Seems just a little overstated, and I get back to normal about sport

According to News Corp, Australia's netball team losing to England means this:

As the Commonwealth Games near an end, may I also revert back to some more typical anti-sporting sentiment?:

*  I can't for the life of me see why netball has a significant following in this country.   Just can't see that it's a technically interesting sport to watch.

*  To be honest, I have no interest in women's team sports of any colour.  Sure, I can admire female swimmers, athletes, cyclists, etc;  but put a team of women playing something that only ever used to be played by men - looks a bit weird to me.  There are men my age who seemingly don't share this view, but with my low interest in sports anyway, there just seems something not quite right about women teaming up for chasing games (see my last comment below.)

*  Really, I'm never going to get used to women's boxing.   The sentiment is growing, with great justification, for men's boxing to be banned;  but at least that sport can be argued as a safer formalisation of testosterone fuelled aggro between men.   With women - yes, I'll say it - it's an unnatural look.

*  Also not a good look to see a marathon runner collapsed on the ground.   I have never understood the public's interest in watching or participating in that event either - just seems to me to a sport so far outside of the bounds of any "natural" activity that it becomes a little, well, silly.   Like free diving.   I mean, ball games like rugby and soccer likely have appeal due to the unconscious reminders of ancient male hunting and chasing on the plains of the Serengeti, or wherever;  but actually testing yourself as to how far deep you can go on a held breath, or how many minutes you can shave off a distance no one ever needs to run: well, it's all rather pointless to my way of thinking. 

Recipe reminder - pumpkin soup

Yesterday we ate at a Yum Cha restaurant in a (I think) Vietnamese run restaurant.  It was very nice (although I have had better chicken feet), cost $64 for four (bargain), and it remains one of my favourite ways to lunch.

Not being sure of its origin as a way of eating, I found the Wikipedia entries on yum cha and dim sum quite helpful.

Anyway, this is all prelude to explaining that we needed a lighter than average evening meal, so I made for the first time in many, many years some basic pumpkin soup following a recipe I wrote in the back of a cookbook maybe 25 years ago.   (I forget where I got it from originally - oh, now I remember, it was on the side of a can of evaporated milk!)   I was pretty sure my wife, or one of the kids, had said many years ago that they didn't care for pumpkin soup, and hence I had not made it for at least a decade, I suspect.   But being told that this was no longer the case, I went ahead and resurrected it, and the result did seem particularly delicious - perhaps it was just the right sort of pumpkin (kent, I think) that came from a roadside sales bin when we trekked off to  Mulgowie last week.

As this blog occasionally serves as a (hopefully permanent) repository for some key recipes I don't want to lose, here goes:

750 g of cubed pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of water turned into chick broth using a stock cube or powder
a large onion
15 g of butter (just a large knob, I guess)
normal size can of lite evaporated milk
nutmeg

That's it.   In a fairly wide saucepan, fry off the onion in the butter to soften it a bit, throw in the pumpkin, water and stock cube/powder and let it simmer, uncovered, for 25 minutes.   Blend what's left in the saucepan (a stickblender should work fine), add the can of evaporated milk, some nutmeg and maybe a little bit of salt to taste.   Reheat gently, and eat.    Toast and some garlic fried beans as a side.  Nice.

Zero Dark Thirty: another in the series of "Late Movie Reviews"

Watched Zero Dark Thirty, the Kathryn Bigelow directed movie about the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden, last night.  This discussion may contain spoilers, on the assumption that most readers who were interested in it have already seen it.

I think it's very much of a piece with Black Hawk Down, which I happened to watch for the first time last week:  high on military realism, but very shallow on depth of characterisation, and little attempt at character development.   I think the latter is more of an issue for ZDT, because it follows one character (a real female CIA agent who did play a large role in finding Bin Laden) over 10 years.  The film gives you the impression she has no inner life at all.  At the start she seems a friendless workaholic; by the end she's moved on to be an even less likeable obsessive friendless workaholic. 

Yet I see, now that I look up articles about the accuracy of the film, that this might actually be an accurate character portrayal, if this part of a 2012 Washington Post article  is anything to go by:

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Not exactly a generous spirit, by the sounds.  (She was also passed over for promotion, according to the report.)

As to the accuracy of the film overall,  I see from this article in The Telegraph that it is pretty true to life, although (amongst other quibbles) some of the things the SEALs do in the Bin Laden compound raid are not technically correct.   I haven't read whether one thing that bothered me in the film was accurate or not - the way this white, red haired, female CIA operative drove herself to and from work in Pakistan.   Seemed a kind of dangerous thing to do - I would have assumed female CIA agents in that country would have had male drivers and bigger cars.

One small but surprising detail in the film is this (from the Telegraph article), although perhaps I had heard it before:

One of the most intriguing cameos in Zero Dark Thirty is that of Fredric Lehne, who plays the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, referred to only as “The Wolf”. Despite being a key figure in the fight against Islamist militants, when we meet him in his office he is practising Muslim prayer.

As surprising as it sounds, this is true, at least according to a report by the Washington Post in March last year: the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), and the leader of the hunt for bin Laden, really has converted to Islam. Named only as “Roger” by the newspaper, he is in his late fifties and has worked for two presidents, four CIA directors and four directors of national intelligence.

His conversion to Islam came after he married a Muslim woman, but, according to the Washington Post, there is no prayer rug in his office. He is, however, known to clutch a strand of prayer beads.

But what about its portrayal of torture as a sometimes useful undertaking?    I think it's hard to deny that the film works as an apologia for torture, and a disingenuous one at that.   I think it tries to show sympathy to anti-torture advocates in the way it starts with our heroine Maya being disturbed by it, and later the male interrogator who feels he has to get out that line of work for a while because it's doing his head in, too.   Yet the film suggests that, while it doesn't always work, information from some interrogations was useful.

This article in The New Yorker argues that this is where the film falls down:

 In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that “we first learned about ‘the facilitator / courier’s nom de guerre’ from a detainee not in the C.I.A.’s custody.” Panetta wrote that “no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”

Well, yeah, that is a bit problematic for how one should view the film morally, I reckon.

So, overall, it's an interesting film as a bit of slightly fictionalised quasi-documentary, which turns out to have a morally dubious take on a key controversy; but even apart from that issue, I don't quite understand why it received so many completely uncritical reviews.   As with Black Hawk Down, these types of film are very impressive as recreations, but they lack emotional kick and the sort of imagery that really makes a film powerful.  Worth watching, but ultimately, not worth endorsing as great movies either.

Off-putting

So, I'm in the somewhat painful process of trying to work out a holiday, and found this photo, from a Mercure Hotel room...

...and I find it triggers claustrophic feelings just from looking at it. 

It's a seriously off-putting photo.

What's happening to me?

The issue:  the Commonwealth Games is making me feel all warm and gooey towards sports.  This is very much out of character. 

I guess I felt somewhat the same when the Sydney Olympics were on - I think it's partly a weird parochial pride that our country can organise these things well.  

I have to say, the TV coverage by the Seven Network has looked and sounded very professional.  It's pretty remarkable, really, that there are any commentators for some esoteric sports who can sound confident and knowledgeable during live commentary.   Who'd have thought there was anyone out there who could talk up the excitement of, I don't know, a 10m air gun target competition, for example?

I also have liked the way that the paralympic events have just been mixed in between the (what's the politically correct term?) able bodied(?) events.    Makes them seem much more relevant, and it seems to me the Olympics would be wise to copy that, if it was at all possible.  

We all know that the Games will have been a mixed economic blessing to businesses on the Gold Coast.   Yet the images on TV have looked so good, and the Australian medal tally so impressive (especially for swimming, which looked to be in an incredible funk only a short time ago, but is once again full of charismatic, spectacularly fit and good looking young folk) that it's hard to believe that it will not be viewed as a success.   Sure, I understand the Olympics are a gargantuan waste of money for host cities and everyone thinks it needs to be reformed, but a more modest scaled event like this looks, well, just about the right size.

But don't worry, I'm be back to my normal dismissive attitude to each and every sport any day now...

Calm and angry comments about Chris Berg

Oh dear.  I was criticising Chris Berg earlier this week for writing vapid papers on blockchain, now he's contributing a vapid, self serving piece on The Conversation:

Are Australians ready to embrace libertarianism?

Everyone agrees that the answer is "no", but I've been torn as to how angry to sound in this post detailing why.

OK, here's the calm response.    If you missed it last year,  I recommend you look at Will Wilkinson's explanation about why purist libertarianism is a utopian idealistic belief system, and those are not a way to make sound policy. 

And here's the angry response:

CHRIS BERG, YOU WERE HAPPY TO BE PART OF A LIBERTARIAN FRIENDLY THINK TANK, NO DOUBT PARTLY FUNDED IN SECRET BY MINING INTERESTS,  THAT HAS AGGRESSIVELY RUN ANTI CLIMATE SCIENCE PROPAGANDA FOR A COUPLE OF DECADES BECAUSE "OO - ER - WE DON'T LIKE TAXES."  YOU MIGHT NEVER HAVE SULLIED YOURSELF BY SAYING "HA! CLIMATE CHANGE IS A CROCK MADE UP BY CROOKED SCIENTISTS", LIKE YOUR STAGFLATION PREDICTING MATE SINCLAIR DAVIDSON:  NO - YOU WERE AN EARLY ADOPTER OF THE DISINGENUOUS "OH, IT'S TOO LATE NOW - NATIONS WILL NEVER AGREE TO LIMIT CO2" WHILE AT THE SAME TIME WATCHING YOUR OWN THINK TANK - AND MATES LIKE DAVIDSON -  RUN PROPAGANDA BY CRANKS DIRECTED TO POLITICIANS AND THE PUBLIC TO TRY TO ENSURE NATIONS WOULD FACE INTERNAL OPPOSITION TO EFFECTIVE AND SIMPLE ACTION LIKE A CARBON TAX.

YES, YOU WERE HAPPY TO BE PART OF ACTIVELY POISONING THE WELL OF GOOD POLICY DECISION MAKING.

IT MAY HAVE TAKEN MARXISM TO KILL OFF A 100 MILLION OR SO DURING THE 20TH CENTURY BEFORE ITS BUNCH OF IDEALIST UPTOPIAN ASSHATS WERE COMPLETELY DISCREDITED, BUT HISTORY WILL LIKELY SHOW IT TOOK DUMB ASS, IDEOLOGICALLY MOTIVATED LIBERTARIANS TO FLOOD EVERY COASTAL CITY ON THE PLANET, DISPROPORTIONATELY KILL OFF THE POOR, AND PERMANENTLY DISAPPEAR HUNDREDS OF SPECIES.

YEAH, THANKS, LIBERTARIANS.  YOU'RE A BUNCH OF DANGEROUS CRANKS.

THAT'S WHY AUSTRALIA IS NOT "READY TO EMBRACE LIBERTARIANISM".  

Outrageous lying politician poisoning politics in his country

Newt Gingrich on Fox and Friends, about the Cohen FBI raids:

We're supposed to have the rule of law. It ain't the rule of law when they kick in your door at 3:00 in the morning and you're faced with armed men and you have had no reason to be told you're going to have that kind of treatment. That's Stalin. That's the Gestapo in Germany. That shouldn't be the American FBI.

You can imagine a large number of the gullible Trumpers watching this thinking that this reflects reality,  when Cohen himself said:

Trump's personal attorney tells ABC News FBI raids were 'respectful' and 'courteous'

WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen told ABC News Tuesday that FBI agents did not storm in, but simply knocked on the door, as they raided his office, hotel room and home Monday.

There were no SWAT teams, no guns drawn. The operation was "respectful" and "courteous," he told ABC News on Tuesday.

All after, of course, various Republican justice officials went to a judge and got a warrant for this.

I mean, seriously, no matter how loony you think parts of the Left have gone in the US, with its intense identity politics and University political correctness, surely all fair minded people should be appalled that it is a famous Republican political actually poisoning political discourse by such ridiculous and deliberately misleading hyperbole. 

To anyone who thinks Trump's tough guy tweets indicate there's no shady connection with Russia...

...I make the following comments:

*  we all know he's an empty shell with no consistent principles, able to be influenced by the last thing he heard, and his fragile buffoon ego always wants to claim he's a "winner".   It's not surprising that one minute he'll decide to sound tough on Russia/Putin, and the next he'll try to walk it back a bit;

*  that's pretty much what we are seeing now. Look at these tweets and their tone of "Jeez, don't blame me for things being bad with Russia.  If it weren't for those damn Democrats persecuting me I'd have it all back on track and things would be great with Russia":

*  there is also the possibility that his peanut brain is just smart enough to think "I'd better sound tough on Putin so that people don't think I'm under the Russian thumb."

*  tax returns?   A very plausible theory is that Trump is scared of the investigation not because he was closely involved in collusion re Russian interference in the election (although his having some knowledge of seedy contacts by his staff is quite likely), but that the investigation will turn up financial ties to Russians that he does not want to see disclosed.  Again, this would justify a "better sound tough, but still want to be friends with Russia" back and forth in his rhetoric.  

Conversion for politics

Interesting article up at The Atlantic:

Converting to Buddhism as a Form of Political Protest 

Low-caste Indians are leaving Hinduism en masse—partly to stick it to their prime minister.

Sounds a lot

China and clean air don't exactly go hand in hand, and it's reflected in lung health:

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is widespread in China with 8.6 percent of the country's adult population - almost 100 million people -suffering from the chronic lung disease, according to a new Tulane University study published in The Lancet.

The study, which provided lung-function screenings for more than 50,990 participants, is the largest survey of COPD across age groups ever conducted in China, researchers say.

COPD, an inflammatory lung disease that causes obstructed airflow into the lungs, is the third leading cause of death in China. It is caused by long-term exposure to irritants in the air, including cigarette smoke. During the past decade, ambient air pollution has become a major public-health crisis in the country while cigarette smoking remains high, especially among men, says senior author Dr. Jiang He, Joseph S. Copes Chair of Epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine.

Yes, exactly

Just noticed this on Twitter (the bit in red is the main part, but the tweet above that is relevant too):

John Gray on "hyper-liberalism"

There's much of interest in John Gray's piece at TLS on what he calls hyper-liberalism.

Just one part, which I will extract here, is about Marx writing about colonialism:

The complex and at times contradictory realities of empire have been expelled from intellectual debate. While student bodies have dedicated themselves to removing relics of the colonial era from public places, sections of the faculty have ganged up to denounce anyone who suggests that the legacy of empire is not one of unmitigated criminality. If he was alive today one of these dissident figures would be Marx himself, who in his writings on India maintained that the impact of British imperialism was in some ways positive. Acknowledging that “the misery that was inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before”, Marx continued by attacking the “undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life” of Indian villages:

 we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it within traditional rules . . . . England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated by only the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. (“The British Rule in India”, New-York Daily Tribune, June 10, 1853)

 Of course, Marx may have been mistaken in this judgement. Along with most progressive thinkers of his day, he assumed that India and other colonized countries would replicate a Western model of development. But like other progressive thinkers at the time, he also took for granted that this was a question that could and should be debated. He never believed that colonialism was self-evidently damaging in all of its effects.

A modest proposal

So, maybe the Chinese want a military base on Vanuatu?

Well, instead of complaining about it, we've got lots of Northern land not being used.   Maybe not many great harbours, but there's probably an adequate one up there somewhere on Cape York.   Also, some aboriginal settlements with limited economic activity.

My modest proposal:   let the Chinese build one up there.   Benefits:  economic activity in an underdeveloped area of Australia; more people with money to spend in Cairns; our military intelligence has an easy place to spy on to get good knowledge of how the Chinese military operates; if they start misbehaving, we just send in the trained attack crocodiles.  Or our fighters from the "bare base" known as RAAF Base Scherger, near Weipa.  

Downsides:  they'll probably blow up every reef within 100 km just as a precaution.   But we can keep the bond money if they do that.

Come on, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Time to address universal basic income

Readers may, or may not, have noticed that despite it having an increasing amount of publicity in the last year or two, I've never mentioned the idea of a universal basic income.

That's because I always felt intuitively that it just surely can't be a good idea, at this stage of technological development, anyway.

I agree that this Club Troppo post does deal with it well.   It's not a good idea, and my intuition was right.

Quiggin on free market economists

I liked John Quiggin's latest post about the free market economists in the US who have capitulated to Trumpism.   His final paragraph:

The last decade or so has been pretty devastating for the idea of economics as a science or profession. As I argued in my book Zombie Economics, ideas that have been utterly refuted by the evidence of the Global Financial Crisis shamble on in an undead form. The hackery I’ve described here isn’t being produced by marginal figures like Larry Kudlow but by some of the leading lights of the “discipline”. In the end, all their expertise turns out to be nothing more than a fig-leaf for service to financial capitalism. As with evangelicals, libertarians and the Republican base as a whole, the last few years have shown that the most lurid leftwing caricatures of free-market economists have turned out to be understatements.

Smoking vomit

I see the NYT has a story about an increase in a painful vomiting syndrome caused by heavy cannabis use:

“After marijuana was legalized in Colorado, we had a doubling in the number of cases of cyclic vomiting syndrome we saw,” many of which were probably related to marijuana use, said Dr. Cecilia J. Sorensen, an emergency room doctor at University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz medical campus in Aurora who has studied the syndrome.

“C.H.S. went from being something we didn’t know about and never talked about to a very common problem over the last five years,” said Dr. Eric Lavonas, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Now a new study, based on interviews with 2,127 adult emergency room patients under 50 at Bellevue, a large public hospital in New York City, found that of the 155 patients who said they smoked marijuana at least 20 days a month, 51 heavy users said they had during the past six months experienced nausea and vomiting that were specifically relieved by hot showers.

Googling the topic, I see that it has the been subject of many stories in the last few years, but I don't think I've posted about it before.

Apart from this particular problem, I find it hard to believe that such regular users don't have some other effect on their health and lives as well.   (Although heavy users do develop a tolerance to the intoxication effect, if I recall correctly.)

The result everyone sensible expected already here?

Where's Laffer to explain how the Congressional Budget Office is wrong?:

Last month, the federal government spent roughly $371 billion, up $7 billion from February 2017. Tax receipts, meanwhile, fell to $156 billion from $172 billion a year earlier.

Interest payments on the nation's debt, Social Security and Medicare, and outlays by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, are the areas where spending has gone up the most, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO attributed the drop in revenue to higher tax refunds and a reduction in income and payroll tax withholding in the wake of the tax cuts that went into effect on January 1.

For the first five months of this fiscal year, which began on October 1, the country's deficit totaled $391 billion, which is $40 billion higher than the same period last year.

For the full fiscal year, Treasury now projects the annual deficit will near $833 billion, and then $984 billion in fiscal 2019.

The climb back to trillion dollar deficits — a hallmark of the financial crisis — has been hastened by policies put into place in the past several months.

The Americans have the examples of Kansas, Oklahoma and California to show the simple relationship to taxes and deficits, but because laughing Laffer drew a graph on a napkin, it's all going to be OK, according to Republicans.

Get a real job, Chris

I've often said that Chris Berg was the likeable IPA face when he turned up on the ABC to sell its esoteric and unpopular fringe ideas to the public.

But he seems to have thrown his lot so completely in with Sinclair Davidson, whose influence I strongly suspect (if judged by media and ABC appearances) has been deservedly dwindling, that I reckon he's wasting his professional life.

Now, he seems to spend all his time writing science fiction tinged guff about how blockchain is going to change everything (including doing away with money, if you read his latest co-authored campfire story to other science fiction reading libertarians), and writing a book with SD to be published by the right wing cranks' publisher of choice (Connor Court) about how the ABC should be privatised.

I suppose someone (RMIT?) is paying for his musings, but really, I think he would be better off getting a real job. 

Funny because it's true

I'll cut and paste this edition of the New Yorker's Borowitz Report in full:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Fox News Channel announced on Monday that it would decide what Donald J. Trump’s Syria response will be in the next forty-eight hours.

At a press conference at the network’s headquarters, Sean Hannity, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and the “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said that, as the people who have been entrusted with the decision of whether to use military force, they were not taking their responsibility lightly.

“The U.S. military is the mightiest force in all the world,” Hannity said. “However we decide that President Trump will use that force in Syria, we promise that it will be a decision he will be proud of.”

Pirro said that she and her colleagues were taking “full advantage of the entire Fox News brain trust” to craft Trump’s Syria response. “The American people should sleep well at night knowing that we are keeping Tucker Carlson in the loop,” she said.

Ending the press conference on an urgent note, Doocy spoke directly to President Trump. “Mr. President, we’ll have a decision for you in the next forty-eight hours,” he said. “Don’t change the channel.”

Just plain salt

Both Soon and Soutphomasane (traditionally ideological opponents) are swooning on twitter over a story by Liaw regarding the invention of chicken salt in South Australia.

Is this a "Asians who want to be bogans" thing?   Because I don't care for chicken salt at all, and always go for plain.  Preferably the greenish flakes full of ocean flavour from some seaside pond in France, or the metallic tang of Himalayan salt.*

Chicken salt - puh.

*  just kidding - just trying to sound like a Guardian reading salt connoisseur.  We do have the pink allegedly Himalayan stuff now at home though, but I have no idea where it really comes from.