Incompetence results in slightly better news

Gee, the Sri Lankan government is looking pretty spectacularly inept:

Sri Lankan authorities have revised the death toll from Easter Sunday’s string of bombings down to 253 people from the previous estimate of 359.

At least the ineptitude on this means better news, of sorts.

The downfall of capitalism, by George Monbiot

While skeptical of the need to "declare capitalism dead", perpetual pessimist George Monbiot's piece in The Guardian is actually pretty well argued, and there are parts I think sound right.  Like this:

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

I guess I don't mind his previous points before this one, too:  in which he notes that it is not really useful just to argue that because capitalism worked spectacularly well in the past that it must continue in the same way in the future:

Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

But he is a bit light on where we move forward from here:

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

But yeah, on the whole, a reasonably argued take on the matter.   I think perhaps all it really amounts to is saying that capitalism as a system needs greater shaping by government intervention, but need not be abandoned in its entirety.
 

Local wildlife continues to surprise

Over the years, I've posted photos of a kangaroo in my street (twice), possums under the deck (here's one example, but there are many more), cockatoos, corellas and more unusual birds.   Of course we get more wildlife that I haven't photographed:  brush turkeys, blue tongued lizards, as well as your lorikeets, flying foxes, kookaburras, etc.   Lots of Australian wildlife, all within 18 km of the heart of the city, but it's not as if my house borders bushland, although it is within a couple of kilometres of patches of it.

Anyhow, last night the dog was doing its job of unnecessarily guarding our house by looking out the front window and barking at passing humans and their canines, when she obviously spotted something walking past closer to the house.  I couldn't see anything, but she was highly excited, and I eventually went out the front to find this:

Yes, a bundle of spikes* that is an echidna, with its head buried in the corner, I suspect in order to eat ants which are always in that area.   It was breathing and scraping, but we just let it be.  I checked half an hour later and it had moved on.

I had once seen one of these on a footpath near the bushy riverbank a couple of kilometres from me, but never really expected to see one in my street.

If only I ever spot a koala in the gum trees in the small park in front of the house (very unlikely, but the way things are going, seems I shouldn't rule it out entirely) I'll have some sort of Australian wildlife bingo game triumph that I never have expected to when I moved into this suburb.



*  now that I think of it, looks a tad like a bicycle helmet as designed for Mad Max; or one for a severe swooping magpie deterrent.

Chinese Australians and ANZAC Day

I'm starting to think it must be quite a onerous task for news services to come up with some fresh historical aspect of Australian war time service for each ANZAC Day.  But they usually do manage something of interest, and this year I choose to highlight the ABC stories on Chinese Australians who served in the World Wars.

There were at least 213 Chinese-Australians who enlisted in World War I, and potentially many more in World War II — however nobody knows exactly how many there were, due to Australia's race-based enlistment policies at the time.

"There were race requirements for entering the armed services during the World Wars," historian Meleah Hampton from the Australian War Memorial told the ABC.

The enforcement of these rules came down to how "European" a would-be soldier appeared in the eyes of the man taking down his enlistment — but Dr Hampton said their assessments became more lax as the need for soldiers grew.

"When they started getting very desperate for men, they started seeing whiter and whiter people I guess," she said.

The article supports this with a photo of someone who tried to enlist in World War 1 but was rejected:

The article notes the story of Billy Sing, of mixed Chinese Caucasian heritage, who was a crack sniper at Gallipoli and served in France too:

He does look quite the badass dude in the next photo

Moving forward to WW2, and Wellington Lee, later a deputy mayor in Melbourne, said he was rejected by the Navy (on pure racial grounds, he believes) but did get to enlist in the Air Force.  (Ahem, always the best service to be in, I say with some direct knowledge.)  Here's a photo of Lee from the article:

I see from another story from 2018 on the ABC, the Air Force again features as the service a Chinese Australian was able to join in WW2:

The White Australia policy treated her father as a "foreigner and enemy" and resulted in her mother's citizenship being revoked.

But despite that, in 1945 — at the age of just 18 — Kathleen Quan Mane enlisted as a decoder in Australia's Air Force for what would be the final year of World War II.

Ms Quan Mane and her sister Doreen, the youngest of five girls in their family, were among the first 21 Chinese-Australian servicewomen to join the war effort.

Here she is in uniform:

Cool.

Good on these people for giving service to our country even when, with its policies, you could argue it didn't really deserve their help.  

Update:   I just found via Twitter that someone writing in the South China Morning Post has an article about his great Uncle, Fred Goon, who did this:

Eight times Goon tried to sign up, and eight times he was rejected. But on his ninth try, on January 12, 1917, he succeeded. The medical officer noted the 23-year-old recruit’s dark complexion and hair, but not his Chinese heritage.

A little over a year later, Goon was gulping down German drift gas in the trenches of the Western Front, and he was hospitalised for months. He returned to the Belgian front in time to take part in the last battle of the war involving Australian troops.

The persistence of Goon, my great-uncle, may be some kind of record.

Here's his photo:

The image on the right is how he appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser when it reported news of his gassing.

Goon had a Chinese father but Irish descended mother.  This combination was not that unusual around Bendigo, oddly enough:

Goon was the son of Louey Fong Goon, a merchant from Taishan in Guangdong who joined the 19th century Australian gold rush. In Bendigo, he married Elizabeth Johnson, daughter of Irish immigrants, in 1896 – three years after she had given birth to their son, Fred.

My great-grandparents’ pairing was not unique; there were 28 marriages between Chinese men and Irish-born women in Victoria in a five-year period at the height of the gold rush, and many others involved Australian-born Irishwomen like Johnson.

But Fred was born into an Australia where racism was already endemic – anger about Chinese men marrying white women had helped trigger violent unrest, including the infamous 1861 Lambing Flat riot, in which Chinese miners were expelled from goldfields by white diggers. By 1901, the White Australia Policy was enshrined in law and would prevent most Chinese immigration for almost 50 years.

The article explains the discretionary nature of the racial criteria for enlistment:

Cheah Ah-Qune said the racism faced by ethnic Chinese would-be recruits was institutionalised, but application of the European-origin rule was up to individual recruitment medics. Some were sticklers. Others would bend the rules.

“One might say, well, you’re Sino in appearance, you have an olive complexion, but your heart is in the right place, so let’s put you in. It was discretionary … especially as the war progressed and more and more men were needed,” she said.

Some Chinese-Australians went to great lengths to enlist, said Cheah Ah-Qune, citing one recruit who travelled from Melbourne to Queensland to sign up, at least 1,700km north.

Interesting stuff.

Beyond the burger

Last weekend I went to burger outlet Grill'd and found that they had a new vegetarian burger being heavily promoted.  It was the Beyond burger - which I had read about in articles that usually talked more about how fantastic the Impossible burger is, with Beyond being mentioned as a good (but not as good as IB) alternative.   I still don't know that we can get Impossible here, but they supposed to be expensive in the US and would presumably even more costly here.

So I had one.

Certainly, in appearance it's a totally convincing replica of your standard beef burger made with very finely ground beef.   (Commercially made burgers always seem to be like that  and have little of the coarser quality of a home made burger patty.)  The internal texture was a bit softer than a meat patty, though.

As for taste:   pretty good, actually.  But I was a bit confused as to whether some of the grilled meat like flavour was as a result of it being grilled on the same surface as real meat patties?  I was half tempted to ask the staff if they did grill it separately, as I can imagine it would upset some vegetarians if they didn't, but in the end I didn't bother.  

Interestingly, I see that one American thinks the Impossible burger is over-praised, finding it usually has a mushy centre, and prefers Beyond.   

I am prepared to have another one, perhaps from a different burger outlet, and see if tastes the same. 

What was I saying about Poland? (It's weird)

When not busy burning Harry Potter books, it seems that Catholics like to turn Easter into an uncomfortably anti-Semitic fun time:

Polish Judas ritual 'anti-Semitic' - Jewish congress

The finger pointing Uhlmann

Chris Uhlmann complains in Michael Rowland's piece about nasty twitter criticism of journalists:

While the hyper-partisans are alert to any perceived "bias", Uhlmann believes one side is way more offensive than the other.

"While one of the memes of the early 21st century is the rise of the aggressive right, the emergence of what I would call the "post-Christian left" is much more of a worry," he said.

"They are the moralisers-in-chief and can be absolutely vicious."

Chris has a long standing problem with the Left:   he has a history of sounding like a climate change denier.   Climate change advocates were using it as a substitute religion, he claimed years ago, and with that "post-Christian left" comment, it's clear that he still brings some dubious (and conservative) analysis to modern politics.

As I used to complain, he was always a soft Abbott/coalition interviewer on 7.30 Report when he hosted it.   I just don't think he is very good as a journalist.

I am skeptical of his take that the Left are much more "vicious" than those on the Right.    I suspect there may be more Left leaning attack Tweets just because I think it's a forum more likely used by a younger demographic.   The nasty older wingnut is more likely to use other outlets - Catallaxy, ringing Alan Jones, etc.   Or they can write about their violent death fantasy about people on an ABC show in Quadrant. 

Ooooh...

The first twitter responses to Avengers Endgame are out and all very positive.

Cinemas may as well run it 24 hours a day for the first 4 days here.   It will be that popular.

Some other things that were "Socialism!"

I see that the history of the American Right decrying US government actions as "Socialism!" is longer than I realised.  Have a look at this thread by Kevin Kruse listing some of its ridiculous use in the past.  (Free polio vaccine, for God's sake.)  

What's the current ludicrous revival about?   Probably due to the intractable nature of properly fixing the American health system and the talk of single payer systems, as well as the "success" amongst dimwits of Jonah Goldberg's rebranding of Hitler and Nazis as dedicated socialists from start to end. And, of course, the intellectual rot of the Right caused by Fox News and social media generally.

That difficult "12 years to act" issue

Myles Allen tries to clarify what climate activists should be saying, rather than some of the sloppy sloganeering they are currently using: 

My biggest concern is with the much-touted line that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we have 12 years” before triggering an irreversible slide into climate chaos. Slogan writers are vague on whether they mean climate chaos will happen after 12 years or if we have 12 years to avert it. But both are misleading. 

Using the World Meteorological Organization’s definition of global average surface temperature, and the late 19^th century to represent preindustrial levels (yes, all these definitions matter), we just passed 1 degree Celsius and are warming at more than 0.2 degrees C per decade, which would take us to 1.5 degrees C around 2040. 

As the relevant lead author of the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C,” I spent several days last October, literally under a spotlight, explaining to delegates of the world’s governments what we could and could not say about how close we are to that level of warming.

That said, these are only best estimates. We might already be at 1.2 degrees C and warming at 0.25 degrees C per decade—well within the range of uncertainty. That would indeed get us to 1.5 degrees C by 2030: 12 years from 2018. But an additional quarter of a degree of warming, more or less what has happened since the 1990s, is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers (the striving taxpayers of 2030). And what will they think then? 

I say the majority, because there will be unfortunate exceptions. One of the most insidious myths about climate change is the pretense that we are all in it together. People ask me whether I’m kept awake at night by the prospect of 5 degrees of warming. I don’t think we’ll make it to 5 degrees. I’m far more worried about geopolitical breakdown as the injustices of climate change emerge as we steam from 2 to 3 degrees. 

So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half-degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5 degrees C, beyond which lie climate dragons. 

What about the other interpretation of the IPCC’s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a 1 in 2 to 2 in 3 chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn’t mean we have 12 years to act: It means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.

And if we don’t halve emissions by 2030, will we have lost the battle and just have to hunker down and survive? Of course not. The IPCC is clear that, even reducing emissions as fast as possible, we can barely keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees C. So every year that goes by in which we aren’t reducing emissions is another 40 billion tons of CO₂ that we are expecting today’s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.

Some ridiculous things coming out of Mueller

*   How do the members of the Cult of Trump rationalise to themselves that their leader did not have a guilty conscience over something when his first reaction to the news of the investigation was that it was a disaster that would end his Presidency.   I mean, honestly, how can that possibly be interpreted as the words of an honest man who feels he has nothing serious to hide?  

*  I do not understand why there is any debate over Sarah Sanders keeping her job.  She completely made up story to give her boss some credibility, not once but twice.   Shouldn't every reporter's response to her future unsourced claims now be "how do we know you're telling the truth this time, Sarah?"   Her keeping the job is just untenable.

*  Rudy Guiliani - what a hyper partisan joke.  Seriously, how could any Republican hold their head up and say "well, if Hilary had sought to benefit from hacked emails being provided from Russia via an intermediary, we would have said that's fair enough too."  As Jennifer Rubin writes:

Let’s not gloss over what Giuliani in essence is saying: Yeah, why not let a foreign power help him win?! (Someone should ask Trump if he intends to ask Russia to help him out again in 2020.) No, in a democracy we — not a foreign dictator — get to pick our leaders. (In case you think this might have been a slip of the tongue, Giuliani repeated this argument on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He told Jake Tapper that “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”)

The Sri Lankan terror attacks

I just had a look at the Wikipedia entry on the history of terror attacks in Sri Lanka, and as I suspected, while it has plenty, they have nearly always been directly political/sectarian in nature and mostly to do with the civil war.  There seems to be no significant history of Islamic terrorism, and at barely 10% of the population, it's not as if they could possibly have ambitions of taking over the place.

So it appears to be one of those particularly pointless examples of extremist Islam attacks which are more like childish tantrums:  "if we can't run the place like we would, we're going to blow you up."   (It might be that the Church specific bombings were in "retaliation" for the Christchurch killings - but that hardly explains the attacks on hotels.)  

I mean, this is what's so frustrating about Islamic terrorism when it happens in nations for which there is no chance of it actually achieving anything for radical Islam.   I can see a bloody-minded point in, say, terrorism within Islamic nations if they think it will weaken a moderate Islamic government and give their brand of Islam a better chance of taking power.  But attack within nations with a small Muslim population?   It's ridiculously pointless.

And as for Sri Lanka's pre-knowledge of likely terror attacks and then doing (apparently) stuff all about it?  It would cause political heads to roll here (sorry, perhaps not the best metaphor on this topic) but will it there?

I think I'll be giving the place a miss as a tourist destination for the next few years.

The Pentecostal PM

I see that Jason has retweeted a James Morrow tweet having a go at those mocking the PM for the shots of his Pentecostal style Easter worship because they would never have a go at Muslim's prostate form of worship in the same way.

OK, let's agree that there is often a Lefty double standard in terms of all Australian Muslims getting a "hey, we respect all of your faith beliefs, save for the extremists who want to blow up people, of course; but we understand they are not true Muslims" versus a conservative Christian  getting a "you and your Church's  condemnation of gay marriage and attitudes to women absolutely appals us and is so medieval and disrespectful."   I get that.

BUT:   the simpler issue here that I would bet is behind a lot of Twitter criticism of Morrison is Australians' dislike of the ostentatious use of religious worship by any politician.

James Morrow ("Prick with a Fork" - he's like those Catallaxy commenters who think they are being amusingly self depreciating in name choice, without realising that most readers just find it accurate)  is from America, I think, where ostentatious worship is still a political thing.  (Curious as to how long it will last, though, given the dramatically reducing faith of the American public as a whole.)

But the Australian standard is to roll our eyes at seeing a politician even just walking into or out of Church when it electorally suits them.  We know most politicians are not regular Church goers and it's only for show, particularly during election campaigns (like Bill Shorten yesterday).  But even for those who do regularly attend (which I think includes the PM?), it's still cringeworthy to see them trying to get self serving publicity by being happy to have the media there as they enter or leave.  Remember Rudd's regular use of that?  It was pretty sickening, especially once the full extend of what a jerk of a boss he could be came to light.

Taking it a step further and getting the cameras inside to watch the PM participation is at another level of cringeworthy.

A dignified politician at most lets cameras show them going in or out, and does not want private worship turning up on the news.

The only good thing about it is that Morrison, who deserves to lose big time, might not realise that it probably hurts more than it helps in public perception?   I think his PR smarts are very lacking.  

Update:   typically, Sinclair Davidson can't understand why many Australians have a problem with Morrison allowing photos of him inside his church to be used during an election campaign.

But he has all the political judgement of a libertarian - which is close to nil.

Hey Sinclair, can you do me a favour and start pressing for more publicity about how many Liberal Party members like the idea of privatising (or "giving away") the ABC?   There's a good chap.
  

News out of Singapore, again

Once again, I feel like recommending Channel News Asia for really interesting news and current affairs content on Singapore and all of South East Asia. 

There is a lot of content on their smart TV app, which I find an easy way to enjoy it.

This story, about the role of social media in the Indian election, is something I found particularly interesting this morning. 

Update:  I also recommend this episode of their "Get Real" program, talking about how social media was used by political parties in the run up to the recent Indonesian election.  

Movies seen

*  Hereditary (on Netflix):   this apparently had a cinema release last year, and received enthusiastic reviews but didn't make much money.  (Although it looks pretty modestly budgeted. and probably was profitable.)     I thought it was a terrible, terrible screenplay:  intended as a spooky/horror family drama, it inspired no tension or frights at all in this viewer, and moved very, very slowly for nearly the entire thing.  The climax became just sillier and way more over the top than necessary.  I said to my son that if he wanted to see a movie that properly built up a sense of mystery and dread as to whether something malevolent is going, he should watch Rosemary's Baby, and when I checked the negative reader reviews on Metacritic,  a few said exactly the same thing.  The one professional critic listed at Metacritic with whom I agreed was Rex Reed - he really disliked it too.

*  Shazam!   Pretty enjoyable, but the more I think about it, the more I realise how much was derivative of other movies and stories.   Like the last Spiderman movie, it featured an overweight Hispanic student (I would be complaining about Hollywood if I were Mexican) and ended with a Ramones song over the credits.  The doors into other dimensions were rather Narnia, as was the ultimate role of the foster family.   The bus falling over the rail had a sequence that was well done, but very reminiscent of the second Jurassic Park movie.  At least the debt owed to Big was wryly acknowledged with a brief floor keyboard bit.  I also thought that some scenes were probably a bit too violent for young kids for whom the movie seeming intended as part of a family audience.   Kids of all ages can handle characters having their head bitten off these days, apparently.   I have to say that some of the human/CGI interactions looked pretty unconvincingly done, too.

Sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but I did for the most part.   I think it could have been better, but had enough laughs to keep me going. [Update:  I also kind of liked that there was one key aspect of the story which was not sugar coated - which was a bit of a novel approach, I thought.]

Some Mueller commentary I liked

Frank Bowman at Slate as to what the report as a whole shows:

The picture of the current president painstakingly etched in the Mueller report is of a man with three dominant characteristics.

First, his narcissism overwhelms all other considerations. Even a more balanced and self-aware person would have found the Russia inquiry politically and personally troublesome. But one cannot escape the feeling (to which Mueller obliquely alludes) that a primary factor in Trump’s desperate efforts to squash the investigation was the fragility of his ego—a manic determination that the epic achievement of his election not be tarnished by even a hint that forces other than Trump played a role. 

Second, Trump believes that, having been elected, the powers of government are to be wielded for his personal and political benefit and the law exists only as a tool to serve his ends. No institution, no law, no set of traditional norms, no professional standard, certainly no moral consideration deserves any deference if it stands in the way of his immediate wishes. 

Third, the thread running through the entire report is Trump’s essential falsity. Mueller confirms that Trump not only lies constantly as part of his public act, but does so privately among his advisers and intimates, and he expects others to lie for him on command. Among the most revealing vignettes is Trump’s effort to convince Don McGahn to lie about the fact that Trump ordered him to secure Mueller’s firing. McGahn, to his credit, refused and showed Trump his notes documenting the order. Trump exploded in astonishment that “lawyers don’t take notes. … I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.” That a subordinate might have personal integrity and be unprepared to sacrifice it on Trump’s command had seemingly never occurred to him....

Whether Donald Trump violated a particular federal obstruction statute is in the end a peripheral matter. The fundamental lesson of the Mueller report is simply that he is fundamentally unfit for office and presents a persistent danger to the integrity of the American legal system. That is the question that Congress and the country must now address. 

Also at Slate on the matter of why Trump denies Russian interference:

The Mueller report also indicates that the president didn’t much care if the results of the Russia investigation made him seem unethical, greedy, or treasonous. He was only worried that any corroboration of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election would undermine the flattering connotations of his victory: that he won America’s popularity contest all on his own. “Several advisors” told the special counsel that Trump believed it would detract from his election triumph if people thought Russia had propped him on top of a few phone books to help him reach the dinner table. 

 Ezra Klein has a very detailed look at the question of impeachment based on the Mueller report (he is against it, but on well considered grounds.)

David Frum summarises what the report finds (particularly of interest to the matter of Julian Assange too - weird anti-Hilary Lefties like Greenwald believe everything Assange asserts):

Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election with the conscious and articulated intent to help elect Donald Trump? Yes.

How important were these interventions to the outcome? Large, possibly decisive.

Did the Trump campaign know that Russia was doing the intervening? From the beginning, cybersecurity experts said Russian hackers had obtained leaked Democratic emails. The Mueller report decisively refutes Julian Assange’s alternative explanation—the lie that WikiLeaks had an “inside source.”

American under a leadership cult

Allahpundit still strikes me as the most sensible conservative commenter at Hot Air - not that I agree with him much of the time, but he's under no illusions about the nature of Trump and his followers.  Here he is talking about Ann Coulter, a nut who has at least retained enough grip on reality to get dismayed at Trump's lying on her pet issue, who has pointed out that Hilary Clinton would have handled the immigration problem better:

She’s overstating her case in the clip below to get under Trump’s and his fans’ skin but a few realities are undeniable:

1. Trump will lie and lie about progress at the border (and everything else) and his more cultish fans will believe anything he says. A Democrat “couldn’t just tweet something out and have everybody say ‘yay,'” an annoyed Coulter notes at one point in the video. For months she’s tweeted sarcastically to counter Trump’s border reassurances. “NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO,” she wrote in a column last month titled “Trump By The Numbers.” There’s not a shred of doubt that a Democratic president presiding over the crush of phony asylum seekers Trump is coping with right now would be rhetorically shredded by border hawks every day, just as there’s no doubt that obstruction allegations about a Democrat like the ones Mueller laid out in his report yesterday would have Republicans demanding impeachment. A Democrat would need to show progress on the border, not merely claim it.

2. The partisan flip side of the argument in point one is that rank-and-file Democrats would have been muted in their criticism of tougher border enforcement measures implemented by a Democratic president. ...

3. It’s possible that Trump’s tough talk about the border without commensurately tough action is actually making the border stampede worse. Various news reports about migrants traveling north from Central America have noted how coyotes and other traffickers have tried to take advantage of Trump’s policies, warning would-be immigrants back home that the border is closing soon so they’d better act now. Trump’s recent “threat” to dump illegals on sanctuary cities might also be backfiring:

Still seems to me that although he understands the nature of the Trump cult, he is way too willing to downplay the disturbing nature of any personality cult in politics and the shocking willingness of Republican politicians to play along because it delivers them power which they fear losing if they contradict the cult membership  "base".   

And what strange bedfellows such American conservatives have - some on the Left, and the libertarian right, who hated Hilary Clinton so much (for reasons I still find pretty puzzling) that they also have developed a shrug-shoulders response to the most impulsively authoritarian, dumb ass President and barely functioning administration by nincompoops we have ever seen.     

Which leads me to the Mueller report:  in all likelihood the Cult of Trump will protect Trump from impeachment, even though there's no doubt that in their heart, a large slab of Republican politicians think it is deserved and would be greatly relieved to see Trump out of office.  (And as soon as he is, there will be yet more stories of his appalling statements and behaviour in private from such politicians suddenly seeking to distance themselves from him.)   But what do Democrats do in the meantime? - they can't really deny that impeachment is deserved, but they know a cult is a cult and that it has all Republicans cowered.

Also, I suspect that the average politically un-engaged American who still sometimes votes sees impeachment as a pretty time wasting exercise almost regardless of the reason, and as such there is risk of it turning them off due to the relative proximity of the next election.    

I strongly suspect that the cowardice of the those Republican politicians who ride on the Cult of Trump's tailcoats will be the great historical takeaway from this weird political era.   

Why never a neat, short-haired Jesus?

We're in the Easter season, so let's talk about it.

I watched some of a documentary Jesus - Countdown to Calvary the other night, hosted by that actor Hugh Bonneville.   It was of some interest, although they kept inserting some pretty cheesy looking  re-enactments with a Jesus played by an actor whose physical appearance was all scruffy helmet hair and anger.   Here:

I mean, does this look like a charismatic bloke?  And the (I think) apostles behind him look like they walked off the stage from the latest production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  
Sure, I suppose Hitler looked a dork yet persuaded millions, but really, I'm getting rather sick of long haired Jesus.

Why?  Because there is a good chance he was pretty short haired, perhaps with a short beard, or maybe with none at all:

When early Christians were not showing Christ as heavenly ruler, they showed Jesus as an actual man like any other: beardless and short-haired. 

But perhaps, as a kind of wandering sage, Jesus would have had a beard, for the simple reason that he did not go to barbers.

General scruffiness and a beard were thought to differentiate a philosopher (who was thinking of higher things) from everyone else. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus considered it "appropriate according to Nature".

Otherwise, in the 1st Century Graeco-Roman world, being clean-shaven and short-haired was considered absolutely essential. A great mane of luxuriant hair and a beard was a godly feature, not replicated in male fashion. Even a philosopher kept his hair fairly short.

A beard was not distinctive of being a Jew in antiquity. In fact, one of the problems for oppressors of Jews at different times was identifying them when they looked like everyone else (a point made in the book of Maccabees). However, images of Jewish men on Judaea Capta coins, issued by Rome after the capture of Jerusalem in 70AD, indicate captive men who are bearded.

So Jesus, as a philosopher with the "natural" look, might well have had a short beard, like the men depicted on Judaea Capta coinage, but his hair was probably not very long.

If he had had even slightly long hair, we would expect some reaction. Jewish men who had unkempt beards and were slightly long-haired were immediately identifiable as men who had taken a Nazirite vow. This meant they would dedicate themselves to God for a period of time, not drink wine or cut their hair - and at the end of this period they would shave their heads in a special ceremony in the temple in Jerusalem (as described in Acts chapter 21, verse 24).

But Jesus did not keep a Nazirite vow, because he is often found drinking wine - his critics accuse him of drinking far, far too much of it (Matthew chapter 11, verse 19). If he had had long hair, and looked like a Nazirite, we would expect some comment on the discrepancy between how he appeared and what he was doing - the problem would be that he was drinking wine at all.

I did post briefly on this topic back in 2011, but it would seem no matter how many times people with knowledge of the era point out that neat hair was common back in the day, we just never get movies or re-enactments which depict him and the apostles that way.

Time for this to be rectified. 

Not hard to imagine why, at all

An article at The Atlantic asks:

Why Are So Many Teen Athletes Struggling With Depression? 

“The professional consensus is that the incidence of anxiety and depression among scholastic athletes has increased over the past 10 to 15 years,” says Marshall Mintz, a New Jersey–based sports psychologist who has worked with teenagers for 30 years. As one 2015 study by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association found, “Many student-athletes report higher levels of negative emotional states than non-student-athlete adolescents.” Though parents and coaches are often best positioned to remedy the problem, they also often make it worse.

Gee, I don't know:  who'd have thought that intense pressure to perform and the enormous amount of time that training can involve at the cost of normal teenage socialising could possibly be harmful? 

Satellite temperatures in the news

As explained in the Washington Post:

A high-profile NASA temperature data set, which has pronounced the last five years the hottest on record and the globe a full degree Celsius warmer than in the late 1800s, has found new backing from independent satellite records — suggesting the findings are on a sound footing, scientists reported Tuesday.

If anything, the researchers found, the pace of climate change could be somewhat more severe than previously acknowledged, at least in the fastest warming part of the world — its highest latitudes.

“We may actually have been underestimating how much warmer [the Arctic’s] been getting,” said Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature data, and who was a co-author of the new study released in Environmental Research Letters.

The satellite record in question is called AIRS, and raises questions about the accuracy of Roy Spencer's UAH record.   But I thought I had seen that UAH did incorporate some Aqua 2 (the satellite) information?   Could be wrong about that, and no time to check.  Spencer will no doubt be weighing in with some criticisms soon.