Another Oscar year to ignore

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button review | Film Reviews - Times Online

The big nominee in yet another year of Oscar nominations that the public just doesn't much care about (God we've had a run of Oscar seasons like that the last few years) is Benjamin Button. One reviewer is not impressed:

The film won an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations, just one short of the record set by All About Eve and Titanic. This is mystifying. It is a tedious marathon of smoke and mirrors. In terms of the basic requirements of three-reel drama the film lacks substance, credibility, a decent script and characters you might actually care for. That it should be pitching for the most coveted prizes in cinema is a far stranger fiction than the story itself.

Yet, with typical Hollywood star myopia, Kate Winslet was on Leno the other night saying something like "oh it's been such an extraordinary year for fabulous movies, of course I didn't expect to win.." etc.

(Actually, she did not come across as all that likeable in that appearance. I would link to it if I could, but it appears to be region blocked by NBC. How odd.)

Crazy brave commentary

All this political commentary in the press ("A Leader out of his League" is the ridiculous heading given in The Age to Michelle Grattan's musings) about Malcolm Turnbull's (well, actually, his whole party room's) decision to oppose the governments latest stimulus is just silly guff in my opinion. (It's his "suicide note" according to Mark Bahnisch, who likes to complain about commentary that concentrates on the political game instead of the policy substance, except of course when he thinks the game is running Labor's way.)

I can see no substantial risk to Turnbull if, as appears likely, the government will get the Greens and independents on side in the Senate with some relatively minor variations to the package. The Opposition's opposition is not going to delay it for long. A week or two, maybe? Big deal.

Furthermore, if, as just about everyone from the PM down expects, the economy really tanks and a lot more action is needed, that's further debt on its way. This package alone may not be scaring too many economics commentators with its future debt implications, but the next stimulus might make them more hesitant.

At which point, Turnbull can say "see, I told you not to spend quite so much on the last stimulus, and to target it better."

Besides which, I reckon Rudd just looks like a fake actor when he tries to do "outrage" in Parliament. Just because Howard was able to make hay out of Beazley's delaying tax cuts, the dynamics are quite different now, and people are not going to be readily sucked in to believing all the self-serving ideological dressing on the economic crisis Rudd spent his Christmas holidays apparently dreaming up.

Finally, I see that Kerry O'Brien is continuing the same pandering tone with Kevin Rudd this year. His approach in a Rudd interview is always along the lines "help me to understand why what you say is right." But when it comes to the Liberals it's "clearly you are wrong. Confess!"

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt points out that there are indications that the public is not uniformly rushing to condemn Turnbull's caution, contrary to what most commentators predicted.

Un-informed

Ocean Acidification and Corals - Watts Up With That?

Watts Up With That has become a favourite blog for global warming sceptics, often quoted by Andrew Bolt, Jennifer Marohasy, etc. (I see Jennifer is away for an undefined period; probably to seek a credibility transplant after some of her recent efforts.)

But Watt's Up is spreading its wings to encourage scepticism about ocean acidification, with the above "guest post" by Steven Goddard.

It is, without doubt, the most starkly uninformed sceptical post about ocean acidification I have even seen at a blog that likes to credit itself as having a scientific attitude.

Worthy of Ted Baxter

Hamster labelled a murder suspect | Weird True Freaky | News.com.au

Go to the link to see the amusing news video.

And by the way, it's sad to think that probably half of my readership are too young to know of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

Stimulus issues

One thing seems to be missing so far from commentary on the stimulus package: criticism of the cash handouts.

As I noted only a couple of weeks ago, Peter Martin had belatedly pointed out that the US experience indicated that temporary gifts of cash did not do much to increase consumer spending.

So what do we get now as a big component of stimulus? More immediate cash. I am waiting for Peter Martin's comments on this, as he is yet to express his own opinion.

Oddly, Ross Gittens has seemingly decided that economics is just a magic art that no one can ever truly know anything about anyway:

It's all very well for Gerry Harvey to say the cash splash failed because he saw no sign of it in his stores. The economy is just a bit bigger than Harvey Norman. The fact is we don't yet have most of the figures for what happened in the economy in December, or even the last three months of last year.

And even when we get the figures it won't be easy to detect what effect various government measures have had on them. For instance, since there are no miracle cures, evidence of the economy's continued decline doesn't prove the measures did no good.

To measure accurately the effect of the measures you have to know something we'll never know: what would have happened in the economy had the authorities not done what they did.

As for my take, which is just as good as anyone else's at the moment, the package deserved better targeting; much better targeting.

Top marks for creativity, at least

Ehud Barak proposes tunnel connecting Gaza to West Bank - Telegraph

Respect your mice

From a report at Physorg.com:

Humans and mice are both good at assessing risk in everyday tasks, according to a study by Rutgers University scientists published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The finding leads Gallistel, professor of psychology and co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, to conclude that risk assessment is not basically a high-level conscious activity, but one that is programmed into the brains of animals - mice, humans and many others....

"These animals [the mice] were doing something that, on the face of it, was mathematically complicated," Gallistel said.

Seems to me the lesson to take from this is that the banking and investment industry may as well be run by mice. Send them to Wall Street, I say.

Psst...don't tell Kevin

It does seem odd that when thinking about ways to stimulate the Australian economy, one of the first things our PM should announce is spending on home insulation.

But, it could have been worse:

In their search to find programs upon which to rest the complaint that the stimulus bill is too generous, some conservatives have seized upon one of their favorite whipping boys: the arts. "Even [House Republicans] can't quite believe it... $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts," declared Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana).

Pence was being sarcastic, of course, but the rest of the article is a defence of government spending on the arts as a stimulus measure:

Arts are actually a great form of economic investment, particularly public art, and they should be amply funded in the stimulus package. Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government, according to Americans for the Arts. There is hardly a person more likely to go out and spend her stimulus check than a starving artist.

One suspects a certain rubberiness in those figures. It also continues the line that was behind much of Rudd's first stimulus idea: that that the poorest people are the best to "stimulate". If we follow that logic too far, we'll end up with the most confortable old age pensioners, unemployable Bachelor of Arts graduates and no-audience polemic playwrights in the world, while the government and those actually doing productive work get pooer. Then I guess it'll be their turn for stimulus.

Michael Crichton would have loved them

Technology Review: The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight.

A fuel cell and battery aircraft: cool

How Things Work: Flying Fuel Cells | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

Well, it was only a powered glider, but it's still impressive:

....his HK 36 Super Dimona carried a 200-pound hydrogen fuel cell that ran an electric motor to turn its propeller. The fuel cell couldn’t quite put out the energy required for takeoff—45 kilowatts—and got help from a lithium ion battery to lift off the runway in Ocaña, Spain. At 3,300 feet Barberán disconnected the battery, and for the next 20 minutes the Super Dimona flew straight and level at about 60 mph on just the fuel cell. It was the first time a piloted airplane had flown powered by a fuel cell alone.

Urgent geek toy alert

A TARDIS Of Your Very Own | Discover Magazine

More details here.

Luke, use the Force

It sounds like this would be an interesting book: real life accounts of people who believe they have had otherworldly assistance when in a dire situation. (Well, some of them just believe it was their brain playing tricks, but it's still an interesting phenomena, even it you are allergic to the paranormal.) The comments after the article are worth reading too.

Famous battle toilets of Japan

I wish I was in Japan at the moment, to see the touring "toilet museum" exhibition. A highlight:

... history buffs are sure to enjoy seeing a quarter-size model of the field toilet on which the famed feudal lord Takeda Shingen reportedly mulled strategies during the Warring States Period (1467-1568).

Expect fewer appointments today, doctor

Dubbo doctor in hot water for posing as prostitute on YouTube - National

This is pretty funny, at least if you don't live in Dubbo and stories of oddball doctors amuse you, but it remains a mystery to me as to why the police would be involved.

Unusual delusion of the day

Mind Hacks: Shattered delusions

Mind Hacks has a post about an unusual delusion of old Europe, in which the sufferers believed that they (or parts of their body) were made of glass.

That is pretty strange. (If you go to the original article on this, you find some very odd similar exampes - such as "earthernware men, and "urinal man".)

You learn something new every day.

From the formerly great Britain - a continuing series

Apparently, 2 million Britons watched Jamie Oliver masturbate a pig on TV last week. Seriously.

On a primary-coloured set, in front of a whooping audience, Oliver had four volunteers, plus Joanna Lumley, spending 24 hours in sow stalls, as an experiment called “Pig Brother”. There was a sow giving birth, live in the studio, as some kind of “Here come the little sausages!” sideshow. And in a moment more The Word than The Word ever managed, Oliver - face contorted with nausea - masturbated a boar into a jar as the audience cheered him on.

It is surprising (well, maybe not, given the excision of anything resembling boundaries in British TV over the last decade or so) that this not the first time such activity has featured there:

Of course, Jamie isn't the first person to masturbate a boar on television - Rebecca “sex with David Beckham” Loos pioneered it as her signature manoeuvre on Five's The Farm, way back in 2004 - but there seemed to be a more palpable air of unwillingness here, as Jamie wailed, “It's spraying all up my arm”, and then asked “Why's it taking so long?” These were not “happy days” with the Naked Chef.

I find this fairly puzzling, as Oliver's show was apparently a serious attempt to raise public awareness of pig farming animal welfare issues in England and Europe. It would appear that pigs are raised considerably more humanely in England, yet cheap European pork is overwhelming the English product in sales.

At the risk of further lessening my credibility as a conservative blogger (at least in the eyes of those who think that it is impossible to want action on greenhouse gases without being a crypto-socialist,) this is a subject that I reckon actually does deserve attention in Australia as well. It seems odd that chickens and their free range status is a matter of interest to many people when they are looking for eggs or chicken meat, yet the conditions in which a (roughly) dog like animal is raised does not seem to be on the radar of most Australians. (Well, it wasn't on my radar either until thoughts about whaling and cruelty made me look around at sites regarding farm animal welfare.)

But really, why put on a sideshow of semen collection as part of this. It's what the punters want, is it?

Sorry, I just can't get used to animal husbandry practices as a source of humour for television.

Coded messages

Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by HG Cocks review | - Times Online

An amusing book review here about the history of the "personal column" in newspapers and magazines.

A magazine devote to it was started in England in 1915, but it was considered a moral scandal:

The police were particularly interested in the number of young men who claimed to be artistic, musical, unconventional, or fans of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Officers also had their doubts about women who claimed to be “jolly” or “sporty”, thinking this might be a euphemism for what might now be called “up for it”.

This part of the review is particularly interesting:

...the anthropologist Gilbert Bartell and his wife posed as swingers to compile a study of wife-swapping in the Chicago area (making excuses and leaving at the vital moment).

The image of swinging, as sold by magazines such as Playboy, was all glamour and decadence. So the Bartells were surprised to find their fellow swingers were, well, rather dull. “The typical male was a slack-waisted, balding man of about 5ft 10in,” reports Cocks. “Women averaged 5ft 4in and, if not exactly fat, had succumbed to the early ravages of middle-aged spread. They were not enormously overweight, but at the very least tended to be over-endowed in the hips, thighs and stomach. For all the advertised charms of big breasts, the women tended to be relatively flat-chested.”

Well, I already knew that from watching Fast Forward a couple of decades ago.

On internet advertising

Roger L. Simon - Pajamas Media matters

Pajama Media's group advertising system has failed.

I know absolutely nothing about internet advertising, except for this fact: it is extremely rare for me to ever click on a advertisement on a blog, or a newspaper site. I would guess at about once a year.

And this is from a person who spends far too much time on blogs and the internet.

The internet is great for finding products and services, but that's what Google is for. I may click on a Google search "sponsored ad", but that's different.

Maybe I am the odd one out, but if a significant number of people are like me, I just can't see how any blogs or newspaper or magazine sites make significant money from advertising.

Dominion over-rated

Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply

As nice a man as he appears to be, Sir David Attenborough is just as much off the mark here as those fellow atheists who blame nearly every single war on religious motivation:

Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

Come on. I thought it was now commonly believed that many pagan societies collapsed as a result of over-flogging the environment. Did all of them have gods directing them to use the earth to maximum advantage too?

Some people might suggest that he's right, in that some societies such as the Australian aborigines and Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment. This always ignores, however, both the relative technological incapacity these groups had to stuff up their environment, and the damage or change that did manage to create anyway. Changing vast swathes of forest to grassland by regular burning is somehow OK for the aborigines when they arrived on the continent; I can't imagine Bob Brown being all that enamoured of the practice if a new island continent was discovered tomorrow. (Mega-fauna would almost certainly have been better off without aborigines too.)

That all humans like to arrange things to make themselves more comfortable, have developed better technology with which to do that over the years, and can find it hard to recognise the point at which to pull back and let an overused resource recover, has much more to do with it than any religious motivation.

UPDATE: overnight it also occurred to me that non-Christian Japan probably has the worst record for overfishing in recent decades.
UPDATE 2: what about China too? Barely a Christian influence to be seen there, yet hardly a beacon of environmental rectitude.

Lesbian separatists of Alabama

Lesbian Communities Struggle to Stay Vital to a New Generation - NYTimes.com

I could also have entitled this post "Nuttiest Lesbians Ever", and some people may have taken offence; but then, after reading the article, I suspect most people would agree with me.

The story is about some "womyn's" communities in the US which date from the 1970's, and comprise women who absolutely want nothing to do with men (and don't even trust transexual men who have had the operation). Some extracts:

Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate....

Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. “I talk to Miracle every day,” Ms. Greene said. “That is one of my joys of living here.”

[Could Ms Greene care to explain whether she is aware of the irony of calling a deer hit by a car "Miracle"?]

....the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”...

There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.

As the article notes, most of these communities are dying, as young lesbians don't see the need to set themselves up as isolationists from the rest of humanity.

UPDATE: spelling of Alabama corrected. I must stop posting late at night.