Seriously...

Headline at Vox:

Rick Perry actually tried to argue that fossil fuels can help fight sexual assault

This is not the Onion.

Gay in Egypt

An interesting take on the matter of gay sex and gay identity in Egypt, and in Islam more generally, has appeared in The Spectator.  He starts by talking about the recent police arrest there of 60 allegedly gay men, found by scanning social media, and continues:

Obviously, that’s 60 too many. We should recall, though, that Egypt is a country of 95 million people, and those arrested mostly deny being gay. So either the police were not making much of an effort to round up the queers, or — more likely — there are in fact almost none in Egypt.

Of course, that’s not the same as saying that there are no Egyptian men who engage in gay sex.As someone who lived in the country for more a decade, is fluent in Egyptian Arabic and has written a book on the country that includes a chapter on male prostitution, I can testify quite emphatically that the exact opposite is true. And therein lies the rub, as it were.

Western correspondents filing dispatches about gay persecution in Egypt and the wider region are ignoring the more nuanced reality. Just as predictably, bigots determined to show how Islam restricts sexual freedom are also having a ball. But the latter especially are wide of the mark. The Koran singles out sex between men as a transgression, but uniquely in the Islamic holy book, proscribes no punishment. And there must be four independent witnesses to the act of anal intercourse (all other forms of gay sex seem to have escaped Allah’s attention). So it’s just a warning not to have sex in the middle of the street. Even then, for those caught, social rehabilitation is encouraged.  

Not sure if the author counts himself as bi or gay, but he certainly gives the impression that he thinks the far from unusual inclination of young arab men to want to bed attractive young guys (while simultaneously chasing women) is quite OK:

In Tunisia, two friends came round for dinner. A Justin Bieber special started on the cable TV channel, and I reached for the remote to turn it off. ‘What are you doing?’ one of them screamed. ‘Leave it on — that boy is so do-able.’

As with the Saudi, the Tunisians had not given any indication that they were ‘gay’. In fact, they spent the rest of the evening using my computer to chat with a French women one had hooked up with a few months earlier when she was holidaying there. Like most of the young, unmarried Arab men I befriended over the decades, they knew a gorgeous boy when they saw one, but would have considered it absurd to attach to such desire an all-consuming social identity symbolised by the rainbow flag.....

The commotion will blow over and Egyptian boys, like Arab boys everywhere, will get back to banging each other like rabbits as they have been doing for millennia. It would take more than the rantings of an MP to eradicate such a deeply entrenched tradition. The golden rule, though, will remain: discretion is the name of the game. And that’s the lesson the rainbow flag activists should now take on board.

 I'm sure that this pragmatic attitude (you can do gay stuff, but just keep it discrete) is considered appalling by Western gay activists who are all consumed with the importance of gay identity.  And I can understand the objection when gay identity can mean risking jail.    But I wonder if, in the long run, there will be a move back in the West towards the more ancient view that gay sex didn't have to equate with gay identity?

A late for Halloween story

At Catholic website Crux, the story of the Curse of St Peter.  Rather like an early, papal version of the Curse of Tutenkamun, actually.   

Opioids and libertarians, again

Jonah Goldberg in National Review makes some sense:

Think of the opioid crisis as the fruit of partial legalization. In the 1990s, for good reasons and bad, the medical profession, policymakers, and the pharmaceutical industry made it much easier to obtain opioids in order to confront an alleged pain epidemic. Doctors prescribed more opioids, and government subsidies made them more affordable. Because they were prescribed by doctors and came in pill form, the stigma reserved for heroin didn’t exist.

 

When you increase supply, lower costs, and reduce stigma, you increase use. And guess what? Increased use equals more addicts.

A survey by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one-third of the people who were prescribed opioids for more than two months became addicted. A Centers for Disease Control study found that a very small number of people exposed to opioids are likely to become addicted after a single use.

The overdose crisis is largely driven by the fact that once addicted to legal opioids, people seek out illegal ones — heroin, for example — to fend off the agony of withdrawal once they can’t get, or afford, any more pills. Last year, 64,000 Americans died from overdoses. Some 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War.

Kevin undone

Gee, if the account of Kevin Spacey's tactics for chatting up/groping men at news.com.au today is accurate, the long standing feeling from interviews that he is, well, creepy seems very justified. 

If he were to admit they are true, the only way I can see Spacey try to defend himself would be to argue that gay men have always been more blunt and direct when seeking sex (which would be true) - but it is refreshing to see that younger gay men are prepared to come out now and say that they don't welcome power plays in sex, just as women don't.   Acknowledging that gay men can be as sleazy as straight men is, in an odd way,  a good thing for normalising attitudes towards gay folk, as I can't help but feel that there has been an exaggeration implicit in the promotion of same sex marriage that everything is fine in the world of gay relationships apart from that issue.  For other human issues relating to relationships and decent behaviour to be acknowledged from the community is therefore a good thing.    

Convictions noted

That Western Australian case of the two nutty women who murdered an 18 year old Asperger's guy for a thrill kill has resulted in their conviction, as was entirely predictable.   Their attempts at blaming each other were exceptionally implausible. 

CCTV footage showed the teenager leaving the shops with the accused pair and security footage from their home showed the three entering the Broughton Way house around 10.30am.

"Mr Pajich did not ever emerge from that house alive," state prosecutor James McTaggart said in his opening address to the jury....

Mr Pajich's body was discovered around a week later buried in the pair's backyard garotted with multiple stab wounds to his chest and neck.

The home's loungeroom had a large section of carpet cut out, concealed by a couch, and police found multiple blood stains and knifes at the property.

Both women denied murdering Mr Pajich and blamed each other.

Lilley claimed she was unaware Mr Pajich had been killed and that Lenon must have murdered him and concealed the crime while she was taking a three-hour nap in the next room.

Lenon however admitted witnessing Lilley stab Mr Pajich to death, claiming she helped conceal the crime out of fear.

Bear in mind this:

Both originally lied to police and told detectives they had not seen Mr Pajich the day he went missing but later admitted he had visited their home.

During the trial, the jury heard how Lilley was obsessed with serial killers and knives, and had told a friend she wanted to kill someone before she turned 25.

She often referred to herself as SOS, a serial killer character she created for a book she wrote as a teenager in 2007.... 

Lilley, who took the stand for five days during the trial, claimed messages between her and Lenon about killing someone were role-play for a new book she was writing.

She claimed she was in character when she wrote Lenon a long message 13 days before the murder.

"I feel as though I cannot rest until the blood or the flesh of a screaming, pleading victim is gushing out and pooling on the floor, until all the roads and streets are streamed red and abandoned, and the fear in the back of everyone's minds and on the tongue of each human that's left standing is SOS," it read.

"I cannot shift this belief that the world has become not only ready for me, it needs me to be ready."

Lenon replied: "It's definitely time. I am ready. You are ready".

They should stay in jail for a very long time.  Preferably til dead...

Yet more murder

Gruesome murder is back in the news again this week.

I don't think that a likely serial killer in Japan is getting quite as much publicity as I expected.   Seems to have been pushed out of the headlines a bit by the goings on in Washington.  

Update:  the details appear to involve a very (sad to say) Japanese set of circumstances, involving loneliness, social media, suicidal desire, the quasi romantic (well, to some people - women especially perhaps) idea of doing it with someone else, and even the suggestion of disturbing sex.  Just awful:

Police suspect Shiraishi found suicidal women on the Internet and pretended that he also wanted to kill himself, posting, “Let’s die together.”

After they showed up, he invited them to his apartment where he killed them and took about 500,000 yen ($4,390) in total from the bodies, according to police.

Further information on his “obscene purposes” was unavailable.

According to police, the first victims were an unmarried couple.

In August this year, Shiraishi had a meal with the couple with whom he had become acquainted through Twitter.

On a later day, he invited the woman to his apartment, where he killed her, according to police.

The woman’s male acquaintance, unable to contact her, asked Shiraishi if he knew where she was. Shiraishi also invited him to the apartment and killed him, police said.

Shiraishi told police he killed most of the nine people when he met them in person for the first time.
Some of the nine people had posted suicidal messages on the Internet, and Shiraishi promised to meet them directly after exchanging messages online.

The Black Death (or sickness, at least)

I don't mind licorice, but don't eat it often.   I had read before that eating large amounts was not good for your health, but Vox explains in more detail:

According to the Food and Drug Administration, if you eat 2 ounces of black licorice — the equivalent of about four Twizzler vines — daily for at least two weeks, you could wind up in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat or even heart failure. 

That’s a lot of licorice — maybe more than most licorice lovers eat in a day. But the FDA is onto something: Licorice root contains a medically active compound called glycyrrhizin acid, and researchers have been discussing its potential health complications for years. Glycyrrhizin can elevate a person’s blood pressure, leading some to experience abnormal heart rhythms, lethargy, even congestive heart failure. Glycyrrhizin can also interfere with other medications and supplements, the FDA warned.

“No matter what your age, don’t eat large amounts of black licorice at one time,” the agency said, adding that people over 40 with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure seem to be most at risk of black licorice-related health complications.

Speaking of other teams...

Time to let the other team try

I still find Malcolm Turnbull likeable as a person, with his steadfast cheerfulness while the evidence continues to pile up around him that he and his Ministers are, shall we say, basically incompetent at this thing called "governing".  

So, seriously, isn't it time for an umpire or someone (electorate of New England, hello?) to tell him and his team that it's really time to take a break and give the other team, who could hardly do any worse, a go?   I mean, it just gets embarrassing after a while, watching the flaying about.

Rupert wants Donald

Who knows what's going on in the ageing mind of Rupert Murdoch, but people have been noticing how the Wall Street Journal is now agitating in defence of Trump and using all of the same "must get Hillary!" distraction squirrels as on Fox News and The New York Post, and up to and including hosting a piece arguing that Trump should just pardon everyone now, including himself!

It is all purely a coincidence that each Murdoch outlet is running the same line, I'm sure:

Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, declined to comment. Mark Cunningham, the New York Post’s Executive Editorial Page Editor, also declined comment. Both did not answer questions regarding whether Murdoch had any input in editorial direction.

“There is a general flabbergastedness about the drift of the edit page,” said one former senior Wall Street Journal editor. “What is fascinating to a lot of people is, why are they now coming around to being sycophants to Trump, aping some of these things that are part of the Republican echo chamber?”

Given that these Murdoch outlets are actually encouraging Trump to get rid of Mueller, how dangerous has Rupert become to the rule of law and good governance?    "Very" is the obvious answer, surely.  

Murder talk (for Halloween)

I've noticed that the prosecution case in Perth against a couple of weird women has concluded, and the details are of the most chilling kind - a thrill kill by a woman with a nutty obsession with both serial killers and kinky sex:

Over the past month, the court has heard allegations of how Ms Lilley, a young woman obsessed with knives and serial killers, and Ms Lenon – a mother-of-three with a history as a “submissive” in Perth’s BDSM scene – had built a close relationship, referring to each other by ‘pet names’.

Ms Lilley was referred to as SOS – which was also a serial killer character in a book she had written in her teens, and also the name of an American serial killer who had murdered eight victims in the mid 70s’.

Ms Lenon was known as ‘Corvina’, a name she had adopted through her participation in bondage and sado-masochistic sex.

The state alleges after the two women met and moved in together, along with Ms Lenon’s younger children, they teamed up to carry out a ‘thrill kill’ on a vulnerable target.

That target, according to the state, was Mr Pajich, who was known to Ms Lenon through a shared attendance at a Kwinana college and his friendship with her teenaged son Cameron.

The 18 year-old was also on the autism spectrum, and according to Mr Taggart “still inhabited a child’s world”, including a passionate interest in computer games.

It was that interest which the state says Ms Lenon used to lure Mr Pajich to the Orelia house she shared with the 26 year-old Ms Lilley, who worked as a nightfill manager at Woolworths in Palmyra.
“Trudi Lenon delivered Aaron Pajich right into Jemma Lilley’s hands and together they murdered him,” Mr McTaggart said.

“These two ladies took Aaron Pajich’s life in a way that was as brutal and violent as could possibly be imagined.”

The motive, Mr McTaggart said, was Ms Lilley’s “life’s objective” to kill someone before she was 25 years-old, which she had revealed to a friend some years before.

 While it appears clear that they had some sort of sexual kink relationship, I'm not sure whether they count themselves as lesbians or not.

In any event, it got me thinking of other thrill kill nutty lesbian cases:   Brisbane had its famous one in  the "lesbian vampire killer" murder in 1991 - the main protagonist is now living in the community on parole.  

There was also the famous New Zealand case that was the subject of the Heavenly Creatures film.   (OK, not a thrill kill exactly, but a weird, obsessively relationship between young women none the less.)

Now, we're obviously not talking a huge sample here, but in comparison to male gay couples, apart from the famous Leopold and Loeb murder from way back in 1924, I can't say I have heard of any gay couple murders which are in the "thrill kill" category.

Sure, serial killers are almost always male, and presumably often kill for all sorts of demented reasons, but my point is that it seems that the shared idea of a kill, based on weird fantasy motivations, might be more of a female/lesbian thing than a male thing?  

I notice that some people complain of lesbians being too readily portrayed as obsessive killers in Hollywood -  I don't really know as it is a genre of film that generally doesn't interest me. 

But, given the grotesque examples of some lesbian murderers, I have to say I'm not all that surprised.  If any reader wants to set me straight with true stories of male couples murdering for the weirdest motivations, let me know...

I'm with Tony

Oh - tough guy cook and travel writer Anthony Bourdain is making a pretty transparent attack on Tarantino for working with Harvey Weinstein for so many years and doing nothing about his knowledge of Weinstein's uber sleaze behaviour.

I've never liked Tarantino or his movies, so good.   Mind you, Bourdain acts it up a bit too much for my liking too, but he's OK in small doses.    

Why Trump is interested in the JFK case

Great column by Adam Gopnik about the release of additional papers on the JFK assassination.

He starts:

The release last Thursday of previously classified, or at least unseen, government files of all kinds relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy is being heralded as Donald Trump’s decision—though it was simply his decision not to prevent their release, which had long been scheduled. In fact, at the last minute, Trump listened to requests from the intelligence services not to release some three hundred of the remaining three thousand files. But that decision raised more suspicions, so on Friday night the President tweeted, “I will be releasing ALL JFK files other than the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living.”

And here are the best paragraphs:

The pretense last week was that, in releasing the files, Trump took action on behalf of the American people, in the pursuit of openness. But Trump acts in his own interest, and his pursuit of apparent openness has as its real end the undermining of public institutions and practices which depend on professionalism, independence, and trust. Trump was likely prodded to speak out about the files by Roger Stone, one of the figures from the fringes of American life whom the President has brought to the center. Stone wrote a book titled “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.” Last week, his profane rants got him suspended from Twitter, but he still appears to be in touch with Trump. Stone has warned of the “deep state,” the new villain of right-wing paranoia—well, an old villain, newly restored to primacy. The thinking in this case seems to be that, if Trump’s followers can be persuaded that no one in the “permanent government” should be trusted, they can perhaps be more easily persuaded not to trust the institutions of the state when, say, they pursue charges against anyone associated with his campaign. The implicit, and increasingly explicit, argument here is: Don’t listen to special counsels who worked for the F.B.I.; those are the guys that withheld all those documents  about the J.F.K. assassination.

As David Frum has pointed out, what Trump’s surrogates really mean by “the deep state” is the rule of law. The idea that there are civil servants or functionaries within the government whose chief trait is loyalty to the Constitution and to the ongoing administration of the state is intolerable to the autocratic mind. So, if those other actors question challenge the White House, they must be taunted, demoralized, and, if possible, dismissed.

In time for Halloween - Holy Bowels

Yeah, we've all read about incorrupt corpses of various saints before, but this article in The Atlantic is a good summary of the topic.  I liked this detail:

Despite (or perhaps because of) the respect accorded to the saintly dead by medieval Christians, they were rarely allowed to rest in peace. As soon as a holy person died, his or her corpse would be scrutinized for signs of sanctity by those who prepared it for burial. When Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, died in 1200, his viscera were removed from his body, which was taken a long distance for burial. Some among his household were initially uncomfortable with this plan, but they warmed to it when the episcopal bowels provided first proof of their owner’s holiness. As the bishop’s chaplain Adam of Eynsham reported in his biography of Hugh, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, “no water or stool was found, and they were as clean and immaculate as if someone had carefully washed and wiped them.”

Certain cynics dismissed the results as the inevitable consequence of the dysentery that plagued Hugh in his final days, but others claimed it a miracle. 

 The reason the lack of decay was seen as significant is explained here:

The insistence on the lifelike qualities of these corpses comes from the Christian tradition that “the saints are not called dead but sleeping,” as St. Jerome once put it. They were expected to possess lifelike qualities even in death. Pink and white coloring, for example, was thought to be a sign of readiness for the resurrection: Their intact, lifelike bodies would literally stand and walk, just as Jesus had done.

 But an obsession with sexual purity was apparently part of the interest in post mortem lack of normal decay, too:

 The medieval mind also connected bodily integrity with virginity. The condition of corpses was thought to reflect individuals’ conduct during their lifetimes. Rapid decay was indicative of sin, whereas miraculous preservation signified sexual purity. This was especially true if a well-preserved corpse oozed sweet-smelling balsam. White corpses, too, were strongly associated with white lilies, a common symbol of virginity. Sexual purity was one of the most important qualities for a would-be saint, but it was also one of the hardest attributes to prove. The discovery of a perfect corpse could provide evidence that few would dare to question.

Blade Runner 2049 in three words (followed by many more)

Trying too hard.

Let me expand:   it's visually fantastic, we can all agree.  Everyone likes the flying cars again, I'm sure. The acting is fine, too.

But, here the slide in my opinion begins:  musically -  loudly pretentious is probably the best description.  (The Vangelis score in the original was just 80's pretentious.)   And I should have guessed, given its fondness for the sudden blare:  Hans Zimmer worked on the soundtrack.  He'll get an Oscar for Dunkirk: a really remarkable and crucial-to-the-movie score; but lots of people complain about aspects of his work on other Nolan films, and I can understand why.

As for my overall rating, I would have to call it a failure.   Not a completely unworthy failure, but a failure nonetheless.

It's OK, I suppose, to try to explore to a deeper extent the themes of the original, but this movie does it mainly by some protracted, serious, very serious, dialogue exchanges which go on too long and don't linger in the mind as to their cleverness or emotional punch.  The impression left with me was that the screenplay was just trying too hard for intellectual seriousness. 

In fact, having watched  three of director Denis Villeneuve's films now, I recognise this as a constant theme in my reaction to his work - he's visually stylish, but always leaves me cold in any emotional connection to the material.   I'm not entirely sure how he achieves that, but despite liking visually what I saw on screen for much of Sicario, Arrival and now this one, by the end of all I felt I had not really been convinced by the human story in any of them.

In this one, the Ryan Gosling character is played sympathetically, but somehow, there is no real emotional punch to watching his woes.   Actually, now that I think of it, the audience probably felt the most sympathy for his software girlfriend character rather than to any  than any flesh and blood one.   That's interesting, but not a good thing. 

For Blade Runner, the problem is probably that its core story is not really worth dwelling on, beyond a quick narrative hit and run.  In fact, re-watching the original cinema released movie last weekend, I was quite surprised at how quickly it went.  And that works fine for Philip K Dick movies, since he wasn't really about plausible science scenarios: just speculative ones allowing him for a one story, or one novel, take on his favourite themes of identity, memory, reality and sanity; all reflecting his own long ongoing issues with his drug addled mind.

Just as everyone agrees that it was a mistake to try to expand on the original implausibilities in The Matrix for a further two movies (massive numbers of comatose humans as alien battery banks: yeah sure),  I reckon it's not a good idea to dwell on the concept of vat growing quasi-humans to adulthood for the purposes of dangerous deep space or general slave work, not to mention giving them fake memories.   Maybe I'm just particularly resistant to the concept:  readers may recall that there was one well regarded science fiction movie that completely left me cold when I found out that that was the explanation.  

But dwell on this scenario is what the people who made this movie are trying to do, and it also felt very much like they were hoping to get a third one out of it too.   However, I see that the director and Ryan Gosling say that there are no definite plans for that.  Given the relatively poor box office, I think a third is now unlikely, and that's not a bad thing.

In fact, one thing that does surprise me is that the slowness and quasi pretentiousness of some of the key scenes were not recognized by the studio, and that they funded it in its current form.   It just seems to me that it should have been obvious on paper that it would not have wide audience appeal.    I fully understand why it has not drawn in the crowds despite mainly positive reviews.  

Again, the movie looks a million bucks, as they used to say before inflation, and all credit to some imaginative production design work.  I didn't fall asleep (Hans took care of that) but I was consciously wishing more than once that the plot would move faster, and (mainly) that it would make me feel more.

Update:  Deborah Ross at the Spectator didn't care for it either, and shares my skepticism of the scenario:

Thirty years later, we now have Ryan Gosling as our blade runner, K, in a world where replicants are still produced, this time by Wallace (Jared Leto), a mogul who sits atop a vast corporation and talks a lot of New Age gibberish. I think he’s meant to be evil, but he just seems like the worst kind of yoga teacher. You do have to wonder why anyone still has any faith in replicants, given their troublesome history, or why they are made so lifelike. They’d be much more useful slaves if, say, they had multiple arms shaped like shovels, plus you’d also be able to spot them a mile off. Just saying.

Spoiler warning:   Thinking about it overnight - what is the point of making replicants with a sex drive, anyway, if you never want them to be able to reproduce?   I suppose there could be a class of prostitute replicants for the sex industry, but why should someone like K have one at all?    Honestly, the basic scenario just makes less and less sense the more you think about it....

Alien asteroid

Interesting astronomy news:

Astronomers have spotted some kind of outer space rock that's the first visitor from outside of our solar system that they've ever observed.

The discovery has set off a mad scramble to point telescopes at this fast-moving object to try to learn as much as possible before it zips out of sight.

"Now we finally have a sample of something from another solar system, and I think that's really neat, " says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, "and so you'd love to see if it looks like stuff in our solar system."

It's long been assumed that an interstellar object like this one should be out there, because giant planets in forming solar systems are thought to toss out bits of space crud that haven't yet glommed into anything. But this is the first time scientists have actually found one.

The mysterious object is small — less than a quarter mile in diameter — and seems to have come from the general direction of the constellation Lyra, moving through interstellar space at 15.8 miles per second, or 56,880 miles per hour.

But there's no tension in this - it was spotted on the way out of the solar system, not on the way in (when we could all have speculated as to whether it was actually an alien spaceship):

"The orbit is very convincing. It is going so fast that it clearly came from outside the solar system," says Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's whipping around the Sun, it has already gone around the Sun, and it has actually gone past the Earth on its way out."

Agreed

Understand annoyance with extreme elements of PC  but not what Right gains from promoting this un-funny  clown https://t.co/FGPd4TXxcd

— jtfsoon (@jtfsoon) October 26, 2017

Good to see a J Soon tweet I can fully endorse.

I watched the 15 minute interview noted in the tweet, just to see if there was any sense in which all the Miloheads were right: that their hero had really showed up the interviewers  - "Milo slays Aussie feminist"  "Milo kills it with hopeless Australian media"  "Thank you Milo, aussie media is so embarrassing", etc etc.

And the answer, unsurprisingly, is - no, he didn't.    There was no "crushing defeat" on either side - the panel made good general points; Milo barrelled on at a rapid rate making myriad claims of misrepresentation which no one had time or capacity to challenge him on in that interview format.  He also make multiple claims of his vast success, as if having foolish fans is self evidently reason you can't contest the offensiveness and contradictions of his style.    Conservatives of only a decade ago would have run a million miles from his self promotion and dis-ingenuous use of "mixing high brow and low brow" as a way of claiming offensive insults as legitimate.   But the culture war allows them to forgive everything.

I've also noted before that the Right wing culuture warrior class on the internet have, over the last few years, gone completely over the top with ridiculous claims of victory in debate which are apparent only to them, and the language used is routinely that of violent, physical defeat.

I really find it creepy and puzzling, and put it down yet again to the unexpectedly corrosive effects of the internet as a means of communication.    

We can see what is going on, but how to stop it?

There's an analysis up at Slate as to how Hannity operates on Fox News, entitled Hannity is a Nightly Recruitment Video for the Cult of Trump, and I reckon it's entirely accurate.

The Right wingnut side of politics swallows whole virtually any conspiracy spun by the Right wing media, bedroom pundits or paid Russian disinformation disseminators;  they have been psychologically primed for this by years of dwelling in the conspiracy mindset of climate change denial.

The effects are absolutely cult like:   the world is divided into those who perceive the Truth, and everyone else is evil and corrupt and depraved.   The faults of the Leader are readily forgiven, as they are in all cults, as the power of ultimate righteousness are not held back by the mere temporary foibles of the Leader.  There's quite the element of a persecution complex, too:  the media are out to get their leader by lying about him. 

But how is this addressed?

The provision of information contrary to their conspiracy mindset is one thing - but we all know that is not enough to break your average cult.

Surely a huge part of the problem is the refusal of the more moderate Right to call out the cult as a cult.   Cults are weakened when former insiders break away and speak publicly about the tactics as viewed from inside. 

In particular, any half reasonable journalist or worker in Fox News needs to break from the network and speak openly about the rabid, harmful partisanship of the likes of Hannity.  

The ultimate would be, of course, the actual ownership of Fox News disowning the awful obsequiousness of most of its hosts - but Murdoch would have to want to stop counting money for that to happen.  Quite frankly, the death of Rupert can't come fast enough if we want any hope of his inheritors actually taking that step.

Besides that, what hope do we have?  

In other Papal news

It's a funny old world, isn't it, when the Pope is making phone calls to the International Space Station in the same week the first English translation of the rite of exorcism is distributed in the US.   (I see that it's not on sale to the public, though:  it would seem being a freelance exorcist is not something the Church wants to encourage.)

The Pope is also making conciliatory statements about the Reformation (not that he is the first to do so, of course, but it will probably annoy the noisy, Right wing conservative branch of the Church anyway.):

The grace of God and decades of ecumenical dialogue have enabled Catholics and Protestants to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation together, emphasizing their shared baptism and faith in Jesus, Pope Francis said.

But at the Catholic Herald, there's an interesting summary of the nastiness of the Church of England's break from Rome, which I'll quote from in part:

With little alternative, Henry resorted to the most basic tool of his power: violence.

Burning people for heresy was an option, but it would raise a few eyebrows. The problem was that Henry largely believed in the same traditional theology that his people did. He had not changed his views from the time of writing the Assertio. This ruled out widespread heresy trials. The solution his circle came up with was more radical.

Treason was originally a common law offence, but put on to a statutory basis by King Edward III in the Treason Act 1351. (It is still in force, although heavily modified, and last used in 1945 against William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”.)

The punishment for high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering – first recorded in 1238 for an “educated man-at-arms” (armiger literatus) who tried to assassinate King Henry III. Other famous early victims included Dafydd ap Gruffydd in 1283 and William Wallace in 1305. The victim was drawn (dragged) to the place of execution on a hurdle or sledge. There he was hanged (slowly strangled), and while alive his genitals were cut off, his abdomen was sliced open, his bowels were pulled out, and they were burned in front of him. Once dead, he was cut down, beheaded, sliced into quarters, and a section sent to each of the four corners of the kingdom for public display. For a woman, the punishment was burning and quartering.

Henry’s first victim was a 28-year-old nun, Elizabeth Barton. She had visions which earned her a following among leading clergymen, and she had even enjoyed an audience with Henry. However, when her prophecies spoke of the wrong Henry was doing by abandoning Katherine and marrying Anne, she crossed a line. Her visions, in fact, suited Cranmer, as condemning her gave him the chance to damage some of her theologically conservative clergy supporters. He and Cromwell obtained her confession to having faked trances, to heresy, and to treason. On April 20, 1534 she was hanged and beheaded at Tyburn along with five of her supporters (two monks, two friars, and a secular priest). Her head was then spiked on London Bridge, making her the only woman in English history to suffer this fate.

The article goes on to summarise some of the English Reformation's greatest lows. 

It's remarkable how attitudes have changed to gory punishment, isn't it?  I think I have speculated before that the best explanation as to why the public butchering of humans as punishment has changed from public spectacle to something sickening to contemplate is probably due to public butchery of animals being a common sight in the market place of old.   The treat a human in the same way was to degrade them to a level of animal, but the sight of blood and gore was not of itself something so uncommon as it is now.

Anyway, in other Reformation anniversary news, a bishop and a Cardinal are getting into a bit of dispute about how to characterise it:

German cardinal Gerhard Müller has said the Protestant Reformation was not a “reform” but a “total change of the foundations of the Catholic faith”.

Writing for Italian website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said modern-day Catholics often discuss Martin Luther “too enthusiastically”, mainly due to an ignorance of theology.

His comments come after the secretary-general of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, reportedly said “the Reformation carried out by Martin Luther 500 years ago was an event of the Holy Spirit,” adding: “The Reformation corresponds to the truth expressed in the saying ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda’”.

The tightrope the Church is currently walking continues...