On 50 year anniversaries

It seems to me that the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the month long Pride events, are attracting much more media and pop culture attention than the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.   (Maybe that will change in coming days, but I have my doubts.)

It's a very surprising turn of events, I think, that shows how very hard the job of futurologist must be, especially when it comes to social views and sentiment.      

A typical pattern

I have been pretty busy today, so not much time to get to deleting Bird poop currently afflicting my comments.

Those familiar with Graeme Bird's history as a serial pest in the Australian blogosphere have had a few days' reminder of what he was like, and why he ends up getting banned sooner or later.

[In fact, sorry to tell you Bird, but your ideas seem pretty much stuck where they were a decade ago.  Your primarily anti-Semitic conspiracies, cosmology and "reverse engineered" physics is very stale.]

As I mentioned before, he's been going through old posts of mine and making comments which I notice because copies are automatically emailed to me.  Hence, I found this at the end of one of his comments last night, to one of my posts about Helen Dale, which is typical of the Bird of old - eventually getting angry or weird enough to throw in a line that sounds like it's from a dangerous psychopath:

In my view the problem was with Australia and not with Helen. She can reinvent her own act every second year, set up any number of protective barriers, to protect the girl and the artist, as much as she wants ...... and its really no-one elses business but her own.

Last time I met her, and last time I talked to her, was before I turned anti-Judaic. Jason can verify this, so don't try and condemn her by association, or I'll come around and slit your puppies throat.

(I presume he has noticed the occasional pic of my pup which gets posted here.)

I think that makes it worthwhile just deleting all future comments from you, Bird:  you're very strange, and  the amusement of interacting with you always wears off fast.

UPDATE:   in response to comments -

*  how have you all missed my dog's photos, such as this one from only a month ago?  (She has appeared a few times before, too.)  Zero marks for observation, everyone. 

*  no, I don't worry that Bird really is a psychopathic wannabe killer - you will note I actually responded to him in comments here in mocking tone, which I would not do if I feared he was actually was a danger to me (or my dog).   But it's still off putting to be dealing with anyone who references, just about daily, an imagined violent fate for his imagined enemies.   I think Jason only found a reference to killing a dog funny because he knows Bird's over the top rhetorical history - but no one near normal makes jokes like that, and he shouldn't be rewarded by normalisation via his repetition of conspiracy think that is ridiculously targeted against Jews, and the violent imagery he often spouts along with it.

*  he has "retracted" the comment, which is nice - but he'll lose his temper again soon enough, or make some bad taste or offensive comment of some kind.  

Hence, I'm just deleting him from now on, but if I am busy - like today - they may linger for a while before they go.

Another Ngo observation

I strongly suspect that many who are outraged that some on the Left are taking a "he asked for it" line on Ngo's attack are the same people who speculate after a lone woman is raped on a dark street that, you know, women really need to be practical about this and be careful not to place themselves in danger. 

[That would make for a good tweet if I could be bothered tweeting...]

Space mold is a worry

If you think that going to live in space might be a cure for mundane Earthly problems like too much mold around your apartment - think again.

Science magazine explains that mold is a persistent problem in the International Space Station - they even have a photo of a patch:

[I would presume that one of the big problems is that bleach fumes are not something you want to have to deal with in a recycling air system.]

What's worse - mold spores can tolerate incredible amounts of radiation:

Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) already constantly battle with mold, which grows on the station’s walls and equipment. That mold, of course, is in a protected structure in low-Earth orbit, where radiation doses are low. Outside of the station, doses are higher—and they would be higher still on the hull of a spacecraft going to Mars or beyond.

To find out what might happen to mold there, Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne and colleagues beamed x-rays and heavy ions at a common black mold called Aspergillus niger, which is plentiful in the ISS. The researchers fired “stupid amounts” of radiation, Cortesão says—much more than encountered on a Mars-bound spaceship (0.6 gray per year) or on the surface of Mars (0.2 gray per year). The gray is a measure of the amount of absorbed radiation energy.

The researchers discovered that the spores could survive radiation doses of 500 to 1000 gray, depending on which type of radiation they were exposed to. Humans, by contrast, get radiation sickness at doses of 0.5 gray and are killed by 5 gray. Cortesão also found that the spores survived large amounts of high-energy ultraviolet radiation, which is commonly used as a hospital disinfectant and has been proposed for sterilizing the surfaces of spacecraft.

Cortesão cautions that her research focused only on radiation and did not include all aspects of the harsh outer space environment. But, she says, at least one older study suggests that mold spores resist radiation even better in a vacuum. Meanwhile, one thing is certain, she says: “We will have spores with us for sure in our space travels. Fungi have been forgotten for the past 20 or 30 years, but it’s time to go back to them.”

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.