realise the insult that pride in that flag represents to such a huge slab of Americans.   David Roberts recently tweeted:

and recommended this New Yorker piece by the great Adam Gopnik:  How the South Won the Civil War.   I haven't read it yet, but must do so soon, before the shooting starts again.

Or - am I misreading this?   Is this cultural moment so strong (and polling indicates it is) that even the great majority of NASCAR fans will accept this?  

*  Ah, Sinclair Davidson:   out there calling a private company's decision not to provide a movie as part of its product line "censorship".   Who knew that a libertarian could be so post modern as to insist "censorship" means just whatever he wants it to mean, and those private companies had better agree with him and stop doing it.  And so should the ABC, or it should be defunded! 

He just makes the stupidest statements on issues involving racism, closely followed by issues of free speech and "censorship".  

Oh, and to round it off:   he's a complete loser on the matter of tobacco plain packaging.  Ha.

An air of desperation Part 3

American policing noted

Here's what follows in the tweets:

Essentially, it appears this was a classic "good guy with a gun" scenario. And once again, because the good guy was black, it didn't end well. 

Store owner Kevin Penn was holding a robber at gunpoint while he waited for police to arrive on March 15. When they did, his lawyer tells AL dot com, he announced the gun, took out the clip and ejected the bullet in the chamber. 

 

Within 4 seconds of officers entering Penn's store, one of them had punched Penn, breaking his jaw and knocking out several teeth, per the article. 

 

As I type this, Decatur Police are reportedly holding a press conference to discuss the incident. Why didn't they do so in mid-March, when it happened? Because the public finally found out this weekend with the release of the video to social media by Penn's supporters....

Like many Alabamians, I'm reminded of another recent "good guy with a gun" scenario that ended even more tragically. E.J. Bradford, a black man, was fatally shot in the back by Hoover Police after pulling a gun to stop an active shooter at the mall on Thanksgiving Day 2018. 

 

Seeing Bradford running, police immediately assumed he was the shooter and shot at him 4 times, killing him. Only later was the public told he was not the killer, who was still on the loose. The officers' actions were later ruled "justified"

Bram, Walt and Dracula

Well, this is all amusingly odd.   From a review of a book about Walt Whitman:

Bram Stoker wrote a fan letter to Whitman in which he seems to be angling for a date (‘I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked…’). Stoker proselytised zealously for Whitman’s work, which, even in bowdlerised form, struck British readers as an American offshoot of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘fleshly school’. Stoker did meet Whitman, but can’t have experienced his magnetism as entirely positive if we are to believe the claim that he went on to base the character of Dracula on the American poet.

This made me realise that I knew nothing about Bram Stoker.  According to Wikipedia:

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed homosexual who used his fiction as an outlet for his sexual frustrations.^[17] In 1912, he demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain: it has been suggested that this was due to self-loathing and to disguise his own vulnerability.^[18] Possibly fearful, and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of his friend Oscar's trials generated, Stoker began writing Dracula only weeks after Wilde's conviction.^[18][19]

Here's a post at Brain Pickings with Stoker's first, gushing, letter to Whitman.  It seems the bit about his weight is edited out?   Another site gives us the full Stoker self disclosure:

I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like— people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me.

Stoker included his physical description, because he surmised from Whitman’s works and his photograph that he would be interested to know the “personal appearance of your correspondents.” Wrote Stoker: “You are I know a keen physiognomist.”

Actually, that article goes on to give details of 3 times Bram met Walt, and seems to deny that they went badly.   So Walt may not be the inspiration for Dracula after all.  Bram Stoker still sounds quite the oddball, though.