The move made

I've finally made the move to Netflix, and am catching up on some shows that I know had been a success in the US.  (And no, I am not really inclined to even try Game of Thrones.)

Some observations so far:

Stranger Things:   Only watched the first two episodes, and have to say I feel a bit uncertain as to how much I should like it.   I'm very fond of many 1980's films, and have commented before about how there was a certain aesthetic about them that I miss.   So on the one hand, I am enjoying this deliberate attempt at a sort of rehash of the Spielberg/Carpenter look and themes;  but I am finding myself a bit too distracted at being reminded of specific scenes from specific films.   I suspect that will stop as the show goes on.  Those twins who are making it must have watched Spielberg even more often that I have...

Mr Robot:   saw the first episode last night.  Pretty intriguing; good to see Christian Slater on screen again.   That lead actor - I hope the ease with which he shows what might be called "resting mad face" doesn't reflect his natural facial expressions in real life.  [Update:  I forgot, that's not on Netflix - it's just that I paid for a season pass on Google Play last night - all of $13.  DVD manufacturing is going to be in serious decline, I suspect.]

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:  pretty amusing comedy, with a likeable star.  And Carol Kane, too - haven't seen her for years. 

Netflix, at its current cost, and range of shows, is remarkably good value.  

Here it is

I had been wondering when a Martin Scorsese appreciation of Jerry Lewis was going to appear, and here it is.    

As it happens, I have never watched King of Comedy, although I had a friend who saw it at the time and said it was very good.  I should try it now, on Google Play, perhaps.

Time for a "most creative alternative use" competition for bag squeezing machine

I deemed the silly Juicero story blogworthy back in April, and am not surprised to see it fail.   Creative owners now unable to get their bags of pre-diced fruit will have to see what other things in the house it can usefully squeeze.

Communist and gay

I made brief mention in an earlier post about Right wing panic attacks that gay marriage is a Marxist/socialist/feminist plot to turn all of our youth into limp-wristed/butch (as the case may be) homosexuals/gender benders. 

Now, it has to be said, it's not as if there aren't Marxist progressive feminists types out there who do have an avowed, um, queer affirming society agenda?   Look at Roz Ward, as the obvious recent example.

But it's also true that actual communist countries didn't show any particular sign of sympathetic tolerance of homosexuality. And their "we're all in this together" feminism of encouraging women into the workplace hardly changed any cultural ideas about gays.

I just Googled the topic and found this letter which is pretty interesting.  Harry Whyte, a serious British gay young Communist wrote at length to Stalin in 1934 trying to get him to reconsider the criminalisation of sodomy.  What I find surprising about the letter is how current the arguments feel -  arguing that panic about the corrosive effects of allowing a small percent of homosexual live their life don't really make sense, and that it is an innate sexuality that can't be cured, etc. 

It counts, I suppose, as a more or less well reasoned argument that Marxism, as properly envisaged, has nothing to fear from legal homosexuality.   (He does gild the lily by seeming to claim that bourgeois capitalism encourages opportunistic homosexuality - but hey, he was trying to convince Stalin.)  Anyway, it's quite a different argument from later feminists that Marxism and justice require the breakdown of gender and sexuality roles.  That's where it all gets silly, and it's no explanation for how quickly many countries have learnt to tolerate homosexuality.

Trans chumps

I have to say, I agree with this NYT column complaining about the nauseas way progressives (and Vogue magazine!) are glamorising transexual Manning.

Origami buildings

I find something very appealing about this idea:

Not so CRISP

Ground breaking genetic and biological research these days seems incredibly ripe for claims that have to be soon retracted.  Looks like the successful use of CRISPR technology on human embryos may be one of these:

Doubts have surfaced about a landmark paper claiming that human embryos were cleared of a deadly mutation using genome editing. In an article¹ posted to the bioRxiv preprint server on 28 August, a team of prominent stem-cell scientists and geneticists question whether the mutation was actually fixed.

More words of wisdom from Catallaxy [SARCASM]

Same sex marriage is starting to frazzle their composure (hahahahahaha - as if they ever had any) at Catallaxy, and some fairly remarkable statements are appearing in threads lately:

At some point there is going to be a backlash, and we are going to go back to jailing sodomites if not throwing them off tall buildings. I should find that utterly disgusting, but perhaps not quite as disgusting as that article.

I suspect that almost all men and a lot of women find homosexuals disgusting. Maybe even homosexuals feel the same. It is something that people can be conditioned into denying, human beings are good at deceiving themselves. We should probably conceal it in their company out of kindness, and we *should* treat them kindly. But pretending that it isn’t a horrible mental disease may be going too far for our own mental health.

Uhuh.

And poor old dover beach: 

The Yes campaign are terrified that the soft center of Australian politics that has been swayed largely by a decade of inane rhetoric, I.e.. Love is love, marriage equality, is going to realise that a Yes vote would put anal sex on the same normative plane as sexual intercourse. Further, that erasing the category of sex from marriage will further the claim that sex is just gender. And this and more would find its way not only in sex education programs but throughout the curriculum. That is why a fire brigade of Yes advocates was sent out the day after the No ad. Panic stations.

Oddly, I didn't imagine that lesbian couples (a bigger percentage of which, one suspects, may be more likely to be keen  on marrying than male couples) were all that interested in the sexual activity that dover seems to think same sex marriage is all about.  And don't a reasonable number of gay men avoid it as a matter of preference too?   In any event, this article from last year should definitely kept out of the reach of Catallaxy threadsters - they'll be talking about it for hours on end.

Update:  by coincidence, I see that Philosophy Now has a free article on line entitled "The Further History of Sexuality:  from Michael Foucault to Miley Cyrus" (!).   Actually,  it's not bad, and parts would actually be embraced by those at Catallaxy who insist that the normalisation of gay sexual relationships is all part of a Marxist socialist plot.*   It ends on this note:

As we have seen, Foucault’s analysis of the shifting significance of homosexuality in Western culture over the last two centuries identifies two stages, corresponding to the production by power of its own opposition:
(i) Homosexuals identified as a ‘deviant’ group, the target of medical and legal intervention.
(ii) Homosexuals accepting this identity, as gay people, and campaigning for equality and integration into general society.
This second stage can be said to have culminated in the recent acceptance, in many countries, of gay marriage. But the ending of this conflict inevitably generates a completely new situation, in which:
(iii) The division homosexual/normal having been overcome, the category of ‘homosexual’ itself loses its rigid borders and begins to dissolve into contemporary ‘pansexuality’.

 *  They don't seem to notice that decades of quasi Marxist attitudes towards women doing their bit in the factories and fields to build the socialist paradise  in Russian and China has actually led to the least gay friendly nations on Earth.  Some Marxist feminists may well think this way - it is not a realistic explanation of why many Western nations have accepted gay relationships.

Because I am a cool dude...

...(well, that's what I like to tell my teenagers) and just to show that Taylor Swift is not the only pop music I sometimes notice, I predicted more than a month ago that Imagine Dragons Thunder would be a hit (after I heard some guy on ABC radio make the same prediction), and I think it is.   This band actually has had quite a few good songs, and I don't know that they are objectionable in any sense.

Anyway, here's the video:

The issue of AGW and intensification of rainfall explained

Chris Colose has chosen to explain via a series of tweets starting here that increased warming under AGW was always predicted to led to increased intensification of rainfall.  

Well worth reading.  

My crypto currency skepticism maintained

From an article in SMH:

The surge in bitcoin's value, which started all of this, comes despite the fact that bitcoin's underlying utility remains debatable. While it has been used as a form of payment in some investment deals, relatively few merchants who sell things to consumers in the real world accept it.

There is little doubt blockchain – which is being used by the big banks, the ASX and others to speed up and reduce friction in transactions – is a big innovation. But no one has been able to explain what any crypto-currency using it actually achieves. If you aren't engaged in secret cross-border transactions, normal money still seems to work.

As people who are better versed in this world than me have said, bitcoin still looks like a solution in need of a problem. And if the biggest crypto-currency of them all still has this question hanging over it, then what does it say for the rest of them?

Thinking too much about herself

Once again, I will inappropriately ponder the question of Taylor Swift.  (Hey, I have a teen daughter, it gives me something to talk to her about.)

The video for the (still pretty awful) new single does indeed show that there is some deliberate self deprecation going on - especially at the end where a whole row of Taylors in her various former images appear and argue with themselves.   They spent quite a bit of money making the clip, by the looks, but there are far too few shots of her at her most attractive - nicely made up and taking a bath in a tub of diamonds.

Anyway, it probably indicates she's not genuinely that obsessed with her past feuds, but it still seems that she spends too much thinking about her image and reputation in any event.   Can't she just decide what look and image she currently likes, and sing pleasant pop songs without so much self referential stuff?

Update:  at the risk of annoying Homer no end, here's Slate's kinda witty take on the video:

Swift’s tour de force of deflective petulance is amazing: It’s essentially a catalogue of every public feud she’s had that, without naming them, manages to extend, mock, and, most important, commodify them. (Side note: Do you know anyone in real life who has “feuds” who isn’t utterly insufferable?) “Look What You Made Me Do”—it’s right there in the title—is an anthem that turns the abrogation of personal responsibility into a posturing statement of empowerment. With its tense “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? … ’Cause she’s dead!” it embraces the possibility of calling “Do over!” as a form of self-realization, and imagines a world in which a clean slate means never having to say you’re sorry because every conceivable way you lash out must be someone else’s fault. Is Taylor Swift to blame for anything? How can any of us know? There was violence on many sides, many sides.

Odd, poverty driven, disease of the day

I had missed an earlier NPR story about this disease podoconiosis - caused by walking barefoot for years in volcanic soils, such as in parts of Africa - but they have an update to it here.

Never heard of it before, and it looks like it has horrible effects - all for the want of footwear.  

I know I'm not going to catch it if I am a tourist, but the African continent seems to suffer from so many diseases in the water, or insect carried, or even from just walking barefoot, it kind of puts me off ever wanting to go there.  

Just not funny

Just as being under 35 and having at least several gay friends seems a crucial determinant of giving lavish praise to gay written ABC comedy like Please Like Me and The Family Law, each of which I gave an honest try but for which I did not care, I think it takes being in a certain demographic to find the comedy of the two female comedians behind The Katering Show and last night's Get Kracki!n  hilariously funny. 

I've complained about them before - see my comments about The Katering Show, which, after last night's experience with their second project, I think were too generous.

Get Kracki!n takes the key problem of the earlier show and makes it much, much worse.    It is a parody/satire that (to use that mocked explanation from a Woody Allan movie) doesn't just bend the stick, but breaks it, repeatedly, in the way the audience of a University review might find funny, but not the rest of us.

Some women and men of a certain age or background find the completely unrealistic outbreak of "honesty", involving lots of swearing and mock live to air chaos, hilarious.  They probably all love Tim Minchin too.   I beg to differ.

Happily, I see that, despite The Guardian reviewer giving it a 4 star review, most of the comments following indicate that it didn't go over well even with your Lefty biased average Guardian reader, for whom one would think the "women being crude" aspect would not be a concern.

It's basically poorly written comedy by a couple of women who, I suppose I should say, might be good at comedy acting if they weren't doing their own material.

Enough with dragons

I haven't been bothered to actually read the articles, but I take it from various headlines that some people have thought that Game of Thrones has been teetering on "jump the shark" territory in this penultimate season.   I also heard on the radio the other day that a big internet discussion had broken out as to whether an ice dragon should actually be able to breath fire, or ice instead.

This is what counts as entertainment in the adult world these days, hey? 

Yes, yes, that's very snootily elitist of me: someone who is happy enough to see what happens next in the fantasy-ish world of Star Wars.  (Mind you, if there is - what are we up to? 4th? - version of a planet destroying Death Star-ish mega device, I really might have to abandon that too).   But really, I've never been one for anything other than short term engagement with fantasy or dragons, and I don't get people taking seriously a very lengthy violent adult show in which such fantasy beasts play a key role. 

I will be glad to see the back of it in popular culture, just as I was glad to see Tolkien movies peter out in eventual recognition that they gone on too long.

Good

American murder

I wouldn't have thought that Houston would have a much higher murder rate than New York, but here you go (from a City Journal article about the flood and why Houston is not an easy place to evacuate)

Before Harvey hit, Houston had a murder rate of about 13 per 100,000 residents. That’s nowhere near as low as New York, with its own murder rate at fewer than four equivalent homicides, but it’s much better than New Orleans, with its homicide rate in 2004, the year before Katrina, of 59 murders per 100,000 people (and 45 today). Houston has also seen its population soar, from 1.6 million in 1980 to 2.3 million today. New Orleans, before Katrina, was shrinking, from 558,000 in 1980 to 455,000 in 2005: thriving municipalities have more civic unity and the necessary service infrastructure to respond to crisis than do cities in decline.

I see in an article from the Economist earlier this year there was this graphic:

And in Australia, we struggle to make it to 1.5 per 100,000 in a year, for murder and manslaughter combined.

Fake news triumphs again

Have you seen the tweets?   There is a very good chance - a virtual certainty in fact - that a significant number of Trump supporters actually believe that Trump is responding better to this hurricane than Obama did to Katrina, despite, well, Obama was not then the President.    (I also saw one that had a go at Michelle Obama for going shopping 3 days after Katrina - probably as a defence of the ridicule Melania got for wearing high heals on the way to Texas.)  

I think the internet might be causing the end of civilisation, but not by those "AI is going to kill us all" freaks who think Google might become conscious and decide to kill us off, but by more mundane method of Facebook and Twitter and its bots empowering the malicious and stupid humans of the world.  

Is this guy still the online editor at Quadrant?

Roger Franklin, apparent friend of Sinclair Davidson and ABC bombing fantasist, shows at Catallaxy (under his open secret identity) that chronological age is no barrier to chronic immaturity and gender attitudes approximately 120 years out of date .   For the sake of women everywhere, be warned:  this manly hot looker:

...would like to rub himself against you.  Here's his explanation of the problem of women in the news workplace

I love women. They are very pleasant to cuddle and rub against, and they have an astonishing ability to spot things that need cleaning and dusting long before the XY eye notices them. I like women in newsrooms as well. Alas, too much of the feminine sensibility screws news judgement. Women, you see, get excited about “issues”, rather than story-specific facts, and if you have enough women at the morning news conference, it is a sure bet they will validate the particular interest and inclination of the moment. Thus have we seen interminable stories about the battered wives of stock brokers and lawyers — there must be days when Rose Bay resembles a scene from the Rape of the Sabine Women — and very little exposure of the fact that, if you overlay a map of DV incidence atop one displaying Aboriginal population densities, they will be a near-perfect match.

Same with “gossip and trivia”. Newsroom women don’t like Trump, so any hint of a squib of a fact to advance that view will be highlighted.

Ah, you say, but what of newsroom men? Well here is where it should be noted that the news business trailblazed the practical application of gender fluidity. Stroll through a Fairfax or ABC newsroom and you’ll certainly see humans who stand up to pee, but mentally they are girls.

I hope this helps to explain Ben Cubby, Peter Hannam, Jonathan Green, Jon Faine…..

One strongly suspects he is a cranky old bachelor who sensible women won't touch with a barge pole.  He certainly deserves to be treated that way, at least.    Sensible women being in short (or no) supply at Catallaxy, they'll go "oh, ah, you're so naughty Roger" and give him a pass.

So, this is the quality of editors working in a conservative publications in Australia today.  It's a joke publication.

It's a gas

People at one of those things the English laughingly call a beach had a chemical gas haze of some kind come and ruin their day recently, and no one can tell what caused it.

Very odd.