What a way to run a Presidency

From Politico:

One key development: White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.

“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”

Downplaying the downside risk of a decision can win out in the short term. But the risk is a presidential dressing-down—delivered in a yell. “You don’t want to be the person who sold him on something that turned out to be a bad idea,” the person said.

Advisers have tried to curtail Trump’s idle hours, hoping to prevent him from watching cable news or calling old friends and then tweeting about it. That only works during the workday, though—Trump’s evenings and weekends have remained largely his own.

So how do the aides come to work out the "preferred course of action" before they put it before the boss?  Especially given a lot of them are in high conflict?

Adam and morality

So Adam Creighton urges caution about the (apparent) Trump tax plan working out all that great.

He likes the company tax cuts, but is doubtful about any economic benefit from the personal tax cuts. This line, though, shows what a jumble of thoughts he is:

The moral case for cutting taxes — “hands off my money” — is stronger than the economic case. On the other hand, the Trump plan could ratchet up inequality — already severe — to levels not seen since ancient times.

So he is acknowledging that inequality, at too severe a level, is immoral?   Which makes quite a puzzle of his years long finger pointing, in the Australian context, of the number of households not paying any net tax.  

Send us your women

Ah, the Faroe Islands - I don't think I had even heard of them before a Foreign Correspondent story a few years ago.

Anyway, the BBC has a story about how quite a few men there are getting their wives from the much, much warmer climes of South East Asia:

There are now more than 300 women from Thailand and Philippines living in the Faroes. It doesn't sound like a lot, but in a population of just 50,000 people they now make up the largest ethnic minority in these 18 islands, located between Norway and Iceland.

In recent years the Faroes have experienced population decline, with young people leaving, often in search of education, and not returning. Women have proved more likely to settle abroad. As a result, according to Prime Minister Axel Johannesen, the Faroes have a "gender deficit" with approximately 2,000 fewer women than men.

This, in turn, has lead Faroese men to look beyond the islands for romance. Many, though not all, of the Asian women met their husbands online, some through commercial dating websites. Others have made connections through social media networks or existing Asian-Faroese couples.

For the new arrivals, the culture shock can be dramatic.

Officially part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroes have their own language (derived from Old Norse) and a very distinctive culture - especially when it comes to food. Fermented mutton, dried cod and occasional whale meat and blubber are typical of the strong flavours here, with none of the traditional herbs and spices of Asian cooking.

 Fermented mutton!   I suppose it couldn't be worse than those Scandinavian swollen cans of fermented fish that make people vomit at the very smell.  Or could it...?

Thank God they're not in the 60's

This is the sort of story I'm reluctant to post about, because trivia doesn't really deserve it.

But Michelle Grattan's headline has it right:  Abdel-Magid Anzac row is a storm over not much.

Is it ever.

Now I perfectly understand that people, especially on the Right-ish side of politics, may not like her views as a sort of politically correct Muslim.   I hardly pay her any attention, but she was one of the ninnies who complained bitterly about Lionel Shriver's not unreasonable criticism of the anti-cultural appropriation set in Brisbane last year, after all; so yeah, she's probably quite the annoying twit.

But the reaction to her ANZAC Day tweet by Right wing culture warriors in the Murdoch press, and politicians, was ridiculously out of proportion.   It demonstrates:

a.   a complete sanctimonious and un-selfaware hypocrisy, when they complain about Lefties, like her, going out of their way to take offence on matters such as identity politics.  I mean, yeah, way to show people how to not completely over-react to a mild political comment promptly apologised for in any event;

b.  as Grattan argued, a complete lack of historical  perspective as to how ANZAC Day was directly criticised in the past, before it underwent its remarkable transformation into a "sacred" day.   I mean, I like the way it is respected now, but I never lost sleep as a young man if there was routine cynicism of it from certain anti-militarism circles.  Thank God Blair, Bolt, Devine, etc etc were still kiddies at the height of anti-establishment protest of the 60's and early 70's.   They would have been bursting blood vessels at the news every single night.

c.  a complete lack of proportion in terms of priorities for any politician who used it as the flimsiest grounds on which to attack the ABC for, I don't know, not being Fox News or Russia Today.

Equality in Japan

Gee, another good long read today - this one in The Guardian about the very low amount of economic inequality across Japan, the reasons for it, and how that may be changing.

Transhumanism and Christianity

There's a long essay here by a woman who lost her faith in Christianity, and then moved her faith, so to speak, to transhumanism.

I hadn't really much thought about the parallels between transhumanism and (some) religious ideas before (and perhaps Jason Soon was the first to mention them to me), but this essay makes them clear and it is a very good read.  Here is a key section:

Of course, mind uploading has spurred all kinds of philosophical anxieties. If the pattern of your consciousness is transferred onto a computer, is the pattern “you” or a simulation of your mind? Another camp of transhumanists have argued that Kurzweil’s theories are essentially dualistic, and that the mind cannot be separated from the body. You are not “you” without your fingernails and your gut bacteria. Transhumanists of this faction insist that resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favor cryonics and bionics, which promise to resurrect the entire body or else supplement the living form with technologies to indefinitely extend life.

It is perhaps not coincidental that an ideology that grew out of Christian eschatology would come to inherit its philosophical problems. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was an obsessive point of debate among early Christians. One faction, which included the Gnostic sects, argued that only the soul would survive death; another insisted that the resurrection was not a true resurrection unless it revived the body. For these latter believers — whose view would ultimately become orthodox — Christ served as the model. Jesus had been brought back in the flesh, which suggested that the body was a psychosomatic unit. In contrast to Hellenistic philosophy, which believed the afterlife would be purely spiritual, Christians came to believe that the soul was inseparable from the body. In one of the most famous treatises on the resurrection, the theologian Tertullian of Carthage wrote: “If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. . . . Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection.”

There is much, much more in the essay setting out the pre-history of transhumanism, so to speak.   It's also good in that it points out that Christians, with their disdain for humans "playing God" with biology (and, I think, rather appropriately, for fear of inadvertent suffering that such experimentation risks), are perceived by some transhumanists as the enemy of transhumanist progress.

I'm certainly a skeptic when it comes to the idea of uploading mind into a computer - it makes for good imaginative stories in science fiction, but Kurzweil's optimism about when it could be achieved is just over the top.   On the other hand, if he is right, I didn't realise that a comment I made here once, that a reason for keeping this blog running is so that it might aid my virtual resurrection in the distant future, is an idea directly derived from Kurzweil:

“I do plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and oblong plastic bins. He wears tinted eyeglasses. He is in his early sixties, but something about the light or his posture, his paunch protruding over his beltline, makes him seem older. Kurzweil is now a director of engineering at Google, but this documentary was filmed in 2009, back when it was still possible to regard him as a lone visionary with eccentric ideas about the future. The boxes in the storage unit contain the remnants of his father’s life: photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and financial documents. For decades, he has been compiling these artifacts and storing them in this sepulcher he maintains near his house in Newton, Massachusetts. He takes out a notebook filled with his father’s handwriting and shows it to the camera. His father passed away in 1970, but Kurzweil believes that, one day, artificial intelligence will be able to use the memorabilia, along with DNA samples, to resurrect him. “People do live on in our memories, and in the creative works they leave behind,” he muses, “so we can gather up all those vibrations and bring them back, I believe.”

I've just got to get some of my DNA details embedded into this blog somehow, and I'll be back!

Anyway, go read the essay.

Stopping the Singapore health care fantasy

Well, I don't think I have ever read a better explanation of the Singaporean health care system than that by Ezra Klein at Vox.

And what is excellent about it is that it makes something clear that I've been muttering here for a couple of years - it's actually kind of ridiculous that some of the the American Conservative or Libertarian Right keep talking about it as if it is something Americans can emulate.  As Klein explains carefully, all they are doing is pointing to one or two elements of it, the ones that align with their personal responsibility ideology, while completely ignoring the big picture that it only can work that way in Singapore because of an enormous amount of government control and intervention.   (And not only that, but it is comparing what one tiny city State can achieve when it is setting up a system from scratch, in a population with high trust in government, and laws which control many things somewhat relevant to heath services - such as high taxes on alcohol, the low use of cars and preventing gun ownership.) 

I think it is really a fantasy that America will be able to emulate Singapore in any substantial way at all, and the reason why is because of the fundamental ideology of the same American Right that keeps on oo-ing and ah-ing about how good Singapore looks.  (I should add - there is also the practical matter of whether it is really in any way practically possible to un-do the long standing American system completely enough to be able to revamp it in the image of Singapore.)

It's also somewhat akin to my other complaint of even longer standing - about the libertarian inclined who have been simplistically praising for years the Portuguese decriminalisation of drug use, while completely ignoring that the system there (with its potential to force users into rehabilitation) is quite contra libertarianism.  Sure, the American Right might learn one lesson from that - that their beloved compulsory sentencing and such like is too harsh and probably counterproductive for small time users - but they are also the side of politics least likely to endorse (or fund) compulsory rehabilitation services on principle.

Things I've learnt this year from MKR

Time for my annual confession that the only reality TV competition cooking show I watch is My Kitchen Rules, and each year I learn something about current culinary fashion.  (Saves me going to expensive restaurants to find out.)

In previous years, it was that putting a shambles of dish components on the plate and calling it "deconstructed" was a thing.  That silly idea seems to have well and truly gone.  I get the impression it is now viewed with cringing embarrassment that it ever was a fashion.

In other years, using the sous-vide method to cook virtually any protein seemed to be very in fashion.   Or maybe it was just one team that was obsessed with it - I'm not sure. 

I get the feeling, from this year's show, that confit is also perhaps not as "in" as it was recently.  Sure, there was some confit going on this year, but nothing at all like the ridiculous number of times it was used only a season or two ago.

As for what's "in" this year:  there is (apparently) a huge revival in the use of the pressure cooker - which is something I'm very pleased to see, because some of my nicest meals come out of one, yet I had the impression that many people are scared to use them.

The only novel thing I've noticed is the use of smoking gun by the somewhat creepy brother/sister team.  Didn't know they existed.

As for the show's format - its patent and obvious manipulation [in terms of editing, and (what one might call) the character arcs that are built into a season*] are so familiar but I think still work almost because of the predictability.  My theory is that it makes the audience feel smarter, this understanding of how they are being manipulated.**   However, I do feel that this year they went too far into the "relationship crisis" storylines, and the gormless "seafood king" and his long suffering wife felt just rather too mean and manipulative of the couple.

The show  still rates well, I see, and I'll still watch it next year.  (Not that every single episode is worth viewing - I have to miss a few "home restaurant" instalments each year, otherwise it is too much.)


*  surely everyone's noticed that one of the initial baddies turns out to more or less a sympathetic girl or guy by the end? 

** or is it like TV wrestling, where it's not clear how much of the audience realises that it is a willing participant in a pantomime?

Tidying up the links

I've been doing some blog roll tidying up, and note the following:

*  added STAT, which is pretty good health and medicine site from the US

*  added Crux, which seems to have decent Catholic commentary (not entirely sure where it fits on the conservative/liberal spectrum, though.)

*  io9 link was recently changed by Gizmodo so it redirected to Australian Gizmodo - so I've changed the link to take you to US Gizmodo, where at the top is the link to io9. 

* added the site for the Society for Psychical Research, which has been revamped and holds a lot more reading material and news than it ever used to.  Despite the old fashioned name, it has always been a very reputable source for information on most things paranormal.

* fixed up the link to Asahi Shimbun, for Japanese and Asian news.

There are probably some more links sites I should delete because I just rarely use them, but they can stay for now.

Update:  nearly forgot - have added Axios, with its unique short, sharp and fast style.   

A very cold war (and some Trump and Hitler stuff)

I like to post unfamiliar war time stories on ANZAC Day, but before I get to the main part, I wanted to quote this section out of a recent New York Review of Books article Lesson from Hitler's Rise, which uses a new-ish biography of Hitler's rise to compare and contrast with Trump.   (It's pretty well done, really, and spends more time on the differences than the similarities.)   This part, about who Hitler was initially impressing electorally, was not something I was really aware of:

However, while both men created coalitions of discontent, their constituencies were quite different. The first groups to be taken over by Nazi majorities were student organizations on university campuses. In their electoral breakthrough in 1930, the Nazis won the vast majority of first-time voters, especially the youth vote. Above all, the Nazis vacuumed up the voters of other middle-class parties, and women of different social backgrounds voted in roughly the same proportions for the Nazis as men.

The two groups among whom the Nazis were relatively unsuccessful were Germany’s religious-block voters (in this case Catholics voting for their own Center Party) and blue-collar industrial workers (who more often shifted their votes from the declining moderate Social Democrats to the more radical Communists rather than to the Nazis). Still, the Nazis drew votes much more broadly across German society than any of their rival class- and sectarian-based parties could boast with some justification to be the only true “people’s party” in the country.

That's a pretty big difference with Trump right there:  most polling shows Trump approval is way low with young adults, although I see that one poll in March found that youngsters in "Trump country" (countries that flipped to Trump, and in which he had big winning margins) gave him the highest approval of all age groups. Just goes to show, I suppose:  have too many young people without a job and they'll vote for any idiot.

Anyway, back to the main story.  On a whim, I Google "World War 2 and Antarctica", and, apart from links to various nut sites about Nazi bases and UFO's down there, I found a few links to Operation Tabarin, in which, late in the war, the British sent a small navy crew (14) on a couple of (presumably) small ships to go and re-establish British claim to some cold islands down around Antarctica.

Wikipedia has a short entry about it (which includes the claim that there was concern in 1941 that the Japanese might seize the Falkland Islands, either as a base or just to hand them over to Argentina to encourage their support of the Axis.)

But more interesting is the account in The Telegraph in  2014, which includes comments by the last surviving member of the crew, George James.   As it explains:

For 70 years, little has been known about this most peculiar episode of the Second World War. Even the men involved never quite knew what they were doing there, improbably told that their secret mission, codenamed Operation Tabarin, was designed to deter German U-boats from lurking in Antarctic waters. 

However, the author of a book about it explains that it was actually all about putting Argentina back in its place:

“By 1941, Argentina quite rightly thought the war was going the way of the Axis powers,” said Stephen Haddelsey, the book’s author. “Would Britain have either the will or the resources to challenge them if they staked a physical claim to the territories? They thought not.”

So, in early 1942, the Argentines sent a ship to Deception Island, a tiny volcanic whaling station in the South Shetlands, where they flew the Argentine flag and buried a cylinder with a formal note proclaiming their territorial rights.

When the Colonial Office heard of this, however, our mandarins’ response was not at all what Argentina had predicted. The War Cabinet was determined to respond, to protect vital revenues in the region and prevent a precedent being set that might encourage incursions elsewhere in the Empire.

The war was still at too delicate a point to provoke outright conflict with Argentina, however, especially as Britain was dependent on substantial cargoes of beef from South America. So the U-boat myth was put about to provide cover for the operation.

George James, that ageing crew member, says:

“A few reasons were put out. We were told it was to do with the Germans but when it came to it, the first party to go down were mainly scientists,” said Mr James. “Now that’s not going down to fight off Germans, is it?”

The crew’s first months in the Antarctic, where the average temperature is minus 10 degrees centigrade, were tough. They moved from island to island constructing rudimentary bases from timber and depositing a handful of scientists at each. But they spent most of their time adjusting to the conditions.

“It was completely alien to all of us,” said Mr James. “Life was in the raw. It was hard going at times but it was a bit of a thrill to think you were there. It was a magical place – we’d be breaking through the ice with ice cliffs on either side.”

It was a very lonely wartime operation:

The war was at its height but there was no conflict here. There were no Argentines to be seen, and Mr James had to face another enemy entirely. “I was once chased along a beach by a sea leopard, with its mouth wide open,” he said. “The penguins would get a bit shirty, too, and have a nip at your legs.” On one occasion, a colony of 10,000 penguins took over one of their bases, entirely surrounding it. Rather than face them down, the crew built another hut. 

And as for the poor Argentinians:

At last, a year into the mission, the Scorseby spotted its first – and only – Argentines, defending their meteorological station on Laurie Island, part of the South Orkneys. Yet the crew could not have had a more hospitable reception. Six of the original Argentine party of 10 men had died, and were buried by their fellow men with wooden stakes behind the hut. After being cut off with no supplies for 18 months, they were delighted to meet the advancing Brits.

“They were lovely to us,” explained Mr James. “They came down to the beach to meet us, crying. We gave them cigarettes and edam cheese. The wireless operator got so excited that he put his arms round me. He took all the badges off his uniform and gave them to me.”

In fact, boredom was a much more persistent danger. “It upset some people a lot. One man got quite scary about it and tried to influence the skipper to turn back. But that didn’t happen, of course.”

Better than being shot at, I suppose; on the other hand, probably not the type of service to make you feel you had been particularly useful to the war effort.

About that juicer

The Atlantic has a somewhat amusing report on the Juicero embarrassment.  I liked this paragraph in particular:

And what is the Press? The official description reads like something manufactured by NASA to drill asteroids for root vegetables. The website promises a “bead-blasted aluminum door” constructed with “aircraft-grade aluminum and precision-forged gearing components” to generate “4 tons [of] potential pressing force,” with a “suite of sensors scans” connected to the internet so that “you have the latest updates,” all optimized through “multiple iterations of miniaturization.” And all this for what? A thing that squeezes a bag?

I notice that on supermarket shelves "cold pressed" juice is all the rage.   Yet I would have thought the worst aspect of that Juicero system is that the bags to be squeezed only have an 8 day fridge life.  (Well, I think you keep them in the fridge.) 

The Obnoxious Right (cont.)

Gee, why does the National Review give space to Kevin Williamson, whose attack on Chelsea Clinton is ridiculously nasty, if you ask me.

But I see that he has previously been noted here as being stupidly hyperbolic - the last time it was about Obama.

Way to make a technology fan feel guilty

From the Catholic Herald:

Global demand for metallic ores used in mobile phones is thwarting efforts to end war and violence in Congo, an African priest has said.

Any person who possesses a mobile phone or other electronic device with components derived from such “conflict minerals” is benefiting from bloodshed, said Fr Richard Muembo, rector of a Congolese seminary firebombed earlier this year.

“Anyone who uses modern technology nowadays is in some way using the blood of the Congolese people,” he said in an interview with the United Kingdom branch of Aid to the Church in Need, a pontifical foundation helping persecuted Christians.

“Looters from all over the world come here to exploit the country,” the priest said in a statement by the charity yesterday.

Fighting in Congo is being perpetuated by a struggle over access to such ores as coltan, from which niobium and tantalum are extracted, he suggested. The ore is used in the production of batteries for smartphones, computers and GPS devices.

I suspect he's right this time...

Adam says "Better the dimwit than full employment, broadly available health care, and a President who has a clue about foreign affairs"

Adam Creighton has that typical problem of small government loving quasi libertarians:   he believes in a magic formula of lower taxes and small, low regulation government, and that's all that matters.

Because, any twit reading this who would go along with his line "I know Trump is not very likeable, but he's better than if Clinton had won" - answer me this:   what is the reason you think Clinton would have done anything dramatically different from the path Obama was following, and why was that path (with good overall employment figures, a budget coming under control, a good attempt at broadening affordable health care, environmental regulation that had a chance of modifying CO2 emissions, and a cautious approach to Syria and the Middle East) such a disaster if it had continued?

Sure, the country wasn't going perfect under Obama, but lower taxes and pointing to Right wing think tanks "freedom index" is not a magic cure all.  Furthermore, as Trump has already shown, he is no foreign policy isolationist (a fact already made clear in his campaign, if you had paid attention) and he is a dumb BS artist who has no idea who to listen to on a whole range of issues.   Sure, some better policy or other will happen while he is President - it is virtually impossible for government to do everything wrong under any President.   And companies may be rubbing their hands together in anticipation of more money flowing in soon.   But try thinking longer term and bigger picture, hey?

Update:  the other Creighton perennial is the repetition of the way, way oversimplified matter of the number of taxpayers not paying net tax.   It's like he has a permanent chip on his shoulder that his own tax rate is too high because not enough of the rest of you are paying tax at all. 

He is, basically, one of the shallowest of economics analysts, and just because he occasionally ends up at a slightly different position from his free marketeer mates doesn't change that.

That's a lot of submarines

Something I had missed in the discussion about North Korea and its ability to wage war, until I heard an expert on Radio National this morning, is that it has a really large conventional submarine fleet:

A substantial number of these sailors serve in the KPN’s submarine fleet, which is one of the world’s largest. In 2001, North Korea analyst Joseph Bermudez estimated that the KPN operated between fifty-two and sixty-seven diesel electric submarines. These consisted of four Whiskey-class submarines supplied by the Soviet Union and up to seventy-seven Romeo-class submarines provided by China. Seven Romeos were delivered assembled, while the rest were delivered in kit form. Each Romeo displaced 1,830 tons submerged, had a top speed of thirteen knots and was operated by a crew of fifty-four. The Romeo submarines were armed with eight standard-diameter 533-millimeter torpedo tubes, two facing aft. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was filmed touring and taking a short voyage on a Romeo-class submarine in 2014.

 Sure, the article argues, the models are considered obsolete, but they are still capable of sinking an American ship or two, or more.  As the article says:

North Korea’s reliance on submarines exposes a harsh reality for the country: U.S. and South Korean naval and air forces are now so overwhelmingly superior that the only viable way for Pyongyang’s navy to survive is to go underwater. While minimally capable versus the submarine fleets of other countries, North Korea does get a great deal of use out of them. Although old and obsolete, North Korea’s submarines have the advantage of numbers and, in peacetime, surprise. Pyongyang’s history of armed provocations means the world hasn’t seen the last of her submarine force.

Computer says "No. I can't explain"

Have a read of this article at MIT Technology Review:  The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.

It's about "deep learning" in AI, which is explained this way:

Artificial intelligence hasn’t always been this way. From the outset, there were two schools of thought regarding how understandable, or explainable, AI ought to be. Many thought it made the most sense to build machines that reasoned according to rules and logic, making their inner workings transparent to anyone who cared to examine some code. Others felt that intelligence would more easily emerge if machines took inspiration from biology, and learned by observing and experiencing. This meant turning computer programming on its head. Instead of a programmer writing the commands to solve a problem, the program generates its own algorithm based on example data and a desired output. The machine-learning techniques that would later evolve into today’s most powerful AI systems followed the latter path: the machine essentially programs itself.

But the odd consequence of this is that it can be impossible (or next to impossible?)to tell how exactly a particular decision was reached by a computer system that has used this method to teach itself.

I was surprised to read (if the article is accurate) that is already being experienced with a medical program:

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully, “but we don’t know how they work.”

I don't know whether to be happy or scared if AI systems are developed with mysteriously good predictive abilities for something as troublesome as an illness of the mind.

On the other hand, perhaps this provides a basis on which a theist can avoid those tricky theodicy  issues (the matter of why a good God allows so much evil.)   Like this:  "Hey, we've got computers churning out correct answers and we don't understand how, and you expect a clear explanation as to what's going on in the Mind, or Plan, of God?  Huh." 

Seriously, I can't believe it

X-Files is returning.

Can't they just end the show with both of them being alien abducted, and leave it at that?  

As someone at Vox writes:

The problem is that even though the 2016 miniseries had its moments, fully half of it was an absolute disaster, with three episodes that served as reminders of why the show eventually left the air in the first place.

What a country...

I see, via Japan Times, that there was another recent public beating to death of someone accused of blasphemy in Pakistan.   And where exactly?  At a university, of course!:

With the sudden fury of a flash storm, images of an angry mob lynching a young man to death at the Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, Pakistan, broke across the news cycle and social media platforms to chilling effect April 13. Mashal Khan, a 23-year-old journalism student at the institute, had been attacked after a series of accusations that he had posted blasphemous content online following an argument with a group of fellow students. Whether he had done so or not was irrelevant — the insinuation of wrongdoing was enough.

From the moment the allegations were made he was as good as dead. Everything that took place afterward was a brutal formality in a country long driven by a mindset that allows people to kill with impunity whenever they perceive their religious sentiments have been offended. And so it proved in this case also.

The savagery of the assault was captured in chaotic video footage taken on mobile phones, which showed the crowd shouting “Allahu Akbar” and stomping on Khan’s lifeless body — the final rites of a slaughter in which the victim was stripped naked, clubbed, beaten and shot....

Since then, it has emerged that there is no evidence Khan committed any blasphemy at all. According to some claims, anger against the student might have been whipped up by the university itself after his comments on a television interview about how the institute was being run. It could be that Khan’s only crime was to expose the failings of a few university officials rather than abuse the prophet of Islam.

The writer goes on to note that the problem is deeply embedded in the culture:

Debate on the subject is as good as dead, and those who might choose to enter this Sisyphean undertaking are at risk of being killed themselves. Unsurprisingly, no leading lawmakers or public figures dare comment for fear of the assassin’s bullet.

Moreover, for all the incalculable grief the blasphemy laws continue to cause, there is a great deal of support for the legislation among average Pakistanis, as if the loss of life is a reasonable price to pay to uphold the sacred.

Moves to revise the laws have been rebuffed by public outcry and street protests, forcing the hand of the administration. When Salman Taseer was murdered, his killer Mumtaz Qadri was hailed as a “ghazi,” a warrior, and over 100,000 people attended Qadri’s funeral after he was executed for the crime.

I think this would have to count as within the bottom few countries on the planet that I would chose to visit.   (Perhaps we can exclude certain virtually lawless Horn of Africa states - I'm not sure you can even treat them as serious tourist destinations - although, I see now, that a company will take you to Mogadishu.) 

Actually, if you want some mild amusement, you can read the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation website, which looks stylistically like it was last updated around 2000.  And some of the information seems about as old.  For example, in customs information:

Tourists are allowed to bring in following items without duty;
Personal clothing, hand bags travel goods and toiletries;
medals trophies or prizes;
jewelry not exceeding Rs.1000/-;
01 watch and 01 travelling clock;
spectacles and physical aid;
01 cigarette lighter and 02 fountain pens;
01 pen-knife and similar items of personal use;
01 electric iron and 01 electric shaver for men or 01 hair dryer for female tourist;
01 still camera and 10 rolls of film;

01 sub-standard cinematography camera with projector and two rolls of films;
01 pair of binoculars;
01 portable musical instrument;
01 portable sound recording apparatus;
01 portable typewriter;
01 invalid chair in use;

Yes, you don't want the country flooded with illegal foundation pen imports, rolls of camera film, and your cinematography camera needs to be "sub-standard"?

Even Japan requires common sense

Japan is an incredibly safe feeling place to visit, but even so:

A self-employed man in his 40s was robbed of ¥40 million in cash during a daylight mugging in Tokyo’s busy Ginza district Friday afternoon.

According to the Metropolitan Police Department’s Tsukiji Police Station, the mugging, believed to involve three men, took place on Suzuran Street in Chuo Ward.

A man hit the victim in the back and kicked him in the stomach before grabbing his bag filled with ¥72 million in cash, police sources said. Some of the cash fell out during the attack.

 Proof, I suppose, that there is no where in the world where it is a good idea to walk down a street carrying $875,000 AUD in cash in a bag.

(Odd how the story does not address why the victim was carrying this money around.)