Krugman on Trumpland

Krugman's column on the problems in "Trumpland" contains one typo that hasn't been fixed yet, I think (either that or I am reading the sentence wrong), but he notes the big picture regarding income disparity between the US poorer regional areas and the urban rich:

Mississippi isn’t an isolated case. As a new paper by Austin, Glaeser and Summers documents, regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption.

An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors — specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.

So what is the matter with Trumpland?

For the most part I’m in agreement with Berkeley’s Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” is must reading for anyone trying to understand the state of America. Moretti argues that structural changes in the economy have favored industries that employ highly educated workers — and that these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: Their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage.

While these structural factors are surely the main story, however, I think we have to acknowledge the role of self-destructive politics.

That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions — but which they won’t accept. Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill — and would create jobs in the process — are also among America’s poorest.

Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.

Speaking of education cuts, I have been very surprised to read how poorly some US States do pay their teachers:

In fact, the amount teachers make can vary greatly by state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest 10 percent of high school teachers earn less than $38,180 and the highest 10 percent earn more than $92,920. 

And look where the lowest paid teachers are:

1. Oklahoma
Annual mean wage: $42,460
2. Mississippi
Annual mean wage: $43,950
3. South Dakota
Annual mean wage: $44,210
4. North Carolina
Annual mean wage: $45,220
5. West Virginia
Annual mean wage: $45,240

Yes, it all aligns with the argument that the American Right has become obsessed with policy prescriptions that are shooting themselves in the foot.   

Didn't realise I was transgender

Well, according to the way Ottoman Empire used to think about gender, apparently. That's the oddest and most novel thing I learnt from this curiously entitled Aeon article:  What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism.

There's a lot that's not new in there - the Foucault-ian bit about older societies not thinking of homosexuality in the same way we do now, for example.  But this paragraph, explaining what the author concludes after (in his words) "combing through five centuries of Ottoman literary works searching for sexual terminology"* was something new to me:

In particular, it indicates that one can speak of three genders and two sexualities. First, rather than a male/female dichotomy, sources clearly view men, women and boys as three distinct genders. Indeed, boys are not deemed ‘feminine’, nor are they mere substitutes for women; while they do share certain characteristics with them, such as the absence of facial hair, boys are clearly considered a separate gender. Furthermore, since they grow up to be men, gender is fluid and, in a sense, every adult man is ‘transgender’, having once been a boy.   

I don't know: this academic uses "heteronormativity" a bit too much for me to be sure I trust him, and his bio does put one category of interests a bit uncomfortably close to another:

His current research interests are cultural and intellectual history, the arts of the book, gender and sexuality, and human-animal relations, all in the context of Islam and particularly Turkey. 

But if he's right, it seems an odd way for the old Turks to have categorised folk.

* sounds like something a teenager would do if regular porn was not available

A complicated dream

Is there a word for the type of dream from which you half wake, and have trouble stopping as you drift back into sleep again even though you would like it to stop?

Sometimes, though, the effect is the opposite - a dream from which you half wake, recognize as telling a particularly interesting story, and wish you could get going again.

This morning I had such a dream.  It was some vaguely science fiction-y/spy story, with something about aliens and a doomsday machine being built by scientists, who were being shut down for working on such a dangerous project, but someone recognized the need to get it going again because it may be needed to fight off aliens.   There were underground facilities, people being shot unexpectedly, a sense the story had finished happily, only for another key character to be shot and the realisation it hadn't ended after all.   I'm not sure that I was a participating character - it was more like watching a TV show or long movie.

I presume this arose from having watched the end of season 2 of Mr Robot last night - not that I have enjoyed the show as much as the dream.   But yeah, there is a sense of a long, never ending story from watching that show.

Shadow protector

From Japan Today:

Because most Japanese people don’t really like the idea of having a roommate, a lot of these young people end up living alone, including young women. But while Tokyo is much safer than large cities in many other countries, crimes do happen, and criminals often consider young women who live alone to be easy targets.

To help address this problem, and also to put the minds of female tenants at ease, apartment management company Leo Palace 21 has developed what it calls the Man on the Curtain system, which is shown starting at the 1:15 mark in the video below.

Using a projector controlled by/attached to a smartphone, Man on the Curtain throws a silhouette of a man onto your curtains, so that when people outside look at your windows, there will appear to be a guy inside, thus masking that you live alone.

If you’re wondering how that’s better than just putting a cardboard cutout by your window, Man on the Curtain is full-motion, projecting videos of actual actors (in silhouette) for an extremely lifelike look. Currently, the system has 12 different options, including such intimidating routines as a boxer throwing practice punches, a marital artist going through a karate kata, a bodybuilder working out with dumbbells, and a sports fan swinging a baseball bat around.

Since it’d be easy to deduce that a short loop is a fake, each video is roughly 30 minutes long, with a variety of motions. Leo Palace 21’s introductory video doesn’t get into the specifics of how the system is operated, it seems like it’d be easy to program it to cycle from one routine to the next, which would give you about six hours of silhouettes before any footage needs to be repeated.

 Given Japan's national problem with young men failing to put much effort into finding a girlfriend, it might have been more realistic to throw in a sequence with a guy doing..well, you can guess.

Dumb as...

Ha.   Steve Kates posted the viral video of the Sinclair Broadcast Group stations reading out the statement about "fake news" and how they don't do it, all with no apparent insight that it's a conservative, Trump supporting company that has made its news hosts look like robots.

There are scores of comments following which are oblivious to the true point of the video as well.   Then someone says "maybe Kates is criticising all media?", which is extremely unlikely, since Kates shows no sign of getting his American political news from anything other the most biased, one eyed, wingnut sites.   He was even in early on being open minded on the "Q conspiracy."

Even after a couple of commenters have made the point that the video is actually being promoted by the Left to criticise the conservative Sinclair group, you get the information challenged, angry, angry entertainer  saying this:

Man, they are dumb...

A good bit of Spielberg

I often forget to watch The Feed on SBS2, but it's lucky I saw it last night, because it featured a very nice interview between the always likeable host Marc Fennell and Spielberg, as well as the two leads from Ready Player One.  (Not that they have much to say, which is fine by me.)

Ready Player done (and yay for 1941)

Of course you knew I would be off to see Ready Player One this weekend.

I think it shows again that Metacritic is a more reliable guide than Rottentomatoes:  unfortunately, it's more of a 64 than an 76. (Actually, that RT score has come down from 80-something a day or two ago.)

On the upside:  even though hyperkinetic in many parts, Spielberg hyperkineticism is better than that by other directors.  There is still directorial flair there, and I have to say that it puts motion capture to good use to create an immersive feeling to the virtual world.

On the downside:  it's still motion capture in a virtual world.  This does drain the story of real risk and consequences.    I mean, as has already been said elsewhere, it is like watching while someone else plays a game at home:  it may be tense and involving for the player, but after a while, the over-the-shoulder viewer gets less interested because they don't have anything at stake, and they can see that the player doesn't really either, apart from testing their own skills. 

Hence, I quite liked a lot of the inventiveness of the scenario for the first half, but by the last third, I felt no real tension and the imagery became less interesting.   I think the screenplay is a large part of the problem:   despite the bad guys being prepared to kill, they really don't seem to put much effort into it.  There are hints of how it could have been more risky for players - at one point the hero mentions that there is a weapon that can be used in virtual reality that will kill not over the avatar, but the player as well.  (How is not explained, and it doesn't get referenced again.)   I think this is the major issue.

That said, my son liked it more than I did, and it has the benefit of being one of those flawed movies which packs enough content that it becomes interesting to discuss the ways in which it is flawed.   (I'll throw another one in - the acting is pretty curious and questionable as well.)    I think the movie will do well enough at the box office, but won't be a runaway hit.   But then again, I thought the same of Black Panther, so my judgement of young audience reactions is not always correct.

In another Spielbergian aspect to this Easter weekend, I had noticed that his widely panned 1979 film 1941 was about to be taken off Netflix, so I re-watched again for the first time in many years.

I still think it's a very amusing and pretty thrilling movie, and what a contrast to RP1 in that it shows all the benefits of pre-CGI movie making: scores of stunt people involved in doing risky looking things, often not as a joke itself, but just to provide the atmosphere of chaos.   I remember critics disliked it because there seemed to be so much money put into it with (what they thought was) little pay off.  But for some people the excess itself is part of what's funny.  If you're going to make an obvious, corny joke, doing it with a dangerous and real explosion in the background makes it seem funny that they bothered doing it at all.  A very "meta" way to find humour, I suppose, but it works for me.

It still looks terrific, and yet the special effects were nearly all physical - the miniature Hollywood Boulevard and amusement park were enormous, apparently, and because the action was at night, the fakery was much better hidden than would otherwise have been possible.  

And besides, the soundtrack by John Williams is really him at his peak - the march theme I still find stirring, and the dance hall tune to which the great indoor dance/fight happens keeps replaying in my head.       

So, yeah, I still had a pretty good Spielbergian weekend, but not quite in the way he intended...

Trumpian politics

Vox's Matthew Yglesias went away for a week:

I spent last week in Madison as “writer-in-residence” at the University of Wisconsin. While it was hardly an off-the-grid experience, it did take me out of the daily news cycle for the first time in a while. Diving back in kind of reminds me of Charlton Heston waking from his space travel to discover that he’s on a planet run by orangutans. Except instead of orangutans*, we have the Republican Party.

And he then catches up on last week's controversies in the article entitled "Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can't wake up".   Sounds accurate.

I liked these paragraphs in particular:

To be fair to Trump and to the surreal nightmare he’s made American politics, the other thing that happens if you step away from the news cycle is you see that things are basically fine. During the election, I saw two possible scenarios for a Trump administration. Down one road lay cataclysm, whereas down another road Trump would pleasantly surprise us with his job performance. 

Reality has confounded both expectations, with Trump displaying no hidden depths whatsoever, even as life continues to be basically fine for most people. America has its share of problems to be sure: sky-high child poverty rate, unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, infrastructure woes, childcare woes, prescription drug affordability woes, you name it. 

But these are basically longstanding issues that our political system writ large has failed to address. They don’t hold a particularly close relationship to the fact that the president is a racist buffoon who is possibly being blackmailed by the FSB over some sex tapes.

The article also contains one of the more amusing corrections I have ever read:

Correction: An earlier version of this article implied that chimpanzees ran the government depicted in 1968’s Planet of the Apes and its sequels when in fact political authority was vested in orangutans and chimpanzees served as a kind of scientist and intellectual caste.

Trump fan confirms she's still as mad as a cut snake

So, this is the quality of the Hollywood star that Trump has chosen to congratulate because she supports him:

On Friday night, Roseanne Barr tweeted a bizarre message that no one seemed to understand.

“President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world. Hundreds each month. He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere,” she wrote, adding he gets the benefit of the doubt from her.

As the article goes on to explain, it's all part of the utterly ridiculous Q conspiracy arising from that obvious source of high quality intel - 4chan.  

A detailed explanation of the history of the absurd conspiracy theory appears in New York Magazine.  It contains this amusing line about 4chan:

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office.

I remain puzzled as to why America decided to give this nutty woman her show again.   Don't get me wrong - I used to like it a lot in its first few seasons, but I thought it was pretty well known that her head got too big for her writers, and the show went down storyline paths that made it unwatchable.   Surely there is every chance that it will happen again.   

Hell on Saturday

Seeing it's Easter Saturday, it's a good time to talk about Hell.

The Catholic Herald reports that there was yet another kerfuffle in Rome this week when an old atheist wrote that in a recent "one on one" with Pope Francis, he (the Pope) expressed a view not compatible with Church teaching:

Eugenio Scalfari, co-founder and first editor of Repubblica, published his latest conversation with Pope Francis in the paper today. After an introduction in which he says “I have the privilege of being his friend”, he relates their conversation on Tuesday at the Santa Marta Palace in the Vatican where Francis has lived since his election.

They begin talking about the Passion and Creation, then Scalfari, well-known as an atheist, reminds the Pope about saying that good souls are admitted to the contemplation of God.

“But the bad souls?” he asks. “Where are they punished?”

“They are not punished, those who repent get God’s forgiveness and go among the ranks of the souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and can not therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls,” Scalfari quotes Pope Francis as saying.

However, Scalfari fails to follow up this statement, moving immediately on to a question about politics.

The Vatican has distanced itself from the report, and this Scalfari does not take care to record words precisely (or at all) during his meetings:

Eugenio Scalfari, 93, has caused controversy before when reporting on his conversations with Pope Francis. In 2014 he said that Francis had claimed that two per cent of all Catholic priests, including bishops and cardinals, were paedophiles. He has admitted after previous conversations with the Pope in 2013 and 2016 that his supposed interviews are entirely based on his memory of the conversations; he doesn’t record them or take notes.

 The article notes this about the annihilationist view:

The theological position that Scalfari ascribes to Francis, the annihilation of the unsaved, became popular in the 19th century with the birth of Christian sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and Christadelphians. Some 20th-century Anglican clerics who have considered the possibility of annihilation include Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple and Evangelical theologian John Stott.

 Don't think I knew before that the JWs and Seventh Day-ers both held that view.  As to what Christadelphians believe - I've never looked into that obscure denomination at all.

Anyway, it's an idea that has considerable appeal for those who think eternal physical punishment is a bit much, especially when it comes to mortal sins of the "not respecting God enough" line.  Sure, no one's going to sweat too much about your average homicidal dictator spending forever in hell, but for not attending Mass?

There are other ways to lessen the modern "that's a bit much" reaction to permanent Hell:  most notably, the CS Lewis promoted line that Hell and Purgatory are one and the same, hence Hell is not permanent for anyone unless they so choose.  (Although even then, he argued that the escape route closed forever once Christ returned and the world - universe, I always presumed - ended.)

I think CS Lewis's view is pretty close to that taken by Dante - certainly, this article on Dante and Purgatory suggests  that he invented the idea that Purgatory was not just a place of purifying punishment, but one in which the participants themselves worked towards moral improvement:

But perhaps the most original aspect of Dante’s version of Purgatory is that the souls in Purgatory are in the process of moral change. They suffer, but not simply in order to repay a debt: they are suffering in order to become good. The consequence of this is that they willingly undergo the suffering, they understand the reasons for it, and they are acquiring the new habits of thought which will enable them to go to Heaven. For Dante, Purgatory is not only a place where you pay the debts you incurred when you sinned: it is in fact the place where you reflect on those sins, and where you change the psychological tendencies which led you to sin. This leads to extraordinary richness in the depiction of character. Whereas, in the Inferno, the sinners met by Dante tended to be fixed in the habits of thought which led them to sin, in the Purgatorio Dante faces the challenge of depicting souls who are in a process of change. 

 

It is also a place of prayer. Throughout Purgatory, hymns and psalms are sung, and prayers are said. This element in Dante’s Purgatory -- radically new in depictions of Purgatory -- is in keeping with his imagining the general tendency of the souls of Purgatory to reflect on their failings.  

Which all puts me in mind of the extremely pleasing The Good Place.  Although the four souls the subject of that show don't sing hymns and psalms, they are all obviously working (under the guidance of Chidi) on moral self improvement, while coping with (admittedly much milder than Dante's!) forms of punishment.  So, yeah, the show is completely consistent with Dante's take on things.

But even if you don't want to play around with various guesses of how Hell and Purgatory operate, you can try and double guess just how many Catholics are destined to Hell despite their clear (and rather open) sinning against the teachings of the Church.   See this article:  Are most Catholics in America going to Hell?

It demonstrates the ways in which modern thinking about what it means to do something with "full knowledge and deliberate consent" allows for some rubbery interpretations.   This is pretty much exactly how the Church has dealt with annulments of marriage, and I think most middle of the road Catholics see that process as a pretty disingenuous way of allowing divorce and remarriage in circumstances where in centuries past, the Church would have had nothing to do with it.   The problem the Church has made for itself is that it makes some liberalising concessions, but then pretends it's always been entirely consistent.  (Same thing when it comes to allowing the rhythm method for contraception, but put a condom on as an extra precaution and it all becomes sinful.  Yeah, sure, and presumably some are destined for Hell for that deliberate act even with their wife.)    

Mind you, the matter of line drawing in morality is a tricky thing.   If I criticise the Church for the way it sometimes handles it, I should criticise the secular for some of things they manage to talk themselves into as well, such as excuse making for infanticide that Peter Singer used to engage in.

Anyway, I've strayed a bit from the original topic.   The Catholic Herald has a separate article up pointing out that Pope Francis has made plenty of statements - including recent ones - confirming his belief in Hell.   And, rather oddly, there have also been reports over the last couple of years that demand for exorcists has risen a lot (at least in Italy) lately, and the Vatican has been happy enough for more to be trained.

So, Hell is still around, but still subject to great uncertainty.  An allowance by the Church that the exact mechanism of how the afterlife works is shrouded in mystery and incapable of definitive teaching (at least beyond the basic matter that some form of Heaven and Hell exists) would be a good concession to realism, but I'm not holding my breath...

This is what desperation for endorsement leads to

It's been pretty funny watching wingnut Trumpkins getting a thrill over Roseanne Barr and her sitcom character being a Trump supporter. And making statements about how lots of people watched the first episode, so see!  the common people really love us Trumpkins!

Have they forgotten what a utter nutjob Barr has been for many, many years?  Of course they have - they are self labelled dimwits by their devotion to Trump anyway.  But just to remind them...

I had forgotten, but she did a bit of self promotion by running for President in 2012, and in the course of that made the following suggestions:

• “In America, if we’re speaking truth, women are called bitches. I seek next Mother’s Day a march of one million American bitches who can get the job done, the job of getting the food to the hungry and thereby saving our rich American friends and neighbours from going straight to hell and burning there for all of eternity.”
• “I will outlaw bullshit. After the passage of this law the patriarchy will inevitably start to crumble as will the concept of war itself which is largely a large load of bullshit.”
• “Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!”
• “As Prime Minister of Israel I will introduce a bill into the Knesset that will simply pay the Arabs not to shoot at the Jews.” 
• “Just 10 of the Jewish billionaires on this earth have more than enough to transform the occupied territories into heaven. We can put the ‘pal’ back in Palestinian.” 
• “Any Hamas or Zionist type who tries to interfere with the labour unions and grab the money will be marched to the guillotines and subsequently beheaded. And isn’t that easier and more productive than some endless, bloody conflict? So sayeth the gospel of common sense. Happy Mother’s Day.”

Move forward a few years to 2015, and Daily Beast summarises some of her views as follows:

....Roseanne has gone on to become nothing more than a raving pseudo-libertarian ideologue who traffics in ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theories of the Alex Jones and Lyndon LaRouche variety. She believes in horseshit like chemtrails; she says the Illuminati's MK Ultra mind control has a complete lock on Hollywood; and of course she thinks 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing were inside jobs, government-sponsored false flag attacks. She regularly cites as a source for her outlandish claims the "investigative" work of batshit pretend journalist Wayne Madsen, the crackpot who remains convinced President Obama is secretly gay. She does all of this while often complaining about the patriarchy and in defense of women's issues -- she did so, amusingly, on Abby Martin's show on RT -- putting her directly at the center of that odd place where the left and right now come together and share a belief in the same ridiculous nonsense. 

 It's rather incredible, given this profile, that anyone agreed to re-unite with her on the show again.  Maybe that's why so many people watched it?

But her conspiracy belief makes her a natural Trump fit - and wingnuts are happy to embrace her, at least until her next condemnation of the patriarchy.  

The Robot considered

I've never mentioned before that I've been watching the US cable show Mr Robot via season pass purchases on Google Play.  (Nearly finished Season 2 now.)

It's an interesting, somewhat flawed show about a gigantic banking/tech industry hack and its consequences, and I offer the following observations:

*   it's a really great looking show, as long as you like dark, noirish interiors.  I had no idea so many people in New York managed to live with so few lights turned on inside!   But the composition of shots and the muted colour palate of everything is generally impressive (it looks designed for cinema as much as for television) and suits its bleak story and characters.

*   Season 1 had the big reveal at the end, which wasn't that big of a surprise, really.   But I seem to recall episodes did move forward with a greater speed that Season 2. 

*   The weird eccentricity of some choices in the story were on full display right from Season 1.  It's puzzling why Sam Esmail, the creator and sometimes writer and director, felt inclined to throw in some S&M and bisexual bedroom antics for one of the key characters (and his wife), as well as have him commit a murder for reasons that appear extraneous to the main plot.  (Perhaps something is about to be revealed at the end of Season 2?)   He is rather like a mini version of the main character from American Psycho, and it's always a worry as to what may happen when he turns up.  Then there's the mysterious but apparently important protagonist who appears to be transgender, or transvestite.    Odd.

*  The show is, apparently, incredibly authentic in terms of how it shows hacks being performed.  It goes out of its way to show computer screen shots with lots of hacking code/commands, and I have read that IT folk watching are delighted that it all makes sense.   It's kind of impressive to know it takes that degree of technical care, even if it doesn't mean much to 95% of the audience.

*  Season 2 suffers somewhat from an excess of flashback that's not always clearly identified as such for a while, some other confusingly structured storylines,  and many slow, slow dialogue scenes in dark rooms (of course) which have been inclined to put me to sleep.  But then suddenly it has one innovative and very clever episode that really impressed, and the show seemed alive again for the next few episodes too.   The Dark Army keeps popping up and machine gunning people in some (very literal) suicide attacks; the trans person does some surprising and un-fully explained things; cryptocurrencies are mentioned more; and it seems worth watching again after I had earlier said I might not bother buying Season 3.

I hope the series manages to tie up all the lose ends one day...

A ridiculous sheet position

David Roberts tweets a lot, and is pretty entertaining and informative on various subjects, but he is bizarrely wrong on this matter (as to whether top sheets are useful, or not.)   You could only conceivably hold the view that a quilt cover alone is better if you lived in a permanently cold bedroom.   In Brisbane, everyone probably spends 6 months of every year sleeping just under a sheet.

The innovation that I want to see in top sheets for double, queen or king sized beds is to have them made so that there is a lengthwise split in the middle from the top down to about 60 cm from the bottom edge, and the two halves overlap by about 30cm.   This would allow one person to use their side to cover their body and (say - because this is how I sleep) pull the top over their head without pulling off the other half from their partner's body.   Sure, you could achieve this by just putting two single sheets on the bed, but the precise arrangement doing that is always going to be fiddly.  

Perhaps I should check if this sheet design has been patented.

Update:   gawd - Google patent search shows many, many patents related to sheets.  One is about half way to my suggestion, but the split should be longer.    A lot of people have thought about sheets over the years...

The ever professional Judith

Have a look at the gif at this tweet, showing Judith Sloan in all her glory.   She must have been a joy to work with.  [sarc].

Yay China?

In an opinion piece sure to make Jason Soon grind his teeth, one Steven Rattner writes in the New York Times:

Is China’s Version of Capitalism Winning?

It's a curious piece, in which he notes and criticises many of the problems with how China operates,  while noting its economic success, and his overall message is something like "just shows you what a unified government (unlike the complete mess of US politics) can achieve." 

Perhaps the better question is whether the material success of the Chinese methods are worth the cost to individual liberties.   Many in China would no doubt answer yes, given the base they've come off.   But  there is the matter of how long the country can keep such a system going, both economically and with respect to the many likely detrimental societal effects (like gender imbalance, and family life being sacrificed for making money.)

Hey monty...

Not sure how often monty might drop in here, but if you do...

Can you pass on a message to dover beach that I find his continual use of "urban bugman" carries with it unpleasant connotations that his culture war/political opponents literally deserve extermination, like cockroaches?  

I had to look up the meme, and it apparently it's meant to signify the (alleged) empty soul-lessness of modern folk.  But honestly, it's hard to avoid reading into it implications similar to Nazi allusions to Jews as rats, deserving death.

In fact, the extermination style talk is very high with several of the sour, angry and damaged characters over there - Tom, cohenite, and the mad 26 high amongst them.   And as advertisement for conservative Catholicism, dover beach himself is a complete fail.  

Thanks...

E-cigarettes under continued scrutiny

Seems that inhaling vapours might be better for you than inhaling tobacco smoke, but is still something that is hardly going to be healthy for you:

Some e-cigarette ingredients are surprisingly more toxic than others

A new study by UNC School of Medicine researchers shows that e-liquids are far from harmless and contain ingredients that can vary wildly from one type of e-cigarette to another.

"We found that e-liquid ingredients are extremely diverse, and some of them are more toxic than nicotine alone and more toxic than just the standard base ingredients in e-cigarettes - propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin," said study senior author Robert Tarran, PhD, associate professor of cell biology and physiology. "The FDA, which helped fund our study, is just beginning to regulate e-liquid ingredients, and we hope that our data will inform their efforts."....

E-liquid's main ingredients of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin have been considered non-toxic when delivered orally, but of course e-cigarette vapors are inhaled. The UNC scientists found that even in the absence of nicotine or flavorings, small doses of these two organic compounds significantly reduced the growth of the test cells.

Again, I have to control my sense of schadenfreude  over the way at least some liberation aligned folk have rushed to endorse (or use) this product well ahead of proper testing and regulation, perhaps at the cost to their health.

And you thought the worst thing could be living next door to a meth lab

I feel very sorry for any neighbour hoping to sell their house in the next year if they are within, say, 100 metres of the house where it now appears nerve gas was sprayed:

Detectives investigating the attempted murders of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal have said they believe the pair were poisoned with a nerve agent at the front door of his Salisbury home.

Specialists investigating the poisoning of the the Skripals have found the highest concentration of the nerve agent on the front door at the address, police said.

Jews in comedy

Some interesting takes on modern American comedy and its dominance by (largely secular) Jews in this review of a book at the TLS.  Some extracts:

In the latter half of the twentieth century, American comedy just was Jewish comedy, even if the Jewishness had to be tamped down to appease mainstream audiences. It was often said of Friends that it was written as if for six old Jews, and then cast with six young attractive people. In Seinfeld, that most Jewish of sitcoms, there was only one codified Jewish character, but that’s simply because the extremely Jewish Elaine and absurdly Jewish George were handed other ethnic identities (WASP with “Shiksappeal” and Greek, respectively) to keep the networks calm....


Instead, Jewishness in comedy – what, in other words, is actually Jewish about the comedy of these secular Jews – is elusive, a bit like Judaism’s conception of the afterlife. Sahl, when first approached with the idea that his act was pervasively Jewish even though he rarely drew on his ethnicity directly, is quoted as saying, “If the role of the Jew is to rock the boat and to be inquisitive – intellectually curious, that is – fine. Classic role”. It is an interesting concept: that Jewishness in comedy is subversive but also something that can be identified in comedians whether or not they wear it on their sleeve...

The complexity is the point: so, too, the obscurity. Dauber talks of how Seinfeld, created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, with its endless discussion of the invisible rules of life – “what are the boundary lines in nebulously defined situations? What consitututes the limits of social acceptability? When does this status change to that one?” – was described by Larry Charles, the show’s producer, as “a dark Talmud”. Except dark is possibly the wrong word: Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, it was a show about small things, about the minutiae and microscopia of everyday, modern life, and as such the one thing Seinfeld never was, was dark. Because dark means weighty, deep, gravitas-achieving. Jewish comedy depends on bathos, on bringing things down to earth – which specifically tends to be the Jewish earth: whether it be with a well-chosen Yiddishism, or a comic-sounding Jewish name, or a reference to the mundane worlds of work, food, money, sex and, well, Jewishness. A joke with a four-word punchline that is quoted by Dauber neatly bears this out: when the Dalai Lama meets his mother she tells him, “Sheldon! Enough is enough”

To come back, then, to what appeared to be a passing, but was not, point about the afterlife: Christianity, and most other religions, are all in the clouds, in the great hereafter – Judaism tends to concentrate on the here and now, and indeed its rules. But in minutiae, there is humanity: it is in reaching after the grandiose things in life that civilization gets skewed. To be microscopic, comically, is to create engagement: these people, the joke says, are like you, because like you, they sweat the small stuff.

Calling John Bolton

I have a solution to this Australian Cricket Team cheating business, which seems to be occupying about 98% of the nation's attention:  invite John Bolton to arrange a tactical nuclear strike on the team, and any outpost of cricket administration.  We know he wants to nuke something, and no one in Australia (or any other cricketing nation) is possibly going to object.   (Or so it seems.)

It may also rid the nation of the most tedious sport ever invented, at least until the cockroaches learn how to hold a bat. 

[Disclaimer:  of course, I have to acknowledge that loving a tedious game does not per se make a cricket fan a bad or deficient person in any respect.   That would require loving both cricket and Frozen, and a short course of treatment involving electrodes would be worth a try...]