Odd bits from the end of the War

I was listening to a good radio documentary on the ABC about World War 1 and its effect on Australia.   Some things that got a brief mention that I don't recall seeing depicted in TV, movies or fiction books before:

*  the food riots in Melbourne caused by great cost of living increases during the war (and affecting food in particular).  Here's a bit I found elsewhere about that:

The cost of living issue and the associated food riots caused two months
of turmoil in Melbourne during September and October 1917. Recent work
by John Lack adds to our understanding of the significance of these riots by
tracing the reasons particular commercial establishments and places of work
were targeted and demonstrating the deep-seated, class-based resentments
about economic injustice that preceded the war and were aggravated by it.161
This embedded anger underpinned the extensive involvement of Melbourne
workers in the Great Strike of 1917, which, as a number of historians have
argued, was driven by ordinary workers, especially the unskilled at the grass
roots of the labour movement, rather than their leaders.162 While the strike
about the introduction of the Taylorist timecard system began and remained
centred in New South Wales, by early September more than 20,000 workers
in Melbourne were also affected – a third to a half of them actually on strike
or locked out and the rest stood down or on short time. The wharf labourers
were already out over the cost of bread, but now added a refusal to handle
black goods (goods handled by non-union labour) to their cause. As the
mainstay of the Victorian strike – first out and last back – they comprised
over a quarter of the state’s strikers. 

*  the impossibility of a fast return of soldiers to not only Australia, but all Allied nations.  (They said there just were not enough ships in the world to get soldiers back home within a year.)   On that topic, I see this today:

Despite the war being over, and Australian troops not constituting part of the Allied occupying force in Germany, it was to be a long time before many Australians would return home. The day after the armistice, Private A. Golding wrote:

They told us we would be another 12 months in France.

Repatriation to Australia was organised by Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, on a first come, first go basis.

While awaiting transport, some men took advantage of the opportunity to travel around France and Britain- one of the incentives for enlisting in the first place. A few hundred Australian servicemen went on to serve in Russia as part of a British force fighting Bolshevik forces. Some light horse units also helped with suppressing an Egyptian nationalist revolt in early 1919.

Had I heard about Diggers fighting Bolshevik's before?  Maybe.   Surely there would be some good material for a story there.

* that some returning soldiers jumped overboard from their ships, probably (in come cases) from the stress of the thought of having to explain to wives or family that they had contracted a venereal disease.   On that topic, I also note an article today about a book written all about the Australia experience with VD during that war:

Two of Australia's Victoria Cross recipients had been sent home with VD and at least six men on board The Wiltshire – that ship of shame – ended up being highly decorated. Initially, army regulations made it difficult for men who had committed acts of misconduct, including contracting VD, to be awarded medals but this was later retracted: around 15 per cent of the entire AIF contracted VD.

How this fits with the overall statistics amongst allied soldiers depends on who you ask. Dunbar says: "Some people like to think that Australian soldiers caught more VD than those in other combatant countries and other people say they caught less. I think it depends on the extent to which the person you are talking to upholds the myth of the heroic digger."

It would be a challenge for any writer to make an entire book on sexually transmitted diseases appeal to a wide audience, but Dunbar's sensitive probing of the human psychology and social mores involved transcends the First World War experience and is a timely reminder of the damaging effects of glossing over our human flaws.

Another late, late movie review

The Pianist, the Roman Polanski directed World War 2 movie is on Netflix, and now I've seen it.

It's a fine movie, based on the true story which Wikipedia makes it easy to compare with the screenplay.   (You know I always like looking up where such movies diverge from the real story.)

It would seem that the movie is quite close to the book, with relatively few embellishments.  

I am curious as to why the movie underplays Szpilman's suicidal thoughts while living in permanent hiding for a couple of years.   Indeed, the movie certainly offers no internal thoughts of the main character at all - which makes for a kind of realism but does make it very emotionally cool in most  respects.   Don't get me wrong - the depiction of casual cruelty by Nazis to Jews is just about as effective as that in Schindler's List - but I guess I still feel it's a pity there was no way devised to give us any of Szpilman's internal dialogue.   

The comparison with Spielberg's film is inevitable.   Of course, List is often criticised for its made up ending (in which Schindler has an emotional breakdown), and I have always felt this was fair enough (the criticism).  But even without that, it is a more emotional (and devastating) film.  Its most famous scene (the lost little red-dressed girl) was highly emotional but, importantly,  made sense of Schindler's motivation.   I presume it was an invention too, but one that worked completely convincingly, unlike the final scene with him.

So it's interesting - both films have an "issue" with emotion - just from the opposite direction.

But both are very good.  (I don't think Schindler's List will ever be beaten as the definitive film of the Holocaust, despite the issue discussed herein.)

Melbourne and violence

Melbourne seems to be having a particularly bad run with immigrant related violence over the past few years.   It would seem that yesterday's inner city attack by a radicalised Muslim could have been much worse if explosions from gas bottles had occurred.   But then again, why was the vehicle burning like that in the first place?   Were some gas bottles opened?   In any case, when I saw the video of people filming the scene, I though to myself that there is no way I would have hung around that close to the vehicle in case there was an explosion.   Must have been worrying the police trying to catch the guy, too. 

I half-watched the Four Corners show this week on the issue of African youth gang violence, and the degree to which it is or isn't being blown out of proportion.   I feel a bit of a fence sitter on the issue:  the show was good in that it didn't shy away from personalising the story both from the perspective of victims, and of young black guys unfairly caught up in the backlash.   It's one of those cases where  you can say both that it's silly to pretend it isn't a problem but still dislike the way the Murdoch media treats it as a problem.

Anyway, I've long been curious as to why this seems to centre on Melbourne.  Some Brisbane suburbs are known for the African immigrants but as far as I know there is no significant issue with youth gangs here.   And now that I check, Sydney had nearly as many Sudanese migrants as Melbourne, at least in 2011. 

Melbourne is a great place for eating and for people with ridiculous obsession with sports;  it's now just so-so for cultural pursuits, I reckon.   But all of those things are indoors (I'm counting sitting in a stadium as indoors) and I assume of marginal interest to current African youth.   If you aren't involved in those three things during the long, grey winters of that city, I think it probably is a pretty boring place.   Sydney and Brisbane don't have the same winter grey doldrums that Melbourne has.

So yeah, I'm going out on a limb and blaming gang violence on crappy weather.  But as time goes on and younger family members get absorbed in that Melbourne Borg of the footy and cricket (God help them), it will reduce. 

Hey, it's a theory.

As I suspected...

The view that it really was a Blue wave midterm election has become more popular, as late counts increase the number of House seats going to Democrats, and likely recounts in the Senate might even reduce GOP wins.

I was also interested in the question of what the popular vote would indicate if repeated in the 2020 Presidential election, and I see that Nate Silver has done that guesstimate, with the result being a solid Democrat win.

I'm also surprised that it was the Wall Street Journal which ran with the story overnight about Trump being highly involved in arranging the payments to silence two women he had affairs with.  It's not usually the paper to do investigative stuff to harm a Republican.   Is Murdoch turning on Trump? 

The Trump personality

While the fake reason for banning the somewhat annoying Jim Acosta from the White House was nauseating (seriously, all women who defend Trump to the death make me queasy, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders deserves ignominy til the end of time), I was bit more interested in the earlier clips of a raccoon faced* Trump gloating over Republicans who didn't support him and lost.  Jimmy Kimmel ran it last night and made the correct call - "he is an absolute child, he really is".




* Isn't it telling that no one has the guts to say to him, "Seriously, Donald, the white eyed look is really noticeable today.  A more natural face looks better on TV."

Friday science

Have you noticed the lengthy New York Times magazine article on the always fascinating topic of the placebo effect?   It's really good, and I particularly liked the explanation of how it was more or less discovered as a thing when Benjamin Franklin was involved in French ordered investigations as to how Mesmerism seemed to be effective, for some.

I will extract some of that:

In a way, the placebo effect owes its poor reputation to the same man who cast aspersions on going to bed late and sleeping in. Benjamin Franklin was, in 1784, the ambassador of the fledgling United States to King Louis XVI’s court. Also in Paris at the time was a Viennese physician named Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer fled Vienna a few years earlier when the local medical establishment determined that his claim to have cured a young woman’s blindness by putting her into a trance was false, and that, even worse, there was something unseemly about his relationship with her. By the time he arrived in Paris and hung out his shingle, Mesmer had acquired what he lacked in Vienna: a theory to account for his ability to use trance states to heal people. There was, he claimed, a force pervading the universe called animal magnetism that could cause illness when perturbed. Conveniently enough for Mesmer, the magnetism could be perceived and de-perturbed only by him and people he had trained.

Mesmer’s method was strange, even in a day when doctors routinely prescribed bloodletting and poison to cure the common cold. A group of people complaining of maladies like fatigue, numbness, paralysis and chronic pain would gather in his office, take seats around an oak cask filled with water and grab on to metal rods immersed in the water. Mesmer would alternately chant, play a glass harmonium and wave his hands at the afflicted patients, who would twitch and cry out and sometimes even lose consciousness, whereupon they would be carried to a recovery room. Enough people reported good results that patients were continually lined up at Mesmer’s door waiting for the next session.

It was the kind of success likely to arouse envy among doctors, but more was at stake than professional turf. Mesmer’s claim that a force existed that could only be perceived and manipulated by the elect few was a direct challenge to an idea central to the Enlightenment: that the truth could be determined by anyone with senses informed by skepticism, that Scripture could be supplanted by facts and priests by a democracy of people who possessed them. So, when the complaints about Mesmer came to Louis, it was to the scientists that the king — at pains to show himself an enlightened man — turned. He appointed, among others, Lavoisier the chemist, Bailly the astronomer and Guillotin the physician to investigate Mesmer’s claims, and he installed Franklin at the head of their commission.

To the Franklin commission, the question wasn’t whether Mesmer was a fraud and his patients were dupes. Everyone could be acting in good faith, but belief alone did not prove that the magnetism was at work. To settle this question, they designed a series of trials that ruled out possible causes of the observed effects other than animal magnetism. The most likely confounding variable, they thought, was some faculty of mind that made people behave as they did under Mesmer’s ministrations. To rule this out, the panel settled upon a simple method: a blindfold. Over a period of a few months, they ran a series of experiments that tested whether people experienced the effects of animal magnetism even when they couldn’t see.

Go read it all, as it goes onto to talk about recent research indicating a molecular reason why placebos seem to work so well on some people, at least.   

Malcolm Turnbull continues to disappoint, even as an ex PM

I had something of a hope that Malcolm Turnbull would use his exit from politics to try to blow up the Liberals by stating the obvious:   there is no working with those in the party who deny climate change.   The party needs to split, as there is within it too large a rump of Right wing, American style "conservatives" who are more obsessed with trying to win back an already lost culture war, and it poisons their judgement against good and necessary policy on climate, economics, and even humanitarian issues.  (The first two because evidence is ignored in favour of conspiracy and ideology; the latter because fighting a culture war means being obsessed with strength and never admitting you have gone too far - hence punishing wannabe refugees can continue forever as far as they are concerned.)

But Malcolm on his Q&A session last night gave no hint of understanding his party that way.  Sure, he makes a good point that the electoral evidence from 3 former safe Liberal seats (now with independents) is that people are wanting Liberals to be centrist, small "l" liberals; but he just does not still seem to appreciate that the conservative wing who dumped him will continue to make it impossible to market the party as the one that he wants it to be.

"Broad church" fails when it tries to accommodate those who won't even acknowledge that a key and urgent issue such as climate change, with its broad impact on energy and economics policy, really exists.

Even Andrew Bolt seems to understand this better than Malcolm, since he has muttered about a split recently. 

So, bring on an election, and let the Liberals have their crisis in Opposition where they can do less harm.

Election talk

Gee, it's hard to find a list of historic popular vote results for US midterm elections.   But I finally turned up this graph, which shows the popular vote swing back to the Democrats is very significant:

The other vote analysis coming out all seems to be showing the old story of the Republican's demographic problems - the party is wildly unpopular with young voters, blacks, Latino/Hispanic and Asians:

When you pile these patterns in the white vote on top of the now-familiar racial divides — CNN’s exit poll shows Democrats winning 90 percent of black voters, 69 percent of Latino voters, and 77 percent of Asian voters — you get a clear sense of what lead to last night’s results: Democrats winning big with minorities and educated whites.   

The party remains strongest with under-educated older white guys.  Way to go, Republicans...

Triumph's return

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is reliability funny, especially on politics:



I see that the US midterms have gone pretty much in accordance with polling - Democrats have taken the House by what looks like a pretty substantial number (even though there seems to have been considerable reservation in US media early in the count to call it a "blue wave"), but the Republicans keep the Senate.

Ted Cruz seems to have been returned by the skin of his teeth, but as someone at Nate Silver's place says, it means Beto O'Rourke might have a better run this way to go for the Presidential nomination. 

I have not seen his media performance at all, but I assume he must have some pretty strong charisma.

Watching other people fish

Somehow, on the weekend, I stumbled across a Youtube channel of Jon B, a young American guy who seems big in the world of spectator fishing.   He also recently had a trip to Australia to meet up with some local, somewhat bogan-ish, guys who do the same thing.   Amusingly (I thought) Jon flew into Sydney, then up to the Gold Coast, only to find his Australian hosts had decided to take him fishing on islands off Airlie Beach (!) a 13 hour drive away.   I have no idea why they didn't suggest he fly up there instead of having to endure the long drive on not very great Queensland highways.

I have to admit, I do find Jon B's videos enjoyable.  He's very positive, doesn't swear to any significant extent, and has an amusing line in American youth slang.   And, of course, video cameras have become so cheap, and editing so easy, that amateur Youtube travel/fishing content now looks more like David Lean or Spielberg than the Leyland Brothers.    I find his videos sort of relaxing, too.

I see that he is all of 22 years old.  He seems to have travelled widely.  I am not sure whether he manages to live off Youtube income, or just comes from a rich family.   I haven't found much biographical detail about him yet.

Anyway, good luck to him, I reckon. 

Brisbane weather

I've been meaning to talk about the local weather for, oh, 6 months or so.

The 2018 winter in Brisbane was, I think, colder than recent ones, certainly at night anyway.  It was also very dry, even though winters here usually are.   One odd result:   a distinct lack of winter weeds.  In previous years when we have had a serious bindi problem in the backyard in (if I recall correctly) early spring, we have nothing this year.   There was no mowing needed for a long, long time too.

Then, with a recent burst of rain, grass everywhere grew suddenly.

This week, as I think often occurs in November, felt like a flip of the switch into summer.   It's been hot (about 34 or 35 degrees) in Western Brisbane for about 4 days now, and humid.   No big storm activity, yet, though.

Toads have suddenly come out of hiding and into the yard at night.   Our dog's hunt for them during the day has resumed.  She has a good memory of where she saw one the night before, and as soon as she is let outside of a morning, she goes and has a good sniff around the area, acting for all the world like a bloodhound.  If she finds one, she bites or mouths it, drops it, and continues harassing it.   This can lead to frothing mouth and the risk of poisoning, but I think the theory that some dogs like the "high" that toad poison gives them has a lot going for it.

You may now resume your regular reading.

Run properly or else

Another horse has died at the Melbourne Cup meeting? 

Look, I think it clear that they're just not trying hard enough to be careful where they put their feet.

You can't expect a horse to understand the consequences of carelessness without a demonstration.

Therefore, I suggest that before the start of each race, when they are all at the barrier, a bit of theatre needs to be performed:  a two person pantomime horse races onto the track, feet all over the place, and stumbles and falls.   A guy in an overcoat rushes out and pulls out a fake rifle and shoots the stupid panto horse, shouting loudly all the time, like Basil Faulty attacking his car with a stick.   If that's not enough, someone can fake chainsaw the "horse" in two, and other assistants drag away the two halves by the feet.

Race track cleared, the event can begin.

You know it makes sense.

[Now that I think of it, I fear that Roy and HG may have already proposed this, many years ago.  My apologies if that's the case.]

Lee Kuan Yew's immodest proposal

Well, the South China Morning Post knows how to write an attention getting headline.   This is mentioned right at the top, but you have to get to the bottom of the article (interesting if you are into Singaporean modern political history, I guess) to find it mentioned in scant detail:

As an aside, Lee Kuan Yew was more liberal than we think. Or more practical. When the tourism sector was down, he floated the idea of allowing a nudist colony on Sentosa or an offshore island to bring them in! The younger ministers vetoed him.

I'm not sure who would want to be naked in the sweltering sun of the equator, but I guess he was open to new ventures.

Floating solar is suddenly "hot"

Hey, I started saying the stuff in this article months ago:

Floating solar is more than panels on a platform—it’s hydroelectric’s symbiont

For example:

Solar panels prevent algae growth in dammed areas, and they inhibit evaporation from occurring in hotter climates. (According to Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, major lakes in the southwestern US like Lake Mead and Lake Powell can lose more than 800,000 acre-feet of water to evaporation per year, and the adorably-described "floatovoltaics" could prevent up to 90 percent of that evaporation.") Additionally, floating solar avoids taking up space on land that is priced at a premium.

I still say it should be incorporated into the Snowy Mountains 2 project to actually power the pumps that make the scheme work like a giant battery.

Get me the Prime Minister's phone number?    Oh, he's touring the country in Trump like caps.  He's a dill.

Sordid, rubbery history

I think I knew that the vulcanization of rubber had led to cheap condoms.  I didn't realise it had another sex related product boom:

When I was teaching nineteenth-century literature and social history, I told my students to remember at least one significant date: 1844, the vulcanization of rubber. Charles Goodyear’s invention of that process went on to bring effective contraception to Britain and the United States. But I didn’t know that it was also the origin of the rubber dildo. One of the many fascinating asides in Amy Werbel’s study of Anthony Comstock, the tireless crusader against pornography in late nineteenth-century New York, is an account of the modernization of this ancient sex toy. The first rubber condoms, diaphragms and cervical caps came on the market in 1869, quickly followed by dildos in many colours and shapes; one company sold twelve versions.

Comstock – who was, on paper, a Postal Inspector like any other, charged with catching “crimes that may adversely affect or fraudulently use the US mail” – was astounded to find these “articles for self-pollution” widely advertised, as he described in his indignant and baffled report to Congress in 1872: “One concern was engaged almost wholly in this manufacture. Who were its customers?” Certainly not prostitutes or the married or the poor, he concluded; indeed the “white rubber Dildoe [sic]” was being sold for $6, a steep price in 1870, roughly equivalent to $116 today. The Grand Fancy Bijou Catalogue of the Sporting Man’s Emporium, which carried dozens of advertisements, called it a “happy and harmless” penis substitute for “reserved females”. By 1874, through his allies in the New York Police Department and the Post Office, Comstock had confiscated and destroyed thousands of dildos in a round-up of 60,300 “articles made of rubber for immoral purposes”. But, predictably, an ingenious sex industry made and marketed the products faster than he could condemn them, and writers and photographers quickly exploited their erotic, instructive and commercial possibilities.

Well, count me as surprised at the apparent number being sold.  

I've always been a bit surprised that anyone would buy one, too.  How has C20th understanding of sex changed this, I wonder?   Did they used to be around from ancient times because it was assumed the male appendage in some form was essential for female pleasure?   Has the sexual revolution meant that they are bought less now, even if more widely available?

Someone else can Google that for me, and let me know.

Lulz Cameron

It's very hard not to be amused by the sacking of Ross Cameron at Sky for using "slant eyes" in the course of a rambling defence of the Chinese.   And sacked by Paul Whittaker, who has come over from running the appallingly tabloid Daily Telegraph.   What fun.

"But the context! He was being ironic"  say some of his defenders at Catallaxy, some of whom are  are busy cancelling subscriptions to Fox.       

The trouble is, of course, that a history of buffoonery is its own worst enemy against that defence.  If you are making a show that frequently attacks political correctness, how are viewers supposed to know when they are being ironically racist. 

Someone at Catallaxy says they know that Cameron gets up early to run a business in the day, then does (or did) his Sky News garbage dump at 11pm.   They do their pathetic attempt at political entertainment live at 11 pm?   The guy's been getting by on 4 or 5 hours sleep, perhaps?   Getting sacked was probably a blessing in disguise.

Hilariously, the guy at Catallaxy who knows Cameron is trying to cast it as some sort of scary "they're coming for us" bit of thought policing:

Just remember, first they came for the SkyNews after dark commentators.

Um, yeah, sure.  Might be a tad more credible if it weren't a long time Murdoch flunky doing the sacking. 

Andrew Bolt is talking about some change or other too - dropping his show, perhaps?

I'm pretty pleased that the Fox News-ification of Sky News at night has such a terrible reputation and low ratings.   The Australian political landscape is much saner than the American due to this.

A personal ban on Netflix original movies

Google the topic "why are Netflix original movies so bad/mediocre" and you'll find much discussion along those lines.

On Saturday, despite getting a bit overdosed on Netflix haunting material lately, we watched the lengthily titled "I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House": a very minimalist and peculiar ghost story that doesn't just flag where it's going, but draws a diagram within the first 5 minutes and doesn't divert from it.  As a result, there is nothing of surprise (save for one bit of sudden violence), even though I expected it must have a twist ending which never came.

The movie, surprisingly, was considered very good by some reviewers:  it seemed to me (and my son) more like a complete waste of 90 minutes.  I thought it had the feel of a student project, really.   Certainly, it should have been cheap to make.   Could the lead character have any less charisma, I wonder?

Given this poor experience, I'm very inclined to not try any more Netflix original material.

Update:   speaking of hauntings, we have started to watch The Haunting of Hill House series on Netflix.  

I have not seen the original movie that it is based on,  and I gather that this series is a very divergent  modern updating of the themes in the original, rather than re-playing the story.   (Now that I think of it, rather like how the re-invented Lost in Space goes all into family drama as a major them.)

I think I will continue watching it, but I have to say, I am getting tired of certain haunted house tropes:

a.  if you wake up very scared by a sound at night, the first thing normal people do is turn on a light.    People in haunted houses would rather stare out into the dark, it seems.

b.  On the occasions they do turn on the light, it becomes clear that they have no idea about wattage strength for their light bulbs.   (Always buying ones that are about a third as bright as they would be in a normal house.) 

c.  People who are renovating haunted houses are much more interested in money than the psychological health of their children.

Taleb being ridiculed

For entertainment, you could do worse than read the perpetually angry and arrogant Nassim Taleb attracting many attacks on twitter for an initial mistake which he then doubled down on, convincing no one in the process.

As I have said before, there is something seriously wrong at a personality level with him.

Great minds going astray

I very much enjoyed this article in The Atlantic:  My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery.

The problem was, no one could understand what he was trying to explain. 

Very satisfying

Um, it might just be that I know the young woman playing this lead last night pretty well.   She practised this a lot, and (especially when mic-ed up as she was at her school music gala last night), it sounds (I think) pretty damn impressive:

[And, as I have written before, getting drawn into the world of young musicianship - even for a musical dunce like me - makes it hard to feel pessimistic about the future not being left in good hands.   People should seek out their communities' local youth orchestras and see how optimistic their individual and joint effort can make them feel.]

Update:  In the interests of even handedness, I might also know the young man who does a sax solo during this Big Band opening last night: