In an unwise attempt to string out information from someone who thinks Einstein was wrong...

Graeme, my unwanted nutty commenter, made a contribution recently that people might have missed - I invited him to read a good Quanta article last week explaining a lot about how Einstein came up with his ideas, to see if he might re-consider his position (ha!) - and he responded as follows:

"In an attempt, no doubt futile, to at least get you to reconsider the matter of Einstein and his wildly experimental successful theories...."

They are not even successful a little bit. Show me the data where it was proved that gravity is space bending? Think about your butt right now. There is no space between your behind and your chair to bend. Yet you still feel the force of gravity. So the theory is refuted right there. Yet the oppressive psy-op abuses us from childhood every day. What an incredible menace this oligarchy is when they subject you to that level of brainwashing.

Graeme - ignoring for the moment the nonsensical nature of the part that starts "think about your butt right now" - you would surely know about the 1919 eclipse observations?  As this ESA site confirms, the experimental confirmation was not left there - it was refined over the following decades til we get to this point:

After half a century of similar eclipse observations of the shifting stars, critics still said that there could be a 20 per cent error in the results. They were not accurate enough to rule out newer theories of gravity that challenged Einstein's version. Radio astronomers did somewhat better, with Quasar 3C279 which passes behind the Sun on 8 October every year. ESA's Hipparcos satellite (1989-93) provided the emphatic confirmation of Einstein's prediction. Hipparcos charted the positions of stars so accurately that no eclipse was needed to see the effect of the Sun's gravity. Where previous observations of the shifts had been confined to objects seen within a degree or two of the edge of the Sun, where the effect is strongest, the European satellite sensed the bending of light-rays even from stars in the night sky, at right angles to the Sun. According to the Hipparcos scientists, Einstein's prediction is correct to within one part in a thousand.

 A normal person would say this is experimental confirmation of theory.

What does an abnormal person like you say?

A distinct whiff of martyrdom achieved

There's not enough time in the day to be across all aspects of the culture wars - hence I haven't ever read a lot about the (apparently) long standing strange situation in Portland where alt.righters rally and the so-called antifa counter-rallies, many of the latter in their menacing, face masking get up.   This Vice article, as well as lots of ones by Jason Wilson at The Guardian, explain a lot of the conflict.   Right wingers complain that the city has let antifa take over the streets; left wingers complain the police are biased against them, and inconsistent in their policing.

As for Andy Ngo - the anti-antifa journalist who was assaulted on the weekend by antifa - I didn't know of him til now, but I see he had tweeted this before the rally:

I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland antifa rally. They’re promising “physical confrontation” & have singled me out to be assaulted. I went on Tucker Carlson last year to explain why I think they’re doing this: They’re seeking meaning through violence. https://youtu.be/Z28JxLWy820 

And he had reason to worry.  Mind you, in the video of his assault, he does seem to be standing in the middle of the antifa crowd.  I suppose that's how you get photos if you're a photographer, but really, couldn't he have been a bit more discrete?

Post assault, he has his photos up at Twitter (and at Quillette) and moderates on the Left side are getting to complain about fellow Leftists making light of his assault.  Those on the Right are of course taking the same line, in many cases with higher outrage.

So, I agree - those who assaulted him should be identified if possible and prosecuted, and antifa no doubt harbours some thugs out for a fight and don't care about criminality of their actions.

But Ngo's before and after assault behaviour does carry a very strong whiff of martyrdom desired and achieved.   I think it's fair to take that into account when considering the bigger socio-political meaning of the event.

American Made - recommended

American Made, the 2017 Tom Cruise movie which I was tempted to see at the cinema, but it made little money and came and went very quickly,  has turned up on Australian Netflix.  I watched it on the weekend.

It's very well made, and very entertaining - a really good Tom Cruise vehicle.  The director, Doug Liman, also made Edge of Tomorrow with Cruise, and on the strength of those two movies I have to say he's a director to watch, but I see he's been around quite a while, just making movies which I wasn't drawn to.  I've never watched his earlier Mr & Mrs Smith, for example - it looked and sounded pretty silly and over the top in concept and execution - but maybe I should give it a go now.)

As usual, in the case of a "based on a true story" movie, I was expecting it to bear anything from about a 25 to 50% relationship to real life.   And I'm correct - after watching the movie, you can go to this quite detailed explanation of what was and wasn't accurate to real life in the movie.   (An awful lot was really based only on rumours of his contact with the CIA - but then again, certain key aspects were true.)

It's not the sort of movie over which I am going to get uptight about its historical inaccuracies, in that it's clearly not being intended as a biopic.  It's more like a fictionalised famous crime figure story, and I can accept that, when it has such high entertainment value.

Post script:  One other thing.  I realised when thinking about this movie that one reason I might like Tom Cruise action movies is that they do not usually (or ever?) engage in big, blood splatteringly graphic examples of violence - there's no shots of brains being blown out of heads for entertainment or shock value, for example, as is so annoyingly prevalent in a lot of movies and cable TV now.    He seems to share my sensibility or threshold as to what is acceptable in movie violence - fists, stabbing and action is all OK, but not to the level of gruesome.

Or am I forgetting something he's been in?   I don't count the silly OTT scenes at the start of Tropic Thunder - that was meant to be satire of war movies, surely.  (I couldn't get far into that movie anyway - for reasons I have explained before.)

Unwanted publicity

The Washington Post has put up some photos from some Swedish photographer's book about his two year trip taking photos of Bachelor and Spinster Balls in outback Australia. 

They are unrelentingly ugly - and with all the dye or paint stained people on show, do not look much like any other B&S Ball photos I have ever noticed.  (Although I am sure that plenty involved people passed out in various states of undress, and vomit stains, have appeared before.)

Anyway, readers of the paper seem to be recoiling in horror, although several have thrown in the observation that this is how they imagine Trump supporting rednecks party too.  

The Australian Tourism Board would probably find it money well spent to buy up all copies of this photo journal book and burn them.

Bird strike

Readers who look at comments would have noticed that Graeme Bird, a complete nutball who is like Alex Jones but with anti-Semitic conspiracies thrown in (and for whom the sincerity of his beliefs is not tainted by the thought that perhaps it is just a money making act), has noticed my blog and decided to start adding his words of wisdom [sarcasm, of course.] 

As I get notification of comments on my email, I see that Graeme spent the weekend going back through the blog making comments here and there - I haven't counted, but I would guess about 30 comments?   While those with an arcane interest in tracking eccentric and lurid conspiracy thought might plough through old posts hoping to find his comments, it is wildly unlikely that such persons exist, and Graeme is just commenting to himself.

He has his own, now unused blog:  I invite him to re-activate it and people who really want to engage with him can do so there.

Graeme is routinely thrown off Catallaxy: one of the few blog administration decisions that I give Sinclair Davidson credit for.    I didn't think there was any simple way to block commenters on Blogger, but it seems there may be.

I will give it a try, because as you can see, he can't help himself for long.   That is, he sometimes tries to "play nice", but the offensive comments regarding Jewish matters spike every now and again, and it's tiresome deciding which reach a threshold that deserve deletion.

In short - go away, Graeme.

Update:  no, I can't blanket ban him.   What should I do?  Just start deleting every comment as soon as it is noticed?

Update 2:  I mean, look at this that he added to my "rules for life" post:

Rule five. When you don't know every culprit in a conspiracy, move to hang the culpable Jews first. Since their reaction will be to offload and betray their gentile collaborators. Then you can scoop every traitor up pretty quickly.

 JC says he's a harmless conspiracy monger who wouldn't hurt a fly.   In fact, I don't think he ever talks about a "solution" - except he makes reference to "why we have to keep moving them on" in a comment somewhere.   And here is he merely arguing to threaten to hang "the culpable Jews", JC?   But he thinks that "they" are behind all sorts of "slaughter" - do you think he has the best intentions as to what he thinks should be done with Jews generally?

Graeme can come and clarify this himself - it may make the deletion of all of your  comments easier.

No redeeming features

Remember when some people at Catallaxy theorised that the Charlottesville driver who rammed into a crowd, and reversed out at high speed, killing a woman and injuring others, might have just been panicked when some anti protest protesters hit his car?   Read some of the comments at this post, which contained these lines:

A white guy, whom I refuse to label, loses his cool, for reasons only known to him, reverses into a crowd of radical leftists and unfortunately killing a woman and seriously injuring a number of others. This single, indeed appalling incident, has become a hole in the dyke incident for Trump, and he buckled and singled out several white nationalist groups by name in his second address on the issue. Not a single radical left group received a mention: this was an undignified capitulation...

The video showed it to be nonsense at the time, but it is the blog for culture war fools, so one referred to him as "that poor boy" who the crowd wanted to lynch, and another who argued that police always recommend that when surrounded by a mob and are in danger, you just keep driving.  

In sentencing the guy today, for life, we hear that he was a hard core neo Nazi since at least a teenager:

Prosecutors said Fields had a long history of racist and anti-Semitic behaviour and had shown no remorse for his crimes.

They said he was an avowed white supremacist, admired Adolf Hitler and even kept a picture of the Nazi leader on his bedside table.

During the sentencing hearing, FBI Special Agent Wade Douthit said Fields "was like a kid at Disney World" during a high school trip to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Mr Douthit read grand jury testimony from a high school classmate of Fields who said he appeared happy and made the remark: "This is where the magic happened."

The statement provoked audible gasps from the crowd that had packed into the Charlottesville courtroom.

The classmate said when Fields viewed the camp's gas chamber, he said: "It's almost like you can still hear them screaming."

As dinosaurs saw it

I had never thought to ask this before:  where are the oldest landscapes on Earth which are pretty much the same as they were in the days of dinosaurs?  An article in Science answers this:

Scientists have shown that several plateaus in Brazil are likely Earth's oldest known landscapes, surviving largely unchanged for 70 million years despite heavy, erosive rainfall. For decades, geomorphologists have fixated on regions where plate tectonics accelerate geologic change, thrusting up mountains, opening rifts, and creating traps for oil and gas. But armed with new geochemical tools that can measure the erosion history of a landscape, geoscientists are turning on to the charms of the slow parts of the planet. Researchers hope these lands, typically plateaus that have had their surfaces armored by rain-induced chemical reactions, can provide new windows to Earth's deep history.

Hey, what's more - it notes that this is research from University of Queensland:

Climbing to the top of the Urucum plateau, a shock of rust-red land thrust 1 kilometer above the Brazilian savanna, is a journey into Earth's deep past. Despite the region's heavy, erosive rainfall, the surface of the plateau has remained largely unchanged for some 70 million years, making it Earth's oldest known landscape. Walk along it and you're only a few meters below the surface that dinosaurs once trod.

That startling picture emerges from a study published this month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by a team led by Paulo Vasconcelos, a geochemist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Until recently, scientists could estimate erosion only by looking at the sediment sloughed off of a surface. But new geochemical tools developed by, among others, Vasconcelos and his colleagues measure erosion from rock that's left behind. “They all converge to the same story,” Vasconcelos says. “Though it's taken some time to convince people.”

Popular show that escaped me

The Guardian notes something that surprises me: 

The most watched show on US Netflix, by a huge margin, is the US version of The Office. Even though the platform pumps out an absurd amount of original programming – 1,500 hours last year – it turns out that everyone just wants to watch a decade-old sitcom. One report last year said that The Office accounts for 7% all US Netflix viewing.

My confession:  I have tried watching a few episodes, and my son sometimes likes to watch it, but it's just not a show that I find has much appeal to me.  

I assume it's meant to be a bit less intensely cringe inducing than the UK version (of which I'm not sure I've even seen a full episode - I really do not warm to Ricky Gervais, although I did find some episodes of Extras pretty good.)  In a way, I find it hard to put my finger on why I don't much care for it:  I think I find the scenarios are still too much straining for humour?   So I am surprised that it's a really lingering success in the US.  C'est la vie.

And suddenly, he didn't like it

I never came back to say what I ended up thinking about the Good Omens mini series.

I thought it remained pretty amusing and very watchable all the way through.  In fact, it was one of few streaming shows that I wanted to binge watch, rather than spreading out the enjoyment as I usually do, as it did play more as a 6 hour movie than a mini series.   David Tennant was very good, but in a way I was more won over by the prissy angel act of Michael Sheen.  It did, from memory, vary from the book a fair way towards the end, and the resolution to the problem of how to prevent  Armageddon was not all that convincing: but nor was it in the book, really.  

Which brings me to a review in the Catholic Herald which is a little odd: 

Good Omens is a travesty of eschatology

Given who wrote the book, that's hardly surprising, is it?

Anyway, what's odd is that the reviewer seems to have enjoyed most of the show quite a lot, but then suddenly turned against it on something like theological grounds.  This is his last paragraph:

David Tennant is marvellous as Crowley; the scenes of him disguised as Mary Poppins and later of his talking to his plants are priceless. Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale seems too dense and simpering, but one gets used to him; he is, after all, a gay angel. As for Gaiman’s travesty of eschatology, best to take it as just another excrescence of trendy atheism: stupid and ultimately risible. 

On the "gay" point:  I'm pretty sure the book (again, this is going back to memory of one reading in the early 1990's) says that Aziraphale was frequently mistaken as gay, given the way he spoke and that he liked to dance in uninhibited fashion; but in fact his lack of genitalia would have shown people their mistake.   There's no disputing, though, that the series does play up the relationship between Crowley and Arizaphale as looking like a rom-com about unfulfilled gay longing.  (Were they mistaken as a gay couple in the book?  I see one review that says so, but I don't recall.)   Anyway, I don't know there is any evidence in the series that Arizaphale is capable of, or wanting to, act on his enjoyment of  his friend's company in any physical sense, just as in the book.  And the final scene of them enjoying lunch was pretty charming. 

So it didn't bother me, and I would be happy to see another series about their adventures, if a good enough story could be found.   I do get the feeling the series has been a hit - there is a lot of fondness for it being expressed on the 'net.

Conservative Party analysis

I like the title:

How the Tories became a Brexit death cult in thrall to Boris Johnson

The article goes on to explain that it appears something like branch stacking (party stacking?) appears to be the explanation as to why the Conservative Party rank and file have decided that Brexit is worth anything:

Surveys can’t confirm whether this so-called Blukip phenomenon is as real as some of the self-styled victims of it, such as Anna Soubry, have alleged. But what they do seem to show is that well over a third of the current Conservative Party membership joined after the 2016 referendum, which some will take as at least circumstantial evidence and may explain why they care more about Brexit than their party’s long-term survival.

What they also show is that, while no deal wins the support of “only” 60 per cent of those members who had already joined the party by the 2015 election, that figure rises to 70 per cent for those who joined after the 2016 referendum, and to an astonishing 77 per cent of those who became Conservative Party members after the 2017 general election.

In short, attitudes on Europe have hardened among rank-and-file Tories; but part of that hardening is due to the fact that some of those with less strident views on the issue may have left the party only to be replaced by Brexiteer-ultras. That, of course, is democracy. But it’s also bloody good news for Boris Johnson – at least until he risks, as prime minister, having to disillusion and disappoint them.

 

The never ending defence budget spend

On a more serious note, have a read of this really good article at New York Review of Books about the ridiculousness of the American defence budget.  

It starts with one anecdote - how many military bands of full time musicians do you think they have?   Answer:  136, with 6,500 personnel, costing $500 million a year.   (It also says the Pentagon has a 4.5 billion dollar "public affairs" budget.)  A 2016 review ended up deciding the band should stay at current levels.

It also notes that the Army has been wanting to stop buying new tanks, as a basically obsolete platform, for years, but Congress doesn't listen.  They have 6,000 of them anyway.

You know how they say that if America didn't have such a high imprisonment rate, its unemployment rate would be closer to other countries?  I always wonder what the rate would be if it had a more normal sized defence force, too.

My Rules for Life (updated)

I thought I was heading faster towards 12, but I'm disappointed to see I had only achieved 3.    But there is another one that occurred to me this morning, so the list is now up to 4:

1.  Always carry a clean, ironed handkerchief in your pocket.  Always.
2.  Never buy into timeshare apartments or holiday schemes.
3.  If you have a choice, buy the washing machine with a 15 minute "fast wash" option.

and, ta-dah:

4.  Always buy reverseable belts. (You know, usually black on one side and brown on the other.)

Comics knowledge expanded

Hey, I don't think I knew this before: 

The Gay Ghost (later renamed the Grim Ghost, not to be confused with Grim Ghost) is a fictional superhero in the DC Comics universe whose first appearance was in Sensation Comics #1 (Jan. 1942), published by one DC's predecessor companies, All-American Publications. He was created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Howard Purcell.

A little further Googling in image search brings up some amusing, hardly gay at all, results:

and now I see Cracked did have an article in 2013 that listed him as one of the 5 most absurd superheros, with this quote noted:

As for cringe-y dialogue:

 and this:

I am, verily, amused.

Frankenstein disappoints

The second series of The Frankenstein Chronicles was really quite bad.  Very badly written with nothing explained clearly; too many protagonists with sideburns who looked so alike it was hard to remember who was who; a very silly conspiracy; overly gruesome in some of its violence; and things hinted at still left unexplained at the end.  In fact, I wondered if there was a budget problem that meant a longer series that was originally written had to be compressed down into 6 episodes, abandoning much needed exposition.   

Quite disappointing after the pretty pleasing first season.

Not encouraging from Boeing

From the BBC:

US regulators have uncovered a possible new flaw in Boeing's troubled 737 Max aircraft that is likely to push back test flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it identified the "potential risk" during simulator tests, but did not reveal specific details.

Another very stable genius

Gee, Boris is very, very Trump like in his inconsistency:

Boris Johnson has said the chances of a no-deal Brexit are a “million-to-one against”, despite promising to leave on 31 October whether or not he has managed to strike a new agreement with the European Union.

Johnson, the frontrunner to be prime minister, told a hustings that the chances of a no-deal Brexit were vanishingly small, as he believed there was a mood in the EU and among MPs to pass a new Brexit deal.

“It is absolutely vital that we prepare for a no-deal Brexit if we are going to get a deal,” he said. “But I don’t think that is where we are going to end up – I think it is a million-to-one against – but it is vital that we prepare.”

I also saw on TV last night his interview in which he explained his alleged hobby of making buses from cartons - it was very, very bizarre.  Many people on twitter think he was making it up (for what possible motivation, though?) and one wit said that some flunky who works for him was probably working all night creating some to prove it's not a weird jape. 

A detailed look at whether perovskite solar cells will really make a difference

Interesting article at Nature about this - seems remarkably uncertain whether the boosters of this new form of solar cell will win out.

A perfectly normal hobby for a politician

The only explanation I can see for disclosing this is that Boris really believes that the more eccentric he paints himself, the more people will overlook his lies and inadequacies:

Boris Johnson revealed that he makes buses out of old wine crates to relax.

He says he likes to unwind by painting passengers enjoying themselves on his model vehicles.

The former mayor of London, whose term in office included the introduction of a new 'Boris' bus to the capital's streets, was speaking to TalkRadio.

When no one answers an argument

What with Gillian Triggs coming out and (apparently - I have only seen extracts) making some dubious broad brush statements yesterday about religious beliefs and employment, I note that no one in my last thread about the Folau controversy has answered this point.   So let's bump it up to a post.

Who really thinks that those who are painting this as a right to religious expression would be donating money if it were this:   an Islamic sportsman with a high profile and social media accounts who used them to support things that he argues as a conservative Muslim are genuinely, religiously justified positions with plenty of tradition behind them, such as:  it would be fair enough for the law to allow for gays to be stoned to death - such a scare would help some save their souls from Hell;  that the death penalty for Muslim apostasy is warranted; that physical chastisement of a wife can be warranted and reasonable; child marriage isn't a big deal.

The obvious point is this:  some religiously justified beliefs are readily capable of holding reasonable offence for small or large parts of a modern Western society.   A company engaged in a business which wants broad support from its society should generally not have the right to discriminate on the grounds of an employees personal beliefs expressed in the private sphere, but are culture war warriors really trying to tell me that they think my hypothetical Muslim sportsman should also be free to express all his religiously justified beliefs in the public sphere via social media and it would not risk tarnishing the image of the sport that is employing him?     

Those who are defending Folau on this are simply drawing the line, as it suits their prejudice and background, as to where offensiveness in relation to religious statements about homosexuality should lie.

And yes, I know there are plenty of gay folk who go out of their way to find offence, in an irritating manner too, and most are not concerned that conservative Christians are right about their destination in the afterlife.    But nor do I dismiss the fact that Christian (indeed, even Catholic) statements about the inherently disordered nature of homosexuality can cause some angst to the self image of people (mainly young people) worried about their sexuality, especially if they come from a conservative  background.  

I therefore do not consider it unreasonable that, in these circumstances, a sporting body require that its generously paid players not engage in religiously motivated conservative commentary about the nature of homosexuality in the public sphere.   As I understand it, Folau had been warned along those lines too before signing his current contract, but he chose to do so anyway.

This means it is a contractual matter, and he may or may not win on the contractual merits.   He should not win on the wrong headed grounds that it should be open slather for any sportsman to be able to express any view under cloak of religious freedom.

PS:   I also think quite a few sports and companies are over-compensating on the matter of support for gay folk.  I would really like it if we could move past gay pride weeks and events, and find much of the public demonstration that is "pro diversity" to be an embarrassment, with gay pride parades frequently featuring fetishes, for example.   I am in no way "all in" with support for the state of gay social politics as it is currently in society.   But none of that changes my view on the Folau matter.

A funny Creighton column

Adam Creighton has decided that the big tech companies (Google, Facebook etc) companies have too much power.  He's particularly concerned that they have drained traditional news media of advertising money (true), so much so that he's willing to contemplate direct government subsidy of the news.  

Well, you might think, isn't that what we get with the ABC?   No, that's not enough:

Publicly funded media organisations can’t do as good a job. Private media companies have a powerful incentive to dig out bad news, even if it upsets governments, because it sells.

Huh? I thought Adam's paper has been complaining about the ABC "digging out bad news" (when it is about a Coalition government in power, anyway) for decades, which kinda proves public broadcasters don't have to be in the "selling" business to be interested in "bad news".

Creighton appears in The Australian - a paper for which the content over the course of a year is about 95% pure ideologically driven right wing opinion to 1% investigative journalism.  (And some of the latter is just true crime stuff - hardly matters of national political consequence.)    If he would actually come out and note that about Rupert's pet paper - as well as make some kind of observation about the heightened propaganda machine that is the money making machine known as Fox News - he might have a skerrick of credibility.

How much "investigative journalism" does Fox News engage in so as to be bring in the big money, Adam?   You know the answer - nil.   Your boss has monetised ludicrously biased spin as the way a "news" network can thrive, and you have the hide to argue that private media is better at investigative journalism.

His column goes on to complain that the big tech companies real danger is to democracy - because of the way their search filters sought out the news.   It doesn't take too much to read between the lines that his problem is that he thinks that filtering has a "left wing" bias he doesn't like - Right wingers have been complaining about search engines conspiring against them for years now.   (Because they have trouble understanding that, with the awful "we don't care about the evidence" path the Right has taken over the last 30 years, facts now have a clear Left wing bias.)

Nor does he not mention the true and clear danger from IT companies, which is via the spread of deliberate misinformation and lies (masquerading as news), sometimes via foreign governments interested in seeding political disunity, via social media.   

As usual, Adam's a just a silly lightweight who attacks all the wrong targets. 

He's dumbing you down, Jason.