Colbert, and International Improve Women Day

Colbert Report has been very funny lately. I still say he far outshines Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers. Beneath the irony laden act, Colbert certainly seems not as ideological driven as Stewart, and capable of some genuine warmth towards conservative figures. (See his recent interview with White House insider Tony Snow.)

The difference is that watching The Daily Show leaves the strong impression that the host and audience just know that all conservatives are idiots. The Colbert Report, despite being a complete satire of conservative TV, still ends up feeling more good natured and generous in its assessment of conservatism.

But am I just being deceived by Colbert's successful acting?

Having now read his Wikipedia entry and a lengthy article about him in Vanity Fair, I am happy to see that my suspicions are somewhat confirmed. Colbert the actor comes from a very large southern Catholic family that was touched by tragedy, now has an apparently happy family of his own, and teaches Sunday School.

Of course, that alone doesn't necessarily stop him from now being as ideologically liberal as they come. But it does indicate that I was correct in detecting some underlying sympathetic understanding of conservative politics and religion on his show.

Anyhow, this was all by way of preamble to an irony filled segment from Colbert for International Women's Day:

Smell like an Egyptian

An unsanitised history of washing - Times Online

Nothing much new in this article, if you've already read stuff about the history of personal hygiene. Except for this little bit:

The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma.

I wonder what scents that involved. (Big potential for poor taste jokes here, I suppose.)

This paragraph from the article is of some interest too:

The outsiders usually err on the side of dirtiness. The ancient Egyptians thought that sitting a dusty body in still water, as the Greeks did, was a foul idea. Late 19th-century Americans were scandalised by the dirtiness of Europeans; the Nazis promoted the idea of Jewish uncleanliness. At least since the Middle Ages, European travellers have enjoyed nominating the continent's grubbiest country - the laurels usually went to France or Spain. Sometimes the other is, suspiciously, too clean, which is how the Muslims, who scoured their bodies and washed their genitals, struck Europeans for centuries. The Muslims returned the compliment, regarding Europeans as downright filthy.

Overanalysis

Disney keeps killing movie mothers | NEWS.com.au

Well, I can't say that I ever spent much time thinking about how dead mothers is a recurring theme in Disney movies and TV. It's true enough, I guess.

But to then blame that for making kids not miss their real life mothers while they are at work: that's just a silly stretch.

One could also make the point that a recurring theme of american sitcoms has been the wife/mother who is secretly the one with power and common sense in the household. (Think about it, if you never have before.) Has this made generations of kids resent their father for being stupid?

Cuts for the sake of cuts

Razor gang slashes carers' bonus | The Australian

LABOR will scrap annual bonuses of $1600 paid to carers as its budget razor gang carves deep into welfare programs to cut spending and curb inflation.

It will replace the payments with a higher utilities allowance but will leave the sick and disabled and their carers hundreds of dollars a year worse off.

Yes, it's important to stop those profligate carers who you always see out at the best restaurants, buying French champagne and using their PDAs.

On Hamas

Comment is free: Hamas' uncritical friends

Ah, there's nothing like a Guardian Comment is Free post that is anti-Hamas to get the readers raging.

The post makes an interesting point about increasing Arab criticism of Hamas and Hizbollah's tactics.

Will it have any effect, though?

Back in Australia, I note that Antony Loewenstein is currently raging about the Gaza situation, with (as you would expect) nary a criticism to be seen of Hamas' rocket tactics. But has he got comments turned off , or is he simply being pretty much ignored these days?

I did see his book "My Israel Question" on sale for $5 recently.

The Lucy situation

I'm still enjoying a lot of That Mitchell & Webb Look (9.30 Wednesdays on ABC1). Some of their silly sketches are very Spike Milligan-ish (especially Numberwang,) but basically I think they are good comedy actors. Try this:

What blew in 536?

RealClimate

Check the link for a post about new evidence suggesting that the likely cause of a globally recorded dimming of the sun in 536AD was a large volcanic eruption. (A comet was the previous suspect.) But still no one seems certain as to which volcano it was (except it was likely in the tropics.)

The story quotes Michael the Syrian:

"The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only a feeble shadow … the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes."

That's one way to counter global warming.

What's Mandarin for "Pardon?"

Bjork's Shanghai surprise: a cry of 'Tibet!' | World news | guardian.co.uk

International Icelandic diplomat Bjork confuses an audience in China:

Bjork is under attack after shouting "Tibet! Tibet!" at the end of her song Declare Independence at a concert in Shanghai.

The crowd did not erupt into jeers, however:

...another audience member, Gabriel Monroe, told the Guardian most people did not register the remark at first.

"One of my friends thought she was saying 'to bed', because she had mentioned it was the last song," he said.

Slogans for You; Slogans for Us

Cliché, not plagiarism, is the problem with today's pallid political discourse. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Hitchens writes amusingly about the vapidity of the modern American political slogan. His comments apply equally well to Australia:

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.

Of course, in Australia presently, there are not just slogans, but whole pages of cliché-ridden "vision speak" issuing forth from those who see the very concept of the 2020 summit as some sort of balm for the abraded soul of the nation:

Having survived the Sinister Prime Minister, we need to put down some of our shields, unclench our fists and let down our guard enough to dream again together. The Rudd Government's gesture is grand. Let's rise to the occasion of the Australia 2020 Summit.

There's more:

I see it as the start of a restoration of confidence in Australian culture, identity and ingenuity, and a faith that we can think about future challenges, and find what we need to face them.

And this:

Regardless of anything else the summit achieves, it has people thinking about where we might go from here, and what we might do instead of what we won't do.

Well, it's certainly making me think hard about a non-clichéd way of saying "what twaddle."

Blubbery vote buying

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Japan seeks new allies on whaling

A one-day seminar on Monday brought delegates from 12 developing countries, most of them not IWC members, to Tokyo to discuss "sustainable use" of whales.

An official told the BBC that Japan hoped these nations would join the IWC.

The nations concerned include those famously whale interested places Angola and Eritrea. At least they have ocean frontage, I suppose.

This is no way to run a whaling commission, although I also wonder what the outcome would be if all nations had to participate via the UN or some such body. The problem then would probably just be getting enough of the uninterested nations to not abstain from votes.

The International Whaling Commission website is full of information, and the page relating to Japan's "scientific" whaling is here. The number of whales Japan wants to take for its new research program is set out as follows:

Annual sample sizes for the proposed full-scale research (lethal sampling) are 850 (with 10% allowance) Antarctic minke whales (Eastern Indian Ocean and Western South Pacific stocks), 50 humpback whales (D and E stocks) and 50 fin whales (Indian Ocean and the Western South Pacific stocks).

They are holding off on the humpbacks for now, as most people would know.

I'm not particularly romantic about my anti-whaling sentiments. If a seaside nation has a long tradition of catching and eating hapless passing whales, I don't have any problem with them taking a relatively small number for old time's sake.

But when a nation wants to go to the ends of the earth to collect close to a thousand every year just for what most residents now treat as a novelty source of protein and some sort of sop to their national pride: that's when I have a problem. It would be like Australia insisting that it is reasonable for it to go and take any manatee that drifted into international waters off Florida because aborigines on Cape York enjoy the odd dugong.

The Sderot Problem

Global View - WSJ.com

This is a pretty good article on the vexed issue of Israel and the appropriate way it should respond to the never ending attack on Sderot.

The constant criticism is that the response of Israel is not proportionate, but it is very unclear what critics think would be proportionate in these circumstances:

Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams -- to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams -- an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?

This is a good point. I would like to know what critics could say if Israel did the literally proportionate thing - an eye for an eye response in the number of unguided rockets. (I don't know that artillery shells really are the same as the Hamas rockets which - I thought - often didn't have much in the way of explosives in them.

Still, as I take it that densely populated areas of Gaza are within easy reach of Sderot, random firings of dumb missiles with no accuracy into Gaza would surely cause more random death and destruction on their side. Would that have any effect on the population at large insisting on Hamas stopping its own rockets? You would have to optimistic to think that it would, but when current targetted tactics are not working, things really are getting desperate.

In everyday conduct, of course, an eye for an eye is hardly a principle that can be universally endorsed by any ethicist no matter what ethical theory they subscribe to. But when it comes to warfare, there is still clear allowance made for a side to lose "normal" protections if they abuse it as a deliberate warfare tactic. Have a look at this article for an interesting discussion as to whether terrorism requires a re-think of the protection issue:

But non-reciprocity is not and should not be all-encompassing. First, current IHL does not preclude reprisals during combat against combatants that might violate IHL. Second, even the bans on reprisals in Protocol I have their detractors, such as the United Kingdom, which issued a reservation to that treaty allowing for the possibility of measured reprisals against civilians if the opposing party itself engaged in serious, deliberate attacks on civilians.

Interesting.

Your home based fuel cell

About a year ago, I mentioned how Japan has some homes that use fuel cells to generate electricity.

Here's another article about it. This is surprising:

The Japanese government is so bullish the technology it has earmarked $309 million a year for fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes - about one-fourth of Japanese households - to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.

They work by extracting hydrogen from natural gas, to which lots of houses in Japan are connected. I wonder if they would be better if hydrogen was stored on site, in one of those new storage systems that seem promising.

Depressing

When the drugs don’t work, try talking - Times Online

This is one of the better articles written about depression since last week's debate about how well anti-depressants really work.

Go for 5%, Brendan

Nelson and Coalition at all-time low | The Australian

Anything that hastens Bredan's departure is welcome.

At last, though, Kerry O'Brien is starting to show to PM Rudd some of the surliness that he used to serve up to John Howard all the time:

KERRY OBRIEN: What I'm asking you, you've making these points as you've been making them ad nauseam since you came to power. When is it reasonable for members of the public to start holding you responsible for high interest rates and high inflation? Are you still going to be blaming John Howard two and a half years from now?

Not so gay

Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but it seemed to me that the media coverage of last weekend's Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras was more restrained than usual.

Everyone seems to have decided to just go with a default figure of 300,000 spectators, regardless of what the true numbers may be. Well, actually the SMH still quotes an organiser as saying it attracts "anything up to 400,000", but even that's an improvement over previous year's heights of figure plucking (try 500,000 in 2006.)

I see that there continue to be some in the gay community who express doubts about its relevance now. But it seems it won't be going for some time yet.

It also seemed odd timing that this morning the media was full of reports about a new Australian study predicting a big increase in HIV infection coming to some States where condom use is decreasing. Why not report this before the Mardi Gras party, instead of the day after?

In fact, the sexual health news has been relentlessly bleak over the last few weeks. Nature.com had the headline "HIV can never be cured", based on a new study about how the virus manages to hide out in the gut.

And then what about the finding that oral sex is leading to an increase in oral cancer in men? Certainly, this was not reported as a gay problem; the main suggestion seemed to be that men can catch it readily from women. But, there's no doubt that gay men can spread HPV virus between each other, and (how to put this delicately), as the issue is the virus getting into the back of the throat, one would imagine that gay men have that area at greater risk than your average heterosexual.

Finally, while Googling for links for this post, I found this recent article on MSNBC by a woman who married a gay man. (Well, maybe bisexual is more appropriate, but this is how the guy defines himself now, so whatever.) It strikes me as inadvertently funny. It opens with her shock at being diagnosed with chlamydia while pregnant with her 4th (!) child. Yet,as the story unfolds, we learn the following: on her first date with her husband-to-be, he warned her to not believe any rumours that he was he gay; he also told her he had teenage homosexual experiments; he refused her offers to sleep with him when they were engaged and she was on the pill; he never seemed especially enthusiastic about sex with her after marriage (yet he still had it with her "3 or 4 times a week"); her husband's work friends warned her he was gay; and before she got the STD he confessed he was visiting gay bars.

One suspects that the only thing she hasn't mentioned is his collection of Judy Garland records and enthusiasm for dancing around the house to "Its Raining Men".

She just seemed to me to be a very silly woman.

Japanese oddity, cont.

Japan's girl geek boom - World - theage.com.au

Japanese character themed cafes have normally catered for sex starved single men whose geekiness repels all normal Japanese women. Get out of the train station at Akihabara (geek central in Tokyo) on a weekend, and there will probably be a dozen girls in french maid or some other character outfit handing out directions to their cafes down the street. The male photographers make for quite a throng.

This new version of such a cafe, however, is even odder:

At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.

Welcome to Tokyo's first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.

In keeping with the schoolboy theme, waiters with manicured hands and soft voices pretend to be teenage students, chatting and flirting with well-dressed Japanese women playing the roles of benefactresses visiting the school.

So far so weird. But it is not like the student characters are even meant to be really interested in the women customers:

Its visitors are united by a passion for such "boy-love manga", or comics about boy-boy romance for female readers - a genre that is currently undergoing a huge revival in Japan.

Most boy-love manga feature dreamy, feminine-looking male characters. The same beauty ideal guides Sakamaki when she selects the waiters who talk about their pretend homework and studies at Edelstein.

This next line really made me laugh:

"I'm in the flower arrangement club," whispers one girlish, long-haired waiter at the cafe, looking up from the book of German poetry he is reading.

The Japanese really need something better to occupy their minds.

Hold the excitement

Labor to deliver lightning internet speeds

Stephen Conroy likes to talk up the future of the internet:

Most homes will have broadband communication speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available, under the Rudd Government's plan to wire Australia for the 21st century.

Federal Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy told The Sunday Age that early discussions on the Government's promised broadband network indicated that it would be much faster than previously thought.

"This is going to revolutionise the way Australians live their lives," Senator Conroy said.

Two reservations:

1. what's it going to cost? Faster speeds are notoriously expensive here already.

2. How exactly is going to "revolutionise" our lives? One of the main things people talk about regarding very high speed internet is how hi definition movies will be downloaded easily. Big deal. It'll save a trip to the DVD library once a week. Less greenhouse gases I suppose, enough to save a couple of ice cubes of artic blue, at least.

The cheerful pessimist, and fake meat

'Enjoy life while you can' | From the Guardian | The Guardian

James Lovelock expects climatic disaster starting within 20 years, but still thinks we should enjoy themselves now.

He's not exactly a pal to most Greenies:

"....All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." ...

To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100.

Yes, I've heard him express these views before. But what is "Quorn"?

Turns out it's a fungus based meat substitute. Wikipedia explains its origins.

Is it even sold in Australia? The only imitation meat I have ever tried here is that dried Textured Vegetable Protein. I actually don't mind a chilli con carne recipe based on it, except for the horrendous amount of flatulence it produces. I can't stand to be near myself for 24 hours.

Cindy goes to Eygpt

Al Jazeera English - News - Interview: Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan is now in Egypt campaigning on behalf of - wait for it - the Muslim Brotherhood.

Well, at least for those who are on trial in military tribunals there.

From the interview:

But what does the US have to do with a military trial in Egypt?

Egypt is a major recipient of US foreign aid, and there is no relationship between American aid and human rights.

If we [America] really want to promote democracy in this region then we cannot silence the voices of the Muslim Brotherhood because they're the moderate voice here and they are the ones who are actually working for democracy.

On such a topic, Wikipedia information has to be treated very carefully, but its entry on the MB is interesting nonetheless. Seems to be a distinct possibility that they proclaim an interest in democracy in Egypt so that, on attaining power, they can remove it.

Renewable woes

As green power investments rise, a fear they are being misguided - International Herald Tribune

Be careful if you are planning to invest in renewable energy is the message of this article. This claim is of interest:

Other experts say pouring money into newfangled renewable technologies could prove less cost-effective than relatively straightforward improvements in energy efficiency. Efficiency measures could cut growth in energy demand in half by 2020 and earn investors double-digit rates of return, said Diana Farrell, the director of the McKinsey Global Institute.

"Too much of the energy debate has focused on simply boosting supplies that are destined to be wasted," she said.

Somewhere I read some American analyst claiming that government subsidies for solar cells is economically a big waste of effort. I can't find it now. Such skepticism does not seem to float to the top of the Google pool.

One thing of which I remain very skeptical is solar cell subsidies in England. Could there be a cloudier country less suitable to PV power than that one?