Spicy

I see that someone at Slate has written an article about how coriander seeds are an under-rated spice.  (I don't know - I think my wife uses them a lot, and I have used them a fair bit too, so I don't think my household can be accused of unfamiliarity with them.)   

But, this story reminds me:  I have been intending to write here for some time how I consider cardamon pods to be my favourite underrated spice.   I recently had an Indian family's chicken curry using fresh ones - delicious.   I like them, but rarely get around to using them. 

Fennel seeds are probably my favourite, more commonly used in my cooking, spice.

That is all. 

Feel free to entertain me with fascinating stories of your use of spices in comments.

Or don't. 

This and that

*   some Indian holy men are starving themselves to death to try to get the government to hurry up with cleaning up the Ganges river.   Good luck with that.   

*  I was hoping for a bit more referencing to other economists from this opinion piece in Foreign Policy which argues that recent Nobel price winning economist William Nordhaus is actually facing quite a lot of criticism from climate scientists and activists for always putting economic growth ahead of fast action on climate change.   (I am, of course, aware of Pindyck's criticism of the sort of models Nordhaus - I think - pioneered, but I really wanted to hear more from someone other than this writer.)   Anyway, some good points are made (assuming this is a correct account of Nordhaus' work):

So how do economists get away with believing that these extreme temperatures are somehow okay? Because the Nordhaus model tells us that even the worst catastrophes will not really hurt the global economy all that much. Maybe a percentage point or two at the most, by the end of the century—much less than the cost of immediate action.

How do they figure this? Because if climate breakdown ends up starving and displacing a few hundred million impoverished Africans and Asians, that will register as only a tiny blip in GDP.  After all, poor people don’t add much “value” to the global economy. The same goes for things like insects and birds and wildlife, so it doesn’t matter if global warming continues to accelerate mass extinction. From the perspective of capital, what most of us see as tremendous ethical and even existential problems literally don’t count.

What is more, Nordhaus reasons that the sectors most vulnerable to global warming—agricultural, forestry, and fishing—contribute relatively little to global GDP, only about 4 percent. So even if the entire global agricultural system were to collapse in the future, the costs, in terms of world GDP, would be minimal.

These arguments obviously offend common sense. And indeed, scientists have been quick to critique them. It’s absurd to believe that the global economy would just keep chugging along despite a collapse in the world’s food supply. And mass extinction of species poses a very real threat to the web of life itself, on which all of human civilization depends. Plus, Nordhaus doesn’t factor in the possibility of feedback loops that could kick in—Arctic methane release, ice-albedo feedback, and others we can’t yet predict—pushing us way beyond 3.5 degrees. No amount of wealth would be enough to help future generations navigate such a total system collapse.

The piece also argues:

The first step is to realize that high levels of GDP are in fact not necessary for high levels of human well-being. True, social indicators are generally correlated with GDP per capita, but it’s a saturation curve: Past a certain point, more GDP adds little to human well-being. Take the United States, for example. In 1975, America’s GDP per capita was only half its present levels, in real terms. And yet wages were higher, happiness levels were higher, and the poverty rate was lower.

Even more interestingly, some countries have high levels of human development with relatively low GDP per capita—and we the United States can learn a lot from them. Europe’s GDP per capita is 40 percent less than that of the United States, and yet it has better social indicators in virtually every category. Costa Rica has higher life expectancy than the United States and happiness levels that rival Scandinavia, with one-fifth of America’s GDP per capita.

How is this possible? It all comes down to distribution. In 1975, America gave a greater share of national income to workers than it does today. And Europe invests more in social goods like public health care and education than the United States does. This raises the question: If Europe can outperform the United States with significantly less income, then does the American economy really need to keep growing?

Interesting.   

A sophisticated hobbyist

I did enjoy this video, about a 25 year guy, without a particular science background, by the sounds, who spends all his (spare?) time building very sophisticated model rockets.  Clever, largely self taught, dude:

The "no, you're dumb" President

How can anyone not hear in their mind the lamest primary school age child attempted come back tactic  when reading the Trump tweet about Tillerson?  "Your lazy": "No, you're lazy". 

It's pretty remarkable how we're not needing to wait for the judgement of history on the Trump Presidency - it's being played out live.

The problem with Gadsby

Usual disclaimer:  It's incredibly hard to write about Hannah Gadsby, because it's obvious she will be/ already is a hate figure for obnoxious males of the alt.right variety. I don't want to be seen to be aligned in any way with them, but this shouldn't make her immune from criticism.  So here goes.

Her "good men" speech was, I think, a complete mess.  I don't think she argues logically or consistently, and I am a bit puzzled as to why anyone would think she is compelling on the matter.  From reading the comments following the article in the WAPO at my link, I'm not alone in this view.  (And I don't think a lot of alt.righters read the Post and comment there.)

Remember what I said about her show Nanette - that I thought it refreshing when, early on, she complained about a lesbian fan telling her that she her shows were no longer lesbian enough in content?   Well, any impression from that one example that she was alert to the unfair pressure arising from identity politics is blown up by this latest speech, which is identity politics writ large - no man, non-black or heterosexual person ever has the right to talk about the behaviour of their own group toward women, whites or gays, apparently.

She makes a point of saying "men aren't creepy", as if she is against unfair generalisations (again, like the one that a lesbian comedian has to base every show around lesbian experience), but then she goes on to insist that all men (and women) think they are good, and to imply (or outright declare - she is such an all-over-the-shop polemicist that its hard to kept track) that all men have double or triple standards as to what they will say about women.   I think most men can say they know that is not true.  Even appallingly sexist men who spend every day mentally sexually rating every woman who crosses their line of sight would surely say that they have met men who don't join in with them doing that.   And she comes up with a collective name "Jimmys" for those late night hosts who have annoyed her. As others have said, how would it go over if a male was criticising a group of women as, say,  "Brendas". 

I wondered whether she might dislike Jimmy Kimmel in particular.   He has undergone something of a transformation from the days of the very politically incorrect The Man Show, which must have dismayed feminists no end, to his current incarnation as a Trump hating liberal.   (Incidentally, and I think I have said this before - I saw more than one episode of The Man Show, and didn't take great offence because it was often ironically about how dumb men's behaviour about sex and women could be.  Still, it was hardly an example of comedy that would help improve the world.)  I don't know that Kimmel has been very prominent on the MeToo issue anyway, but I like his aggressive anti-Trump line, and while not all of his humour works, a lot does.

Anyway, back to Gadsby:   there is still too much of an impression coming from her appearances that she is a woman on the edge, with suppressed anger and depression still bubbling away just under the surface due to past mistreatment at the hands of men (and yes, that mistreatment could be quite serious for all I know.) 

But putting it on display makes me feel it is not helping her - just in the way so many stand up comics make jokes about their life and you would hope that maybe it is cathartic, but then they end up in suicide or addiction anyway.   

And what's more, as I argue here, it's not like her points are doing a public service, because she does not argue clearly and well on these issues anyway.   She is changing no one's mind, I reckon.  I think she needs to get another way to make a living, for her own sake if not everyone else's.  Identity politics fans will find another hero soon enough.

PS:   I just learned a bit more about Gadsby's unsettled young life at this Guardian article of her talking to Roxanne Gay - who I don't exactly "get" either.   Gay says she was "completely insane" in her early twenties:  Gadsby apparently lived in a tent illegally on someone's farm near Byron Bay for 4 months in her mid twenties.

Maybe I only like comedians if they haven't been obviously mentally unwell?  

When the oceans died

There's a good article at The Atlantic talking about the end-Permian great extinction, and the implications for the future planet under climate change.   Long story short: 

“This study suggests we should be worrying much more about hypoxia than about ocean acidification,” Deutsch says. “There’s vastly more resources being put into [studying] organisms’ responses to pH in seawater than there is into understanding temperature-dependent hypoxia. I think that the field has basically allocated those resources in exactly the wrong way.”

The modern oceans have already lost 2 percent of their oxygen since 1960, a remarkable loss driven mostly by coastal nutrient pollution and global warming. It’s an environmental problem that promises to worsen in the warmer world of the coming centuries, just like it did in the end-Permian. And if Earth’s past is any indication of its future, this asphyxiation could be truly world changing. The prospect has led dozens of paleoclimatologists, geochemists, and oceanographers to sign the Kiel Declaration on Ocean Deoxygenation, developed this September to raise global awareness of a problem with increasingly worrying geological precedent.

“This study shows that we’re on that same road toward extinction, and the question is how far down it we go,” Penn says.

Read the whole thing.

Let's talk pornography...

There's much discussion going on about Tumblr suddenly banning all pornography.   

I think it was a couple of years ago that I first looked at Tumblr.   I didn't understand it then, and still don't.   It seems to promote itself as a simple blogging site, but it seems hard to find any non-porn site on it that is anything other than self indulgent photos or pictures (often of an arty variety) with very few words accompanying them.   What's more - I don't recall any advertising (unlike Blogger, which allows users - like me -  to go advertising free, but encourages its placement.)

How was it ever meant to work?

Anyway, I don't really understand anything about the commercial world of pornography since the internet.   Sure, at first, the net might have helped with commercial porn promoting itself via advertising and free samples of their wares.  But when the amount of free, routinely pirated, porn (usually taken from commercially produced porn) flooded the place, why would anyone ever pay for the original material anymore? 

I also read some thread on Reddit recently about pornography generally, and there seemed to be a very strong sentiment that "amateur" category is now very popular.  Lots of people said it's less fake with less ridiculous vocal performances.   No surprise there.   But again, if this is now "big", how does the old school pornography industry survive at all?  Yet you do still get these cringey and anachronistic (to my mind) "Sexpo" events around Australia once a year or so, in which (from what limited reporting about them I have read) old school style porn stars are still featured to some degree.   But really, the names of current stars are not widely known like in the late 70's or 80's when the industry was probably at its peak.   Boogie Nights made the industry look pathetic - I can't help but feel that getting into the industry now smacks of more desperation than ever, given that even the commercial side of it doesn't seem to make any sense. 

As for the effect of explosion of free pornographic images on the public psyche - I get the impression that everyone thinks this is an interesting question, but it's not something that attracts much academic research.   Mostly, commentary on it seems to be more at an anecdotal level - especially its relationship to apparently declining levels of actual sex between young people in some countries, and also the matter of their unrealistic expectations regarding the act and body image.

I don't doubt that the internet has de-sensitised the public to extreme and ridiculous pornography in much the same way that I complain about the rapid desensitisation of the public to gory gun shot wounds to the head. I tend towards the view that there is likely not much social harm in "vanilla" nudity and sexual imagery, and videos of your average sexual activity, being relatively easily available.  It has, after all, been available in one form or another for millennia, and children seeing animal (and indeed human) sex in real life was probably much more common in poorer centuries when farm animals were everywhere and families slept all in one big room.   But the normalisation of fetishistic and extreme porn is problematic, for reasons I won't bother trying to elaborate here.

So I find it hard to feel concerned about any site like Tumblr giving up and just wanting to ban it all due to the impossibility of drawing lines as to what is acceptable or not in terms of nudity and sex. 

Which leads me to the most interesting thing, and a large part of the reason for this post:   I heard on ABC radio recently a bit about a documentary about how there are businesses based in the Philippines (and doubtless elsewhere) which do provide a human monitoring service for imagery and videos on social media such as Facebook.   A lot of what they are trying to catch is, of course, child pornography or extreme porn of other varieties (bestiality I guess), as well as grotesque violence material:

Finding the moderators at all was a challenge.

Content moderation is a mostly secretive and hidden industry, often outsourced to labour hire companies in corners of the world far removed from northern California.   

The specific psychological hurt caused by dealing with a constant stream of traumatising imagery is clearly shown in the documentary.

The filmmakers collaborated with psychologists, and Block said it was not just the act of sitting in front of a screen, clicking through the worst humans can offer, that was damaging for moderators.

It was also the silence: Non-disclosure agreements with their employers and social pressure also kept them from talking about what they were seeing and feeling.

"You're not allowed to verbalise the horrible experience you had," Block said.

"While we were filming the documentary … we both had time to talk about what we are filming, time to have a break and to stop watching and to take our time to recover from what we saw.

"The workers in Manila don't have the time. They don't have the ability to talk to someone."

It is also clear in the film that many of the content moderators consider that, all told, their job is a good one.

"When they are hired, a lot of them are really proud about getting a job in a clean environment and in one of the best parts of the city," Riesewieck explained.

"What is highly underestimated is the psychological consequence of it … they just notice it when friends … tell them, 'you have changed'.

"Or they notice that they have developed phobias … or when they notice that they're not able to have a sexual relationship anymore."

This is when, the filmmakers said, they return to those necessary narratives — the story of Christian sacrifice or the need for social cleansing.

There's another site talking about it that says there have been suicides - and the work conditions are such that they have to view tens of thousands of images a day - something like 15 - 20,000 I think.

I just can't imagine that viewing such a rapid rate of changing images can be healthy, even if the images are just of puppies or something harmless!

Anyway, I thought the documentary sounded very interesting.  And I feel very sorry for the people who live in the Philippines and for whom this counts as a "good" job.

Leave Kant alone!

This is upsetting:  the Russians have it in for Kant -

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant has stirred surprising tensions in his Russian hometown over the prospect of naming the airport after him, with officials branding him a "traitor" and vandals throwing paint at his tomb.

Kant was born and spent most of his life in Prussian Königsberg, which was renamed Kaliningrad after coming under the control of the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. Now it is Russia's westernmost city and hosted World Cup matches this year.
Until recently the philosopher (1724-1804) was in the lead in an online poll to choose a name for the city's airport, currently called Khrabrovo after the nearby village.This sparked a furious row with officials blasting Kant as a "Russophobe", even though there is no historical evidence that the philosopher harboured strong feelings toward the Russian Empire.

In a video on regional media, a senior Russian naval officer urges servicemen to vote against Kant in the poll, saying he "betrayed his motherland."

The philosopher, a central figure in Western thought, has now sharply dropped in the rankings below Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, whose army captured the city in 1758 but abandoned it five years later.

Kant, during the brief period of Russian rule, asked the empress to let him teach at the local university, but his letter was never delivered.

"He demeaned himself to get a department in the university, so that he could teach and write some strange books that none of those present here today have read," says the naval officer in the video, identified by local media as Vice-Admiral Igor Mukhametshin, head of the Baltic Fleet staff. 

In an op-ed for pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad, Kaliningrad regional lawmaker Andrei Kolesnik called the philosopher a "Russophobe", adding that it would be unpatriotic to "Germanize" the airport.

"The author of the 'Critique of Pure Reason' cannot be one of the main symbols of a Russian region," Kolesnik said.

Why not?  Russians are weirdos.

A student at the local state university Mikhail Shipilov was questioned by police after proposing a rally in support of the philosopher on his social networking page, local news website New Kaliningrad said.

He told AFP he has since spent several days trying to get the authorities' permission for the event, calling the experience "Kafkaesque".

He said he thinks the Kant controversy stems from a "dislike of everything German" harboured by some Russians: "Kant is a German, therefore he's an enemy."
Vadim Chaly, head of the philosophy department at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, said that if Russians objecting to Kant actually read his works, they would find that his values are the "normal values of any modern society, including Russian".

On France

Reading this piece in The Guardian by a journalist who has long worked in France, you get the distinct impression that part of the problem is that the country has so many people who share a fondness for public demonstration as a political tool that once they start, no one really has any clear idea how unified the demonstrators are.  Hence there always ends up being a multitude of possible mixed motivations, which makes calming it down all the more difficult.

Of course, people say that about demonstrations in other countries too (you know, the matter of whether demonstrations are being "hijacked" by a radical group), but it seems a really chronic problem when you're in a country where anyone will demonstrate at the drop of a political hat.   As Lichfield says:

I’ve lived in France for 22 years and have witnessed street protests by workers, farmers, wine producers, truck drivers, railway employees, university students, sixth-formers, teachers, youths in the multiracial suburbs, chefs, lawyers, doctors and police officers. Yes, even police officers. 

Anyway,  another article in The Guardian looks at the question of whether petrol prices in France are really that expensive, and they apparently aren't.   But Macron being a strange political fish, who believes in climate change, is pro-EU, leery of populist sentiment against immigration, but also wants to de-regulate work conditions, has the problem of thereby not being able to have solid support from either arm of politics. 

I don't know enough about France to have really solid opinions about it or him, but naturally I gravitate towards centrism and moderation, and (of course) view the populist Right as a real danger.  It's a pity that the Macron brand of centrism seems not to be working.  But whether that's because he's too far "dry" on economics or too "wet" on environmentalism - or a bit of both - I don't really know.

Silly economic prediction

I didn't post about the Fourth National Climate Assessment because of the immediate criticism I noticed about the "economic effect" part that suggested that even under a high emissions path, the effect on the US economy may only be 10% of GDP.

While its seems most media unthinkingly reported the figure as if it was high, lots of people on Twitter with a clue immediately thought that was just ridiculously low.   We're talking an 8 degree temperature rise - that would be a huge change in global conditions (bearing in mind a drop of only 4 to 5 degrees is all it takes to put the planet into an ice age.) 

I don't know that there has been as much discussion about the obvious problems with that figure in the report as there should have been, but And Then There's Physics had a decent post about it, in which the comments are well worth reading.

It would seem there is some hedging in the Report itself about the figure, but in a way it's a wonder that the skeptics have not done more to grab onto this figure to argue that climate change is not a problem.

The lazy JC at Catallaxy has done so - but then he believes the last skeptical thing he ever reads and has now been convinced by Scott Adams, the cartoonist who does videos from up Trump's rectum, that climate models are a fraud.   So gullible:  believes anything that fits the theory "there is no problem."

But it would seem that the professional climate change skeptics have decided to ignore this point and criticise the report in other ways - their familiar refrain of "the science is all too uncertain". 

I don't think the problematic economic prediction is one from an Integrated Assessment Model - but in any event, it is well worth remembering Robert Pindyck's long standing work pointing out that economic forecasts for climate change are a bit of a crock.

Summing up Godless

So, we got to the end of Netflix's Godless on Friday night.  [Spoilers ahead].

It had everything:   lesbians and downtrodden black folk taking on the oppressive white man in a massive shootout in which it seemed 200 people died, even though there were only 80 there.

Actually, I'm being facetious and pretending to be a Wingnut.   It was, in fact, very satisfying.   (Oh, and the black folk take much part in the final shootout - they're mostly eliminated before then.)

The production values and acting again came to the fore:   this was really the best looking Western I can remember since, well, I don't really know.  It's not as if I follow the genre closely, and at the cinema there are so few examples now I don't remember the last one I would have seen there.   The acting was also very uniformly good throughout the series:  Jeff Daniels was the most surprising as a very convincingly menacing and nutty bad guy.   

I was pleased that most of the "good guys" survived, and the cemetery speech was actually touching.

Sure, the series isn't perfect:  a bit too horsey sometimes; I was waiting for the origin story of bad guy Frank's dedicated band of followers but it never came;  and I can't say the whole scenario of the town soldiering on with widowed women felt particularly likely, even though it made for an innovate setting.   (In fact, I have been meaning to check if the writer/director based it on any historical example that sparked the idea.  I'll come back and update if I turn up anything interesting.)  But the thing is, we all know that Westerns take liberties with history and we can enjoy them nonetheless for their imagery and sentiment.

So, I'm glad I watched it, and puzzle once again over the matter of why Netflix can make some very enjoyable mini series, but seems pretty woeful at producing their own films.

A hot issue

Hmm.  A study from Finland finds that frequent sauna use by folk over 50 is associated with (much lower) mortality from cardio vascular disease.  But is it just that healthy people tend to have more sauna time, or is there causation involved?   A doctor thinks it the sauna might make people fitter:

Professor Laukkanen continued: "There are several possible reasons why sauna use may decrease the risk of death due to CVD. Our research team has shown in previous studies that high sauna use is associated with lower blood pressure. Additionally, sauna use is known to trigger an increase in heart rate equal to that seen in low to moderate intensity physical exercise."

I wonder:  the Japanese have long lives too, and really like their hot baths.   Possible causation there too?

Well, there you go - this has been the subject of specific study too:

 The objective of this study was to determine how traditional Japanese style bathing could promote good health. Using healthy volunteers, we assessed body temperature (core and cutaneous), red blood cells, white blood cells (WBCs), venous blood gas parameters (PO2, SO2, PCO2, TCO2, HCO3, and pH), weight loss (which may indicate sweat volume), and the time until sweating before and after bathing. We simultaneously conducted a double-blind clinical trial using a bath additive group and a control group to investigate the effect of a bath additive on the same parameters. We found that bathing increased the core and cutaneous body temperature, as well as PO2, SO2, and blood pH. All of the subjects also showed increases in heart rate and weight loss (sweat volume). After bathing, the number and ratio of granulocytes increased while the number and ratio of lymphocytes decreased. These results tended to be emphasized in the bath additive group; however, significant between-group differences were not detected. Our results indicated that bathing improved blood circulation and had a modulatory effect on the autonomic nervous system. This suggested that traditional Japanese style bathing might contribute to good health and longevity; however, additional larger-scale studies were needed to confirm or refute this conclusion. 

Judy, Judy, Judy

I missed the news yesterday that an accidental leak of salaries from News Corp showed Judith Sloan gets $357,000 pa for writing two columns per week (!)

Is she still on any boards as well?

Does she collect a fee for appearing on ABC too?   (Mercifully, she appears less and less it seems to me, but then I don't watch The Drum.)

Anyway, seems an extraordinarily generous fee for what I would presume is 2 days work a week. 

Really into it

I thought this "opinion piece" in WAPO, which attracted criticism for reading more like some PR blurb, was nonetheless interesting for explaining just how reliant the Chinese have become on the internet - or at least those urban ones who can connect to it.

On the House

Hill House:  the Haunting of, is that to which I refer.

I'm up to episode 6, with another four episodes to go, but I feel the urge to comment on it before the end.

I think it's quite good, but flawed in interesting ways.   The best part is the acting of the younger version of the family - all of the children are very good, with the young, poor-sighted (if his thick glasses are anything to go by) Luke being a particularly charming and likeable presence.   (Even older Luke as junkie still has a basically sympathetic face.)   It is nice to see Henry Thomas, famous as Elliott in ET, is still making a living too.  The mother is fine, with only the domestic help feeling a bit cliched sometimes.

Another think I have liked quite a lot is the imaginative detail in some of the spook action in the house.  The levitating bowler hat man sequence was a particularly good example in (I think) episode 5.  Last night's episode 6 also had some nice surprises in the present day, too.  (It was a very well made episode, with lots done in long, unbroken takes.)   I give credit to it for not being too gruesome in most of its scares, and often the tension is nicely built before a spectre makes an appearance.  There's not an over-reliance on the cheap jump-scare, although they do occur. 

On the downside, as I commented here before, there is a bit of suspension of disbelief necessary, not uncommon in haunted house movies, as to why the family persists in living there for so long after so many weird things have happened.  Also - turn on the light!  Normal people scared in the middle of the night turn on the light.   [This, it has occurred to me, is probably why I find Poltergeist so enjoyable - it's a brightly lit haunted house movie, and scarier for it, because it is more realistic in that aspect.    There is also a reason for the family to stay there  that doesn't apply to your average haunted house.  All praise to Spielberg, who wrote the witty, clever and scary screenplay.]

Back to the House:  the main problem I have is that I really don't think the writing of the adult children's unresolved conflict ever comes across as completely convincing.   They strike me as unreasonably upset with Steven, the eldest, for writing a book about the haunting when he apparently does not really believe that it was supernatural at heart.   I mean, he offered to share the money.  And besides, as we learn in episode 6, he did see at least one thing in the house which really only had a supernatural explanation, so why did he start later thinking it was all mental issues?   I don't really get it.   If the series wants us to understand why he annoyed his siblings so much, I think more specific detail needed to be given.  Maybe more in coming in the last few episodes. 

The two elder sisters conflict seemed a bit over the top last night too -  aren't they a bit too upper-middle class for the swear-y shouting on display?  And what was going on in the storeroom?  Is lesbian hook-up sister (a character who, in adult version, I find hard to like) actually cheating with a husband for whom I feel sympathy for having married into such a nutty family?   The whole lesbian bit with her seems just gratuitous to me, too.   I like the way she is psychic with touch and wears gloves all the time presumably for that reason - but the picking up the girl at the bar seemed just a bit of unnecessary filler.

There are another four episodes to go, so perhaps I will start feeling better about the writing of the dialogue between the adult family.   But I don't think I can be the only one who wishes that some episodes spent more time in the past than in the present, not only because that is where most of the chills are, but because the adult family writing is not as good as it should be.
 

Trump news

Yeah, sure he's read "some of" the climate change report.  Perhaps the front page?   Has the nation ever had a President before who seems so bereft of a basic life skill?   I wonder how Reagan got on when he had the start of dementia?   I suspect then even he may have done more reading than Trump.

Yeah, sure, a State run pro-Trump international media network to counter CNN is a good idea.  Nothing like what a tin pot dictator would want at all.   I don't know that a lot of people internationally find CNN influential anyway - it's kind of boring.  But narcissistic autocrats need lots of praise, and CNN does not provide it.  Only because there is nothing to praise. 

GM closing plants is not a great look.  It would seem that what might help GM - climate driven policies to encourage people to buy smaller more fuel efficient cars - is exactly what Trump is against.  Huh.

Tim doesn't like the idea of being in Opposition: even worse, of earning a dollar out in the cruel world

Timbo Wilson is looking chubby and different (older?) in this pic:

It's been a curious thing - his path from IPA anti climate change, anti tobacco plain packaging, anti HRC roots to HRC member and then into government as a Turnbull supporting "wet".  Well, he's certain "wet" on gay marriage:  maybe not so much on other things?

The one thing I never hear him talking about now is climate change - the key issue that the Liberals are killing themselves over.

Come on, Timbo - be the Liberal who recants and says his scepticism in the past has been replaced by a genuine belief in the problem, and tell the conservatives who wanted to stop you getting married that they are wrong on this (much more important issue) too, and are killing the party.

I see that one of the flipped seats in the Victorian election is pretty much Tim's electorate too.

He seems worried.   But I have my doubts he could be in that much trouble, unfortunately.

Taiwanese politics is...complicated

I know nothing really about Taiwanese politics, but it was surprising to read last year that, due to the judiciary, the country was moving towards legalising gay marriage.  

However, a referendum on the weekend went against it (even though it would seem to be an advisory ballot only).   Why have advisory ballots if you have to constitutionally allow for something?   Seems odd:

The vote on Saturday, organised by Christian groups that make up about 5% of Taiwan’s population and advocates of the traditional Chinese family structure, contradicts a May 2017 constitutional court ruling. Justices told legislators then to make same-sex marriage legal within two years, a first for Asia, where religion and conservative governments normally keep the bans in place.

Although the ballot is advisory only, it is expected to frustrate lawmakers mindful of public opinion as they face the court deadline next year. Many legislators will stand for re-election in 2020.

“The legislature has lots of choices on how to make this court order take effect,” said referendum proponent Chen Ke, a Catholic pastor in Taiwan and an opponent of same-sex marriage.

Christian groups are small but that influential?  I guess if they align with traditional Chinese  sentiment towards family. 

But the rest of Taiwanese politics seems so complicated, too:

Taiwanese also elected candidates from the China-friendly opposition Nationalist party to a majority of mayoral and county magistrate posts, reversing the party’s losses in 2014.

China welcomed the defeat of Taiwan’s pro-independence ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP) at the local elections, saying it showed people wanted peaceful relations with Beijing.

The vote dealt a major blow to President Tsai Ing-wen’s hopes of re-election in 2020, forcing her to quit as DPP leader as the Beijing-friendly main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) made gains in the face of China’s increasing pressure on the island.

The DPP has been left in control of only six of Taiwan’s cities and counties, compared with at least 15 for the KMT. The losses included one of its most steadfast strongholds, the southern city of Kaohsiung.

At a time of growing concern over China flexing its muscles by building island military bases in strategic positions, isn't it surprising that a "Beijing friendly" party is making a comeback in Taiwan?

I don't really understand...

Deadest dead government walking ever?

What a sense of schadenfreude it is giving me that Victoria, the home of the IPA, Sinclair Davidson, Judith Sloan, Steve Kates, Andrew Bolt and climate change denialism - the issue which is making the Coalition an un-electable rabble - is looking so hostile to the Liberals right now.   And Newspoll at 55/45 TPP! 

It's one of those periods where you wonder how the politicians on the obviously losing side manage to get up in the morning.   Do they mutter to themselves "it's all so pointless" over their corn flakes?

Anyway, let's sit back and enjoy watching the centrists and the science denying, culture warring Right in the Party fighting it out.  (Hilariously, I see at Catallaxy, the people argue that the Liberals need to be led by someone more like Trump.   They have no idea.)

The answer remains clear - you can't have coherent energy and climate change policy without believing in climate change.  That big rump (I'm guessing 35%) of the Coalition that just refuses to believe it is an issue at all need to be told to leave the party.

Update:  and I forgot to mention - the LDP gets 3,000 odd votes in the Upper Lower House - third from the bottom.   More pleasure for me.

Update 2:  As I was rudely told in comments, the votes in my previous update were for the Lower House, not the Upper, and I think the party ran 3 candidates.  So they cracked a 1,000 votes each, or thereabouts?  Congratulations!   As for the number of votes in the Upper House, I don't understand how the voting works there, given we don't have an Upper House in Queensland.  But I see that the LDP did get 50,000 odd votes, which puts it about even with the Animal Justice Party,  way behind   Deryn Hinch's Justice Party, and also behind the Shooter Fishers and Farmers Party.   What's more, at the last election, they got 3.06% of the vote, but at this one, at the moment, the vote is at 2.3%.

So, they're going backwards?  Again, congratulations. 

There's no there there

Did the Coen Brothers overcome the Netflix curse for having big names make only middling to bad movies? 

Well, I'm only 2/3 of the way through Buster Scruggs, and I think it is safe to say already that they have not.

The first story is absurdist, and violent (as indeed, it seems most episodes are) - I mean, seriously, as I said before JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN SHOW A GRAPHIC, BRAIN SPLATTERING SHOT TO THE HEAD, HOLLYWOOD, DOES NOT MEAN THAT GRAPHIC, BRAIN SPLATTERING SHOTS TO THE HEAD SHOULD BE ENTERTAINMENT.

Did you notice, it bothers me a great deal, this nihilistic use of heat shot special effects??

Anyway, even ignoring that, the first story is still mainly just peculiar - seemingly a thought bubble they had for a silly musical Western that they couldn't work out how to stretch to movie length.*

The main problem I have had with each story is the lack of dramatic drive.   Particularly in the one with Liam Neeson - I thought it just flat out boring.   And the Tom Waits one too. 

Sure, the cinematography looks great, although these days you never know when even nature scenery is real or faked up.   But really, I think that this movie, to the extent that people like it, is rather like Tarantino - it's a matter of style triumphing over nihilistic content.  There is no there there.


*  Actually, now that I think of it, it perhaps plays more as a mocking mini movie they couldn't cram into Hail Caesar!