A coupla questions...

Regarding Islamic State, the repulsive movement which seems entirely based on it attracting enough young male psycho/socio-paths from around the world to keep it going:

a. why are the efforts to financially starve this group seemingly taking so long to have any effect?  Or does the demand for a $200 million ransom mean that it is starting to have effect?

b. is there a lack of co-operation from certain countries in this approach to the problem?  If so, shouldn't we know?  What would be the point of the West tip-toeing around that issue?

How "no-go" are "no-go" zones?

The Origins of Fox's Favorite Muslim No-Go-Zone Myth - The Atlantic

Here's a detailed look at the oft repeated claim that Muslims have created "no-go" zones within European cities. It's interesting to see that Daniel Pipes once regretted calling them such, but apparently has recently used the term again.  A bit of opportunism there, perhaps?

Slate also weighed in on the matter, with one of its contributors saying she lived in what Fox designated such a zone in 2007, and she found it fine.

It's good to see this being addressed, as I always suspected there was some Pauline Hanson style exaggeration going on.

Recent TV viewing

This week's episode of James May's Toy Stories, featuring his effort to make an Action Man doll break the sound barrier, was particularly entertaining.  It seems to be up at Dailymotion, and is presumably on the SBS site for viewing too for a couple of weeks yet, too.

David Attenborough's quick run through animal evolution which finished last night on ABC was also good.  Many parts of China that he was in looked quite beautiful.   Perhaps this was a repeat, but I hadn't seen it before.

American Liar noted

I hadn't paid attention to the Chris Kyle story until the controversy over American Sniper, so I am a little surprised to learn about how he has been shown up as a self aggrandising liar, at least with respect to his exploits in America after returning from Iraq.

I wonder if the exposure of this, shall we say, problematic aspect of his character led Spielberg to drop the project?  Or did it only gain ground after he was shot?

Update:  from a Slate movie critic reflecting on the movie:

The falsehoods in American Sniper are dangerous because a lot of audiences leave the theater thinking that Chris Kyle was a role model. I’ve actually gotten emails from military vets who were also troubled by the film. A lot of them are even harsher on Kyle than I’m comfortable being, in part because I’ve never served and in part because I was once attacked by Glenn Beck’s online army after poking holes in Lone Survivor. But American Sniper convinces viewers that Chris Kyle is what heroism looks like: a great guy who shoots a lot of people and doesn’t think twice about it. Watching American Sniper, I kept wondering who Kyle himself had been imitating. Sylvester Stallone? John Wayne? Or the ultimate irony, Clint Eastwood himself as Dirty Harry?

ABC doing pretty well compared to Rupert's baby

Oh, so Rupert's pride and joy, The Australian, is doing its boss's bidding and attacking ABC TV for going from 11% of the national audience to 10.8%.  Quelle horreur!  I can likely put that down to a few things:  too many QI repeats, even for people who don't mind Stephen Fry;  many BBC shows being rather dull of late or being sold off to Foxtel already; and Australian comedy and light entertainment production being in a bit of a slump (seems to me to be little in the way of young new talent for years now.) 

But how is The OZ doing in popularity, given that about 90% of comments following the ABC story say its because the network is now so Left wing in current affairs?

According to Morgan, across all platforms, from 2013 to 2014 it lost 5.7% of its readership.

Makes the ABC's ratings loss look trivial.*

Being a magnet for one eyed, right wing dummies doesn't seem to pay off, hey Rupe?

*   (Although, to be scrupulously fair, 10.8/11 x 100 = 98.18, so the ABC's loss calculated the same was is about 1.8%.   Still, only a third of the OZ's loss.) 

More atonement made easy

I found another brief reference to an atonement method in the book Israelite Religion - this time a Greek ceremony, and with an odd connection with figs.

I have Googled the topic and found a couple of descriptions in books.  First, from "Problems with Atonement"

And in another book (The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity)

I'm not sure if there is any connection with Jesus cursing a fig tree because it wasn't bearing any fruit.

And as to why figs were deemed particularly significant in Greek purification/atonement rituals:  this site makes some observations, and uses a lot of big words, but it still seems rather unclear.

Whether it has anything to do with the fact that, if one eats a significant amount of figs at one sitting, one will feel nearly empty of all intestinal impurities within about 24 hours, remains another mystery...

Some seriously deranged thinking going on here...

Man who suffered failed penis enlargement operation 'murdered prostitute' | Daily Mail Online
 [I did recently post about penile enlargement operations, and - separately - about a famous author's chronic habit of blaming women for his strong sex drive which seemingly disgusted him.   The moral of this news story may therefore be that it's lucky that Tolstoy didn't have modern cosmetic surgery available to him.]

PS:  I think I deserve some sort of recognition for - I suspect - creating the first piece of writing in the history of the universe to link Tolstoy with penile enlargement surgery.  

When Harry reviewed Richard

I see that last week, Harry Clarke (at his temporary blog) posted a review of a book by Richard Tol.

Given that Harry only recently pointed out at his old blog where his temporary blog was located, I was surprised to find that Tol himself had already appeared in comments complaining about Harry's rather mildly worded review. 

This suggests Tol likely spends a fair amount of time Googling up his own name for references to him, no matter where they appear.

It also appears that Harry does not know of Tol's reputation for attacking people he disagrees with.   Harry should do some searches for references to him at Rabbett Run, and And Then There's Physics, and elsewhere.

And elsewhere, I see Tol weighing in on a ATTP post about Matt Ridley's complaining column in The Times that he's unfairly attacked for being a "lukewarmer". 

I think Richard has too much time on his hands

That'll go over well...

Pope Francis planning to address joint session of Congress, organizer says | TheHill: Pope Francis is planning to address a joint session of Congress and visit the White House during a trip to Washington, D.C., in September, one of the archbishops organizing the pontiff’s trip said.

Clint Eastwood is not all bad...

....he did, after all, improvise the "empty chair" bit at the 2012 Republican convention, which  moderates at the venue found an embarrassment, including Mrs Romney and Romney aides.    Democrats lapped it up as showing a weirdly out of touch party that had to attack "imaginary Obama" instead of the real one, as Jon Stewart put it.   I have no doubt that it hurt the party far more than it helped.   Thanks, Clint.

But as a director (and, even more chronically, as an actor) he has no talent.   I know that even liberal movie critics don't agree - but I simply do not understand the ways in which his direction is supposed to be impressive.  My prediction is he won't be used as an example in movie schools of the future, in the way many of his contemporaries will.

So the unexpected opening success of American Sniper has me wondering what is going on.  His recent films have not been clear box office hits, and there are quite a few reviews of it by liberal critics which indicate it has a somewhat morally ambiguous take on the effect of violence on the lead character.  (The fact that Spielberg was once intending to direct it also surely indicates this.)

Yet films which show such ambiguity are not normally $90 million openers.   

And there have been articles noting that far Right wing nutters are coming out of it tweeting that it has given them a strong urge to kill Arabs (no doubt with their own gun collection.)   Certainly, some reviewers think it is too celebratory of violence, but as I say, opinion seems divided.

I therefore suspect that what is going on is best summed up in this article from The Guardian, whether or not her take on Kyle's character is accurate (I haven't read enough to have an opinion):

Adds Scott Foundas at Variety: “Chris Kyle saw the world in clearly demarcated terms of good and evil, and American Sniper suggests that such dichromatism may have been key to both his success and survival; on the battlefield, doubt is akin to death.”

Eastwood, on the other hand, Foundas says, “sees only shades of gray”, and American Sniper is a morally ambiguous, emotionally complex film. But there are a lot of Chris Kyles in the world, and the chasm between Eastwood’s intent and his audience’s reception touches on the old Chappelle’s Show conundrum: a lot of white people laughed at Dave Chappelle’s rapier racial satire for the wrong reasons, in ways that may have actually exacerbated stereotypes about black people in the minds of intellectual underachievers. Is that Chappelle’s fault? Should he care?

Likewise, much of the US right wing appears to have seized upon American Sniperwith similarly shallow comprehension – treating it with the same unconsidered, rah-rah reverence that they would the national anthem or the flag itself. Only a few weeks into its release, the film has been flattened into a symbol to serve the interests of an ideology that, arguably, runs counter to the ethos of the film itself. How much, if at all, should Eastwood concern himself with fans who misunderstand and misuse his work? If he, intentionally or not, makes a hero out of Kyle – who, bare minimum, was a racist who took pleasure in dehumanising and killing brown people – is he responsible for validating racism, murder, and dehumanisation? Is he a propagandist if people use his work as propaganda?

That question came to the fore last week on Twitter when several liberal journalists drew attention to Kyle’s less Oscar-worthy statements. “Chris Kyle boasted of looting the apartments of Iraqi families in Fallujah,” wrote author and former Daily Beast writer Max Blumenthal. “Kill every male you see,” Rania Khalek quoted, calling Kyle an “American psycho”.

Retaliation from the rightwing twittersphere was swift and violent, as Khalek documented in an exhaustive (and exhausting) post at Alternet. 

In any event, I won't be seeing it, at least until it's free on TV.   It's important that the purity of my disdain for Eastwood is not sullied by the risk that he has made a film I might like (even though I think there is a very small chance of that.)

Update:  another article that argues that the movie shows moral complexities (even if it greatly simplifies the particular war in question) is here. 

Update 2:  gee, this review of the book the movie is based on (via one of the links above) makes it sound like poison to a liberal.  It certainly would seem the movie accurately reflects Kyle's simplistic world view; perhaps it increases the sympathy for his post war troubles beyond what the book achieves.  But if so, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? 

That big?

Two undiscovered planets as big as Earth ‘could be on edge of solar system’ | Science | The Guardian

About 18C Racial Discrimination Act

I see that Tim "Selfie" Wilson continues his jihad against s18C of the RDA in a lengthy column in The Australian.

I also see that Mike Carlton has taken offence at his mention in the column, too.  I would have thought he has grounds for a defamation action, but I could be wrong.   I hope some lawyer volunteers to act for him, though, even if he is annoying much of the time. 

I don't really understand Wilson's ability to run around continually trying to drum up support for policy changes which are not entirely consistent with the policy position of his workplace, the HRC.   (Well, I think that's what's going on, anyway.)

The media attack on his boss, Triggs, has also been a disgrace.    Sure, her finding of compensation being warranted to a detainee kept confined for years after he served his criminal sentence sounded high, but the finding that his detention was in breach of international convention was hardly surprising to most lawyers who have commented on it.

The Right seems to think that you're an immigrant, you can be kept detained indefinitely if you have committed a serious crime, even after serving the sentence.  (They are displaying exactly the same nonchalance about the situation on Manus Island, which is likely to turn very ugly soon, by the looks.)  

But back to 18C:   one of the odd things about it is that I see no compelling evidence that Tim's buddy Sinclair Davidson is worried about its use against him for hosting a blog that becomes chock full of the most inflammatory comments about Islam and Muslims after every terrorist attack.

And as for Wilson's argument that he's worried that aboriginal attitudes against gays can't be discussed freely because of 18C - what a completely bogus point.   As someone at Catallaxy (how odd - something useful from that blog!) has pointed out - the topic of aboriginal tradition being used as a self justification for completely unacceptable sexual behaviour was thoroughly canvassed in The Australian in a column in 2007.  Did 18C prevent that being published?  

Wilson and his buddies selfservingly exaggerate the operation and effect of 18C - and they have little in the way of actual cases to point to where it has interfered with a topic getting discussed in the media.

But, that's right, Andrew Bolt got taken to court over a column and his paper had to print a statement to run with the offending columns.   (And we don't know who paid for Andrew's legal costs.  But it was stressful for him.  Very, very stressful.  And so s.18C must go.)

Poor Rupert

Rather unbelievable that Rupert Murdoch should tweet complaining about the tax he pays in New York, isn't it?   I take it he means 55% - and the outpouring of sympathy in tweets following is very amusing to behold.

Oh no it's Alan Jones

I don't normally listen to 4BC, but this morning it happened to be on in the car, just in time for me to hear its new morning host (Alan Jones on relay from Sydney - groan), but it was interesting to hear him telling the world that no one can believe a word the lying liar Campbell Newman says.  (Jones actually went through the campaign launch speech and mocked all of his promises.)

It's all to do with Jones being against farm land being lost to miners. 

I didn't listen long enough to get to the point of understanding who Jones thinks Queenslanders should vote for, though....

The problem of Tony

I missed the story yesterday that a leak shows that top ranking Ministers are dead keen to let the public know that they did not agree with the Abbott "captain's call" to get into the Medicare rebate.

Unrest within government ranks about the PM's competency must be running a lot higher than journalists seem to be letting on.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if the Coalition "does a Rudd" with Tone?  (Although, of course, I assume they would say it couldn't be done the same way, and they would just insist that he resign or the party faces certain defeat, and for all his faults, Tony doesn't have the personality of Rudd and would - I expect - accept such a rebellion.)

Atonement simplified (and other Old Testament stuff)

I've been slowly reading a book written in 1963 by a Swedish Biblical scholar, Helmer Ringgren called Israelite Religion.    (It was at a second hand book market at Kelvin Grove, and I bought it because I thought it might fill in some lack of knowledge about Jewish temple practices.)  Helmer only died in 2012, I see, at the ripe old age of 94.

It is quite a good read, actually, and although only half way through, there are a few curious points I consider "blogworthy":

*  tent sanctuaries, such as that originally described for the Ark of the Covenant, are clearly known to have been used by pre-Islamic Arabs, and by modern Bedouins,   Seems little reason to doubt, then, that Jews had one.   In fact, I see now that there is a book called The Kregal Pictorial Guide to the Tabernacle which goes into much detail about these.  Interesting.  I just didn't realise that they were likely many of these wandering the deserts of the ancient Middle East.

*  there is the curious story of Jephthah in the book of Judges which is a little like the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son, except in this case the daughter does actually get it.   I don't think I had heard of this before, although it is probably a favourite of the "New Atheists", as it is clearly not, shall we say, Sunday School friendly.  (It certainly didn't pay for kids in that part of the world  to rush out of the house to great their Dad after a hard day on the battlefield.)

 The Wikipedia article about it notes the various ways its meaning has been guessed, although Ringgren himself seems to think it may be an echo of human sacrifice undertaken by the Canaanites.  He thinks, however, that there are other parts of the Old Testament that more clearly indicate some Israelites at some times may have "borrowed" other Middle Eastern ideas of the sacrifice of children.

Update:  Wikipedia has a quite detailed entry about the controversy over child sacrifice to Moloch

*  As far as the matter of sacrifice and atonement in the Temple is concerned, Ringgren makes brief mention of a Babylonian atonement ceremony which involved putting dough on a person and washing it off.   Seems a lot simpler than killing a bull, goat or pigeon and sprinking its blood on the altar.  (I wonder if the size of the sin had to be reflected in the size of the animal?)

The chapter about sacrifice and its meaning is one of the most interesting in the book, but I haven't finished it yet.

Update:  the book has also reminded me about the "showbread" or "Bread of the Presence" which was left in the Temple.  I only had the vaguest recollection of this, but once again, there's a decent enough summary of this practice in Wikipedia.

As you may guess from this post, the Catholic Church has not, in my lifetime, shown much interest in teaching people about the Jewish precedents for Christian practices.   Catholics to tend to only know about a fairly narrow range of the OT through the first readings at Sunday Mass.   I guess the Catholic Church has more or less been motivated to distance itself from Judaism over most of history, and I presume that's the explanation...

A First World Problem, if ever there was one...

Our TVs at home are all a good number of years old now - in fact we still use in one room a plasma screen that must be pushing 8 or 9 years, and is a very "standard" definition screen that still somehow gives quite satisfactory enough viewing with DVDs.  The other big screen TV is LCD, but I think a fairly low end one.  It does night time scenes from DVDs particularly poorly.

At Christmas we were watching Guardians of the Galaxy on DVD on my sister's new-ish LCD TV, and while I was sitting there thinking how clear and crisp the image was, my wife pointed out that it was actually too clear - it was like watching very high quality video, not a cinema movie. Once it was pointed out to me, it did become a little distracting.

I noticed that this was also the case with all the HD TVs at the department store this afternoon too - they were all were showing a silly Avengers movie, and they all made it looked rather like video.

But I see on Googling the topic that this is a common issue people have when they first get their shiny new HD TVs.

An article in Wired from last August explains:

This annoying little phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “soap opera effect,” and it’s a byproduct of your TV’s motion-enhancing features. Thankfully, the effect can be turned off, and that’s probably a good idea when you’re watching movies. While these smoothing features can make a few things look better—scrolling tickers, sports, and HDTV test discs, for example—our eyes and brains expect something very different when we’re watching movies. A slower frame rate is one of them.

It then goes into a rather technical description of what's going on, and how to try to make sure your TV isn't making some sublime cinematography look like a high end Days of Our Lives.

I see that this was discussed in the SMH in mid 2013, but I didn't pay much attention to an article describing a problem I hadn't yet seen.

Anyway, now that I realise it's an issue, I'll know how to deal with it when we get a new TV.  We're kind of hoping that happens soon, as the LCD TV did an odd flicker out the other day, but revived itself.  It would be good to be able to watch movies with night scenes again...

Local and global heat

I've been meaning to comment here that it's been a hot and uncomfortable summer in South East Queensland.   When the temperature hasn't been high (it will likely reach 38 degrees in the Western parts of Brisbane today), it's been very humid*, but with little relief from storms.     (Oh yeah, but when they have come, they have caused damage pushing close to $1 billion.)

So with a hot summer, it will make the message that global warming is real more readily accepted by to many in Australia.

Amusingly enough, I see that when the Wall Street Journal runs a "straight" story reporting on the NOAA, NASA and JAMA findings that last year did set a global record (just), it does not go down well with its readership.   (Have a look at the comments.) 

Of course, the paper will probably run six follow up pieces by the likes of Roy Spencer, John Christy, Pat Michaels or Nigel Lawson all offering comfort to their deluded and gullible right wing readership that the paper hasn't abandoned them.

Anyhow, according to the stupid (or, more accurately, the ideologically motivated to disbelieve science)  this is what "AGW - Ha! What a crock!" looks like:

And this is what it looks according to the Japanese (using a different baseline):

And let's not forget - what does Richard Muller's Berkley Earth temperature independently calculated record say:

(Actually, they say that 2014 was a record, but by such a tiny margin it's hard to be sure it really did beat 2010 or 2005.   Seems they are very clear 1998 is not the king, though.)

We all know what the climate change "do-nothings" will say - look at the satellite records - even though they attempt to measure, via the most indirect and complicated means available, the temperature of the atmosphere above the earth rather than surface temperatures.  The two major satellite records have been increasingly diverging, and were shown to be clearly wrong for a protracted period in the past, but deniers will cling to them anyway, rather than believe thermometers on the ground.

That all said, the temperature rise is still running on the low end of model projections (gee, who would have thought that modelling and measuring heat distribution across an entire planet would be complicated...), but stepping back and looking at the big picture (literally, in the case of graphs), people have to be very determined to convince themselves there is not a big problem....

*  This weekend's high humidity (and temperatures - 38 near my house again, today) - noted here.

The secret life of vegans

I didn't go looking for this story, honest.  (I was in fact reading about The Box Trolls' Oscar nomination, and the Laika studio is based in Oregon - see.)

Anyway, this is one of more improbable headlines I've seen for a while:

Two Portland strippers sue vegan strip club Casa Diablo for back wages, unlawful deductions, battery


And the opening sentence:

Two strippers accuse Portland's Casa Diablo, which bills itself the "World's First Vegan Strip Club" of not paying them wages and fining them for such artistic transgressions as failing to disrobe fast enough.

I would never have guessed that a vegan strip joint would have an audience, but it seems to have been operating for a few years at least. 

Bee on being simulated

Backreaction: Do we live in a computer simulation?

Good post by the best active physics blogger that I know...

Update:  I'm sure these are not novel thoughts, but I guess the upside of being in a computer simulation which is running right now is that on death, it may make re-loading me immediately into another simulation a.k.a "the afterlife" a relatively straightforward process.  And, I guess, letting a person review their past life either as part of the dying process, or even at a more leisurely pace from the other simulation, should be easily accommodated too, providing there have been good backups made for "viewing." 

I don't really see that there should be much difficulty in allowing ghost like visits from one simulation to another, too.  Perhaps either the person/thing running the simulation could allow for it, upon request, or there could be viruses that allow for cross simulation incursions.

Of course, the downside is that if the simulation controller is a super advanced teenage gamer, he/she/it may find relocating people into randomly chosen varieties of afterlife a bit of a laugh.  "Put Hitler and all the other bad dudes into  into what everyone else thinks is Heaven, and see how they react?  Haw, haw, haw."

Or does something like Game Theory dictate that if you are running simulations, you do not mistreat your underlings for fear of being punished yourself in the simulation you might be running in?