A message across the aether (which will be understood by few - the rest can just ignore it)

Gee, soon Catallaxy open threads will be down to a face moisturising Perth man sharing gin cocktail recipes with a bunch of middle aged women.

That and a handful of other men with anger management issues, a chronic plagiarist whose copied works still appears at the blog, and young male student who likes to defame  female Australian journalists.  (If Latika Burke cares to email me, I'll provide the link.)

Updates:  I have a theory that Sinclair Davidson's continual defence of  Andrew Leigh - which is otherwise incomprehensible, given that every other economist who shares similar positions to Leigh is considered wrong at the blog - must have a science fiction element to it.  Maybe he once travelled back in time and fathered Andrew is my best guess so far.


 

Infallible or not

Why It's Good To Be Wrong - Issue 2: Uncertainty - Nautilus

Physicist David Deutsch has a somewhat interesting article regarding fallibilism, including (partly) in the context of the Catholic Church.   I liked these paragraphs in particular:

Fallibilism, correctly understood, implies the possibility, not the impossibility, of knowledge, because the very concept of error, if taken seriously, implies that truth exists and can be found. The inherent limitation on human reason, that it can never find solid foundations for ideas, does not constitute any sort of limit on the creation of objective knowledge nor, therefore, on progress. The absence of foundation, whether infallible or probable, is no loss to anyone except tyrants and charlatans, because what the rest of us want from ideas is their content, not their provenance: If your disease has been cured by medical science, and you then become aware that science never proves anything but only disproves theories (and then only tentatively), you do not respond “oh dear, I’ll just have to die, then.”

The theory of knowledge is a tightrope that is the only path from A to B, with a long, hard drop for anyone who steps off on one side into “knowledge is impossible, progress is an illusion” or on the other side into “I must be right, or at least probably right.” Indeed, infallibilism and nihilism are twins. Both fail to understand that mistakes are not only inevitable, they are correctable (fallibly). Which is why they both abhor institutions of substantive criticism and error correction, and denigrate rational thought as useless or fraudulent. They both justify the same tyrannies. They both justify each other.

Carbon pricing seems to be working

Is carbon pricing reducing emissions?

A good analysis at the link of whether carbon pricing, and not just a drop in demand, is behind reduced carbon emissions in making Australian electricity.  Here is one crucial part:

Although it’s difficult to point to concrete short term changes in the electricity market, the carbon price is having an impact on long term investment decisions, which is where the real benefits will start to play out. The economics of power systems mean that it’s much easier to materially affect the investment decisions for a new plant than to affect the short-term dispatch decisions of an existing plant. It has been argued that this already means wind is now cheaper than coal if you’re building a new plant, due to the very large impact of the carbon price on financing costs for emissions-intensive generation options.

The market is clearly responding to long term investment signals towards lower emissions generation. The vast majority of new plants in the planning stages are either renewable or gas-fired. Here again we must acknowledge complexity and the contribution of many factors – much of the investment in renewables is driven by the Renewable Energy Target scheme, and could not be supported by the carbon price alone at this stage.

But the lack of proposals for significant new coal-fired plant is a good indication that the carbon price is having an influence over investor decisions. This is where the real pay-off lies – by avoiding the installation of more coal-fired generators we avoid the very significant greenhouse emissions that would result from those power stations over their 30-year-plus lifetime.

Conservative Catholic Paranoia

I've never paid much attention to "Traditionalist" Catholics before (basically, the ones who are devoted to the Latin Mass, actually follow Papal teaching on contraception, and freak out about how everything in the Church has gone to hell in an handbasket since Vatican II.)

But reading the Catallaxy blog,  which has in the last couple of years increasingly attracted a significant number of Traditionalist Catholics and Catholic supporters, has led me to look at some conservative Catholic figures over the last 6 months or so.

What a worry they are.   In the US, they have culturally aligned with the Tea Party, so I suppose it should be no surprise that they seem to like Catallaxy, which is like the Australian Tea Party sub branch.

Father Z's blog  seems to be very popular in the US, and I gather that Zuhlsdorf has been on Fox News quite a bit.  A look around his blog indicates he likes guns, and nuns who use them.  (Yes, really.)  The blog gives an excellent taste of the Pharisaical obsession that this branch of Catholicism has with liturgy. 

He is pals with Michael Voris, a conservative lay Catholic who has built a subscription media business out of videoing himself every second day explaining how the Church must return to its pre-Vatican II state.  He seems to be pretty big in the Trad Catholic circles, but how is it possible that a man (especially an American) who advocated in all seriousness that a Catholic monarchy is "the only way to run a country" still have any popularity at all?  He does tick the box on other Right wing obsessions, though:  climate change is all a conspiracy to do something or other, for example.

In any event, the point of the post is this:  it would seem that the recent legal successes in court cases in the US for gay marriage, as well as Italian media reporting about gay priest in the Vatican, has sent both of the them in great paranoid spasms about the e-vil currently befalling the Church.  Here's Father Z a few days ago:

There are those who hate the Church with as much hate as we love the Church. They are organized, they have a great resources, they have a Dark Prince. Dreadful liberal publications and websites, and even the blitherings of some priests and bishops, are only shadows of the deeper agenda flickered out on the back of the cave for popular consumption by barely witting dupes.

Deeper enemies, like our own beautiful missionaries and martyrs of ages past, are willing to set aside their appetites, put on a facade, and endure for patient years for the sake of a long term plan.

Yes, I buy it. I have seen manifestations of communist, Masonic, and especially homosexual networking in the Church both in the USA and in Rome. It would be stupidly naive to think that it isn’t present. In the USA, Masonic and communist? Maybe not so much.  Elsewhere, yes.  The other thing?  Ohhhh, yes.

Those agents will probably go to Hell.  Let us remember that the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church.

However, Our Lord did not promise that Hell would not prevail in these USA or, in the Roman Curia, in any other particular place.

When you hear awful stories, do not become discouraged.

We are nearing some kind of turning point. I think it is time to press forward HARD and with courage to renew our Holy Church’s liturgical worship, the best, clean antidote.

 Yes sir-ee.  Purity of liturgy is the answer to the "homosexual networking" in Rome.   Sure.

Voris has also been in Rome recently at the same time as Zuhlsdorf, both attending the same liturgy conference I think, and if you have never seen him before, this video of him hyperventilating about Roman gay priests and whether there is Satanism involved is as good a place as any, I guess.

(Actually, you could also look at this video in which he also paints the broad picture that the Church has gone all wrong since about 1960.)

These guys are hopeless:   poisonous Catholic Right wing cultural throwbacks who lack charity to a profound degree.  Even if they are "right" on a topic, they express it in such a way that it is embarrassing to say one agrees with them.   The Church will pass them by, but their ugly noise in the meantime is interesting to watch in a train wreck type of way. 

Pancakes and the Sunday morning butter explosion

I see that it was back in 2011 that I last mentioned a pancake recipe that was better than average.

I've decided it was too much work for your average Sunday morning, so today I tried another recipe, this time not from Gourmet Traveller, but from Kidspot.   It worked well, except for the unfortunate microwave butter explosion.  (I have successfully melted butter in the microwave before, but the container used today seemed particularly well suited to making melting butter explode.  Must use cling wrap to contain said explosions next time.)

Apart from that problem, the recipe worked pretty well:

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate soda
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 tbsp butter, melted
• 4 tbsp butter for greasing the pan  (???  I am sure this a mistaken quantity.  Just use spray oil anyway)

Method:

In a bowl, place the milk, lemon juice and sugar together and whisk. Leave to stand for 5 minutes. The milk will take on a curdled appearance but that's fine.
In a bowl, sift the flour and bicarbonate soda and whisk in the curdled milk mixture.
Whisk in the egg and cooled, melted butter until well combined.

 Then you cook them.   Oh:  and I added a bit of vanilla essence too, and a pinch of salt.

Nice.

Speaking of movies, again...

I see George Lucas got married this week. Here's the lovely photo from People, assuming of course  that it's not an entirely digital creation from Industrial Light and Magic:

The magazine reports that the guests included "Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart and Tyler Perry." What the hey? Since when does Jackson go ahead of a list including Spielberg and Ford?

As it happens, a couple of nights ago I ended up  watching a lengthy documentary on the original Star Wars films that I think is part of the DVD set my wife has.  I had seen it before, but a long, long time ago, in a life time far far away.

Anyhow, I had sort of forgotten how young and weedy looking George was when he made the first movie.  (He would have been 33, if my maths is right.)   The work was genuinely gruelling for him, with a huge amount of studio pressure to wind up the shoot when it started to go over, trouble with editing it, and the special effects taking forever to come together and look half way decent.   He thought he was having a heart attack at one point.  (The same thing happened to Barry Sonnenfeld when he was directing Men in Black 2. In fact, here's his full summary of the stresses he has suffered as a director:

On the first movie I directed, The Addams Family, I ended up fainting when, after a sleepless night, I thought I could maintain some sense of awareness the next day by drinking nine straight espressos. When the head of Paramount Studios said that it was unreleasable, I spent the night weeping on Sweetie's (the wife's) lap. During Men in Black II, I was raced to the hospital with what I thought was a heart attack. After spending the night in the emergency room next to a woman whining, "I need quinine," I was given an echocardiogram and told that I was simply suffering from stress and that I should get into a program of meditation. (I didn't tell the doctor that I was meditating when the chest pain started.) On Wild Wild West, I broke my hand in five places when I punched Will Smith's arm.

In fact, I like nearly everything Sonnenfeld has done.)

But back to George:  sure, he lost his ability to recognise a good story from a so-so one pretty much after Empire Strikes Back (or, perhaps, Temple of Doom,) but he did work really hard for his success, and was essentially behind much of the technological innovation in movie making that was realised with money he generated, so I find it impossible to not have some admiration for him and wish him luck.

The virtual world of Gatsby

I still have no interest in seeing The Great Gatsby, but as it was only a couple of weeks ago that I linked again to a video from a couple of years back showing how they use green or blue screens in TV and movies for results with remarkable realism, I note with interest the new video out showing how the same technique is used to spectacular effect in The Great Gatsby.  (Sure, some shots where the camera zooms in and out make the background look un-real, but there are many, many shots here where it's completely surprising to see how much of what is on the screen is not there when it is shot.)

The Great Gatsby VFX from Chris Godfrey on Vimeo.

No danger for me, but beware Tony

Triathlon Deaths Increasing Among Males Over 40

As the average age of competitors in endurance sports rises, a spate of deaths during races or intense workouts highlights the risks of excessive strain on the heart through vigorous exercise in middle age.

Among the recent casualties: American Michael McClintock, senior managing director of Macquarie Group Ltd and a triathlete, who died at age 55 of cardiac arrest earlier this month after training.

The men's 40-to-60-year age bracket - often referred to as middle aged men in Lycra, or Mamils - now holds 32 per cent of the membership in USA Triathlon, the sport's official governing body in the US.

More fitness conscious than previous generations, their numbers in competitive races are swelling, along with their risk of cardiac arrest. Triathlons, the most robust of endurance races requiring swimming, biking and running, are also believed to be the most risky.

The ways in which over exercise can hurt a middle aged heart apparently includes just physical wear and tear:

Intense exercise for periods longer than one to two hours can cause over-stretching and tiny tears of the heart's tissue, says James O'Keefe, a sports cardiologist and head of preventative cardiology at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri.

This type of repeated injury over years can cause irregular heart rhythms, increased inflammation, scarring and stiffening of the arteries, he says.

Athletic over-achievers tend to think that “more is better,” though when it comes to health, “moderation is almost always best,” O'Keefe says.

This part I find encouraging for my present lifestyle (heh):  

“If anyone is going to have a cardiac event they're far more likely to have one during exercise,” says Davison. A person is seven times more likely to have a heart incident while exercising than at rest, he says, citing a 1984 New England Journal of Medicine study.

Odd if it was in a movie

A movie based on this scenario would seem pretty odd, yet here it is, the subject of an upcoming criminal trial in Melbourne:

A tourist from Holland has claimed she was subjected to six weeks of sexual and physical abuse, mental trauma and a death ''ritual'' in a Melbourne hotel by a man possessed by an ancestor.

The woman, 22, has told police she was repeatedly raped and bashed, felt brainwashed and was blindfolded, hogtied with chains and forced to act like a dog and live on scraps.

A detective testified the woman claimed Alfio Granata, 46, performed a ritual by sealing an envelope with her photo, finger and toenails, a piece of hair and her blood to symbolise her ''being was no more''....

In the police summary, the bisexual woman said she met the two accused at a party in St Kilda last October and later engaged in consensual ''threesomes'' and drug use. It was alleged that by November he became violent to both women and then the tourist felt brainwashed and could not leave before she was subjected to abuse, death threats and trauma until she was admitted to hospital on Christmas Day.

Detective Senior Constable Marc Hodgson said at the bail hearing that Mr Granata had become ''possessed by one of his ancestors''.

Innovative idea for police public relations

Noticed in the Jakarta Post:

Dozens of boys wearing sarongs and black velvet caps looked worried, some sobbing on their moms’ laps, and many fled the police station premises upon hearing their friends scream in pain.

It was a free mass circumcision held by the local police as part of a public relations event to mark the 67th National Police Day on Friday.

Fry (and me) on loneliness

Only The Lonely � The New Adventures of Stephen Fry

A few weeks ago I noted Stephen Fry's "confession" that he had tried to commit suicide last year, despite his self awareness of his mental health problems.  (I saw one of the first stories about it, and probably wouldn't have bothered once it became widespread in the media soon thereafter.)

In any event, I see that he now has a post up at his website which deals mainly with the topic of loneliness.  Last I had noticed, he was a in long term relationship, but the post makes it clear he is single again, and I see now from Wikipedia that he has been since 2010. 

Fry's comments on how he, as a very famous and publicly popular figure who has a very active life can still be lonely, reminded me very much of part of interview I saw years ago with Freddie Mercury in which he expressed a very similar sentiment.   (From memory, it was along the lines that you can be surrounded by people every day who think you're great but still feel you have no friends.)  Given that by that stage it was already known he had led a very active gay recreational sex life, I also felt it a poignant comment on the lack of emotional satisfaction that such a lifestyle could entail.

Anyway, here's what Fry writes:

In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to. If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise…

It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful. But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone. Perhaps this is just a form of narcissism, vanity, overdemanding entitlement – give it whatever derogatory term you think it deserves. I don’t know the answer.

I suppose I just don’t like my own company very much. Which is odd, given how many times people very kindly tell me that they’d put me on their ideal dinner party guestlist. I do think I can usually be relied upon to be good company when I’m out and about and sitting round a table chatting, being silly, sharing jokes and stories and bringing shy people out of their shells.

But then I get home and I’m all alone again.

I think that there may be many people out there who understand this - more than Stephen realises, probably.  When single, intimate (not just sexual) company can be missed sorely; yet when in relationships, any desire for time alone can be seen as being a slight on the partner or family, and people may feel a bit bad for even wanting some time alone. 

It seems to me that this latter attitude was not always with us.  I have the impression that, perhaps up to the 1960's or so, it was not so uncommon for at least the artistically inclined (writers especially?) to travel for lengthy periods away from their family for the experience and personal enjoyment, and it was not thought remarkable.  (Of course, being artists, one would also not be surprised if there were sexual encounters involved as well.)  I'm not sure when the tide turned against this, but I have the distinct impression that it has.

I don't raise this in any particularly autobiographical sense either - I very much enjoy domestic time at home after my long time as a single person, and in any event, the nature of my work affords little opportunity for time away - but if I was idly rich, I wouldn't mind short trips away.  Occasionally.

I'll now end on a note which will probably annoy some readers.  I had often wondered when I was single about how it was that, although I could wish I was more "connected", some people who are very outgoing, busy and popular with people (such as Mercury and Fry) can still feel lonely.   Fry perhaps has bipolar as a possible explanation, but I don't think that is always the case for people who feel like him.

My suspicion is that, for people who believe (or even, perhaps, have just believed in the past) in a personal God (or any non materialist belief system which involves an otherworldly care for their well being?) may always have a more fundamental feeling of worthiness that helps prevent loneliness from moving into despair.   If this is true, it shows the value of teaching such types of religious belief  to children, rather than the modern idea that it is more honest to let them know intellectually about all religions and decide which (if any) is true when they grow up.   And as for not teaching religion at all until people are adults, coming new to a belief in a personal God, or a deceased relative watching over you, carries too readily for them the suspicion of wish fulfilment.  But if you have a child feeling emotionally that it is true, and noticing that it provides comfort for others in their family, I half suspect that the psychological benefit persists even if they become agnostic in the future.

There's probably been some work on this somewhere which I could go looking for, but not right now. 

On the Rudd return

Harry Clarke has a personal dislike of Rudd that's probably even more intense than mine, but his post on the return of the bizarrely popular politician is pretty accurate.  Rather me doing a fresh post, I'll just put here my comment that I made at his blog, with a couple of corrections:

It’s hard to disagree with this analysis. If Rudd had put as much effort into helping articulate government policies as he did in getting revenge on those who dumped him, it could have helped the polling. But it didn’t suit him to do so.

Still, the biggest mystery is why Rudd is relatively popular with the public in the first place. It’s always been a puzzle to me, and it seems to be an unfortunate consequence of most voters only getting their news from the 6 pm TV bulletin that they did not have a clue that Rudd was replaced due to his own (hidden from the public) appalling management skills that many considered made him impossible to work with – not due to some vicious ambition of Julia Gillard to replace him at all cost. Those of us who had been paying attention to stories of the people he was offending (and who knew of his reputation in Queensland under Goss) were not surprised.

Having said that, I don’t want to see Abbott as PM – if anything, the Coalition is the side more in the need of an urgent clean out of ideologues who have been converted to the Tea Party obsessions regarding climate change and a hopelessly over-simplified view of economics. *

Funnily enough, last election I was pretty disappointed with much of Gillard’s campaigning – particularly her hopeless policy of seeking to put off carbon pricing until the silly idea that public meetings would converts dills who get their science from Andrew Bolt and Monckton had been tried.  Hence I actually did not vote at all in the House of Reps, but voted towards Labor in the Senate. But then Gillard started to impress once she formed government and started implementing policies with more care (generally) than the haphazard approach of Rudd.

I suspect this time I will have to vote Labor in both houses of Parliament despite my great annoyance at the Rudd re-ascendency and the appalling way Gillard has been treated in the right wing media and blogosphere. I suppose it does depend on his “new” policy adjustments, though.

 *  I have never, ever seen so much of the Right in Australian politics so ugly and dumb as it is at the moment.   With a few moderates in the Liberals leaving at the election, this could possibly get worse.  

The little known war

The Sino-Japanese war: The start of history | The Economist

This review of a new book on the Japanese war on China last century makes it sound an interesting read.  I think it's certainly true that most Westerners only know a vague outline, and (apart from one or two atrocities), few details:

It is also a story, pure and simple, of heroic resistance against massive odds. China is the forgotten ally of the second world war. For more than four years, until Pearl Harbour, the Chinese fought the Japanese almost alone. France capitulated in 1940, but China did not. Its government retreated inland, up the Yangzi river to Chongqing (Chungking)—a moment that would later be described as China’s Dunkirk (pictured). From there it fought on—sometimes ineptly, often bravely—until victory in 1945.

Asia has never had a strong China and a strong Japan. Their complex relationship in modern times began when Japan welcomed the West in the mid-19th century while China pushed it away. As Japan modernised, it became a model for Chinese reformers and a refuge for Chinese revolutionaries who opposed their own government’s insularity. Chinese students who went to Japan in the early 20th century included Sun Yat-sen, who led the 1911 revolution, and Chiang Kai-shek, the man who would lead the Nationalist government of China against Japan in the 1930s.

But as Japan’s imperial ambitions grew, China was the obvious place to expand. In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, turning from mentor to oppressor. The full-scale invasion began in 1937. Mr Mitter does not skimp in narrating the atrocities; the stench of war infuses his narrative. But he paints a broader account of the Chinese struggle, explaining the history that still shapes Chinese thinking today....

Up to 100m people (20% of China’s population) became refugees during the conflict. More than 15m were killed.

Suddenly, over Suncorp Stadium last night, the Airship "Ego" was seen rising again, to the usual puzzling acclaim

Well, that didn't go to plan...

Time to resurrect Julia the Kevin Slayer

Bonds on the brain

For a non economist like me, one of the most unclear aspects of an economy is the bonds market.

Take two stories in the media this morning, for example:  one in the Sydney Morning Herald, which talks about bond prices going up, and how Australian bonds don't affect as much as they do elsewhere; and then one by Alan Kohler, talking about concerns of there being "the biggest government bond bubble in history" and how it needs to deflate carefully.

I come away from both articles still being somewhat confused; but maybe that's just me...

Anyway, the comments following the Kohler article are interesting, including one by someone talking about the vast extent of the derivatives market being a major concern.  (Yes, according to him, the derivatives problem that caused the GFC are in a sense still around bigger than ever.)   Yet, someone following that points out that the value of this market all depends on how you count the amount of money at stake; and, I must admit, the first comment does sound as if it might be from someone equivalent to a fiat currency nutter.   But I don't know.

And now that I think of it - in the current situation, provided this bond market stuff doesn't blow up,  the goldbugs (who often tend to be climate change skeptics)  have probably blown a huge amount on gold investments,  and will never get it back, haven't they?*    Including, I hope, JoNova.    It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

*  Oddly, in the comment piece I link to, the writer says "I’ve always thought of ‘gold bugs’ as the crashing bores of the investment world — the same personality type who bangs on obsessively at dinner about the evils of Europe or the perils of climate change."   He's completely wrong on the point - see JoNova, and (I am sure) many in the Tea Party movement.

As inspired by watching Q&A last night

It's a history topic, OK?

I can't remember what article I was looking at recently that linked to this one from last year: Getting It On: The Covert History of the American Condom | Collectors Weekly, but the condom article  turned out to be a pretty fascinating read.

Things I learnt included the fairly gruesome sounding attempt by the military in World War 1 to deal with veneral disease with self administered clean up kits:

In 1905, in an effort to combat common infections like gonorrhea and syphilis, the Navy implemented the first trial system of chemical prophylaxis dispensed by staff doctors. Though the treatment was strictly post-intercourse, its results impressed Navy brass enough that the procedure became standard on all ships by 1909. However, one of the system’s major flaws was its dependence on self-reporting to a doctor, so the following year prophylactic kits or “pro-kits,” were distributed to soldiers for self administration. This was highly preferred to an exam, and though still painful, the pro-kits protected many recruits from being court martialed for contracting VD.

When draft examinations for World War I revealed infections for nearly a quarter of all recruits, military policy was altered to accept some soldiers with pre-existing VD. Over the next two years, around 380,000 American soldiers would be diagnosed with some form of VD, eventually costing the U.S. more than $50 million in treatment. Jim Edmonson explains that during World War I, American soldiers weren’t issued condoms; instead they were given a “Dough Boy Prophylactic Kit.” The idea behind these kits was that soldiers who “went out on a weekend furlough and had sexual contact would then clean themselves up afterwards with antiseptics and urethral syringes and so forth.” Edmonson points out that this method was like “closing the gate after the horse is out of the barn; not very effective.”

 You can see from the photo of the "Dough Boy" kit that it included some mercury compound - just about the last thing I expect any modern man with even a vague knowledge of toxicology would want to be using in a  ointment to be applied liberally to the relevant area (or in urethral syringe, although I am not sure what they contained).  It seems, from some other sites, that th Not only that, it didn't work so well anyway:

This half-hearted prevention program resulted in a complete epidemic of sexually transmitted infections. Sarah Forbes says nearly 18,000 soldiers a day were unable to report for duty because of these illnesses. Starting with the pro-kit, which Forbes describes as “glorified soap that was completely ineffective,” the U.S. military began its attempts to counteract the dire consequences of VD.  Slowly but surely, they provided condoms and developed health education programs, which Forbes says became the precursor to sex-education in American public schools.  

 One other thing of wry amusement in the article was the photos of condom tins from the 1930's, which "highlight fantasies of the Mid-East with names like Sheik, Ramses, and Sphinx."

Isn't it funny how cultural assumptions about regions change?  Although the I presume that the popularity (at least with women) of  Rudolf Valentino in his arabian roles in the 1920's may have had something to do with why a condom company in the 1930's would want their product to be associated with the Middle East, it does raise the whole question of how the region got a reputation for erotic allure, and then lost it totally.

I don't know much about the topic of its original reputation, although the description of this book gives some ideas:

 Richard Bernstein defines the East widely—northern Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands—and frames it as a place where sexual pleasure was not commonly associated with sin, as it was in the West, and where a different sexual culture offered the Western men who came as conquerers and traders thrilling but morally ambiguous opportunities that were mostly unavailable at home. Bernstein maps this erotic history through a chronology of notable personalities. Here are some of Europe’s greatest literary personalities and explorers: Marco Polo, writing on the harem of Kublai Khan; Gustave Flaubert, describing his dalliances with Egyptian prostitutes (and the diseases he picked up along the way); and Richard Francis Burton, adventurer, lothario, anthropologist—and translator of The Arabian Nights.

When I think about it,  I guess the idea of the Middle East as a region of sultry sexual intrigue for heterosexual men lasted right up to the 1960's.  (Is it too silly to cite "I Dream of Genie" in support of this argument?)   But at some point - perhaps the 1970's or 80's, this all reversed, and I think it is safe to say that the Middle East is now seen as just about the last place a Western man would think of in terms of eroticism.  But how that happened, I am not entirely sure either.

In any event, I see that despite the new reputation, you could at least up to 1996 still buy Sheik branded condoms in the US.   (There's an annoying ad for them on Youtube.)  Condom name traditions die hard, obviously.

Update:  I was just googling around and found a brief account from a few years ago by a retired journalist of his WW2 experiences, which notes how the US managed to make the situation worse:

I was eventually assigned to an Army base about 60 miles north of Calcutta. The area boasted the highest rate of venereal disease of any overseas region in which U.S. troops were based. Before the American army's arrival, Calcutta was renowned as a sin city crammed with hundreds of brothels licensed by the British army. The incidence of VD was minimal, however, because the local prostitutes were periodically examined and treated by military doctors.

Aghast at what they regarded as official immorality, the U.S. Army chaplains pressured the British to abolish the system. With the whores now no longer under medical surveillance, the VD rate soared. For the men in my outfit, the 903rd Signal Co., the scenario was sadly familiar. Before coming to India, the company had been stationed near Alexandria, Egypt. There, too, the British Army's traditional medical control of local brothels collapsed with the arrival of the Americans. Once again, a VD epidemic broke out. A handful of my 903rd buddies landed in India with undesired "souvenirs" from their sojourn in Egypt.

 As someone in comments notes, the US and the backfiring ideal of abstinence has some history to it.

Everyone makes planes, except us

Aircraft-makers: Singin’ in the rain | The Economist

The Economist reports that the market for manufacture of civil aircraft is looking bright.

What surprised me, though, is that it's not just Brazil which is getting into mid size regional jet building, but Canada too (and Russia and China are hopeful new entrants too):

Other firms, including ones from developing countries, have long been eyeing the mainstream single-aisle market, where growth is strongest. They are closing in.

Closest of all is Bombardier of Canada. Pierre Beaudoin, its boss, promises that its new CSeries, aimed at the 100- to 150-seat market, will make its maiden flight this month, give or take a week, and that deliveries will start in 2014. Bombardier has 177 firm orders for the plane so far. It will be the first to use Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engine, the closest thing to a big idea engine-makers have had for a while. Replacing the usual shaft between fan and turbine with a gear allowing each to revolve at its optimal speed should cut fuel use, emissions and noise significantly.

Embraer, the Brazilian firm that is Bombardier’s biggest rival in the market for smaller “regional” jets, confirmed at the show that it would revamp its E-Jet, designed for the 70- to 130-seat market, and said it already had 300 orders and options for the new version. It does not intend—yet—to compete against Airbus and Boeing, but it will overlap with the smaller version of Bombardier’s CSeries. And it will also use Pratt & Whitney’s new engine.

Russia too has aspirations. In Paris Irkut, owned by the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), displayed a mock-up of its planned 130- to 150-seater MC-21, which will again use the geared turbofan engine (and eventually a Russian one). Irkut expects to start building the aircraft this year and to fly it in 2015.

I suppose Australia did manage to build trouble prone diesel submarines; but in the high technology  stakes,  I would personally feel better it if we could build planes that other countries wanted.   Maybe they should try converting the flying box known as the Nomad  to vertical take-off and landing. (Ha.)