Whales and cannibals

Here's another late review you never knew you needed.

Watched "In the Heart of the Sea" last night on Stan (the home of the "not quite A level" movie, it seems.)    You may or may not recall - this was the fairly recent box office flop of Ron Howard (and star Chris Hemsworth) based on (one of the) real life inspirations for Moby Dick:  the sinking of the whaling ship Essex after being rammed a couple of times by a whale.

First things first:   yes, it's a chance for me to whine about historical movies again, and whether or not I approve of what liberties they take with facts.

But, as far as how factual it was, I don't have too much to complain about:  it seems it was more or less accurate, with one notable exception.

Spoiler section:   No, the whale didn't pursue the survivors as the movie suggests.   This story element is understandable in a dramatic sense, but also a bit patently silly.   I think it should have been dropped, but true, it is hard to come up with dramatic highlights in a story of lifeboats drifting at sea.  End of Spoiler section.

But, apart from that, I have to say, it seemed a very good attempt at the general depiction of Nantucket whalers' lives at that time.   And the practical side of how whaling was done was, I'm pretty sure, quite authentic.   There are couple of articles linked below which certainly indicate this.

And while aware of the Essex story, I had forgotten about the cannibalism that was a large part of it;  the movie isn't gory in what it shows, but it doesn't shy away from the topic either.   The bit where the bones were strewn on the floor of the boat when the captain was saved was, apparently, accurate.

So, overall, I recommend the movie for this reason alone.

However, at the technical level, there were two very curious problems.

The minor one:   Chris Hemsworth did seem to have trouble with staying in the same accent.  Not that I'm sure what a Nantucket whaler from the 1800's should have sounded like, but his accent did seem to wander.  Did the voice coach give up?  Is Chris too big a star to correct?

The major one:  For a big budget movie with a famous director and star, it did have some really serious issues with the uneven quality of the special effects.   The land based look of the film is very fine - the recreation of Nantucket looks authentic.  But at sea, it is sometimes a very different matter.  As my son said during one of the worst looking sequences (when the ship first runs into bad weather), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End  looked more convincing, even in fantasy like conditions. (I still feel that that movie is seriously underrated, by the way.)

Then there are later sequences where some shots look fine, but they are intercut with other shots which have the glow-y fake look that I've complained about in the Lord of the Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels.  The inter-cutting of variable quality shots in the one sequence makes it look very obvious, if you ask me.  

I would guess that two different effects companies worked on the shots which were then spliced together, and somehow they never got the "look" to match.  If I were Ron Howard, I would be rather upset about this.

Or am I imagining it all?  I doubt it.

Anyway, I don't want to put anyone off watching it for these reasons.   Because, well, the life of the seamen in those days was ridiculously tough, and the history of whaling from Nantucket is very fascinating.

To get a good summary, here's a lengthy article in The Smithsonian by the author of the book (Nathaniel Philbrick) that the film is based on.  It's a great read.

As for an article that talks more generally about how often whales sank ships, you probably can't do better than this one at Quartz.   Here's a key section:

In fact, nearly 200 years after the Essex went down, a huge mystery still hangs over the story: Was the sperm whale that attacked the Essex actually acting out of vengeance—and are these great animals even capable of such calculated violence?

Not just the Essex

It might seem that way given that the Essex was hardly the only whaleship to be rammed by a sperm whale. Others include the Pusie Hall in 1835, the Lydia and the Two Generals in 1836, the Pocahontas in 1850, the Ann Alexander in 1851, and the Kathleen in 1902 (all except the Pusie Hall and the Pocahontas sank). Another, the Union, went down near the Azores in 1807 after running into a whale in the night. These perilous encounters with sperm whales ended abruptly after the mid-1800s, thanks in part to the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859—a substitute for whale oil—as well as to rising wages, as Derek Thompson explained in The Atlantic. Another factor was that after 1850 most new ships were built not with wood but iron, which even an 80-ton whale can’t splinter. Tellingly, the last ship that sank due to a run-in with a sperm whale, the Kathleen, had been built in 1844, and was therefore made of wood.

The mystery of Mocha Dick

However, there might have been other sperm-whale attacks than just these seven—particularly if the legend of Mocha Dick is true. The story, first recorded by newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds, tells of a mammoth white whale near Isla Mocha, off the Chilean coast, that was famed for assailing whaleships. (As you probably have guessed, Melville took even more of his inspiration from the Mocha Dick legend than the story of the Essex.) The whale was said to have sunk some 22 whaleships between 1810 and 1830.

And as for cannibalism at sea:  this review in The Economist of Philbrick's book indicates he talks in detail about it:

With almost voyeuristic minuteness he has found out that when a body is deprived of water, the lips shrink as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts round the eyes as to prevent blinking. He has discovered that the fat on starving bodies turns to a “translucent gelatinous substance” and that the meat such a body could yield would be of doubtful nutritional value without fat to accompany it. He can tell us too about the psychological effects of starvation, and the descent into “feral” behaviour as evidenced by Auschwitz survivors. 

On that gruesome note, I'll end.

The frightening appointments begin....

Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national security adviser, loves Russia as much as his boss does - Vox

From the article, look what Powell thinks of him:

Colin Powell wasn’t pulling punches.

“I spoke at DIA last month,” the former secretary of state wrote
in a hacked email released this summer. “Flynn got fired as head of
DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got
fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad
management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”

Update:  wow, look at what CNN's reporting about the right wing social media nuttiness of Flynn's son, who works closely with Dad.

Update 2:  perhaps Flynn won't accept, because there are some real issues with his on line behaviour.  In July, the Jerusalem Post reported:

The former general– who GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump considered for his running mate, and who last week delivered a primetime speech to the Republican National Convention– was responding to accusations by the Clinton campaign that Russia was behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, and a subsequent leak of e-mails, in order to help Trump's candidacy.

Flynn wrote that "the corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything" to get Clinton elected. "This is a new low," he said, retweeting a message that read: "Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore."

He has since apologized for the retweet, calling it "a mistake."

Yellen speaks sense

Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan : The Two-Way : NPR

Let's wait for Trump to release his flying monkeys onto her.

A curious line

A curious line from the "yay for the coming break up of the EU - I don't like regulation, so I don't like it" column by Adam Creighton:

Not to mention the inflationary potential of Trump’s promised $US550 billion ($735bn) infrastructure binge financed by a huge tax cut.

Sarcasm?  With small government, libertarian-ish economists, and their fondness for Lafferism, it can be hard to tell...

About selfie deaths

Data Scientists Chart the Tragic Rise of Selfie Deaths: The team also found that the most common cause of death was falling from a height. This reflects the penchant for people taking selfies at the edge of cliffs, at the top of tall structures, and so on.

Water also accounts for a large number of deaths. And a significant number involve water and heights—things like jumping into the sea from a height and so on.

Interestingly, in India, trains feature significantly as a cause of selfie death. “This trend caters to the belief that posing on or next to train tracks with their best friend is regarded as romantic and a sign of never-ending friendship,” they say.

Another feature is the significant proportion of selfie deaths in the U.S. and Russia caused by weapons. “This might be a consequence of the open gun laws in both the countries,” the team suggests.

Because they were healthier in the first place?

Older Moms May Live Longer | TIME

Both do like labels...

The Link Between Autism and Trans Identity - The Atlantic

Sorry, still more Trump talk to consider

Megyn Kelly: Trump's lawyer threatened me, seemed OK with me getting physically hurt.

You should read it, to have an idea of the nastiness of (some) people supporting Trump.

Into the Right

Inside the Sacrifice Zone | by Nathaniel Rich | The New York Review of Books

Interesting review of a book by someone trying to understand the American Right by talking to them.

Too many things I want to copy, but I hadn't realised that Louisiana was another State that did the Lafferite thing and not have it work:

Louisiana’s governor is among the most powerful chief executives in the nation, a legacy that dates back to Huey Long’s administration, and under Governor Bobby Jindal’s dictatorship, between 2008 and 2016, the state’s prospects declined with unprecedented severity. After he reduced corporate income taxes and expanded the exemptions granted to oil and gas companies, the state’s revenue tumbled roughly $3 billion. He transferred $1.6 billion from public schools and hospitals to oil companies in the form of new tax incentives, under the
theory that the presence of oil and a robust petrochemical infrastructure were not incentives enough. (The Louisiana Legislature is not only soaked with oil and gas lobbyists—during a recent session there were seventy for 144 legislators—but many lawmakers themselves
hold industry jobs while serving in office.) Jindal fired 30,000 state employees, furloughed many others, cut education funding by nearly half, and sold off as many state-owned parking lots, farms, and hospitals as he could.

Despite these punishing cuts, he managed over the course of his administration to turn a $900 million budget surplus into a $1.6 billion deficit. National agencies downgraded the state’s
credit rating. The damage was so great that it helped to bring about one of the most unlikely election results in recent American history. Jindal’s successor is John Bel Edwards, a Democrat—the only one to hold statewide office. Edwards is vehemently pro-life and agnostic about climate change, but he is determined to hold the oil and gas industry responsible for funding their share of coastal restoration. He currently enjoys a 62.5 percent approval rating. Almost a year into his first term, however, despite several emergency measures, the state remains in arrears.

And yet I see that Louisiana just voted 58% to 38% for Trump!


Much of the book review talks about the conservative paradox - why so many people who vote Republican do so against their own interests.  The author comes up with a "deep story" that she thinks explains it best:

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream. It begins with an image of a long  line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers—white, older, Christian, predominantly male, many lacking college degrees—are
somewhere in the middle of the line. They trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting them in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even Syrian refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. The pelican, writes Hochschild,

needs clean fish to eat, clean water to dive in, oil-free marshes, and protection from coastal erosion. That’s why it’s in line ahead of you. But really, it’s just an animal and you’re a human being.

Meanwhile the Tea Partiers are made to feel less than human. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and the “traditional” values they have been taught to honor from birth. Many speak of “sympathy fatigue,” the sense that every demographic group but theirs receives sympathy from liberals. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one Tea Partier tells Hochschild. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

When Hochschild tells her deep story to some of the people she’s come to know, they greet it rapturously. “You’ve read my mind,” says one. “I live your analogy,” says Mike Schaff. She concludes that they do not vote in their economic interest but in their “emotional self-interest.”
What other choice do they have?

 All very interesting...

A typical story

Wired started a recent article with this anecdote:

In mid-October I wandered into a Trump field office in Youngstown, Ohio and met Coni Kessler, a kind 75-year-old Youngstown native with penciled-on eyebrows and a Women for Trump button on her Trump 2016 t-shirt. She sat me down in a chair just beside her, and for more than an hour, explained why she detested Hillary Clinton and was ecstatic to vote for Trump this year.

Clinton, she told me, is an atheist who wears an earpiece during debates so billionaire George Soros can feed her talking points. The day Clinton collapsed into the back of her van when she was sick with pneumonia? According to Kessler, the Clintons hired a young actress to run up and give Clinton a hug for a staged photo after the collapse. Kessler also said she’d seen videos of Bill Clinton raping an underage girl but that the video had mysteriously disappeared. She wondered why no one was talking about Bill Clinton’s illegitimate, half-black son. And she said that whenever she talks negatively about Clinton online, “they”—presumably the technology overlords—shut her phone down.

At some point, I stopped Kessler to ask her where she’d gotten all these stories, stories I knew were false Clinton conspiracy theories. Her answer: “It was on my Facebook page.”

Piketty on the Trump win

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail | Thomas Piketty | Opinion | The Guardian

I think he makes quite a bit of sense.

His views will, however, be completely rejected by a large slab of the Right because, for tribalistic reasons, they will reject that he has any point about climate change, and will reject any talk of increasing taxes as "socialism".

How is that fundamental problem with the Right to be overcome?   

Is anything else happening in the world?

Keeping up with the anti-Trumpism is pretty exhausting, but how can you resist, really?

A few random thoughts:

*  as a customer, I would not be impressed if Trump turned up in the restaurant I was eating in.  Would you trust an undocumented waiter not to take a stab at him, or turn the gas on and leave pronto?  But, it seems, he had a few well wishers at 21 Club, and given a burger there costs $36, you can just tell that this was a audience which would get this benefit from his policies:

When our meal ended, we wandered over to the front bar room. An hour later, people lined up to see Trump and his family exit. (An NBC video would show him saying “we’ll get your taxes down” as he made his way out.) Only one or two people among the dozens clapped. Many of the others were frantically snapping pictures with their smartphones. One man nearby shouted “Thank you, Donald.”

 *  What's irritating about the Trumpkins complaining about the nation wide protests is that they would have to be fooling themselves (well, they already have, but go with me here) if they were to deny that if the shoe was on the other foot - Trump had lost but with 1,000,000 + of the popular vote - the pro-Trump protests would have been full of armed wingnuts in the streets fully primed by Trump's pre-election "the system's rigged" rhetoric.     The situation would have been a thousand times scarier.

*  There is, however, due to Trump's lack of transparency re taxes, business arrangements, and exposure to foreign lending, some added legitimacy to the campaign to not just wave him into the White House.  If ever there were people with damaging disclosures to be made about Trump in any respect, now is the time to make them.

*  I've noticed quite a few tweets in #Trump by people saying in response to Megyn Kelly's "Trump bullied me" line words to the effect "Hey you started it by bullying him with that rude first question you asked."   We're not dealing with normal people here, to put it mildly:  protective of their hero getting asked a clear and direct question about his history of extreme sexism is "bullying".  Dimwits.

*  Vox has an interview with a social scientist about why social media is so bad for democracy - a favourite theme of mine - and large parts are worth reproducing here:

Jonathan Haidt

... I’m a fan of the political scientist Karen Stenner, who divides the groups on the right into three: The laissez-faire conservatives or libertarians who believe in maximum freedom, including economic freedom and small governance; the Burkean conservatives, who fear chaos, disruption, and disorder — these are many of the conservative intellectuals who have largely opposed Trump.

And then there are the authoritarians, who are people who are not necessarily racist but have a strong sense of moral order, and when they perceive that things are coming apart and that there’s a decrease in moral order, they become racist — hostile to alien groups including blacks, gay people, Mexicans, etc. This is the core audience that Trump has spoken to.

That’s not to say that most people who voted for him are authoritarians, but I think this is the core group that provides the passion that got him through the primaries...

Sean Illing

What you’re describing sounds like an expansion of the culture war. Is it your view that culture wars have subsumed all of our politics and that policies are just props in this broader battle?

Jonathan Haidt

Yes, that’s right. There are existential questions at stake, and this election has felt really apocalyptic for both sides. The right thinks the country is crashing into a void and that Trump, while crazy, is our only hope. The left thinks Trump will bring about a fascist coup, a war with China, or a betrayal of our alliances.

So there is an apocalyptic feeling here. Sacred values are at stake. There really can be no compromise between these two visions....

Ok here's the part about social media:

Jonathan Haidt

We haven’t talked about social media, but I really believe it’s one of our biggest problems. So long as we are all immersed in a constant stream of unbelievable outrages perpetrated by the other side, I don’t see how we can ever trust each other and work together again.

I don’t know what we’re going to do about social media. I’m hopeful that future generations will learn social media responsibility and somehow manage to communicate without demonizing the other side.

We have to recognize that we’re in a crisis, and that the left-right divide is probably unbridgeable. And if it is, we’ll have to give up on doing big things in Washington, and do as little as we possibly can at the national level. We’re going to have to return as much as we can to states and localities, and hope that innovative solutions spring from technology or private industry.

Polarization is here to stay for many decades, and it’s probably going to get worse, and so the question is: How do we adapt our democracy for life under intense polarization?

Sean Illing

There are some who think we’re not quite as polarized as it seems. The idea is that what often appear to be deep divisions are really just products of people living in echo chambers, and that this amplifies differences and obscures commonalities. I’m not terribly persuaded by this, but perhaps it’s worth considering.

Jonathan Haidt

There’s certainly a debate among political scientists about this, but I’m a social psychologist, so I’m not looking at people’s views about policy; I’m looking at their views about each other. And if you look at any measures of what people think about people on the other side, those have become vastly more hostile. That’s what concerns me.

In the 1960s, surveys asked people how they’d feel if their child married a Republican or an African American or a Jew, and back then some people really didn’t want their kids to marry someone of a different ethnicity, but a different political party wasn’t as big a deal. Now the opposite is true.

So I’m quite confident that there is affective polarization or emotional polarization in recent years.

Can't she even Google?

So, Judith Sloan seems to be completely unaware that Prince Albert of Monaco has a conservation foundation in his name, and has taken particular interest in recent years in ocean conservation.

Now look, that information wasn't exactly in the forefront of mind either (although I have a vague idea I had read about his conservation activism before), but at least I know to Google a topic before shooting my mouth off.

Or does she just see words about conservation and immediately go "Bahh...what rubbish"?

With the Trump election, Right wing rudeness combined with ignorance must be at some global high watermark at the moment.

Update:   tone and style is the speciality of some of the women who comment at that blog:

It's like Australia's special little 4chan for people over 65 of both sexes.

Pretty much what you would expect with a Breitbart transition team

Career civil servants should not serve in the Trump administration.

After that article was written, the big news is that Eliot Cohen, a Never Trumper who was on the Douthat side of the "should good people serve Trump, or not" argument has now changed his mind:

A topical article

Can Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Be Both Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic? - Israel – Forward.com

Short answer:  yes.  From the article:

Breitbart News isn’t the only place where anti-Semitism and Zionism
go hand in hand. Anti-Semitic attitudes abound in Poland, for example,
even as Poland has a strong diplomatic relationship with Israel.

This duality is a central component of “Trumpism,” said Yael
Sternhell, a Tel Aviv University professor of history and American
studies. Though Trump has flip-flopped on the Middle East, he has
professed an ultra-right view of Israel that would seem to outflank even
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also has a Jewish
son-in-law, and a daughter who converted to Judaism. At the same time,
many of Trump’s followers spout anti-Semitism.

“As long as Jews are in Israel fighting the ‘good fight’ with the
Arab world as a bastion of American ideals and values in the Middle
East, then they are very useful and admirable allies,” said Sternhell.
“Once they are home demanding a multi-cultural democracy, demanding that
the country accommodate their religion, their belief and their custom
that is a different story.”

And more:

Some on the alt-right, the emerging group of racist activists who
support Trump, oppose the close U.S.-Israel relationship as part of a
broader critique of U.S. interventionism abroad. Yet they admire Israel
as a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism,” according to the
right-wing online encyclopedia Conservapedia. Some also see Jewish
immigration to Israel as helping their cause of a Jew-free white
America.

The coexistence of anti-Semitism and right-Wing Zionism “in Trump’s world
make sense,” said Todd Gitlin, the Columbia University sociologist and
cultural commentator in an email to the Forward.


“Anti-Semitism and right-wing Zionism are varieties of ultra
nationalism, or, to put it more pejoratively (as it deserves to be put)
tribalism. They both presume that the embattled righteous ones need to
bristle at, wall off, and punish the damned outsiders. They hate and
fear cosmopolitan mixtures. They make a fetish of purity. They have the
same soul. They rhyme.”

Yes, pretty stupid

Group of U-Va. students, faculty ‘deeply offended’ by Thomas Jefferson being quoted at school he founded - The Washington Post

Talk about playing into the hands of the Trumpian anti-political correctness overreaction.   Although, as someone in comments says, the university does have 20,000 students and "only" 469 signed the letter; so is it a case of the media playing up university level immaturity?  To an extent, probably; but there were faculty members signing too....  

Mary Beard on the Trump election

Her article about how she missed the late night drama of the Trump election is both witty and serious.  Her last paragraphs:

Trump and Trump’s policies are truly ghastly, but you have to face the fact that a very large number of people actually voted for him. What is more, resentment at “the elite” has morphed into a proud contempt for truth, expertise and knowledge – not unlike Michael Gove’s jibe at “experts” before the Brexit vote. And in the broader context of political rhetoric, the idea that he won’t be as bad as he claimed is more, rather than less, worrying. I thought that the conciliatory speech was the worst thing I had heard all evening. The idea that he could be thanking Clinton for her service to the country (“I mean that very sincerely”) and be speaking of “binding the wounds of division” – when only the day before he’d promised to impeach her and poured salt into the very wounds he was now promising to heal – beggars belief. It has nothing to do with being “gracious” (as the television pundits had it), and everything to do with words not meaning anything. It was precisely what ancient rhetorical and political theorists feared almost more than anything else: that speech might not be true, and the corrosive effect of that on popular power.

So if we have a big job in a Trump (and Brexit) world, it is not simply to limit the damage. It is also to restore the place of knowledge as necessary for the political process, and not as something that merely reeks of privilege – and to revalue the nature of rhetoric, from “Crooked Hillary” to “taking back control”. Politicians may always have lied, but at least the Greeks and Romans worried about that. We have come almost to take it for granted.

Swamp not drained - actually being replenished with filthier water

Donald Trump’s Great Bait and Switch - The New Yorker

Obama's right

I just saw a clip on the new of Obama saying regarding Trump something close to this:  "I don't think he's ideological, really.  He's more of a pragmatist, which can be a good thing.  It depends on the people he surrounds himself with.  Am I worried about his administration - of course I am."

Yes, it's Obama being generous, and assessing Trump right.  I mean it's abundantly clear, the number of times Trump contradicts himself, that he has no well thought out ideological positions.  He tells the audience what he thinks they need to hear in order to advance his own self interest. 

To take a skerrick of "looking on the bright side" on Trump*, there is a case to be made that a Cruz presidency would have been more dangerous, because you can't imagine him ever changing a position based on pragmatism winning over ideology.  He would be absolutely impervious to contrary advice.

The crucial thing with Trump, though, is that with the appointment of Bannon as adviser, and a likely cabal of ideologically driven AGW deniers/lukewarmers and economic Laffer-ites around him, there is virtually no reason to believe he will get sound advice.

* although this may end up being as fruitless an exercise as asking whether Mussolini, if he were German, would have made a better leader for pre-war Germany than Hitler.

About banking regulation

Trump Should Repeal Frank Dodd - And Replace It With Obama And Clinton's Sensible Alternative

This isn't a topic I devote time to studying, but news of soaring bank stocks due to their anticipation that they'll be less regulated under Trump should, I would have thought, make anyone with more than a goldfish memory when it comes to financial crises a tad nervous.

Tim Worstall makes a reasonable sounding suggestion here, but it involves a new tax, and what hope is there that the GOP would run with that?

Update:  I was just looking at other columns by Worstall, and noticed in comments to one in which he sites a "ridiculous EU regulation" story, it is noted that he is a UKIP supporter.   I had overlooked that before.   His credibility just took a large hit.