I want Spielberg taken to a secure location until 1 January

So, the 2016 terrible run of relatively early deaths of entertainers who a lot of people liked continues, with Carrie Fisher dying today.   She was, apparently, very likeable in person; but to be honest, I didn't follow her post Star Wars career all that closely.  (Didn't read any of her autobiographic books, or see the movie based on the first one, for example.)

There is much speculation on Reddit and the like that she may well have had heart trouble due to her earlier years of cocaine and alcohol abuse.   Seems a reasonable guess.  Google shows me that she was a smoker, too, both when young and even quite recently.  I also see she said she started smoking marijuana at 13 - probably well before it was so well recognised that using it at such a young age is the most dangerous time for developing serious mental health issues.   Again, one of those cases where it's hard to know whether the drug use led to the problems for which she later "self medicated" with more drugs.

As for her later disclosures of drug use - I assume she didn't seek to glamorise it at all, but there is always the worry that any reformed drug abuser who talks too much about their past use inadvertently signals to some people that it's OK to overuse it for a while because they will be able to recover, after having their youthful fun.  However, given that I don't really know how she wrote or talked about it, I don't know whether she ever had that effect or not.

I see this morning that there is increasing speculation that George Michael had gotten back into serious drugs (heroin) in the last year.

And although it seems his death was accidental, pain killing drugs were behind Prince's death too.

So, while all of this deaths have saddened many, many fans, I hope at least that some people, particularly the young, are taking some lessons about drug abuse from them.

Celebrity and unhappiness

I've written on this general topic before, but anyway...

I noted a couple of posts back that I knew little of George Michael's private life, but obviously, those gaps are being filled in now by the media attention following his death.

He really seems a prime example of how celebrity and happiness are so often strangers to each other, and how hard it is to know which way the causation flows in any individual case.  Does the personality type that makes public performance in any field an attractive career mean they are already primed for future depression?  (That seems an especially likely scenario for modern comedians who base their act - as so many do now - on "confessional" comedy about their problematic personal lives.   Older style comedians, who didn't rely on milking their own family or failed relationships, don't give the impression of having been so prone to being unhappy in real life.)

Or is it that financial success and celebrity attention exacerbates any dissatisfaction in relationships and life to such an extent that someone who otherwise might not have developed depression gets it anyway?  One obvious contributing factor to that is the ease with which money gives access to drugs (and the popularity of their use within the entertainment industry.)   Michael apparently had a very big marijuana habit, and also took "party drugs"; but as a means of "self medication" for depression, it seems even pro-cannabis websites are very cautious about it being a good idea. 

As for relationships and sex:  of course, The Guardian's gay writer Owen Jones thinks he shouldn't be criticised for only "coming out" after an arrest made it more or less inevitable, and also notes the rather shameful media reaction to it, which just shows how far England has changed; and this is fair enough.   Yet Jones also seems to think there is something admirable about Michael subsequently reacting by wearing anonymous sex and having open relationships on his sleeve as a honest advertisement for gay people being able to chose to live however they want.

Yet, oddly, Jones doesn't mention perhaps the most problematic thing Michael even said about his sex life, namely that had given up being tested for HIV because he was afraid of the results.  This was in 2007 in an interview that Stephen Fry was going to use in a documentary, but which Michael subsequently asked not to be used.  (It got into the media anyway.)

Now, he apparently said he had stopped being tested since "at least 2004", and his gay partner had died of AIDS long before that, so it appears he did not catch HIV from him.   It would indicate that he had a fear of catching HIV from his promiscuous sex life after that boyfriend's death.

Of course, this seems a very irresponsible attitude, but there are a couple of ways of mitigating it, I suppose:  first, he did have depression for a long time, it seems, and that alone can affect judgement.  Secondly, although I think this is pulling a long bow:  a person who is scrupulous about safe sex might feel their status is irrelevant if they are always going to only engage in the safest sex activities.  But really, how likely is it a drug taking depressive is going to be that careful during every sexual encounter?

And more generally:  Michael's defiant attitude to gay promiscuity is very close to the view expressed by Freddie Mercury, who nonetheless made sad comments towards the end of his life that being surrounded by people all the time does not mean you can't be lonely.  I always found it hard to read that as anything other than an admission that throwing yourself completely into sexual hedonism is not a reliable path to happiness, but it seems a particularly hard lesson for some gay men to accept.

And no, I am not convinced of this attitude being a case of "straight" hypocrisy - you know, the sort of argument that people think a man who sleeps with scores of women over a few years is just a "lad" having fun, whereas the same thing in a gay man is disgusting irresponsibility.   First, I think many people do draw a mental line as to how responsible it is for straight men to bed a different woman every week or two.  But also, in many cases, I think there is a bias, but one which is hypocritical in the other direction - that people don't criticise cases of gay promiscuity when they would if it were straight encounters.   It's the attitude of "well, that must be what's good about being gay - men know men can have casual encounters with no emotional baggage, so why wouldn't they have lots and lots of sex?  I would."

But don't cases like Michael and Mercury indicate the dubious credibility of that?   Sure, it is understandable that gay men think differently about casual sex, but let's be real and admit that excessive hedonism of any kind is probably not good for the emotional life of anyone, and is nothing to be admired....

Update:  of course, to be fair, it appears he was pretty generous with charitable donations, and there are many people speaking well of him.   I'm not trying to paint him as a bad man, but he was certainly a troubled one who openly admitted to having a "self destructive" impulse.

The silly, simple capitalist

The election of Donald Trump has brought out a burst of "ain't capitalism grand?" commentary by certain economists, and amongst them is the always annoyingly simplistic Deidre McCloskey.

Her recent column in the NYT carries the message of "don't worry about inequality in the US, you can never fix it, and trying to do so only makes things worse" is chock full of over-generalisations of the most irritating kind.

She doesn't address criticism of inequality by economists such as Stiglitz and Piketty, she just ignores them outright, and goes on to talk as if any attempt to address inequality is akin to the full blown Socialism of Russia and China in the 20th century:

 Another problem is that the cutting reduces the size of the crop. We need to allow for rewards that tell the economy to increase the activity earning them. If a brain surgeon and a taxi driver earn the same amount, we won’t have enough brain surgeons. Why bother? An all-wise central plan could force the right people into the right jobs. But such a solution, like much of the case for a compelled equality, is violent and magical. The magic has been tried, in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. So has the violence. 

 McCloskey distinguishes herself amongst Right wing straw man loving economics writers only by seeming to accept that climate change is real (oh, and perhaps by accepting that it is appropriate for the State to pay for education to year 12).  So why does she not devote any time to criticising the abject failure of the American Right to accept the need for capitalist friendly policies (obviously, a price on carbon) for the problem that is bound to have vast economic consequences and affect the growth she loves?  Instead, let's just write a swooning love letter to capitalism.

Yes we know, Deidre, capitalism has done a great job in many respects and outlived the doomed to fail examples of Russia and nearly every other communist state.  And free trade has helped drop poverty levels globally - even Krugman is a fan of it.

But stop pretending that inequality critics are Communists, and that inequality counts for naught in nations like the US, where examples of the working poor are legion, in comparison to other successful capitalist nations that manage to reduce inequality by policies that haven't killed their economy and don't stop the rich being rich.

Failed conversions

Ross Douthat's Christmas column, about his interest in "secular moderns" who have supernatural seeming experiences, but who don't come out of it with any particular conversion to belief in the supernatural, is  interesting.  I like reading about those sort of experiences too.  

He links to a recent article by The Exorcist director William Freidkin, who visited (out of curiosity, really) the Vatican exorcist to see how accurately his film reflected real life exorcisms.   I don't find the case he follows particularly convincing of anything, but one of the stories a New York psychiatrist tells him is more interesting:

LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis. “Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.

As for The Exorcist itself:  I think I have mentioned before that I have never watched more than perhaps 10 minutes of it on TV, and found it too over the top to be scary or convincing.   It's a pity, in a way, that the book/movie did this; from what I have read (a long time ago, now) cases of possession with much more subtle aspects could be much more persuasive of the supernatural.

An unshared enthusiasm

No disrespect intended for the value of the life of George Michael as a fellow human, but I do have an odd urge to express my unfashionable opinion that most of his musical output was either gratingly bland (Last Christmas - a "straight to Muzak" song if ever there was one - I actively dislike) or annoying (have people forgotten "I want your sex"? I know I had, until I just read his obituary.)   And, while I'm speaking inappropriately of the deceased (again, I'm not dissing him as a person - I know very little about him - just expressing an opinion of his work that I know few agree with), I may as well spread the disrespect and admit that, amongst other signs, I always thought that Princess Diana's fondness for Wham! to be a pretty good indication that Prince Charles really had made a mistake in marrying her....
His voice was OK, I suppose, but I just found the material it was used for was usually not to my taste.  But then again, in music, my taste is very limited...

Continuing the Christmas theme

There's a good read to be found at The Japan Times on the "first" Japanese Christmas. 

Those missionaries really made converts work for their salvation:

The Christmas of 1552 could hardly have been more different from the Christmases we know today. Familiar Yuletide iconography — Christmas trees, reindeers, mistletoe and the like — was not yet established anywhere in the world (and, naturally, there was not a whiff of the commercialism that marks modern-day Christmas festivities.) The setting for this Christmas was the abandoned Daido-ji Buddhist temple, converted into the Jesuits’ house of worship and living quarters. It would be among the first of Japan’s nanban-dera, or southern barbarian temples, the name given to the makeshift Christian churches housed in Buddhist buildings, with shoji and engawa (a type of terrace) and, often the sole exterior visual difference, a cross erected upon the kawara roof tiles.

On Christmas Eve, Japanese believers were invited to spend the night in the Jesuit living quarters, cramming the venue as they embarked upon an all-nighter of hymns, sermons, scripture readings and Masses. For today’s readers, at least, de Alcacova’s account comes across as a rather gruelling experience, although there’s no reason to doubt the missionary’s numerous references to the “great joy” of the Japanese converts. From dusk until dawn, the new converts were treated to sermons and readings about “Deus” — the Portuguese word for God. The entire celebration contained no fewer than six Masses.

Father Juan Fernandez, an important Jesuit who wrote the West’s first lexicon of Japanese, opened the midnight scripture sessions. When his voice grew weary, he was relieved by “a Japanese youth with knowledge of our language,” de Alcacova writes. At the crack of dawn, Cosme de Torres — leader of the Jesuit mission after Xavier’s departure for India — led a new Mass, while another priest read passages from the gospels and the Epistles. After this night of Christian immersion, the faithful were allowed to go home, likely exchanging greetings of “Natala” — the Portuguese word for Christmas, meaning “birth.”

 There is much more of interest in this lengthy article, which you can read here.

Re-working the classics

For my 2016 Christmas graphic, I thought I would run some classics through Prismsa.
I wonder what da Vinci would have thought of this.   Here's the original, with the most Italian looking Christ child ever:

And here's part of it, turned a bit Japanesque via Prisma:

You know what I find interesting: I reckon this filter makes the Christ child look very much like a photo that's been filtered, not a painting.

I tried others through Prisma too, but I liked this the best.

As for your more classic Nativity scenes, how's this one for bright colours and an amazing amount of peculiar detail to analyse:

 

I find it very odd. Merry Christmas, anyway!

Update:  I've added a bit...

I expect such behaviour to be banned under ...ugh..President Trump

US Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, and a bunch of her staff, show themselves to understand what can please the Japanese, by dancing to a popular song, and including a mascot too:

An example of Trump not knowing who to listen to

Wow.  A really clear explanation by Matthew Yglesias as to why the simplistic ideas about trade by Trump approved advisers Ross & Navarro are just wrong. 

A good example of how Trump has no judgement as to who has credibility on virtually any subject.

Tiny food before the big food season

A Japanese thing I didn't know about:

YouTube is replete with Japanese tiny-food videos. Their creators shrink recipes to Lilliputian dimensions: pancakes the size of nickels, burgers compact enough to flip with chopsticks. The meals may be extremely diminutive, but they’re edible. Most of the ingredients are hulking compared with the finished products, but whenever possible, the chefs choose smaller stand-ins: Pearl onions or shallots sub for their bigger counterparts, and quail eggs replace chicken eggs.
Some of the YouTube channels devoted to tiny food post only periodically, while others roll out new installments a few times a week. Miniature Space, to take one example, has more than 1 million subscribers; its most popular video—a strawberry shortcake made from a single berry—has been viewed more than 8.5 million times. The videos are addictive; there’s something at once mesmerizing and weirdly funny about a gigantic hand trying to chisel a tiny sliver of meat, or smooth whisker-thin coats of icing on a multitiered “cake” cut from a single slice of bread.

All we want for Christmas - charcoal underpants

BBC - Future - How to tackle the most embarrassing problem on planes
I think I missed this article from two Decembers ago, about the problem of expanding intestinal gases on planes. (I'm glad to read it's not just my imagination - I had wondered for some time if the reduced cabin air pressure was really enough to cause this.  Apparently it is.) I also didn't know that you can buy charcoal filled underpants:

Even so, Rosenberg’s personal feeling is that more could be done – particularly since no smoking policies have made other odours more easily discernible. It may be possible to place charcoal within the seats themselves, he suggests – though previous studies have suggested that is not particularly effective, perhaps because most trousers and skirts create a “tunnel effect” that direct the fumes away from the cushion. Instead, he thinks that airlines would do better to use blankets with charcoal woven into the fabric. For people who are especially worried about their own flatulence, he points out that you can now buy underwear designed along similar principles; the American Journal of Gastroenterology reports that charcoal-lined underwear absorbs nearly 100% of the odour, compared to removable (and reusable) pads placed within trousers, which only absorb about 70%.

Somehow, I had previously missed reading about this brand of charcoal filtering underwear, and their rather upmarket looking website   You can thank me later...

No wonder defence industries like him...

The shambolic embarrassment of a President elect announcing potential policy as half-arsed thoughts on Twitter continues, I see:

 President-elect Donald Trump has said the US should enlarge its nuclear arsenal, an apparent reversal of a decades-long reduction of the nation's atomic weaponry that came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated calls for his country's arsenal to be reinforced.

And while the stoopid who voted for him thought it was great that careless reporting indicated Boeing was willing to shave about $1 billion off the cost of a new Air Force One (seriously, do reporters really think Boeing just admitted that it had bolstered the cost by 25% just because it could get away with it?), they might want to consider that all defence companies do have a great incentive to be seen to be flattering his massive ego, because they know he is a cash cow just waiting to be milked:

Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are already competing to build a next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the US Air Force, a project expected to cost at least $85 billion.
That is just one part of a modernisation plan that will contribute to what defence analysts call a gathering "bow wave" of spending in the coming decade on major weapons that future presidents will face.
Defence companies stand to benefit from a resurgence in military spending promised by Mr Trump and already under way in Western Europe and Asia as global tensions rise.

Vanilla coffee

On a whim, I recently put a few (well, maybe 5 or 6) drops of vanilla extract in my morning instant coffee.  (Moccona, if you're interested.)

It works well.  Not a strong taste, but sort of smooths out the flavour somewhat, I think.  Or perhaps I need to do a blind taste test to make sure I'm not imagining things.

Carry on.

Something vaguely optimistic

From The Guardian:

The Indian government has forecast that it will exceed the renewable energy targets set in Paris last year by nearly half and three years ahead of schedule.
A draft 10-year energy blueprint published this week predicts India will be generating 57% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2027. The Paris climate accord target was 40% by 2030.
The forecast reflects an increase in private sector investment in Indian renewable energy projects over the past year, according to analysts.
The draft national electricity plan also indicated that no new coal-fired power stations were likely to be required to meet Indian energy needs until at least 2027, raising further doubts over the viability of Indian mining investments overseas, such as the energy company Adani’s Carmichael mine in Queensland, the largest coalmine planned to be built in Australia.

Some astonishing figures

Why are rural areas seeing a rise in drug-dependent newborns? - CSMonitor.com

Gee, this isn't the cheeriest series of posts so close to Christmas. But Trump is on the way to the White House and the sense of doom is palpable.

Anyhow, here's one surprising sign of societal problems in rural America:

Roughly 1 out of every 130 babies in rural America are born dependent on drugs, according to a study published Monday.

The report, published in JAMA Pediatrics, shows a dramatic increase in neonatal abstinence syndrome – when a newborn baby is dependent on drugs and goes through withdrawal after birth – in rural areas between 2004 and 2013. In just a decade, the number of rural newborns suffering from chemical dependency skyrocketed from 1.2 per every 1,000 hospital births to 7.5 per 1,000.

While previous research has suggested an increase in neonatal abstinence syndrome in certain areas, the findings published Monday are the first to show just how widespread of a problem newborn drug dependency is across rural America, fueled by an increase in opioid use among women of all social classes and insufficient resources in far-flung areas to treat drug addiction.

Not a good sign...

Ice-melting temperatures forecast for Arctic midwinter | Environment | The Guardian

Earlier this year, when Arctic ice extent was low before summer, it looked possible that the summer melt would set a new record, and I thought that would be a good thing as the final nail in the coffin of AGW deniers, on top of record global temperatures convincingly beating the 1998 record, even on the dubious satellite records.  Well, it wasn't quite to be (a new record low ice extent, I mean), even though the summer melt was still very low.

But the recent patterns of global ice extent, and these odd winter temperatures, perhaps indicate we really don't have long to wait for the next record low.

Nick Cohen walking back from his Left hate?

I haven't followed his opinions all that regularly over the years, but I think it fair to say that, with this column, Nick Cohen's putting his attacks on the Left a bit more into perspective now, given the rise of the far Right in Europe and the US.   He really doesn't trust Russia, either.  Here's part of what he says about the murder this week in Turkey:

The propagandists of dictatorship are the most blatant exploiters of other people’s deaths. They use murder to brainwash their subjects at home and their fellow travellers abroad. Under the Tsars, Bolshevism and now Putin’s mixture of gangster capitalism and orthodox nationalism, hatred of the West has always been a defining feature of Russian ideology. When a Turkish police officer killed a Russian diplomat in Ankara this week – yelling ‘Don’t forget Aleppo!’ moments after the murder – Russia’s politicians and lickspittle ‘journalists’ instantly blacked out his real motives so they could fit him into their anti-Western story.

Even by the abysmal standards of Russian propaganda, the response to the assassination was breathtaking. It was either the result of Western protests about the Russian destruction of Aleppo or the direct result of a plot by ‘Nato secret services’. Despite helping Donald Trump to victory, and despite having the support of every far right party in Europe and Jeremy Corbyn’s contemptible British Labour party, Russia still has to regard the West as an enemy with supernatural powers. The propaganda is too deep-rooted and too useful to change. The naïve who think that Putin can be placated should watch it. Russia is telling us that not only that it cannot be appeased, it does not want to be appeased either. I doubt even a Trump presidency will stem the paranoid hatred.

Fear of blood

Menstruation really, really struck some old societies as something to be feared, didn't it?  And I see that in some corners of the globe, it still causes some terrible treatment of women and girls:

A 15-year-old girl died in a menstrual hut in western Nepal sometime between the night of Saturday, Dec. 17, and the morning of Sunday, Dec. 18. According to Nepal's Republica newspaper, Roshani Tiruwa, from Nepal's Achham district, went to the shed after eating dinner around 6 p.m. She lit a fire in the tiny mud hut before going to sleep. Tiruwa's father found her body the next morning. District police suspect the ninth-grader died from a lack of oxygen....

Since 2007, at least eight other deaths related to menstrual seclusion have been reported in Achham, a district with a population of 250,000. Carbon monoxide poisoning from lighting fires to heat the sheds was a common cause of death. Wild animal attacks was another.

The practice of menstrual seclusion is widespread in western Nepal. Taboos surrounding menstruation, rooted in Hindu mythology, have led to a range of restrictions on menstruating girls and women: from forbidding entrance to kitchens or temples to the practice of sleeping outside the house, called chaupadi. Many people believe that a menstruating girl who breaks the rules risks angering the gods and inviting misfortune on her family.

Chaupadi was outlawed by Nepal's Supreme Court in 2005 but proves difficult to eradicate. A 2011 U.N. report estimated 95 percent of women in the Achham district follow the practice. The government has invested in awareness campaigns and village by village has been declaring "chaupadi-free" zones. But that hasn't stopped the practice: Tiruwa's village was declared "chaupadi-free" in September 2015, according to Republica.

Tangled wins

Continuing my grudge against Frozen, this comedy song highlight from Tangled is about 20 times wittier than anything in the former movie.  You can read the lyrics on this version:

Not just me

I was watching Rick Stein's latest pleasant cooking/travel show last night, and he ended up in Greece, where he noted that a lot of people are "rather rude" about Greek cuisine.

Count me in on that.  Of all the European cuisines, I have always said that Greek is the least interesting, and I invariably find Greek restaurants are dull and way, way too similar.   Mind you, a good moussaka can be pretty nice, even though last night's example must be pretty damn heavy with olive oil.  But overall, I like to give Greek food a miss.

And in another example of confirmation that I am not alone, after all, I see that quite a few readers of The Guardian are criticising Frozen, a movie which I agree is completely underwhelming, with a popularity based on one song.  

Oh, and Jonathan Greene on Twitter has been sharing a three year old ribald attack on Love Actually, with which I also agree.  I really find that movie the pits, and would force people who love it into re-education camps if I were a not-so-benevolent dictator.