A review of Japan's economic issues

Seems like a reasonable summary here at The Interpreter.  

Don't mean to sound rude, but...

....I am a bit surprised by the number of people in Houston caught out by a massive flood for which they actually seemed to have a fair bit of warning.   I get the impression that we seem to do precautionary evacuations a bit better than what we're seeing in Texas.

I mean, there would be quite the scandal in Australia if nursing home residents were shown like this:

even if they were all eventually rescued.

I'm reading that Houston is a flood prone city:  perhaps that makes the residents lazy about evacuation warnings?    But then, so is Brisbane, and while you had people caught out in the 2011 flash floods of the Lockyer Valley, I don't know that you had all that many people in Brisbane city needing rescue from their homes as they did have some hours warning.

Update:  Oh yeah, I forgot that I had linked  two years ago to Andy Revkin's lengthy piece about  how Texas and its famously relaxed zoning laws had led to lots of housing on flood plains.   Another case of "Yay for minimal regulations!" [sarc].

What a weird White House

Gee, that new-ish Axios site has proved great for quick, succinct and accurate reporting as to what's going on in the White House, hasn't it?

So, they are noting how Tillerson's "the President speaks for himself" quip on the weekend is certainly indicative of a limited future he has in the job, and Trump already doesn't like him.

In another post, they quote some very specific details from a White House meeting in which Trump bemoans that the globalists are opposing him on tariffs, with Trump saying:

"John, let me tell you why they didn't bring me any tariffs," he said. "I know there are some people in the room right now that are upset. I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don't want them, John, they don't want the tariffs. But I'm telling you, I want tariffs." 

Yet, as Allahpundit at Hot Air notes about Tillerson's obvious slight against Trump, it's hard to follow what's going on:

This hard jab at the boss underlines the strange timing of Trump ridding the White House of nationalists at a moment when he’s under fire for his Charlottesville reaction. The one man in the West Wing who loudly supported Trump’s comments afterward was … Steve Bannon, who was out of a job within the week. Sebastian Gorka, another big name among Trump’s nationalist base, left two days ago. The “globalists” are in ascendance — but the “globalists” are the ones most likely to take issue with Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” equivocating. We’re experiencing a weird moment where centrists like Tillerson and Gary Cohn keep dogging the president publicly for how he responded to Charlottesville and meanwhile it’s the populists like Bannon and Gorka who are being ushered out. If Trump flips out and starts canning people like Tillerson for insubordination, who’ll be left?

 In the meantime, as Houston goes under water, Trump's tweets sound hardly Presidential, with Vox's article on this entitled:

President Trump's response to Hurricane Harvey devastation: "Wow"

 An AP report more or less goes the same route:

Donald Trump’s tweets during the hurricane have left people baffled

 A stranger man so totally devoid of the gravitas of the role of President we will never see.   

Everyone's over the top

Gee, Guy Rundle lets Chris Uhlmann have it with both barrels for his "you have to do deals with the devil, sometimes" defence of our ASIS boss being photographed doing a stupid fist pump of support with the execrable Duterte.   

I think the photo was inappropriate (what, does Duterte start every meeting with "If you don't do the fist thing with me for my photographer, there will be no co-operation"?).   I also think Uhlmann's defence was pretty ridiculously soft on Duterte, who is only referred to in this way:

To confront those threats Australia needs the cooperation of all the region's leaders, even those many find objectionable....

This apparently means he is giving full throated support to the President's brutal policies. 

But then, I also think Rundle sounds a bit over the top too.  Unfortunately, I know so little about the Cambodia story (yeah, sorry, even though it was well and truly during my lifetime) that I am unsure whether his description of what happened is completely fair.

I still don't really care for Uhlmann, though  - I still suspect he is unconvinced of climate change as a serious issue, and was always soft on Abbott as an interviewer on 7.30 when he was hosting.   He is, at least,  right about Trump, so I have to give him credit for that, but it's such an obviously correct response to this gormless President it's not as if it is hard for him to hold that position.

Putin love would be tested

The Atlantic notes:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this week became the latest U.S. official to say Russia was supplying arms to the Afghan Taliban, calling it a violation of international norms. His remarks, which came just days after President Trump announced a new open-ended U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, echo those of General John Nicholson, the head of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, and Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command. Russia, which has been critical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, has vehemently denied the accusations. 

The article then goes on to quote experts explaining that this is an easy claim to make, and it almost certainly is true that Russian is starting to play footsie with the Taliban, but it is very hard to verify.

Still, I sort of want it to be true, so I can laugh at the Conservative Right's (and Jason Soon's) mancrushy defences of Putin.  

Heh...

This is how Alec Baldwin opens when he's spoofing Trump at his Phoenix rally:

“I'm going to give you the hits. Electoral map, ‘drain the swamp,’ ‘lock her up,’ all of them. But first, I want to talk about Charlottesville. As we know, there was a tragic victim that came out of Charlottesville: me."

I always wanted an antenna in my head

Haven't readers of science fiction always liked the idea of having an implanted antenna in their head?  Science makes it possibly closer:

Engineers have figured out how to make antennas for wireless communication 100 times smaller than their current size, an advance that could lead to tiny brain implants, micro–medical devices, or phones you can wear on your finger....

The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100,000 times more efficiently, they report today in Nature Communications.

“This work has brought the original concept one big step closer to reality,” says Y. Ethan Wang, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped develop the idea, but did not work on the new study. Rudy Diaz, an electrical engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe, likes the concept and execution, but he suspects that in a consumer device or inside the body the antennas will give off too much heat because of their high energy density. Wang notes that the acoustic antennas are tricky to manufacture, and in many cases larger conventional antennas will do just fine.

Still, Sun is pursuing practical applications. Tiny antennas could reduce the size of cellphones, shrink satellites, connect tiny objects to the so-called internet of things, or be swallowed or implanted for medical monitoring or personal identification. He’s shrinking kilohertz-frequency antennas—good for communicating through the ground or water—from cables thousands of meters long to palm-sized devices. Such antennas could link people on Earth’s surface to submarines or miners. With a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, he’s also creating brain implants for reading or controlling neural activity—helpful for diagnosing and treating people with epilepsy, or eventually for building those sci-fi brain-computer interfaces.

Not good

Yes, having it heard it once, I would have to say that I agree with this Slate criticism of Taylor Swift's new song.  Wisely, it even covers the possibility that it is a send up of her media image:  

“Blank Space” worked as a light-hearted tribute to Swift’s tabloid reputation as a man-eating cyclone of drama; “Look What You Made Me Do” is neither fun nor funny enough to make for a satisfying meta riff on her reputation. The narrator sounds more bitter than self-aware and, given Swift’s history of well-placed disses, the story sounds too close to the truth.

And no, I don't actually follow her feuds at all - just as I know nothing about the Kardashian family except for sometimes seeing photos of the ridiculously disproportionate butt of one of them.  But Swift can write some terribly likeable songs, and one can only hope she avoids the self destruction that's so common with pop super-stardom.

Message to Jason

All of the unpopular ideas in that list are unpopular for pretty good reason.

What I find more productive is to look at fanciful ideas of the likes of libertarians - who, for pretty good reason, can be blamed as being behind the large scale destruction of cities and infrastructure later this century and next, all for current greed.

A pretty good unpopular idea, then:  confiscate their riches and use it for clean energy development, and consider sending them into exile in some God forsaken desert.

Here's a hint to JC

My sometimes reader JC hasn't turned up here in comments lately, but I note that he's expressing surprise at the possible rainfall dump from the current hurricane near Texas:

Harvey could be freaking huge with estimates of up to 30 inches of rain, which is unheard of… well rare anyway.

Yeah, well, there might be a reason for that, as I've been noting here for about 7 years or so:

Can you tell your Wingnut Misery Support Club mates, including the chronic whinger (and chronically lonely) Rabz, that this is what was expected under global warming?    (Johanna is right, by the way - he should stop talking and just leave the country if it depresses him so much.)   And, with another 1 degree rise, how bad do you think new flooding is going to get?  

Why (some) mushrooms are "magic"

Ed Yong has an interesting article at the Atlantic, explaining a theory that some mushrooms make hallucinogens to ward off insects:

These genes seem to have originated in fungi that specialize in breaking down decaying wood or animal dung. Both materials are rich in hungry insects that compete with fungi, either by eating them directly or by going after the same nutrients. So perhaps, Slot suggests, fungi first evolved psilocybin to drug these competitors.

His idea makes sense. Psilocybin affects us humans because it fits into receptor molecules that typically respond to serotonin—a brain-signaling chemical. Those receptors are ancient ones that insects also share, so it’s likely that psilocybin interferes with their nervous system, too. “We don’t have a way to know the subjective experience of an insect,” says Slot, and it’s hard to say if they trip. But one thing is clear from past experiments: Psilocybin reduces insect appetites.

Powerline in fantasyland

I visited Powerline to see if they have started to turn on Trump yet (no, of course not, although I would say it is more muted than before), but I note that John Hinderaker tries to defend Trump on Afghanistan by - you got it - blaming it all on Obama:

Barack Obama’s administration was a horrific failure in just about every way, but he has had the press running interference for him for eight years and counting. His lies and broken promises about Afghanistan are a sobering reminder of what a poor job he did as president. So far, Donald Trump has been a vast improvement.

This is where the American Right is stuck - in a ridiculous belief that, against all economic and other evidence, the Obama administration was a disaster.    They have no credibility til they stop believing that.

More on the Brexit reality sinking in

Have a read of Martin Kettle in The Guardian.

Nuts for Trump

I had noticed this guy in the background at the Arizona rally.  Here's his story:

Strange story of a 'Blacks for Trump' guy standing behind President at Phoenix rally

The weird Dershowitz show

At last, some background on why Alan Dershowitz has been putting himself out there in support of many Trump views.  

It has been weird, and I could have just put it down to my general theory that most people above a certain age come to have, shall we say, unreliable views.   (Don't worry, I've got at least another 20 years of blogging before you can start to hold this against me.)

The Trump decline

Trump is getting a lot of negative commentary after the Arizona rally, and the Washington Post says that even those attending got bored with his self indulgent (and never ending) complaints that everything is the media's fault.

Yes, it seems the Charlottesville reaction is a true turning point for Trump, and one from which it is hard to see how he will recover, given the "it's everyone else's fault" cycle that he's stuck in.

Wives on offer

The issue of marriage as part of cultures is a hot topic at the moment, given the same sex marriage "plebiscite," and it has led to me reading about oddities of some other cultures' practices within marriage of which I was unaware.

I couldn't recall ever having heard anything about marriage in Inuit culture, but I found via Google that the popular topic there is the matter of wife swapping/trading. 

There's a .pdf paper from 1971 (when Inuit were still eskimo) on the topic here  - and it makes for interesting reading, not only for the wife swapping parts, but also the picture it paints of how dangerous it was for an eskimo/Inuit man to meet a stranger in the middle of nowhere.  (Unless the other guy was recognized pretty quickly, it was usually a matter of run away, or kill or be killed, apparently.)   Doesn't sound very "noble savage" at all.

More discussion about it can be found at this 1961 paper.

Both make the point that the half siblings produced by these arrangements felt a special bond - quite a bit different from the "mixed family" issues we see in the West.

For those who can't be bothered following the links, I'll post a brief wiki explanation here:

Among the Inuit, a very specialized and socially-circumscribed form of wife-sharing was practiced. When hunters were away, they would often stumble into the tribal lands of other tribes, and be subject to death for the offense. But, when they could show a "relationship" by virtue of a man, father or grandfather who had sex with their wife, mother or other female relatives, the wandering hunter was then regarded as family. The Inuit had specific terminology and language describing the complex relationships that emerged from this practice of wife sharing. A man called another man "aipak," or "other me," if the man had sex with his wife. Thus, in their conception, this other man having sex with one's wife was just "another me."^[36]

None of these studies discuss what the wives actually thought of the arrangement - the implication seems to be that they didn't mind the variety -  but surely they must have been resentful at some of their husband's loser mates visiting and claiming rights.

As for gay marriage, or even recognition of homosexuality, it seems that some modern Inuit thinks it's very un-traditional and against their culture.   I guess the counter to that, for the same sex marriage advocate, is that perhaps a culture that flourished by socially endorsed wife swapping shouldn't really be complaining too much about what others think is acceptable within marriage...

Holding their heart in their hands - literally

What an extraordinary thing: 

An initiative reunites transplant recipients with their former organs for education and therapy.

Vietnam War revisionism revised

Yes, I had noticed how those at Catallaxy who think The Left-Liberals in Politics Have Been And Always Will Be The Source of All Evil and Failure in Society are fully on board with the idea that the Vietnam War was just a failure of American will, not American military power, and if it weren't for those goddamn liberal newspapers publicising leaks about how the Generals weren't always telling the truth about things, it could have all been wound up with great success by 1970.

I've always thought that this sounded like a rubbish argument, and this column today in the New York Times by a historian explains that it's always been a minority view amongst his peers, and he gives some explanation as to why.

The big question is how similar Afghanistan is to the Vietnam situation.

In some sense, I would have thought it's pretty similar - both the North Vietnamese communist leadership and the Taliban are ideologues of the most entrenched kind. 

On the other hand, I think (from what little I know) that the Afghanistan government being propped up is not a corrupt or unworthy government in the way the South Vietnamese one was. 

But back to a similarity:  the locals in Taliban controlled areas are (I think) often sympathetic to the Taliban.  What's the point of winning those dirt poor territories if they are going to resent their "liberation" anyway?

As I was pondering all of this while shaving this morning, a thought did occur to me - surely one big difference is the military supply lines that the North Vietnamese had was not going to stop.  But where does the Taliban get its weaponry from?   Is it just that they don't really need that much to cause mayhem, and a little goes a long, long way?

As for the Jason Soon question raised yesterday - why support Afghanistan at all - the issue of the Taliban/IS taking over most of the country and having nuclear armed Pakistan next door does sound a reason to worry about giving up on it entirely.

Civil war and sex

What with all this talk about the American Civil War, and gay relationships in Australia, I thought it only appropriate that I Google the combination of both and see what turns up.

I think this post Sex and the Civil War is pretty good, relying (heavily, perhaps) on the main book on the topic that comes up.

Anyhow, lots of talk about prostitution and the war, but on the gay side there isn't much to note.

I did like this cross dressing story that would seem improbable in a movie:

Occasionally ordinary soldiers would share their tents with their wives. In the Confederacy, Keith Blalock signed up with “Sam” Blalock, a good-looking sixteen year old boy, actually his wife Melinda. Melinda fought three engagements before she was wounded and found out by the regimental surgeon. Upon discharge from the Confederate army, they continued to soldier on together as Union partisans.

But back to homosexuality, this paragraph is interesting, especially the Jefferson proposal which just goes to show how tough you can still be and call it leniency when the original punishment is death:

Homosexuality was not much of an issue. There are not many recorded, probably because sodomy was regarded as an unspeakable crime. Though some reenactors a few years back “reenacted” a firing squad for two soldiers dressed in pink uniforms for “conduct unbecoming”, in fact there is no record of any soldier on either side being executed for the offense of homosexuality, or for that matter being disciplined for the offense. However, a handful of sailors were thrown out of the navy. Military law did not specifically outlaw sodomy until 1921. But we should not infer from this that homosexuality was previously accepted along the lines of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Keep in mind that at the time of the Revolution sodomy was punishable by death in all thirteen colonies. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed a more lenient penal code under which homosexuals would be castrated and lesbians would have their noses pieced with half-inch holes; Jefferson’s proposal was rejected and sodomy remained a capital crime until 1831.

 I don't know how the homoeroticism of Walt Whitman fits into that take on matters, though...

Update:  just went to check - sodomy in Britain only had the death penalty removed in 1861, although the last two executed for it were in 1835.   Their story - executed for activity for which the only evidence was a witness who watched through a keyhole - makes for an interesting Wikipedia entry. Oddly enough, various websites inform me that death was still the punishment for it in Victoria up to 1949 (!).  I did note here in a previous post, though, that the last Australian execution for it was in 1863 in Tasmania.   Took them a hell of a long time to remove the punishment from the books in Victoria, then.